DAVID
J.
GORDON
95
tion whatever different people see in a text. What we can agree on is a
choice of norm that establishes what we have decided to look for. No
norm, says Hirsch firmly, can be deduced from a text; it must be
chosen. Much of what we call literary value-apart from the not
inconsiderable value inherent in the very act of making sense-is
normati ve judgment.
The norm most of us follow, whether we are fully conscious of it,
is authorial intention-that is, we say the best interpretation is the one
that tries
to
understand what the author meant
to
say. We cannot know
for sure that we have succeeded but we might have.
If
our judgment is
shared by a community of others, it is objective and constitutes
knowledge. But it follows that if a norm is an ethical choice rather than
an epistemological inevitability, another norm could be chosen. And
the structuralist critics have in effect done that. Rejecting as an
interpretative goal "what the author meant
to
say," they are led
to
an
anachronistic norm: the best meaning would be one that in some
interesting way reflects the reader or his age or his favorite theory. Can
judgment of this kind be considered objective? Only, it seems to me, if
the interpretative community were homogeneous enough to make the
anachronistic norm a constant - as it was for medieval Christian
interpreters who agreed to find in the classics what was useful for their
faith. There is surely no such consensus today nor is one likely
to
develop in the foreseeable future. The critic who recognizes the norm of
authorial intention (which doesn 't of course mean that he must like
that intention) is providing the only practical basis for criticism as an
intellectual discipline.
What I want to show in the following pages is how the indeter–
minacy debate (at any rate the twentieth-century version of it) arose and
developed, how the concern with close reading stemming from Rich–
ards, Empson, and Leavis brought the dilemma of relativism into
sharp focus, and how a number of contemporary theorists, attempting
(daringly or modishly) nothing less than a deconstruction of our
historical and scientific modes of thought, have got tangled in incon–
sistencies. Perhaps I shall also be able to account for some of the
fascination of their enterprise and to clarify its limited usefulness .
I.
A. Richards in the 1920s formulated a view of reading that was
influenced by the growing fields of linguistics and psychology but was
carefully set off from each. Literary art, he insisted, is a communication
by means of language rather than a revelation of an author's mind; "we
read to find out not what authors were thinking but what their words
can do for us. " The mind of the author is something we project for the
