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The Meaning of Meaning: The Politics of Reader-Centered Interpretation

Intention? Who Needs It?

Though, like all things human, it is deeply flawed, Western tradition — the culture that arose from the triple pillars of Greek philosophy, Roman law and biblical religion — is the greatest human achievement of all time. From it has risen sustained rational analysis, representative government, freedom under law, unimaginable prosperity, scientific progress beyond our greatest dreams, and an unprecedented and unequaled spread of human rights and human liberation.

Western tradition is the fertile soil that gave rise to the encyclopedic artistry and intellect of Dante, the soaring spirituality of Bonaventure, the unflinching and penetrating human insight of Augustine, the unparalleled natural genius of Shakespeare, the undaunted, indeed undauntable, heroism of Milton, and the haunting, chiaroscuro craftsmanship of Rembrandt. To be an heir of Western tradition is to inherit the greatest human legacy the world has seen.

But Western tradition has its sworn enemies, not just its grateful heirs and defenders. Sometimes those who hate the West do so overtly. They fly jetliners into the nerve center of Western commerce in New York City and into the heart of Western military defense in Washington. They detonate bombs in the transportation systems of European capitals. Their intentions are obvious.

Not all the West's most resolute enemies, however, are so overt. Some are more subtle, though no less intent. Like their more militant counterparts, they name the West as the chief source of what they oppose, as the fountain of multi-form oppression: chauvinism, colonialism and racism, to name a few.

These detractors of the West know that much of the substance of the culture they so despise resides in what are known as the great books of the Western world. They despise those books because they despise the ideas those books preserve and advance. While these detractors don't destroy libraries and burn books (the way some of them did when they were college students in the 60s), they target the books nevertheless.

They seek to empty the great books of their content by means of hermeneutics, or the rules of interpretation. They purposely intend to evacuate the great books of their author-given meaning because they hate both those writers and their ideas. They denigrate the Biblicism of Milton, the hierarchicalism of Chaucer, the conservatism of Burke, and the piety of Spenser, and they seek to rid the world of it all — hermeneutically.

They know they can silence the great authors — the much-hated Dead, White, European Males (DWEMS) — simply by insisting that meaning equals interpretation, that a text means whatever the reader says it means, not what its author intends it to mean. That way, the meaning of Paradise Lost is not tied to John Milton's intention for his poem, or to the words and word sequence he so carefully selected in constructing it, but to the (for instance) postmodern, feminist readers who want to silence him and his patriarchal notions.

That's Not What I Meant!

Here's how it works: If meaning is the reader's prerogative and not the author's — if the meaning of a text is tied to the reader's response and not to the author's intention — then a text has no meaning until a reader gives it one. Because there are many possible readers, all with potentially different interpretations of the text, then there are many possible meanings of any given text, none of which is subjected to the author's intention.

Philip Sidney cannot complain that the meaning a modern reader gives to the sonnets in his Astrophil and Stella is nothing like his intention for them because his texts mean what the reader says they mean, not what Sidney intended. By this leftist-inspired, hermeneutical sleight-of-hand, Sidney is silenced and the meaning of his texts is evacuated. And what is done to Sidney and his texts can be done to any author and text, whether it be the Constitution of the American founders or the letters of the Apostle Paul — texts whose traditional interpretation and application the postmodern left hates.

Without this radical and revolutionary way of reading, neither abortion nor evangelical feminism, for example, could or would find any basis at all in our foundational documents, a basis the left is intent to manufacture ad hoc. Armed with this hermeneutic, all things are possible. Tied to authorial intention, they are not.

But, of course, this hermeneutic is utterly indefensible. It will never do. Let me illustrate.

While I was a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar at Princeton, I debated a feminist literary critic on the nature of meaning. She spoke first, explaining why she thought that meaning ought to equal the reader's interpretation, not the author's intention. When her 10-minute introductory remarks were completed, she sat down.

I walked to the podium, turned directly to her and said, "Thank you, Professor X, for agreeing with me that meaning equals the author's intention."

"That's not what I meant," she insisted loudly and forcefully enough for all to hear.

I paused to let the point sink in, and then said again, "Thank you, Professor X, for agreeing with me that meaning equals the author's intention."

She was speechless. She could not argue that I was wrong unless she first agreed that I was right. I had silenced her by precisely the same means she had tried to silence Shakespeare and Spenser, and she didn't like it. She wanted to privilege her words and meaning, by excluding them from the evacuative grid through which she intended to pull Chaucer's or Wordsworth's.

I proceeded.

"Professor X, if you are correct, rape is impossible. Rape is impossible because 'no' does not mean 'no.' It means whatever the interpreter of the victim's words says it means. If you are right, when a woman in danger shouts this word in fear or in great distress, her word has no meaning until the rapist gives it one. You and I know what meaning will be given to it. So, I ask you, is rape possible or impossible? If your hermeneutic is correct, rape is impossible. But if rape is possible, if 'no' means 'no,' then you must give up your hermeneutic. If her 'no' means 'no,' so does Dante's. Which do you choose?"

Silence.

Drenched Deconstructionism

With Professor X's silence still hanging in the air, I began the following story: In my view, Maurice Kelley is probably the 20th century's greatest American Miltonist. Back in the 1930s, when he was still a young man, Kelley got the chance to go to England to work firsthand with Milton's manuscripts, a lifelong dream. As a young cultural liberal who was hoping to make his way up the ladder of academic success, he had uncritically accepted the notion of most of his superiors and peers that meaning equals the reader's interpretation.

At the end of his first day in the British Museum, Kelley and all the other hard-working scholars in the place were hustled out the front door. It was raining, and in the rush to get his things together and to leave in a timely fashion, Kelley had somehow misplaced his umbrella. As he fought his way manfully toward the apartment he had rented, he was soaked to the bone, cursing his fate. Suddenly, on an overhead shop sign he spied the words "Umbrella Recovered."

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Where do you think meaning comes from: the author or the reader? Why?

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"Good," he thought, "perhaps this man can help me recover mine."

A moment's reflection revealed his folly: "Recovered" meant "repaired" or "refurbished," not "retrieved," he realized, and nothing he could do would change that fact. The meaning of the word was the one given it by the shopkeeper who put up the sign, not the one given it by the drenched pedestrian who was reading it. No matter how badly Kelley wanted the word to mean something different, it did not.

"At that moment," he later explained to me, "I stopped being a liberal because I figured out how words really work."