Steven Mailloux: "Textual Scholarship and 'Authorís Final Intention'"
by Meg Roland

Contents:
Inferred Intention
Editing Process and Critical Interpretation

In 1982 Mailloux published Interpretive Conventions – The Reader in the Study of American Fiction. Mailloux sets before himself the task of marshaling reader response criticism to the aid of the editorial concept of an author's final intention. He begins by noting that despite the work of New Critics, in which authorial intention was declared an interpretive fallacy (fallacy of intention), the concept of an author's final intention was central to American textual studies, not to mention the standard accepted by the Center for Editions of American Authors, for the previous 30 years. Mailloux's stated intention is to "demonstrate how reader–response criticism and theory can contribute to the development of editing's central concept, 'author's final intention'" (94).

Mailloux begins with a theoretical discussion of inferred intention, applies his theories to the process of editing and interpreting, and concludes with a discussion of how to establish a text. He provides several examples of textual issues which editors have wrestled with in regard to American authors such as Dreiser, James, Hawthorne, Melville, Fitzgerald, Norris and Crane. (American women authors apparently have seamless, uncontested texts!)

Inferred Intention       [Top]

Noting that the goal of Gregís theory was to establish a text intended by the author, Mailloux details Bower's further development of the theory to attempt to determine the author's final intention—his or her last known wishes regarding a text or last authorial revisions. Mailloux sees two problems with this approach: first, that it assumes "relevant intention exists only after a work is finished," and, second, that no critical methodology was specified as to just how to determine the author's final intention. Mailloux draws upon the work of Michael Hancher, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle in exploring the concept of "active intention" as opposed to ultimate intention, but offers his own redefinition: "Active intention characterizes the actions that the author, as he writes the text, understands himself to be performing in the text" (96). Mailloux contends this definition of intention provides a space for the concept of intention as a process.

Mailloux goes on to define "operative intention" as characterizing "the actions that the author, as he writes the text, understands himself to be performing in the text and the immediate effects he understands these actions will achieve in his projected reader" (99). This concept, he contends, "provides a description of intention from the author's point of view." To describe the reader–critic–editor's "side of the literary communication" he proposed the concept of inferred intention. "Inferred intentions characterize the critic's description of the convention–based responses that the author, as he is writing, understands he will achieve as a result (at least in part) of his projected reader's recognition of his intention" (99). Mailloux follows these definitions of intention with a discussion of speech act theory and how, in combination with literary conventions, it can explain readersí understanding both of an authorí characters and of the author's intention. Perhaps the most interesting part of his work here is his application of these theories to the work of the author. Mailloux contends that these conventions "enable the author to predict what his projected reader will infer about his intentions" (103). Although Mailloux's logic seems circular, in fact what he has done is show that reader–response is a valid means of determining authorial intention because writers consciously employ speech act and literary conventions as a means of predicting what their readers will infer. So, if you can determine what readersí response is, then you have, in Mailloux's view, a legitimate means of determining the author's intention.

One might ask at this point, looking ahead to Stanley Fish, if literary analysis can point in "as many directions as there are interpreters" (106)? Are the conventions Mailloux outlines in the end just one critic's view of "what makes sense" in a given passage. Couldn't an opposing view be argued? Mailloux, however, believes that speech act and literary communication conventions can determine a particular order and sense that is determinable by an editor.

Editing Process and Critical Interpretation       [Top]

Like Tanselle, Mailloux stresses the critical interpretation of the editor as a vital component of the editing process and the view of editions as attempts at historical reconstructions. He departs from Tanselle, however, in that he feels that the chronological aspect of the concept of "final" intention is inadequate in either establishing a text or editing portions of a text. He proposes an "aesthetic criterion which is best defined in terms of the intended structure of the reader's response." This is the heart of Mailloux argument. The editor's job, according to Mailloux, is to be aware of the conventions the writer assumed he or she was sharing with the intended readers of the work. An editor's knowledge of these conventions will raise the mist, so to speak, in the process of determining "authorial intention."

Mailloux provides two interesting textual examples to illuminate his point. In Frank Norris's A Man's Woman, a graphic surgery scene was cut in a second edition as a result of the publishing house's capitulation to public outrage over the visceral nature of the passage. Mailloux argues that the original scene should be restored because of the "temporal aspect of authorial intention." In this case, the missing passage was replaced with one written later which, according to Mailloux, fails to make logical sense or to properly set up the subsequent passage. In Hawthorne's "The Hall of Fantasy" Hawthorne himself decided to cut a passage in which he satirizes some of his contemporary writers. Here again Mailloux applies the same argument—the temporal aspect of the narrative becomes confused because of the deleted passage; thus, the original passage should be restored. But note a major difference in these two cases: Hawthorne was not under any publishing house pressure, as Norris was, to change his passage. He made an editorial decision of his own. But in both cases, the revised passage resulted in a disruption—in Mailloux's interpretation, at least—of speech–act conventions. In this sense, Mailloux privileges speech–act conventions as better guides to authorial intention than revisions made by the author. Mailloux argues that "editors can validly overrule the author's chronologically final intention." Mailloux states " editors can take control of the intended text out of the author's hands if justified by an examination of historical evidence and the intended structure of the reader response" (121). And what of authorial intention? Even an author's stated intentions can be wrested out of his or her control by a discerning editor on the basis of … authorial intention relative to speech–act theory. For Mailloux, then, for a later revision to be accepted by an editor it must uphold, improve or correct the speech–act conventions established in the original version notwithstanding later decisions made by the author in the revision process.

In contrast, in a footnote early in the chapter, Mailloux quotes Hancher as determining that the author's judgment "may not always be good, and he may release it too soon or too late or when (we think) he never should have; but it is his judgment not ours, his work of art which he makes ours" (as quoted 97). Clearly, Mailloux distances himself from this perspective. In his view, "illogical restructuring" on the part of the author causes the author to forfeit authority over his or her text to the editor. An editorial decision which, circling back to Tanselle, may ultimately rely on the critical judgment of the editor. In contrast to Bowers, Mailloux 's approach seems to favor earlier rather than "final" intentions if those earlier decisions better meet his criteria of "logical structuring."

Mailloux's work does offer a bridge between the polarities of New Criticism and authorial intention via the vehicle of reader–response but constricts an author's later revisions to those which confirm the work's initial structuring. In cases in which no specific authorial intention is know, his approach seems useful in providing a specific methodology in determining authorial intention. How such an approach could be applied to works in which the authors work to confound logical structuring seems limited.