I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 3 5Authors may have long forgotten what they intended a poem or
story to mean. In any case, works of literature do not mean just one
thing. They are capable of generating whole repertoires of meaning,
some of which alter as history itself changes, and not all of which
may be consciously intended. Much of what I had to say of literary
texts in the first chapter would no doubt have come as news to their
creators. Flann O’Brien probably did not realise that the opening
paragraph of The Third Policeman could be read as implying that
John Divney was thick- headed enough to spend his time turning
an iron bar into a bicycle- pump with the specific intention of
killing old Mathers with it. E.M. Forster may well have been
surprised to learn that the first four phrases of A Passage to India
have roughly three stresses each. It is unlikely that Robert Lowell
could have provided a detailed account of how the metre and
the syntax work athwart each other in the opening lines of ‘The
Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. When Yeats writes of a ‘terrible
beauty’ in his poem ‘Easter 1916’, the phrase may well refer to his
beloved Maud Gonne as well as to the military uprising in Dublin,
but he was probably oblivious of the fact.
Behind the belief that the author is the key to a work’s meaning
lies a particular conception of literature. This is the doctrine of
literature as self- expression, much favoured by some creative
writing courses. On this theory, a literary work is the sincere
expression of some experience that the author has had, and which
he wishes to share with others. This is a fairly recent idea, dating
mostly from romanticism. It would no doubt have come as a
surprise to Homer, Dante and Chaucer. Alexander Pope would
have found it puzzling, while Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot would have
scornfully dismissed it. It is not clear what personal experience the
author of the Iliad was trying to share with us.