about a literary text—what can the language of this text possibly mean?—
but its viability does not entail the conclusion that other kinds of questions,
including questions about intentionality, should be ruled out of court. In other
words, the deconstructionist position that language always undoes itself is
compatible with its operative question about possible meanings, but that
position and that compatibility do not undermine the equally valid question,
“what did the person who wrote this text for this audience probably want to
communicate?” Consider, for example, the famous first sentence of Jane Aus-
ten’s Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single
man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” If we ask
the Anglo-American deconstructionist question, our answers will include not
only the incompatible ironic and nonironic meanings—the sentence is send-
ing up those who believe its literal statement; no, the literal statement is right
on target—but other incompatibilities as well. Consider the phrase “single
man in possession of a good fortune.” Even as the sentence clearly asserts the
relation between the single man and the fortune (he possesses it), the sen-
tence also implies that possessing the fortune inevitably creates the desire for
the wife—and thus that the good fortune is simultaneously in possession of
the man. This recognition, in turn, invites us to contemplate the incompatible
meanings of the word good.
If, however, we ask rhetorical theory’s question about intentionality, a
question that can be translated as “what are the writer’s reasons for using the
language in this way rather than some other way in relation to some audi-
ence?,” then we arrive at a very different view of the sentence. The question
invites us to consider whether the sentence is designed to be ironic, nonironic,
or somehow both—and a look at the design with all three possibilities in mind
indicates that the teller probably meant it to be ironic. That hypothesis offers
the most satisfactory explanation of the movement of the sentence from its
initial signaling of some grand wisdom (not just “A universally acknowledged
truth is” but “It is a truth universally acknowledged that”) to its final delivery
of a dubious proposition. That answer also recognizes that the teller’s choice of
irony establishes a much richer relation to her audience than the other options
and that doing so at the beginning of a novel makes good sense. If the designer
wanted the nonironic reading, she has not executed her intention particularly
well, especially since she could have just written “It’s widely assumed that any
rich, single man in our society is on the lookout for a suitable woman to be
his wife.” If she wanted to insist on both meanings, she would have needed a
way to make the nonironic hypothesis more plausible. (The same logic can be
applied to Fish’s example of the names on the blackboard: once we shift from
asking if the names can possibly be interpreted as a religious poem to asking
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