Beware the ‘Intentional' Fallacy

Whiling away a few hours the other night on the Internet I chanced upon a review of one of my mystery/thrillers that gave me a pause. The reviewer had missed what I had in mind when I set pen to paper, as it were, and so, off in her own world, shrugged and gave the book Three Stars, citing what she had hoped to find but indeed, did not. Alas, what we have here is the bane of all authors…an example of the 'intentional’ fallacy.

Let’s go to the literature for a good definition of the term. “The 'intentional' fallacy is a term used in 20th-century literary criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming the intent or purpose of the artist who created it.

“Introduced by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley in The Verbal Icon (1954), the approach was a reaction to the popular belief that to know what the author intended—what he had in mind at the time of writing—was to know the correct interpretation of the work. Although a seductive topic for conjecture and frequently a valid appraisal of a work of art, the intentional fallacy forces the literary critic to assume the role of cultural historian or that of a psychologist who must define the growth of a particular artist’s vision in terms of his mental and physical state at the time of his creative act.”

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

I first ran into the intentional fallacy when seeking professional reviews for my second novel, Frozen in Time: Murder at the Bottom of the World. Based loosely upon my participation in the 16th Chilean Expedition to Antarctica in 1961-62, this post-modern mystery/thriller (which subsequently became Book I of Cold Blood: The Antarctic Murders Trilogy) is a tale told by my fictionalized stand-in, grad student Ted Stone. The story is a tale of greed, betrayal, danger, and murder—one in which the reader is given a window into the frozen world at the bottom of the Earth that few people ever will read about, much less experience. Among other things, it explores why, though seemingly unfair, bad things happen to good people; how the battle between good and evil can change forever even the most innocent person; and most of all, the role deception plays in Nature, Man, and Life. And those who have read Milton’s Paradise Lost will even be surprised to find elements of that famous poem in the pages of this novel.


Grad student ‘Ted Stone’, Chilean Army Base Bernado O’Higgins, January, 1962 (Photo: Dr. Martin Halpern)

Kirkus called the story “[A] nasty little piece of skullduggery.” Reviewers at Reader Views, Pacific Book Reviews, and Feathered Quill, among others, made similar statements. , http://www.theodore-cohen-novels.com/... But only one reviewer, who shall remain unnamed, viewed the book as a coming of age story, something I certainly had not intended it to be (there’s that word again). At least the thought had never crossed my mind.

Here’s the thing. Each reader is an individual who brings to a book their unique ‘history’ based on who they are, where they live, what they’ve read, how they woke up that morning, and myriad other things that go into one’s state of mind at the instant they flip the pages of the book they’re reading. What they perceive may no more be what the author had in mind when he or she penned the chapter being read than an artist might have seen in their mind’s eye when they laid down the paint on the canvas at which the critic is staring in the Louvre.

I’m sure the authors among us can cite examples of the intentional fallacy from their own book reviews. Readers may even have looked at someone’s review in the past and asked “How in the world did they come to that conclusion?!” Encounters with the fallacy are part and parcel of the writing trade . . . they are something that will always be with us. The key is to recognize them for what they are and to know they are not failings on our part but rather, they are a part of life. For as individuals, we all see things through our own life’s filters.