The Literary Criticism Web

A Critical Summary of

Hirsch, E. D. "Objective Interpretation." PMLA 75 (1960): 463, 470-79. Rpt. in Contexts for Criticism. Ed. Donald Keesey. 3^rd ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1998. 17-28.

Reading a piece of literature is a personal experience, and it is easy for a reader to assign the text a meaning based largely upon personal views, circumstances, or qualities of character. However, for E. D. Hirsch this meaning would be simply wrong. In "Objective Interpretation," Hirsch argues that the legitimate meaning of a literary text does not derive from the reader, but from the "speaking subject," the authorial consciousness and intentions which have shaped the text (26). In an objective interpretation, the reader must set aside any subjectivities in attitudes, values, or predispositions and assume the author's stance. To do this calls for a reader who will make "explicit reference to the speaker's subjectivity" (24). Only from this perspective can the reader determine the probable, rather than the possible, meaning of a text.

In referencing this subjective consciousness that shapes literary meaning, a distinction must be drawn between the speaking subject and the author. The author is the historical person who wrote the text. The speaking subject, on the other hand, is the persona that the author takes on in the process of writing. Certainly the culture, attitudes, and beliefs of the author affects this persona. The persona is also determined by the language available to the author. In each literary work, the author has a more-or-less unique mindset with distinct attitudes, beliefs, and values. To a degree, the author becomes a different person, a different speaking subject, in each work. It would be wrong, then, to evaluate one text based on the author's position in another text. Thus, to evaluate a work based on the author's biographical status twenty years prior to a work may not be relevant in finding the meaning of the text. However, the objective interpreter of literature must adapt an appropriate authorial stance because text is an "intentional act" (26) and its meaning bounded by the writer's "verbal intention" (18).

For Hirsch this definition of the text and its meaning provides a means of acknowledging the importance of textual form without detaching it from the author's subjectivity. His disagrees with the new critical assertion that "the object of interpretation is not the author but his text" (19). If a text were simply such a detached "'piece of language'" (19), any sequence of words could have a meaning rooted in the reading public's norms of language. If meaning were determined by such norms of language, several possible meanings could be found for just once sentence. Hirsch rejects such a plurality of meaning.

Hirsch explains his position using Saussure's semiotic concepts of langue and parole. Accepting the potential for multiple meanings treats the text as a langue, but the text is clearly a parole, a particular and intentional application of a cultural language system available to the writer (22). The text is a representation of the speaking subject's parole. Only by reconstructing "the author's aims and attitudes" can his parole and textual meaning be understood (18).

Hirsch assesses two critical responses to a poem by Wordsworth to demonstrate the nature and value of such a methodology. Cleanth Brooks and F. W. Bateson take different approachs and arrive at contrasting interpretations of one of Wordsworth's Lucy poems. Brooks sees the poem as an evocation of death. Bateson, however, see the poem as an affirmation of life. Both of these interpretations seem reasonable based upon just the language of the text in isolation. But for Hirsch, Bateson's reading of the poem is more probably true because his method of interpretation refers to information about the speaking subject of the poem; Bateson "grounds his interpretation in a conscious construction of the poet's outlook" (25).  Because Bateson sets the poem in the context of the Wordsworth's attitudes and interests at the time of composition -- especially his pantheism -- Bateson's interpretation is more objectively verifiable.

Hirsch details several criteria for objective verification of literary interpretation. His first criterion requires the reader to approach the text with the same language base available to the author. If an interpretation is "permissible within the public norms of the langue" upon which the text is based, then it possesses legitimacy (24). To the extent that an interpretation also accounts for all of the linguistic elements of the text, it also meets Hirsch's second criterion: correspondence. Hirsch's the third criterion, generic appropriateness, again requires an interpretation to be rooted an appropriate langue available to the speaking subject. It must meet the conventions of the genre of which the text is an example. These three "preliminary" criteria, lead the way to a fourth and, for Hirsch, most important criterion for verification: coherence (24).

Because the first three criteria eliminate incorrect meanings of a text but still leave room for several interpretations, coherence is the "decisive criterion" (24). Coherence, or plausibility, gives significance to the other criteria. It articulates "a sense of the whole meaning" that necessarily "depends on the context" of the text (24). Hirsch explains that "[o]ne meaning coheres with another because it is typical or probable with reference to the whole" (24). What is coherent in one context, may not be coherent in another: "The criterion of coherence can be invoked only with reference to a particular context, and this context may be inferred only by positing the author's 'horizon,' his disposition toward a particular type of meaning" (24). Only by knowing the author's outlook or persona can one determine if a meaning coheres with the context: the context is grounded in the language of the speaking subject.

Hirsch seeks to "revive the half-forgotten truism that interpretation is the construction of another's meaning" (27). Objective interpreters must self-critically purge their own subjectivities in order to reconstruct the "author's subjective stance" (25). In discovering and confirming the meaning of a text "only the speaking subject counts" (27). The critical reader's "primary task is to reproduce in himself the author's 'logic,' his attitudes, his cultural givens, in short his world." Objectively verifying interpretation may be an arduous and complex task, but for Hirsch "the ultimate verificative principle is very simple: the imaginative reconstruction of the speaking subject" (26).

updated 08/30/06