What’s in a Text?: Intentional and Affective Fallacies and the Logical Fallacy of Arguments from Silence

Posted on by Wolfgang Childerglas
Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Medieval history,, Performing arts, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture, Travel, Visual Arts, World history,

Exegesis: Relegating the author In literary and artistic aesthetics the intentional fallacy occurs when readers or viewers use factors outside the text or visual work (such as biographical information) to evaluate its merits, rather than ignoring these “external” factors and relying solely on the textual or visual evidence of the novel, play, poem, painting, etc. to assess the work in question (what’s actually in the text and nothing outside). This key precept of the New Criticism school declares that a poem (or other work of art) does not belong to its author, it is (as stated by the term’s originators WK Wimsatt and MC Beardsley) “detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it”1⃞. Authorial intention is a non-consideration in the assessment of the work. The text or work has an objective status and its meaning belongs solely to the reading or viewing public. The reader’s task in literature, advocates of New Criticism assert, is to eschew subjective or personal aspects such as the lives and psychology of authors and literary history and focus entirely on close reading and explication of the text (A Glossary of Literary Terms (4th edition, 1981), edited by M.H. Abrams).

The intentional fallacy, elaborated in Wimsatt’s 1954 The Verbal Icon

The intentional fallacy doctrine has a corollary in the affective fallacy which adheres to the same principles. Wimsatt and Beardsley affirmed that evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader, is an erroneous way of approaching the task. Giving rein to the emotions a work of art evokes in you, negates an appreciation of “the (work’s) inherent qualities and craftsmanship” that an objective analysis permits (Prince Kumar, ‘Understand Affective Fallacy from Example’, LitforIndia, 23-Dec-2023, www.litforindia.com).

(source: cornerstoneduluth.org)

Semantic autonomy, Intentionalism, Anti-intentionalism: The intentional and affective fallacies as prescriptive “rules” of hermeneutics held sway from the 1940s to the 1970s, however this is not to say that there was no pushback from scholarly dissenters. Proponents (primarily American) of what is called “Reader-response theory” reject the claims of New Criticism of this prescribed mode of interpreting and critiquing a work of literature. Some of these objected to the fallacy’s nothing outside the text rigidity for constricting exploration of all possibilities of a work’s meanings. Critic Norman Holland frames it in a psychoanalytical context, the reader, he affirms, will react to a literary text with the same psychological responses he or she brings to events in their daily lives, ie, “the immediate goal of interpretation is to fulfil (one’s) psychological needs and desires” (‘Psychological Reader-response Theory’, Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism (2016), www.literariness.org). Theorist ED Hirsch in his “Objective Interpretation” essay also took issue with the expositors of the intentional fallacy thesis, arguing that on the contrary authorial intent (intentionalism) was integral to a full understanding of the work…the only meaning that is permanent and valid is that of the author in question, the reader should confine him or herself to interpreting what the author is trying to say (E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation, 1967) .

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A quite different kind of fallacious argument is the argument from silence (Latin: argumentum ex silentio). This arises when a conclusion or inference is drawn based on an absence of statements in historical documents and source materials…the argument seeks not to challenge or rebut specific things an author includes in a book or document, but is critical of the author for something they should have said but didn’t! The most common instances of the argument from silence in practice relate to biblical debates and controversies, but a contemporary classic example of a non-theological, historical nature, one generating considerable heated discourse, concerns the 13th century merchant and explorer Marco Polo and the famous book of his travels in the East.

Medieval Venezia at the time of Marco Polo (source: Bodleian Library, Oxford)

Medieval world travelogue guru?: Known by various names including Description of the World (Divisament du monde), Book of the Marvels of the World, Il libro di Marco Polo detto il Milione, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, or simply The Travels of Marco Polo, the book is one of the most celebrated tomes in the annals of literature dealing with the experiences of travellers to distant and unknown lands. The story, told and retold in numerous languages over centuries, presents Marco and his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo embarking on an epic road trip along the Silk Road to the court of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Beijing). The book recounts Marco’s travels in Cathay (North China) and Manji (South China), among other Eastern lands. The consensus among most historians is that Signor Polo, despite a tendency to exaggerate and embellish the tales of his travels2⃞, did nonetheless journey to China as he claimed in the book. The publication of Did Marco Polo Go to China? by Frances Wood in 1995 controversially swam against this tide. Wood infers serious doubts about Polo’s achievements, suggesting that despite his being away from his native Italy for the best part of a quarter-of-a-century, he never reached his intended destination China. According to Wood, he got only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea where he accumulated all of his information on Chinese society and other Asian lands (his source material for the “Travels”) from picking the brains of visiting Persian merchants.

A page from the Polo travelogue

Doubting “Marco’s millions”: What made Wood so convinced that Marco Polo never visited China? Firstly, there is the book’s puzzling itinerary, it proceeds in a disjointed, incoherent fashion, is not uniformly chronological, has some odd detours and gets some geographical place names in China wrong. Then, while acknowledging The Travels of Marco Polo contains references to porcelain (from Fujian province), coal, rice-wine, paper currency and other items, Wood hones in on the fact that the Venetian traveller failed to mention certain other quintessentially Chinese things—namely the Great Wall of China, tea, chopsticks, cormorant fishing and the practice of foot-binding—in the pages of his “Travels’. Wood also picks up on Polo’s failure to learn Chinese during his sojourn in the Middle Kingdom. Allied to these omissions was the absence of Polo’s3⃞ name in any official Chinese document of the period, which Wood believed, further incriminated Marco as the perpetrator of a fraud.

A crumbling section of the not-so-great wall in north China built prior to Polo’s time (photo: John Man, The Great Wall)

Wood herself is perpetrating a pattern of reasoning which is problematic by recourse to an argument from silence. As Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2010) (ISBN0-415-96219-6Routledge pp. 64–65) note, “arguments from silence are, as a rule, quite weak; there are many examples where reasoning from silence would lead us astray.” Academic critics have been quick to pinpoint the shortcomings and misconceptions in Wood’s argument. There are, they counter, manifestly valid reasons why Polo would not refer to the Great Wall, for one, it was largely not there in the period of his residency in China! The impressive edifice of the Great Wall as we think of it was primarily a product of the Ming Dynasty (from 1368, three-quarters of a century after the Polos’ stay)…what there was of the not-so-Great Wall prior to that was a much more modest, unprepossessing sight (“a discontinuous series of derelict, pounded earth ramparts”) (‘F. Wood’s Did Marco Polo Go To China?’, A Critical Appraisal byI. de Rachewiltz, http://openresearch–repository.anu.edu.au). With the matter of the Chinese penchant for tea-drinking, perhaps Polo didn’t think the topic simply sufficiently noteworthy to rate a mention4⃞. The question of the omission of foot-binding, chopsticks and Polo’s linguistic ignorance of Chinese in the travelogue can all be accounted for. China and the royal court was under Mongol control (Yuan Dynasty) in Marco’s time, accordingly Polo moved in those circles, tending not to mix with the (Han) Chinese population. and so lacked the motivation (or opportunity) to learn Chinese. Likewise, he wouldn’t have encountered many upper class Chinese women in their homes, this was the strata of society that practiced female foot-binding, not the Mongols. Again, with chopsticks, not a utensil of choice for the Mongols who Polo tended to fraternise with (Morgan, D. O. (1996). Marco Polo in China-Or Not [Review of Did Marco Polo Go to China?, by F. Wood]. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 6(2), 221–225. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25183182). As for “the Travels’” silence on fishing with cormorants, the activity was not a widespread phenomena in China during the Yuan era, confined to the remoter areas of Sichuan Province (‘Cormorant Fishing in China’, Sally Guo, China Travel (Upd. 04-April-2021), www.chinatravel.com).

MP (source: caamadi.com/de/marco-polo-in-venice)

Filtered Marco Polo – Rustichello et al: And there’s another line of thought when considerating the book’s glaring omissions, inconsistencies and inaccuracies that Frances Wood doesn’t seem to have factored into her thesis…The Travels of Marco Polo, the published book we read today, is a different beast in form and content to the original article from the late 1290s. In fact the original manuscript which Polo dictated to his amanuensis, an imaginative romance writer Rustichello de Pisa —who had licence to inject his own theatrical flourishes and flavour into Marco’s original story—was lost early on, so “the Travels” have gone on an untraceable and interminable journey through “dozens of translations of translations, none of which are necessarily accurate” (‘The Travels of Marco Polo: The True Story of a 14th-Century Bestseller’, Anna Bressanin, BBC, 09-Jan-2024, www.bbc.com). Of the 54 extant manuscripts (out of around 150 distinct copies in all languages), no two copies are entirely alike with “improvements” and edits made by each copyist and translator. We should also remember that Marco was in prison, relying on his memory to recount a multitude of events and experiences, some of which stretched back over 20 years, hardly surprising then if readers have to contend with the recollections of a not entirely reliable narrator (‘Marco Polo’s book on China omits tea, chopsticks, bound feet’, Peter Neville-Hadley, South China Morning Post, 04-Oct-2020, www.amp.scmp.com).

The Marco Polo saga has spawned a long history of film and television versions with romantic adventure taking precedence over story accuracy

Heavily redacted archives: The issue of Polo’s claim to have been an official in Kublai Khan’s service—and in particular governor of Yangzhou—was seized on by Dr Wood who pointed out that Marco’s name does not appear in any historical official Chinese archives. Rather than being necessarily proof of Marco fabricating a presence in China as Wood assumes, other factors may explain the discrepancy…no other Italian merchants known to have visited medieval China are mentioned in any Chinese sources, even the Papal envoy to the Great Khan’s court, Giovanni de Marignolli, doesn’t rate a mention (‘Marco Polo was not a swindler. He really did go to China’, Science News, 16-Apr-2012, www.sciencedaily.com). Another factor germane to this is the fact that the Ming (Han) Dynasty that succeeded the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty initiated the practice of erasing the records of earlier non-Han officials (Morgan).

(source: LibriVox)

One particularly vocal critic of Did Marco Polo Go To China?, Sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel from the University of Tübingen, produced a research paper demonstrating that Marco’s descriptions of currency, salt production and revenues from the salt monopoly in China were of a standard of accuracy and uniqueness of detail5⃞, that produces a very high level of proof that Polo had to have been in China, close to the wheels of power, to be privy to such comprehensive knowledge (www.sciencedaily.com).

Chinese salt production (source: Wellcome Images)

The “logical fallacy of weak induction”: Frances Wood’s iconoclastic book was certainly an attention-grabber, both for medieval scholars and Sinologists and for the general public, causing a furore upon its publication in 1995 and spawning several TV documentaries. China and the world of the Great Khan is a central tenet of the Marco Polo story, making it unthinkable to most scholars, almost a sacrilege, to suggest that the legendary Venetian traveller never set foot in the Middle Kingdom! The weight of the counter-argument unleashed against Wood’s thesis throws a spotlight on the hazards of trying to “treat the absence of evidence as evidence itself”, as Steven Lewis summarises the fallacious nature of the argument from silence (‘The Argument from Silence”, Steven Lewis, SES, www.ses.edu).

(image: silk–road.com)

Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo go to China? (1995, Secker & Warburg, London)

1⃞ Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 ‘Intentional Fallacy’ essay to some extent has its antecedents in the earlier debate between CS Lewis and EMW Tillyard, published as The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), in which Lewis argued that an author’s own personality and biography has negligible to zero impact on the literary text, while Tillyard enunciated the contrary position: that an author’s own imagination and story can have an indelible influence on a work of literature

 2⃞   and there had been doubters even in Marco’s time and later about some of his more wilder and fantastic claims, earning him the epithet Il Milione or “the Millions”) (aka “Marchus Paulo Millioni”). Wood’s particular slant on Polo’s book follows the lead of earlier German Mongolists

3⃞ who had claimed to have been an emissary in the emperor’s service

4⃞ Wood herself concedes that Rustichello may have edited out references to tea on the grounds of it being “of no interest to the general public”

5⃞ and corroborated by Chinese documents

Being “Ern Malley”, the Avatar Bard of Croydon, NSW, 2132

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture

Every age produces its share of literary hoaxes, it’s a practice to deceive that has been around for ‘yonks’. A Irish hack writer back in the 18th century claimed to have discovered (and subsequently published) a ‘lost’ play purportedly penned by Shakespeare. Jonathan Swift dabbled in it in his time, and in recent times we have seen the surfacing of false claims of a ‘lost’ autobiography of Howard Hughes and the emergence of the so-called “Hitler Diaries”.

▲ Pranker J McAuley

The Antipodes’ most celebrated entrant in the canon of great literary hoaxes occurred in 1944. The perpetrators were two nondescript conservative young poets serving in the Australian army, (Lt.) James McAuley and (Cprl.) Harold Stewart (both Fort Street High old boys), who “shared an animus towards modern poetry” (Lehman). The two desk soldiers, intent on “deflat(ing) the egos of the pretentious literary avant-garde“𝟙, honed in on the most conspicuous target, Max Harris, Adelaide publisher of the modernist literary mag Angry Penguins.

▲ Pranker H Stewart

McAuley and Stewart’s prank𝟚 was to write to Harris pretending to be one “Ethel Malley” from Croydon NSW, informing him of unpublished poems written by her brother Ern, a working class soldier whose life had been cut tragically short. Harris, taken in by the fraud lock, stock and barrel, called “Ern’s poems” modernist gems and was only too eager to publish the 18 “Ern Malley” poems in a 1944 volume of Angry Penguins.   ⿻ ⿻ ⿻
▲ Cover art by Sidney Nolan

Malley’s “magnum opus“, entitled ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, according to the hoaxers was written in a single afternoon in a random manner, a pastiche of fragments patched together from widely disparate sources of inspiration – Shakespeare, the classics, a dictionary, a book of  quotations, a tome on tropical hygiene, a US Army treatise on mosquito infestation…all mixed in together with snatches of McAuley and Stewart’s own poetry. Consisting of abstruse, flowery, high-sounding verse, to the minds of the hoaxers they were simply creating nonsensical, bad modern poetry:

❝ Though stilled to alabaster

This Ichthys shall swim

From the mind’s disaster

On the volatile hymn. ❞

𓂎𓂎𓂎

❝ The swung torch scatters seeds

In the umbelliferous dark ❞

𓂎𓂎𓂎

❝ I am still

the black swan of trespass on alien waters. ❞

𓂎𓂎𓂎

▲ Max Harris with his Heide Circle friends (Source: literaturelust.com)⿻⿻⿻

After a Sydney tabloid exposed the poems as a hoax and McAuley and Stewart fessed up to the deed, the fallout for Harris was caustic, the publisher was publicly humiliated for being duped so completely. And to add insult to injury, he was charged, tried and convicted on obscenity grounds (“indecent advertisements” the police prosecution charged). The trifecta of misfortune for wunderkind Harris was that his publication Angry Penguins folded within two years of the episode. Harris relocated to Melbourne, becoming a bookseller (fronting the Mary Martin’s chain of bookshops).

⿻⿻⿻

Afterwards Harris reproached himself for not picking up on the several clues McAuley and Stewart embedded in the text, eg, “It is necessary to understand that a poet may not exist”; (alluding to earlier incongruous stanzas) “these distractions were clues” (Parezanović). Interestingly though, Harris never backtracked from his initial evaluation that the ‘Darkening Ecliptic’ poems were works of genius𝟛. Despite being pilloried by the press he also elicited support from the literary world for his stance, most notably from influential critic Sir Herbert Read who contended that “it was possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means – even if the motive of the writer was to perpetrate a travesty” (Lehman).

▲ No. 40 Dalmar St Croydon: the Malleys’ supposed address, actually the home of Harold Stewart⿻⿻⿻

Read’s anti-clockwise take on the controversy points to a debate that continues to this day over the merit or otherwise of the “Ern Malley” poems. Critics at home and abroad praised ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’ for its literary merit – including Robert Hughes. American poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch both lauded the poems’ surrealist qualities and even taught Ern’s work in their college literature classes (Wertheim). Even a poet of the highest calibre, TS Eliot, had positive words, wiring his support for the poems.

⿻⿻⿻

Ern Malley and the intentional fallacy
The Ern Malley controversy focuses attention on the issue of authorship. Sasha Grishin argues that where an author is “unknowable” and the author’s intentions irretrievable and perhaps irrelevant…once a work of art has been created…it is largely a fruitless task…to try to determine what an author may have intended by it“. Michel Foucault gives credence to this perspective: “we can imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” – a prime example of this is Homer, the unknowable but putative author of western literature’s ur-canon. ⿻⿻⿻
Nolan’s “Ned Kelly” series ▲

Like the poems or loathe them, the Malley hoax continues to fascinate critics and writers. US poet and critic David Lehman calls it “the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century”. Sidney Nolan (who contributed the cover artwork for the Ern Malley volume) credits the phenomenon with giving him the nerve to embark on his iconic “Ned Kelly” series of paintings. Garry Shead is another artist who produced his own idiosyncratic visual take on the Malley poems. In Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake the Malley hoax influence—along with the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein— shows itself in the novel’s character ‘Christopher Chubb’.

▲ Garry Shead’s Ern Malley ‘Petit Testament’ interpretation

A cause célèbre with staying power
Undeniably, the creation of the fictitious Ern Malley far surpassed the literary significance of his creators (Grishin). As Lehman noted, “Malley escaped the control of his creators (enjoying) an autonomous existence beyond and at odds with the critical and satirical intentions of McAuley and Stewart”.

◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘

𝟙 Stewart late in life described the deception as “a wonderful jape (which would) absolutely slay Max Harris”

𝟚 some have suggested that the Australian anti-modern poet AD Hope was behind the prank to deceive Harris but Hope vigorously denied any involvement (McCulloch)

𝟛 Stephen Orr suggests that Harris’ eagerness to take the Ern Malley discovery at face value and run with it was in part due to his being on the lookout for something authentic and new to take the place of bush poetry in Angry Penguins, something “modern, anti-Adelaide, anti-Australia-as-a-talcum-scented tea shop”

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Papers and published pieces consulted:

‘The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax – Introduction’, David Lehman, Jacket, 17 — June 2002, www.jacketmagazine.com

‘The Poet Who Never Was’, David Lehman, Washington Post, 06-Mar-1994, www.washingtonpost.com

‘Garry Shead and the Ern Malley series by Sasha Grishin, 2003’, Gagprojects, www.gagprojects.com

“It is Necessary to Understand That a Poet May Not Exist: The Case of Ern Malley”, Tijana Parezanović, SIC – A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, Dec 2012, www.sic-journal.org

‘The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley: The Poet who wasn’t’, Christine Wertheim, Cabinet, Issue 33, Spring 2009, www.cabinetmagazine.org

‘In Dialogue with A.D. Hope – Dialogue Three Politics & Poetics of Australian Literature’, Ann McCulloch, Double Dialogues, Issue 5 2003, www.doubledialogues.com