Nehmas and the genius

When thinking about the meaning of a text and the authoritative creator of that meaning, some people, like Alexander Nehmas, believe that the meaning of the text cannot come solely from the author. He argues that the reader makes the meaning, while considering the author as a being. I think that his analysis makes important claims about the author and the meaning of the text that cannot be overcome. However, I think his examination strips the author of her agency. With the addition of Kant’s concept of the genius that gives the author creative power, I think that Nehmas’s argument restores some of that agency to the author.

Nehmas argues that the meaning of a text is made or equivocal, that the reader makes the meaning with reference to who the author is and the context, and that there is only one correct interpretation of the meaning of a text but that we can never totally discover it.  While the author sets the bounds or the scope of the meaning, she can never totally control it. The process of writing the story is so different from reading the story that the meaning cannot totally be translated exactly from writing to meaning. In his essay “The Postulated Author,” Nehmas claims that, “just as the author is not identical with a text’s fictional narrator, so he is also distinct from its historical writer. The author is postulated as the agent whose actions account for the text’s features,” and he goes on to add that, “the author, unlike the writer, is not a text’s efficient cause, but so to speak, its formal cause, manifested in thought not identical with it” (562). Here Nehmas discusses the difference between the author as a historical figure and the creative being that wrote the text. He believes that we need to look at the writer of the text as an author and not the historical figure in total. Limiting the study of the writer as a historical figure would limit the understanding of the author as an agent. For instance, the historical writer may believe that her text is about one thing, but may not realize what cultural forces are working upon her and therefore not fully realize the meaning of her text.

While I agree with the idea that the author may not understand all of the influences upon her work, I personally believe that Nehmas’s position strips away too much of the author’s agency in creating the meaning of a text. Certainly there are things that we do not have complete knowledge of that impact our thinking on a regular basis, but that does not mean that we have no understanding of it. Nehmas addresses this by claiming that, “what a text means is what it could mean to its writer” (564). I know that Nehmas allows for the author’s meaning to play a role, but it still seems as though he does not give the author enough credit when it comes to the author’s intention, skill, and understanding of the meaning. If cultural forces act upon the author that she may have no awareness of and writes a text full of meaning, it feels like from Nehmas’s argument that the author played no role in the creation of the text. They were simply some robotic function of culture’s control. I certainly believe that this can and is the case all the time. As a historian, I know that cultural studies examine texts that are written about some event or musings that say much about the culture of the time period, but these are not texts that we necessarily read every day. The literature that we are talking about is generally something extraordinary and the author plays an essential role in creating that.

In reconciliation with Kant’s ideas on the genius, I believe that Nehmas may have a better argument. I do not think that he would disagree with Kant’s description of the genius and he may in fact welcome the combination of the two arguments. Kant argues that the genius is a being through which something happens that creates the beautiful. I believe that the beautiful in this case may also be the meaning of the text. The good author is a genius who is able to create a great work with meaning. They may not be able to fully explain what they did and how they were able to do it, but they were the one who wrote it. Perhaps, like Nehmas warns, even if they think that they know how they created the meaning, they may not truly understand all of the processes that took place and therefore not actually know the meaning. While it does not necessarily change Nehmas’s argument, I think the addition of Kant’s notion of the genius can restore some agency to the author of a text.