In his article “Persecution and the Art of Writing” (1941), Leo Strauss introduces the metaphor of “writing between the lines.” The interlinear space of the text’s meaning is not filled in by the reader’s interpretation but intentionally created by the author. Five years later, Wimsatt and Beardsley challenged the idea of authorial intention as an interpretive category in their article “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946). Though not in direct conversation, the tension between these views has framed literary theories of meaning and interpretation since. From Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) to his Moses and Monotheism (1939) and to Lacan’s seminars, we find similar notions of inter-linearity, concealment, omission, and internalized censorship. While in poststructuralist thought, we find similar skepticism about the intentionality of an individual’s articulation from within the structure. How do these opposing positions relate to reading practices, to our understanding of literature and the possibilities of translation?
Beyond the written or printed word, language itself has been understood from similarly opposing perspectives. J. L. Borges celebrates the Kabbalists who elevated the combinatorial power of words, seeing them as the building blocks of creation. Their perfect, even magical combination was the source of the divine power of creation. Today generative AI suggests that meaning is a matter of statistical combination. In the infinite monkey theorem, or in Borges’ total library, without an infinity of time and space, linguistic meaning is a statistical anomaly. What does it mean to read, write and translate, within a frame where intention is either esoteric queen or a fallacy, where words are either the divine building blocks of creation or their meaning is a statistical anomaly? What identity formations (historical and contemporary) does this frame support or challenge?
