Criticism acknowledging the work's insoluble ambiguity. By Brenda Murphy

A number of critics tried to explain the origin of ingrained and insoluble ambiguity and the effects of such ambiguity on the reader.

Brenda Murphy:

According to Brenda Murphy, controversies can never be resolved and there is n answer to the questions to the text raises.

For example, we cannot determine whether the author intended to write a ghost story or a story of mental illness. The critic will try to understand the author’s meaning in the context of an extrinsic genre, having already lost the possibility of grasping in the author’s actual intrinsic genre.

Murphy then turns to James’s statements about the story, which seem not to be sincere because his intentions are not clear neither related to what he has said about his own work.

Some other critics as Salomon and Aswel have ignored the author’s statements in the preface and established quite disparate interpretations, believing that the real meaning of the story was only in James’s conscious and imagination.

Nevertheless, Murphy considers impossible the fact of determining an unconscious purpose or intention unless it s made conscious. For her it is important to interpret words and actions, much as we interpret a text. But again the hermeneutic circle reappears. In deciding what element it is important to be considered, we are influenced by our own preconceptions so for Murphy, failure becomes inevitable, because the problem of the hermeneutic circle is a fact of what is perceived and what is communicated.

Furthermore, Murphy cites Hirsch’s critic that the author’s intended meaning enfolds analogous and unforeseeable implications, which of course are not known to its originator.