A BRIEF
HISTORY OF LITERARY THEORY III
By Chris Lang
The Reader-Response Theory of
Stanley Fish
He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout:
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
Edwin Markham
At this point I
would like to take a closer look at Stanley Fish's reader-response theory. It
is my intent first to examine Fish's literary theory before criticizing it and
then tie it in more broadly with the privatization of meaning and other
phenomena occurring in philosophy and society which I will argue are
historically conditioned. In other words, Fish's thesis is influenced by
existential notions of truth and the rise of modernism/post-modernism.
There are really two
kinds of reader-response criticism: one is a phenomenological approach to
reading which characterizes much of Fish's earlier work, and the other is an
epistemological theory characteristic of Fish's later work. The
phenomenological method has much to commend itself to us as it focuses on what
happens in the reader's mind as he or she reads. Fish applies this method in
his early work "Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost."
His thesis in this work is that Milton used a number of literary techniques
intentionally to lead the reader into a false sense of security whereupon he
would effect a turn from the reader's expectations in order to surprise the
reader with his own prideful self-sufficiency. The supposed intent of Milton
was to force the reader to see his own sinfulness in a new light and be forced
back to God's grace. Fish's thesis is a rather ingenious approach to Paradise
Lost and to Milton's (mis)leading of the reader.Footnote28
Fish's concern at
this point in his career is with what "is really happening in the act of
reading," and this is reflected in his compilations of essays entitled Is
There a Text in This Class? especially the first half.Footnote29 Fish
defines his own phenomenological approach as "an analysis of the
developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one
another in time.Footnote30 His
concern is with what the text does as opposed to what it means. As J. F.
Worthen suggests, much of his work can be seen as a reaction against the
formalism that characterized the age of New Critical theory which held that
meaning was embedded in the textual artifact or, as Wimsatt and Beardsley
referred to it, "the object".Footnote31 He
suggests that, "The context for the discussion is the question of whether
formal features exist prior to and independently of interpretive
strategies."Footnote32 As one
might imagine Fish eventually offers a negative response to this question. He
posits that rather than having a text that contains formal features
identifiable in all times and places that it is the reader that projects these
features onto the text, thereby also answering "No" to the question,
"Is there a text in this class?"
From this point in
Fish's career his theories evolve into a form of criticism that rejects the
author's intentionally and places meaning solely within the arena of those
receiving the text. Thus his theory is sometimes called "reception
aesthetics" or "affective stylistics." Fish claims that it is
the interpretive community that creates its own reality. It is the community
that invests a text, or for that matter life itself, with meaning. Those who
claim that meaning is to be found in some eternal superstructure or
substructure of reality he labels "foundationalists." Naturally,
because foundationalists comprise their own interpretive communities and
interpret through such a grid, they will be opposed to theories such as his
own. His theory is epistemological in that it deals not so much with literary
criticism (although the implications for such are tremendous) as with how one
comes to know. In the following analysis of Fish's theory I will focus
primarily on his later reader-response theory.
Meaning in the
Reader
This aspect of
Fish's theory is one of the most radical and controversial. He posits that
meaning inheres not in the text but in the reader, or rather the reading
community. "In the procedures I would urge," he writes, "the
reader's activities are at the center of attention, where they are regarded not
as leading to meaning but as having meaning."Footnote33 He can
hold this because he believes that there is no stable basis for meaning. There
is no correct interpretation that will always hold true. Meaning does not exist
"out there" somewhere. It exists, rather, within the reader.
In his earlier work
he made a claim, not wholly disavowed in his later material, that what a text
means is the experience that it produces in the reader. To define meaning he
says, "It is an experience; it occurs; it does something; it makes us do
something. Indeed, I would go so far as to say, in direct contradiction of
Wimsatt and Beardsley, that what it does is what it means."Footnote34 Here
Fish stakes out the territory of his critical enterprise which is to set
himself against the formalist principles of the past with its supposed
scientific agenda. This project he admits took some time from which to effect a
complete liberation. But this is the principle that will eventually lead his
theory from (what his critics would call) an "objective" to a fully
blown "subjective" interpretive theory. Indeed, his early theory
appears to be completely vulnerable to the criticism of subjectivity as he
posits an experiential dimension to meaning which inheres in "the active
and activating consciousness of the reader," a charge he will later
attempt to counter.Footnote35
Fish's next move in
his anti-formalist agenda is to deny the text as object, which was so important
to Wimsatt and Beardsley and the New Critics. "The objectivity of the text
is an illusion and, moreover, a dangerous illusion, because it is so physically
convincing."Footnote36 What
exactly Fish means by this statement is somewhat unclear. He does not, as it
may appear, deny the ontological reality or the existence of the palpable
object, although one could argue that that is exactly what this sentence by
itself means because he apparently pairs the word "objective" with
"physical."Footnote37 It is
the context that illuminates what he is driving at. But he does deny the text's
independence as a repository of meaning.Footnote38 The text
does not contain meaning: despite being written upon, it is a tabula rasa,
a blank slate onto which the reader, in reading, actually writes the text.
Fish takes the idea of
the hermeneutical circle seriously. The reader is always reading her
preunderstanding back into the text with no possibility of achieving an
"objective" or author-centered interpretation. Fish claims that an
interpretive theory is itself circular, that the interpreter will always find
what he is looking for in the text, that formal patterns "are themselves
constituted by an interpretive act."Footnote39 He
claims at one point that:
Theories always work
and they will always produce exactly the results they predict, results that
will be immediately compelling to those for whom the theory's assumptions and
enabling principles are self-evident. Indeed, the trick would be to find a theory
that didn't work.Footnote40
Because the
assumptions one begins with will determine the outcome of the study, for Fish,
"success is inevitable."Footnote41 The
methods with which one approaches the text have already determined the outcome,
one's presuppositions actuate the product.Footnote42
For Fish a text is
only a RorschachFootnote43 blot
onto which the reader projects her self-understanding or, as we shall see, her
culturally determined assumptions. The text contains nothing in itself, rather
the content is supplied by the reader. It is the reader that determines the
shape of text, its form, and its content. This is how Fish can claim that
reader's write texts. Worthen's comment is apt. He says, "as far as Fish
is concerned, reading can only repeat reality, in that it necessarily consists
of nothing but replications of independently existing collective interpretive
strategies."Footnote44 This is
exactly what reading does and this is one of the difficulties of his theory. It
fails to account for the text being able to expand the readers' understanding
or Weltanshung by introducing her to a different way of perceiving. For
Fish the text can only function as a mirror that provides a reflection of its
reader.
Authorial Intent
It is in this same
manner that Fish dismisses the idea of authorial intent as the guiding
principle in interpretation. In analyzing one of his previous critical works he
declares,
I did what critics
always do: I "saw" what my interpretive principles permitted or
directed me to see, and then I turned around and attributed what I had 'seen'
to a text and an intention. . . . What I am suggesting is that formal units are
always a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear; they are not
"in" the text, and I would make the same argument for intentions.Footnote45
To claim that the
author intended to say or do such and such is really a declaration regarding
the interpreter, in Fish's theory. Thus different interpreters will see
different intentions because they are a creation of the reader and not the
author. As with New Critical theory, the author fails to live past the creation
of the text, indeed, for Fish the author as well is a creation of the reader.Footnote46
Fish can make this
move because of his epistemic beliefs that nothing we see, perceive, or think
is uninterpreted. He considers the attempt to access the author's intention as
naive; for how would one ever access an intention as it does not exist in any
objective or uninterpreted realm that can be mediated to our consciousness
without itself being interpreted? We could have access to documents regarding
the author's true intention, "but the documents . . . that would give us
that intention are no more available to a literal reading (are no more
uninterpreted) than the literal reading it would yield." Thus when John
writes, "These things have been written that you might believe that Jesus
is the Christ, the son of God; and that believing you may have eternal life in
his name," we are no closer to his intentions than were he to have said
and written nothing.Footnote47
Fish is following
after the New Critical school, which as we have seen, disregarded authorial
intent as well as historical interpretation. For Fish it is not important to
access the original context in order to access meaning. He says, "to
consult dictionaries, grammars, and histories is to assume that meanings can be
specified independently of the activity of reading."Footnote48 But as
we have seen it is the activity of reading which takes center stage in the
making of meaning. Fish posits this because he believes that we as interpreters
are cut off from past worlds or cultures. In other words, he believes that we
are without commonality with past cultures and that, therefore, a complete
disjuncture exists. The interpreter belongs to a different world from the
author.
Interpretive
Communities
What lies behind Fish's
thinking at this point is a strong view of the social construction of reality.
Fish firmly believes that knowledge is not objective but always socially
conditioned. All that one thinks and "knows" is an interpretation
that is only made possible by the social context in which one lives. For Fish
the very thoughts one thinks are made possible by presuppositions of the
community in which one lives and furthermore the socially conditioned
individual, which all individuals are, cannot think beyond the limits made
possible by the culture. This culture is referred to by Fish as an
"interpretive community" and the strategies of an interpreter are
community property,
and insofar as they at once enable and limit the operations of his
consciousness, he is too [community property]. . . . Interpretive communities
are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for
writing texts, for constituting their properties.Footnote49
Fish believes that
interpretive communities, like languages, are purely conventional, that is,
arbitrarily agreed upon constructions. The way a community lives is in no way a
reflection of some higher reality, it is rather a construction, or edifice that
has been erected by consensus. This holds true for the interpretive strategies
a culture or an institution employs as well as their notions of right and
wrong. A culture's morality is no more founded in any external reality than its
language.Footnote50 Nor is
it possible to specify how language correlates with the external world.Footnote51 Language
and its usage are arbitrary decisions made by convention as is the fact that we
call north "North" instead of something else.
In response to a
criticism launched by M. H. Abrams, Fish explains some of his understanding of
the conventional nature of language.
If what follows is
communication or understanding, it will not be because he and I share a
language, in the sense of knowing the meanings of individual words and the
rules for combining them, but because a way of thinking, a form of life,
shares us, and implicates us in a world of already-in-place objects, purposes,
goals, procedures, values, and so on; and it is to the features of that world
that any words we utter will be heard as necessarily referring [italics mine].Footnote52
Similarly, what we
call literature is not such because of some abiding principle of truth or art
that exists in an atemporal state, but it is such because the culture values it
for interests of its own, that is because it reflects the culture's
values and beliefs in some way.
Thus the act of
recognizing literature is not constrained by something in the text, nor does it
issue from an independent and arbitrary will; rather, it proceeds from a
collective decision as to what will count as literature, a decision that will
be in force only so long as a community of readers or believers continues to
abide by it.Footnote53
In this view
literature is simply the expression of an ideology. Because of his views on
literature, literature tends to lose its "special status" as
literature and becomes simply a reflection of communal values which is as
subject to change as are cultures. That is not to say that the individual or
culture consciously chooses its values, which would imply some form of
objectivity or the ability to stand apart from one's values. To Fish it is not
possible to abstract one's self from one's values. Fish is simply a product of
his environment without the ability to choose his beliefs and values. They are
instead informed or determined by the culture which is historically conditioned
and no more able to choose objectively than the individual.
Using Fish as an
example of post-structuralist critical theory, I will in the remaining chapters
analyze his thought as it relates to post-modernism. What follows is an
examination of post-modernism from the perspective of the discipline of
philosophy, or an history of ideas approach. It is not intended to be a
comprehensive history of Western philosophy but a brief examination of some of
the salient features which I believe have contributed to the rise of what is
now being called post-modernism. I will end the chapter with an emphasis on the
"linguistic turn", as Rorty has called it, in philosophy of the
twentieth century by examining some of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein as
his thinking bears some similarities to that of Stanley Fish and lays some of
the groundwork for the current state of things. Wittgenstein is important as
his thinking is often characterized as thoroughly conventionalist and
misappropriated as such.
In the following
chapters I would also like to take a critical look at some of Fish's theory and
examine some of the consequences of his thinking. Fish claims that because his
thinking is theoretical it is without consequences (he consistently tells his
critics "not to worry"). He is at least disingenuous if not patently
dishonest in this assertion as his theories have grave consequence especially
for those who would appeal to some transcendent standard.
In taking a critical
stance toward Fish's literary theory I am well aware of Fish's response to
those who disagree with his theories or, as he puts it, "feel
threatened" by his ideas. Those who hold to the idea of essences, or to
the reality and accessibility of transcendent truths, he labels as
foundationalists, members of the "intellectual right."Footnote54 And he
further accuses them of holding to a naive epistemology which views the mind as
merely reflecting the world as it really is (an sich). Footnote55 Moreover
they are characterized as without understanding how fundamental language is to
one's world view and the cultural assumptions that go with it. I must plead
guilty to being a foundationalist with objections to Fish's theory. Fish claims
that his theory, however, is internally coherent, while I will argue just the
opposite, that his theory does not cohere based on his own assumptions. Fish's
response to these criticisms would be to deny me as his critic access to his
theory in the first place because I do not share his assumptions and, to him,
only those who are within a community can understand its thought. That claim
is, however, as we shall see, one of the bases of my criticism. Let us turn
briefly to the history of philosophy.
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