From
…In this view discerning an intention is no more or less than
understanding, and understanding includes (is constituted by) all the
activities which make up what I call the structure of the reader's experience.
To describe that experience is therefore to describe the reader's efforts at understanding, and to describe the reader's efforts at
understanding is to describe his realization (in two senses) of an author's
intention. Or to put it another way, what my analyses amount to are
descriptions of a succession of decisions made by readers about an author's
intention; decisions that are not limited to the specifying of purpose but
include the specifying of every aspect of successively intended worlds;
decisions that are precisely the shape, because they are the content, of the
reader's activities.
Having said this, however, it would appear
that I am open to two objections. The first is that the procedure is a circular
one. I describe the experience of a reader who in his strategies is answerable
to an author's intention, and I specify the author's intention by pointing to
the strategies employed by that same reader. But this objection would have
force only if it were possible to specify one independently of the other. What is being specified from either perspective are the
conditions of utterance, of what could have been understood to have been meant
by what was said. That is, intention and understanding are two ends of a conventional
act, each of which necessarily stipulates (includes, defines, specifies) the
other. To construct the profile of the informed or at-home reader is at the
same time to characterize the author's intention and vice versa, because to do
either is to specify the contemporary conditions of utterance, to identify, by
becoming a member of, a community made up of those who share interpretive
strategies.
The second objection is another version of
the first: if the content of the reader's experience is the succession of acts
he performs in search of an author's intentions, and if he performs those acts
at the bidding of the text, does not the text then produce or contain
everything--intention and experience--and have I not compromised my antiformalist position? This objection will have force only
if the formal patterns of the text are assumed to exist independently of the
reader's experience, for only then can priority be claimed for them. Indeed,
the claims of independence and priority are one and the same; when they are
separated it is so that they can give circular and illegitimate support to each
other. The question "do formal features exist independently?" is
usually answered by pointing to their priority: they are "in" the
text before the reader comes to it. The question "are formal features
prior?" is usually answered by pointing to their independent status: they
are "in" the text before the reader comes to it. What looks like a
step in an argument is actually the spectacle of an assertion supporting itself.
It follows then that an attack on the independence of formal features will also
be an attack on their priority (and vice versa)…
*****
This, then, is my thesis: that the form of
the reader's experience, formal units, and the structure of intention are one,
that they come into view simultaneously, and that therefore the questions of
priority and independence do not arise. What does arise is another question:
what produces them? That is, if intention, form, and the shape of the reader's
experience are simply different ways of referring to (different perspectives
on) the same interpretive act, what is that act an interpretation of ? I cannot answer that question, but neither, I would
claim, can anyone else, although formalists try to answer it by pointing to
patterns and claiming that they are available independently of (prior to)
interpretation.
*****
The moral is clear: the choice is never
between objectivity and interpretation but between an interpretation that is
unacknowledged as such and an interpretation that is at least aware of itself.
It is this awareness that I am claiming for myself, although in doing so I must
give up the claims implicitly made in the first part of this paper. There I
argue that a bad (because spatial) model had suppressed what was really
happening, but by my own declared principles the notion "really
happening" is just one more interpretation.
Fish, from “Interpreting
‘Interpreting the Variorum’,” 1976
Affective criticism is arbitrary only in the sense that one cannot prove
that its beginning is the right one, but once begun it unfolds in ways that are
consistent with its declared principles. It is therefore a superior fiction,
and since no methodology can legitimately claim any more, this superiority is
decisive. It is also creative. That is, it makes possible new ways of reading
and thereby creates new texts. An unsympathetic critic might complain that this
is just the trouble, that rather than following the way people actually read I
am teaching people to read differently. This is to turn the prescriptive claim
into a criticism, but it will be felt as a criticism only if the alternative to
different reading is right reading and if the alternative to the texts created
by different reading is the real text. These however are the fictions of
formalisms, and as fictions they have the disadvantage of being confining. My
fiction is liberating. It relieves me of the obligation to be right (a standard
that simply drops out) and demands only that I be interesting (a standard that
can be met without any reference at all to an illusory objectivity). Rather
than restoring or recovering texts, I am in the business of making texts and of
teaching others to make them by adding to their repertoire of strategies. I was
once asked whether there are really such things as self-consuming artifacts,
and I replied: "There are now." In that answer you will find both the
arrogance and the modesty of my claims.
Fish, “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” from
Is There a Text in This Class? (1980)
[1] Last time I sketched out an
argument by which meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts
nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are
responsible both for the shape of a reader's activities and for the texts those
activities produce. In this lecture I propose to extend that argument so as to
account not only for the meanings a poem might be said to have but for the fact
of its being recognized as a poem in the first place. And once again I would
like to begin with an anecdote.
[2] In the summer of 1971 I was
teaching two courses under the joint auspices of the Linguistic Institute of
America and the English Department of the State University of New York at
Buffalo. I taught these courses in the morning and in the same room. At 9:30 I
would meet a group of students who were interested in the relationship between
linguistics and literary criticism. Our nominal subject was stylistics but our
concerns were finally theoretical and extended to the presuppositions and
assumptions which underlie both linguistic and literary practice. At 11:00
these students were replaced by another group whose concerns were exclusively
literary and were in fact confined to English religious poetry of the
seventeenth century. These students had been learning how to identify Christian
symbols and how to recognize typological patterns and how to move from the
observation of these symbols and patterns to the specification of a poetic
intention that was usually didactic or homiletic. On the day I am thinking
about, the only connection between the two classes was an assignment given to
the first which was still on the blackboard at the beginning of the second. It
read:
Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman
(?)
[3] I am sure that many of you will
already have recognized the names on this list, but for the sake of the record,
allow me to identify them. Roderick Jacobs and Peter Rosenbaum are two
linguists who have coauthored a number of textbooks and coedited a number of
anthologies. Samuel Levin is a linguist who was one of the first to apply the
operations of transformational grammar to literary texts. J. P. Thorne is a
linguist at Edinburgh who, like Levin, was attempting to extend the rules of
transformational grammar to the notorious irregularities of poetic language.
Curtis Hayes is a linguist who was then using transformational grammar in order
to establish an objective basis for his intuitive impression that the language
of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is
more complex than the language of Hemingway's novels. And Richard Ohmann is the literary critic who, more than any other, was responsible for introducing the vocabulary of
transformational grammar to the literary community. Ohmann's
name was spelled as you see it here because I could not remember whether it
contained one or two n's. In other words, the question mark in parenthesis signified
nothing more than a faulty memory and a desire on my part to appear scrupulous.
The fact that the names appeared in a list that was arranged vertically, and
that Levin, Thorne, and Hayes formed a column that was more or less centered in
relation to the paired names of Jacobs and Rosenbaum, was similarly accidental
and was evidence only of a certain compulsiveness if, indeed, it was evidence
of anything at all.
[4] In the time between the two classes
I made only one change. I drew a frame around the assignment and wrote on the
top of that frame "p. 43." When the members of the second class filed
in I told them that what they saw on the blackboard was a religious poem of the
kind they had been studying and I asked them to interpret it. Immediately they
began to perform in a manner that, for reasons which will become clear, was
more or less predictable. The first student to speak pointed out that the poem
was probably a hieroglyph, although he was not sure whether it was in the shape
of a cross or an altar. This question was set aside as the other students,
following his lead, began to concentrate on individual words, interrupting each
other with suggestions that came so quickly that they seemed spontaneous. The
first line of the poem (the very order of events assumed the already
constituted status of the object) received the most attention: Jacobs was
explicated as a reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a
figure for the Christian ascent to heaven. In this poem, however, or so my students
told me, the means of ascent is not a ladder but a tree, a rose tree or rosenbaum. This was seen to be an obvious reference to the
Virgin Mary who was often characterized as a rose without thorns, itself an
emblem of the immaculate conception. At this point the
poem appeared to the students to be operating in the familiar manner of an
iconographic riddle. It at once posed the question, "How is it that a man can climb to heaven by means of a rose
tree?" and directed the reader to the inevitable answer: by the fruit of
that tree, the fruit of Mary's womb, Jesus. Once this interpretation was
established it received support from, and conferred significance on, the word
"thorne," which could only be an allusion
to the crown of thorns, a symbol of the trial suffered by Jesus and of the
price he paid to save us all. It was only a short step (really no step at all)
from this insight to the recognition of Levin as a double reference, first to
the tribe of Levi, of whose priestly function Christ was the fulfillment, and
second to the unleavened bread carried by the children of Israel on their
exodus from Egypt, the place of sin, and in response to the call of Moses,
perhaps the most familiar of the old testament types of Christ. The final word
of the poem was given at least three complementary readings: it could be
"omen," especially since so much of the poem is concerned with
foreshadowing and prophecy; it could be Oh Man, since it is man’s story as it
intersects with the divine plan that is the poem's subject; and it could, of
course, be simply "amen," the proper conclusion to a poem celebrating
the love and mercy shown by a God who gave his only begotten son so that we may
live.
[5] In addition to specifying
significances for the words of the poem and relating those significances to one
another, the students began to discern larger structural patterns. It was noted
that of the six names in the poem three--Jacobs, Rosenbaum, and Levin--are
Hebrew, two--Thorne and Hayes--are Christian, and one--Ohman--is
ambiguous, the ambiguity being marked in the poem itself (as the phrase goes)
by the question mark in parenthesis. This division was seen as a reflection of
the basic distinction between the old dispensation and the new, the law of sin
and the law of love. That distinction, however, is blurred and finally
dissolved by the typological perspective which invests the Old Testament events
and heroes with New Testament meanings. The structure of the poem, my students
concluded, is therefore a double one, establishing and undermining its basic
pattern (Hebrew vs. Christian) at the same time. In this context there is
finally no pressure to resolve the ambiguity of Ohman
since the two possible readings--the name is Hebrew, the name is Christian--are
both authorized by the reconciling presence in the poem of Jesus Christ.
Finally, I must report that one student took to counting letters and found, to
no one's surprise, that the most prominent letters in the poem were S, O, N.
[6] Some of you will have noticed that
I have not yet said anything about Hayes. This is because of all the words in
the poem it proved the most recalcitrant to interpretation, a fact not without
consequence, but one which I will set aside for the moment since I am less
interested in the details of the exercise than in the ability of my students to
perform it. What is the source of that ability? How is it that they were able
to do what they did? What is it that they did? These questions are important
because they bear directly on a question often asked in literary theory. What
are the distinguishing features of literary language? Or, to put the matter
more colloquially, How do you recognize a poem when
you see one? The commonsense answer, to which many literary critics and
linguists are committed, is that the act of recognition is triggered by the
observable presence of distinguishing features. That is, you know a poem when
you see one because its language displays the characteristics that you know to
be proper to poems. This, however, is a model that quite obviously does not fit
the present example. My students did not proceed from the noting of
distinguishing features to the recognition that they were confronted by a poem;
rather, it was the act of recognition that came first--they knew in advance
that they were dealing with a poem-- and the distinguishing features then
followed.
[7] In other words, acts of
recognition, rather than being triggered by formal characteristics, are their
source. It is not that the presence of poetic qualities compels a certain kind
of attention but that the paying of a certain kind of attention results in the
emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as my students were aware that it was
poetry they were seeing, they began to look with poetry-seeing eyes, that is,
with eyes that saw everything in relation to the properties they knew poems to
possess. They knew, for example (because they were told by their teachers),
that poems are (or are supposed to be) more densely and intricately organized
than ordinary communications; and that knowledge translated itself into a
willingness--one might even say a determination--to see connections between one
word and another and between every word and the poem's central insight.
Moreover, the assumption that there is a central insight is itself poetry-specific,
and presided over its own realization. Having assumed that the collection of
words before them was unified by an informing purpose (because unifying
purposes are what poems have), my students proceeded to find one and to
formulate it. It was in the light of that purpose (now assumed) that
significances for the individual words began to suggest themselves,
significances which then fleshed out the assumption that had generated them in
the first place. Thus the meanings of the words and the interpretation in which
those words were seen to be embedded emerged together, as a consequence of the
operations my students began to perform once they were told that this was a
poem.