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Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum" Author(s): Stanley E. Fish Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 191-196 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342880 . Accessed: 16/08/2013 09:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 143.207.2.50 on Fri, 16 Aug 2013 09:32:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"

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Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"Author(s): Stanley E. FishSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 191-196Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342880 .

Accessed: 16/08/2013 09:32

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CriticalInquiry.

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Page 2: Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"

Critical Response

III

Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"

Stanley E. Fish

Together Professor Bush and Mr. Mailloux present a problem in in- terpretation not unlike those that were the occasion of the paper they criticize: Professor Bush takes the first section of that paper more seri- ously (or at least with a different kind of seriousness) than I do, and Mr. Mailloux complains that I do not take it seriously enough. In their dif- ferent ways they seem to miss or slight (or perhaps resent) the playful- ness of my performance, the degree to which it is an attempt to be faithful to my admitted unwillingness to come to, or rest on, a point. Professor Bush seems to think that I am mounting an attack on the Variorum. Let me say at the outset that I intended no such attack, that I am sorry if anything I wrote gave that impression, and that I regret any offense that may have been taken. Professor Bush and I view the Var- iorum from different perspectives, both of which seem to me to be per- fectly legitimate. He views it as a document, while I view it as a text. As a document, as a record and history of research and interpretation, it is a model of its kind, full, judicious, and, above all, honest. The editors pay us the compliment of not pretending to an impossible objectivity. They leave us the valuable record of their own occasional disagreements, and thus suggest (to me at least) that they know very well that theirs is an interim report. My inquiry is into the significance of that report; it is not a brief against the compiling of its materials but an attempt to put to them a question the editors quite properly do not ask: what does the history of the effort to determine the meaning of Milton's poems mean? In short, I am extending the scope of interpretation to include the inter- preters themselves and, rather than attacking the Variorum, taking one step further the task it has so well begun.

Even in the context of our differing perspectives, however, Profes-

191

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192 Critical Response Stanley E. Fish

sor Bush and I may not be so far apart as he thinks. We both agree that in Milton's poetry one finds "complex, even contradictory feelings" and that the poet is "moving, at times, through doubt and struggle, to a

positive resolution." It is just that while Professor Bush wishes to em-

phasize the resolution, I want to emphasize the doubt and struggles, to

argue, that they are ours as well as the poet's, and to assert that they do not lose their value (in the sense of being significance bearing) simply because they give way to other "feelings." Like Ralph Rader, Professor Bush seems to believe that our final understanding (and I admit that we do in some cases achieve one) of what a poem means should be taken to be its meaning ("resolved sense"). It is my contention, however, that this

understanding is no more to be identified with "the meaning" than the

understandings which precede it and that an interpretation the reader entertains and then discards (or revises, or modifies, or expands, or

forgets) has, in fact, been hazarded, and because it has been hazarded it involves commitments (to propositions, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs) which, even if they are only temporary, are nonetheless a part of the

poem's experience. It is a question finally of whether perceptual strategies are regarded as instrumental, in the sense that they are pre- liminary to the determination of meaning, or as constitutive, in the sense that they are, at every moment, making meaning, and then, at every subsequent moment, making it again. It is a question, as Mr. Mailloux

points out, of whether one's critical model is spatial or temporal. Of course this is to do no more than restate the position to which

Professor Bush is objecting, but what he does not seem to have realized is that I object to it too, or at least to the claims made for it in the first two sections of the paper. Those claims are withdrawn at the end of the third section, when I admit that in the course of defending my procedures I have given up the right to declare them superior to the procedures I had been criticizing. That is because the arguments in the later sections un- dercut the possibility of demonstrating that superiority (of providing evidence for it) and reduce it to an assertion. It is this that Mr. Mailloux sees and regrets, although apparently he believes that I have simply made a mistake. In fact what I have done is allowed two stances that had up to now been kept separate to come together within the (artificial) confines of a single article. The result, as Mr. Mailloux observes, is a contradiction ("what Fish now appears to have given us is a self-

consuming criticism"), and it is a contradiction which follows directly

Stanley E. Fish's most recent publication is "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism" (Special Centennial Issue of Modern Language Notes, Summer 1976). His The Liv- ing Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing is scheduled to appear in the autumn of 1977.

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Page 4: Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"

Critical Inquiry Autumn 1976 193

from an equivocation in my own theory and practice. At times, as in the first half of "Interpreting the Variorum" and in an earlier piece on

"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso," my analyses are presented as if they were descriptive, as if I were in the business of making available to analyti- cal consciousness the strategies readers perform, independently of whether or not they are aware of having performed them. When I am in this mood, my claim is similar to that sometimes made by linguists-to be

telling people what it is they have always done, even though, as a conse-

quence of their critical principles, they may be either unable or unwilling to acknowledge that they have been doing it. It is a claim, in short, that

you read the way I say you do, and it won't do you any good to deny it because I can always explain away your denial as either a devaluation or a deliberate suppression of what has "really" happened. The other stance is no less arrogant, but it is arrogant in another direction. It is

prescriptive, and it involves urging readers to read in a new or different

way. When I am in this mood, I do not say "this is the way you read whether you know it or not," but, rather, "why don't you try it this way." "This way" means falling in with my assumption that the content of a reader's experience is a succession of deliberate acts (or perceptual strategies) and then monitoring the acts which are produced by (rather than discovered by) that assumption. The procedure will yield results, but they will have no necessary or demonstrable relationship to a shared or normative reading experience.

Only if such a relationship obtains can the polemical stance of the first half of "Interpreting the Variorum" be justified, although the justification would depend on my ability to provide independent evi- dence for my analyses. But it is the very possibility of providing such evidence that is denied in the paper's second half, when, in a wholesale repudiation of formalism, I cut myself off from any recourse to eviden-

tiary procedures. Mr. Mailloux says that "the claim of affective stylistics" ("that its description/interpretation reflects or dramatizes the way most readers actually read") is an empirical one "that can be tested against intuitive, psycholinguistic, and critical evidence." The case, however, is much less strong: intuitive, psycholinguistic, and critical evidence can be

appropriated by affective stylistics, but it can not serve as a test. By "critical evidence" I take Mr. Mailloux to be referring to the way I use

previous criticism. Typically, I will pay less attention to the interpreta- tions critics propose than to the problems or controversies that provoke them, on the reasoning that while the interpretations vary, the problems and controversies do not and therefore point to something that all read- ers share. If, for example, there is a continuing debate over whether Marlow should or should not have lied at the end of Heart of Darkness, I will interpret the debate as evidence of the difficulty readers experience when the novel asks them to render a judgment. And, similarly, if there is an argument over who is the hero of Paradise Lost, I will take the

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194 Critical Response Stanley E. Fish

argument as an indication that, in the course of reading the poem, the identity of its hero is continually put into question. There will always be two levels, a surface level on which there seem to be nothing but dis- agreements, and a deeper level on which those same disagreements are seen as constituting the shared content whose existence they had seemed to deny. In short, critical controversies become disguised reports of what readers uniformly do, and I perform the service of revealing to the

participants what it is they were really telling us. As a strategy, however, this will be persuasive only if one accepts the

assumption that criticism is a code that must be cracked rather than a body of straightforward reporting and opinion (the difference, again, between the Variorum as a text and as a document). Rather than citing evidence, I am manufacturing it by stipulating in advance that a scrutiny of the materials will reveal just the kind of activities that I claim readers to be performing. In short, for the "evidence" to be supporting, it re-

quires the addition or superimposition of the very hypothesis it would test. This holds too for psycholinguistic evidence. It is true that the

experiments of some psycholinguists have uncovered perceptual strategies that are similar to those I describe, but in their analyses these

strategies are in the service of processing meaning, while it is my claim that they have meaning, not at one point, but at every point. Again, it is only by assuming what I would prove that the evidence becomes evi- dence, and indeed if we take as representative Frank Smith's definition of successful reading as the reduction of uncertainty, then the re- searches of psycholinguistics would seem to offer more comfort to Rader and to Bush than to me. All that remains to me is Mailloux's third

category, intuitive evidence, by which he means the evidence provided by someone who, after hearing or reading me, nods in agreement. But this is evidence of a different kind than is required, for it is not available to a disinterested observer and therefore will compel assent only from those who have already assented. That is why the notion of an interpre- tive community is so important to my argument. It is at once objective, in the sense that it is the result of an agreement, and subjective, in the sense that only those who are party to that agreement (and who therefore constitute it) will be able to recognize it.

This last is a restatement of the final section of "Interpreting the Variorum," and it is an inevitable consequence of my gradual abandon- ment in that article of the descriptivist position. This is why it is curious to find Mr. Mailloux speculating that it may be a desire to preserve a "descriptive focus" that accounts for my retreat from the claim of prior- ity, as if that claim would be easier to make in the absence of any descrip- tivist pretensions. The case, however, seems to me exactly the reverse: it is only by maintaining a descriptive focus that a claim of priority could be justified (at least theoretically), for without it there is no basis on which

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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1976 195

such a claim could be tested. In other words, it is because I have already done what Mr. Mailloux urges me to do-back off from the assertion of

"descriptive power"-that I can no longer do what he wants me to do -hold on to the assertion of priority.

This does not mean, as he seems to fear, that I have given up the distinction between affective stylistics (not the happiest of designations) and the methodologies to which it originally stood opposed. It isjust that the distinction cannot be maintained in its strongest form, as a distinc- tion between what is true and what is not. Mr. Mailloux is right to point out that by virtue of a metacritical step I have put formalist and affective

analyses on a par, but that is only in relation to the claim either of them

might make to objectivity; and it is also only in relation to that claim that the distinction between reading strategies and critical strategies is col-

lapsed. With respect to other levels of comparison the differences re- main. The chief difference, as Mailloux observes, is between a method which assigns value to the temporal reading experience and a method which either denies that experience or regards it as merely instrumental. The difference is not, however, one of fidelity to that experience, since the act of reading which is the object of affective criticism is also its creation. Even so, a case for the superiority (if not the priority) of affec- tive criticism can still be made. First of all, it is more coherent in its own terms than formalist criticism, which is vitiated, as I have argued, by the absence of any connection between its descriptions and its interpreta- tions. Either the interpretation precedes the description and is then made (illegitimately) to appear its consequence, or a description is scrutinized until, as if by magic, an interpretation which fills its spaces emerges. In either case, the procedure is arbitrary. Of course there is arbitrariness in my procedure too, but it enters at the beginning, when a set of assumptions is adopted which subsequently directs and generates the analyses. Affective criticism is arbitrary only in the sense that one cannot prove that its beginning is the right one, but once begun it un- folds in ways that are consistent with its declared principles. It is there- fore 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 unsym- pathetic 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

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196 Critical Response Stanley E. Fish

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.

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