Page 67 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 6: Is There a Text In This Class—Stanley Fish: Analysis

of interpretation in the career of a single reader would seem to argue for the existence of something Notes
independent of and prior to interpretive acts . . .". What it is that is prior to these acts is the existence
of a reader's interpretive strategy that is present before he actually approaches the work. In other
words, he doesn't have to read a work in a certain way, but, as a function of his interpretive strategy,
he chooses to do so. To illustrate this he uses St. Augustine's argument from his On Christian
Doctrine that " . . . everything in the Scriptures, and indeed in the world when it is properly read,
points to (bears the meaning of) God's love for us and our answering responsibility to love our
fellow creatures for His sake". If something does not seem to point in this direction, Augustine says
that it is simply a figurative way of creating the same "text" and that it is the Christian's duty to find
a way to interpret (to choose to interpret) it as such. In his "Normal Circumstances and Other Special
Cases," Fish describes how baseball player Pat Kelly's conversion is exemplary of this. Kelly credited
all of his homeruns to his faith in God, and Fish points out that,
His conversion follows the pattern prescribed by Augustine in On Christian Doctrine. The eye that
was in bondage to the phenomenal world (had as its constitutive principle the autonomy of that
world) has been cleansed and purged and is now capable of seeing what is really there, what is
obvious, what anyone who has the eyes can see: 'to the healthy and pure internal eye He is
everywhere.' He is everywhere not as the result of an interpretive act self-consciously performed
on data otherwise available, but as the result of an interpretive act performed at so deep a level
that it is indistinguishable from consciousness itself .
Fish posits that this idea is really an interpretive strategy for looking at the world, and a very
successful one at that. In the same way, he says, readers choose, on a level that is "indistinguishable
from consciousness itself," to interpret texts either as the same or different and this choice produces
the sameness or differentness of the texts' formal features.
This may shed some light on why an individual reader may read a text one way or another, but
it doesn't address why separate readers often have the same (or at least similar) understanding of
the same text. Fish states that "they don't have to" but when they do it is because of his " . . . notion
of interpretive communities . . ." which are " . . . made up of those who share interpretive strategies
not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing [creating meaning in] texts, for constituting
their properties and assigning their intentions" . This idea of interpretive communities is central to
Fish's position, as is evidenced by the fact that Is There a Text in This Class is subtitled The
Authority of Interpretive Communities. In the introduction to the book he makes this position
clear by stating, " . . . 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". This implies once again that the
meaning of a text is brought to it by readers and that it can change from place to place and from
time to time.
In Normal Circumstances, Fish's idea that a text, though fixed at a certain time and place, can
change over time brings up the concept of "context" as is illustrated in the following passage:
. . . we usually reserve 'literal' for the single meaning a text will always (or should always) have,
while I am using 'literal' to refer to the different single meanings a text will have in a succession
of different situations. There always is a literal meaning because in any situation there is always
a meaning that seems obvious in the sense that it is there independently of anything we might do.
But that only means that we have already done it, and in another situation, when we have already
done something else, there will be another obvious, that is, literal, meaning . . .We are never not
in a situation. Because we are never not in a situation, we are never not in the act of interpreting.
Because we are never not in the act of interpreting, there is no possibility of reaching a level of
meaning beyond or below interpretation .
In other words, everything is always already in a context, and it is because of this context that
sentences have meaning.
Fish takes his argument a step further by contesting the distinction between direct and indirect
speech acts. Direct speech acts are ones in which the meaning of the utterance is clearly imbedded

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