Page 68 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes in its "text." Indirect speech acts are ones in which the meaning lies outside the "text" but is
understood by the hearer due to a shared contextual understanding with the speaker. In both
cases the contextual understanding of the utterance is typically considered to be subject to "normal"
circumstances. In other words, the hearer knows what the speaker is talking about, whether he
uses direct or indirect language, because the utterance and its reception occur in a situation that
lies in the realm of both parties' understanding. It is this idea of normal circumstances with which
Fish takes issue. He says, " . . . I am making the same argument for 'normal context' that I have
made for 'literal meaning' . . . There will always be a normal context, but it will not always be the
same one". As an example he uses John Searle's use of the following situation:
Searle begins by imagining a conversation between two students. Student X says, "Let's go to the
movies tonight," and student Y replies, "I have to study for an exam." The first sentence, Searle
declares, "constitutes a proposal in virtue of its meaning," but the second sentence, which is
understood as a rejection of the proposal, is not so understood in virtue of its meaning because "in
virtue of its meaning it is simply a statement about Y". It is here, in the assertion that either of these
sentences is ever taken in the way it is "in virtue of its meaning," that this account must finally be
attacked. For if this were the case, then we would have to say that there is something about the
meaning of a sentence that makes it more available for some illocutionary uses than for others, and
this is precisely what Searle proceeds to say about "I have to study for an exam": "Statements of this
form do not, in general, constitute rejections of proposals, even in cases in which they are made in
response to a proposal. Thus, if Y had said I have to eat popcorn tonight or I have to tie my shoes in
a normal context, neither of these utterances would have been a rejection of the proposal" .
At this point, Fish asks "Normal for whom?" in regards to Searle's proposed normal context. He
then goes on to list a number of situations in which eating popcorn and tying shoes could be taken
as a rejection of a proposal as long as both X and Y were privy to the circumstances. To the
argument that these circumstances are special as opposed to normal, Fish answers that "'normal'
is content specific and to speak of a normal context is to be either redundant (because whatever in
a given context goes without saying is the normal) or to be incoherent (because it would refer to
a context whose claim was not to be one)" . He does not intend to imply that an utterance can mean
anything, but, rather, that its meaning is subject to certain constraints: " . . . chaos . . . would be
possible only if a sentence could mean anything at all in the abstract." He goes on to point out,
however, that "A sentence . . . is never in the abstract; it is always in a situation, and the situation
will already have determined the purpose for which it can be used" .
It is difficult to place Fish in relation to the other critics we have examined in class. He seems to be
anti-structuralist, anti-formalist, and anti-stylist, yet he does not deny the validity of many of their
premises, only the conclusions they derive from them. Essentially Fish's position seems to be
composed of the ideas that
1. reading is an activity,
2. rather than being imbedded in formal features, the meaning of any text is brought to it by the
reader's interpretive strategy,
3. interpretive communities make it possible for there to be some agreement on the meanings of
texts,
4. all acts of interpretation occur in some context or other.
These seem to be straightforward and even obvious assertions, yet they seem to frighten many
critics. They apparently feel the same way that Wimsatt and Beardsley do, that Fish's method
leads to a lack of certainty. Fish himself does not try to argue against this claim directly. In fact, at
the end of Interpreting the Variorum he himself admits this uncertainty when discussing how one
can know to which interpretive community one belongs. He says, "The answer is he can't, since
any evidence brought forward to support the claim would itself be an interpretation . . ." All one
can have as far as proof of membership is a " . . . nod of recognition from someone in the same
community . . ." He ends this essay with the only words that someone who speaks from his
viewpoint can truly maintain with any certainty: "I say it [we know] to you now, knowing full
well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me" .

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