Page 74 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes (inquiring, let us say, as to whether the focus of this class was to be the poems and essays or our
responses to them, a question in the same line of country as hers but quite distinct from it) or he
might have simply been stymied, like my philosopher friend, confined, in the absence of an
explanation, to his first determination of her concerns and unable to make any sense of her words
other than the sense he originally made. How, then, did he do it? In part, he did it because he
could do it; he was able to get to this context because it was already part of his repertoire for
organizing the world and its events. The category "one of Fish's victims" was one he already had
and didn't have to work for. 0f course, it did not always have him, in that his world was not
always being organized by it, and it certainly did not have him at the beginning of the conversation;
but it was available to him, and he to it, and all he had to do was to recall it or be recalled to it for
the meanings it subtended to emerge. (Had it not been available to him, the career of his
comprehension would have been different and we will come to a consideration of that difference
shortly.)
This, however, only pushes our inquiry back further. How or why was he recalled to it? The
answer to this question must be probabilistic and it begins with the recognition that when something
changes, not everything changes. Although my colleague's understanding of his circumstances is
transformed in the course of this conversation, the circumstances are still understood to be academic
ones, and within that continuing (if modified) understanding, the directions his thought might
take are already severely limited. He still presumes, as he did at first, that the student's question
has something to do with university business in general, and with English literature in particular,
and it is the organizing rubrics associated with these areas of experience that are likely to occur to
him. One of those rubrics is "what goes-on-in-other-classes" and one of those other classes is mine
And so, by a route that is neither entirely unmarked nor wholly determined, he comes to me and
to the notion "one of Fish's victims" and to a new construing of what his student has been saying.
Of course that route would have been much more circuitous if the category "one of Fish's victims"
was not already available to him as a device for producing intelligibility. Had that device not been
part of his repertoire, had he been incapable of being recalled to it because he never knew it in the
first place, how would he have proceeded? The answer is that he could not have,.. proceeded at
all, which does not mean that one is trapped forever in the categories of understanding at one's
disposal (or the.. categories at whose disposal one is), but that the introduction of new categories
or the expansion of old ones to include new (and therefore newly seen) data must always come
from the outside or from what is perceived, for a time, to he the outside. In the event that he was
unable to identify the structure of her concerns because it had never been his (or he its), it would
have been her obligation to explain it to him. And here we run up against another instance of the
problem we have been considering all along. She could not explain it to him by varying or adding
to her words, by being more explicit, because her words will only be intelligible if he already has
the knowledge they are supposed to convey, the knowledge of the assumptions and interests from
which they issue. It is clear, then, that she would have to make a new start, although she would
not have to start from scratch (indeed, starting from scratch is never a possibility); but she would
havc to back up to some point at which there was a shared agreement as to what was reasonable
to say so that a new and wider basis for agreement could be fashioned. In this particular case, for
example, she might begin with the fact that her interlocutor already knows what I text is; that is,
he has a way of thinking about it that is responsible for his hearing of her first question as one
about bureaucratic classroom procedures. (You will remember that "he" in these sentences is no
longer my colleague but someone who does not have his special knowledge.) It is that way of
thinking that she must labor to extend or challenge, first. perhaps, by pointing out that there are
those who think about the text in other ways, and then by trying to find a category of his own
understanding which might serve as an analogue to the understanding he does not yet share. He
might, for example, be familiar with those psychologists who argue for the constitutive power of
perception, or with Gombrich's theory of the beholder's share, or with that philosophical tradition
in which the stability of objects has always been a matter of dispute. The example must remain
hypothetical and skeletal, because it can only be fleshed out after a determination of the particular
beliefs and assumptions that would make the explanation necessary in the first place; for whatever

68 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY