INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM

INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM

[This essay was prescribed for Annamalai University MPhil]

Stanley Fish

S

tanley Fish is a leading exponent of American ‘Reader-response’ criticism. His book on Milton Surprised by Sin was subtitled, ‘The Reader in Paradise Lost’. Fish argues that the reader in the book is constantly lured into mistakes of interpretation by the ambiguities of Milton’s syntax, and thus compelled to recognize his own ‘fallen state’.

I

NTRODUCTION

In the present essay Fish questions New Criticism’s efforts to locate literary meaning in the formal features of the text, rather than on the author’s intention or the reader’s response— “The intentional Fallacy” and  “The Affective Fallacy”— and argues:

à Both authorial intention and formal features are produced by the interpretive assumptions and procedures the reader brings to the text.

à Authorial intention and formal features have no prior existence outside the reading experience.

J Fish’s arguments have affinities with the reception theory of Wolfgang Iser and with Derridean theories of discourse.

 The present essay is taken from Is There a Text in this Class?

C

ommentary

Fish says that the publication of the Milton Variorum helped him in his method:

The surveying of the critical history of a work in order to find disputes that rested upon a base of agreement of which the disputants were unaware.

The base of agreement can be identified with the experience of a work.

 Formalistic criticism, because it is spatial rather than temporal in its emphasis, either ignored or suppressed what is happening in the act of reading.

 Example:-

Fish takes up three sonnets of Milton and argues that there is a syntactic slide or hesitation in them.

What is syntactic slide? A reader is invited to make a certain kind of sense only to discover that the sense he has made is either incomplete or simply wrong. In formalistic analysis that moment will disappear. Either it is flattened out or made into an insoluble crux. Or it has been eliminated in the course of a procedure that is incapable of finding value in temporal phenomena.

♣   The moments that disappear in a formalistic analysis can be made to appear in another kind of analysis.

♣   Formal features do not exist independently of the reader’s experience.

♣   My account of the reader’s experience is itself the product of a set of interpretative assumptions. In other words, the facts that I cite as once ignored by a formalistic criticism –premature conclusions, double syntax, misidentification of speakers –are not discovered but created by the criticism Fish himself was practicing.

The essay has 3 parts. 1. The case for reader-response analysis, 2. Undoing the case for reader-response analysis, and 3. Interpretive communities.

In the first part Fish presents a bad model of interpretation that had suppressed what was really happening. In the second part, Fish says that the notion of “really happening” is just one more interpretation. In the final section , Fish argues the need for interpretative communities. It is an explanation for the differences we see and the fact that the differences we see are not random or idiosyncratic but systematic and conventional.

T

he case for reader-response analysis

♣   The first two volumes of the Milton Variorum Commentary have appeared.

♣   Commentators have expressed different opinions on some of the points of disputes in the poems.

What is the two handed engine in ‘Lycidas’?

What is the meaning of Haemony in ‘Comus’?

There are many other problems connected with the pronoun referents, lexical ambiguities, and punctuation.

♣   The editorial procedure always ends in the graceful throwing up of hands or in the recording of a disagreement between the two editors themselves.

In short these are problems that apparently cannot be solved.

Fish says that these problems are not meant to be solved but to be experienced. Any attempt to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail.

Fish tries to solve the problems in some of the sonnets.

 He takes 3 sonnets of Milton.

1. Twentieth sonnet:- “Lawrence of Virtuous father Virtuous son”.

The poet invites a friend to join him in some of the pleasures. It is a  neat repast intermixed with wine, conversation and song, a respite from all hard work because outside the earth is frozen. But the problem is in the last two lines:

“He who those delights can judge, and spare

To interpose them oft is not unwise”.  

The focus is on the word ‘spare’. Two interpretations are possible—‘leave time for’ and ‘refrain from’. In one reading the ‘delights’ are recommended. He who can leave time for them is not unwise. In the other, they are the subjects of a warning—he who knows when to refrain from them is not unwise. Two critics A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush express opposing views on the meaning of ‘spare’. Bush reviews the evidence marshalled by Woodhouse, but draws the exactly opposite conclusion.

♣    Evidence brought to bear in the course of formalist analyses will always point in as many directions as there are interpreters; that is , not only will it prove something, it will prove anything.

♣    Instead of the question ‘What does ‘spare’ mean?’, we substitute the question ‘what does the fact that the meaning of ‘spare’ has always been an issue mean?’

♣    The lines first generate a pressure for judgement and then decline to deliver it.

♣    The pressure, however, still exists, and it is transferred from the w words on the page to the reader, who comes away from the poem not with a statement but with a responsibility, the responsibility of deciding when and how often—if at all—to indulge in those ‘delights’.

♣    The transferring of responsibility from the text to its readers is what the lines ask us to do—it is the essence of their experience—it is therefore what the lines mean.

♣    The variorum critics want to give the responsibility back to the text. But the text refuses to accept that.

♣    The issue is not finally the moral status of ‘ those delights’ but on the good or bad uses who which they can be put by readers, who are left, as Milton always leaves them, to choose and manage by themselves.

2. Another sonnet of Milton: “Avenge O Lord thy Slaughtered saints.”

♣   We may be able to extract from the poem a statement affirming God’s justice. We are not allowed to forget the evidence that makes the extraction so difficult. [ God rains down punishment so indiscriminately]

♣   It is a difficulty we experience during the act of reading, even though a criticism which takes no account of that act has, as we have seen, suppressed it.

3. Third sonnet: “When I consider how my light is spent”.

Fish undertakes a detailed analysis of the poem. Fish concludes that we leave the poem unsure. Our unsureness is because of the unsureness with which the final line is, or is not, made. This unsureness also operates to actualize the two possible readings of ‘wait’: ‘wait; in the sense of expecting, that is waiting for the opportunity to serve actively or wait in the sense of waiting for an opportunity to serve actively or wait in the sense of waiting in service, a waiting that is itself fully satisfying because the impulse to self-glorifying action has been stilled.

U

ndoing the case for reader-response analysis

Fish opposes the suggestion that there is a sense, that it is encoded or embedded in the text, and that it can be taken at a single glance.

The goal here is to settle on a meaning, and the procedure involves first stepping back from the text, and then putting together or otherwise calculating the discrete units of significance it contains.

Fish says that in the course of following the meaning of a text, the reader’s activities are at once ignored and devalued. They are ignored because the text is taken to be self sufficient— everything is in it—and they are devalued because when they are thought of at  all, they are thought of as the disposable machinery of extraction.

♣   Fish urges a procedure where the reader’s activities are at the centre of attention; where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning.

♣   Reader’s activities include—

The making and revising of assumptions,

the rendering and regretting of judgments,

the coming to and abandoning of conclusions,

 the giving and withdrawal of approval,

the specifying of causes,

the asking of questions,

 the supplying of answers, the solving of puzzles.

Next, Fish comes to the vital question. Who is this reader?

Fish’s ‘optimal reader’ is the reader whose education, opinions, concerns, linguistic competences, and so on make him capable of having the experience the author wished to provide.

The effort of this reader is always an effort to discern and therefore to realize an author’s intention. Discerning an intention means understanding, and understanding includes all the activities which make up the structure of a reader’s experience. Intention and understanding are two kinds of a conventional act, each of which necessarily stipulates the other.

♣   Fish analyses 3 lines from “Lycidas”:

The willows and the hazel copses green

Shall now no more be seen,

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

Fish argues that the formal units are always a function of the interpretative model one brings to bear. They are not in the text and the same can be said of intentions also.

♣   Fish argues that the form of the reader’s experience, formal units and the structure of intentions are one, that they come into view simultaneously, and that therefore the questions of priority and independence do not arise.

♣   Fish agrees in conclusion that his interpretation of the meaning of a poem is just one more interpretation.

I

nterpretive communities

 If interpretive acts are the source of forms rather than the other way round, why isn’t the case that readers are always performing the same acts or a sequence of random acts, and therefore creating the same forms or a random succession of forms? How, in short, does one explain these two ‘facts’ of reading?

1)      The same reader will perform differently when reading two different texts.

2)      Different readers will perform similarly when reading the same text.

Fish takes the example of “Lycidas” once again.

“Let us suppose that I am reading Lycidas. What is it that I am doing? First of all, what I am not doing is ‘simply reading’, an activity in which I do not believe because it implies the possibility of pure perception. Rather, I am proceeding in the basis of two interpretive decisions. 1) That ‘Lycidas’ is a pastoral, 2) that it was written by Milton. Once these decisions have been made, I am immediately predisposed to perform certain acts, to ‘find’ by looking for, themes, to confer significances (on flowers, streams, shepherds, pagan deities), to mark out formal units (the lament, the consolation, the turn, the affirmation of faith, and so on). My disposition to perform these acts constitutes a set of interpretive strategies, which, when they are put into execution, become the large act of reading”.

That is to say that interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading; they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them.

♣    A reader other than Fish who, when presented with Lycidas proceeds to put into execution a set of interpretive strategies similar to mine. He and Fish may be tempted to say that they agree about the poem. But what we really agree about it is the way to write it.

♣    A reader other than Fish might put into execution a different set of interpretive strategies. One of us might then be tempted to complain to the other that we could not possibly be reading the same poem.

Fish argues that the notion of different or same texts is fictions, if I read Lycidas and The Waste Land differently it will not be because the formal structure of the two poems call forth different interpretive strategies but because my predisposition to execute different interpretive strategies will produce different formal structures. That is, the two poems are different because I have decided they will be.

 Augustine in ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE delivers ‘the rule of faith’ which is a rule of interpretation.

 It is dazzlingly simple.

 Everything in the scriptures, and indeed in the world when it is properly read, points to god’s love for us and our answering responsibility to love our fellow creatures for His sake.

 This is a stipulation for what meaning there is and a set of directions to find it, which is a set of interpretive strategies.

Fish takes up another question: “Why should two or more readers ever agree? What is the explanation on the one hand of the stability of interpretation and on the other of the orderly variety of interpretation if it is not the stability and variety of texts?

    The answer to all these questions is to be found in a notion that has been implicit in my argument, the notion of interpretive communities.

Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than the other way around.

This is the explanation for the stability of interpretation among different readers and for the regularity with which a single reader will employ different interpretive strategies and thus make different texts.

It also explains why there are disagreements and why they can be debated in a principled way: not because of stability in the text but because of stability in the makeup of interpretive communities and therefore in the opposing positions they make possible. Of course this stability is always temporary.

Interpretive communities grow and decline, and individuals move from one to another; thus, while the alignments are not permanent, the are always there, providing just enough stability for the interpretive battles  to go on, and just enough shift and slippage to assure that they will never be settled.

The notion of interpretive communities saves us from interpretive anarchy.

It is the fragile but real consolidation of interpretive communities that allows us to talk to one another, but with no hope or fear of ever being able to stop.

Interpretive communities are not natural or universal but learned.

Those outside the community will be making a different set of interpretive strategies.

Dr. S. Sree Kumar