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Content INTERPRETIVE CONVENTIONS AND
RECENT ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERARY THEORY
by
Steven John Mailloux
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1977
UMI Number: DP23063
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U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K
LO S A N G E L E S , C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
Ph.
' 7 8
M "^21
This dissertation, w ritten by
s J p b p x /j/)a ijlotuZ'
e
under the direction of Dissertation C o m
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in p a rtia l fu lfillm e n t of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE,
T )
PREFACE
i
i
I ;
i 1
j This study builds on modern attempts by literary !
!
theorists to account for how readers make sense of texts.
i
The early chapters provide an overview of recent Anglo- '
American critical theory and outline the hermeneutic j
I
assumptions of my approach to interpretation. Chapter 4
i
I
presents an account of conventions {traditional, regula-
I
tive, and constitutive). Chapter 5 combines the theories
of interpretation and convention (proposed in the previous
1 i
chapters) into a comprehensive theory of interpretive I
I
conventions. As shared strategies for making sense of !
■ purposeful action, interpretive conventions provide a
coherent approach to literary study and a framework for
relating literary study to other hermeneutic disciplines.
I owe a debt to several people whose writings or •
advice have contributed to the strengths of my study but j
who are not responsible for its weaknesses. I especially
wish to thank Stanley Fish, Walter Fisher, Brian Loer, j
I
Hershel Parker, and W. Ross Winterowd. Above all, I thank I
. i
Mary Ann Mailloux for her patient assistance. j
i
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
1 RECENT LITERARY HERMENEUTICS .......... 1
2 A MODEL OF CRITICAL THEORY............ 51
3 READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM AND
THEORIES OF INTERPRETATION ......... 71
4 CONVENTIONS ............................ 100
5 A THEORY OF INTERPRETIVE CONVENTIONS . 123
6 INTERPRETIVE CONVENTIONS AND CRITICAL
RESPONSE TO THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. 150
7 AUTHORIAL INTENTION AND CONVENTIONAL
READER RESPONSE ....................... 171
8 CONCLUSION ............................ 207
APPENDIX INTERPRETATION AND EVALUATION .... 210
FOOTNOTES .......................................... 229
BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 274
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Page
The Inferential Process of
Editing......................................185
Northwestern-Newberry edition
of Typee, p. 2 1 5 ..........................192
"Four Meetings," Scribner1s
Monthly, 15 (November 1877),
5 5............................................ 195
"Four Meetings," Scribner1s
Monthly, 15 (November 1877),
5 6........... 196
Centenary Edition of Mosses from
an Old Manse, p. 175 .............. 200
A Man1s Woman (New York: Doubleday j
& McClure, 1900) , pp. 64-65 ........... 202 j
A Man1s Woman (New York: Doubleday, !
Page & Co. , 1903) , pp. 64-65 ........... 203 1
CHAPTER I
RECENT LITERARY HERMENEUTICS
Cratylus apparently became convinced that i
communication was impossible because, i
since the speaker, the auditor, and the i
words were changing, whatever meaning might
have been intended by the words would be
altered by the time they were heard. There
fore, Cratylus is supposed to have refused j
to discuss anything and only to have wig- !
gled his finger when somebody said something j
to indicate that he had heard something but j
that it would be pointless to reply, since i
everything was changing. j
The sentence now being read indicates that I have
foolishly refused to content myself with wiggling my
finger in the air. However, Cratylus' interpretive skep- i
ticism is not altogether irrelevant to this study. Indeed,'
a general interpretive skepticism is an abyss along the
edge of which all hermeneutics is poised. Through an
overview of interpretive theory in recent literary study, j
I will illustrate in this chapter how most Anglo-American
literary theorists avoid falling into that abyss and how I j
avoid the fall myself. J
j
Several definitions and distinctions will prove I
useful in surveying the various interpretive theories. I
will go around twice: first I will set out the contro- I
versial issues in the overview of recent literary herme- j
i
neutics, and then I will retrace my steps to show how I
have attempted to resolve the controversies for my own
approach to interpretation.
I
Basic Hermeneutic Definition. "In the most gen
erally accepted sense, literary interpretation is explica
tion and explanation of the meaning, theme, or signifi-
2 I
cance of a work." However, while following its basic I
outline, several literary theorists provide variations on j
I
this definition. For example, Quentin Skinner has
reviewed several hermeneutic theories and claims "that the
business of interpretation can be defined as the business
of 'getting at the message' of a text, and of decoding and i
I
making explicit its meaning, such that the 'best reading' j
. . . can be attained."^ !
During the last decade E.D. Hirsch has contributed
as much to the discussion of interpretation as any other ,
American literary theorist. In Validity in Interpretation ■
i
he also views meaning as the object of interpretation but I
l
defines "meaning" more narrowly as "that which is repre- i
sented by a text;it is what the author meant by his use of
a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs repre-
4 i
sent." Hirsch later refers to the goal of interpretation I
; 5 !
' as "the sharing of meaning." Still later he expands his t
i !
notion of meaning to include non-authorial meaning and
! I
| restates his position: "the nature of interpretation is ;
to construe from a sign-system (for short, 'text') some-
6
thing more than its physical presence." A crucial dis
tinction for Hirsch is that between significance and
meaning: "The important feature of meaning as distinct j
from significance is that meaning is the determinate i
representation of a text for an interpreter. An inter-
! preted text is always taken to represent something, but :
! !
i that something can always be related to something else.
7
Significance is meaning-as-related-to-somethmg-else. "
!
Hirsch1s hermeneutics and other recent theories !
have chosen sides in several interrelated controversies
over interpretive assumptions, aims, methods, and values.
As concepts incorporated into definitions of interpreta
tion, Skinner's "best reading" and Hirsch's "authorial j
; meaning" and "representation" introduce some of the herme- j
neutic controversies that will emerge more explicitly in
the distinctions that follow.
Ontological Assumption: Interpreting Subject and J
Interpreted Object. Frederick Jameson points out that in
any hermeneutics it is always an interpretation to sep
arate subject from object, "understanding monad from monad |
8 '
understood." This claim provides a key to many of the
3
differences among interpretive theories in Anglo-American !
i
literary criticism. Roughly speaking, we might distinguish!
I
three different relationships assumed between interpreter
and text: autonomy of text, interdependence of interpreter j
and text, and creative authority of interpreter. i
The belief in a completely independent text is a
legacy of Anglo-American New Criticism. John Crowe Ransom ■
claimed that the first law of criticism was that it "shall |
be objective, , shall cite the nature of the object" and j
recognize "the autonomy of the work itself as existing for !
9 :
its own sake." Thirty years later, Monroe Beardsley was '
still writing with the same objectivist assumption: "The !
work is an object, capable (presumably) of affording aes- i
thetic satisfaction. The problem is to know what is there
to be responded to; and the literary interpreter helps us
to discern what is there, so that we can respond to it
more fully.For New Criticism the literary text was I
an autonomous object (independent of any interpreter) ;
whose characteristics are described and explicated in
I
interpretation. "Literary works are self-sufficient
entities, whose properties are decisive in checking inter- i
pretations. To protect interpretive recognition of
this self-sufficiency, Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt proposed
i
avoiding the "psychological fallacies." They warned that J
"the outcome of either Fallacy, the Intentional or the ,
Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object of speci- j
12 ■
fically critical judgment, tends to disappear." An
unsympathetic critic describes this New Critical legacy j
in this way:
The objectivity of the text is an illusion,
and, moreover, a dangerous illusion, because
it is so physically convincing. The illu
sion is one of self-sufficiency and complete
ness. A line of print or a page or a book ’
is so obviously there— it can be handled, j
photographed, or put away— that it seems to i
be the sole repository of whatever value and
meaning we associate with it. (I wish the
pronoun could be avoided, but in a way it !
makes my point.)13 i
A second interpretive stance counters the objectiv- :
ist belief in an autonomous text. We might characterize
this contrasting assumption as phenomenological: there |
is a mutual interdependence between interpreter and text. '
In this view, the text loses its complete independence ,
I
I
and becomes in part a creation of an interpreter. For j
example, Norman Holland's psychoanalytic criticism assumes ;
that "we cannot extricate an 'objective' reality from our ’
14
'subjective' perception of it." Thus, for Holland, the
objective text and the subjective interpretation are "only
useful fictions, vanishing points we approach but never j
reach. The problem, then, is not to sort out subjective ■
from objective but to see how the two combine when we have
„15
experiences."
Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological criticism provides |
another version of this interpretive assumption. He
posits both an objective text and a creative interpreter.
He characterizes the "interaction" of text and interpret
ing reader in this way:
The literary work has two poles, which we
might call the artistic and the aesthetic:
the artistic refers to the text created by
the author, and the aesthetic to the real
ization accomplished by the reader. From
this polarity it follows that the literary
work cannot be completely identical with
the text, or with the realization of the
text, but in fact must lie halfway between
the two. The work is more than the text,
for the text only takes on life when it is
realized, and furthermore the realization
is by no means independent of the individ
ual disposition of the reader— though this
in turn is acted upon by the different
patterns of the text.16
Versions of the interpretive assumption illustrated by
Holland and Iser have come to dominate most recent Anglo-
American literary theories, replacing the belief in the
absolute autonomy of the text.
A more radical interpretive assumption is the view
that the text is completely created by the interpreter.
Stanley Fish's most recent work illustrates this assump
tion; he claims that the text is constituted in all its
aspects by interpretive strategies. On the metacritical
level, Fish argues that the only difference between his
criticism and that of formalists and phenomenologists is
that he is aware that his criticism creates the text it
talks about, whereas these other approaches do not admit
I their interpretive creativity. Writing about his
j affective methodology, Fish claims that
! affective criticism is arbitrary only in the
J sense that one cannot prove that its begin- |
ning is the right one, but once begun it
unfolds in ways that are consistent with its
declared principles. It is therefore a
superior fiction, and since no methodology
can legitimately claim any more, this super
iority is decisive. It is also creative. j
That is, it makes possible new ways of read- |
ing and thereby creates new texts. An I
unsympathetic critic might complain that \
this is just the trouble, that rather than !
following the way people actually read I am j
teaching people to read differently. This i
is to turn the prescriptive claim into a j
criticism, but it will be felt as a criti- ;
cism only if the alternative to different
reading is right reading and if the alter
native to the texts created by different
reading is the real text. These however
are the fictions of formalisms, and as fic- I
tions they have the disadvantage of being !
confining. My fiction is liberating.17
A hermeneutic theory like Fish's, then, makes two comple-
i
mentary claims: (1) disagreeing with both formalist and !
phenomenologist interpretive assumptions, it holds that i
j
1 interpreters create the text they interpret; and thus i
I
(2) it also makes the metacritical claim that formalist, 1
; I
phenomenological, and affective approaches are merely dif- j
i
ferent interpretive strategies, each providing a different 1
: way of constituting the text.
Closely related to these differing assumptions about!
the status of the text are the arguments over semantic
autonomy and inherent meaning. A belief in the autonomy ;
7
, of the text necessarily entails a belief in inherent mean- '
■ ing— meaning is in the objective text. Fish characterizes !
! "formalist analyses" as "analyses generated by the assump-
18 !
tion that meaning is embedded in the artifact." Inter
pretation finds the meaning that is there. How is such
meaning constituted? Beardsley argues "that texts acquire
i
■ meaning through the interaction of their words without the i
19 1
intervention of an authorial will." This belief that ;
"a verbal construction carries its own inherent determi- j
. t
j nate meaning regardless of what meaning was intended by j
' its author" is what Hirsch calls a belief in "semantic !
i 1
20 '
autonomy." In its purest form, a hermeneutics of seman- ;
tic autonomy and inherent meaning claims that no special ,
i
attention need be paid to authorial intention or readers'
. interpretive strategies; meaning is in the objective text 1
1
and interpretation is a matter of reflecting or capturing
, that meaning.
In contrast, Hirsch believes that "meaning exists |
i
only in consciousness, not in the verbal tokens them- j
selves." And "if meaning exists only in consciousness, i
[
then it exists only in the consciousness of (1) the author j
21 ^
of a text and (2) the interpreter of a text." Hirsch !
i
explains further that '
what had not been noticed in the earli
est enthusiasm for going back to "what the j
text says" was that the text had to j
represent somebody's meaning— if not the I
i
8
i author's then the critic's. It is true that :
a theory was erected under which the mean-
! ing of the text was equated with everything
i it could plausibly be taken to mean. . . .
! The theory of semantic autonomy forced itself ,
' into such unsatisfactory, ad hoc formulations
because in its zeal to banish the author it j
ignored the fact that meaning is an affair !
of consciousness not of words. . . . A word j
sequence means nothing in particular until
somebody either means something by it or '
understands something from it.22
Fish goes even further than Hirsch in rejecting i
i
' inherent meaning and semantic autonomy and in so doing |
tends to collapse Hirsch's distinction between authorial j
meaning and interpreter's meaning: J
I
In the old model utterers are in the busi- j
ness of handing over ready made or prefabri- :
cated meanings. These meanings are said to i
be encoded, and the code is assumed to be
in the world independently of the individ
uals who are obliged to attach themselves to
it (if they do not they run the danger of
being declared deviant). In my model, how
ever, meanings are not extracted but made !
and made not by encoded forms but by inter- [
pretive strategies that call forms into (
being.2 3
Fish explains further that "rather than intention and its :
formal realization producing interpretation (the 'normal'
picture), interpretation creates intention and its formal
realization by creating the conditions in which it 1
becomes possible to pick them out."^ Fish illustrates j
I
this premise by pointing to his own affective analyses,
i claiming: "I 'saw' what my interpretive principles per-
i
mitted or directed me to see, and then I turned around and I
attributed what I had 'seen' to a text and an intention.
Every critical approach, Fish argues, resorts to a similar ;
1 I
(though unacknowledged) strategy. Such an account
"resolves" many hermeneutic controversies that appear i
irresolvable; however, it raises a problem of its own, one
that Fish is aware of but can do nothing about:
i
This, then, is my thesis: that the form of
the reader's experience, formal units, and j
the structure of intention are one, that |
they come into view simultaneously, and j
that therefore the questions of priority and j
independence do not arise. What does arise 1
is another question: what produces them?
That is, if intention, form, and the shape j
of the reader's experience are simply dif
ferent ways of referring to (different per
spectives on) the same interpretive act, i
what is that act an interpretation of? I
cannot answer that question, but neither, j
I would claim, can anyone else, although 1
formalists try to answer it by pointing to
patterns and claiming that they are avail
able independently of (prior to) inter
pretation.
And of course Fish does not believe in such objective
"patterns": "they do not lie innocently in the world but
are themselves constituted by an interpretive act, even j
26 i
if, as is often the case, that act is unacknowledged." j
One additional interpretive assumption related to
, these issues of the autonomous text and inherent meaning I
is the relationship of part to whole in a literary work. |
With a formalist bias, the question might be stated in
this way: how do words, sentences, and larger structures
combine to form the literary text? Here the text is
10
I viewed as an object built ..up from units of meaning. M.H. |
I
, Abrams describes how this "objective orientation" analyzes (
| the work of art "as a self-sufficient entity constituted !
27
, by its parts m their internal relations." Beardsley
I
represents this orientation when he writes:
Now the aesthetic value in which we take an
interest (when our interest is aesthetic)
is something that arises out of the ingred
ients of the poem itself: the ways its
verbal parts— its words and sentences— work
together to make something fresh and novel
emerge. The poem, the verbal structure and
texture, has to work on us. It works by
manipulating our understanding of parts to
make us experience a whole that contains
something not in the parts. The individual
words, in combination, make suddenly a meta
phor, and language means something there
that is meant nowhere else. The names and ;
verbs strung together concresce into a j
story, with dramatic tensions and resolu- '
tions. Regional qualities play on the sur
face— wit, or tenderness, or elation. 23
Themes and theses rear up to be contemplated.
In this objectivist scenario, words are the building
1
blocks of the text. Like other aspects of the New
i
Critical enterprise, this spatial model has recently
received its share of hostile commentary:
Like the determinist, the New Critic must
proceed by assuming what he hopes to prove; '
he assumes the existence of "objective"
relations between the words of the poem he
is studying and then attempts to perceive j
such relations. The distinction between j
"objective"— that is, in some sense veri
fiable— and purely subjective or personal
meaning must necessarily be a central one
for this type of poetics. New Critics are
constantly protesting that they are not
"reading into" works, that the meanings
11
they ascribe to the words or images of a j
literary text are objectively there rather j
than subjectively imposed.29 ,
I
Reliance on similar objective relations is neces- [
sary to any belief in the independent status of the text;
some structures must be assumed to exist objectively withih
the text. In this model, interpretation becomes an objec
tive description of the spatial part-to-whole relation
ships within a work. Even interpretive models that reject j
the notion of an autonomous text and inherent meaning
often assume that some textual structures must exist inde
pendent of the interpreter: for example, the phenomen-
I
I
ological model of Iser (with its temporal rather than i
I
spatial orientation) requires that the interpreting reader
be interacting with something. In contrast, a model such
as Fish's posits that formal features (structures in the
text) are constituted by the interpretive strategies that j
claim to discover them. Fish argues that structures can j
i
be viewed as existing prior to interpretation only if they !
exist independent of interpretation:
Indeed, the claims of independence and prior- i
ity are one and the same; when they are sep
arated it is so that they can give circular I
and illegitimate support to each other. The
question "do formal features exist independ
ently?" is usually answered by pointing to
their priority: they are "in" the text
before the reader comes to it. The question
"are formal features prior?" is usually
answered by pointing to their independent
status: they are "in" the text before the j
I
I
12
reader comes to it. What looks like a step ;
in an argument is actually the spectacle of 1
an assertion supporting itself.30
I i
Fish's account of interpretation avoids this vicious cir~
> I
cularity, but, as we have seen, the price he pays is an ;
i
apparently insolvable paradox: If there are no textual j
structures independent or prior to interpretation, what j
are interpretive acts interpretations of? I
i
Independent text, semantic autonomy, inherent mean- ;
I
ing, objective structures— assumptions about these basic !
< hermeneutic issues usually determine the stance taken by
^ recent literary theorists toward the interpretive distinc
tions outlined in the following sections.
Aim: Literal and Non-Literal Sense. Closely
related to the status of the interpreted text is the dis-
i
tinction between literal and non-literal meaning. Herme
neutic theories differ in the kind of sense they aim to
i
, explicate: whether literal, symbolic, allegorical, mythic,;
or other non-literal meanings. Of course, these theories
necessarily assume a definition of literal meaning, but
such assumptions are difficult to isolate because they are ;
seldom foregrounded. Instead of being explicitly defined, !
"literal meaning" is usually contrasted implicitly with \
"non-literal meaning" in one of two ways: either it is
assumed that (1) literal meaning is conveyed by literal
language, which is contrasted to figurative language; or
13
that (2) literal meaning is the surface level in any lan
guage usage, while the non-literal is meaning below or
beyond that level. !
i
t
( 1 ) One standard handbook definition reads: J
I
Figurative language deviates from what we j
apprehend as the standard significance or |
sequence of words, in order to achieve spe- j
cial meaning or effect. Literal language,
in its broadest sense, is distinguished from !
all figurative language, and signifies entire
accordance with standard usage; in a more
limited sense, "literal language" is distin
guished only from the use of metaphors and |
other "tropes.
What usually follows from such literal/non-literal distinc
tions is an essentialist definition of literature: liter- !
ature is viewed as a deviation from a norm of ordinary
speech. This deviation is either quantitative or qualita
tive: either literature has a higher ratio of figurative 1
to literal language; or it has the same ratio (i.e., such
(
ratios are inconsequential) but the nature of the literal
or figurative language is different, e.g., the literal is i
fictive or the figurative is more striking than usual. ;
i
Such essentialist definitions of literature have I
i
come under increasing attack in recent literary theory.
E.D. Hirsch argues, for instance, that literature "is an
arbitrary classification of linguistic works which do not
exhibit common distinctive traits, and which cannot be 1
I
defined as in Aristotelian species. . . . The idea of lit-
32
erature is not an essentialist idea." What, then, is j
'literature? Stanley Fish claims that "literature is lan
guage . . . around which we have drawn a frame, a frame
I that indicates a decision to regard with a particular self-
consciousness the resources language has always possessed.
. . . What characterizes literature then is not formal
properties, but an attitude— always within our power to
assume— toward properties that belong by constitutive
right to language." Under this premise, "literature is
still a category, but it is an open category, not defin
able by fictionality, or by a disregard of propositional
, truth, or by a statistical predominance of tropes and fig-
33
ures, but simply by what we decide to put into it."
(2) In addition to distinctions based on the nature
of the language used, there are hermeneutic assumptions
about the relation of literal and non-literal senses
within the "whole meaning" of the text. "According to one I
!
much used metaphor, the point is that we must be prepared \
to 'go beyond the plain literal sense' in order to dis- ;
close the full meaning of a literary work. Or according
to an even more seductive metaphor, the point is that we
must probe below the surface of a text in order to attain J
34 |
a full understanding of its meaning."
We can see such assumptions active in the old New
Critical model. As discussed in the previous section, j
New Criticism focuses on the objective relations of part- i
to-whole; a fuller description of this model would also i
15
include its emphases on the relations of whole-to-part and ■
i
of part-to-part in a unified whole. Such an organic model
extends to the theory's treatment of literal and non-
35
literal meaning as well. Any non-literal meaning should \
contribute to the unity of the literary whole. In The !
Verbal Icon Wimsatt refers to (literal) "statement" and
(non-literal) "suggestion" and points out that the two are t
i
fused in the successful work of art; that is, "specifically!
qualified literal objects" combine with "objects touched j
by symbolic radiation" to form an organic whole. Wimsatt
I
writes further that "poetry is that type of verbal struc- :
I
ture where truth of reference or correspondence reaches a j
i
maximum degree of fusion with truth of coherence— or where
external and internal relation are intimately mutual
reflections."^
t
There is a direct relation between this New Critical!
f
belief in semantic richness and organic unity and its |
I
attitude toward the status of the text. Non-literal mean- |
i
ing and its relation to the literal level are assumed to j
be objective in the same way that the text and its words j
I
are. Indeed, the connotative is seen as an inseparable j
part of the text's words (another manifestation of the !
I
organic theory). Of course, this assumption relates back
to the New Critical belief in inherent meaning: both lit- j
i
eral and non-literal meaning are in the text, in the words,:
and both can be objectively discovered in interpretation. !
The interpretive procedure that such assumptions
imply has recently been analyzed by Richard Strier in his '
I
critique of New Critical poetics: :
In dealing with texts, particularly poems, :
in which the relations among the words or
images involved are not immediately intelli
gible, the New Critic seeks for connecting i
connotations. He will, therefore, attempt |
to screen out as far as possible his own |
personal associations . . . and to respond i
to what might be termed the "connotative I
flow. j
New Criticism assumes that a text has objective unity and
sets out to discover it. And "if a critic can point to the
i
'sub-surface' connotative flow of.the language of a poem j
and show it to have cognitive content relevant to the appar-i
ent or literal content of the poem as a whole, he has foundj
j
a way to establish the unity of a work which may appear to
have no unifying principle at all. ..." (p. 176). For
Strier,. this procedure is inadequate because, though it can'
justify the existence of metaphors and other surface mani
festations of the connotative flow, "it leaves the place- !
I
ment of the particular words in their particular positions |
i
entirely unaccounted for. The essential point is this: a
demonstration of the relation of each part of a literary
work to the whole does not and cannot serve to establish ;
J
the relation of part to part" (p. 188). Strier argues
i
that such a spatial model should be replaced by a temporal !
one that focuses not on "imagery and the 'subsurface I
, autonomy' of language" but on "writers' conscious control >
I over their works as expressed in such 'surface' qualities j
3 8 i
, as syntax and dramatic structure-" However, if such a j
I I
; temporal model is designed to discover the objective unity
assumed (but inadequately described) by the spatial model
of New Criticism, then Strier"s proposal is open to at
i
! least one criticism leveled at the poetics he critiques: j
i
"such a unity always turns out to be spurious, imposed |
39 I
rather than intrinsic." That is, critics can always j
find a unity if they presuppose that such a unity exists. J
Perhaps if the literal/non-literal distinction were J
separated from the New Critical model, we would have more j
i
success in isolating the notion of literal meaning. For j
example, in "Allegory as Interpretation," Morton
Bloomfield provides a discussion that does not seem to rely
wholly on an objectivist model. Rather than focusing on
literal and allegorical meaning in the text, he focuses j
on the interpretive procedures that constitute those mean- 1
ings. For Bloomfield, allegory is "the seeing of the sig- ;
40 '
nificance of a literary work beyond its meaning." Alle- j
gory (in this broad sense) includes personification-
allegory, allegory as irony, hermetic allegory, and alle- 1
gory with systems of signification (e.g., Christianity) 1
serving as matrix. Such a broad category even includes
"general meaning in or above the meaning of its particu-
41
lars." The only meaning that is not allegorical is what
the words mean: "The only stable element in a literary
work is its words, which, if we know the language in which
it is written, have a meaning. The significance of that
42
meaning is what may be called allegory." For Bloomfield,
the literal level is what the words mean and the allegor
ical level is any other meaning connected with the text.
!
Bloomfield himself raises two problems for his I
model and provides only very weak solutions. First, as he
i
has defined it, allegorical significance is potentially 1
infinite for any text:
As C.S. Lewis says, "No story can be devised >
by the wit of man which cannot be interpreted !
allegorically by the wit of some other man. !
. . . Therefore the mere fact that you can
allegorize the work before you is of no proof I
that it is an allegory." Now, works can cer- :
tainly have a plethora of significations,
but they cannot have an infinity of signifi- i
cations if we are concerned with the histor
ical situation. If we are not, then any j
work can mean many things— but the histori- !
cal truth acts as a sobering force. It is !
not satisfying to feel that anything can
mean anything.43
As a matter of fact, some literary theorists are satisfied j
44
with such an indeterminate state of affairs. All
Bloomfield can do to exclude interpretive freeplay is sug- j
i
qest "common sense and reliance on the text" (p. 311). !
I
Common sense is too vague a restriction, while the objec- i
tivity of the text is for some theorists simply an illu
sion.
More damaging to Bloomfield's distinction between
literal and allegorical meaning is his inability to answer !
the question: "When does the area of signification ;
4 5 I
begin?" He admits: "the problem of the lxteral level j
is much more complex, I think, than has been admitted. It
is not easy to draw the line between the literal and the
spiritual [allegorical] level" (pp. 313-14). Ultimately,
Bloomfield cannot even approximate such a line: :
The problem of the allegorical level, or
allegory as interpretation, lies essentially !
in the literal level. Meaning in many senses
is intertwined with the literal level. Fur- i
thermore, the over-all signification some- !
times is necessary in order to get the "mean
ing. " These levels and their divisions are
a very complicated m a t t e r . ^6
I
The distinction between literal meaning and non- ,
literal meaning proves to be a very slippery one. I
Geoffrey Hartman captures the nature of the problem (if
not the solution itself) when he comments that a certain
question "need not be taken literally": j
Yet what we mean by "taking literally" is j
itself a wild and worrisome matter in the >
history of interpretation. Something, '
doubtless, is always "taken" or "posited"
as literal— but what kind of constructive
activity is that? Can the literal be
denied by the mind that posited it? Or is
it not always denied and posited in what !
we call literature? Does literalism imply
a Nietzschean will to knowledge or power? j
Are traditions and literary histories lit- I
eralisms?**7 * i
Methodology I: Internal vs. External Interpreta- |
tion. Since this first methodological question is settled j
most often as result of the hermeneutic assumptions we
have already discussed, I can cover this issue very
quickly. Unlike the distinction between literal and non- j
!
literal meaning in the previous section, the controversy
over internal and external interpretation has often been
foregrounded and explicitly discussed.
An example of internal interpretation can be found |
!
i
in what I have called the objectivist or New Critical i
I
approach and what Abrams here refers to as "objective
criticism":
Objective criticism approaches the work as I
something which stands free from poet, !
audience, and the environing world. It j
describes the literary product as a self-
sufficient object or integer, or as a world- j
in-itself, which is to be analyzed and
judged by "intrinsic" criteria such as com
plexity, coherence, equilibrium, integrity,
and the interrelations of its component
elements.48
Though this description captures the basic stance
of an internal methodology, it collapses several different :
procedural distinctions into one. We can see this by i
viewing the kinds of internal interpretation as a series ,
of ever-widening circles around what each considers intrin-|
i
sic to literature. The first circle encloses the poem !
I
alone, excluding any consideration of authorial intention j
i
49
or effect on readers. A wider circle includes both
5 0
intention and response within the poem itself. Still i
wider is a view that any literary evidence {literary j
tradition, genres, an author's entire oeuvre, etc.) is !
relevant to the interpretation of a single poem; outside
this circle would be all other non-literary disciplines:
51
history, psychology, philosophy, biography, etc. Sur
rounding this circle, we have external interpretation by
almost any account, though perhaps some critics would
argue that a slightly wider circle should be included
which lets in their pet discipline which cannot be sep
arated from literary interpretation: for example, histor-
icists might argue that historical context is absolutely
necessary for the correct interpretation of a poem and
indeed is reflected (at least in part) through the arti- !
fact itself.
The expansion and contraction of the circle by
individual critics illustrates the interpretive nature of
I
the internal-external distinction. That is, the method- 1
i
ological assumption about what is internal and what is j
i
i
external is another implicit interpretation that is made |
in the course of any hermeneutic enterprise. The more I
I
that this interpretation allows "in" the larger the circle j
I
becomes. However, the dispute over internal and external
interpretation is not isomorphic with the controversy over i
I
i
the status of the text. Theorists can agree on the objec
tivity of the text but disagree on what evidence is rele
vant to its interpretation. Nor is the dispute over meth- i
i
odology exactly an argument about where to draw the !
boundaries of the text. Rather, it is predominantly a
i
question of what is relevant to interpretive procedures. ■
I
j
Originally in the 1940's and 50's, the debate over
internal and external interpretation was identical with
the debate over relevant and irrelevant evidence. A very
constricted circle defining internal interpretation was
drawn by the New Critical orthodoxy, which also identified j
what was internal with the relevant and what was external
i
j
with the irrelevant. Out of such an identification came j
the Intentional and Affective Fallacies accepted as laws |
I
i
by so many critics. More recent theorists have rejected i
these fallacies by expanding the boundaries of the circle. ,
i
Some recent critics have granted New Criticism its con- j
stricted circle, but have rejected its identification of
i
what is relevant with what is internal. For example,
textual-biographical critics argue that external evidence !
52
is required to check internal interpretation.
The dispute over internal and external interpreta
tion has often become a dispute over linguistic and his- !
torical interpretation. For example, the New Critics !
I
argued that only linguistic evidence was necessary for the j
correct interpretation of a literary text; their opponents j
53
countered that the social context was just as important. !
I
An underlying assumption of both linguistic and historical
interpretation is that interpretation involves discovering
| a determinate meaning encoded in the text. Thus, both j
procedures stress the importance of validity in interpre- !
j tation, though they disagree on the nature of the validat- J
54
ing evidence. In the next section I will contrast
these procedures with an approach that denies the need
for interpretive validity; for this approach the contro
versy between internal and external interpretation simply !
i
, disappears.
Methodology II: Validity in Interpretation vs. j
, Interpretive Freeplay. The explication of this contro- j
versy can be presented most easily in narrative form: j
1 first the debate centered around which standard of inter- |
pretive validity to accept (internal vs. external, lin- j
guistic vs. historical, authorial vs. non-authorial); then
I
the methodological question shifted radically in the more
recent dispute over whether any standard was necessary or
possible (validity in interpretation vs. interpretive
freeplay).
We can begin our brief story with a restatement of
New Criticism's anti-intentionalist stance: "The design
or intention of the author is neither available nor desir- <
i
able as a standard for judging either the meaning or the
55 !
value of a work of art." In the 1960's the most influ- I
ential attack on this position was mounted by Hirsch's
56
Validity in Interpretation. Hirsch argued that banishing
24
the author from hermeneutic procedures resulted in inter- j
pretive chaos, because without authorial meaning there j
I
I
could be no universally accepted standard of validity. In j
arguing for the "normative authority of the author's orig
inal meaning," he restricted the definition of "meaning"
to "what the author meant by his use of a particular sign
sequence" (pp. 10,8). More specifically, Hirsch defined
"verbal meaning" as "whatever someone has willed to convey i
by a particular sequence of linguistic signs and which can
be conveyed (shared) by means of those linguistic signs"
(p. 31; cf. p. 49). Everything that this verbal meaning
i
t
relates to was called "significance": ;
I
Thus, if it is said that Gibbon's comments ,
on superstition reflect the common atti- !
tudes of his own time, that would point
out a meaning of Gibbon's work to histori
cal generalities, but not a meaning in the
work itself. The difference between these
tiny prepositions is highly important and
too often ignored. Significance is always '
"meaning-to," never "meaning-in." Signif- j
icance always entails a relationship ;
between what is in a man's verbal meaning
and what is outside it, even when that rela- ;
tionship pertains to the author himself or j
to his subject matter. (pp. 62-63) j
i
Validity in Interpretation aroused a great deal of
discussion between intentionalists and anti-intentionalistsI
For example, Genre published a "symposium" of responses to
" >
Hirsch's book in July 1968, which included a restatement j
i
of the New Critical position by Monroe Beardsley, "Textual |
Meaning and Authorial Meaning." As we have already seen,
i Beardsley argued that textual and authorial meaning are not!
' identical and that textual meaning could be discovered !
I
I
' even if authorial meaning was ignored. For Beardsley, I
!
< |
i
textual meaning is public not authorial: the poem not the
author is the standard of validity in interpretation.
In 1970 Michael Hancher presented a different
i J
response to Hirsch in "The Science of Interpretation and ,
57 . ’
the Art of Interpretation." He argued that Hirsch's
i
definition of "meaning" was too restrictive: \
i
! Some sort of provision must be made to jus- j
ify and embrace those interpretations of a ;
, text which, though cognitively irresponsi- j
' ble— indifferent to the singular meaning i
intended by the author— do nonetheless repre- i
sent a meaning which can be greatly valued.
The process of interpretation that formu
lates such an unauthorized but nonetheless
highly valued meaning will doubtless have
no practical or ethical claim to universal- ;
ity; it will not be scientific in method;
and it will not issue in knowledge. It will ■
in fact be more an art than a science, (p. 797) i
I
Practitioners of the "science" of interpretation would :
j
include both Hirsch and Beardsley (both assume some stand-
5 8
ard of validity). The "art" of interpretation is prac- |
ticed by any critic whose only norm is a valued reading. j
i
(Hancher refused to call this norm a standard of validity.)|
In response to critiques like those by Beardsley j
and Hancher, Hirsch revised his definition of "meaning" i
in "Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics" (1972). He admitted !
I
that his identification of all meaning with authorial j
26
, meaning was too restrictive: "meaning" should include I
i
I both author's "original meaning" and non-authorial "anach- !
| |
ronistic meaning" (p. 249). This redefinition prepared
!
the way for a shift in Hirsch's argument over interpretive
, validity. In Validity in Interpretation, he argued his
point in a critical atmosphere where the need for a stand-
[
ard of validity "was unquestioned; in Hancher's terms, he j
had wanted to establish a science of interpretation based j
on authorial meaning, and all he needed to do was show
that authorial meaning was recoverable and that it was the
only universally acceptable standard of validity. In
"Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics," the emphasis changed:
i
a need for standards of validity was no longer universally
recognized; therefore, it was no longer enough merely to
claim that original meaning was the most determinate and
acceptable standard. Instead, Hirsch based his new argu
ment on an ethical premise: j
I
Unless there is a powerful overriding value |
in disregarding an author's intention (i.e.,
original meaning), we who interpret as a
vocation should not disregard it. Mere indi- i
vidual preference would not be such an over- j
riding value, nor would be the mere pref
erences of many persons, (p. 2 59) 1
I
What we have seen here is a radical shift in the i
methodological debate: the dispute over the proper stand- j
ards for interpretive validity has become a controversy
over whether any standards are needed. This most recent
27
development can be viewed as a debate between those
theorists who argue for validity in interpretation and !
i
those who embrace interpretive freeplay or, what Jacques
Derrida calls, the "unbounded space for the play of sig- ;
nification.
One battle of this methodological war is presently J
6 0 1
being fought in the pages of Critical Inquiry. The |
major protagonists are M.H. Abrams and J. Hillis Miller: !
the former is a literary historian and a believer in inter-;
pretive validity; the latter is a deconstructionist critic J
t
and a practitioner or interpretive freeplay.
Abrams bases his enterprise on the assumption that ,
he can interpret an author's sequence of sentences and j
61
discover its "core of determinate meanings." He argues
|
that "the historian is indeed for the most part able to
interpret not only what the passages that he cites might
mean now, but also what their writers meant when they
wrote them. Typically, the historian puts his interpre
tation in language which is partly his author's and partly ;
his own; if it is sound, this interpretation approximates,
closely enough for the purpose at hand, what the author
m e a n t . I
In contrast, Miller rejects such notions of deter
minate meaning. Miller's critique of Abrams is usefully
summarized by Abrams himself:
[Miller's] central contention is not simply
that I am sometimes, or always, wrong in my
interpretation, but instead that I— like other j
traditional historians— can never be right in |
my interpretation. For Miller assents to ;
Nietzsche's challenge of "the concept of
'rightness'in interpretation," and to j
Nietzsche's assertion that "the same text (
authorizes innumerable interpretations (Aus-
legungen): there is no 'correct' interpreta
tion.” Nietzsche's views of interpretation,
as Miller says, are relevant to the recent j
deconstructive theorists, including Jacques I
Derrida and himself, who have "reinterpreted |
Nietzsche" or have written "directly under
his aegis." He goes on to quote a number of
statements from Nietzsche's The Will to Power
to the effect, as Miller puts it, "that read
ing is never the objective identifying of a
sense but the importation of meaning into a
text which has no meaning 'in itself.'"63
This summary may help prepare a reader for Miller's own |
I
account (or rather figuration) of his enterprise:
Far from providing a benign escape from the
maze, Ariadne's thread makes the labyrinth,
is the labyrinth. The interpretation or
solving of the puzzles of the textual web
only adds more filaments to the web. One
can never escape from the labyrinth because
the activity of escaping makes more labyrinth,
the thread of a linear narrative or story.
Criticism is the production of more thread
to embroider the texture or textile already
there. This thread is like the filament of
ink which flows from the pen of the writer, |
keeping him in the web but suspending him |
also over the chasm, the blank page that thin i
line hides.^4 j
Miller's aim is not to establish a determinate meaning but j
to continue self-consciously embroidering. ;
Abrams is absolutely correct when he writes that j
"the deconstructive method works, because it can't help 1
29
, working; it is a can't-fail enterprise; there is no complex!
| passage of verse or prose which could possibly serve as a
I 6 5 1
1 counter-instance to test its validity or limits." That J
I
is, in Miller's methodology the criterion of validity
simply drops out.
In the terms we have been developing, Abrams' enter
prise acknowledges a standard of validity in interpreta- ;
i
tion, while such standards are completely rejected in the (
i
. course of Miller's interpretive freeplay. Here we have '
reached the apex of methodological disagreements in recent
; Anglo-American literary hermeneutics.
II !
j
In the survey of recent Anglo-American literary \
theory provided in Part I, we found several fundamental
disagreements among hermeneutic approaches as well as par- ■
adoxes within individual theories. I would now like to
make some suggestions concerning these problems and to '
present the interpretive premises upon which my own theory
of interpretation is based. First, let me complicate the
hermeneutic discussion a bit more by considering the claims:
of the "hermeneutic circle."
The hermeneutic circle is mentioned often in recent !
I
literary hermeneutics. For example, Hirsch explains the j
1 concept:
This principle holds that the process of
understanding is necessarily circular,
30
since we cannot know a whole without know
ing some of its constituent parts, yet we j
cannot know the parts as such without know- j
ing the whole which determines their func- j
tions. . . . In Sein und Ze.it- , Heidegger ,
expands the circumference of the hermeneutic
circle beyond textual interpretation to
embrace all knowing. Everywhere in knowl
edge the whole is prior to its parts, since
the meaningfulness of a part is disclosed
only in its relation to or function within
a larger whole.
1
I
From a different perspective, Skinner warns that "before I
i
we can hope to identify the context which helps to disclose;
the meaning of a given work, we must already have arrived
at an interpretation which serves to suggest what contexts
may most profitably be investigated as further aids to
I
interpretation. The relationship between a text and its i
I
appropriate context is in short an instance of the herme- ^
neutic circle, not a means of breaking out of it."^ !
Until recently, the aim of literary theory has been j
i
to escape the hermeneutic circle and ground interpretation !
I
on a rock bed of objective fact or in the self-evident j
truth of transcendent meaning. New critics relied on the
objective text, myth critics on transcendent myths, his- j
I
toricists on historical context, Freudian critics on psy- I
choanalytic dogma/ etc. All held in common the belief in 1
one independent, verifiable "reality" (outside the herme
neutic circle) that would explain or explicate the meaning |
!
of the text. The trend now seems to be toward an accept-
*
ance of the hermeneutic circle, a realization that it cannotj
68 1
be escaped but it can be better understood. What fol- .
lows is an attempt to trace out more fully the outlines of
the hermeneutic circle.
Definition. Interpretation=translation into j
acceptable approximation.
The OED .gives as one obscure meaning of interpret: !
I
"the action of translating; a translation or rendering of
a book." i
i
I
Interpret is derived from the Latin interpretari—
to explain, expound, translate, understand— from interpres: 1
an agent between two parties, a broker, a negotiator, !
69
explainer, expounder, translator.
70 !
"All reading is translation." j
All interpretation is translation:
we translate one meaning into another
one text into another j
one phenomenon into another j
one interpretation into another
one translation into another
dark clouds become a warning of rain :
[kat] becomes "cat" i
"Je t'aime" becomes "I love you" 1
a sequence of words becomes a poem j
a novel becomes an allegory of j
initiation j
the ritual of initiation becomes a
symbol of biological birth j
and on and on.
Is interpretation therefore infinite translation?
Potentially, yes. Practically, no. Interpretation as j
i
translation is a version of the hermeneutic circle. !
Potentially, we could circle round and round within an !
I
ever-expanding circle of translation. But we don't. We
stop. We do not break out of the hermeneutic circle; we !
simply are satisfied with some translation within the 1
i
i
circle. It makes sense. It is an acceptable approxima- j
tion. |
A simple example: i
I
Molly walks in and says, "Je t'aime." (
Steve is puzzled and asks, "Jet tern?"
She replies softly, "Ahlufya." I
He says, "What?" 1
She responds irritably, "I_ love you."
He romantically responds, "Oh." I
Interpretation in communication is always translation ;
I
toward acceptable approximation. We approximate the
i
speaker's meaning as we create it for ourselves. Trans- ^
lation toward a conventionally acceptable approximation is ,
the form of most interpretive strategies. i
i
However, translations could approximate unendingly: |
that is a translation of Derrida's insight— the text is an j
"unbounded space for the play of signification." Transla
tion should approximate unendingly: that is an approxima- ,
tion of the motivating force behind Miller's deconstruc- j
71 I
tionist strategy of using etymologies. i
Methodology. Deconstructionist assumptions embrace '
a view of interpretation as approximating translation.
However, they ignore (or miss the point of) j
acceptable approximation
acceptable translation
standard translation ,
conventional translation. j
1
In an indeterminate field of translations, one often i
i
becomes valued above others. It is conventionally agreed j
72 I
upon— xt becomes the "correct" translation. The exist- ;
ence of the "correct" translation is usually not a debat- j
i
able question; it is "correct" if it is conventionally \
agreed upon. The explicit form of the Abrams-Miller ;
debate is misleading: Abrams keeps saying, "There is_ a j
correct interpretation," but actually means," I accept !
the standard translation (and the fact there is one)"; '
while Miller argues, "There are no correct interpreta-
tions," and means, "I reject the standard translation (and ,
I
the fact there should be one)." Both view interpretation
in a way congruent with approximating translation; the
decisive disagreement is over the status of acceptable
approximation. Abrams wants the author's meaning to be I
the object of interpretation (the goal toward which his
translation approximates), while Miller uses the approxi
mating translations of etymologies to carry out his inter
pretive freeplay. For Abrams, acceptable approximation is
a goal in itself ("we are satisfied that we have approxi-
73
mated the author's meaning"). For Miller, acceptable
(etymological) approximation is merely a tool for his ;
deconstructionist criticism. I
i Miller asks: "What, is the status of these etymol-
' I
! ogies? Identification of the true meaning of the word? j
! i
j Some original presence rooted in the ground of immediate
i ,
1 experience, physical or metaphysical? By no means. They j
serve rather to indicate the lack of enclosure of a given
word. . . . The effect of etymological retracing is not to
ground the word solidly but to tender it unstable, equiv- 1
ocal, wavering, abysmal. All etymology is false etymology,!
both in the sense that there is always some bend or dis-
i continuity in the etymological line, and in the sense that
i
etymology always fails to find an etymon, a true literal
74
meaning at the origin." A tracing out of verbal roots
; or any thread in the web of the text finally arrives at an
impasse, not being able to go any farther but unable to
i
find any ultimate grounding, an abyss. Miller uses the
figure of the mise en abyme to describe this abyss: j
j
Mise en abyme is a term in heraldry meaning j
a shield which has in its center (abyme) a !
smaller image of the same shield, and so, !
by implication, ad infinitum, with ever j
smaller and smaller shields receding toward j
the central point. . . .
The paradox of the mise en abyme is the
following: without the production of some
schema, some "icon," there can be no glimpse |
of the abyss, no vertigo of the underlying
nothingness. Any such schema, however, ;
both opens the chasm, creates it or reveals >
it, and at the same time fills it up, covers ;
it over by naming it, gives the groundless j
a ground, the bottomless a bottom. Any
such schema almost instantaneously becomes j
a trivial mechanism, an artifice. It j
becomes something merely made, confected, :
therefore all-too-human and rational. 5 ;
The mise en abyme, the impasse in interpreting a text, '
---------------------------------------------------------------------- i
: cannot be avoided. It "may only be veiled by some credu- i
. lity making a substance where there is in fact an abyss,
i 1
for example, in taking consciousness as a solid ground. ;
i !
The thinly veiled chasm may be avoided only by stopping
short, by taking something for granted in the terminology
i
one is using rather than interrogating it, or by not push- ;
ing the analysis of the text in question far enough so
I
1 that the impossibility of a single definitive reading I
' 7 6
■ emerges." "Stopping short" is a form of acceptable j
, approximation. Miller rejects such acceptable approxima- j
tion, while Abrams makes it his goal; Miller refuses to
stop short, while Abrams sees such a move as the proper
role of literary interpretation (if, of course, the stop
ping short is accomplished at the author's probable mean
ing, the acceptable approximation of Abrams' translation). ;
A definition of interpretation as translation
I
toward acceptable approximation has helped clarify the !
; terms of the methodological debate over validity and
creativity in interpretation. The definition will become
more useful when I translate it in terms of conventions. j
My claim is that interpretation is conventional in two
complementary ways: ;
I
(1) meaning— the object of interpretation— is constituted j
i
by conventions; and J
(2) interpretation as a procedure is governed by |
!
36
■ conventional rules.
' I can use Abrams' critique of Miller to illustrate
i
, these assumptions. Miller "leaves no room for taking
. into account that language, unlike the physical world, is
a cultural institution that developed expressly in order
to mean something and to convey what is meant to members
of a community who have learned how to use and interpret
; 77
language." In my terms, Abrams attacks Miller for ignor
ing the conventions that are generally accepted for the
constitution of meaning. Abrams goes on: "Endowed . . .
with the sedimented meanings accumulated over its total j
history, but stripped of any norms for selecting some of j
I
these and rejecting others, a key word— like the larger j
passage or total text of which the word is an element— ;
i
becomes (in the phrase Miller cites from Mallarmd) a sus-
J
I
pens vibratoire, a vibratory suspension of equally likely
meanings, and these are bound to include 'incompatible' i
78 1
or 'irreconcilable' or 'contradictory' meanings." Here >
Abrams is complaining that Miller has rejected procedural I
i
c o n v e n t i o n s g e n e r a l l y a c c e p t e d f o r e s t a b l i s h i n g v a l i d i t y . J
i
That is, Abrams sees normative conventions as absolutely ;
binding while Miller rejects them as an illusion. Both j
fail to recognize that acceptance of specific conventions
is a legitimate procedural choice (whether acknowledged or j
not). This last characterization may be unfair to both :
37
; Abrams and Miller, since both seem to recognize that J
I
Miller has made some kind of "choice" in rejecting certain ,
i
i procedural conventions. My point is that Abrams considers j
such a rejection nonsensical and Miller thinks it unavoid- j
able.
The notion of convention then helps clarify still
I
further the methodological distinction between validity ;
and creativity in interpretation: the two sides of the i
e
debate have chosen radically different conventions of
79
; meaning and procedure. Such a concept of interpretive !
i
j conventions will also shed light on some of the other con- i
troversies we have examined.
I
1
In the case of internal vs. external and linguistic |
1
' vs. historical interpretation, a consideration of the role 1
, of constitutive conventions tends to dissolve the contro
versies. As we have seen, an internal methodology I
i
restricts the relevant evidence to the poem itself. More
specifically, such a methodology requires close attention
1
to linguistic evidence within the poem. But how is such
evidence interpreted? Here is Beardsley's answer: j
Roughly speaking, to know the meaning of a j
word is to know how to use it in the per
formance of linguistic acts: in such acts i
as asserting, promising, threatening, com
manding. And to know how to use it is to be j
able to use it in accordance with rules that
govern its use in a certain speech community. |
So the first point is that some sort of rule- j
governed behavior is essential to the very !
38
existence of meaning, and therefore one
broad condition of valid interpretation is
that it be in accordance with the rules gov- j
erning the words that are being interpreted. |
Second, once we learn the rules of lan
guage use, we have all we need fbr interpreting
at least the plain meaning of an indefinite
number of utterances, without inquiring into
anyone else's acts of will— in the same way
we can discover (without asking) that four
people at a table are playing bridge, if we
know the rules of that game and observe the i
way they proceed.80 j
I
The internal, linguistic sort of interpretation necessar- J
ily relies on the rules or- conventions of language-games. !
The same is true for external or historical interpreta
tion, as refined in recent approaches:
A number of literary theorists . . . insist j
that there must be at least one sense of i
[historical] context— the idea of a context
of prevailing conventions and assumptions—
which it will always be essential to recover
in order to interpret the meaning of a lit- j
erary text. The argument in favor of this
central conclusion generally begins with the !
claim that we need to recover an author's 1
intentions in writing in order to under- j
stand the meaning of what he writes. It is j
then pointed out that, in order to recover j
such intentions, it is normally taken to be !
essential to surround the given text with an j
appropriate context of assumptions and con
ventions from which the author's exact
intended meaning can then be decoded. This
yields the crucial conclusion that a knowl
edge of these assumptions and conventions
[of illocutionary acts, for example] must
be essential to understanding the meaning of
the text.81
Therefore, in terms of reliance on constitutive conventions
of language, both linguistic and historical methodologies
agree. The one remaining difference is the procedural
:convention of historical interpretation that allows the use 1
! of external evidence (primarily as negative proof restrict
ing the range of possible intentions interpreted from the
!
linguistic evidence).
Aim. We have seen that the literal/non-literal dis
tinction is an especially troublesome one. I think a
notion of interpretive conventions helps show why.
I
Geoffrey Hartman has asked: "Something, doubtless, is j
always 'taken' or 'posited' as literal— but what kind of I
82 '
I constructive activity is that?" I would answer that it i
I
is a conventional activity in two ways: !
(
(1) Literal meaning is what the words "really" mean, which
is to say it is what we conventionally agree that they
mean.
(2) Constructing the literal meaning of a text is conven
tionally viewed as horizontal translation; that is, when J
we summarize the plot of a story, we usually think that we :
are not adding another level of meaning. When we explicate [
the non-literal meaning, our translation has moved to the :
vertical; we add another layer of meaning below or above j
the literal.
The reasons theorists have not yet been able to
draw satisfactory distinctions between literal and non- i
literal (and never will be able to do so) is because the
constitutive conventions of (1) are always in flux and the
procedural conventions for (2) are vague or non-existent.
40
(1) In the most obvious sense, words change their ;
meanings; they change their denotations as well as conno- j
I
tations. Meanings go in and out of fashion. Sometimes
i
(all the time?) figurative meaning becomes literal, conno- |
tations evolve into denotations. The history of any lan
guage is partially a history of changes in the agreements
about word meanings.
Less obviously/ the literal meaning of a word is j
an empty node, a point at which other literal meanings
cross. That is, a word only means in relationship to J
|
other words. All signification (literal and otherwise) !
is based on relations. Language "is a system of relations
!
and oppositions. . . . Units are not positive entities but |
the nodes of a series of differences, just as a mathemat
ical point has no content but is defined by its relations
8 3
to other points." The literal significance of a word is t
constituted by its relations to other literal significa- [
tions. Such relations are always in flux, always changing
as words drop out of a language or are added, as nodes of
I
meaning become closer or farther removed in their relation
ships. A convention of literal meaning provides the j
j
necessary illusion of stability that is necessary for ;
i
communication; it temporarily limits the range of rela
tionships and freezes their movement. To try to define
"literal meaning" positively has been so difficult because
theorists assume it is a stable, limited range of meaning
which the word contains; whereas, it is actually a chang
ing convention temporarily freezing a flux of relation
ships which "contains" the word.
(2) The difficulty of defining literal meaning by
contrasting it to non-literal meaning is a result of sim
ilar confusions, plus considerable procedural vagueness.
If all signification is structural (based on relations),
then a strategy of contrast in defining literal meaning
would seem to be appropriate. However, where do we start?
What is contrasted with what? We might begin by saying
that non-literal meaning is whatever is not covered by the
convention of literal meaning; but this assumes that the
convention enables us to draw a boundary around literal
meaning. This is mistaken. What the convention actually
does is help us approximate what is acceptable as literal.
Perhaps we can come at the distinction from the
other end: literal is whatever is left after we take away
the non-literal. In Bloomfield's terms, the non-literal
(allegorical) meaning is what is detachable from the lit-
84
eral. But, again, we have no procedure for drawing a
sharp line between the two; indeed, if we did, we would
not need to worry about defining the two by contrast
because we would already have the required operative defi
nitions. What all this suggests is that any attempt to
i draw a sharp line between literal and non-literal meanings '
' may be doomed from the beginning. Perhaps the prefix I
j i
j "non" has misled theorists all along to hope for such a
, sharp dividing line: either this meaning is literal or I
; i
non-literal.
Such a conclusion is compatible with a proposed
solution to a related problem: the norm/deviation debate
in defining literature. As we have seen, a belief in a j
clear distinction between literal and non-literal language j
: usually leads to an essentialist definition of literature, j
I
!
, Such a definition makes more problems than it solves, and, |
as we have also seen, has come in for more and more criti- J
!
■ cism in recent literary theory. |
I
In contrast to an essentialist definition, Hirsch
I
claims that literature is "an arbitrary classification of
I
linguistic works" and Fish argues that it is an "open j
category" definable "simply by what we decide to put into ■
)
8 5 '
it." These claims suggest that what an individual |
i
critic considers to be literature is arbitrarily arrived ;
j
■ at by that critic. But this is not the case: an artifact I
]
is considered literary by convention. As Fish remarks, ,
"All aesthetics .... are local and conventional rather ■
than universal, reflecting 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 :
43
(it is very much an act of faith) continues to abide by 1
8 6 i
it." Earlier, Morse Peckham had made a similar claim ;
i
about all art: "A work of art is any perceptual field j
which an individual uses as an occasion for performing the
role of art perceiver. . . . I have attempted to show that
the notion that all works of art and all aesthetic exper-
j
iences have something in common is in error, that art is :
i
i
a disjunctive category, established by convention, and j
that art is not a category of perceptual fields, but of j
role playing. . . .Though art is a logically empty category,j
8 7 j
in our culture it is not a conventionally empty category." ;
i
Ontological Assumptions. The controversy over j
inherent meaning and semantic autonomy earlier seemed to !
i
have presented us with irreconcilable differences. Now we
can at least see what the two sides in the debate hold in
common: a focus on the conventions of language in their
interpretive procedures. The anti-intentionalist who
believes in semantic autonomy relies on linguistic conven- '
8 8
tions to construct public meaning. Indeed, what is
public meaning if it is not conventional meaning? An j
intentionalist like Hirsch who rejects semantic autonomy J
relies on a similar "principle of sharability" based on !
89
the conventions of language. Again: "Verbal meaning is
whatever someone has willed to convey by a particular
sequence of linguistic signs and which can be conveyed
90
(shared) by means of those linguistic signs." As
, Tanselle points out: "a reader does not have access to
an author's mind, and, if he understands a text to mean
something, it is (at least to begin with) as a result of !
91
certain conventions of language which both are following." I
There is then a common ground for Wimsatt, Beardsley,
Hirsch, and Tanselle, though attention to authorial will
i
(in terms of negative evidence, for example) still remains j
1
an irreconcilable difference.
1
This disagreement extends to the problems of inher- !
; ent meaning and the status of the text. The New Critics i
claimed that meaning and unity were in the objective text. ;
I
; Inherent meaning could be discovered because it was public,!
i
ruled by shared conventions. However, unity as a part of j
that meaning presents a problem because there seems to be ’
no commonly-shared conventions determining it. Thus, the
New Critics had no way of restricting the unities found in j
a text or texts. Every critic was given a license to j
write about whatever unity he "found" in a text. The :
i
result was an unending series of articles entitled "The j
Unity of . " The resultant subjective, idiosyn- !
cratic unities were certainly not the objective meanings \
!
the early New Critics had hoped to find.
Intentionalists like Hirsch saw the problems with :
this formalist methodology. Hirsch concludes Validity in j
Interpretation with the following summary: "In the
earlier chapters of this book, I showed that only one '
interpretive problem can be answered with objectivity:
'What, in all probability, did the author mean to convey?1 J
In this final chapter, I have tried to show more partic- j
ularly wherein that objectivity lies. It lies in our
capacity to say on firm principles, 'Yes, that answer is
92 I
valid' or 'No, xt xs not.'" In Hxrsch's theory, meaning |
has moved from the illusory objective text to the author's .
t
I
mind. Still, we are left with the same problem: how does !
the interpreter discover it? Hirsch responds, "Through :
i
the principle of sharability." However, to say this is to !
I
say that intention is ultimately the creation of communal
9 3
interpretive strategies (or conventions).
Fish's theory of interpretive strategies provides
the critic with a solution to the problems inherent in
formalist and intentionalist models: critics can still
talk about structures in the text but must realize that
they are the creation of their interpretive theories and
I
will only be acceptable to other critics who share the
i
same interpretive strategies; and critics can reconstruct I
an author's intention if they interpret the author to be i
!
in a similar interpretive community as themselves, sharing
the same interpretive conventions. However, by shifting
the burden of interpretation to interpretive strategies
(or interpretive conventions), the theorist also runs up
against Fish's paradox: if intention and the text are '
1
constituted by interpretive strategies, what are interpre- j
tive acts interpretations of? In what follows I will j
i
attempt to provide the answer Fish's theory fails to
provide.
Let's begin by picturing a new hermeneutic figure:
Conventional
Subjective Objective
This hermeneutic triangle illustrates the interrelation-
!
ships among three perspectives on the interpretive scene. ;
A hermeneutist of the objective (realist) perspective views
the interpreting subject as trying to discover the pre- j
existent meaning in the objective text. A hermeneutist j
of the subjective (idealist) persuasion views the inter- j
preting subject as creating the text. I would argue that
the subjective and the objective "merge" in the conven-
(
tional. We can only talk about subject and object in termsj
of interpretive conventions. Conventions constitute the |
i
subject's perception of the object, and the object parti- !
cipates in constituting the whole interpretive scene. The
• i
interpretive scene (subject, object, and context) is con- j
i
stituted by and constitutes the interpretive convention. !
This account does not allow for an objective text
i that is prior to or independent of interpretation. The ]
! text is constituted by interpretive conventions as an j
i I
i inseparable aspect of the interpretive scene. Now this !
would seem to leave me open to the objection raised to i
Fish's theory: what are interpretative acts interpreta
tions of? Since Fish's account makes the objective text
disappear, he assumes that there is nothing to supply as j
the "object" of interpretative strategies. My account i
fills this void with the interpretive scene itself. ;
i
, The fact that the interpretive scene is the result j
; of an interpretation is not a valid objection to my j
i
account. It is merely a part of the hermeneutic circle |
l
which is our situation in the world. It is as inescapable |
in our life as it is in our theorizing. We create the
■ scene through interpretation and we interpret through our '
i
scene. I
Fish's problem is that he does not focus on the !
I
fact that we are always in an interpretive scene, we are j
always in-the-world. He assumes that something presents j
us with a situation for literary interpretation and then !
i
we interpret (create) a text. The actual case is differ- |
ent: we are always interpreting (creating)our scene and
the scene is always producing our interpretation; then
something changes in the scene (a book is opened) and we ;
continue interpreting, now incorporating this change into I
48
, our interpretation. The change in scene transforms our |
! interpretation of the scene, and we transform the scene by !
j
' creating the change, admitting it into our interpretation.
After the book closes, we continue interpreting the scene.
Fish focuses only on interpretation in the literary situa
tion and how such interpretation writes the text; he
ignores the scene before and after. Thus, he needs some-
• thing that gets interpretation going, not realizing that
94
it is always going. i
My account avoids the impasse of Fish's, while pre- '
serving its strengths which solve the ontological problems !
I
of formalist and intentionalist approaches. However, my ;
theory does more. Since Fish's theory acknowledges no j
objective text, it is unclear how changes in (what objec-
tivists call) the words-on-the-page (e.g., deletions or
i
additions) can be accounted for within his approach. In j
l
my theory, textual changes become a part of a new inter
pretive scene, translatable in terms of interpretive con- I
ventions. j
Of course, my hermeneutic assumptions force me to j
I
acknowledge that my account of interpretation is itself
another interpretation, truer than others I have discussed
only in that it proves more useful. It replaces the form-
’ alist, intentionalist, and Fishean fictions with another
i
fiction. "The final belief is to believe in a fiction,
49
' which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing
95
! else." My account does not escape the hermeneutic circle,
j j
, (an impossibility), it embraces it, translating it into an j
acceptable approximation.
We have traveled from the skeptical abyss of
Cratylus, where we could do nothing, to the creative chasm
of Derrida and Miller, where they claim we can do every- j
thing. We can now see that Cratylus' fiction was at least 1
partially "right": interpreters and their meanings are j
, always changing— the conventional rules of interpretation
and the constitutive conventions of meaning constantly '
evolve. But this fiction is incomplete. A more useful I
one would recognize that there is stability within change
: and change within stability. Conventions of procedure and
I
meaning remain stable long enough to make communication |
I
possible yet are flexible enough to allow interpretive |
I
freeplay. Of course, any stability is itself a convention;;
at this point the mise en abyme becomes the final accept- j
i
able approximation. j
I
I
I
I
I
I
50
CHAPTER 2
A MODEL OF CRITICAL THEORY
Further exposition of my theory of interpretation
must await a fuller analysis of convention. First I will
present a model of the critical enterprise in this
chapter, so that I can compare various reader-response
approaches (Chapter 3), upon which I build my own theory
of interpretive conventions (Chapters 4 and 5).
I
The act of criticism has been analyzed in several
ways.'*' One model of the critical act includes four
specific activities: description, explication, explana
tion, and evaluation. Description is usually thought of
as a neutral rendering of what is there in the text. Under
this view, explication becomes the discovery of the mean
ing of what is described, and explanation is an account of
why what is described is the way it is. Evaluation then
becomes a judgment on the value of the meaning that has
been explicated and its presentation. Under this com
monly held view only explication and (what I will call)
synchronic explanation are considered to be interpretation.,
In contrast, I will claim that all four activities are at j
i
least partially interpretive.
i
Description is interpretive in that it is a way of J
making sense of a text and is never a neutral reflection
of that text. Take the example of a literary description,
such as a plot summary. A summary must always be selec
tive in its choice of factual details. This selection !
necessarily gives certain details more significance than
others, and the summary organizes the selected details
into a meaningful whole. Such selection and organization ;
t
indicates how a plot summary is interpretive. Clearly, a j
plot summary is a way of making sense of the text.
Moreover, the naming of the details (not just their
selection and organization) is simultaneously an interpre
tation of the "facts." R.W. Stallman's summary of The Red !
Badge of Courage provides a (perhaps too obvious) example. 1
I
The following passage is from Stanley Greenfield's cri- !
i
tique of Stallman’s reading of The Red Badge as a j
i
i
Christian allegory: j
I
As an example of Stallman's method in his j
analysis of the novel, we may look first at
his purported objective summary of the ;
action, which precedes the explicit formula- |
tion of his theory of salvation and redemp
tion. In reviewing the sequence of events j
in the opening chapter, he describes the j
reception of Jim Conklin's rumor that the j
army is going into action the next day |
!
I
i
(italics, save for the word tall, are mine):
But Jim Conklin’s prophecy of hope
meets with disbelief. "It's a lie I"
shouts the loud soldier. "I don't be
lieve this derned old army's ever going
to move." No disciples rally round the
red and gold flag of the herald. A fur
ious altercation ensues; the skeptics
think it just another tall tale. Mean
while Henry in his hut engages in a spir
itual debate with himself: whether to
believe or disbelieve the word of his
friend, the tall soldier. It is the gos
pel truth, but Henry is one of the doubt
ing apostles. . . .
[C]onsider the words I have italicized in the
above quotation: not one of them appears in
the part of the novel Stallman is describing.
In brief, there is not the faintest hint of a
religious question of faith versus doubt.
Religious phrasing unfortunately predisposes
the reader toward an interpretation of spir
itual redemption.^
Finally, it is not only the naming, selection, and
organization of the factual details that makes literary
description interpretive; it is the nature of the "facts"
themselves. What Fish claims for the stylisticians is
also true for any descriptive enterprise:
The stylisticians proceed as if there were
observable facts that could first be
described and then interpreted. What I am
suggesting is that an interpreting entity,
endowed with purposes and concerns, is, by
virtue of its very operation, determining
what counts as the facts to be observed;
and, moreover, that since this determining
is not a neutral marking out of a valueless
area, but the extension of an already exist
ing field of interests, it :Ls an interpre
tation . ^
"Explication" is the most common synonym for
"interpretation." This is easily accounted for since
53
i explication captures the sense of translation that is at !
1 the core of interpretation: to explicate a passage is to i
1 . !
give its meaning. As we have seen, explication (as syn- |
1 !
i chronic translation) can be either horizontal or vertical. |
Horizontal explication may consist merely of a literal
paraphrase— a translation of one literal meaning into
t
J
another that is more acceptable (clearer to certain aud- j
I
iences, more useful for certain purposes, etc.). Vertical i
explication consists of a wide range of non-literal inter- i
]
' pretations— a translation of literal meaning into meanings
that are symbolic, allegorical, mythic, etc.
Another common use of "interpretation" is to mean i
"explanation"— an answer to a question about why something I
4 1
is the way it is. Explanation can be synchronic or dia
chronic. For example, a why-question about a narrative
incident X could have two kinds of answers: (1) a syn
chronic explanation providing a narrative cause— "X was j
I
caused by Y happening earlier in the story" or "Character !
Z's act (X) can be explained because the narrative shows
that Z had certain characteristics"; and (2) a diachronic
explanation providing a historical cause— "X is the way it j
I
is because of the author's lack of ability or pressure
5
from a publisher."
At least some aspects of evaluation are interpre
tive. Once an evaluative standard has been chosen or
I
54
j assumed, comparison of the standard with the text being
i
■ evaluated is partly an interpretive process, as is the
! ■
: explicit formulation of the standard itself. For example, '
; if "high seriousness" is taken as an evaluative criteria, |
i
then it is an interpretation when the "high seriousness"
of a work is explicated and when the meaning of the eval-
g1
uative phrase "high seriousness" is explicitly formulated, i
The account given above can be incorporated into a
larger model of the critical enterprise, one that includes
: the critical act and its four aspects. This model consists!
of a theory of interpretation, a model for critical dis-
, cussion, and a model of reading. Every critical project
t
assumes a hermeneutic theory, an account of the way inter
preters translate a text in order to make sense of it.
Such a theory necessarily implies models for criticism and
reading. A model of critical discussion provides the pro
cedures to be used in interpretive activities (description,;
explication, and explanation), and it specifies the way ;
7
interpretations are exchanged m critical dialogue.
Hermeneutic theories and critical models also imply models i
of reading, accounts of how readers actually read. j
This model of the critical enterprise will become
clearer in the next chapter when I use it as a framework
for comparing several reader-response approaches to lit
erary criticism. For now, let me illustrate the useful
ness of one of its distinctions: the relationship between
55
; the model of reading and the model of criticism. I am j
using the term "reading" to refer to the temporal inter- !
' action of the reader with the text, the moment-by-moment :
i 1
psycholinguistic process that occurs from the instant a j
reader opens a book and perceives the title or first line j
to the moment he comprehends the final sentence. There- j
fore, a model of reading is necessarily a temporal model. \
j
In contrast, a particular critic's model of criticism may
I
be temporal or atemporal; it may attempt to "reflect" the
| temporal reading experience (as in reader-response i
1 approaches) or it may ignore that process and spatialize |
1 i
8 1
the text (as in formalist approaches). One way to capture!
the difference between models of reading and those of crit-
!
icism is to say that a model of reading indicates how a
critic assumes readers actually read in time, while a model
of criticism indicates how the critic reconstructs the text
after the temporal reading process is completed.
i
i
H i
Stanley Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum" is a
9 :
rather curious performance. The first two sections con-
i
tain another striking example of Fish's ability to resolve |
critical disagreements by using his reader-oriented analy
sis. However, in section III of the article, Fish has
made a strategic retreat: he no longer claims priority for
his Literature-in-the-Reader Approach. He is now satisfied
with being one among equals; reader-response, psychoan
alytic, even formalist criticisms are now seen as equally
valid approaches to literature. This is a far cry from
Fish's earlier claims: "I am calling not for the end of
stylistics but for a new stylistics, what I have termed
elsewhere an "affective" stylistics, in which the focus of
attention is shifted from the spatial context of a page
I
and its observable regularities to the temporal context of i
a mind and its experiences.Fish's abandonment of this
i
position follows a rather direct course in "Interpreting I
the Variorum": from the claim that people read this way,
using this interpretive strategy; to the qualification,
all people interpret but interpretive strategies differ; toj
the conclusion that no critical interpretive strategy has
priority over any other. This radical change in Fish's
I
I
stance results from a rigorous re-examination of his crit- |
ical position and his honest attempt to clarify his pro- |
I
cedures for himself and his critics. Nevertheless, we !
j
might justifiably ask if these most recent developments i
result in an advance, a retreat, or even a surrender in ■
i
I
Fish's rethinking of his reader-response methodology. j
i
The crux of Fish's argument in "Interpreting the i
Variorum" is that people read different ways (they write
different texts) because they belong to different inter-
!
pretive communities. True enough. However, in the course
I of his argument Fish seems to collapse the distinction I
j between the interpretive act of reading and the interpre- '
; tive act of criticism. Fish uses the term interpretive
I i
strategies to refer to both the interpretive strategies
performed by readers and to his critical strategy which
describes those acts. However, critical models are not
isomorphic with reading strategies; that is, critical
interpretations like Fish's are descriptions of perceptual ;
strategies (in reading) and not the strategies themselves. ;
I
! Fish's implicit dismissal of the reading-process/reading-
description distinction for his own approach leads him to
i
dismiss the distinction for other approaches. And since j
i
he has already acknowledged that people read in different
ways, he concludes that different critical models are
i
equally valid. Therefore, according to Fish, critics !
I
disagree because they read differently. But, as I will i
I
show, critical interpretations differ, not only because j
I
critics belong to different interpretive communities of i
readers, but also because they belong to different inter- |
j
pretive communities of critics. i
<
In previous articles when Fish discussed interpre- i
tation, he kept the interpretive act of reading and the \
i
interpretive act of criticism conceptually separate. In j
"What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible
Things About It?" he explains the all-important difference
between his reader-response criticism and the work of
I
stylisticians: "I have repeatedly objected to the absence j
I
i
in the work of the stylisticians of any connection between ;
their descriptive and interpretive acts. In the kind of !
stylistics I propose, interpretive acts are what is being
described.” Fish's Affective Stylistics describes the
interpretive acts involved in reading, and thus its
description is also interpretation. At this point the j
i
description/interpretation is still separate from "what is i
i
being described"— the interpretive acts of reading. j
I
I
Fish's final statement in this discussion is perhaps j
ambiguous: 1
The stylisticians proceed as if there were |
observable facts that could first be :
described and then interpreted. What I am
suggesting is that an interpreting entity,
endowed with purposes and concerns, is, by
virtue of its very operation, determining ■
what counts as the facts to be observed; |
and, moreover, that since this determining |
is not a neutral marking out of a valueless !
area, but the extension of an already j
existing field of interests, it is an inter- i
pretation.il j
I
Who is the "interpreting entity" referred to in this last j
sentence: the reader, the critic, or both? Since inter- '
pretation is the making sense of or giving significance to
i
12 1
"facts" or (m Fish's terms) "the extension of an alreadyI
existing field of interests," Fish's final statement could
be referring to critics and readers, both of whom perform
interpretive acts. However, since he is contrasting some
■ activity to what the stylisticians do, he seems to be
I
' referring to his critical interpretive act. Fish comes j
, close to collapsing the interpretive act of reading with
the interpretive act of criticism in this last sentence
(or is it only the article's reader that does this?), but
he doesn't unambiguously do it. Not so in his later
article, "Interpreting the Variorum."
The argument in section III of "Interpreting the j
Variorum" moves from a consideration of problems within
Fish's model to a transcendence (or expansion) of the modelj
I
, to include a recognition of all critical strategies. The j
' discussion begins with a clear statement of Fish's \
approach, which restates past formulations preserving the
reading-process/reading-description distinction: "In the
procedures I would urge, the reader's activities are at
the center of attention . . . these activities are inter
pretive— rather than being preliminary to questions of j
I
value they are at every moment settling and resettling j
questions of value— and because they are interpretive, a i
description of them will also be, and without any addi- ■
i
tional step, an interpretation, not after the fact, but of ;
i
the fact (of experiencing)" (p. 474). As Fish begins con-
I
sidering the objections to such descriptive procedures, i
he introduces the notion of "interpretive strategies" i
(p. 476), which he uses to refer to activities of readers. .
60
i In describing the reading experience of a line from >
; Lycidas, Fish writes that "the reader is always making
; sense . . . the reader will have hazarded an interpreta
tion, or performed an act of perceptual closure, or made a j
decision as to what is being asserted. I do not mean that
he has done four things, but that he has done one thing
' t* 16 description of which might take any one of four forms— I
!
I
making sense, interpreting, performing perceptual closure,
deciding about what is intended" (p. 477, emphasis added), j
i Here reading and description of reading are distinct; how-
I ever, the distinction starts to blur when Fish begins
describing his description. |
i
In his metacritical discussion, reading strategies I
i
and critical strategies become synonymous; Fish collapses
the distinction between interpretive acts in reading and
i
those in criticism. Fish writes, j
Rather than intention and its formal real- 1
ization producing interpretation (the "nor- ;
mal" picture), interpretation creates inten- ;
tion and its formal realization by creating <
the conditions in which it becomes possible
to pick them out. In other words, in the
analysis of these lines from Lycidas I did what |
critics always do: I "saw" what my interpre-
tive principles permitted or directed me to
see, and then I turned around and attributed
what I had "seen" to a text and an intention. i
(p. 477) i
I
"Interpretive principles" guide his criticism which is
based on an "interpretive model": "formal units are always
a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear"
61
i (p.478). From "interpretive principles" to "interpretive i
i
‘ model" to "interpretive strategies." These interpretive
] |
| strategies in criticism become indistinguishable from the ;
I interpretive (perceptual) strategies of reading. In other
t
words, Fish's discussion makes interpretive strategies
refer to what originally was two different levels of inter
pretation: reading and its description. This ambiguity i
I
makes the collapsing of the distinction imperceptible:
the act of reading and the critical act become one and the
I same. Therefore, when Fish shows that different interpre
tive strategies of reading (different perceptual habits) !
I i
exist (p. 4 79), it is an easy step to assert that differ- ;
. ent equally valid interpretive strategies of criticism
exist:
The moral is clear; the choice is never
between objectivity and interpretation but 1
between an interpretation that is unacknowl- 1
edged as such and an interpretation that is
at least aware of itself. It is this aware— j
ness that I am claiming for myself, although :
in doing so I must give up the claims !
implicitly made in the first part of this ;
paper. There I argue that a bad (because j
spatial) model had suppressed what was really
happening, but by my own declared principles i
the notion "really happening" is just one I
more interpretation, (p. 480) !
I
However, this conclusion is the result of an unacknowl- !
------------------ j
edged metacritical step: the collapsing of a distinction
between the reading process and its description in criti
cism.
62
With this crucial step made, Fish goes on in
section IV to discuss why interpretations differ.
Explicitly, he discusses interpretive strategies of read
ing; implicitly, he refers also to critical strategies.
His insights into the nature of "interpretive communities"
are extremely convincing. Still, they do not fully
!
i
explain disagreements in critical interpretations. This
is because there is a difference between interpretive com
munities of reading and interpretive communities of criti
cism. A formalist may read a text the same way as Fish;
he may use the same perceptual strategies in his temporal
reading process and thus belong to the same interpretive j
community of readers. However, the formalist's critical I
t
model causes him to devalue his temporal reading exper- (
ience, to ignore his reading strategies. This is, in fact,
what Fish has earlier asserted in the less ecumenical part
of his article: "My quarrel with this procedure (and with
the assumptions that generate it) is that in the course of
following it through the reader's activities are at once ,
j
ignored and devalued. They are ignored because the text j
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 extrac
tion" (pp. 473-74). The critical conclusions of Fish and
the formalist differ not because they belong to different •
I
interpretive communites of readers but because they belong I
13
to different interpretive communities of critics. Of j
course, Fish can't make this distinction because he has j
collapsed the two levels of interpretation— reading and ;
j
criticism— into one.
In formalist interpretive strategies, the descrip
tive act (designation of grammatical units, patterns of j
imagery, etc.) is followed by an interpretive act (assign- I
ment of independent meaning to formal units or giving sig- I
• ■ 14 ■
nificance to the connotative flow). In reader-oriented
criticism like Affective Stylistics, the description is of j
I
interpretive acts; so the descriptive and interpretive
j
acts of criticism are one (though the reading process and :
i
its description remain separate). With formalist inter- j
pretive strategies, a spatial model of reading is assumed: :
the reader is always "stepping back from the text, and then'
putting together or otherwise calculating the discrete
units of significance it contains" (p. 473). The actual
temporal reading experience goes unrecognized; the moment-
by-moment interaction of reader with text is ignored. In
reader-response criticism a temporal model reflects the
reading process. That is, the claim of Affective Stylist
ics is that its description/interpretation reflects or ’
dramatizes the way most readers actually read. This is an
empirical claim that can be tested against intuitive, psy- i
15 *
cholxnguistxc, and critical evidence. j
I
' Of course, the use of all this evidence is itself j
i
j an interpretation (a metacritical one). But what is most j
I important here is recognizing the reason for using these i
i
types of evidence: all have a phenomenological basis in
■ perception. Reader-response criticism is indeed a fic-
, tion,^^ but it is a fiction securely based on a perceptual
foundation: the act of reading literature. It may or may j
t
I
not be an accurate description of that act, but at least
it attempts to describe a temporal reading experience, a j
1
model differing radically from the spatial models of for- j
r
• malist criticism. And as long as reader-response critics
| use other fictions— intuitive, psycholinguistic, and crit
ical— to support their analysis, they can claim a priority j
for their approach.
This priority is what Fish now seems to deny in
i
section III of "Interpreting the Variorum. 1 1 However, his |
I
denial is a paradoxical one. As Fish himself has shown, j
formalist critical strategies are based on a model of ^
|
, reading that devalues the temporal reading experience. j
Therefore, Fish can accept formalist models as valid only !
i
. if he denies the very basis of his positing interpretive j
|
strategies in the first place: readers interpret as they
read. Indeed, what Fish now appears to have given us is a
self-consuming criticism.
!
Fish begins with an evaluative assumption at the
65
very basis of his theory: "attention to the reader is a !
17 !
: critical necessity." This leads him to a description of >
the temporal reading process. And since the reading
process involves interpretive strategies, his description j
is at the same time an interpretation. At this point in '
his critical formulation, Fish could move quite logically
J
from description/interpretation to evaluation: true to
the original assumption of his approach, he could begin
i
evaluating literary works in terms of the interpretive ^
i
strategies actualized during the reading process. What j
i
kind of reading experience does the creation of the text |
provide? Does that reading experience encourage the ;
reader to become a better performer of interpretive strat- j
f
i
egies? As Fish has recognized, he is attracted to works
that disorient the reader— "perhaps literature is what
disturbs our sense of self-sufficiency, personal and lin- ;
18 1
guistic." This disorientation makes the reader more
self-conscious of his reading process and thus makes him
19
a better reader (and perhaps even a better person). The
value of literary disorientation is implicit in Fish's
approach. And since Affective Stylistics provides the i
best methodology for discovering such disorientation, it \
\
holds priority over other methods that are less effective, i
The point here is that an approach founded on an
assumption of the reader's priority can not in the end deny I
that value. When Fish accepts formalist criticism to be
I
66
. as valid as his own approach, he does exactly that. He is~j
i
1 able to do this and still seem consistent, because, instead
I
of moving from description/interpretation to evaluation,
1 !
I ,
' he moves from description/interpretation to metacriticism, j
The process is simple: interpretive strategies (as a
metacritical category) become more valued than readers
(as a critical emphasis). What was initially a constitu
tive means becomes a theoretical end. The decisive step j
(as I have shown) was to collapse the reader's act and the j
' critical act.
Instead of recognizing the evaluative logic of his
|
model, Fish rejects the priority of his specific procedures;
i
and announces an ecumenical policy toward all critical |
approaches. Why? The answer may be that Fish is more
interested in preserving the descriptive focus of his
approach than in recognizing the evaluative bias of his
|
assumptions. As he has continually stated: "My method
1
. . . is oriented away from evaluation and toward descrip
tion, " and "I regard evaluation not as a theoretical issue j
20 1
but as a subject m the history of taste." j
Certainly, the descriptive power of Fish's pro- j
cedures is impressive. Fish himself has often helped to i
i
clarify the strengths and weaknesses of his approach. He !
I
has shown that the method begins with an epistemological
view of reading and adopts a procedure that will bring the
67
21 !
reader's interpretive strategies to critical light. j
There arises a dual pressure within his critical formula- |
tion: on the one hand, Fish is drawn to applying his model!
not only to reading (from which it initially arose) but
also to criticism itself. This results in the metacriti-
cal tolerance of "Interpreting the Variorum" and the denial
j
of his original model's priority. On the other hand, there!
|
is a tendency within the original model, implicit in the j
basic value placed on reading, to move from description/ |
i
interpretation to evaluation. Fish chooses to embrace the '
1
I
descriptive power of his method at the expense of the eval-1
l
uative force of his assumptions. Fish is able to accept ;
i
the validity of all interpretive strategies in criticism ,
only by denying the assumption upon which his own critical ’
strategy is based: the priority (in the critical act) of
describing the experience of the reader in his interaction
I
with the text. j
\
i
In this section I have not been arguing that Fish !
cannot abandon his claim of priority; to do so, he need '
only repudiate the evaluative assumptions upon which that 1
priority was based. And in effect this is what he has
done. My critique has been leveled instead at the way in j
which he accomplished this transformation. He gives the j
appearance of being forced to move inevitably from
description, of reading to metacritical description, imply
ing that no other process is involved except logical
i
necessity. What he has actually done is abandon not a ;
I
descriptive focus (he's merely moved it to a higher inter- |
I
t
pretive level) but the evaluative assumption that was the
foundation of his original approach, the assumption that •
the temporal reading experience should tee valued in the j
critical model.
However, Fish has done more than abandon this
critical value. As we will see more clearly in the next
chapter, he has also abandoned an interpretive assumption:
he not only denies that the reading experience is to be
valued above all else and that description of that act as
it actually occurs is a critical priority, but now he also (
i
denies that such a description can take place. That is, he
now-believes that any description of "what actually hap- |
I
pens" is entirely an interpretation and not a neutral
reflection of some actual occurrence. j
This section, then, is not an argument for preserv- !
I
ing a critical value but rather an argument that preserv- ]
ing such a critical value is not illogical given the j
Fishean methodology. Furthermore, Fish is able to make it j
i
seem illogical by confusing the distinction between read
ing and criticism. Preserving the distinction will not
save the evaluative assumption of Fish's Affective
! Stylistics, but it will indicate more clearly how Fish
. actually abandons the priority of his earlier approach.
Ill
Section II illustrates the usefulness of a distinc
tion between a model of reading and a model of criticism.
Such a distinction has helped clarify the recent theoriz
ing of one prominent American literary theorist. In
Chapter 3, I will make further use of the larger critical
' model of which this distinction is a part: theory of
interpretation, model for critical discussion, and model
of reading.
70
CHAPTER 3
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM AND
THEORIES OF INTERPRETATION j
I
t
Recent literary theory has seen an explosion of j
interest in readers and reading.'1 ' There is talk of j
implied readers, informed readers, fictive readers, ideal •
readers, mock readers, literents, narratees, interpretive :
communities, and assorted kinds of reading audiences.
The term reader-response criticism has been used to
describe a multiplicity of different approaches that focus
on the reading process: affective, phenomenological,
subjective, transactive, structural, rhetorical, psychol- j
ogical, psycholinguistic, speech act, and other criticisms j
I
have been indiscriminately lumped together under the label :
i
of reader response. In this chapter I will not try to j
i
bring metacritical order out of this chaos by comparing !
I
every reader-oriented approach to every other. Rather, my j
more modest aim is to place one reader-response critic,
Stanley Fish, in the context of four others— David Bleich,
Norman Holland, Wolfgang Iser, and Jonathan Culler— in
order to illustrate the role of hermeneutic theories in
2 I
I one "school" of recent literary criticism.
! 1
; Some generalizations about reader-response critics j
; can be presented at the outset. All focus on readers
reading. Some examine individual readers through psy
chological observations and participation; others discuss
reading communities through philosophical speculation and
1 i
i
literary intuition. Rejecting the "affective fallacy" of !
t
American New Criticism, they all describe the relation of j
text to reader. Indeed, all share the phenomenological !
assumption that it is impossible to separate perceiver
; from perceived, subject from object. Thus, the text's j
autonomy, its absolute separateness, is rejected in favor 1
I
of its dependence on the reader's creation or participa- j
tion. Perception is viewed as interpretive; reading is
i
not the discovery of meaning but the creation of it. In
reader-response criticism, examination of a text in-and-
i
of-itself is replaced by a discussion of the reading proc- j
ess, the "interaction" of reader and text. 1
Stanley Fish's early statement, "Literature in the i
i
Reader: Affective Stylistics," exemplified the main con- i
i
i
cerns of reader-response criticism (in his own highly j
i
idiosyncratic way, to be sure). Fish viewed a sentence in J
(
the text not as "an object, a thing-in-itself, but an j
event, something that happens to, and with the participa
tion of, the reader." His earlier claim was descriptive:
72
"In my method of analysis, the temporal flow is monitored
and structured by everything the reader brings with him,
by his competences; and it is by taking these into account ;
as they interact with the temporal left to right reception j
of the verbal string, that I am able to chart and project j
3
the developing response." '
In this earlier incarnation, Fish talked as if a
I
reader was manipulated by a text— the text forced the
|
reader to perform certain cognitive acts— and he, as '
critic, described that manipulative process. As we have ,
seen in Chapter 2, Fish now claims that the manipulative
text is itself constituted by readers' interpretive strat-
egies and that the process he formerly claimed to describe j
is actually a creation of his critical theory: "What my
principles direct me to 'see' are readers performing acts;
the points at which I find (or to be more precise, declare)j
I
those acts to have been performed become (by a sleight of j
hand) demarcations in the text; those demarcations are 1
i
then available for the designation 'formal features,' and j
as formal features they can be (illegitimately) assigned |
the responsibility for producing the interpretation which j
4 '
in fact produced them." ;
Fish has moved from a phenomenological emphasis j
(which describes the interdependence of reader and text) i
to a structuralist one (which studies the underlying j
r -- - - - -T - - ^
I systems that determine the production of textual meaning
(
I 5
and m which the individual reader tends to disappear).
’ i
I
I He has given up the descriptive focus and abandoned the I
l I
. priority of his earlier approach. He views affective j
stylistics as only one of many possible interpretive i
strategies; it does not describe how all readers read but |
i
rather suggests one way they could read. However, Pish ;
i
i
continues to practice his earlier criticism, and though he ;
i
denies its priority over other approaches, he still claims |
it as a superior fiction because of its consistency with j
6 i
its declared principles (not with some objective truth). j
Fish therefore occupies two places on the schema of reader-.
’ response criticism that follows on page 75. j
To better understand Fish's position among reader-
i
response critics, we can fill out this schema by discuss-
i
ing the approaches of the other critics included there. |
Norman Holland provides a useful starting point, because j
in his writings he has touched on most issues relevant to ' •
the different levels of the critical enterprise: theory ofj
i
interpretation, model for critical discussion, and model j
of reading.
I
!
i
Holland's transactive criticism "takes as its
subject-matter, not the text in supposed isolation, as the
New Criticism claimed it did, nor the self in rhapsody, as
SUBJECTIVISM......................... PHENOMENOLOGY. STRUCTURALISM
David Norman Wolfgang Stanley Jonathan Stanley
Bleich1s Holland's Iser's Fish's Culler's Fish's
subjective transactive phenomeno affective structuralist theory of
criticism criticism logical
criticism
stylistics poetics interpretive
strategies
primacy of transaction inter text's reading interpretive
subjectivity between
reader and
text within
reader's
identity
theme
action
between
reader
and text
manip
ulation
of reader
conventions communities
1 the old. impressionistic criticism did, but the transaction
7 !
between a reader and a text." The notion of an "identity |
j theme" is central to Holland's approach: "we can be pre- 1
cise about individuality by conceiving of the individual j
as living out variations on an identity theme much as a j
musician might play out an infinity of variations on a '
single melody." A person brings this "unchanging inner >
core of continuity" to all transactions between Self and j
8 1
Other, including reading. :
I
Holland's model of reading proceeds from his more j
i
, general theory of the relation between personality and I
perception. Perception is a "constructive act," not i
i
merely reflecting but forming reality: "the individual
apprehends the resources of reality (including language,
his own body, space, time, etc.) as he relates to them in
9 !
such a way that they replicate his identity." That is, j
i
perception is also interpretation, and "interpretation is j
I
a function of identity, specifically identity conceived as :
i
variations upon an identity theme." Holland particular
izes this view of perception in his central thesis about j
t
reading: identity re-creates itself. "All of us, as we j
read, use the literary work to symbolize and finally to
replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own
characteristic patterns of desire and adaptation."^
Within this principle of identity re-creation,
76
Holland isolates four specific modalities, which he con-
I
veniently organizes under the acronym DEFT— defenses, |
i
expectations, fantasies, and transformations. "One can 1
think of these four separate principles as emphases on one j
}
aspect or another of a single transaction: shaping an j
experience to fit one's identity and in doing so, '.1 ^
(D) avoiding anxiety, (F) gratifying unconscious wishes,
(E) absorbing the event as part of a sequence of events,
and (T) shaping it with that sequence into a meaningful j
I
totality." The concept of a "meaningful totality" or
unity is pivotal for Holland's reading model (and is
equally important in his general theory of interpreta-
i
12
tion). According to Holland, the reader makes sense of
S
the text by creating a meaningful unity out of its ele- ,
I
ments. Unity is not in the text but in the mind of a
reader. "By means of such adaptive structures as he has \
been able to match in the story, he will transform the j
fantasy content, which he has created from the materials
of the story his defenses admitted, into some literary
13
point or theme or interpretation." For Holland, meaning i
i
is the result of this interpretive synthesis, the trans
formation of fantasy into a unity which the reader finds j
coherent and satisfying. As with all interpretation, "the
unity we find in literary texts is impregnated with the
!
identity that finds that unity." Each reader creates a J
i
I
I
77
unity for a text out of his own identity theme, and thus
i
"each will have different ways of making the text into an j
I
experience with a coherence and significance that satis- j
14 '
fies." Therefore, Holland's model of reading accounts
exceptionally well for variable response.
However, recurrence of response is a more problem
atic question for Holland's theory. Recurrence was easily !
explained by his earlier model: in The Dynamics of J
Literary Response (1968), Holland spoke as if "fantasies
" '■ i
I
and their transformations were embodied in the literary i
work, as though the work itself acted like a mind"; dif-
i
ferent readers could take in ("introject") a text and |
I
"participate" in whatever psychological process was embod- j
ied there. Accounting for recurrence has become much more
I
difficult in Holland's revised model, in which "processes
J
like the transformation of fantasy materials through 1
defenses and adaptations take place in people, not in ;
15 :
texts." No longer embodying psychological processes,
autonomous texts no longer serve as a guarantee of recur
rence in Holland's present model of reading. Instead, i
similar identity themes must somehow account for similar |
response. This psychological explanation contrasts with j
Fish's "sociological" one: for Fish, it is not individual
identities but communal interpretive strategies which
account for recurrence in interpretive response. However, j
the comparison becomes more complex when we compare the
status of the text in Fish's and Holland's theories.^ j
i
Holland and Fish both claim that perception is a ;
constructive act: we interpret as we perceive, or rather, j
perception .is an interpretation. For Fish, interpretive j
strategies constitute the text; only as print and paper ,
does the "text" have any autonomy. As soon as we read, !
t
i
we interpret, and thus our interpretive strategies create i
the text that we later discuss in critical exchange. j
Holland seems to hold a similar view: "A literary text, I
I
after all, in an objective sense consists only of a certain!
configuration of specks of carbon black on dried wood pulp.;
When these marks become words, when those words become j
images or metaphors or characters or events, they do so (
because the reader plays the part of a prince to the
17 . i
sleeping beauty." However, Holland runs xnto the same ;
I
problem as Fish: if interpretation constitutes the text, j
I
what is the interpretation of? Fish throws up his hands:
"I cannot answer that question, but neither, I would
i
claim, can anyone else, although formalists try to answer !
it by pointing to patterns and claiming that they are
X 8
available independently of (prior to) interpretation."
Holland does try to solve the paradox but in so doing
necessarily equivocates. In one place he writes, "A
reader reads something, certainly, but if one cannot
separate his 'subjective' response from its 'objective'
basis, there seems no way to find out what that 'some-
19
thing' is in any impersonal sense." However, m another
place Holland states that "the reader is surely responding
to something. The literary text may be only so many marks
on a page— at most a matrix of psychological possibilities
for its readers. Nevertheless only some possibilities, we
2 0
would say, truly fit the matrix." Here Holland implies j
I
that the text sets limits to response, that a "matrix"
I
exists separate from the reader, not created by the :
i
reader's interpretation and somehow restricting that inter-!
pretation. Holland's discussions of response assume some
i
aspects of the text prior to interpretation: he often j
talks about elements of a story that are combined accord-
21
ing to the reader's identity theme. He does not focus
!
on how these elements (language, dialogue, character, plot)
are constituted (are they in the text as matrix or are j
i
they also constructed in the transaction?). Holland's 1
discussion of interpretation occurs at a higher level of 1
j
reader activity. That is, the story (as a combination of [
pre-existent elements) is recreated by the reader's iden- ;
l
tity through the modalities of DEFT, and interpretation
("the making sense") is a unity that the story takes on
for the reader. Put another way, for Holland, meaning is
an output of a psychological process; the input to that
! process is the story. Like Holland, Fish believes that j
! meanings are "not extracted but made," but he claims fur- j
i ,
I
: ther that the text is constituted (in all its aspects) by I
22
the interpretive process and is not prior to it.
On the level of critical discussion, the form of
Fish's and Holland's arguments is the same: both use the
i
interpretive strategies they describe for readers as j
explanations for the interpretive strategies used by |
I
critics. For Fish, critics interpret in their criticism in I
i
the same way they interpret as they read. Similarly, !
I
: Holland views critics "as simply another group of readers ,
operating under special stringencies'?; in reading and
criticism the process is the same: re-creation through ■
23
identity. For Holland, the critic's interpretation is
I
merely an extension of the reader's interpretive synthesis.^
And since "all interpretations express the identity themes j
i
of the people making the interpretations," the interpre- j
tations by critics ("professional readers") are also man- j
24 |
ifestations of their identity themes.
I
t
Since Fish and Holland agree that we do criticism
in the same way that we read (i.e., we use the same inter- .
pretive strategies in reading and criticism), their |
I
explanations of recurrent responses carry over to their
discussions of critical consensus. In their accounts of
critical agreement, Fish and Holland present different j
81
.. 25
1 arguments: Fish sociological, Holland psychological. '
Fish moves from the community to the individual, Holland i
from the individual to the group. Critics agree when they i
• 2 g
; belong to the same interpretive community, says Fish,
i i
. Critics agree when they can assimilate the others' identity
re-creations into their own, argues Holland. Holland
i
implies that this agreement can take place either because j
two critics have similar identity themes ojr two critics
with widely divergent identity themes are still able to
| utilize each other's interpretations in their own \
re-creations. People "distinguish different readings of a
i
text or personality 'objectively' by how much and how i
directly they seem to us to bring the details of a text or !
a self into convergence around a centering theme. We also
compare them as to whether they 'feel right' or 'make
!
sense.' That is, do we feel we could use them to organ- |
i
ize and make coherent our own experience of that text or j
i
2 7
person?" I
In terms of the levels of the critical enterprise,
both Fish and Holland present us with coherent conceptual ,
t
frameworks: their theories of interpretation provide j
explanatory centers (identity themes or interpretive com- ;
munities) which account for the acts of reading, criticism,;
and critical exchange. !
j
82
II
On several occasions David Bleich and Norman
i
2 8
Holland have exchanged views on each other's work.
Their interaction in print proves especially illuminating
at times, not only for what it shows about the contrast
between their two approaches, but also for how it illus- ,
i
trates their shared differences from other reader-oriented i
i
critics. Bleich's model of reading consists of percep- j
I
tion, affect, and association. Like Fish and Holland,
Bleich holds that "the perception of the poem is a sub- I
I
jective reconstruction rather than a simple recording of j
facts." Like Holland, Bleich discusses a reader's "style j
of perception," the forms of "individual perception
created by the particular biases of the reader." A
reader's report of perception tells "what he sees in the
I
poem or what he thinks the poet says," while reports of !
i
affective response describe "the actual affect [fear,
satisfaction, indignation, etc.] he felt while reading the
29
poem." Associative response embodies those aspects of
the reader's previous experience that are stimulated by
the affect derived from his reading experience. Similar [
I
to most reader-response approaches, Bleich's "subjective
criticism" posits that meaning is not in texts but in
readers. But the distinguishing characteristic of
Bleich's work is its emphasis on emotional response. i
83
Meaning itself becomes "a direct outgrowth of the reader' s ^
30 !
emotional grasp of the story." j
!
Like Fish and Holland, Bleich rejects the notion of
an objective text completely independent of the reader.
However, he does not wrestle with the question of inter
pretation's relation to the text during the reading proc
ess. Instead, Bleich refers primarily to critical inter- :
t
pretation, an activity subsequent to the reading exper
ience: "For the reader, the interpretation is the ;
31 1
response to his reading experience." Once again the :
emotional response comes into play: it directly influ- j
ences the critical interpretation. "The reasons for the ;
I
shape and content of both my reponse and my interpreta-
32
tion are subjective." ;
i
On the level of critical exchange, Bleich assumes
!
that interpretive knowledge "is subjective . . . not a j
formulation of some unchanging 'objective' truth, but the j
!
motivated construction of someone's mind." He argues that
"interpretation is the creation of a fiction," which :
"always tests its viability in ongoing interpersonal rela- ' ■
tionships." Put another way, interpretive judgment "is a 1
subjective act, framed in objective terms, whose . . .
success, rather than truth, is measured by its capacity
33
for reassimilation by other readers."
Bleich views the subjective/objective distinction
i as absolute and therefore criticizes Holland's transactive ;
! paradigm which denies that absoluteness. Holland claims
l
| that "'objective reality' and 'pure experience' are them- !
!
j selves only useful fictions, vanishing points we approach j
but never reach. The problem, then, is not to sort out
subjective from objective but to see how the two combine
34
when we have experiences." Bleich rejects this view |
I
and criticizes Holland's "set of auxiliary concepts and
constructs" which are "aimed at affirming both the sub-
I
1 jective and the objective and the space in which they j
combine. !
I
In reply, Holland claims that he "could flesh out j
David Bleich's proclamation of 'the primacy of subjectiv- j
i
ity,' providing both a theoretical base and a wider appli-
3 6 '
cation for his intuitions about response." This state-
I
ment does not answer Bleich's charges, however, since that \
"fleshing out" is what is at issue. A more effective
response is Holland's 'feounter-charge": "Bleich's failure !
|
to take advantage of these new discoveries about identity
1
replication and DEFT perception leave him no way at all to :
account for the re-creation of private experience into j
' intersubjective consensus. . . . How can there be a con- i
sensus like 'Darwinism' or 'New Criticism' if each member
of the consensus is responding only to his own inner
promptings? What an extraordinary coincidence they would i
| represent!At the level of critical exchange, then, 1
i i
Holland provides his strongest argument for a more complex
model of reading and criticism than the model Bleich
i presents. As Holland further explains, '"each of us
, accepts external knowledge or the opinions of others as we
find we can use them to re-create our several identities
(a transactive account of Bleich's 'interpersonal and
38 ^
intercommunal negotiation')." [
Despite their differences, Holland and Bleich can j
I
I be grouped together when compared to other reader-response
, critics. They define their critical paradigm (subjective
i
or transactive) from a psychological perspective (not a [
!
sociological one). They emphasize the individual over the ;
group; reading is a function of personality not shared
strategies. Furthermore, Bleich and Holland both study
the reported responses of readers in developing their J
I
theories. As Holland remarks, "it is the close analysis j
I
of what readers actually say about what they read that dif-|
' ferentiates" reader-response critics like himself and !
i
Bleich from those like Iser and Fish (and he could have 1
39
included Culler as well).
I
III
Phenomenology forms the philosophical center of our
reader-response schema. Wolfgang Iser's phenomenological
criticism underlines the epistemological assumption of all j
I I
1 reader-oriented approaches: the object of knowledge can '
I !
■ never be separated from the knower; the perceived object
can never be separated from perception by a perceiver.
' For literary criticism, this means that discussion of the
literary work must focus on the reader's response to that
work. Bleich calls that response "subjective re-creation,"
while Holland talks of a "transaction" and Iser refers to
I
the "interaction of text and reader." Fish's so-called I
affective stylistics is "a method of analysis which takes j
1 the reader, as an actively mediating presence, fully into
40
. account." Even Jonathan Culler has underlined a phe
nomenological basis of his structuralist poetics: "Struc
tural analysis must take place within phenomenology in
that its goal must be that of explicating and formalizing
what is phenomenally given in the subject's relation to
41
his cultural objects." Iser sums up his own approach in ;
this way: "The phenomenological theory of art lays full
stress on the idea that, in considering a literary work,
one must take into account not only the actual text but
i
also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in j
42
responding to that text."
I
Though sharing a phenomenological assumption, j
I
• reader-response critics diverge in following out its con- i
sequences. As we have seen, this divergence is particu- !
larly clear in the formulation of the text's status within
87
' I
1 their theories. Bleich makes everything subjective, and (
. i
I therefore the problem of an objective text is "solved" by
I !
I
[denying its existence as a problem. Fish's solution is
that interpretive strategies constitute the text. Holland !
! i
i
. tends to agree with Fish, substituting identity themes for
interpretive communities as the source for interpretive j
strategies. But in trying to answer the question that
baffles Fish (What are interpretive strategies interprets- ,
i
tions of?), Holland implies some notion of a fixed text
! (elements of a story or psychological matrices), which putsj
' limits on response. Iser goes further than Holland: he
explicitly posits a pre-existent text which interacts with !
the reader and in that interaction restricts the reader's :
response.
Iser describes this interaction as the reader's
attempt to "remove the inherent indeterminacy" of the 1
43 i
text. The "written part of the text" leaves "gaps" that i
i
the reader must fill; "the 'unwritten' part of a text 1
44
stimulates the reader's creative participation." Unlike ;
Fish, Iser holds that "the written text imposes certain ;
I
45
limits on its unwritten implications." As Iser writes
in another place, "The meaning is conditioned by the text
itself, but only in a form that allows the reader himself
46
to bring it out." This is the closest we get to the
traditional objectivist position among the reader-response
88
critics we are considering here.
Though Iser does assume a stable text of some kind, j
i
his emphasis is on the creative role of the reader: "a
text can only come to life when it is read, and if it is j
i
to be examined, it must therefore be studied through the
eyes of the reader." He describes the reading process "as
the reader's transformation of signals sent out by the
text." Each individual transformation reflects one of
many realizations of the potential text. Though there are j
i
limits on the possible realizations, there is not one t j
stable meaning: "meanings in literary texts are mainly j
generated in the act of reading; they are the product of !
a rather difficult interaction between text and reader and j
47
not qualities hidden m the text."
In Iser's model of reading, interpretation becomes
a matter of filling gaps left by the written text. This j
I
removal of indeterminacy occurs at several "textual j
i
levels": there are gaps between the text's attitudes |
|
toward the world and those of the reader; between the var- 1
I
ious "schematized views" in the text, such as different :
plot threads; between the narrative and ways of judging it |
supplied by the narrator; between the actions of the char- i
48 !
acters and their possible future acts.
The removal of indeterminacy might further be
analyzed in terms of holistic and sequential interpretive
49 1
1 acts. Holland emphasizes holistic interpretation in his
■ model of reading: a reader interprets the text by finding j
: a coherent and satisfying unity among its elements. Sim- !
ilarly, Iser's model describes how the reader groups j
"together all the different aspects of a text to form the j
consistency that the reader will always be in search of." i
As with Holland's unity, consistency is created by indi- j
vidual readers: "This 'gestalt' must inevitably be col- j
’ ored by our own characteristic selection process. For it ]
' is not given by the text itself; it arises from the meet- !
; ing between the written text and the individual mind of |
J
the reader with its own particular history of experience,
50
its own consciousness, its own outlook." A distinguish- j
ing feature of Iser's formulation of holistic interpreta
tion is that "this consistency conflicts with the many
t
other possibilities of fulfillment it seeks to exclude, !
with the result that the configurative meaning [a holistic :
interpretation] is always accompanied by 'alien associa
tions' that do not fit in.""*1 Of course, in Iser's model j
it is the fixed text that thrusts forth these "alien j
associations" into the reader's consciousness. "The
i
moment we try to impose a consistent pattern on the text, !
discrepancies are bound to arise. These are, as it were,
the reverse side of the interpretive coin, an involuntary
product of the process that creates discrepancies by tryingj
90
to avoid them. And it is their very presence that draws
52
us into the text." .
I
Closely related to holistic consistency are sequen- j
i
tial connections. Such sequential interpretation must j
53 *
precede or accompany holistic interpretation. "In every
text there is a potential time-sequence which the reader
must inevitably realize, as it is impossible to absorb even'
54
a short text in a single moment." Reading then is a
temporal process of anticipation and retrospection. Iser
i
I
describes the content of that process: "We look forward, j
we look back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form j
I
expectations, we are shocked by their nonfulfillment, we !
question, we muse, we accept, we reject; this is the
55
dynamic process of recreation." In Iser's description
we see a striking parallel to Fish's "structure of the
I
reader's experience." It is this emphasis on the temporal I
interaction of reader and text that distinguishes Fish's j
|
literary criticism. It is "an analysis of the developing j
reponses of the reader in relation to the words as they
succeed one another in time .... The basis of the method!
is a consideration of the temporal flow of the reading |
I
experience, and it is assumed that the reader responds in !
56
terms of that flow and not to the whole utterance."
Fish describes the content of the reading experience as a
"succession of deliberative acts": "the making and
' revising of assumptions, the rendering and regretting of
judgments, the coming to and abandoning of conclusions, ;
I |
! the giving and withdrawing of approval, the specifying of !
i causes, the asking of questions, the supplying of answers,
57 '
the solving of puzzles." |
I
t
IV I
Jonathan Culler has reviewed the work of Fish, Iser,;
58 i
and Holland. For Culler, "the task of literary theory |
or poetics . . . is to make explicit the procedures and '
I
conventions of reading, to offer a comprehensive theory of 1
I
the ways in which we go about making sense of various kinds;
59
of texts." In his Structuralist Poetics, Culler uses
1
structuralism as a heuristic to generate a description of
"literary competence," implicit knowledge of reading con-
6 0
ventions. Culler's reading conventions resemble Fish's
interpretive strategies in that both make interpretation 1
possible. The two reading models suggest that a "poem be :
i
thought of as an utterance that has meaning only with '
respect to a system of conventions which the reader has ;
6X !
assimilated." Furthermore, in contrast to Holland and j
I
Bleich, Fish would agree with Culler's statement that ;
i
"meaning is not an individual creation but the result of ;
I
applying to the text operations and conventions which
6 2
constitute the institution of literature."
In Culler's model, "reading poetry is a
92
i rule-governed process of producing meaning; the poem offers
J a structure which must be filled up and one therefore j
attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal J
• rules derived from one's experience of reading poetry, j
}
which both make possible invention and impose limits on i
it." The limits come not from the text but from the j
reader's literary competence; indeed, the structure of the :
text is a creation of the reader. Culler views reading as j
a structuring activity, essentially a process of natural-
i
ization; "to naturalize a text is to bring it into rela- j
tion with a type of discourse or model which is already,
]
in some sense, natural and legible." That is, "to assim
ilate or interpret something is to bring it within the ;
6 3
modes of order which culture makes available." Such
naturalization can be understood as a type of holistic
interpretation, but with a structuralist difference (at !
least initially). Though Holland's "unity" and Iser's J
I
"consistency" are also relational, there is an interpretive;
i
core— usually thematic— around which coherence is organ- ;
ized. In contrast, Culler initially agrees with Barthes
that the literary work is like an onion
a construction of layers (or levels, or sys- !
terns) whose body contains, finally no heart,
no kernel, no secret, no irreducible princi
ple, nothing except the infinity of its own
envelopes— which envelop nothing other than
the unity of its own surfaces.63
However, because of his concept Of literary competence,
93
Culler cannot accept the more radical notion of a systeme
decentrd (advocated by post-structuralists like Derrida
and Kristeva), which calls for the displacement of the
interpretive center during the analysis and the production
of a text of infinite possibilities. Culler explains that j
in the approaches of Derrida and Kristeva there is "no I
i
ultimate and absolute justification for any system or for i
the interpretations flowing from it . . .There is nothing
65 '
to which results ought to correspond." It is here that j
the formulation of "infinite creation" becomes unaccept- J
I
able to Culler. In his interpretive theory, "results" do !
correspond to something, that which is constituted by lit- !
erary competence. Because Culler's theory is finally a j
i
descriptive enterprise (i.e.. Culler attempts to describe '
how readers actually make sense of texts), he cannot allow
the center of interpretation to remain empty. In practice,j
I
he claims, since an infinite number of relationships can
not be described, "the crucial question is what governs
their selection and development. Even if 'emptied' by a
radical theory, the centre will inevitably fill itself in
as the analyst makes choices and offers conclusions.
There will always be some kind of semiotic or literary
6 6
competence at work." Thus, in the final analysis, the
structure of Culler's holistic interpretation does not
differ radically from that of Holland's and Iser's.
i On the level of critical exchange, Culler's theory
1
: resembles Fish's and Holland's in that his explanatory key j
i
! for reading serves to explain criticism. For Culler, "the ;
possibility of critical argument depends on shared notions j
i
of the acceptable and the unacceptable, a common ground J
which is nothing other than the procedures of reading." |
i
Like Fish, Culler sees critical consensus as dependent on j
conventions in that they limit acceptable interpretation: I
?
"The claim is not that competent readers would agree on an j
; interpretation but only that certain expectations about
poetry and ways of reading guide the interpretive process i
and impose severe limitations on the set of acceptable or !
t
C "7
plausible readings." Of course, Fish makes explicit
what Culler only implies: the interpretive strategies ,
which constitute this "set of acceptable or plausible read
ings" is always evolving. And it is unclear whether !
Culler's notion of literary competence recognizes the j
presence of different interpretive communities existing ;
1
simultaneously (i.e., contemporaneous groups with literary [
competencies embodying radically different notions of inter-'
»
pretive acceptability). '
In terms of his interpretive theory, Culler seems to ;
stop short of,Fish's present position. Both agree that the;
4"real world" is the "socially given text" (Culler)— or the -
"standard story" (Fish).®^ This would seem to commit both
95
theorists to Fish's claim that "no use of language matches ^
f
reality, but that all uses of language are interpretations ,
69 1
of reality." For Fish, "the rules and conventions under I
which speakers and hearers 'normally' operate don't demand |
!
that language be faithful to the facts; rather, they
specify the shape of that fidelity (what Gale calls the j
i
j
'real workaday world'), creating it, rather than enforcing
i
it." Fish writes further: "I am not denying that what j
I
will and will not be accepted as true is determined by the I
standard story. I am only pointing out that its being (or j
telling; it amounts to the same thing) the truth is not a I
matter of a special relationship it bears to the world
(the world does not impose it on us), but of a special j
relationship it bears to its users.Culler seems to
back off from conclusions similar to these (though his
i
exact position is unclear). "The first type of vraisem- i
blance [naturalization] is the use of . . . a discourse j
--------------------------------------------------------------------- i
j
which requires no justification because it seems to derive ,
i
directly from the structure of the world." Culler con- j
tinues: "Recognition of this first level of vraisemblance
need not depend on the claim that reality is a convention
produced by language. Indeed, the danger of that position ;
i
is that it may be interpreted in too sweeping a fashion. |
Thus, Julia Kristeva argues that anything expressed in a
grammatical sentence becomes vraisemblable since language ;
71 1
is constitutive of the world." Culler would likely
accuse Fish of a similar distortion of the relation
between language and reality.
Still, Fish's theory of interpretation has closer
affinities to Culler's than to that of any other reader-
response critic we have examined. Fish is no longer
guilty of the deficiency Culler noted in his review of
i
Self-Consuming Artifacts: "here Fish's theoretical enter-
]
prise quite abruptly vanishes; to the question, how does
the reader create meaning, he has no general reply to ]
72 !
make." Fish's concept of interpretive strategies would
now fill this explanatory void, serving a function similar
to Culler's reading conventions. Though Culler's theory i
is descriptive and Fish's creative, both would agree that
any change in interpretive strategies "can proceed only
step by step, relying on the procedures which readers |
73
actually use." It is Culler's goal to describe the j
"procedures readers actually use," while Fish has given up 1
i
this descriptive focus: "Rather than restoring or recover-!
i
ing texts, I am in the business of making texts and of j
|
reaching others to make them by adding to their repertoire !
74 ■
of strategies."
i
In looking back at our reader-response schema, we
can now use those theories to the right to place those to
i
i
the left. For example, Fish's theory of interpretive ,
strategies when applied to critical models provides a
framework to organize the various critical approaches advo
cated by other reader-response critics. Culler's theory of
conventions and Fish's affective stylistics (originally
descriptive in focus) are interpretive strategies based on
public, shared conventions; Holland and Bleich's
i
approaches present alternative strategies based on private,j
i
individual identity themes. Iser's theory holds a middle !
ground, recognizing the individual disposition of the self j
i
I
(in filling the gaps in the text) and the shared conven
tions of the literary speech act (in creating the reality
i
of fiction). On the level of reading models, a theory of j
f
interpretive strategies recognizes (advocates) the various j
1
models of reading: Bleich and Holland's psychoanalytic
model, Iser's phenomenology, Culler's structuralism, and
Fish's own affective sytlistics are all viewed not as
mutually exclusive descriptions of reading but rather j
simply as different ways of reading.
A final point, the social act of communication is
I
better accommodated within the convention-based systems of !
t
Fish and Culler than in the individual-oriented theories j
of Holland and Bleich. For example, Culler accounts for j
communicative intention in this way:
To intend a meaning is to postulate reactions
of an imagined reader who has assimilated the
relevant conventions. 'Poems can only be
made out of other poems,' says Northrop Frye,
but this is not simply a matter of literary
influence. A text can be a poem only
because certain possibilities exist within
the tradition; it is written in relation to
other poems. A sentence of English can have
meaning only by virtue of its relations to
other sentences within the conventions of the
language. The communicative intention pre
supposes listeners who know the language.
And similarly, a poem presupposes conventions
of reading which the author may work against,
which he can transform, but which are the 7t.
conditions of possibility of his discourse.
After presenting and applying a theory of interpretive
conventions in the next three chapters, I will return
to the question of intention in Chapter 7.
CHAPTER 4
CONVENTIONS
i
Building on the recent work of Fish and Culler, I j
will present a comprehensive theory of interpretive con
ventions in the next chapter. First, however, I need to
provide an account of convention in general.
I
The term "convention" is used in a variety of ways
across several areas of study, including sociology, lin-
I
guistic pragmatics, philosophy of language, social psy- '
i
chology, cultural anthropology, and literary criticism. !
i
The following schema isolates three kinds of conventions |
i
relevant to these studies of human action. Each cate- ;
i
gory— traditional, regulative, and constitutive— is fol- i
i
lowed by a working definition, a pair of representative j
terms around which the definition can be organized, and '
three examples of each kind of convention taken from
I
♦
sports, religion, and literary study. I
Traditional conventions are conventions based on j
I
precedent and are manifested most explicitly in a society's
100
Traditional— conventions of precedent j
descriptive rules recognizing (past) regularities ;
in action and belief j
representative terms: custom and ritual j
examples: singing the national anthem before a !
a football game |
)
central ritual of organized religion (such !
as the Mass of Roman Catholicism) ,
I
genre and mode in literature j
Regulative— conventions of agreement or stipula
tion
prescriptive rules regulating (future) action
representative terms: covenant and law
examples: penalties in football
central covenant of organized religion
(such as the Mosaic Law of Judaism)
propriety in literature
Constitutive— conventions of meaning
descriptive rules constituting (present) meaning
representative terms: meaning and system
examples: touchdown/football rules
transubstantiation/system of religious
belief
speech act/language
customs and rituals. For example, singing the national
j
anthem before a sports event is a traditional convention
within contemporary American society. David Lewis has i
i
provided a useful account of this kind of convention:
Conventions are regularities in action, or
in action and belief, which are arbitrary
but perpetuate themselves because they serve
some common interest. Past conformity breeds
future conformity because it gives one a i
reason to go on conforming; but there is I
some alternative regularity which could have I
served instead, and would have perpetuated [
itself in the same way if only it got !
started.^ !
i
Such conventions can loosely be translated into descrip- j
I
tive "rules" that account for conventional behavior and j
i
belief. These rules or conditions will make the content
I
of the conventions explicit. For example, we might
describe the sequence of actions that make up a certain
traditional ritual: just before an American football game,
the announcer asks the audience to stand; the audience
stands; the band begins to play; etc.
Traditional conventions easily "rigidify" into
regulative (or prescriptive) conventions: we have always j
i
done it this way (a description), therefore we should con- j
I
tinue to do it this way (a prescription). Standing up for \
the national anthem is an obvious example. Prescriptive
conventions as rules regulating future action are most
formally manifested in covenants and laws. A simple
illustration is penalties in football, formal rules of
behavior for which all players agree to be held account- !
I
able. I
i
In contrast to prescriptive rules for football '
penalties, there are descriptive rules that constitute a i
f i
i
touchdown. These constitutive conventions describe the
conditions under which a certain action has meaning. John
Searle has usefully contrasted the "regulative rules" of !
I
etiquette (regulative conventions) with the "constitutive
i
I
rules" of achieving checkmate or making a touchdown (con- ,
2 1
stitutive conventions). "Constitutive rules do not
merely regulate, they create or define new forms of ■
3 1
behavior." Without such constitutive conventions it ;
would be impossible to make a touchdown, whereas without ;
i
the prescriptive conventions of etiquette it would still
be possible to eat mashed potatoes with your hands. "Con
stitutive rules often have the form: X counts as Y in !
4 I
context C." Through a system of constitutive conven
tions, a football player's crossing of a certain line with I
a certain object counts as a touchdown. 1
All three kinds of conventions motivate human
action: by providing precedents (traditional conventions);
by stipulating the rules for action, agreed upon through
voluntary covenant or imposed law (regulative conventions);
and by describing the conditions under which a certain
l
institutional act counts as such (constitutive
I conventions). This account does not rule on whether all
I , I
i action is conventional (i.e., motivated by convention).
I j
I This proposed theory of conventions can be applied j
to a wide range of human activity and within a variety of
disciplines. In what follows, I will use the theory to
examine the kinds of conventions employed in literary
study.
I
ii :
Literary criticism and theory have made wide use of !
the notion of convention. Literary conventions have most j
j
often been viewed as traditional conventions: accepted
subjects and forms used by writers and recognized by
. readers. In a historical survey of twentieth-century I
American criticism, Robert Browne defines literary con
ventions as "the act or process of intersubjective deter
mination by which conceptions of materials or structures
5
of poetry come to be widely accepted." Conventions are
"habits of art" which provide compositional possibilities ;
6
for authors and raise expectations for readers. Browne j
i
distinguishes two closely related kinds of literary con
ventions: "conventions of material," such as the recur-
I
rent sonnet theme of unrequited love; and "conventions of j
I
structure," such as the rhyme-scheme of the Petrarchan
sonnet and its customary resolution or comment on the pre-
7 ' ■
ceding octave m its sestet. Browne's useful survey showsj
I
________________________ 104 j
that most American theorists and critics in the first half '
I
of the twentieth century viewed literary conventions as
8 ^
traditional artistic practice, conventions of precedent. !
i
Browne's study stops at 1950. Since that date much ;
has been written that relates to the concept of literary
conventions. One way of viewing the subject matter of
these writings is the following: Literary conventions as
I
conventions of precedent include both modal and generic !
I
conventions. Modes are stylistic and thematic conventions ,
that cross genre? e.g., symbolism, realism, and romanti- j
cism are modes that can be manifested in the lyric poem, [
the historical drama, and the war novel. Genres are con
ventional categories of literary works. |
Though studies of individual modes are common,
theoretical treatments of mode in general have been scarce.
1
For Paul Alpers, "mode is the literary manifestation, in a
given work, of the writer's and the putative reader's
9
assumptions about man's nature and situation." Guided by
i
such a definition, we might say that modal conventions |
determine the world view that a reader expects to share ,
(or at least recognize) in the course of his reading withinj
j
a specific mode. Northrop Frye defines mode as "a con- !
ventional power of action assumed about the chief char
acters in fictional literature, or the corresponding atti
tude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic
10
literature." Frye observes that "modes tend to succeed t
one another in a historical sequence": myth, romance,
high mimetic (most epic and tragedy), low mimetic (most i
i
11 1
comedy and realistic fiction), and ironic. Neither ]
Alpers nor Frye focus exclusively on the conventional
nature of modes. In contrast, Douglas Hewitt does so
I
restrict himself, but he discusses only one specific mode i
i
(realism) within one specific genre (the Victorian novel): j
i
By 'realistic' . . . I refer to a formal con- j
vention. Like all conventions it is the
result of compromise between various demands. !
But we often talk as though it is not a con- !
vention at all, as though it were a way of j
presenting a direct picture of a series of !
typical and lifelike experiences. As soon 1
as we try to define it, however, we realize i
how many questions we are usually begging— j
how far we take for granted highly conven
tional and often highly complex features. - * - 2
Generic conventions have been more widely discussed
13 i
than those of mode. "Genres are essentially contracts i
l
between a writer and his readers; or rather, . . . they |
are literary institutions, which like the other institu- j
i
tions of social life are based on tacit agreements or con- !
14 |
tracts." Such agreements are based on precedents; that
is, all generic conventions are traditional. A writer
uses a pre-established genre in composing his work, and j
j
the generic conventions determine structural and thematic
expectations for the reader. A typical description of a
genre includes the historical precedents and the relevant !
conventions:
I
106 I
The Gothic novel, or "Gothic romance," is a '
type of fiction which was inaugurated by <
Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, a Gothic
Story (1764)— the subtitle refers to its medi
eval setting— and which flourished through the
early nineteenth century. Following Walpole's
example, authors of such novels set their
stories in the medieval period, often in a
gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subter
ranean passages, and sliding panels, and made
plentiful use of ghosts, mysterious disap
pearances, and other sensational and super
natural occurrences (which in some writers |
turned out to have natural explanations); i
their principal aim was to evoke chilling ter
ror by exploiting mystery, cruelty, and a var
iety of horrors.15
i
In Chapter 6, I will describe the generic conventions of
the nineteenth-century war novel. j
I
Traditional literary conventions can function as
1
regulative conventions, but they need not necessarily do j
so. Regulative literary conventions are stipulations
about what should and should not be written. In its crud
est form, a regulative convention of literature is a form !
of censorship. More subtly, such conventions function as !
evaluative criteria: they are rules that every "good work
i
of art" should follow. For example, such rules include :
the conventions of propriety (prohibitions against portray-j
ing explicit sex, against cursing and blasphemy, etc.).
Also, traditional literary conventions like those of genre
and mode can rigidify into regulative conventions. An
interesting example is provided by the contemporary
reviews of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, to which I will
107
now turn before discussing constitutive conventions in
literary study.
Less than a year before the publication of his
sixth book, Melville wrote wryly to his friend, Evert
Duyckinck, "I don't know but a book in a man's brain is
better off than a book bound in calf— at any rate it is
safer from criticism" (13 December 1850)."^ Nevertheless,
on 18 October 1851 Bentley published The Whale in London;
and Harpers published Moby-Dick; or The Whale in New York
17
on or before 14 November. The title was not the only
difference between the first English and American editions
The "Etymology" and "Extracts" appeared in an "Appendix"
after the final chapter in the third volume of the English
edition, rather than at the beginning of the book as in
the American. More important to the critical reception
were the alterations made in the American proofs from
which the English edition was set. In addition to
Melville's own revision on the proofs he sent to England,
Bentley or his reader also made several changes in the
text: deleting Chapter 25 for its disrespect toward
royalty, changing "God" to "G-d" and "damn" to "d— n" and
expurgating passages considered irreverent or indecent.
Because they worked with the unexpurgated version, the
American reviewers criticized Melville much more often
than their British counterparts for the "indelicasies" and
"profane jesting" in his book. Even more crucial to the
critical response was the fact that the epilogue was miss- j
ing in the first English edition. j
The response to The Whale and Moby-Dick ranged from
enthusiastic praise to extravagant condemnation. The com
parisons made to Melville's earlier works illustrate the
i
range of opinion. The New York Daily Tribune praised |
j
Moby-Dick, saying, "We think it the best production which I
I
has yet come from that seething brain . . . it gives us a j
I
higher opinion of the author's originality and power than
even the favorite and fragrant first-fruits of his genius, j
18
the never-to-be-forgotten Typee." However, the !
Democratic Review complained, "In bombast, in caricature, j
in rhetorical artifice— generally as clumsy as it is inef
fectual— and in low attempts at humor, each one of his
volumes has been an advance upon its predecessors" (p. 83).I
The London Examiner was of a similar opinion: "We cannot
say that we recognise in this writer any advance on the
admirable qualities displayed in his earlier books— we do j
I
not see that he even greatly cares to put forth the i
i
strength of which he has shown himself undoubtedly pos
sessed" (p. 24). Yet the London Atlas could write of The j
Whale "In some respects we hold it to be his greatest
effort" (p. 13).
Two of the most influential British papers, the
Athenaeum and the Spectator, were highly critical in their
, comments, while Blackwood's apparently ignored The Whale '
I [
| entirely. The Athenaeum bluntly indicated its displeasure
I
| with Melville's performance: "Our author must be hence-
i i
' forth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who
occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius,
while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities,
i
i
carelessness, and other such harassing manifestations of
I
bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise" !
!
(p. 8). Melville's "extravagances," his "raving and
1 rhapsodising" were favorite targets for the London Morning ;
Chronicle and others: "mad (rather than bad) English,"
wrote the Athenaeum (p. 7) . Opposed to such censure were
reviews like the one in John Bull: "few books which pro- ;
(
fessedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of
the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much
genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod's whaling expedi- ;
tion" (p. 9). Still more enthusiastic was the London
Morning Post: "we cannot hesitate to accord to Mr.
Melville the praise of having produced one of the clever
est, wittiest, and most amusing of modern books" (p. 30). 1
The London Morning Advertiser claimed that no work "more !
honourable to American literature" had "yet reflected 1
credit on the country of Washington Irving, Fenimore
Cooper, Dana, Sigourney, Bryant, Longfellow, and Prescott"
I
(p. 7) . ;
i
110
The majority of American reviews were very brief
notices, many giving no evidence of a close or even com- .
plete reading of Moby-Dick. The longer reviews and the j
more perceptive shorter ones were just as divided in their j
I
I
opinions as the British notices. The Literary World pro
nounced Moby-Dick "a most remarkable sea-dish" (p. 49),
while the Spirit of the Times called it "a work of exceed- i
ing power, beauty, and genius" (p. 64). "It will add to j
Mr. Melville's repute as a writer, undoubtedly," wrote
the Evangelist (p. 41). In contrast, Today complained,
"the book appears to us rather drawn out, and could easily
i
afford considerable paring down" (p. 86). The strongest i
criticism came from the Democratic Review, which concluded
its comments: "if there are any of our readers who wish
to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted
sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty j
of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. j
Melville's" (p. 84). !
I
The professionalism of the British reviewers gave j
i
their comments a sophistication and precision found in
only a few American notices. In their reviews of The
Whale, the British critics were guided by tested literary
standards, based on a thorough knowledge of traditional
literary conventions. For some this descriptive knowledge
rigidified into prescriptive rules, i.e., traditional
conventions became regulative. The advantage of such
literary prescriptions was that a reviewer could more
i
clearly and rigorously specify the faults of inartistic j
works. Where conventional precepts become inadequate are
19
in cases of "unconventional" masterpieces. To explain
its criticism of The Whale— "an ill-compounded mixture of
romance and matter-of-fact"— the Athenaeum gave first the j
general precept, "There is a time for everything in imag- '
I
inative literature;— and according to its order, a place— :
for rant as well as for reserve; but the rant must be j
good, honest, shameless rant, without flaw or misgiving"; ’
i
I
then its specific objection followed: "The voice of the 1
I
storm wind Euroclydon must not be interrupted by the facts j
of Scoresby and the figures of Cocker" (p. 7). The
|
Spectator proceeded in a similar fashion: "It is a canon
i
with some critics that nothing should be introduced into a j
novel which it is physically impossible for the writer to j
have known. . . . Mr. Melville hardly steers clear of this i
!
rule"; then it added, "and he continually violates another,1 ,
by beginning in the autobiographical form and changing ad j
I
libitum into the narrative" (p. 12). The London Examiner j
i
complained that "all the regular rules of narrative or I
I
i
story are spurned and set at defiance. For a great part
of the book it is Ahab the captain monologizing in a wild
mad way; then it is the seaman Ishmael; and then Mr.
Melville himself." The reviewer then observed that it is
Melville "who has kindly taken up the narrative which must !
i
I
otherwise have gone to the bottom with Ishmael and every- !
I
i
body else concerned" (pp. 24-2 5). Indeed, the uninten- !
tional absence of the epilogue in The Whale certainly |
i
caused as much dissatisfaction among the British critics
as any intended "rule-breaking" on Melville’s part. The
i
(
Spectator, New Quarterly Review, and Dublin University
I
Review all noticed the inconsistent ending. The remark of j
i
the Literary Gazette was typical: "How the imaginary
writer, who appears to have been drowned with the rest, 1
communicated his notes for publication to Mr. Bentley is
not explained" (p. 61).
The British preoccupation with literary conventions j
(traditional turned prescriptive) led them naturally to
ask: into what traditional genre should The Whale be
placed? Since three-decker novels were common, the
Literary Gazette thought that the book was "professing to (
be a novel" (p. 60). With a similar assumption, the
Britannia wrote that it was "at a loss to determine in what
category of works of amusement to place it. It is cer
tainly neither a novel nor a romance, although it is made j
to drag its weary length through three closely printed
volumes, and is published by Bentley, who, par excellence,1
is the publisher of the novels of the fashionable world, ^
1
for who ever heard of novel or romance without a heroine ;
i
i
113
. or a single love scene?" (p. 22). Similarly, the New
j I
; Quarterly Review observed: "Many doubtless, will cavil at
!
| the application of the term 'novel' to such a production j
I
j as this, seeing that no tale of love is interwoven with
the strange ana of which it is compounded" (p. 78). The
London Morning Chronicle exemplified the bewildered
response when it commented that Melville's book was a |
i
!
"strange conglomeration of fine description, reckless j
fancy, rhapsodic mistiness, and minute and careful Dutch i
I
■ painting" (p. 77). On the other hand, the London Weekly j
I
I
News had no problem categorizing The Whale: it is "the !
most powerful and original contribution that Herman ,
Melville has yet made to the Romance of Travel" (p. 55). j
The admiring London Leader was puzzled but not frustrated
when it asserted, "The book is not a romance, nor a trea
tise on Cetology. It is something of both: a strange, j
wild work with the tangled overgrowth of luxuriant vege-
j
tation of American forests, not the trim orderliness of an |
i
English park" (p. 26). Perhaps this understated comment '
|
from the Dublin University Magazine most typified the !
reaction of its British counterparts: "All the rules j
which have been hitherto understood to regulate the com- j
position of works of fiction are despised and set at j
naught. Of narrative, properly so called, there is little
or none; of love, or sentiment, or tenderness of any sort,
114
; there is not a particle whatever; and yet, with all these ;
]
i glaring defects, it would be vain to deny that the work '
1 has interest" (p. 86). !
i
In their analysis of Moby-Dick, most American J
reviewers were less specific than The Whale's commenta
tors in England. However, because they were also less
i
concerned with literary proprieties (traditional and regu- 1
lative conventions), they did not become as frustrated j
with the strange mixture of genres that made up Melville's ;
I
!
; masterpiece. In fact, the imaginative American labels for
: Moby-Dick seem a celebration of its diversity. "Such a
; salmagundi of fact, fiction and philosophy, composed in a ;
style which combines the peculiarities of Carlyle,
Marryatt and Lamb, was never seen before," exclaimed the
New York Commercial Advertiser (p. 53). The Literary
World called Moby-Dick "an intellectual chowder of romance,]
philosophy, natural history, fine writing, good feeling, j
I
bad sayings" (pp. 49-50). "It appears to be a sort of |
hermaphrodite craft— half fact and half fiction," wrote j
the Boston Evening Traveller in a brief approving notice i
i
(p. 32). The New York Daily Tribune coined the term I
I
"Whaliad" for what the Washington National Intelligencer
called "a prose Epic on Whaling" (pp. 47, 68). Finally, I
Harper's New Monthly Magazine labeled Moby-Dick "a romance,]
a tragedy, and a natural history, not without numerous
gratuitous suggestions on psychology, ethics, and theology.]
Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader j
1
may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illus-
i
trate the mystery of human life" (p. 57). Not preoccu
pied by the literary precepts of the British professionals |
and having the "Epilogue" in their edition, the American i
reviewers made no complaints about Melville's "violation"
of conventional narrative rules. The only review to
i
raise the issue was written by the sophisticated critic !
for the Washington National Intelligencer: "Nor do we ;
1
propose . . . to haul Mr. Herman Melville over the coals j
for any offences committed against the code of Aristotle !
i
and Aristarchus: we have nothing to allege against his j
i
admission among the few writers of the present age who j
i
give evidence of some originality" (p. 66).
This lengthy example from literary history illus
trates the usefulness of the notions of traditional and 1
regulative conventions in understanding critical response, j
i
In most recent literary theory, constitutive con- :
ventions of literature have received more attention than ;
either traditional or regulative conventions. As we saw j
in Chapter 1, some theorists claim that the category of ^
t
literature is a conventional category: literature is j
t
defined by what a society has decided to call literary. |
I
i
Literature is not a set of characteristics held in common !
by verbal objects; rather it is an empty category filled I
i
116
by a general conventional agreement.
I
Other theorists have attempted to isolate specific i
conventions that constitute literary or fictional dis- i
course. For example, Richard Ohmann provides the follow- j
ing Speech Act definition of literature: "A literary work
is a discourse whose sentences lack the illocutionary
forces that would normally attach to them. Its illocu- :
20
tionary force is mimetic." In Ohmann's view, speech act j
conventions are somehow void in literary discourse; they
I
are "quasi-speech-acts," constituted by conventions that
21
imitate speech act conventions m ordinary discourse.
i
I
Literature can be distinguished from non-literature i
I
because literary works consist of these quasi-speech-acts.
Such a speech act definition ends up sounding like essen-
tialist definitions of literature and is vulnerable to the
same objection: any "essential characteristics" found in !
literary language can also be found in non^literary lan-
22
guage, whether rhyme or metaphors or fictivity.
In contrast to defining sufficient constitutive j
|
conventions for literature, some theorists have focused on \
I
conventions that are merely necessary. That is, these
theorists do not claim that such conventions are the
exclusive property of literary discourse. As Mary Pratt
argues:
When the literary speech situation is viewed j
in speech act terms, it becomes apparent i
that the identity of literature does not
rest on a single feature like "literariness"
or "dominance of the poetic function," but
rather is composed of a cluster of charac
teristics, none of which is itself unique to
literature. These characteristics will
include, for example, the following facts
about the conventional procedure for making
a literary speech act (in the modern period):
1. The literary speech act is prepared prior
to being delivered to the addressee. . . .
2. The literary speech act is pre-selected
by people whose job is to eliminate the
least successful creations in a given j
genre or sub-genre, and to disseminate i
the most successful. . . . j
3. The literary speech act is volunteered, ;
like remarks or exclamations, not I
required like term papers, oaths of !
office or responses to questions.23 j
Still other theorists have rejected the definition !
problem altogether and simply restrict themselves to !
I
I
describing the kinds of constitutive conventions under- ;
lying the activity of reading in the literary situation. |
They focus on the question: How do readers and critics !
make sense of literary texts? As we saw in Chapter 3, |
Stanley Fish answers this question with "communal inter- j
I
pretive strategies" while Jonathan Culler uses a notion of !
"reading conventions." I will build on these concepts in |
Chapter 5. I
We might more fully understand conventions relevant I
!
to literary study by looking at the following diagram, [
I
!
which places literary conventions (traditional, regulative,
and constitutive) within a larger framework:
I
SOCIAL
— i . i . i . i . i . t f i . n. n i 4 ■ ■
LINGUISTIC
LITERARY
AUTHORIAL
WITHIN
INDIVIDUAL
WORKS
Social conventions are studied in disciplines such
as sociology, social psychology, and cultural anthropology.'
The question "What is art?" can be answered at this level, *
if art is viewed as a social institution constituted by
£
convention. Language is a social convention with its own
set of linguistic conventions; lexigraphic, syntactic,
i
semantic, and pragmatic. These conventions of language ;
i
are studied in disciplines such as linguistics (including
sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, ethnography of speak- j
ing, etc.), philosophy of language, and rhetoric (communi- |
cation theory, reading theory, etc.). Reading conventions '
i
are best described at this level. I have already dis
cussed literary conventions, e.g., modal, generic, and
interpretive. Specific conventions of reading literature
i
119 I
I are isolated at this level. Authorial conventions are '
i
I
developed by a writer in several works in his literary out-,
i put. Examples range from characteristic word usages and
individual symbolic systems to idiosyncratic plot or image
' V • t
patterns to particular variations on modal conventions.
We might also speak of conventions within individ
ual works. It might at first seem unsatisfying to refer toj
a "convention" established during the reading of a single i
text. However, like generic conventions, conventions
! within a work are agreements or contracts set up between
I
1 reader and author; they are "ground rules" of narrative. 1
|
Specific conventions vary, but "what we do demand is con- \
I
24 1
sistency to its convention within each work." Such con- j
ventions are sometimes recognized immediately by a reader
and at other times are learned slowly during the reading
[
i
experience. For example, as we will see in Chapter 6, !
I
Crane established an obvious ironic convention in The Red j
Badge of Courage, the most important aspect of which has '
i
to do with the interpretation of Henry Fleming in the final!
chapter. The central question of Red Badge criticism has I
i
been: Does Henry change, does he grow, does he gain self- j
insight? Most of the debate has centered on the section
of the last chapter where Henry emerges from his "wild ;
t
I
battle madness." Having fought without fear, he "strug- j
I
gled to marshall his acts" in an attempt at self-evaluation;i
I
i
120
at the end of this evaluation of his conduct, Henry feels '
25
"a quiet manhood." However, Charles WalCutt points out !
that the reader , sees this ending as "a climax of self-
!
delusion. If there is one point that has been made it is
2 6
that Henry has never been able to evaluate his conduct."
Here Walcutt is relying on the ironic convention set up
early in the novel between Crane and his reader and more i
i
particularly on that aspect of the convention which has
shown Henry to be self-centered and self-deluding every
i
time he attempts to evaluate his own behavior.
Ill
I
Interpretation as a human activity is (like sports, ,
religion, and literature) understandable in terms of con- !
ventions. In Chapter 1, I distinguished between conven- !
tions of procedure and conventions of meaning in talking j
about interpretation as a conventional act. Procedural ;
conventions can now be divided into traditional and pre- j
scriptive conventions. For example, the traditional con- j
vention of American New Criticism that a text was viewed !
in terms of a spatial model (part to whole) has been
replaced in some reader-response approaches by a conven
tion of viewing the text through a temporal model. Ear
lier, New-Criticism had replaced the traditional conven
tions of historical and impressionistic criticism with the
prescriptive conventions known as the Intentional and
Affective Fallacies. A history of literary hermeneutics
is a chronicle of such shifts in procedural conventions
of interpretation.
The central assumption of my theory of interpre
tive conventions focuses on constitutive conventions of
meaning. In the interpretive act, the traditional and
regulative conventions of any human activity (such as
sports, religion, or literature) become constitutive of
the interpreter's understanding of that activity. Put
simply: in interpretation, traditional and regulative
conventions become constitutive.
i
CHAPTER 5
A THEORY OF INTERPRETIVE CONVENTIONS
Interpretive conventions can be understood as \
i
shared ways of making sense of reality. They are publicly-
known and agreed-upon procedures for making intelligible
the world, behavior, communication, and literary texts.
They are group-licensed strategies for constructing mean-
1 j
xng, descnbable xn terms of rules for xntellxgxbxlxty. ,
In Chapter 4, I distinguished three kinds of conventions:
traditional, prescriptive, and constitutive. The basic ,
assumption of a theory of interpretive conventions is that
I
in interpretation all these conventions are constitutive. j
!
I
That xs, all make meanxng possxble: from the complex con- |
ventional nature of language to the various features of j
!
genre and mode to the binary signification of football !
t
penalties. To return to the example of standing for the j
national anthem before a sporting event: we have already J
1
I
noted how such a traditional convention can become pre
scriptive. It also becomes constitutive; that is, com- j
i
pliance or non-compliance with the traditional convention
signifies: not standing up for the national anthem counts ;
f
123
j as disrespect for the flag, the nation, etc. ;
i
i This theory of interpretive conventions accounts
j
I for a wide-range of human activity: It combines the 1
i
explanatory power of the hermeneutic theory developed in
Chapter 1 with the account of conventions in Chapter 4.
When applied to literary theory, we can use the concept of
interpretive conventions to explain the sense critics make !
!
of a text in critical exchange as well as the sense j
I
»
readers are constantly making as they read. Thus, my
■ theory of interpretive conventions provides a hermeneutic
2
theory, a model for criticism, and a model of reading.
A hermeneutic theory in which traditional literary !
conventions are constitutive also easily accommodates the '
useful concept of intertextuality. Culler explains that
intertextuality is
the relation of a particular text to other
texts. Julia Kristeva writes that 'every
text takes shape as a mosaic of citations,
every text is the absorption and transforma
tion of other texts. The notion of inter
textuality comes to take the place of inter
subjectivity. ' A work can only be read in
connection with or against other texts,
which provide a grid through which it is
read and structured . . . And hence inter
subjectivity— the shared knowledge which is i
applied in reading— is a function of these |
other texts.3 ;
i
In the terms I have been developing, intertextuality can
be seen as traditional generic conventions becoming con
stitutive of interpretations. For readers, then, generic !
124
I conventions not only provide expectations as traditional
iconventions, they also function as a means of making sense
i
jof texts as constitutive conventions. Conventions within
j
;an author's entire oeuvre and within individual works serve
I
a similar dual function: they constitute part of both
4
sequential and holistic interpretation.
Interpretive Conventions account for both communica
tive interpretation and interpretive freeplay. By communi
cative interpretation I mean the attempt by readers (or
hearers) to recover the intention of the author (or
speaker). As I will argue in Chapter 7, intention in com
munication can only be recovered through interpretive con
ventions; insofar as intention (as a state of mind) is not
expressed (or manifested) conventionally, it is to that
extent not recoverable.
In contrast to communicative interpretation, inter
pretive freeplay gives no special status to authorial
5
intention. However, such interpretive freeplay can also
be accounted for by invoking interpretive conventions.
For example, in the approach of post-structuralists like
Derrida and Kristeva, "interpretation is not a matter of
recovering some meaning which lies behind the work and
serves as a centre governing its structure; it is rather
an attempt to participate in and observe the play of pos-
6
sible meanings to which the text gives access." However,
even in a systeme decentre, which entirely ignores
authorial intention, conventions continue to function in ;
the practice of interpretation. As Culler points out, i
"Anything can be related to anything else, certainly: a !
cow is like the third law of thermodynamics in that
neither is a waste-paper basket, but little can be done
with the fact. Other relations, however, do have thematic
i
potential, and the crucial question is what governs their j
selection and development. Even if 'emptied' by a radical
theory, the centre will inevitably fill itself in as the
7
analyst makes choices and offers conclusions." There
g
will always be some interpretive conventions at work.
Another distinction to be drawn is that between j
interpretive conventions shared by writer, contemporary j
!
audience, and later interpreters and those conventions
operant only for later interpreters. The former case is
illustrated in Chapter 6, where I argue that Stephen j
Crane's contemporary audience interpreted The Red Badge of
Courage within the generic conventions of the nineteenth-
century war novel. The basis of my argument in that
i
chapter is that these interpretive conventions were shared '
by both the contemporary audience and later critics. The
i
implication is, of course, that literary historians can |
[
only make sense of Red Badge criticism by invoking these
shared conventions. On the other hand, interpretive con
ventions can also be "created" by later critics (an I
instance of interpretive freeplay, sometimes acknowledged, ;
sometimes not). Much generic criticism proceeds in this i
way; conventions which were not shared by an author's con- :
temporary audience are posited by later critics in order !
to show similarities among different texts. A self-aware
example of such an approach is Stanley Fish1 s Self-Consuming
[
Artifacts. As Fish puts it: "Rather than restoring or i
recovering texts, I am in the business of making texts and
of teaching others to make them by adding to their reper
toire of strategies. I was once asked whether there are \
really such things as self-consuming artifacts, and I
9
replied: 'There are now.'" ;
I
I have till now limited the proposed theory of
interpretive conventions to interpretation of literary
j
texts. But the theory need not be so restricted. We make
sense of all human action in the same way that we make ;
i
sense of texts. In summarizing a hermeneutics with
which .my theory agrees, Quentin Skinner writes that "the
appropriate objects of interpretation, on this account,
I
are taken to be 'texts' in a special and extended sense
!
which includes both texts in the literal sense and text |
analogues such as voluntary action."^ In terms of my j
theory, we "read" acts in the same way that we read texts: j
through interpretive conventions. This theory of inter- i
pretive conventions can be further extended: we make
sense not only of texts and actions through interpretive
conventions but also of all cultural events and other
aspects of our experience. That is, we read the world as
a text.'*''*'
II
I can further explicate the proposed theory of
interpretive conventions by comparing it to recent work in
the philosophy of language. We can begin by discussing
John Searle's distinction between constitutive and regu
lative rules, a distinction that my theory seems to col
lapse. (The additional distinction Searle draws between
"rules" and "conventions" will be disregarded for the
moment. Later I will show how Searle's notion of "conven
tion" corresponds to my concept of "traditional conven
tions," his "regulative rules" to my "regulative conven
tions," and his "constitutive rules" to my "constitutive
conventions.")^
For Searle,; "Regulative rules regulate a pre
existing activity, an activity whose existence is logi
cally independent of the rules. Constitutive rules con
stitute (and also regulate) an activity, the existence of
13
which is logically dependent on the rules." Thus,
Searle contrasts the regulative rules of etiquette and
fishing with the constitutive rules of chess and speech
acts. It should be noted that Searle is not referring to
the interpretation of these activities nere but to their ;
performance. Certain acts are made possible by constitu
tive conventions: promising, playing chess, writing a ;
i
poem. But, I would argue, interpretation of all action
is made possible only through constitutive conventions.
That is, we make sense of acts by invoking interpretive
conventions (traditional, regulative, and constitutive); J
such conventions constitute meaning. But have I used the I
|
phrase "made possible" here in a sense different from that j
intended by Searle? I think not. In Searle's usage, a j
i
promise is made possible by constitutive rules in that
1
they specify the conditions upon which an act of promis- !
ing is logically dependent for its existence. Similarly,
meaning is made possible by constitutive conventions in
that they specify conditions upon which interpretation
(making meaning) is logically dependent for its existence.
To restate my point then: though performance of some acts
does not require constitutive conventions, interpretation
of all action does > and insofar as traditional and regu- !
i
lative conventions are invoked in interpretation, they are i
l
constitutive of meaning. j
Therefore, Searle's distinction— regulative rules ;
I
are not constitutive— can only be maintained if Searle
restricts his discussion to the performance (and not the
interpretation) of acts. However, Searle does not restrict!
129
himself in this way. we can see this most clearly by ;
examining his comments on the two formulae he has used to
characterize constitutive rules: "The creation of consti
tutive rules, as it were, creates the possibility of new
forms of behavior," and "constitutive rules often have
14
the form: X counts as Y in context C."
(1) "New forms of behavior." Initially, Searle's
I
point in his discussion of the first formula seems intui- j
tively correct: regulative rules guide behavior while j
constitutive rules make new behavior possible. Thus, !
I
Searle contrasts the regulative rules of etiquette with ;
I
the constitutive rules for making a touchdown. However, j
I
Searle also adds a qualification: "Where the rule is
purely regulative, behavior which is in accordance with
the rule could be given the same description or specifica-
I
i
tion (the same answer to the question 'What did he do?') j
i
whether or not the rule existed, provided the description
or specification makes no explicit reference to the rule. j
i
I
But where the rule (or system of rules) is constitutive, j
I
behavior which is in accordance with the rule can receive !
I
specifications or descriptions which it could not receive !
15
if the rule or rules did not exist." That is, a touch
down is constituted by constitutive rules in a way that
I
a faux pas is not, because belching at dinner (for example)!
can be described without reference to any constitutive !
i rules whereas a toucnaown cannot he so described or
i specified.
| By introducing the question "What did he do?" as a j
; part of his criteria, Searle has shifted his focus from
performance to interpretation in the discussion of his
first formula. That is, the question "What did he do?"
calls for an interpretation. It is true that a guest can i
f
belch during dinner whether or not there are rules of
etiquette in a way that he cannot score a touchdown if
I
there were no rules of football. But is it possible to
interpret a stylish guest's deliberately belching during
dinner in American society without our relying on consti-
16 1
1 tutive conventions? I think not. We could not capture
the full meaning of such an act unless we relied on a sys-
I
tern of regulative conventions in our interpretation; that
is, we could not fully understand the answer to the ques- j
tion, "What did he do?" j
i
My objection can be restated: Searle claims that ;
a regulative rule (as distinguished from a constitutive
rule) is one that governs behavior which could be given :
the same description whether or not the rule existed, j
i
I
"provided the description or specification makes no j
explicit reference to the rule." The last qualification
excludes a description like the following from being a
counter-example: "The guest's belching is against the i
131
i - - . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I
, ruies ox exiquexte. " cut wnat aDout trie uesunptiuu,
| "The guest's belching is rude"? Without the rules of J
i
j etiquette, such a description would not make sense.
: ■
Searle might respond to my objection in this way:
I would say that the statement you propose
as a counter-example ("The guest's belching
is rude.") is an appraisal, and appraisals
are not specifications or descriptions as
I am now using those two terms. Thus, your
objection does not show that regulative rules I
are constitutive (in the area I have been
discussing), because you have presented no
rule-dependent specifications or descriptions
of belching, only appraisals. The descrip-
1 tive qualification to my first formula still
stands.
I
Such a response(which is merely a restaging of Searle's j
remarks on page 36 of Speech Acts) would not be very !
satisfying, primarily because of his crucial dependence on
an unclear distinction between appraisals and descriptions.!
Appraisals (as evaluative statements) can often be restated'
in descriptive terms: "The guest's belching is rude" or
"The belching guest committed a faux pas" is logically j
equivalent to "The guest's belching is against the rules
17
; of etiquette." If such appraisals are logically equiv- j
alent to descriptions, how can they be excluded from I
Searle's test for constitutive rules except by arbitrary
i
legislation? Clearly, if Searle wants to retain the
descriptive qualification to his first formula, he must
show how "He committed a faux pas" as an appraisal differs
from "He hit a home run" as a description or specification.
132
He has not yet provided such a justification. !
Nevertheless, insofar as the first formula focuses j
i
on performance rather than interpretation, it does capture
a real distinction between regulative and constitutive
conventions, one that my theory of conventions would recog
nize. It is only when Searle's discussion slides into
interpretation that my theory of interpretive conventions
would deny a sharp distinction between regulative and con
stitutive conventions. I would prefer to restate Searle's
first formula in this way (dropping the descriptive qual
ification entirely): "The creation of constitutive rules
I
creates the possibility of new forms of behavior (behavior ;
that goes beyond the act of signifying by following or j
i
breaking regulative rules)."
(2) "X counts as Y in context C." More serious
problems arise with the second formula Searle uses to
I
characterize constitutive rules. The shift to the herme
neutic focus takes place immediately. That is, the initial
statement of the formula--"X counts as Y in context C"--
focuses not on performance so much as interpretation. :
Indeed, the formula describes quite precisely an important
aspect of the interpretive process: recognition that some-|
t
thing counts as something else in certain contexts. For !
example, it is an interpretation that a skull and cross-
bones count as a warning on a bottle of liquid. i
Searle makes the following distinction between
fishing and promising:
Now there are, indeed, techniques, proce
dures and even strategies that successful
fishermen follow, and no doubt in some
sense all these involve (regulative) rules.
But that under such and such conditions one
catches a fish is not a matter of convention
! or anything like a convention. In the case
! of speech acts performed within a language,
i on the other hand, it is a matter of con-
j vention— as opposed to strategy, technique,
procedure, or natural fact— that the utter-
1 ance of such and such expressions under cer
tain conditions counts as the making of a
promise.I8
Searle has shifted his focus slightly in the course of
presenting this comparison. In the fishing case he is
speaking of the performance of an act, while in the prom
ising case he is talking primarily about interpretation.
If we spoke of interpretation of the acts in both cases,
then could we not say that interpretation of an act like
fishing is a matter of convention? For example, a child
raised in a desert who saw a man fishing for the first
time might not be able to make sense of the action. If
he could not interpret the act, it would probably be
explainable by the fact that he was not familiar with the
appropriate interpretive conventions; and in this case the
relevant conventions would be very much like the regula
tive conventions Searle refers to. Once again, regulative
t
| conventions become constitutive in interpretation.
134
I
Stanley Fish employs Searle's regulative- j
j
constitutive distinction in a critique of the use of '
Speech Act Theory by literary critics. For example, Fish
writes that Wolfgang Iser j
equivocates between two senses of "conven- . j
tion": the stricter sense by which illocu- I
tionary acts are constitutive rather than ;
regulative, and the looser sense (roughly ]
equivalent to "accepted practice") employed ;
by literary critics when they talk, for
example, of the conventions of narrative. i
The equivocation is important to Iser . . . !
because he wants to assert a parallel between
a violation of speech act conventions and a
violation of the conventions of literature I
or society. But the parallel will not hold ;
because in one case a violation amounts to j
non-performance, while in the other the
convention (which rather than constituting :
the activity is merely a variation on it)
is either replaced or modified.^ ,
Like Searle, Fish is talking primarily about the perfor
mance of an act and not its interpretation. He is there
fore correct in saying that the constitutive conventions
of an illocutionary act are not the same as the tradi-
I
tional conventions ("accepted practice") of writing nar-
t
ratives: violation of the former results in non- ;
performance, while violation of the latter will simply |
I
provide variations on story-telling. However, as in our I
discussion of Searle, if we shift the focus from perfor
mance to interpretation, traditional conventions become
constitutive: "accepted practice" becomes a way of making
sense of a literary act in the same way that speech act
135
conventions are used to interpret an utterance. Critics
attempting to make sense of a text rely as much on tradi
tional conventions of genre and mode as on the speech act
conditions of literature. In literary interpretation,
variations on traditional conventions constitute meaning
as much as compliance does.
A word about Searle's implied distinction between
conventions and rules before I proceed to a consideration
of the tacit role of interpretive conventions in other
arguments in the philosophy of language. The outline of
interpretive conventions presented above implies that con
ventions are specifiable in terms of rules. This implica- j
i
tion is not crucial to the theory: rules could be |
i
I
replaced by conditions or statements with little loss of
clarity. However, the term rules (for all its misleading
------ i
20 1
associations) does capture the sense of order that I
underlies the possibility for interpretive intelligibility,!
the basis of any theory of interpretive conventions. Also,j
I
the term suggests parallel usages in the philosophy of j
i
language: as David Lewis points out, we can "understand |
i
the 'rules of language' we encounter in the works of
21
philosophers of language as tacit conventions."
We can apply Lewis's observation more specifically
to Searle's usages of the terms conventions and rules.
First, imagine that chess is played in dif
ferent countries according to different
conventions. Imagine, e.g., that in one
country the king is represented by a big ,
piece, in another the king is smaller than j
the rook. In one country the game is j
played on a board as we do it, in another ' I
the board is represented entirely by a
sequence of numbers, one of which is
assigned to any piece that 'moves' to that
number. Of these different countries, we
could say that they play the same game of
chess according to different conventional
forms. Notice, also, that the rules must
be realized in some form in order that the
game be playable. Something, even if it
is not a material object, must represent
what we call the king or the board.22
Searle makes the following comment on this example: "The
chess case illustrates what it is for a practice to have
conventional modes of performance, where the conventions
are realizations of underlying rules, and where the rules
and some conventions or other are required to perform the
23
acts at all." Searle uses "convention" here in the
sense of traditional conventions (as I have defined that i
I
concept— descriptive rules recognizing [past] regularities [
of action); he uses the notion of underlying (or consti-
l
tutive) rules in the sense of constitutive conventions |
(descriptive rules constituting [present] meaning). And,
as I have already shown, Searle calls rules of etiquette
regulative rules, a usage that parallels my notion of reg
ulative conventions (prescriptive rules regulating [future]!
action). I do no harm to Searle's theory when I translate
it into my system; and in fact I give it a wider applica
bility, for now it can be used more consistently in a ^
137
theory of interpretation. 1
i
Now I will return to the role of interpretive con- j
ventions in recent arguments in the philosophy of lan
guage, focusing primarily on discussions of the Gricean
analysis of meaning. Searle's treatment of this influen
tial proposal is another episode of an involved history
i
i
that began with Grice's 1957 article "Meaning." Many of
the objections to Grice's original analysis (including
Searle's) might profitably be viewed as attempts to incor- J
|
porate a notion of interpretive conventions into the j
i
Gricean account of meaning. !
I
The account that Grice first proposed can be sum-
I
marized in the following way: I
'A meantNN something by x' is (roughly) equiv- |
alent to 'A intended the utterance of x to pro
duce some effect in an audience by means of the |
recognition of this intention.'24 ;
t
Grice later provided a more formal statement of this |
I
definition: |
"U meant something by uttering x" is true
iff, for some audience A, U uttered x
intending .
(1) A to produce a particular response r
(2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1)
(3) A to fulfill (1) on the basis of his ful
fillment of (2).2^ j
I
In subsequent discussions of the proposal condition (3) is
referred to as the Gricean mechanism— a backward-looking
or reflexive intention— and it provides one of the areas of!
controversy in later critiques. More relevant to our I
I
i interests here, however, is another focus of debate: !
Grice himself touches on the issue in his 1957 article 1
i
when he writes, "An utterer is held to intend to convey j
i
what is normally conveyed (or normally intended to be con
veyed) , and we require a good reason for accepting that a
particular use diverges from the general usage (e.g., he ,
I
2 6 *
never knew or had forgotten the general usage)." In :
i
I
. making this suggestion, Grice is attempting to explain the
connection between what is intended and what is understood.!
We can view such an attempt in terms of traditional con
ventions (within a theory of interpretive conventions of
I
\
the kind I have proposed). This conventional connection |
between intention and meaning becomes the focus of later
critiques of Grice, because such a connection is not incor
porated into his original analysis of meaning (though j
i
Grice does refer to it obliquely in his commentary, as
: the quotation above illustrates). I
i
For example, in a 19 6 5 critique of Grice's proposal,J
Searle argues that "what we can mean is a function of what j
we are saying. Meaning is more than a matter of intention,j
it is also a matter of convention. . . . We must therefore j
reformulate the Gricean account of meaning in such a way
as to make it clear that one's meaning something when one
says something is more than just contingently related to
i
139
i what the sentence means in the language one is speaking."
| Searle attempts such a reformulation when he presents his
i
| analysis of illocutionary acts, an analysis, he says,
which "must capture both the intentional and the conven
tional aspects and especially the relationship between
27
them." In Speech Acts (1969) Searle proposes the fol
lowing revision of Grice's analysis:
S utters sentence T and means it (i.e.,
means literally what he says)=
S^ utters T and
(a) S intends (i-1) the utterance U of T
to produce in H the knowledge (recog
nition, awareness) that the states of
affairs specified by (certain of) the
rules of T obtain. (Call this effect
the illocutionary effect, IE)
(b) S 3 intends U to produce IE by means of
the recognition of i-1.
(c) S intends that i-1 will be recognized
in virtue of (by means of) H's knowl
edge of (certain of) the rules govern
ing (the elements of) T. 23
Note that Searle's proposal preserves the Gricean mechan
ism and incorporates a notion of rules (or constitutive
conventions) into an account of meaning.
\ In 1969 Grice responded to objections such as
Searle's in this way:
Characteristically, an utterer intends an
audience to recognize (and to think him
self intended to recognize) some "crucial"
feature F, and to think of F (and to think
himself intended to think of F) as corre
lated in a certain way with some response
which the utterer intends the audience to
produce. It does not matter so far as the
attribution of the speaker's meaning is
concerned, whether F is thought by U to be
140
really correlated in that way with the
response or not; though of course in the nor- i
mal case U will think F to be so correlated. 2 9 j
t
Grice then revised his original analysis (preserving the
reflexive intention): "U meant something by x" is rede
fined in this way:
Ranges of variables: A: audiences
f : features of utterance
r: responses
c: modes of correlation (for !
example, iconic, associa- j
tive, conventional)
!
( 3 A) ( 3 f) (3 r) ( 3 c) : '
U uttered x intending (1) A to think x possesses _f j
(2) A to think U intends (1) j
(3) A to think of f_ as corre- '
lated in way c with the ,
type to which r belongs j
(4) A to think U intends (3)
(5) A to think on the basis I
of the fulfillment of (1)
and (3) that U intends
A to produce r
(6) A, on the basis of ful
fillment of (5) , to pro- I
duce r 1
(7) A to think U intends |
(6).30 |
i
The relevant addition here is of course sub-clause (3) and i
I
the definition of variable c, which incorporate a notion j
of convention into Grice's account of meaning. Grice
gives iconic, associative, and conventional as three |
examples of modes of correlation: I would argue that
iconic and associative correlation are conventionalized,
i.e., they must be part of a repertoire of interpretive
conventions in order to function in communication.
Furthermore, when Grice states that a response may not "be
really correlated" with a feature of a speaker’s utter- j
I
ance, I do not take him to mean that a communicative fea- j
ture can be non-conventional (which would include non-
iconic and non-associative, where such modes have been
conventionalized). Rather, I take him to mean (in my
terms) that it is entirely possible that a successful com- |
munication may depend on interpretive conventions not
known by any other language users except those engaging
in the communication (say, one speaker and one hearer).
It is not possible, however, that communication can take
place between a speaker and a hearer when they hold no j
I
interpretive conventions in common.
Grice provides the following example which will !
clarify my point:
i
I have been listening to a French lesson j
being given to the small daughter of a j
friend. I noticed that she thinks that a j
certain sentence in French means "Help your- !
self to a piece of cake," though in fact it
means something quite different. When there
is some cake in the vicinity, I address to her
this French sentence, and as I intended, she
helps herself. I intended her to think (and
to think that I intended her to think) that
the sentence uttered by me meant "Help your
self to some cake"; and I would say that the '
fact that the sentence meant, and was known |
by me to mean something quite different is
no obstacle to my having meant something by
my utterance (namely, that she was to have
some cake).31
My explanation of the communication between the author and
142
the child would exclude the possibility that no interpre- ■
tive conventions are operating (i.e., that the correla- ;
tion between the sentence and the response is not conven- |
tional). Rather, I would say that the author and child
share an interpretive convention (that the sentence counts
as "Help yourself to a piece of cake" in the context of
their interaction) which is not shared by other speakers :
of French. i
In Meaning (1972) Stephen Schiffer provides still j
another revision of Grice's original analysis; again, one \
j
objection centers around the correlation between intention j
and convention. Schiffer abandons the Gricean mechanism I
and replaces it with (among other conditions):
S^ meant something by uttering x only if S
uttered x intending to produce in A a cer
tain response r by means of A's recogni
tion that x is related in a certain way R ^2
to the type of response to which r belongs.
I would argue that the recognition of the relation R i
<
between x and r is a function of an interpretive conven- 1
tion. In just this way, R in Schiffer's analysis resemblesj
Searle's "underlying rules" and Grice's "modes of correla- !
tion" in their respective accounts of meaning.
My purpose in relating this brief history of the j
Gricean program is not to suggest its failure (in fact, I
rely on a version of Grice's account in Chapter 7), but to
illustrate the centrality of interpretive conventions I
33 - - |
in this account of meaning. Obviously, I am not yet
)
convinced that a definition of speaker's meaning can pro- !
I
ceed independently of a theory of conventions. i
i
I have referred above to interpretive conventions
that are shared among participants in a successful commu
nication. Such shared interpretive conventions might be |
. • I
called conventional knowledge. This cpncept parallels i
both Fish's communal "interpretive strategies" and J
Culler's "literary competence," discussed in the last
chapter. The term conventional knowledge can be used to
j
refer to our shared ways of constituting the world: the ;
(
t
dominant paradigms for structuring our experiences, group-
licensed strategies for organizing (making sense of)
reality. As interpretive conventions internalized, tacit ,
conventional knowledge makes interpretation possible. We j
can distinguish between tacit conventional knowledge and j
conventional knowledge of which we are fully aware. Tacit ;
conventional knowledge can be understood as implicit knowl-(
I
edge interpreters have of interpretive conventions. The
models for such knowledge are Hymes "communicative com
petence," Chomsky's "linguistic competence," and Culler's
34 . !
"literary competence." We are sometxmes aware of our
i
interpretive strategies, but more often we are only aware
of the interpretations that are their result. Conven-
I
I
tional knowledge consists of these tacit interpretive
i
144
conventions and the interpretations that are their result I
and of which we are self-aware. ■
Introducing Searle's distinction between brute and j
institutional facts will be helpful here:
There is a certain picture we have of what
constitutes the world and consequently of
what constitutes knowledge about the world.
It is a picture of the world as consisting
of brute facts, and of knowledge as really J
knowledge of brute facts. Part of what I |
mean by that is that there are certain para- ;
digms of knowledge and that these paradigms
are taken to form the model for all knowl- ;
edge. The paradigms vary enormously— they
range from "This stone is next to that ,
stone" to "Bodies attract with a force i
inversely proportional to the square of the |
distance between them and directly propor- !
tional to the product of their mass" to "I j
have a pain," but they share certain common !
features. One might say they share the
feature that the concepts which make up the
knowledge are essentially physical, or, in
its dualistic version, either physical or
mental. The model for systematic knowledge
of this kind is the natural sciences, and
the basis for all knowledge of this kind
is generally supposed to be simple empiri
cal observations recording sense exper- (
iences.35
I
■ Searle suggests that there are other kinds of facts that
do not fit into this picture. "A marriage ceremony, a j
i
baseball game, a trial, and a legislative action involve
a variety of physical movements, states, and raw feels, |
but a specification of one of these events only in such
terms is not so far a specification of it as a marriage
ceremony, baseball game, a trial, or a legislative action."
I
Reports of such events Searle calls institutional facts. ;
145
. "They are indeed facts; but their existence, unlike the
1 existence of brute facts, presupposes the existence of
1
certain human institutions. It is only given the insti- j
tution of marriage that forms of behavior constitute Mr. !
Smith's marrying Miss Jones." Such institutions "are i
3 6 I
systems of constitutive rules." Searle argues that the
brute fact conception of knowledge is inadequate to i
I
account for these institutional facts. Institutional
' facts cannot be explained in terms of brute facts. Searle
■ therefore sees brute and institutional facts as two sep-
, arate kinds of knowledge.
Searle adds this footnote to the above discussion:
Brute facts,- such as, e.g., the fact that
I weigh 160 pounds, of course require cer
tain conventions of measuring weight and j
also require certain linguistic institu- !
tions in order to be stated in a language,
but the fact stated is nonetheless a brute
fact, as opposed to the fact that it was
stated, which is an institutional fact. 37
This seems to give brute facts a very tenuous existence
indeed. First of all, they can't be specified without
■ institutional facts. And, more destructively, in this ,
I
example at least, the brute facts would not exist without j
the institutional facts. We might be tempted to say that
though the fact that a person weighs anything is an insti
tutional fact, the fact that a person consists of mass
that can be measured is a brute fact. However, the con-
I
cept of mass depends for its existence on the institutional;
I
146
, fact of distinguishing between mass and energy, and so on. J
Could any examples of brute facts be presented that did
i
■ not depend on institutional facts in a similar way? I
think not. As Stanley Fish explains:
What I have been suggesting is that identi
fication (or specification of facts) is
always within a story. Some stories, how
ever, are more prestigious than others; and ;
one story is always the standard one, the
one that presents itself as uniquely true ,
and is, in general, so accepted. . . . What
I am saying is that the facts Searle would j
cite as "brute," the facts stipulated by ;
the standard story, are also institutional,
and that the power of the Law to declare a i
man and woman husband and wife is on a par !
with the.(institutional) power of the stand- '
ard story to declare that Richard Nixon j
exists.3®
I
Institutional facts make brute facts possible.
Though institutional facts do not fit into an exclusively
brute fact world, brute facts do fit into an institu
tional fact world. Put another way, we can conceive of
brute facts only by virtue of an interpretive convention j
that allows us to do so. Ultimately, by following :
i
Searle's insight farther than he would follow it, we are !
led to the conclusion that brute facts are shadowy enti- j
ties with no substance except that which interpretive con- !
ventions give them. (We can continue to believe in the !
i
brute fact world, but, alas, that too is a convention.) In
this view, knowledge becomes knowledge of institutional
facts, facts dependent on institutions— systems of
147
constitutive rules or conventions. Such knowledge becomes !
another way of speaking of conventional knowledge.
What is the relationship between conventional ;
knowledge (as I have defined it) and Schiffer's "mutual
39
knowledge*"? Put roughly, to say that "S and A mutually
know* that p" is to mean : S knows that p; A know that p;
S knows that A know that p; A knows that S knows that p;
S knows that A knows that S knows that p; and so on ad
infinitum. As far as S himself is concerned, the fact
that he knows p is not a matter of convention (neither tra-
40
ditional, regulative, nor constitutive). It could be
called intuitive or natural knowledge but certainly not
conventional as I have defined It. However, our knowledge
that S knows that p (say, p is "snow is white") is a mat- 1
ter of convention as is his knowledge that A knows that p.
That S knows that A knows that S knows that p is also con- !
i
ventional knowledge. So, too, that S knows that A knows j
that S knows that A knows that p. And so on. Thus, i
mutual knowledge* consists of intuitive (or natural) knowl-'
i
edge and conventional knowledge (that is, only the latter ;
i
i
is a result of internalized interpretive conventions). j
111 I
My purpose in Chapters 1, 4, and 5 has been to
propose a comprehensive theory of interpretive conventions.
148
In the next two chapters I will apply the theory in
solving two problems in literary study.
149
CHAPTER 6
INTERPRETIVE CONVENTIONS AND CRITICAL
RESPONSE TO THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE j
I
A theory of interpretive conventions provides the j
scholar with a coherent approach to literary history. In i
i
this chapter I will focus on one aspect of that approach:
I
the way in which a literary historian can use interpretive
conventions to explain the history of critical response to
a literary text. The criticism of Stephen Crane's The Red |
Badge of Courage presents a particularly difficult prob
lem: How could Red Badge have become a literary classic if
I
it has been known only in a severely expurgated text? j
The Red Badge of Courage was published by D. !
Appleton and Co., in September 1895.'*' This first American •
edition does not print several passages that can be found j
in the extant manuscript; some of these eventual deletions j
are crossed out in the manuscript while others are not. !
I
Hershel Parker suggested that the excisions were the result
I
of external pressure from Ripley Hitchcock (Crane's j
Appleton editor) and that the deleted passages make the |
t
text of the Appleton first edition inconsistent and in
150
2 — — -• 1
; places illogical. Subsequently, Henry Binder has demon- 1
j strated that this is especially true of the crucial final ;
| chapter, which most critics use as proof that Private ;
1 3
! Henry Fleming has found true courage. The maimed ;
Appleton text is the form in which reviewers and later
critics have read Crane's masterpiece. If the Appleton
text is illogical and inconsistent (as Binder shows), then
i
how have Crane critics been able to make sense of it, let j
alone call it a classic? A theory of interpretive con
ventions provides a means to make sense of the critics'
making sense of the Appleton text.
i
I |
Traditionally, The Red Badge of Courage has been I
viewed as a war story about a young private who runs away
from battle only to redeem himself by returning and fight- i
I
ing courageously. The contemporary reviewers put Crane's
novel squarely in the tradition of the nineteenth-century
war novel when they compared it to Tolstoy's Sebastopol
, 4 I
and Zola's La Debacle. In fact, the generic conventions
i
of the war novel formed the background against which most !
contemporary and many later reactions to Red Badge took
place. Here we have a striking example of traditional 1
i
(narrative) conventions becoming constitutive of interpre- j
tation. It will be useful therefore to trace the evolu
tion of the conventions of the war story during the
t
I
151
| nineteenth century.
We can begin with the Historical Romance, which !
idealized war and its combatants. Typical American j
| ,
examples were James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1821) and |
t
I
Lionel Lincoln (1825) and William Gilmore Simm's romances
5
of the Revolutionary War (1835-56). In most historical
romances war is viewed as "an opportunity for attaining ;
6
glory." Officers are courageous heroes, and the common j
i
soldier is content with his role, having no doubts about i
i
[ the war or authority. If any barbarity appears in the j
i
battle descriptions, it is usually to show how "dastardly" !
the enemy is. This is the case in John Esten Cooke's j
i
Surry of Eagle's Nest: or, The Memoirs of a Staff-Officer j
Serving in Virginia. This 1894 romance also contains
another traditional convention, the romantic love inter
est, e.g., the hero is haunted by the face of a girl whose j
7 i
, handkerchief he carries. i
I
I
The conventions of the historical romance persisted !
1 throughout the nineteenth century, but after the Civil War ;
many war novels appeared that began modifying these con- ;
ventions. One such change was the presentation of more :
0
realistic detail among the romantic idealizations. Such
I
war narratives can be divided into stories that continue j
to idealize war but not the combatants and stories in
which war is not idealized but the heroes still are. A
152
| British example of the former is Rudyard Kipling's early
I
short story, "The Drums of the Fore and Aft" (1888),
which was compared to Crane's novel in some Red Badge
j Q
. reviews. In Kipling's story a young regiment is dis
graced when it flees in fear during battle, and it is not
wholly vindicated even though it later fights gallantly.
Unfailing courage is the standard accepted by characters
I
and narrator, and war is the arena in which courage is !
i
always to be shown. Stories also appeared in which brave .
i
‘ heroes participated in a war that was not idealized. In i
The Days of Shoddy: A Novel of the Great Rebellion in j
1861 (1863), Henry Morford depicts the corruption during j
war but still melodramatically idealizes the characters. ;
Joseph Kirkland's The Captain of Company K (1891) presents
! realistic descriptions of battle primarily to give his
love plot a realistic background.And in Miss Ravenal1s >
Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), John William j
DeForest portrays the horrors of battle and the injustices !
of war, but one of the main characters (Colonel Colburn)
12 I
is still idealized as an example of courage throughout. j
i
i
The Realistic War Novel made its appearance with j
Tolstoy's Sebastopol (1854-55; English translation, 1887).
; The realistic war novel is an anti-romance, in which
, neither war nor hero is idealized. A fallible anti-hero
replaces the traditionally courageous hero of historical
romance. At the beginning of the realistic war novel, the
central character is often vainglorious, and the tradi-
I
tional martial attitudes of romance are sometimes parodied.j
i
The hero then shows himself afraid in battle and only later
becomes brave. Courage does exist but it is acquired not
inborn. Thus, the realistic war novel established a new
convention: growth from cowardice or bravado to real i
i
courage. As Eric Soloman has observed, "By the time j
i
I
American novelists began writing about the Civil War, a |
European tradition of irony and realism, and a motif of |
the development, through war, from innocence to maturity,
had been established through the war fiction of De Vigny,
13 '
Stendhal, Zola, and Tolstoy." \
In the contemporary reviews and later criticism,
14
The Red Badge of Courage was often compared to Sebastopol.
The Appleton text does seem to exhibit all of the con
ventions that characterize the realistic war novel as
i
typified by Tolstoy's book. Henry Fleming is a common ;
i
soldier, whose romantic visions of war ("a Greeklike |
i
struggle") are soon undercut. Though at the outset he |
dreams of heroic accomplishments, Henry has grave doubts
about his courage before his first battle. After standing j
firm during the first attack, he flees in terror during j
the second. Eventually he is returned to his regiment
and seems to fight courageously in his next battle. The
final chapter of the Appleton text shows Henry has |
matured to a "quiet manhood.
i
Crane's novel was also compared to the stories of |
Ambrose Bierce in at least two Red Badge reviews. j
i
Bierce represents another anti-romantic attitude in his
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). He goes further
than realists like Tolstoy in rejecting the conventions of !
i
the historical romance. For Bierce, war is absurd; not j
I
only are battles and heroes not idealized, but courage j
I
itself is an illusion. Some reviewers saw a similar por- |
trayal in Red Badge. The anonymous reviewer for the New |
;
York Press called the novel "an extraordinary and merci- !
I
less realization of the psychology of combat, in which
paralyzing terror, reckless bravery and ignominious flight
17
appear to be the result of a sort of hypnotism." Sim-
i
ilarly, Harold Frederic spoke of Henry's "early panic" j
18 1
and "later irrational ferocity." For an earlier |
i
reviewer in the New York Times, Crane depicts war as "a '
}
mean, nasty, horrible thing; its seeming glories are the I
!
results of accident or that blind courage when driven to j
I
bay and fighting for life that the meanest animal would j
show as strongly as man." The first two of these reviews |
do not mention a change in Henry, but the Times writer i
mentions that Henry has been "transformed": "He has saved
19
the colors, and he has sounded his own depths."
The maimed state of the Appleton text did not 1
!
allow reviewers and later critics to see the true orig- |
i
inality of Crane's achievement. The manuscript version '
I
is anti-romantic, but it is also the ultimate extension
of ironic realism: it rejects the convention of initia
tion. In the manuscript there is no growth, no movement
i
from innocence to maturity or illusion to enlightment. j
The passages not published in the Appleton first edition !
clearly indicate that Henry Fleming has learned nothing at
i
the end of the novel. In a realistic novel like Tolstoy's !
i
Sebastopol, there were obvious precedents for the story i
I
in the Appleton text within the tradition of the : !
nineteenth-century war novel. But what Crane wrote in the j
manuscript transcends the tradition. The Appleton text
merely follows the traditional generic conventions of the
realistic war novel, while the manuscript breaks new ,
ground by reacting against both the historical romance's
idealization of war and the realistic novel's convention i
of initiation. I
I
!
I
i i :
!
Crane has been praised on the basis of the Appleton !
I
text for initiating or perfecting the use of certain modal !
conventions: impressionism, ironic realism, deterministic
21
naturalism, and modern symbolism. Such conventions can
156
be exhibited across genres, throughout a single text, and J
even in fragments of texts. This explains how the expur- |
1
gated Appleton text could still be widely praised. How
ever, what interpretations of Red Badge do such evalua
tions assume? That is, what holistic sense of the
Appleton text has been made by its interpreters?
We can limit our discussion to critical interpre
tations that focus on Crane's use of two generic conven-
i
tions— attitude of narrator toward characters and growth
of protagonist— because most holistic interpretations of
i
Red Badge focus on Crane's use (or misuse) of these con
ventions. In the course of the discussion, I will show
how modal, generic, and authorial conventions constitute
the interpretations of the Appleton text. That is, Red
Badge criticism clearly illustrates how traditional con-
1
ventions become constitutive conventions in interpreta- j
i
tion. i
I
I
The critics of Red Badge fall into one of three 1
general categories: (1) those who, seeing few if any |
problems, make a sense of the Appleton text in which Henry
grows and the narrator's attitude toward him changes from
ironic undercutting to various degrees of sympathetic j
approval; (2) those who cannot make sense of the text;
and (3) those who make a sense of the text in which there
is no growth in Henry and in which the narrator's attitude j
; is consistently ironic throughout. I will discuss each
; of these groups in detail before attempting to fully
explain their interpretations.
(1) An overwhelming majority of Crane scholars
fall into the first category; they interpret the text
according to the conventions of the nineteenth-century war
novel, seeing Henry as growing in the course of his war
22
experience. However, there is an extremely wide diver
gence of opinion over how Henry grows, whether through
changes in bravery, experience, or insight.
One group believes Henry's growth is from fear to
courage, from cowardly civilian to brave soldier. These
critics view Red Badge as a war story in its narrowest
sense. Most contemporary reviewers are part of this
' group; for example, in the Saturday Review Sydney Brooks
spoke of "a raw youth" that "develops into a tried and
trustworthy soldier," and the reviewer for the Bookman
saw in the novel "a genuine development of the untried
23
civilian into the capable and daring soldier." In his
famous comments in 192 5, Joseph Conrad referred to Crane's
"war book" and "the problem of courage"; he saw Henry as
24
a "symbol of all untried men." And in 1950 Lars
Ahnebrink wrote of Henry's "development into a real war
25
hero" and about "the process of conquering fear."
Critics of this persuasion could be expected to compare
158
, Red Badge to Tolstoy's Sebastopol or Kipling's "The Drums
I
; of the Fore and Aft." j
i
j A second group of critics interprets Henry as grow-
| ing in experience from innocence to maturity but makes --no
explicit reference to any self-insight. In 1895 W.D.
Howells called Henry "a tawdry-minded youth" and praised
Crane's skill "in evolving from the youth's crude expec
tations and ambitions a quiet honesty and self-possession
2 6
. manlier and nobler than any heroism he had imagined."
I
In a similar vein, V.S. Pritchett (in 1946) talked about j
Henry as "a green recruit" who "loses his romantic illu- j
I
sions and his innocence in battle and acquires a new !
27
identity, a hardened virtue." In 1945 R.B. Sewall j
interpreted the ending as a complete "moral victory" for
I
Henry, whose "victory over fear" seems to have made up
for his past sins (running from battle and deserting the
t
tattered soldier).. However, Sewall was also the first to
I
I
voice objections to the ending of the Appleton text: he !
|
' found Henry's final "state of complacency" to be "unde- •
i
served and arbitrary" in terms of "Henry's moral struggle
2 8
as Crane has represented it."
Donald Pizer's 19 66 interpretation of Red Badge
1 provides the most interesting example of this second
group. For Pizer, Henry "emerges at the end of the battle
not entirely self-perceptive or firm-willed— Crane is too
159
much the ironist for such a reversal— but rather as one ;
1
i
I
who has encountered some of the strengths and some of the j
i
29
failings of himself and others." Pizer never states !
explicitly that Henry gains an insight into himself; he
only describes Henry's growth negatively— he is not the
same as he was— and implies that the difference may be
self-knowledge.^^ Pizer writes that "something has hap
pened to Fleming which Crane values and applauds," and
Pizer suggests that this "something" is partly Henry's
movement from isolation to "oneness with his fellows."
It is not clear whether Pizer thinks Henry himself actuallyj
i
realizes this: "Henry is still for the most part self- j
i
deceived at the close of the novel, but if he is not the
'man' he thinks he has become, he has at least shed some
I
3 2
of the innocence of the child." Sensitive to Crane's
ironic conventions, Pizer is careful not to claim too much I
I
for the Appleton text; the ambiguities of his interprets- j
tion are the result of an intelligent critic reading a
maimed text.
The third group of critics who see growth in Red
!
Badge interprets it as a movement from illusion to enlight- j
ment. In 1925 Joseph Hergesheimer put it simply: Red
i
Badge is the "story of the birth, in a boy, of a knowledge \
33
of himself and self-command." There has been a great
diversity of opinion about what precisely is Henry
! Fleming's self-insight. A contemporary reviewer saw
i Henry's "agony of fear" turning into a "recognition of the ;
! 34 i
; universality of suffering." In 1951 R.W. Stallman spoke 1
i !
of a "spiritual change" in which Henry "confesses to him- ]
1
self the truth" about his previous pride and "puts on new
35
garments of humility." Earlier, Harry Hartwick had seen
that Henry acts first "in blind panic and then in wild j
I
bravery" but Hartwick implied that Henry sees this too as |
' the youth "reaches the conclusion that the chief thing is 1
to resign himself to his fate . . . [i.e.,] to become a j
3 6
stoic." Later, Eric Solomon argued that "the standards ;
by which Henry's development is measured are those of j
(
group loyalty rather than fear and courage." At the end !
of the novel, Henry's "self-interest and pride are not
obliterated but transformed as he identifies himself as a
I
member of his group." For Solomon, Henry "has learned the '
essence of man's duty to man, as well as the fact that i
i
life (like war) is not a romantic dream governed by abso- !
lutes, but a matter of compromises. . . . At least war has ;
shown the young soldier his true self, and the acquisition ;
i
of self-knowledge is no small accomplishment. Crane |
reveals and accepts his hero; that Henry is censured [for
deserting the tattered soldier] does not mean he is
37
condemned."
Edwin Cady provides one of the best discussions
i
t
161
from a member of this third group. For Cady, Henry
Fleming discovers the courage to be human and gains a cer- \
t
j
tain understanding and modesty: Henry, "neither a hero
nor a villain," sees that "he must assume the burdens of
a mixed, embattled, impermanent, yet prevailing human-
3 8
ity." The strength of Cady's analysis is that he
describes in detail Crane's ironic distancing of the nar- '
J
rator from Henry: how Henry is a "perfect neo-romantic"; j
how his romantic egotism is undercut by "ridicule and |
irony"; how false are both his "irresponsibility" for his I
I
|
acts on the one hand and his sense of a "prophetic role" i
i
on the other; and how nature "varies with his psychic f
39
states." Cady also notes how Henry's "heroism" is a j
result of "battle sleep" (though Cady feels it is still a
40
genuine "personal victory"). Even more significant is
Cady's observation: "As he trudged away from 'blood and
wrath' Fleming's 'soul changed'— as it had changed some- ;
times three times in a page earlier in the novel, though
I
with more prospect of duration (not permanence) this :
41
time." A close reader of the Appleton text, Cady also
uses the manuscript, but he runs into the problem of claim-;
ing that deleted pages are operant in the first edition;
furthermore, he entirely misses the interpretive signifi-
i
42 I
cance of the deletions in the last chapter. I
t
There are some critics among this third group who !
see Henry as growing but who also recognize problems in :
the ending of the novel. George Johnson notes that Henry
i
"supposedly" learns to abide incongruity and find the j
world meaningful," but he also points out the "dramatic j
43 !
falseness of this implicitly optimistic ending." j
Mordecai Marcus interprets Henry as revolting against both j
his cowardly and fierce behavior and accepting "the peril- ;
44
ous but unavoidable human lot." However, Marcus also
mentions a "general weakening of interest and cohesion in i
I
the last eight chapters" and that the conclusion "jars
slightly with some of the preceding narrative, especially j
with the ironic treatment of Henry," the reasons being the '
"suddenness of Henry's insight" and "traces of irony in . . . i
45 !
the final chapter." Marcus ends up sweeping these prob- .
lems aside when he confusingly argues that restoring the
deleted passages would make the final chapter "quite ambig-!
J
t
uous and would suggest that Crane regarded Henry ironi-
4 6
cally to the very end." That is, Marcus first complains i
i
the ending is "slightly jarring" but then rejects the solu-[
tion that would remedy that "jarring." Marcus sounds like j
i
the next category of Crane scholars when he writes:
Crane's "final problem was to make us accept some intel- [
i
lectual self-transcendence in Henry so that our sympa-.
thies— no matter how they have been tried— will remain
with him. Crane's success with this problem was, I think,
47
only moderate."
(2) The first category of Crane critics -was able
to make sense of the Appleton text by interpreting Henry j
i
Fleming as growing in bravery, experience, or knowledge. 1
A second category of critics could not make sense of the j
Appleton text and therefore evaluated Crane's artistic j
48 I
skills negatively. For example, Richard Chase states j
t
that themes of "spiritual death and rebirth" and of i
1
"advancing maturity" are "only sketchily there, if at all."!
I
I
Crane "seems half-hearted about carrying things through to j
the moral conclusion." Crane inclines toward dramatizing '
|
the discrepancy between Henry's illusion and actual fact j
but instead tries to draw a moral "in the vague and pre- i
tentious language of the last five paragraphs" (which j
49
Chase does not interpret ironically).
John Shroeder argues that Crane's novel is "more
50 i
confused than its critics have been willing to admit." j
I
He finds "false directions and incoherencies" and calls j
51 !
aspects of the book "diffuse and inchoate." Concerning
the last chapter, .Shroeder thinks that Crane "had his own ;
i
doubts about the validity of Henry's transformation." !
Giving a non-ironic reading to "He turned now with a ;
I
lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows,
i
cool brooks— an existence of soft and eternal peace," i
i
Shroeder comments that "Crane seems to have forgotten j
52 ;
everything that has gone before in his own book." James i
' Colvert makes a more detailed attack on the story told in
the Appleton text:
i
| Although the novel might appear to be a
straightforward account of how a self-
centered young man acquires, as a result of
his war experiences, a measure of redeeming
wisdom, the problems raised in the story
are not clearly defined or resolved. As a
consequence the ending is confused and uncon
vincing. We are told that Henry is a
changed man, but we are not told how he is
supposed to have met the conditions implic
itly required of him in the first sixteen
chapters. In the first part of the story j
Henry is the target of the narrator's
relentless ironic criticism, scored for his
delusions of grandeur, his assumption that
he somehow merits a special place in the
regard of the universe. And though Crane
labors in the final chapter to convince us
that his hero has rid himself of these delu
sions, the deterioration in the quality of !
the writing— the appearance of a tendency I
toward incoherence— shows that the task is '
too much for him. The tone shifts inap
propriately, the irony is erratic and often j
misdirected, and the hero is permitted cer
tain assumptions inconsistent with his pre- !
vious characterization and Crane's estab- j
lished attitudes toward him. ^ 1
The interpretive problems evident in discussions of j
The Red Badge of Courage are, of course, a direct result
of the expurgations made in the Appleton text. But if this;
is true, how do we account for:
(3) those critics who make a sense of the text in i
i
I
which Henry does not grow and the narrator's attitude is j
consistently ironic? That is, if the problems in inter- j
preting the Appleton text are caused by the missing pas- j
i
sages, how can a small group of Crane critics not only ;
165
interpret that text but, in fact, provide a sense that
i
closely resembles Binder's interpretation of the raanu- ■
I
script? How do Charles Walcutt and John Berryman, for
example, interpret Henry as not growing and the narrator's
attitude as ironic throughout? One answer might be the
use of modal conventions by the interpreter. In American
I
Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream, Walcutt argues that i
Crane is a naturalist who "makes us see Henry Fleming as
an emotional puppet controlled by whatever sight he sees
54
at the moment." But apparently the use of modal con
ventions is not sufficient in itself to determine an inter
pretation that sees Henry not growing at all: Pizer, for
example, also invokes modal conventions in his interpreta
tion. Nor are authorial conventions enough: Marston
LaFrance is as sensitive as Berryman to Crane's ironic
i
conventions throughout his oeuvre, yet he still interprets |
I
Henry as attaining "authentic self-knowledge and a sense j
of manhood after long and fierce battles with his own
55
moral weaknesses."
We can, however, point to another narrative con
vention and its manifestation in Red Badge criticism. As I
stated by John Searle: "The author will establish with ;
the reader a set of understandings about how far the hor- |
i
izontal conventions of fiction break the vertical connec
tions of serious speech. . . . What counts as coherence ;
will be in part a function of the contract between author ;
5 6 ■
and reader about the horizontal conventions." Or put j
more simply by Douglas Hewitt: "What we do demand is con- j
57
sxstency to its convention within each work." Both
these theorists are referring to what can be called a con
vention of narrative consistency, one corollary of which
might be roughly stated: there will be no radical (unex- i
f
plainable) change in the attitude of the narrator toward !
i
his protagonist. What Berryman and Walcutt have done in
their interpretations of a maimed text is to use a conven
tion to supply what "wasn't there"— they merely extended
the conventional contract established early in the novel.
Berryman notes how a "pervasive irony is directed toward
the youth-— his self-importance, his self-pity, his self-
58 '
loving war rage." As a result, Berryman comes to the
last chapter and protests, "But then comes a sentence in j
which I simply do not believe." This sentence— about a i
i
"lover's thirst" for "soft and eternal peace" (which i
Shroeder took so literally)— is interpreted by Berryman
on the basis of the ironic conventions of the earlier j
59
chapters. Walcutt is even more explicit on why he \
1
refuses to interpret Henry as growing: Walcutt sees the ;
I
self-evaluation in the final chapter as "a climax of self- !
I
delusion. If there is any one point that has been made it
is that Henry has never been able to evaluate his :
!
167
I conduct. .60 ;
: i
Such an account of how a small number of critics
|
j could interpret the Appleton text ironically also explains !
what happened with the critics who found the text incoher
ent: they simply refused to extend into the final chapter
the interpretive conventions established early in the
novel. But then what happened with the first category of !
critics who made a non-ironic, "coherent" sense of the
text? We could simply say that they did not read closely
enough, as Binder has shown: they ignored relevant dis- j
crepancies (relevant, that is, according to the terms of j
their own interpretations) which cannot be conventionally
61 1
, accounted for without the manuscript evidence. But we j
could also further surmise: because of the long action
chapters between the obvious narrative irony and the last
i
chapter, these critics were able to accept a radical ;
change in the narrator's attitude toward Henry Fleming, 1
and because growth was a traditional generic convention, '
[ i
Henry was accepted as growing. '
In this way the interpretations of the Appleton
I
text can all be accounted for by the ability (or inability)j
of critics to invoke narrative conventions. We might add
that only those critics who were most sensitive to the
i
conventions Crane was employing could come close to a j
i
knowledge of Crane's originality within the tradition of ;
the realistic war novel. |
168
Ill !
I
Crane scholars have sometimes made use of the
manuscript in their struggles to make sense of the
Appleton text, though no critic (before Binder) has seen :
the true interpretive significance of it. Most critics j
have ignored the manuscript entirely. Why has this been I
I
so? To answer this question, we must move from the gen-
i
>
i
eric and modal conventions of literary interpretation to j
i
the regulative conventions of criticism and editing.
American New Criticism encouraged the critic to
view the published text in front of him as sacrosanct; he
need not go beyond it. The Intentional Fallacy prescribed .
that the critic ignore authorial intention, and this pre- :
scription was usually extended to include all aspects of
the author's composing process. This regulative conven
tion of New Criticism pressured most critics to ignore
all pre-publication forms of the text. The literary work !
was thus viewed synchronically, the text being frozen in |
time (often in a corrupted state), rather than diachron- ;
t
ically. Almost all interpretations reflected this 1
restriction, even those not directly made under the dom- |
i
inance of the New Critical paradigm. .
In contrast, editors in establishing critical
texts did make the author's composing process a center of
attention. They were concerned with all versions of a !
I
i
169
; text, including pre-publication forms. Editors and
; textualist critics might, then, be expected to have read
I
: the Red Badge manuscript closely. However, another regu
lative convention got in the way: whatever form of the
text best reflects the author's chronologically final
intention is the form that should be reprinted and inter
preted. I will examine this regulative convention of
editing in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 7
AUTHORIAL INTENTION AND
CONVENTIONAL READER RESPONSE i
t
I
A theory of interpretive conventions can provide a
useful account of authorial intention. The notion of
intention is slippery in three ways:
; (1) There is a need (often overlooked or inadequately
fulfilled) to isolate the kind of intention relevant to |
I
interpretation. Consideration of kinds of intention j
necessarily leads to definitions and distinctions.
(2) Discussing kinds of intention assumes or precedes a
i
consideration of the nature of intention in general, which j
usually results in a view of intention as a description of 1
a state of mind. Such an account raises the question of
the knowability of that state of mind: what evidence do
we consider a valid basis for inferring an intention?
(3) Descriptions assume the reality of the object '
I
described. But how "real" are intentions? To what extent j
t
are specific intentions interpretive constructs? In lit
erary criticism, for example, how true is it to say that,
\
as the author wrote, he intended this meaning, this effect
171
i this interpretation? I am not just raising the question
' of conscious, subconscious, or unconscious "intention" ,
j i
i here, or even the more difficult problem of an author's i
: discovering his intention as he writes; rather I am rais
ing the question of whether it is more helpful to view the
notion of intention functionally rather than ontologi-
cally. A functional view would argue, for example, that
a reader's positing a specific intention constitutes com
municative interpretation whether intention (as an
author's actual state of mind) exists or not.
Theoretical discussions of intention in literary
criticism focus on the first problem listed above, kinds 1
of intentions. For example, in "Three Kinds of Intention,"!
I
Michael Hancher distinguished "programmatic intention"
("the author's intentions to make something or other"),
"active intention" ("the author's intention to be [under
stood as] acting in some way or other"), and "final inten- '
i
tion" ("the author's intention to cause something or other !
1 i
to happen)." He then argues that only active intention j
is relevant to literary interpretation.
»
i
Philosophical treatments of intention use kinds of
intention merely as a way into talking about the nature !
of intention in general. The focus is primarily on the :
i
problem involved in viewing intention as a state of mind |
!
and the question of evidence for inferring intention. For j
172
; example, in Intention G.E.M. Anscombe faces some of the ;
|
! questions mentioned under (2) above and answers them by
j replacing a view of intention as a "special interior move
ment" with a focus on the external answer to a why-question
2
about an action. "The term 'intentional' has reference
to a form of description of events. What is essential to
this form is displayed by the results of our enquiries into i
. 3 i
the question 'Why?'" Anscombe's account can be trans- |
lated in the following way: "intentional” has reference j
I
to a form of description of events, the essential charac-
, teristic of intention being displayed by means of the con
ventional interpretive procedure of asking "why?" Such a i
translation indicates that for Anscombe intention is a
construct (an answer to a why-question) and that her
account has similarities to an explanation based on a gen
eral theory of interpretive conventions.
My theory of interpretive conventions argues that
we often make sense of an action by positing a conven
tional intention "in" the actor. For example, in commu
nication we are able to make sense of an utterance through |
j
our tacit knowledge of a system of shared conventions. We |
i
assume that a speaker is invoking the conventions (this
assumption is itself a convention, one of the most basic
in communication), and our understanding is constituted by
our knowledge of the specific conventions he is invoking. !
173
Such a theory answers the question of evidence (for infer
ring intention) by claiming that the only available evi- i
dence is interpretive conventions. That is, intention as
i
a state of mind is only knowable in terms of interpretive
conventions.
i
i
t
As we saw in Chapter 1, intention has recently had '
a very problematic role in literary criticism. In con- i
trast, it has been a constant and central concern for j
I
1
textual editing. It is surprising therefore that there i
is very little in the theory of textual study that deals I
t
directly with the concept of "authorial intention." This >
glaring omission has existed in textual theory in spite of 1
the fact that in edition after scholarly edition the !
"author's final intention" has guided editors in estab- j
i
i
lishing their critical texts.
"The aim of Greg's theory, with which no scholarly
editor would quarrel, is to establish the text which the
4 1
author intended." The notion of an author's final inten- !
i
tion was implicit in certain sections of W.W. Greg's
classic article, "The Rationale of Copy-Text." At one
point Greg says that if an editor determines that a "later
reading is one that the author can reasonably be supposed
to have substituted for the former," then the editor should
5
accept this later., reading into the text. Fredson Bowers
later championed Greg's theory of copy-text and expanded j
on some of its basic principles. In 1964 Bowers saw the j
editor's task as providing a text that would "represent ;
the nearest approximation in every respect of the author's j
i
final intentions," and as late as 1975 Bowers referred to j
i
"final intention texts arrived at by eclectic methods"
and viewed "final intentions as the basis for critical
6 !
conclusions." Bowers and others gave wide currency to I
j
the phrase "author's final intentions," and later theo- i
rists used the phrase to mean an author's last known wishes
7 !
or the latest authorial revisions. I
I
The central notion of "author's final intention"
then was implicit in Greg, amplified by Bowers, and used j
!
by textual editors during the last twenty^five years. Yet .
it is only within the last two years that a textual theo-
i
rist has come to grips with the problems inherent in this
central concept and its application. Though Hershel
Parker provided a useful examination of typical problems
in his "Melville and the Concept of 'Author's Final
Intentions,'" G. Thomas Tanselle is the first to present
I
a comprehensive theoretical and practical discussion in
"The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention."
The significance of Tanselle's article cannot be over
emphasized; it is a milestone in textual theory. I make
this point now because the following discussion spends j
, more time correcting or supplementing Tanselle's essay I
, than praising it. J
! |
I Tanselle begins with a search for the kind of inten-,
I i j
tion relevant to textual editing. He then touches briefly
on the critical implications of an editor's focus on
authorial intention. Tanselle argues quite convincingly
that editing involves literary interpretation and not just !
decisions based on bibliographical, historical, and bio-
8
graphical evidence. In light of the conception of author
ial intention that he has isolated in the first section,
Tanselle goes on to discuss editorial decisions about '
i i
authorial and non-authorial variants. In section three he j
discusses problems involving final authorial intention. j
i
!
My reservations about Tanselle's article are two:
f
i
first, Tanselle's use of Hancher1 s>definition of active
i
intention does not provide an adequate guiding concept j
for editors; and, second, Tanselle's discussion of inten
tion provides no positive connection with critical inter-
i
pretation. J
In attempting to isolate the kind of intention
relevant to editing, Tanselle depends on the distinctions
made by Hancher in "Three Kinds of Intention." Tanselle
adopts Hancher' , s def inition of "active intention" without
any reservations: "Active intentions characterize the
actions that the author, at the time he finishes his text,
1761
9 '
understands himself to be performing in that text."
This formulation is inadequate for editorial practice •
!
because it implies that relevant intention exists only |
I
after a work is finished. An example such as Melville's J
Pierre presents this formulation with a problem. Melville j
wrote the first part of the book with one intention and 1
then wrote most of the last part with a greatly differing
intention and never reconciled the two. Melville does not i
I
seem to have had one single active intention when he com- j
pleted the book; it would make more sense to speak of his j
intention as he was writing each section."^ i
There is a more subtle objection to the phrase "at
the moment he finishes the text" in Hancher's definition. j
How are we to judge a work to be "finished?" Hancher
I
11
implies that a work is finished when it is published.
i
But then what about the textual situation of The Red Badge !
I
of Courage, a work that seems to have been "finished" long j
12 ^
before it was published in an expurgated form.' j
i
As we will see, the question about when a work is finished !
i
is a question about final authorial intention. Hancher's \
formulation requires the textualist to face this issue
before he has a clear notion of intention on which to
build. That is, by starting out with a definition that
includes an answer to the question he has set out to
answer, Tanselle is begging the question.
1 For these two reasons I propose the following
I redefinition:
| (a) Active intentions characterize the actions ,
that the author, as he writes the text,
| understands himself to be performing in !
1 that text. j
Such a redefinition provides a diachronic view of inten
tion which will prove much more useful to the textual '
13 i
scholar. It does not replace Hancher's synchronic view . !
but actually contains it (the moment of completion is
merely one of many moments in a diachronic view) without
i
introducing the problem of when a work is finished.
A second major objection to Hancher's definition of
, active intention involves his distinction between active
14
and final intention. He envisions the difference between
them as a distinction between meaning and effect, what is
intended to be understood and what effect is intended.
However, for editors and critics this oversimplified dis
tinction between relevant meaning (active intention) and
irrelevant effect (final intention) is inadequate. An
editor/critic is as concerned with how the reader is i
I
affected by a particular passage as he is with what that
passage means. For example, Fitzgerald intends that the
reader be amused and disgusted with Tom Buchanan when that;
.......... i
character asks Nick, "Have you read 'The Rise of the
Colored Empires' by this man Goddard? . . . Well, it's a
fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if j
178
we don't look out the white race will be— will be utterly
submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
Fitzgerald reinforces the effect a few pages later when he
has Nick think, "Something was making him [Tom] nibble at
15
the edge of stale ideas ..." To include such relevant
j immediate effects in a definition of intention, I propose
the following reformulation of (2) :
i (b) Active intentions characterize the actions
i that the author, as he writes the text,
understands himself to be performing in
the text and the immediate effects he
understands himself to be achieving as a
result of the reader's recognition of
his intention.
The added clause here not only incorporates "immediate
I effects" (as opposed to after-effects like being moved to j
i I
\ |
i action) into the definition, it also utilizes the Gricean j
i I
: i
reflexive intention to account for how those immediate
•j g i
effects are achieved.
Like Hancher's original formulation, my redefini
tion (b) provides a formulation of intention from the
i
! author's point of view. For the critic and editor, an
author's active intention is an ideal construct, something
in the author's mind, not capable of being directly appre
hended. Indeed, the actual text may or may not convey
this ideal construct. Therefore, what is needed to supple
ment a concept of author's active intention is a notion of
inferred intention:
179
(c) Inferred intentions characterize the
critic's description of the conven
tional responses that 'the author, as he
is writing, understands himself to be
achieving as a result of his projected^
reader's recognition of his intention.
Several explanatory comments need to be made about
(c). First of all, the central assertion here is that
inferred intention should be defined in terms of conven
tional reader response. This assertion needs to be
unpacked as two interrelated claims: (1) Inference can be j
accounted for most easily through a theory of interpre- !
i
j
tive conventions; and (2) Intended reader response is j
achieved by means of interpretive conventions shared ■
[
between author and reader. |
(1) Shared conventions provide a basis for making !
inferences about intention. As Tanselle writes, "Lan
guage, after all, consists of symbols, which must be |
invested with meanings if they are to mean anything. At ;
the same time, a reader does not have access to an j
author's mind, and, if he understands a text to mean some- I
i
thing, it is (at least to begin with) as a result of cer- j
18
tain conventions of language which both are following."
My claim is that the only positive evidence on which to j
base an inference about authorial intention is that pro- j
vided by interpretive conventions. Under this assumption,
the theory of interpretive conventions developed in
I
Chapters 4 and 5 can be used to account for inferred \
i
i
(
180
intention.
: I
I
1 (2) The term "response" in (c) replaces "immediate j
I effect" in (b). ("Response" is used by P.F. Strawson in j
19
his revision of Grice's original analysis of meaning.)
From the author's view, he can be said to intend x when he
understands himself to be performing an act which will
produce a certain response in a reader by virtue (at least 1
i
i
in part) of the reader's recognition of the author's j
I
intention. The author can depend on a reader's recogni- j
i 1
| tion of his intention when he knows that they share a set
I of interpretive conventions. "To intend a meaning is to
■
postulate reactions of an imagined reader who has assim- ;
20
ilated the relevant conventions." From the reader's
view, understanding is constituted by his recognition of ;
the author's intention to invoke certain conventions—
|
social, linguistic, literary, and authorial. |
I
My use of "reader response" here is meant to |
include all reading activities relevant to authorial j
i
intention; such overlapping terms as "cognitive," "emo
tive," and "attitudinal" describe the range of responses
that an author intends to elicit by conventional means. j
I
t
Thus, response includes both understanding (illocutionary
effect, uptake) and immediate effect (perlocutionary
effect). The perlocutionary effects that are relevant to
intended reader response must be carefully restricted. I
I
181
i am referring primarily to immediate intended effects 1
i
i during reading and not to after-effects like becoming a
j
| bullfighter after reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. |
I am referring to cognitive and attitudinal responses
primarily, but also to emotive as well (though the latter
category has always been very problematic in literary
21
interpretation). These intended responses are further ;
I
restricted by the possible interpretive conventions avail-
22
able to the author. My textual examples in the last \
I
: part of this chapter will illustrate the range of intended '
I
responses relevant to literary interpretation by an editor.1
‘ I
There is (at least) one objection to the above
account: shouldn't "intention" refer only to meaning I
I
that is propositional or illocutionary and not to perlocu
tionary effect? (Searle makes such an argument in his
23
critique of Grice's original analysis.) It is unclear i
why intention should be so restricted. Perlocutionary j
effects are intended along with propositional content and j
I
illocutionary effect in all communication, including lit- '
erature. As we will see, reader responses that appear to
i
be perlocutionary effects are directly relevant to the I
i
interpretation of intention in literary acts. j
<
By combining illocutionary and perlocutionary !
effects under the category of intended conventional
response, I do not mean to deny the distinction usually j
made between illocutionary and perlocutionary acts: the
I
success of illocutionary acts is conventional while the
success of perlocutionary acts is contingent. That is, !
when a hearer recognizes a speaker's intention to invoke '
the conventions of greeting (an illocutionary act), greet- j
ing has taken place; whereas when a hearer recognizes a
speaker's intention to persuade (a perlocutionary act), !
!
persuasion may or may not then take place. However, . .
recognition of intention to achieve perlocutionary effects
is as convention-governed as recognition of intended illo-
I
cutionary force (uptake). An attempt to persuade is only J
recognized through interpretive conventions, just as an j
i
attempted greeting is recognized. The difference, again,
is that recognition of illocutionary intent constitutes a
successful illocutionary act (uptake), while recognition
I
of perlocutionary intent does not constitute a successful |
i
perlocutionary act. Still, a perlocutionary effect may be ;
achieved through recognition of an intention to achieve a ^
perlocutionary effect (e.g., a reader's belief in the ]
truth of a statement by a reliable witness). But it may !
i
also be achieved without such recognition (e.g., do we
become sad reading a tragic love story because we recog
nize an author's intent that we become sad?), or a certain
perlocutionary effect may be achieved in spite of our
recognition that another is intended (e.g., laughing at
. the clumsy bathos of a "tragic" love story). ;
i I
i I
i The notion of inferred intention developed here is j
i
1 not meant to replace "active intention" but to supplement
1 it. Not only does (c), as a definition of inferred inten
tion, offer a more exact formulation of the kind of inten
tion with which editors and intentionalist critics are
I
I
most directly concerned, but (unlike Tanselle's use of |
- - I
Hancher) it also provides a logical connection with a j
i
critical framework; that is, implicit in inferred inten- I
tion is a rationale for critical interpretation.
A notion of inferred intention is not alien to
Tanselle's article. He writes that "to explain the inten- ;
tion of a work . . . constitutes an inference about an !
24
event which took place in the past." On what basis can
we make inferences about authorial intentions? Figure 1 (
on page 185 schematizes the inferential process in editing.!
i
Establishing the intended text is a historical
reconstruction based on an editor's critical interpreta- j
tion of the work and his examination of relevant histori
cal, biographical, bibliographical, and linguistic evi-
25 :
dence. (Historical evidence, for example, may indicate '
I
. that portions of a text are non-authorial or that external j
2 6 ■
pressure caused authorial revisions.) Critical inter
pretation is an inference about authorial intention based
on positive and negative evidence. Negative evidence
184
Figure 1. The Inferential Process of Editing
INFERENCE
IN HISTOR
ICAL RECON
STRUCTION
[INTENDED
TEXT]
CRITICAL., INTERPRETATION
(Active Intention)
[INTENDED RESPONSE
— MEANING AND EFFECT]
A
V
EXAMINATION OF HISTORICAL
BIOGRAPHICAL, .AND BIBLIO
GRAPHICAL EVIDENCE
(ACTIVE INTENTION)
H
00
oi
POSITIVE
EVIDENCE
NEGATIVE
EVIDENCE
STRUCTURE OF
THE READER'S
RESPONSE
INFERRED
' INTENTION
HISTORICAL
SITUATION
I provides a way of excluding intentions that were histor-
i 27
| ically impossible for the author to have had. Tanselle ,
1 I
! is weakest on defining the nature of positive evidence:
I i
!
• for example, he writes that "the only direct evidence one .
has for what was in the author's mind is not what he says
was there but what one finds in his work," but the nature
2 8 1
of this discovery process is left unclear. (Also, as I 1
will show, Tanselle's discussion of positive evidence for
■ critical interpretation has no useful connection with his
1 discussion of intention.) From positive and negative
; evidence an editor can infer authorial intention, which
' i
combines with historical, bibliographical, and other evi-
i
dence to determine an editor's historical reconstruction j
I
of the author's intended text.
I
The formulation of inferred intention I have pro-
. posed in (c) is preferable to Tanselle's use of Hancher, |
first, because it solves the problems I raised earlier: j
!
it makes authorial intention concurrent with the diachronic'
writing process; it doesn't make a false distinction !
between relevant meaning and irrelevant effect; and it !
provides a view of intention from the perspective of the |
i
editor and intentionalist critic. More importantly per- j
haps, inferred intention defined in terms of intended j
conventional response provides the important connection to i
a framework of critical interpretation that is missing in i
186
Tanselle. That is, Tanselle defines the relevant notion
I
i
of intention as "active intention" and then argues that
an editor must make critical interpretations. However, he j
does not provide a framework for that critical interpreta- j
i
t
tion. Instead, in his analysis of textual examples, he
relies on such ambiguous jargon as: "purpose, direction,
or character of a work," "spirit of the original version," !
I
"representation of the author's vision," "conception of an
organic whole," and "general tone and spirit of the j
29
whole." ;
This is perhaps the major criticism of Tanselle's i
I
article. By separating his discussion of intention from
a framework for critical interpretation, Tanselle ulti- ]
i
mately cuts off his discussion from the most important > .
criterion fo,r establishing author's final intention; for
"author's final intention" is not a chronological concept ;
I
but an aesthetic one. Chronology as a determinant of ;
author's "final" intention should be rejected in favor of !
t
3 0 1
an aesthetic criterion. Instead of asking what was ;
last, an editor should ask what was most complete. 1
Usually what is final is most complete, but this need not
31
necessarily be the case. ;
For example, Melville's Typee and Crane's Maggie
were revised by their authors as a result of pressure from
publishers after the publication of first editions. Such
! external pressure invalidates the author's chronologically,
! final intention. In cases like Typee and Maggie, an
j editor is justified in rejecting the revisions and adopt-
I
32
xng the earlier readings. In these two examples we are
talking about different published forms. What about The
Red Badge of Courage, where biographical evidence indi-
cates that pressure was applied prior to publication of |
i
33 1
the text in book form? In this example no chronological j
I
criteria (including a publication date) can be used to i
establish a final or most complete intention.
I
What can be used is an aesthetic criterion. To
■
l
repeat: "author's final intention" is not a chronological i
concept but an aesthetic one. What is "most complete" is j
best described in terms of the structure of the reader's
response (including both sequential and holistic inter-
34 i
pretation). This view of "author's final intention" j
I
(or author's fullest or most complete or in some cases even
original intention) follows naturally from a notion of
inferred intention defined as intended conventional J
j
response. That is to say, unlike Tanselle's use of
i
"active intention," "inferred intention" implies an aes-
i
thetic criterion: inferred intention defined as intended
I
(conventional) reader response implies a critical frame- j
work of reader-response criticism within a theory of inter
pretive conventions.
188
As we saw in Chapter 3, reader-response criticism
describes the interaction of the reader with the text.
For the editor, of course, the reader is the intended
reader, "the reader whose education, opinions, concerns,
linguistic competences, etc., make him capable of having
35
the experience the author wished to provide." The
editor must therefore be aware of the interpretive con
ventions that an author most likely would have assumed
his readers to share with him. The interaction of the
intended reader with the text includes cognitive activi
ties (such as sequential and holistic interpretation) as
well.as attitudinal and emotive responses. For the edi
tor, the most important aspect of a reader-response
approach is its temporal nature: it is "an analysis of
the developing responses of the reader in relation to the
3 6
words as they succeed one another in time." All of
these points can be summarized by the phrase "the struc
ture of the reader's response."
Ill
To return to Figure 1: in Tanselle1s model of
editorial practice, an editor's decisions are based on his
critical sensitivity and knowledge of historical, biblio
graphical, and other evidence about final authorial inten
tion. Tanselle's discussion defines "authorial intention"
but provides no positive link between his definition and a
, framework for critical interpretation. What I have done ;
; in Section II is provide this theoretical connection. Now
i
I will illustrate in practical terms how an editor's sensi-i
tivity to the structure of reader response can interact
with his knowledge of external evidence in establishing
37
an author's intended text.
There are three kinds of textual decisions that are j
central to the editor's attempt to establish the intended |
text; these decisions involve:
(1) Separate versions: distinguishing separate versions j
i
of a work that should not be conflated through eclectic J
means and deciding if one version has priority over others.;
i
These decisions are based on critical considerations about j
the structure of the reader's response and on external
evidence such as pre-publication forms of the text, publi
cation history, and external pressure on the author.
*
(2) Copy-text: choosing a copy-text for a critical edi- |
tion is a decision based entirely on Greg's theory and !
3 8
involves no critical interpretation. However, choice of
I
I
copy-text can have an effect on reader response. For j
example, the extant manuscript of The Great Gatsby retains
Fitzgerald's sparse use of commas, while the first edition
text is heavily punctuated as a result of house styling.
By choosing the first edition as copy-text, an editor
adopts its accidentals and thus loses the authorial rhythm
39 1
of the manuscript's style.
190
t (3) Emendations: making corrections and choosing between |
, textual variants. Making corrections in a text involves !
i
| both bibliographical evidence and critical interpretation.
For example, to establish the text of the passage repro
duced in Figure 2, the editors of the Northwestern-
Newberry edition of Typee relied on the structure of the
reader's response in emending "nations" of the English :
first edition and "nation" of the American first edition
I
to "matrons." Here is their explanation: ;
i
The E reading "nations" seems to have struck j
the compositor of A (or perhaps Gansevoort
Melville as he worked over the proofs he '
gave to Putnam) as historically inaccurate. I
The A reading, unchanged in AR, is "nation". |
What the context calls for must be a syno
nym of "mothers" (earlier in the paragraph)
and "dames" (later in the paragraph), which ‘ . I
in Melville's hand could easily be misread
as "nations": "matrons" alone satisfied all \
these requirements, and it is adopted as the
word Melville probably wrote.^0 !
As with corrections, an editor's choice between existing
' variants involves him in critical interpretation and
I
evaluation of all external evidence. j
Decisions about different versions and variant ;
passages and words are decisions about "author's final
intention." They involve cases of "revision" that force 1
. the editor to make choices about what text the author j
intended his audience to read. The textual examples that
41
follow are limited to these cases.
"If, in practice, editors are not going to regard
191
firm support; while with the arms clasped about the trunk, and at regular
intervals sustaining the body, the feet are drawn up nearly a yard at a time,
and a corresponding elevation o f the hands immediately succeeds. In this
way I have seen little children, scarcely five years of age, fearlessly climb
ing the slender pole of a young cocoa-nut tree, and while hanging perhaps
fifty feet from the ground, receive the plaudits of their parents beneath,
who clapped their hands, and encouraged them to mount still higher.
What, thought I, on first witnessing one o f these exhibitions, would
the nervous mothers o f America and England say to a similar display o f
hardihood in any of their children ? The Lacedemonian matrons might
have approved o f it, but most modern dames would have gone into hys
terics at the sight.
At the top of the cocoa-nut tree the numerous branches, radiating on
all sides from a common centre, form a sort of green and waving basket,
between the leaflets of which you just discern the nuts thickly clustering
together, and on the loftier trees looking no bigger from the ground than
bunches o f grapes. I remember one adventurous little fellow—Too-Too
was the rascal’s name—who had built himself a sort of aerial baby-house
in the picturesque tuft o f a tree adjoining Marheyo’s habitation. He used
to spend hours there,—rustling among the branches/and shouting with
delight every time the strong gusts of wind rushing down from the moun
tain’s side swayed to and fro the tall and flexible column on which he was
perched. Whenever I heard Too-Too’s musical voice, sounding strangely
to the ear from so great a height, and beheld him peeping down upon me
from out his leafy covert, he always recalled to my mind Dibdin’s lines—
“There’s a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft,
T o look out for the life of poor Jack.”
Birds—bright and beautiful birds—fly over the valley of Typee. You
see them perched aloft among the immovable boughs o f the majestic
bread-fruit trees, or gently swaying on the elastic branches of the Omoo;
skimming over the palmetto thatching of the bamboo huts; passing like
spirits on the wing through the shadows of the grove, and sometimes de
scending into the bosom of the valley in gleaming flights from the moun
tains. Their plumage is purple and azure, crimson and white, black and
gold; with bills o f every tint:—bright bloody-red, jet black, and ivory
white; and their eyes are bright and sparkling; they go sailing through the
air in starry throngs; but alas! the spell of dumbness is upon them all—
there is not a single warbler in the valley!
Figure 2. Northwestern-Newberry
edition of Typee, p. 215
192 j
; each version as necessarily a separate work, then some :
i rationale is required for distinguishing those instances
i
I
j of revision which are to be edited as separate works from j
■ 42
| those which are not." A reader-response methodology
helps provide such a rationale. In talking about differ
ent versions, we can focus on pre-publication versions
like those for Melville's Billy Budd or Faulkner's
43
Sanctuary. Or we can dxscuss post-publication versions: ,
Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Auden's poems, or James's New ;
44 j
York Edition. All of these pre- and post-publication I
f
, versions could be analyzed in terms of the structure of
the reader's response. A radical restructuring of response
1
would indicate that the editor is dealing with separate
versions that should not be conflated into one critical
text but should be edited separately. |
!
Let me illustrate: Are the two versions of James's [
i
"Four Meetings" different works or merely refinements of
i
one work? "Four Meetings" was originally published in •
Scribner's Monthly in November 1877; a revised version was
i
4 5 1
published in the New York Edition in 1909. In both ver- j
sions Caroline Spencer longs to see Europe more than any
thing else and saves for years to make the trip. She
finally fulfills her dream, but after only 48 hours in
Europe she gives all her money to a worthless cousin and
must return to the U.S. Five years later, the narrator
i
193
; finds her still in New England, now waiting on a fake !
countess (her dead cousin's "wife") and having no i
: I
prospects of ever returning to Europe. ■
From the two versions of the story, the reader |
forms radically different attitudes toward the narrator. ^
The difference is most striking at the very end of the
story (see Figures 3 and 4). Both the reader and narrator
realize that the illusion of serving a countess is all J
that's left of Europe for Caroline, for she has given up j
I
I
, all hope of returning to the Continent. In the 1877 ver- i
!
sion, the narrator is careful not only to leave her illu- j
sion intact but also to refrain from intentionally embar
rassing her about the loss of her dream. When asking j
i
about the loan to her cousin, he corrects himself : "there
was something too methodical in my questions" (p. 55). ’
The 1909 version changes this to a hyperbolic and (in the
i
circumstances) insensitive : "I kept her on the rack"
I
(p. 305). In both versions the narrator resolves not to
take away from Caroline the last connection to her orig- i
t
inal dream, even though it is illusory : the woman j
Caroline is waiting on is obviously not a European coun- j
tess. At the end of the 18 77 version, he is true to his j
I
resolution (p. 56). But in the 1909 version he does
exactly what he resolved not to do : he shows contempt for
the countess (pp. 311-12). When the reader arrives at the
narrator's comment that Caroline "was glad I was going"
194
“ Can she not wait upon herself? ” .
“ She is not used to that.”
“ I see,” said I, as gently as possible.
“ But before you go, tell me this: who is
this lady ? ” ;
“ I told you about her before—that day.
She is the wife of my cousin, whom you
■ saw.” . .
“The lady who was disowned by her
family in consequence of her marriage ? ”
“ Yes; they have never seen .her again.
They have cast her off.”
“And where is her husband?” • -
“ He is dead.” , . • •
“ And where is your money ? ”. '
The poor girl flinched; there was some
thing too methodical in my questions.
“ I don’t know,” she said wearily.
But I continued a moment. •
“ On her husband’ s death this lady came
.over here?” • • i--,
“ Yes, she arrived one day ”--— . ..
“ How long ago ? ” . __ : _
“Two years.” - • • • . ■
“ She has been here ever since ? ”
“ Every moment.” • • , .
“ How does she like it?” • . .
“ Not at all.” / : : - .< ■ } .
“ And how do you like it ? ”
Miss Spencer laid her face in her two
hands an instant, as she had done ten min
utes .before. Then, quickly, she went to get
the countess’ s coffee. .
I remained alone in the little parlor; I
wanted to see more—to learn more. At
the end of five minutes, the young man
whom Miss Spencer had described as the
countess’ s pupil came in. , He stood looking
at me for a moment with parted lips. I saw
he w as- a very weak-eyed young man. _
“ She wants to know if you wont come
out there ? ” he observed at last.
“ Who wants to know ? ” ■
“The countess. That French lady.”
“ She has asked you to bring me ? ” ■ ,
“ Yes, sir,” said the young man feebly,
looking at my six feet of stature.
I went out with him, and we. found the
countess sitting under one of the little
quince-trees in front of the house. She was
drawing a needle through the piece of em
broidery which she had taken from the
sinall table. She pointed graciously to the
chair beside her. I seated myself. M r.
Mixter glanced about him, and then sat
down in the grass at her feet. He gazed
upward, looking with parted lips from the
countess to me.
, “ I am sure you speak French,” said the
countess, fixing her brilliant little eyes upon
me.
“ I do, madam, after a fashion,” I answered,
in the lady’ s own tongue.
“ Voila / ” she cried most expressively. “ I
knew it so soon as I looked at you. You
have been in my poor dear country.”
“ A long time.”
. “ You know Paris ? ”
“ Thoroughly, madame.” And with a
certain conscious purpose I let my eyes
meet her own.
She presently, hereupon, moved her own
and glanced down at Mr. Mixter.
“ What are we talking about ? ” she de
manded of her attentive pupil.:
He pulled his knees up, plucked at the
grass with his hand, stared, blushed a little.
, “ You are talking French,” said M r.
Mixter. . .
. “ L a belle decotiverte/ ” said the countess.
“ Here are ten months,” she explained to
me, “ that I am giving him lessons. Don’ t
put yourself out not to say he’ s a fool; he
wont understand you.” . '
“ I hope your other pupils are more grat
ifying,” I remarked.
“ I have no others. They don’t know
what French is in this place, they don’t
want to know. You may therefore imagine
the pleasure it is to me to meet a person who
speaks it like yourself.” I replied that my
own pleasure was not less, and she went on
drawingher stitches through her embroidery,
with her little finger curled out. Every
few moments she put her eyes close to her
work, near-sightedly. I thought her a very
disagreeable person; she was coarse, affected,
dishonest and no more a countess than I
was a caliph. “ Talk to me of Paris,” she
went on. “ The very name of it gives me
an emotion!. How long since you were
there?” - ; ;-
“ Two months ago.” -
“ Happy man! Tell me something about
it. What were they doing? Oh, for an
hour of the boulevards 1 ”
“ They were doing about what they are
always doing—amusing themselves a good
deal.”
“ At the theaters, eh ? ” sighed the coun
tess. “ At the cafes-concerts—at the little
tables in front of the doors ? Qitelle existence /
You know I am a Parisienne, monsieur,” she
added, “—to my finger-tips.”
, “Miss Spencer was mistaken, then,” I
Figure 3. "Four Meetings," Scribner* s
Monthly, 15 (November 1877), 55
ventured to rejoin, “ in telling me that you
i are a Provengale.”
| She stared a moment, then she put her
nose to her embroidery, which had a dingy,
desultory aspect. “ Ah, I am a Provengale
by birth; but I am a Parisienne by—in
clination.”
“ And by experience, I suppose ? ” I said.
She questioned me a moment with her
hard little eyes. -
“ Oh, experience! I could talk of that if
| I wished., I never expected, for example,
i that experience had this in store for me.”
And she pointed with her bare elbow, and
with a jerk of her head, at every thing that
surrounded her—at the little white house,
; the quince-tree, the rickety paling, even at
' Mr. Mixter. - . - ■ - ... ■
• “ You are in exile! ” I said smiling. ^
“You may imagine what it is! These two
1 years that I have been here I have passed
I hours—hours! One gets used to things,
; and sometimes I think I have got used to
this. But there are some things that are
! always beginning over again. For example,
my coffee.’’
“ Do you always have coffee at this
hour?” I inquired.
She tossed back her head and measured
me. •
. “At what hour would you prefer me to have
; it ? I must have my demi-tasse after breakfast.
“ Ah, you breakfast at this hour ? ” •
i “ At mid-day—comme cela se fait, • Here
they breakfast at a quarter past seven! That
i ‘ quarter past ’ is charming I ” , ;
“ But you were telling me about your
’ coffee,” I observed, sympathetically.
“ My cousine can’ t believe in it; she can’t
understand it. She’ s an excellent girl; but
that little cup of black coffee, with a drop
of cognac, served at this hour—they exceed
her comprehension. So I have to break the
ice every day, and it takes the coffee the
j time you see to arrive. And when it ar-
j rives, monsieur! If I don’ t offer you any
i of it you must not take it ill. It will be
because I know you have drunk it on the
boulevards.” . ......
I resented extremely this scornful treat
ment of poor Caroline Spencer’ s humble
hospitality; but I said nothing, in order
to say nothing uncivil. I only looked on
, Mr. Mixter, who had. clasped his arm s
round his knees and was watching my com
panion’ s demonstrative graces in solemn
fascination. She presently saw that I was
observing him; she glanced at me with a
little, bold, explanatory smile. “ You know,
he adores me,” she murmured, putting her
nose into her tapestry again.. I expressed
the promptest credence and she went on,
“ He dreams of becoming my lover! Yes,
it’ s his dream. He has read - a French
novel; it took him six months. But ever
since that he has thought himself the hero,
and me the heroine 1 ” ' -V .
M r. Mixter had evidently not an idea
that he was being talked about ; he was too
preoccupied with the ecstasy of contem
plation. At this moment Caroline Spencer
came out of the house, bearing a coffee-pot
on a little tray. I noticed that on her way
from the door to the table she1 gave me a
single quick, vaguely appealing glance. ’ I
wondered what it signified;- I felt that it
signified a sort of half frightened longing to
know what, as a man of the world who had
been in France, I thought of the countess.
It made me extremely uncomfortable. I
could not tell her that the countess was
very possibly the runaway wife of a little
coiffeur. I tried suddenly, on the contrary, ,
to show a high consideration for her. - But
I got up; I couldn’t stay longer.- It vexed
me to see Caroline Spencer standing there
like a waiting-maid. - - •
“ You expect to remain some time at Grim-
winter?” I said to the countess. -
She gave a terrible shrug. - f-v--
“ Who knows ? ■ Perhaps for years. ' " When
one is in misery! * ■ -* * Chere belief she
added, turning to Miss Spencer, “ you have
forgotten the cognac !”-- . --5 - s
- I detained - Caroline Spencer" as, after
looking a mOment: in silence at the little
table, she was turning away to get this
missing delicacy/ I silently gave her my
hand in farewell. She looked very tired,
but there was a strange hint of prospective
patience in her severely mild little face. I
thought she was rather glad I was going.
M r. Mixter had risen to his feet and was
pouring out the countess's coffee. As I
went back past the Baptist church I reflected
that poor Miss Spencer had been right in
her presentiment that she should still see j
something of Europe.
Figure 4. "Four Meetings," Scribner1s
Monthly, 15 (November 1877), 56
i (which appears in the final paragraph of both versions), ;
i i
| he makes very different interpretations: in reading the j
| 1877 version, the reader thinks Caroline is glad because |
j the narrator's presence reminds her of her past dream; in
I
reading the 1909 version, he realizes that it is because
of this reason and because of the narrator's attitude
toward the present remnant of that dream. !
Once it has been established (as in the above '
i
example) that the reading experience has been radically j
i
changed, then another question arises: does one version j
f
of a work have priority over another? There are two con- ;
I
I
i
. siderations in answering this question: external influ- j
f
ence on the author and illogical or inconsistent restruc- j
' turing of reader response. The revised American edition
of Typee is an obvious example of external pressure— a
betrayal of active intention— and of a radical weakening :
46 i
of the structure of the reader's response. ;
An even better example is provided in "Sober Second ■
Thoughts: The .'Author's Final Version' of Fitzgerald's i
Tender Is the Night," where Brian Higgins and Hershel ;
Parker compare the 1934 version of Tender with the 1951 :
Cowley edition, which rearranged major sections of the !
i
book with only the slightest rewriting. These textualists
criticize Cowley for following the directions of Fitzgerald
47
which are highly suspect on biographical grounds.
197
1 Higgins and Parker also argue that "as far as aesthetics
f i
> j
! went, Cowley barely asked such superficial critical ques-
, tions as the effect of moving a particular scene about,
much less more profound questions about how any literary j
work is constructed and how any piece of literature
48
affects its readers." Higgins and Parker claim that,
I
by the time Fitzgerald got to the original Book II, "almost1
i
every detail of what he chose to write was to some extent J
a consequence of what he had already written and was
designed to cause certain effects in the mind of the
49
i reader who had already read certain scenes." Thus, when
a large section of the original Book II was placed at the j
►
beginning of the 1951 text with only minimal revisions,
this reordering "caused great damage, in the long run, to
all parts of the novel," resulting in much violent and
50
unintended restructuring of the "reader's response."
In their article on Tender, Higgins and Parker have ;
demonstrated how biographical evidence and reader-response j
analysis can be used together to determine the priority of i
51
one version of a work over another. However, sometimes
the external influences are unclear, the historical evi-
I
dence inconclusive. Then the analysis of the structure of I
reader response must carry the weight of the argument over
priority of versions. This is the case for Hawthorne's
l
"The Hall of Fantasy," which was published in its original {
198
form in Pioneer (February 1843) and then revised for inclu-
52
sion in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The major dif- ,
ference between the two versions is the deletion from the
original of two long passages referring by name to some of
Hawthorne's contemporaries. It is unclear why Hawthorne
made these excisions. Though various commentators have j
speculated about his motivation, no decisive historical j
evidence exists.
However, the differing structures of reader response;
I
do provide a foundation for a choice. For example, as j
i
Figure 5 illustrates, the narrator's expression of affinity
with the group of writers is immediately followed by a
i
declaration that they are a "techy, wayward, shy, proud,
unreasonable set of laurel-gatherers." The reader cannot
help but be confused as he reads first one and then the
other passage; the confusion is a result of a long dele- I
54 I
tion between the two paragraphs. The omitted passage ;
t
contains light satiric thrusts at some of Hawthorne's con- ;
i
temporaries. Hawthorne did not take the trouble to mend
55 '
the gap. The illogical restructuring of the reader's
response in the Mosses version provides an aesthetic !
56 I
reason for giving the original version priority. j
I
What these examples show and what the following
cases will further indicate is that the author's chrono-
i
logically final intention can be overruled. Put most !
“Pray let us look at these water-drinkers,” said I.
So we passed among the fantastic pillars, till we came to
a spot where a number of persons were clustered together,
in the light of one of the great stained windows, which
seemed to glorify the whole group, as well as the marble
that they trod on. Most of them were men of broad fore
heads, meditative countenances, and thoughtful, inward
eyes; yet it required but a trifle to summon up mirth, peeping
out from the very midst of grave and lofty musings. Some
strode about, or leaned against the pillars of the hall, alone
and in silence; their faces wore a rapt expression, as if sweet
music were in the air around them, or as if their inmost
souls were about to float away in song. One or two, perhaps,
stole a glance at the bystanders, to watch if their poetic
absorption were observed. Others stood talking in groups,
with a liveliness of expression, a ready smile, and a light,
intellectual laughter, which showed how rapidly the shafts
of wit were glancing to-and-fro among them.
A few held higher converse, which caused their calm and
melancholy souls to beam moonlight from their eyes. As I
lingered near them— for I felt an inward attraction towards
these men, as if the sympathy of feeling, if not of genius,
had united me to their order—my friend mentioned several
of their names. The world has likewise heard those names;
with some it has been familiar for years; and others are daily
making their way deeper into the universal heart.
“Thank heaven,” observed I to my companion, as we
passed to another part of the hall, “we have done with this
techy, wayward, shy, proud, unreasonable set of laurel-
gatherers. I love them in their works, but have little desire
to meet them elsewhere.”
“You have adopted an old prejudice, I see,” replied my
friend, who was familiar with most of these worthies, being
himself a student of poetry, and not without the poetic flame.
Figure 5. Centenary Edition of
Mosses from an Old Manse, p. 175
contentiously: control of intended text can be taken out
of the hands of the author through an examination of his
torical evidence and the intended structure of the reader's
response.
This argument can even be applied to pre-publication
versions. The choice of a text based on the manuscript of j
i
The Red Badge of Courage (instead of the Appleton first j
57
edition) is an example. Another is the inclusion of the ;
I
58 ■
raft episode in a new edition of Huckleberry Finn. ;
Another responsibility of the editor is choosing !
i
i
between extant variants: here again reader-response anal- i
ysis coupled with all the historical evidence can be ;
!
helpful in making editorial decisions. j
A typical case is provided by Chapter III of Frank
i
Norris's A Man's Woman. Published in 1900 by Doubleday &
i
McClure, this novel was "scored for brutality by many j
59 1
reviewers." A passage in Chapter III describing a
j
surgical operation was particularly criticized. One j
I
reviewer called it "sickening and disgusting" and added j
i
that "such a description out-Zolas Zola, and has no legit
imate place in a work of fiction."60 As a result of such
criticism, the publisher apparently required that Norris
replace the passage in a republication of the novel (sorae-
61
time before 1903).
The variant passages (reproduced in Figures 6 and 7)
are followed immediately by these paragraphs:
S treet located the head of the thigh-bone with his
fingers and abruptly thrust in the knife, describing
Sayre’s cut, going down to the bone itself, F arn-
ham turned back the flap m ade by the sem icircular •
1 incision, and with a large, broad-bladed, blunt- 1
, edged knife, slightly curved upon the flat, pulled ■
I the soft tissues to one side. Street, w ithout looking
away from the incision, held the knife from him, and 1
' Lloyd took it and laid it on the table with her left ’
j hand, at the sam e tim e passing the bistoury to him ‘
i with her right. W ith the bistoury the surgeon, in :
| half a dozen strokes, separated the surrounding in-
j tegum ents from the diseased head of the bone. B ut '
by this tim e the w ound was full of blood. Street j
drew back, and Lloyd washed it clear with one of
; the gauze sponges, throw ing the sponge in the pail S
under the table im m ediately afterw ard. W hen the !
operation was resum ed the surgeon w ent into the
| incision again, b u t this tim e with the instrum ent
I called the periosteal elevator, peeling off the perios- ;
1 teum ,and all the muscles with it,from the bone itself.
' M eanwhile Lloyd had gone to the foot of the table
' and had laid hold of the patient’s leg ju st above the ;
i knee, clasping it with both her hands. D r. Street i
nodded to her, signifying that he was ready, and
Lloyd, exerting her strength, pulled down upon the
■ leg, at the same tim e turning it outw ard. T he hip-
i jo in t dislocated easily, the head of the bone p ro
truding.. W hile Lloyd held the leg in place F arn-
harn p ut a towel under this protruding head, and the
: ■ surgeon, 'w ith ' a ,chain-saw, cut it away in a few
•strokes.' A nd that was all— the joint was exsected.
Figure 6. A Man1s Woman (New York:
Doubleday & McClure, 1900), pp. 64-65
Prom ptly the operation was begun; there was no
delay, no hesitation; what there was to be done had
been carefully planned beforehand, even to the mi
nutest details. Street, a m aster of his profession,
| thoroughly fam iliar with every difficulty that m ight 1
• present itself during the course of the work in hand,
| foreseeing every contingency, prepared for every
I emergency, calm, watchful, self-contained, set about
j the exsecting of the joint with no trace of com punc
tion, no em barrassm ent, no m isgiving. H is assist- j
ants, as well as he himself, knew that life or death
hung upon the issue of the next ten m inutes. U pon
Street alone devolved the life of the little girl. A
second’s hesitation at the w rong stage of the opera-
| tion, a slip of bistoury or scalpel, a trem or of the |
I wrist, a single instant’s clumsiness of the fingers,
i and the Enem y—w atching for every chance, intent
i for every m om entarily opened chink or cranny
} wherein he could th ru st his lean fingers— entered
j the frail tenem ent with a leap, a rushing, headlong
j spring that jarred the house of life to its foundations,
i Low ering close over her head Lloyd felt the shadow
of his approach. H e had arrived there in that com
m onplace little room , with its com m onplace acces-
, sories, its ornam ents, that suddenly seemed so triv
ial, so im pertinent—the stopped French clock, with
its sim pering, gilded cupids, on the m antelpiece; the
photograph of a num ber of picnickers “ grouped ”
on a hotel piazza gazing with monolithic cheerful
ness at this grim business, this struggle of the two
world forces, this crisis in a fife.
T hen abruptly the operation was over.
Figure 7. A Man1s Woman (New York:
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903), pp. 64-
The nurse and surgeons eased their posi
tions immediately, drawing long breaths. They
began to talk, commenting upon the operation, ,
and Lloyd, intensely interested, asked Street j
why he had, contrary to her expectations, j
removed the bone above the lesser trochanter.
He smiled, delighted at her intelligence. !
"It's better than cutting through the neck, ]
Miss Searight," he told her. "If I had gone
through the neck, don't you see, the trochanter
major would come over the hole and prevent the !
discharges."
"Yes, yes, I see, of course," assented
Lloyd. i
The incision was sewn up, and when all was |
over Lloyd carried Hattie back to the bed in
the next room. Slowly the little girl re- j
gained consciousness, and Lloyd began to
regard her once more as a human being. Dur- j
ing the operation she had forgotten the very j
existence of Hattie Campbell, a little girl j
she knew. She had only seen a bit of mechan- |
ism out of order and in the hands of a -. .
repairer. It was always so with Lloyd. . . .
The original portrayal of the operation, with its objec
tive medical descriptions, is consistent with the imper
sonal discussion of the operation that follows it, indi- j
eating that Lloyd "had forgotten the very existence of ' ■
Hattie Campbell," the patient, "a little girl she knew." ;
The reader understand the narrator's point when he reads |
i
that "Lloyd began to regard her once more as a human j
i
being." However, the revised description of the operation j
unintentionally confuses the reader's response. The new !
passage contains the sentences: "His assistants [includ
ing Lloyd], as well as he himself, knew that life or death I
1
|
hung upon the issue of the next ten minutes. Upon Street j
alone devolved the life of the little girl." In the j
204
jrevised form, Lloyd does not forget the little girl. Fur- ^
; i
ithermore, the operation is viewed (melo)dramatically not
I
|objectively by Lloyd and the reader. Thus, in the revised
’state, the drama is anti-climatically followed by an
insensitive discussion; whereas, in the original, the dis
cussion is merely an extension of the impersonal profes
sionalism of the operation. j
Several other textual situations provide similar j
examples where external evidence and reader-response I
i
:structures conspire against the author's chronologically
|final intention: the two added paragraphs at the end of
Chapter 27 of the English edition of Melville's White-
6 2
Jacket, Howells' revision of Irish slurs in An Imperative
63
Duty, Howells' replacement of a character's anti-semitic
64
i remarks in The Rise of Silas Lapham, etc.
i
I V ;
What Hershel Parker claims for Melville is true for j
i
i
other authors as well: "an editor of Melville finds a :
series of . . , ambiguous textual situations in which he
may decide, contrary to Greg, that the author's final 1
65 ^
intentions should not be obeyed." However, any such
decision requires a principled justification: "anyone |
i
arguing for the original reading must elaborate some
alternative to the concept of letting the author himself
6 6
always have the last say about his texts." In this
205
chapter I have attempted to offer such an elaboration by
combining the interpretive conventions of reader-response
criticism with the textualist's procedural conventions of
historical reconstruction.
CHAPTER 8
CONCLUSION
The term "interpretive conventions" is usefully
ambiguous: on the one hand, it refers to conventions of
meaning, interpretive constructs that determine our under- i
|
standing of texts; on the other hand, it also refers to j
conventions of procedure, agreed-upon ways of investiga- |
tion and other purposeful activity. This ambiguity has
been exploited throughout this study. For example, in
discussing the criticism of The Red Badge of Courage, I
argued that critics have used interpretive conventions of
genre and mode (meaning conventions) to make sense of a
maimed text. And in examining the problem of "author's
final intention," I turned the interpretive conventions
of reader-response into procedural conventions for editors.
I
Ultimately, however, this useful ambiguity can be dis- i
i
carded: conventions of meaning are always conventions of
procedure. To describe meaning, in this view, is always
to describe procedures for making meaning: to understand
is to make sense.
207
In Chapter 1 I presented a theory of interpretation i
i
based on conventions of meaning; in Chapter 4 I provided
an account of conventions of procedure (traditional, regu- ;
I
lative, and constitutive). Chapter 5 combined these two j
models into a comprehensive theory of interpretive con
ventions. This theory of interpretive conventions is both j
i
a practical tool for solving specific literary problems j
and a theoretical framework for relating literary study to j
other disciplines. j
I
Chapter 6, on Red Badge criticism, shows that the !
proposed theory provides an approach to literary history.
Chapter 7, on intention, illustrates its usefulness for
textual scholarship. It is a theory of literature which
leads to a method of practical criticism (interpretations ,
— i
based on historical, generic, modal, authorial conventions ,
i
as well as conventions established within individual j
l
works). This theory of interpretive conventions, then, is j
a practical and coherent program for literary study. !
!
But it is more than that. As a theory of conven- j
tions, it relates literary study to the social sciences i
I
which deal with conventions social and linguistic: sociol-!
ogy, social psychology, cultural anthropology, linguistics,'
philosophy of language, and rhetoric. As a theory of :
i
interpretation, it relates literary study to all disci- j
plines that are self-consciously hermeneutic, such as some j
aspects of the philosophy of science, ethnomethodology,
perceptual psychology, and rhetorical criticism. My
strongest claim for this theory of interpretive conven
tions is that ultimately it points toward a systematic
perspective on a wide-range of humanistic studies.
APPENDIX
INTERPRETATION AND EVALUATION
I will conclude this study with some comments on
the relationship between interpretation and evaluation.
In Chapter 2 I proposed a model of the critical enter
prise: a theory of interpretation implies a model for
criticism which in turn implies a model of reading. I
intentionally left out an important aspect of most criti
cal enterprises: an axiology, a system of evaluation.
There is a temptation to say that literary criticism con
sists of two separate projects— interpretation and eval
uation. It is usually thought that first a text is
described and its meaning explicated and explained in
literary interpretation, and then the meaning and the
skill of its conveyance are compared to other valued mean
ings and performances in literary evaluation.
However, as I suggested in Chapter 2, some aspects
of evaluation are interpretive, e.g., explicitly formu
lating the evaluative standard and explaining how a lit
erary work manifests some valued criterion. And values in
turn permeate and surround interpretation. They precede it
in that decisions about objects of interpretation, stand
ards of validity, etc., are value-ridden and antecedent
to interpretation.^" And values are employed following
210
interpretation: standards of judgment are chosen or
assumed, and these standards provide comparative values
for literary evaluation of what is interpreted. i
Interpretation and evaluation then are closely- j
related, and it is impossible to make them distinctly j
I
separate activities. I would like to illustrate this j
premise by examining the implicit role of values in the
descriptive enterprise of reader-response criticism. i
i
2 I
Value is "any object of any interest," wrxtes R.B. Perry, i
Victor Hamm points out another sense of the word: "value [
. . . which we employ so readily and ingenuously, denotes j
to the metaphysician a good he recognizes as a property j
3 !
of being." These two complementary senses of the term
4
will be stressed m the discussion that follows. (
i
Most reader-response approaches are descriptive:
they attempt to describe the interaction of the reader I
i
I
with the text. Affective Stylistics can serve as an |
example. In what follows, I will discuss Stanley Fish's
5 !
work before he abandoned his descriptive focus. >
Affective Stylistics is "an analysis of the devel- j
oping responses of the reader in relation to the words as j
they succeed one another in time."^ As a critical strat
egy, Affective Stylistics is an approach "in which the j
focus of attention is shifted from the spatial context of j
a page and its observable regularities to the temporal
7 :
context of a mind and its experiences." In order to •
accomplish this shift of focus, in order to make the new !
I
focus acceptable to skeptical critics, Fish redefined an j
i
evaluative term: a literary work "is no longer an object, j
i
a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to,
and with the participation of, the reader. And it is this
event, this happening— all of it and not anything that ;
could be said about it or any information one might take j
8
away from it— that is, I would argue, the meaning." Fish 1
I
i
redefines meaning as an event (instead of information con- |
tent) in order to place a greater importance on that event,;
|
to give it a new significance by bestowing on it a higher j
I
priority of interest (a value). That is, Fish takes an j
evaluative term with the highest positive connotations and ,
i
places it approvingly on the experience of the reader in
i
i
interacting with the text: meaning is significant; the j
I
reading experience is meaning; therefore, the reading j
experience is significant. An evaluative process is ~ ;
implicit at the very inception of the method. Does it stop
here?
Fish embraces the notion of a purely descriptive ;
capacity for Affective Stylistics. He regards "evaluation .
not as a theoretical issue but as a subject in the history
9
of taste." In fact, Fish carefully avoids the term eval
uation in any reference to his approach, except to
describe what it is not: "My method allows . . . for no
such fixings of value. In fact it is oriented away from ,
evaluation and toward description.This extreme hesi- j
tancy to use the term results at times in his confusing
interpretation (explanation) with what is actually eval
uation. For example, in describing the reader's exper
ience at the end of Heart of Darkness, Fish calls the ,
reader's moral evaluation of Marlow's lie "the final
interpretive decision." Fish states that "what this novel
has done is disabled you as an interpreter in the sense
that the final pages call for an interpretation . . . one
that you are not able to deliver.Rather, the novel J
has not made an interpretation impossible (Fish's own ]
j
interpretation is evidence of that), but instead it has
made evaluation (judgment of value— in this case ethical
value) impossible for the reader.
Fish's meticulous care to avoid evaluative terms <
seems a result of his desire to guard against a mistake >
i
similar to that of the stylisticians he criticizes: "the ;
absence of . . . any connection between their descriptive
and interpretive acts." Fish's approach bridges this I
!
alleged gap between description and interpretation:
"Interpretive acts [of readers] are what is being
i
12 1
described." In Affective Stylistics, description and !
interpretation are self-consciously one. However, Fish !
zealously avoids making what he considers an unjustified
i
jump from interpretation to evaluation. He implies that j
there is no connection between his interpretive and eval-
I
i
uative acts. I would like to discuss the inevitability of
making just such a connection within his Literature-in-
the-Reader Approach.
The answers to the following questions illustrate
the importance of implicit values in Affective Stylistics: I
(1) Where should a literary critic focus his attention:
i
(Definitional Value)
(2) What is the "proper response" to literature? (Norm
ative or Prescriptive Value)
(3) How is "good" literature distinguished from "bad" j
literature? (Comparative Value)
(4) What ethical concerns are present? (Ethical Value)
Concerning Definitional Value: Where should a lit- ,
erary critic focus his attention? Affective Stylistics is :
explicit in its answer: the interaction of reader and
text, the structure of the reader's response, the reader's
experience. I don't think it is trivializing Kierkegaard' s
phrase to call this answer a "leap of faith." As Earl
Miner observes, a reader response critic begins with "the j
presumption that attention to the reader is a critical
13
necessity." That is, an Affective Stylistician believes
that the reader's experience is most important in literary j
criticism, and he requires no self-justifying proof for !
i
_________________ 214 1
this belief. The reader's response becomes an ultimate
i
concern in this critic's literary microcosm; everything
else in his interpretation becomes significant only in
terms of its relation to this ultimate concern. He estab
lishes a value.
The recognition of the ultimate value of the
1
reader's response results in "a procedure which is from j
the very beginning organizing itself in terms of what is 1
i
significant." In other words, "an interpreting entity, '
endowed with purposes and concerns, is, by virtue of its 1
i
very operation, determining what counts as the facts to be ;
observed; and, moreover, that since this determining is I
i
not a neutral marking out of a valueless area, but the
extension of an already existing field of interests, it .is ,
14
an interpretation." Or more precisely an evaluation.
This initial positing of value, then, determines |
what else is seen as significant. Thus, Fish values the j
activities of the reader; "the making and revising of !
assumptions, the rendering and regretting of judgments, 1
the coming to and abandoning of conclusions, the giving |
and withdrawing of approval, the specifying of causes, the j
asking of questions, the supplying of answers, the solving
of puzzles." Finding "value in temporal phenomena," Fish
especially emphasizes the commitment and choice of the
15
reader in his progressing interaction with the text.
Evaluation, then, is implicit at the very inception '
I
of the Literature-in-the-Reader Approach: first, the j
I
reader's response is seen as significant and good— read- |
ing involves "what it is to be human"and then the J
activities within that response (decisions, commitments,
etc.) are valued as part of the reader's experience.
Whether a comparative or ethical value is also given to !
all of these activities remains to be seen. J
i
Concerning Normative or Prescriptive Value: What i
is the "proper response" to literature? i
i
"What is being specified from either perspective j
[authorial intention or reader response] are the condi- j
tions of utterance, of what could have been understood to |
I
17
have been meant by what was said." Reading requires ,
certain things of the reader: he must do them in order to
read. In this way, Affective Stylistics joins Speech Act '
i
Theory and moves from description to evaluation, from is j
to ought— from "the reader is reading" to "he ought to
respond to the conditions of utterance." (As Searle
points out, this commitment to reading conventions has
18 i
"no necessary connection with morality.")
I
i
A second prescriptive value is posited by Fish when j
he describes his "Informed Reader." After specifying some
of the characteristics of the Informed Reader, Fish com-
i
ments: "I would want to say that his experience of the I
sentence will be not only different from,'but.better than, !
19 i
his less-informed fellows." A conditional imperative is j
I
t
implicit here: If a reader wants to get the best exper-
ience (a more forceful phrase than "proper response") in j
reading, then he must possess the characteristics of the
Informed Reader, i.e., he should be or become an informed j
|
reader. Prescriptive statements become more explicit in j
i
Fishian sentences beginning, "What he [the reader] does
20 i
(or should do) ..." Description and evaluative pre- i
scription seem closely intertwined in such analysis. |
Fish has raised a question about his method that !
involves another type of prescription: "Is this method a
method of reading or an analysis of what's happening in |
I
the reading process? Am I training people so that they
t
will read differently than they ever have before or am I
training people to be able to bring to analytical light j
what they've been doing when they've been reading? . . . ;
Strong claim: progressively make conscious what's been
happening subconsciously; pr is it: work in this method
21 '
forms what you're going to be doing?"
I
Is the method primarily analysis or training, • : *
description or prescription? This question can be
answered in two ways: First, if the method leads to an
accurate analysis of the structure of a reader's response,
i
I
the teaching of the method will reinforce (by making more j
self-conscious) this reading process. So, though the [
question is "either/or" the answer is "both": Affective
f
Stylistics is both analysis and training. Second, if the j
method does not produce an accurate analysis^of^a reader's
response, then another question arises: could the teach
ing of the method train the reader to read in a manner
radically different from the way he naturally does? If
yes, then at the very least the training must actualize
some potentiality already present. Then the question
becomes: should this potentiality be actualized?
I
In sum, if the model is valid, then Affective j
Stylistics first describes the commitment of the reader j
to certain conventions and hypothesizes an Informed Reader j
who has "better": reading experiences; then it prescribes
that a reader must commit himself to the reading conven-
i
tions in order to read and that a less-informed reader j
should become an informed reader. If the model is not j
valid, then the teacher/critic must decide whether to ^
actualize the potentialities affected by the Literature-
in-the-Reader method. In other words, with the model
valid. Affective Stylistics involves prescriptive values; ,
i
with the model invalid, the question becomes one of com-
!
parative and ethical values. I will proceed as if the
model were valid (the former assertion), but in so pro
ceeding I will directly deal with the issues raised in the
latter question: comparative and ethical values.
Concerning Comparative Value: What is "good lit
erature?" Or what response should good literature pro- |
I
voke? Here Fish meets the evaluative question head-on: ' 1
"My method . . . is oriented away from evaluation and J
toward description. It is difficult to say on the basis j
of its results that one work is better than another or
22 '
even that a single work is good or bad." Is Fish's dxs- j
claimer misleading? Are there any "literary values" j
I
(necessarily comparative) that can be inferred from the
2 3
Literature-in-the-Reader Approach? (Of course, for the
reader-response critic any literary values must be defined
in terms of reader experiences.)
Fish's work implies a view of art explicit in the '
writings of several critics: Art is valued disorder.
Morse Peckham and Wolfgang Iser, among others, view art
I
I
in this way. Peckham writes, "Art is rehearsal for those j
i
real situations in which it is vital for our survival to ;
i
endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of valida-i
i
tion by affective congruence when such validation is inap- ;
I
propriate because too vital interests are at stake; art is
the reinforcement of the capacity to endure disorienta- j
tion so that a real and significant problem may emerge." j
Likewise, Iser comments, "If reading were to consist of
nothing but an uninterrupted building up of illusions, it
would be a tsuspect,:'if not downright dangerous, process: j
instead of bringing us into contact with reality, it would ;
i
wean us away from realities. . . . There are some texts i
i
»
which offer nothing but a harmonious world, purified of
all contradiction and deliberately excluding anything that
might disturb the illusion once established, and these are
the texts that we generally do not like to classify as
24
literary." j
In these passages Peckham and Iser seem to embrace
the evaluative criterion of disorientation. Similarly,
Fish writes: "In general, I am drawn to works which do
not allow the reader the security of his normal patterns
I
of thought and belief. It would be possible I suppose to j
i
erect a standard of value on the basis of this prefer- |
*
ence— a scale on which the most unsettling of literary
experiences would be the best (perhaps literature is what
disturbs our sense of self-sufficiency, personal and lin
guistic)— but the result would probably be more a reflec
tion of a personal psychological need than of a univer- 1
25
sally true aesthetic." That is, disorientation for Fish
!
is a personal preference, unconnected (he feels) with his i
!
method which only describes/interprets and doesn't eval- j
i
uate; according to Fish, the Literature-in-the-Reader j
Approach erects no standard of value on the basis of the i
disorienting effects it seems to find so often within the
(
reader's experience (its ultimate concern). j
It is easy to see, however, that Affective ;
Stylistics lends itself to being "linked up" with such
evaluative standards: critics (Fish, Iser, Peckham, and
others) with an evaluative bias toward "literature as dis
orientation" could easily use a methodology that values j
(makes significant) commitments, choices, judgments, and j
other reader confrontations with text. Indeed, Affective ;
Stylistics, as an approach to the reader's experience,
seems to put pressure on the critic using it to value cer
tain literary criteria, e.g., disorientation. This ten- :
I
dency refers us backward to the evaluative assumption upon j
which the Literature-in-the-Reader Approach was based and |
forward to a concern with the ethical values also implicit |
in the method. The ultimate concern for the reader's
experience and the disorienting content of many of those
experiences leads us from literary value to ethical value j
|
(the valued effects of that disorientation). j
i
Concerning Ethical Value: What ethical concerns I
I
t
are implicit in the approach?
Walter Fisher, a rhetorician discussing value-laden
discourse, argues that "Human communication implies, if it !
i
I
does not explicitly present, contentions and conceptions j
2 6 j
of the good." A set of ethical values can be observed I
in any type of discourse, be it public address, literature,
or literary criticism. Affective Stylistics is especially I
susceptible to such analysis. The Literature-in-the-
1
Reader method, especially as applied by Fish, is a morally-^
I
based approach to literature. It is concerned with
ethical values in at least three ways: it describes !
ethical attitudes actualized in the reader by the text;
it begins with ethical assumptions about reading and being j
s
human; and it pressures the critic to accept certain ;
I
ethical values, i.e., the use of the method "is produc- |
I
tive of" ethical values. j
An important part of the subject matter of Affective
j
Stylistics involves ethical attitudes formed by the reader !
in his interaction with the text. The reader is pres
sured to judge, to take stands, to become committed (in j
an ethical sense), to evaluate, that is, to concern him
self with moral issues (goodness, right action) while
reading literature. Numerous examples can be cited from
I
I
experiential criticism: "This, then, is the structure of j
the reader's experience— the transferring of a moral label !
i
27 I
from a thing to those who appropriate it," and "You are
invited to take contradictory moral attitudes toward the
2 8
various personages who turn up in the novel." Of course,
this interest in moral questions is a descriptive concern
of the method and not an ethically evaluative one. But
this interest does indicate the inevitable involvement with
morality in the method's treatment of literature.
My second point is less a descriptive aspect of the
i
approach and more an evaluative one. Affective Stylistics |
i
has as its ultimate concern the experience of the reader.
This concern is arrived at through an evaluative leap of
faith by the reader-response critic. He places the
highest possible value (literary and ethical) on the read
ing experience: "notions of what it is to read . . . are i
29
finally . . . notions of what it is to be human." Fish j
writes elsewhere: "my set is toward the message for the
1
sake of the human and moral content all messages neces- I
I
30 1
sarily display." Continually, Fish makes morally eval- i
i
uative judgments: "my larger objection [to the goal of |
i
the stylisticians] is that it is unworthy, for it would
deny to man the most remarkable of his abilities, the
ability to give the world meaning rather than to extract
31
a meaning that is already there." And this moral objec
tion is not accidental nor is it an idiosyncrasy of Fish;
rather it is a direct consequence of his method's ulti-
mate concern, the reader. i
I
I
I would contend, then, that at the center of !
Affective Stylistics is a pressure to hold and promote j
certain ethical values. There is at the very least a '
i
directing force within the method— initiated by its ulti
mate concern (with the reader) and focused by its subject
matter (confrontation with text)— to see literary disor
ientation as an ethical value. That is, since the reader
is the central concern of Affective Stylistics, and since
disorientation in his interaction with the text helps him
to grow, literary disorientation is morally valuable (it
is good). The reader's enrichment through temporary dis
order in literary experience is central to the approaches
of critics like Iser and Peckham. And to quote Fish
again: "perhaps literature is what disturbs our sense of
32
self-sufficiency, personal and linguistic." This eval
uative insight does not merely illustrate a "psychologi
cal need" (as Fish suggests), but rather it evidences a
pressure that exists within the method itself.
In "The Bad Physician: The Case of Sir Thomas
33
Browne," Fish carefully distinguishes between part one
in which he uses his method on Browne's prose and the
second part which he claims is his personal evaluation
unconnected with his Literature-in-the-Reader Approach.
Fish notes that in Browne's work "the moment of insight
reflects backward to his skill rather than inward to our
edification." Fish sums up his evaluation: "in brief,
what sets Browne apart from those with whom he shares so
much is the absence in his work of their intentions, which
are rhetorical in a very special sense. They seek to
change the minds of their readers. . . . In all of these
works, an uncomfortable and unsettling experience is
offered as the way to self-knowledge, in the hope that
I self-knowledge will be preliminary to the emergence of a
' I
I better self, with a better (or at least more self-aware) j
i
jmind." Fish concludes these comments with a revealing
i remark: "And by offering that experience rather than j
another, these works shift the focus of attention from j
themselves and from what is happening in their formal con- I
: !
fines to the reader and what is happening in the confines j
34 •
of his m m d and heart." Thus, edifying disorientation
within these valued devotional writings (excluding
I
: Browne's) leads us back to the ultimate concern, the j
j reader. !
There is a circularity here not of argument but of
effect: The reader and his response are valued; disor- j
ientation is valued because it helps the reader grow, i.e.,;
he becomes a better reader and person; and thus his read
ing experience becomes more valuable. Fish argues, "I can j
i
simultaneously say that the use of this approach will not !
I
only allow you to see what you've been doing while reading
but will make you a better performer in reading which is j
I
what Milton wants you to do, but that's not what every- i
body wants . . . the Miltonic aesthetic is unique . . . j
35
not one that can be applied to everyone." As a matter ^
!
of fact, the experiential critic does apply it to everyone ;
(not descriptively, but evaluatively): authors, readers,
and critics should (and usually do) want the reader to I
225
perform better. This imperative is, again, a direct
result of the ultimate concern with the reader's exper- !
j
ience. The reader response critic values that text which, •
\
for example, disorients the reader and helps him to grow— !
I
to become a better reader and person. This is a good, a
positive ethical value for the experiential critic.
Affective Stylistics, then, is not only generally evalua-
i
tive but also specifically moral. j
I
I
Fish's Literature-in-the-Reader approach to criti- ■
cism is the most convincing method available that claims j
to approximate the reader's experience. Within the ;
i
approach other literary theories are "redefined in terms j
3 6 I
of potential and probable response." Therefore, if the '
structure of the reader's response is considered of utmost
importance, then other literary approaches describing
response to response should take their starting point from I
i
such experiential criticism.
i
Though outwardly embracing only the descriptive
capabilities of his method, Fish appears to be restraining i
t
i
a desire to bring in evaluative criteria. He admits a
"hierarchy" in his own tastes, and points out that he only •
works (in print) with texts of indisputable literary value.
Though he admits his own evaluation and recognizes the
evaluative function of criticism, he makes no attempt (and
in fact denies the possibility) of linking his methodology
. with evaluative criteria by virtue of any intrinsic logic
i of the method. Rene Wellek, among others, stresses that \
I 37 !
: "the final task of the critic is evaluation." If >
Affective Stylistics is to help redirect the attention of
i i
critics away from an objective, spatialized text and
toward the temporal reading experience, then some attempt
must be made to show either that it is possible to link up J
the method with evaluation or that the method's assump- j
tions require certain evaluative criteria (evaluative cri- !
I
’ teria derived directly from its basic assumptions).
Since Affective Stylistics is a method of analysis
that examines the moment-by-moment experience of the
reader as he is being pressured by the text, the results |
i
of this analysis can be used by many schools of criticism
as raw material (just as Affective Stylistics uses the
formalist insights of New Criticism and Linguistics). A ;
Marxist critic will see if the reader is being manipulated j
in an orthodox manner, the Myth critic will ask what !
archetypal responses to the reading experience occur, etc.
3 8
These critics will discuss the "response to a response,"
I
and they will go off in as many different directions as j
i
there are critics.
I have contended, however, that Affective Stylistics^
I
I
when its assumptions are properly understood, holds forth
the possibility either that a certain approach to
i
227
evaluating literature arises out of the assumptions of the i
method or that the ethical assumptions point to restraints i
i
upon the directions that critics can go with the analysis. j
These are restraints on the description of the response to J
a response, and these restrictions call for a consistency j
between the method and the evaluative theory to which the j
method is linked, i.e., the ethical assumptions of \
Affective Stylistics demand that the method be used by
certain value-related schools of criticism. :
"Criticism, insofar as it is rational inquiry, can- j
not escape from the limitations placed upon it by its !
basic assumptions. As with theologians, each school of
39
critics naturally believes in its own premises." As I |
have shown in this essay, the assumptions and methodology
of Affective Stylistics are value-laden, Furthermore, the
ethical values arising out of its premises make the !
(
Literature-in-the-Reader method more appropriate to human- ,
istic approaches to literature, those which value the ,
growth of the reader. My most important claim is what I
c i
have been emphasizing in the last part of this chapter: |
f
Affective Stylistics is a moral approach to literature m I
1
and of itself.
i
I
228
Notes for Chapter 1
Richard H. Popkin, "History of Skepticism," in The '
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, ed. Paul Edwards (New
York: Macmillan Co., 1967), p. 449. j
I
2
Wallace Martin, "Interpretation," in Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger,
enlarged edition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1974), p. 943. Martin also points out that "although ;
sometimes used as if it were synonymous with 'interpreta- !
tion,' the word 'hermeneutics,' traditionally associated
with biblical exegesis, is now generally employed to j
designate interpretive theory." j
3
Quentin Skinner, "Motives, Intentions and the
Interpretation of Texts," New Literary History, 3 (Winter
1972), 394. The phrase "getting at the message" is quoted J
from Richard Kuhns, "Criticism and the Problem of Inten- I
tion," The Journal of Philosophy, 57 (January 1960), 7. ,
5
4 !
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New j
Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. 8.
5
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., "The Norms of Interpretation— A
Brief Response," Genre, 2 (1969), 59.
6 f
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., "Three Dimensions of Hermeneu- i
tics," New Literary History, 3 (Winter 1972), 246. !
I
7 ’
Ibid., p. 250; see also Hirsch, Validity, p. 8. !
8
Introduction to Jameson's translation of Wilhelm
Dilthey, "The Rise of Hermeneutics," New Literary History,
3 (Winter 1972), 230. i
i
i
i
9
John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York: j
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), pp. 342-43.
10 i
Monroe C. Beardsley, "Textual Meaning and Authorial ,
Meaning," Genre, 1 (July 1968), 179. j
^Monroe C. Beardsley, quoted in Martin, p. 943.
229
12 '
Monroe C. Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., "The j
Affective Fallacy," Sewanee Review, 17 (Winter 1949), rpt. :
in W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., The Verbal Icon; Studies in the j
Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky.: Univ. of Kentucky, i
1954), p. 21. The Intentional and Affective Fallacies are I
usually understood as prohibitions against focusing on j
either the intention of the author or the effect on a i
reader in interpreting or evaluating the literary text.
13
Stanley Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affec
tive Stylistics," New Literary History, 2 (Autumn 1970),
140.
14
Norman N. Holland, "Transactive Criticism: Re- ,
Creation Through Identity," Criticism, 18 (Fall 1976), 340.;
---------- i
15 i
Norman N. Holland, Poems in Persons: An Intro- j
duction to the Psychoanalysis of Literature (New York: j
W.W. Norton & Co., 1973), p. 2. Holland's claims about j
the status of the text are much more complex than these i
two quotations indicate; see my Chapter 3, section I. j
t
"^Wolfgang Iser, "The Reading Process: A Phenom- |
enological Approach," New Literary History, 3 (Winter 1972)^
279. For a detailed account of Iser's approach, see
Chapter 3, especially section III.
17
Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting 'Interpreting the
Variorum,'" Critical Inquiry, 3 (Autumn 1976), 195. See ;
Chapters 2 and 3 for a fuller account of Fish's past and
present approaches.
18 •
Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," j
Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976), 467. j
19
Beardsley, "Textual Meaning," p. 172.
20
G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of |
Final Authorial Intention," Studies in Bibliography, 29 j
(1976), 176. For Hirsch's discussion of the concept, see j
Validity, pp. 1-4. |
^Hirsch, "Norms," p. 58.
22
Hirsch, Validity, pp. 3-4.
23
Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," pp. 484-85. I
For Fish's account of how interpreters create certain
texts rather than others, see "Interpreting the Variorum," j
pp. 481-83. |
!
24 i
Ibid., p. 477. i
!
25t, . , :
Ibid.
26Ibid., p. 479.
i
27 !
M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (London: i
Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 26. j
2 8
"Textual Meaning," pp. 179-80.
t
29 I
Richard Strier, "The Poetics of Surrender: An !
Exposition and Critique of New Critical Poetics," Critical
Inquiry, 2 (Autumn 1975), 174.
30 '
Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," p. 476. !
(
^M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3rd
ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 60.
32 I
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., "Some Aims of Criticism," in j
Literary Theory and Structure: Essays in Honor of William
K. Wimsatt, ed. Frank Brady, John Palmer, and Martin Price
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), p. 52. See also I
Tanselle, pp. 176-77, n. 19. :
3 3 I
Stanley E. Fish, "How Ordinary Is Ordinary Lan- j
guage?" New Literary History, 5 (Autumn 1973), p. 52. See :
also Stanley E. Fish, "How to Do Things with Austin and
Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism," MLN, !
91 (October 1976), 1011-23. j
i
34
Skinner, "Motives," p. 394; the quote within this
quote is taken from Kuhns, p. 7, with italics added by
Skinner. Cf., for example, Morton Bloomfield, "Allegory
as Interpretation," pp. 303-17, and William Righter, "Myth i
and Interpretation," pp. 319-44, in New Literary History,
3 (Winter 1972).
231
3 3 •
Cf. Cleanth Brooks, "New Criticism," in Preminger,;
pp. 567-68, especially: "These critics, then, have |
attempted to take the full context into account and to see j
each individual word of a work, not only as contributing i
to the context, but as deriving its exact meaning from its !
place in the context. Hence the development of terms like
irony, plurisignation, ambiguity, etc., to indicate the
richness and complication of meanings developed in a
poetic context" (p. 568).
"^Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, pp. 146, 149. i
i
3 7 i
Strier, "Poetics of Surrender," p. 175. The page ;
numbers cited in the text of this paragraph refer to this :
article.
i
i
3ft I
Ibid., p. 171. Cf. Fish, "Literature in the I
Reader," pp. 126-29. j
i
39 !
J. Hillis Miller, "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition I
and Narrative Line," Critical Inquiry, 3 (Autumn 1976), 74.!
40
Bloomfield, p. 303. The page numbers cited in
the text of the next two paragraphs refer to this article.
^Ibid. , p. 309.
42
Ibid., p. 303.
43
Ibid., p. 311.
44
See the discussion later in this chapter, "Meth
odology II: Validity in Interpretation vs. Interpretive
Freeplay."
^Bloomfield, p. 313.
^Ibid. , p. 314.
47
Geoffrey Hartman, "Literary Criticism and Its
Discontents," Critical Inquiry, 3 (Winter 1976), 216.
^Abrams, Glossary, p. 37.
i 49
See Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional
Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The !
' Verbal Icon, pp. 3-39. i
, --------------------------------- ^ I
1 50
Cf. W.K. Wimsatt, "Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited,'1 ;
in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas
Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1968), pp. 210-11, and Fish, "Interpreting the
Variorum," p. 476.
^See Hirsch, Validity, pp. 146-47.
^See Tanselle, p. 180.
53
Cf. Beardsley, "Textual Meaning," pp. 172-74, and
Quentin Skinner, "Hermeneutics and the Role of History,"
New Literary History, 7 (Autumn 1975), 215.
54
Compare, for example, the work of intentionalists
like Hirsch and Tanselle with that of anti-intentionalists
, like Wimsatt and Beardsley. The former group will focus ]
on "authorial meaning." while the latter emphasizes "public J
meaning," but both talk about valid (or correct) interpre
tations. See Beardsley, "Textual Meaning," p. 173.
■^Wimsatt, "Genesis," p. 222.
~*^In this paragraph references to Validity are I
cited in the text. For other discussions of the Inten- j
tional Fallacy, see Tanselle, p. 170, n. 8. j
57MLN, 85 (1970), pp. 791-802.
5 8
Inclusion of Beardsley here is my decision not
Hancher's. Since the only standard for validity that
Hancher seems to recognize is Hirsch's, "authorial mean- i
ing" may be the only object of a science of interpretation !
that Hancher accepts as valid. Under that premise !
Beardsley's search for public meaning is not "scientific." I
But it is not self-consciously an art of interpretation !
either because it claims a standard of validity for its
object, public meaning. Now, Hancher might claim that
Beardsley's enterprise is art rather than science whether
Beardsley knows it or not; or he might claim that
Beardsley's theory is scientific rather than artful because
233
I Beardsley does have a standard of validity (even though it
i is misguided). Handler's decision would depend on whether ■
: a search for authorial meaning or a standard of validity j
i was more important in identifying a science of interpre- i
j tation. I assume here that he would choose a standard of
i validity as the determining criterion.
59 ' ^
Jacques Derrida, L'Ecriture et la difference
: (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 411; translation from Jonathan
Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structutalism, Linguistics,
, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1975), p. 247.
I
6 0 1
See M.H. Abrams, "Rationality and Imagination in j
Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth," Critical j
Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976), 456-58, and "The Deconstructive j
Angel," Critical Inquiry, 3 (Spring 1977), 425-38; and i
I J. Hillis Miller, "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the i
Narrative Line," Critical Inquiry, 3 (Autumn 1976), 57-77, ;
and "The Critic as Host," Critical Inquiry, 3 (Spring 1977)/
439-47. Cf. the debate between Jacques Derrida, "Signa
ture Event Context," and John R. Searle, "Reiterating the ■ ;
Difference: A Reply to Derrida," Glyph, 1 (1977), 172- j
208. I
^Abrams, "Rationality and Imagination," p. 457. j
6 2 1
Abrams, "Deconstructive Angel," p. 426. i
6 3 i
Ibid., pp. 427-28; Abrams is quoting from J. I
Hillis Miller, "Tradition and Difference," Diacritics, 2 |
1 (Winter 1972), 8, 12. j
64
J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as
Cure, II," The Georgia Review, 30 (Summer 1976), 337. j
65 '
Abrams, "Deconstructive Angel," p. 435, emphasis j
'added. i
Hirsch, "Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics," i
p. 252. |
i
^Skinner, "Hermeneutics," p. 227. 1
234
C O
See Hartman, pp. 217-18, and Skinner, "Herme
neutics," p. 210.
69
OED and Webster's New Twentieth Century Dic
tionary of the English Language, 2nd ed. (1962).
70
Harold Bloom, "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression,"
Critical Inquiry, 2 (Winter 1975), 242.
71
See, for example, Miller's translating and
retranslating of the "key word" cure by using its etymo
logical history, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure,"
I, The Georgia Review, 30 (Spring 1976), 7-10.
72
Cf. Fish's discussion of the "standard story" in
"How to Do Things with Austin and Searle," p. 1019.
73
Abrams, "Deconstructive Angel,"
P-
438.
74
Miller, "Ariadne's Thread," p. 70.
75
Miller, "Stevens' Rock," I, pp. 11-■12.
^Miller, "Ariadne's Thread," p. 74.
77
Abrams, "Deconstructive Angel," p. 432.
78 . ,
Ibid., p. 433.
79
Cf. Hartman, p. 218.
8 0
Beardsley, "Textual Meaning," p. 173.
81„. .
Skinner, "Hermeneutics," p. 216 •
82„ .
Hartman, p. 216.
83Culler, p. 11.
84
Bloomfield, p. 305.
8 5
Hirsch, "Some Aims of Criticism," p. 52, and
Fish, "Ordinary Language," p. 52.
I
1 8 6
I Fish, "Ordinary Language," p. 52.
8 7
Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos: Biology,
Behavior, and the Arts (New York: Sehocken Books, 1965),
pp. 68, 69, 70.
O p
See Beardsley, "Textual Meaning," pp. 173-74.
^Hirsch, Validity, p. 31.
91 ]
Tanselle, p. 177. ;
I
^Hirsch, Validity, 207. '
i
93 i
The phrase "communal interpretive strategies"
is nearly synonymous with "interpretive conventions." The
difference between the two phrases resides in the fact that
they imply different hermeneutic theories within which they
function as jargon terms. As will be seen in Chapters 3
and 5, my theory of interpretive conventions partially
builds on Fish's theory of interpretive communities.
94
See Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," p. 480: ;
"It seems then that the price one pays for denying the !
priority of either forms or intentions is an inability to !
say how it is that one ever begins." Cf. Hubert L. !
Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artifi
cial Reason (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 200: i
A phenomenological description of our exper- |
ience of being-in-a-situation suggests that
we are always already in a context or situa- j
tion which we carry over from the immediate !
past and update in terms of events that in !
the light of this past situation are seen to
be significant. We never encounter meaning
less bits in terms of which we have to iden
tify contexts, but only facts which are i
already interpreted and which reciprocally ■
236
! define the situation we are in. Human exper
ience is only intelligible when organized in
j terms of a situation in which relevance and
l significance are already given.
I 95
| Wallace Stevens' oft-cited adage, quoted in
| Miller, "Stevens' Rock," I, p. 9; cf. Stanley E. Fish,
"Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader," Critical
Inquiry, 1 (June 1975), 891, and Fish, "How to Do Things
with Austin and Searle," p. 1022.
Notes for Chapter 2
i See, for example, Leroy Searle, "Tradition and j
| Intelligibility: A Model for Critical Theory," New
' ■ Literary History, 7 (Winter 1976) , 393-415.
2
Stanley B. Greenfield, "The Unmistakable Stephen
Crane," PMLA, 73 (December 1958), 562; Greenfield is
quoting from Stallman's Introduction to the Modern Library !
Edition of The Red Badge of Courage (New York: Random
House, 1951), pp. xxiv-xxv. i
3
Stanley E. Fish, "What Is Stylistics and Why Are
They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" in Approaches
to Poetics, ed. Seymour Chatman (New York, 1973), !
, pp. 148-49. J
I
I
4 1
Cf. Quentin Skinner, "Hermeneutics and the Role of :
History," New Literary History, 7 (Autumn 1975), p. 210.
5
See Chapter 6, section II (especially footnote 48)
for detailed examples of synchronic and diachronic expla- |
nation.
®For a fuller account of the relationship between
interpretation and evaluation, see Appendix.
7
Any model of criticism should also include an
axiology. But I will postpone any additional discussion j
of the non-interpretive aspects of evaluation until the j
Appendix.
I
8 '
Cf. David Bleich, "The Subjective Paradigm in i
Science, Psychology, and Criticism," New Literary History, '
7 (Winter 1976), 313.
i
9 I
Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," \
Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976), 465-85; all page '
references made in the text of this chapter refer to this j
article. ,
■^Fish, "What Is Stylistics?" pp. 143-44.
I
■^Fish, "What Is Stylistics?" pp. 148-49.
12 . 1
Fish quotes Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can't j
Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (New York: Harper &
Row, 1972), p. 136: "There must be some way of avoiding
the self-contradictory regress of contexts, or the incom- |
prehensible notion of recognizing an ultimate context, as
the only way of giving significance to independent, neu
tral facts. The only way out seems to be to deny the sep
aration of fact and situation . . . to give up the inde
pendence of. the facts arid understand them as a product of
the situation" ("What is Stylistics?" p. 148, n. 37), :
emphasis added. ■
!
13
Psychoanalytic criticism (like Norman Holland's)
presents a distinctly different case. It resembles the I
reader-oriented criticism of Fish in that both value the i
reader's experience and set out to describe it. The dis
tinction, of course, is in the level of response
described: conscious vs. unconscious. (See Victor Erlich,
"Reading Conscious and Unconscious," College English 36
[March 1975], 766-75.) Therefore, Fish is right when he |
implies that there is no theoretical justification for j
claiming his method's priority over psychoanalytic crit- !
icism. (See "Interpreting the Variorum," pp. 481-82.)
14
See Richard Strier, "The Poetics of Surrender:
An Exposition and Critique of New Critical Poetics," j
Critical Inquiry, 2 (Autumn 1975), 171-89. In this cri
tique of American New Criticism and its emphasis on the
connotative flow, Strier's argument for attending to syn- j
tactic and dramatic structure dovetails nicely with Fish's i
analysis of the temporal reading experience.
i
15
Fish's concluding statement m "Interpreting the
Variorum" is paradigmatic of his use of intuitive evi- ;
dence: "you will agree with me (that is, understand) only |
if you already agree with me" (p. 485). Regarding psycho- |
linguistic evidence: Fish has noted the work of percep- j
tual psychologists like T.G. Bever ("What Is Stylistics?" i
p. 151). Supportive evidence for a model of perceptual j
habits in reading can be found in works such as The Liter- j
ature of Research in Reading with Emphasis on Models, ed.
Frederick B. Davis (New Brunswick, N.U . : Rutgers, 1971);
Psycholinguistics and Reading, ed. Frank Smith (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973); and J.A. Fodor et al..
The Psychology of Language (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
For Fish's use of critical evidence, see the citation of j
239
; other critics' reading responses in his Surprised by Sin; !
The Reader in Paradise Lost (1967; rpt. Berkeley: Univ.
1 of California Press, 1971), and the first two sections of
j "Interpreting the Variorum." j
I 16
See Stanley E. Fish, "Facts and Fictions: A
Reply to Ralph Rader," Critical Inquiry, 1 (June 1975),
883-91.
17
Earl Miner, review of Self-Consuming Artifacts by ;
Stanley Fish, JEGP, 72 (October 1973), 536. i
18
Stanley Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affec
tive Stylistics," New Literary History, 2 (Autumn 1970),
147.
i
i
19 I
Cf. Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts:
The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley:!
Univ. of California Press, 1972), especially p. 371: "In
all of these works, an uncomfortable and unsettling exper- ;
ience is offered as the way to self-knowledge, in the hope ,
that self-knowledge will be preliminary to the emergence i
of a better self, with a better (or at least more self-
aware) mind." See the Appendix to the present study,
"Interpretation and Evaluation."
i
20
"Literature in the Reader," p. 146; "Facts and
Fictions," p. 891, n. 7.
21
Fish has said, "I in print have critiqued Searle |
, because he along with Austin thinks man is a legal animal, i
The correct critique of me would be to say that for me j
man is an epistemological animal, because my reader as I I
talk about him is always attempting to place himself, ask- '
ing himself questions about what he knows and where he ;
stands, and in the context of those questions in fact
placing himself in various positions in which he rests, 1
from which he is dislodged, from which he moves voluntar- I
ily and involuntarily" (MLA Annual Convention, Seminar |
284: The Reader in Fiction: The "Narratee" and the j
"Implied Reader" Approached through Semiotics, Herme- j
neutics, and Phenomenology, December 28, 1975).
240
Notes for Chapter 3
I i
; An indication of this interest is the 1976 English
I Institute conference on reading, organized by Stanley Fish :
and including papers by Norman Holland, Richard Poirer,
I Stephen Booth, and Jonathan Culler. At the 1975 MLA j
Annual Convention a large crowd attended a seminar with
the prodigious title, "The Reader in Fiction: The 'Nar-
ratee' and the 'Implied Reader' Approached through Sem
iotics, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology," with Fish, !
Gerald Prince, and Wayne Booth on the panel. Continued
interest in readers resulted in a full-scale forum at the
1976 MLA. The forum session, "The Reader of Literature," |
included presentations by Fish, Holland, David Bleich, i
Michael Riffaterre, and Walter Ong.
2
Wolfgang Iser is included m this comparison only
because there is no prominent critic representing his ;
; particular theoretical position working within the Anglo- :
American tradition. Iser's German works have been trans
lated into English and widely reviewed (see, for example, j
Frank Kermode, "The Reader's Share," Times Literary Sup-
: plement, 11 July 1975, p. 751, and Robert Scholes, "Cog- I
nition and the Implied Reader," Diacritics, 5 [Fall 1975], J
13-15).
3
Stanley Fish, "Literature m the Reader: Affec
tive Stylistics," New Literary History, 2 (Autumn 1970), i
125, 143. i
9 f
4 I
Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," i
Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976), 478.
i
5
These parenthetical clauses can serve as working
definitions of phenomenological and structuralist
approaches. (The phenomenological perspective will be ■
further discussed in section III; see also Jonathan Culler,!
"Phenomenology and Structuralism," The Human Context, 5 !
[1973], 35, 38, 41.) My point here is that Fish's revised j
theory more closely resembles that of a "radical struc- |
turalist" like Jacques Derrida than that of a phenomenol- j
ogist like Wolfgang Iser. For example, like Derrida, Fish j
now rejects the notion of a "correct interpretation," with !
its objective standard of interpretive validity. Also, as j
in many structuralist approaches, the individual subject ]
tends to disappear in Fish's revised theory: communal
j interpretive strategies replace individual readers as the j
determinant of meaning. (Cf. Jonathan Culler, Structural- I
! ist Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975),
; pp. 28-31, 258.) Finally, for Fish words do not refer to
some "extra-institutional reality" but rather to some j
standard "story that has been told about the real world" !
(Stanley E. Fish, "How To Do Things with Austin and I
Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism," MLN, !
91 [October 1976], 1021-22). Such a view is a variation
on the Derridean critique of "presence," the metaphysical
belief that we can come face-to-face with one present and
ultimate meaning behind the text. (See, for example,
Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context, Glyph 1 [1977], j
172-97; I will return to the structuralist perspective in !
section IV.) ;
C
Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting 'Interpreting the
i Variorum,1” Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976), 478. !
7
Norman N. Holland. "Transactive Criticism;
Re-Creation Through Identity," Criticism, 18 (Fall 1976),
334. j
8 j
Norman N. Holland, "Unity Identity Text . . j
Self," PMLA, 90 (October 1975), 814; "Transactive Criti
cism, " p. 338.
9
Norman N. Holland, "The New Paradigm: Subjective !
or Transactive?" New Literary History, 7 (Winter 1976),
343.
"^Holland, "Unity," p. 816. j
I
11 !
Holland, "Transactive Criticism," p. 342. For
other accounts of DEFT, see Norman N. Holland, Poems in
Persons: An Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Liter- i
ature (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973), pp. 76-78;
5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975),
pp. 113-28; "Unity," pp. 816-18; and "The New Paradigm,"
p . 3 3 8 .
12 1
As Holland writes, "Identity is the unity I find ini
self if I look at it as though it were a text" ("Unity,"
p. 815). Holland further explains that "interpretation is
a function of identity, identity being defined operation
ally as what is found in a person by looking for a unity
in him, in other words, by interpretation. We seem to be
242
, caught in a circular argument, but it is. not the argument
which is circular— it is the human condition in which we |
. cannot extricate an 'objective' reality from our 'subjec- j
I tive' perception of it" ("Transactive Criticism," p. 340). j
j i
! 13
Holland, 5 Readers Reading, pp. 121-22; for a
i detailed description of this transformational process, see
■ Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), Chs. i-vi.
i
"^Holland, "Unity," p. 816. !
I
15 I
Holland, 5 Readers Reading, p. 19, and see Norman
N. Holland, "A Letter to Leonard," Hartford Studies in
Literature, 5, nos. 1-3 (1973), 9-30.
16 !
It should be clear from what I have presented so !
far that the difference between Fish's and Holland's
models of reading is not that one accounts for recurrence
and the other for variability. Both models claim to
account for both kinds of response: shared interpretive
strategies and similar identity themes explain recurrence, i
and different interpretive strategies and dissimilar J
identity themes account for variability. Rather, the rel- I
' evant distinction here is the ability to account for
unique, idiosyncratic response. Holland's model allows
the possibility of a unique personality and thus a unique
response. It is not clear whether Fish's.model allows for
such a response because he implies that unique interpre
tive strategies are impossible. Rules for intelligibility
are shared by definition. j
i
17
Holland, 5 Readers Reading, p. 12. j
I
18 '
Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," p. 479.
19
Holland, 5 Readers Reading, p. 40.
i
^Ibid. , p. 12 . j
I
21
See, for example, 5 Readers Reading, pp. 116-19;
but perhaps a phrase such as "elements in the story" or
"materials of the story" is merely what Holland calls a
"useful fiction" (p. 19)— cf. p. 126: the reader "will
try to make the language, events, or people he creates
from the text function in multiple directions to work out
243
i the compromise among the demands of inner and outer reality
that is his own style" (emphasis added).
! t
1 2 2
; Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," p. 485. I
| |
^Holland, "A Letter to Leonard," p. 21.
24
Holland, "Unity," p. 816; 5 Readers Reading, p.
246.
25 1
My use of sociological may be misleading here. I :
am using it to refer to the study of societal groups as
opposed to the study of individual personalities (Holland
and Bleich's psychological perspective). Perhaps, the
term social is preferable here, used in the sense of "tied ;
to conditions specified by a society" (Fish, "How To Do j
Things with Austin and Searle," p. 1006). ;
26 '
"Interpretive communites are made up of those i
who share interpretive strategies" (Fish, "Interpreting I
the Variorum," p. 483). Interpretive community is not [
synonymous with critical consensus. Critical consensus is j
the result of a historical interpretive community. Put J
another way, critical consensus is the agreement voiced
in critical exchange. Shared interpretive strategies con
stitute that agreement, providing the basis for its formu
lation and recognition. A consensus is arrived at and is
recognized at the end of dialogue; interpretive communi
ties are pre-existent and are constitutive of the dialogue.
!
^Holland, "Unity," p. 816. 1
28
Besides the sources cited below, see, for example,!
Holland, "A Letter to Leonard," pp. 21-28, and "The New I
Paradigm," pp. 335-45; David Bleich, "Pedagogical Direc- \
tions in Subjective Criticism," College English, 37
(January 1976), 462-63; and Norman N. Holland and David
Bleich, "Comment and Response," College English, 38
(November 1976), 298-301.
i
29
David Bleich, Readings and Feelings: An Intro-
duction to Subjective Criticism (Urbana, 111.; NCTE,
1975), pp. 27, 32, 31, 33.
i
30 1
David Bleich, "The Subjective Character of Criti
cal Interpretation," College English, 36 (March 1975), 746.
244J
^Ibid. , p. 7 54. I
I
32 !
Bleich, Readings and Feelings, p. 62.
3 3 1
Bleich, "The Subjective Character of Critical !
Interpretation," pp. 740, 743-744, 751-52. j
34
Holland, Poems in Persons, p. 2.
35
David Bleich, "The Subjective Paradigm xn Science,;
Psychology, and Criticism," New Literary History, 7 i
(Winter 1976), 332. . I
i
i
"^Holland, "The New Paradigm," p. 337. j
I
^Ibid. , pp. 340, 342. j
q o
Ibid., p. 344. !
39
Holland, "Unity," p. 882, n. 8. j
4 0 ^
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 123.
41
Culler, "Phenomenology and Structuralism,"
pp. 37-38.
42
Wolfgang Iser, "The Readxng Process: A Phenomen
ological Approach," New Literary History, 3 (Winter 1972),
279.
43
Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's
Response in Prose Fiction," in Aspects of Narrative, ed. i
J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971),
p. 25.
*
44 '
Iser, "The Reading Process," p. 280. On the same
page Iser writes that the literary work must "be conceived
by the author in such a way that it will engage the
reader's imagination in the task of working things out for
himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active
and creative. In this process of creativity, the text
may either not go far enough, or may go too far, so we may
say that boredom and overstrain form the boundaries beyond
which the reader will leave the field of play."
245
45Ibid., p. 281.
46
Iser, "Indeterminacy," p. 43.
47
Ibid., pp. 2-4.
48
Ibid., pp. 8-24.
49
Cf. Holland, 5 Readers Reading, pp. 252-54.
50
Iser, "The Reading Process," pp. 288-89.
51Ibid., p. 291.
52Ibid., p. 295.
53 !
A better formulation might be: sequential inter- 1
pretation often consists of the reader's attempt to make
holistic sense prematurely. ;
54
Iser, "The Reading Process," p. 285.
^Ibid., p. 293.
56
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," pp. 126-27, and
see Stanley E. Fish, "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to
Ralph Rader," Critical Inquiry, 1 (June 1975), 883-91.
57
Fish, "Facts and Fictions," p. 888; "Interpreting
the Variorum," p. 474.
5 8
See, respectively, "Stanley Fish & the Righting t
of the Reader," Diacritics, 5 (Spring 1975), 26-31; "The
Frontier of Criticism," Yale Review, 64 (June 1975), 606-
12; and "Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading," in The
Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpreta
tion, ed. by Inge Crosman and Susan Suleiman, forthcoming ;
(an earlier version of this essay was presented at the !
1976 English Institute on reading).
59
Culler, "Stanley Fish," p. 29.
Though structuralist in its character, Culler's
theory of reading conventions is not restricted to struc- :
turalist insights or emphases; see Structuralist Poetics, j
pp. 160 and 242, for Culler's distancing of his theory !
from many structuralist enterprises.
61
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 116.
^Culler, "Stanley Fish," p. 30; see also Struc
turalist Poetics, pp. 28-30, 258. Recently, Iser too has
emphasized the conventional over the individual perspec
tive in his reading model— Wolfgang Iser, "The Reality of j
Fiction: A Functionalist Approach to Literature," New J
Literary History., 7 (Autumn 1975), 7-38— but see Fish's
comments on Iser's use of Speech Act theory in Fish, "How
To Do Things with Austin and Searle," pp. 1002-04.
^Culler, Structuralist Poetics, pp. 126, 138, 137. j
For the different levels of naturalization, see pp. 140-59.;
^Roland Barthes, "Style and its Image," in Liter-" j..
ary Style: A Symposium, ed. S. Chatman (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1971), p. 10, quoted in Culler, Structuralist
Poetics, p. 259.
65
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 248.
^Ibid. , pp. 250-51. |
[
^7Ibid. , pp. 124, 127. ;
^Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 140; Fish, |
"How To Do Things with Austin and Searle," p. 1019. [
69 i
"How To Do Things with Austin and Searle," p. .
102 3. ;
i
70Ibid., pp. 1018, 1020-21. j
71Culler, Structuralist Poetics, pp.. 140-41. j
72 1
Culler, "Stanley Fish," p. 29.
247
73
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 253.
!
74 i
Fish, "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum,'" |
p. 196. '
75
Structuralist Poetics, p. 30; also see Fish,
"Interpreting the Variorum," pp. 47 5-76 and compare
Bleich, "The Subjective Character of Critical Interpreta
tion," pp. 753-54. |
Notes for Chapter 4
; David Lewis, "Languages and Language," in j
: Language, Mind, and Knowledge, ed. Keith Gunderson I
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1975), pp. 4-5; |
for a more complete account of convention, see pp. 5-6 and j
also Lewis's earlier discussions in David K. Lewis, Con
ventions: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 19 69). Cf. Stephen R. Schiffer,
Meaning (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1972), especially
pp. 148-55; pp. 129.-30 of Schiffer's book suggested the
use of the terms "precedent and agreement (or stipulation)"
in my account of convention. i
!
2 1
John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge, Univ. Press, i
: 1969), pp. 33-42. !
^Ibid., p. 33.
4 ■
Ibid., p. 35.
5 1
Robert M. Browne, "Theories of Convention in Con
temporary American Criticism," Diss. Catholic Univ. of '
America 19 56, p. 14.
i
^Ibid., pp. 11-12. 1
"^Ibid. , pp. 10-11.
i
8
Browne's survey includes the most important theo- i
retical discussions of literary convention between 1919 |
and 1950, such as those in John Livingston Lowes, Conven
tion and Revolt in Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1919); Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931); Haakon M. Chevalier, "Con
vention," in Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T.
Shipley (New York: Philosophical Library, 1943); and J
Harry Levin, "Notes on Convention," in Perspectives in
Criticism, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1950). Browne's study focuses primarily on
the use of convention (the term and concept) in the work
of Pound, Eliot, Winters, Ransom, Tate, Brooks, and
Blackmur. I
249
i 9
Paul Alpers, "Mode in Narative Poetry," in To Tell
' a Story: Narrative Theory and Practice (Los Angeles:
. Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, 1973), p. 29. i
; !
■^Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 366. Frye defines
fictional as "relating to literature in which there are
internal characters, apart from the author and his aud
ience" and thematic as "relating to works of literature in
which no characters are involved except the author and his
audience, as in most lyrics and essays, or to works of j
literature in which internal characters are subordinated ;
to an argument maintained by the author, as in allegories '
and parables" (pp. 365, 367).
11 '
Ibid., p. 366. See Alpers' discussion of Frye's ;
■ theory of modes, Alpers, pp. 26-30, 49-54.
12
Douglas Hewitt, The Approach to Fiction (London: j
1972), 47. |
I
13
Genre criticism has recently been in and then out !
of fashion among literary theorists; it now seems to be !
making a comeback. See, for example, Tzvetan Todorov,
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: The Press of Case
Western Univ., 1973); Frederic Jameson, "Magical Narra- ,
tives: Romance as Genre," New Literary History, 7 ■
(Autumn 1975), 135-63; and Norman N. Holland and Leona F.
Sherman, "Gothic Possibilities," New Literary History, 8 !
(Winter 1977), 280-94. j
i
i
14 -
Jameson, "Magical Narratives," p. 13,5. i
15
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3rd ed.
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 69. i
Generic conventions are most obvious in "literary formu- |
las"— see John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: |
Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: j
University of Chicago Press, 1976). I
16
The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R.
Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1960), p. 117.
j
250
17
| See Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, vol. I (New
i York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951; rpt. with supplement, New
j York: Gordian Press, 1969), pp. 430, 433.
i 18
' See Moby-Dick as Doubloon, ed. Hershel Parker and I
Harrison Hayford (New York: W.W. Norton & Go., 1970), j
p. 49. All page numbers in the text following the quoted i
comments refer to Doubloon.
19
"Unconventional" does not mean "non^conventional" !
here. All novels are constituted by some kind of conven
tions (otherwise they would not be understood). Moby-Dick {
is "unconventional" in that it modifies traditional con
ventions into new forms. I
i
20 I
Richard Ohmann, "Speech Acts and the Definition I
of Literature," Philosophy and Rhetoric, 4 (1971), 14. j
1 21
1 Ibid.
22
See "Aim: Literal and Non-Literal Sense" in
. Chapter 1.
2 3
Mary Pratt, "Speech Act Theory and Literary Dis
course," mimeograph distributed at The Reader of Litera
ture Forum Workshop: Speech Act Theory and Reader
Response, MLA Annual Convention, 27 December 1976. Pratt's!
book, Toward a Speech Act Definition of Literature is |
forthcoming from Indiana Univ. Press. :
24
Hewitt, p. 58.
25
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage: An
Episode of the American Civil War (New York: D. Appleton j
and Co., 1895), pp. 219-33. j
2 6 ’
Charles C. Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism,
A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1956), p. 81. !
251
Notes for Chapter 5
Cf. Stanley E. Fish, "How To Do Things with Austin ;
and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism," !
MLN, 91 (October 1976), 986, and Thomas S. Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 189.
2
See Chapters 2 and 3.
I
3 1
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, i
N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Pres¥7 1975) , p"I 139; Culler is cit- ,
ing Julia Kristeva, Semiotik&: Recherches pour une j
semanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 146. Cf. Harold j
Bloom, "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression," Critical Inquiry,
2 (Winter 1975), 234, and Frederic Jameson, "Magical Nar
ratives: Romance as Genre," New Literary History, 7
(Augumn 1975), 155. i
t
i
4 I
See Chapter 3, section III. I
5
See "Methodology II: Validity m Interpretation
vs. Interpretive Freeplay" in Chapter 1.
6
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, p. 247.
^Ibid., pp. 250-51. j
8 '
Cf. Geoffrey Hartman, "Literary Criticism and Its j
Discontents," Critical Inquiry, 3 (Winter 1976), 218. i
9 . i
Stanley, E. Fish, "Interpreting 'Interpreting the j
Variorum,'" Critical Inquiry, 3 (Autumn 1976), 196. ;
I
■^Quentin Skinner, "Hermeneutics and the Role of j
History," New Literary History, 7 (Autumn 1975), 210. j
■^Cf. Morton Bloomfield, "Allegory as Interpreta
tion," New Literary History, 3 (Winter 1972), 303; Culler,
Structuralist Poetics, pp. 140-41; Michael Hancher, "The
Science of Interpretation and the Art of Interpretation,"
MLN, 85 (1970), 799; and Kuhn, pp. 121-29, 184-207.
12
Brian Loer made the following observation about
my whole discussion of Searle's constitutive-regulative
distinction: A more sympathetic reader of Searle would
realize that he i_s focusing exclusively on performance
and not on interpretation, though his terminology is mis
leading in places. For example, Searle is using "counts
as" in its legal sense; it is the specification of the
"necessary conditions for performing an act of a certain
kind," i.e., truth conditions.
13
John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1969), p. 34.
■*"^Ibid., pp. 35-36.
15Ibid., p. 35.
160f course, the significance of deliberate belch
ing is entirely different in those societies where the
regulative rules of etiquette specify that it is polite
to belch.
17
Cf. Searle, Speech Acts, pp. 133-34.
■^Ibid. , p. 37.
19
Fxsh, "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,"
pp. 1003-04.
20
See Lewis's discussion of rules ("an especially
messy cluster concept") in Convention (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 100-07.
2^Ibid. , p. 106.
22
Searle, Speech Acts, p. 39.
23Ibid., pp. 40-41.
24
H.P. Grice, "Meaning," Philosophical Review, 66
(1957) , 385. Grice uses "meant^" as an abbreviation for
"meant nonnaturally" as contrasted to "meant naturally"
(in the sense that spots naturally mean measles).
2 5 I
H.P. Grice, "Utterer1s Meaning and Intentions," (
Philosophical Review, 78 (1969), 151. I
^"Meaning," p. 387.
t
^^John R. Searle, "What is a Speech Act?" in j
Philosophy in America, ed. Max Black (London : Allen & i
Unwin, 1965), p. 230.
9 R
Speech Acts, pp. 49-50.
29 . i
Grice, "Utterer's Meaning and Intentions," p. 16 3.?
i
30 I
Ibid., pp. 163-64. This is only Redefinition III,
Version A, but Redefinitions IV and V retain the revision t
(inodes of correlation) that is relevant to my discussion j
here. j
31Ibid., pp. 162-63. j
32 !
Stephen Schiffer, Meaning (London : Oxford Univ.
Press, 1972), p. 50. j
33
Cf. P.F. Strawson, "Intention and Convention m
Speech Acts," Philosophical Review, 73 (October 1964,
439-60, and Quentin Skinner, "Conventions and the Under- j
standing of Speech Acts," Philosophical Quarterly, 20 <
(April 1970), 118-38. ;
1
34
See Dell Hymes, "Linguistics, Language, and .
Communication," Communication, 1 (1974), 48; and Culler,
Structuralist Poetics, pp. 8-10, 113-20. Cf. Michael
Polanyi, Personal Knowledge : Toward a Post-Critical
Philosophy (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), !
pp. 67-245, on "the tacit component." j
35 '
Searle, Speech Acts, p. 50. I
!
3^Ibid., p. 51.
37
Ibid., p. 51, n. 1.
3 8
Fish, "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,"
pp. 1019, 1020. On an earlier page, Fish had provided the
following example of a non-standard story :
; [S]uppose someone with a philosophical turn
of mind were to declare that Nixon as a free
and independent agent whose actions can be ;
reported and assessed did not exist; that
"in fact" the notion of his agency was a j
; bourgeois myth (one might say a fiction) by
! means of which a repressive society evaded
responsibility for its own crimes and tyran
nies .... [A]ny evidence brought forward
to substantiate Nixon's existence (birth
certificate, photographs, witnesses to his
actions) would be inadmissible because the '
rules of evidence (the procedures for its j
stipulation) were derived from (or consti- I
tuted by) the same myth (pp. 1017-18). j
i
39
Schiffer, Meaning, pp. 30-32. ;
4 0
Perhaps it would be more exact to say that, for j
S, that he knows something is not a matter of convention.
What that something is (or perhaps how he knows what it |
is) is a matter of interpretive conventions. However, I j
. seem to be saying that intuitive knowledge is empty. Can s
knowledge of an indeterminate something be called knowl- . ;
edge? For example, I know that this paper is white, or ;
rather I know that I can "interpret" the color of this
paper, or rather I know that I can interpret a quality !
of whatever this is, or . . . Certainly the formulation
of empty knowledge towards which such a sequence tends is |
a strange concept, a concept void of all interpretive
substance. I think it would be better to avoid this
epistemological paradox and say instead that we have
knowledge of our interpretations, and such knowledge of ;
our interpretations is conventional knowledge (knowledge j
based on interpretive conventions). Then we could say i
that, for any one individual, that he has conventional i
knowledge is as natural as that he has bodily functions, !
and he knows this to be the case intuitively (or natu
rally) .
255
Notes for Chapter 6
1
I In November 1895 William Heinemann published a j
! British edition whose text was set from advanced copies |
of the Appleton edition. For the textual history of the I
Red Badge, see William L. Howarth's "The Red Badge of
Courage Manuscript: New Evidence for a Critical Edition,"
Studies in Bibliography, 18 (1965), 229-47; Fredson
Bowers, "The Text: History and Analysis," in The Red
• Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War,
ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of |
Virginia, 1975), pp. 183-252; and Hershel Parker, review j
of The Red Badge of Courage: A Facsimile Edition of the j
Manuscript and the Virginia edition of Red Badge, Nine
teenth-Century Fiction, 30 (March 1976), 558-62.
2 I
Parker, review of Facsimile and Virginia Red I
Badge, 561-62. j
3
Henry Binder, "Stephen Crane and Ripley Hxtchcock: ;
Author and Editor in the Nineties," forthcoming; and Henry
Binder, "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows," Studies
’ in the Novel, 9 (Summer 1977). A facsimile of the first
impression, first edition of the Appleton text has been
published by Charles E. Merrill Pub. Co. (Columbus, Ohio, ;
1969), introduced by Joseph Katz.
4
See, for example, the reviews reprinted xn Stephen :
Crane: The Critical Heritage, ed. Richard M. Weatherford
(London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973),
pp. 85-197.
5
Wayne Charles Miller, An Armed Amerxca, Its Face
in Fiction: A History of the American Military Novel
(New York: New York Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 10-14, 21.
^Marvin Klotz, "The Imitation of War, 1800-1900:
Realism in the American War Novel, " Diss. New York Univ.
1958, p. 20, quoted in Miller, Armed America, p. 11. ;
7
Miller, Armed America, pp. 82-83.
O
"Realism" and "romanticism" are relative terms j
placed along a spectrum with abstract stylization and :
idealization near one end and photographic realism near
256
the other, the values along the spectrum being defined
by the standard story (see Chapter 5, n. 38). Realism,
like romanticism, is a modal convention. "But we often
| talk as though it is not a convention at all, as though
1 it were a way of presenting a direct picture of a series
I of typical and lifelike experiences. As soon as we try
to define it, however, we realize how many questions we
are usually begging— how far we take for granted highly
conventional and often highly complex features" (Douglas
Hewitt, The Approach to Fiction [London: Longman, 1972],
P. 47) .
9
See the reviews in the Philadelphia Press, 13
October 1895, p. 30, and the London Saturday Review, 11
January 1896, pp. 44-45; rpt. in Weatherford, pp. 84-85
and 99-103. Kipling's short story was included in the
Indian edition of his Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child
Stories (1888); in a British edition, Wee Willie Winkie
and Other Stories (1890); and in Indian Tales-III (New
York: John W. Lovell Co., 189 0).
"^Miller, Armed America, pp. 85-86.
■^Eric Solomon, Stephen Crane: From Parody to
Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966),
p. 711, and Eric Solomon, "Another Analogue for The Red
Badge of Courage," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 13 (1958),
63-67.
12
Miller, Armed America, pp. 57-65, and Solomon,
Stephen Crane, pp. 16-17, 71-72.
13
Solomon, Stephen Crane, p. 69.
14
See, for example, Weatherford, pp. 85, 100, 135,
150, 163, and 311; and Lars Ahnebrink, The Beginnings
of Naturalism in American Fiction, 1891-1903 (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1950), relevant passages reprinted
, in the Norton Critical Edition of The Red Badge of Courage,
ed. Sculley Bradley et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
1962), pp. 153-60.
15
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage: An
Episode of the American Civil War (New York: D. Appleton
and Co., 1895), p. 232.
257
Pall Mall Gazette, 26 November 1895, p. 4, and
Spectator, 27 June 1896, p. 924; rpt. in Weatherford,
pp. 92-94 and 130-32.
17
New York Press, 13 October 1895, p. 4; rpt. in
Weatherford, p. 86.
18
New York Times, 26 January 1896, p. 22; rpt. in
Weatherford, p. lo8.
19
New York Times, 19 October 1895, p. 3; rpt. m
Weatherford, pp. 88, 90.
20
See Binder, "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody
Knows," and Chapter XXV (pp. 185-93) of the manuscript
reproduced in The Red Badge of Courage: A Facsimile of
the Manuscript, II (Washington, D.C.: Bruccoli Clark
Book, NCR/Microcard Editions, 1972), pp. 170-78.
21
See Edwin H. Cady, Stephen Crane (New York:
Twayne Pub., 1962), pp. 118-40; Donald Pizer, "Stephen
Crane," in Fifteen American Authors Before 1900:
Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism, ed.
Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert (Madison: Univ. of
Wisconsin Press, 1971), pp. 112-18; and Marston LaFrance,
"Stephen Crane Scholarship Today and Tomorrow," American
Literary Realism, 7 (Spring 1974), 129, 131-33.
22
And, of course, those .critics in this first
category who note the narrator's ironic attitude in the
early sections argue (implicitly or explicitly) that the
narrator's attitude changes before or during the final
chapter, where they interpret Henry as showing he has
grown.
23
Rpt. m Weatherford, pp. 101 and 120.
24
Joseph Conrad, "His War Book: A Preface to )
Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage" (London, 1925)
as reprinted in Joseph Conrad, Last Essays (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1926) and the Norton Critical
Edition of The Red Badge of Courage, 2nd ed., ed. Donald
Pizer et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1976),
pp. 192-93.
23Ahnebrink, p. 159.
^ Harper's Weekly, 26 October 1895, p. 1013.
27
V.S. Pritchett, "Two Writers and Modern War," in ,
The Living Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), p. 174. |
28
R.B. Sewall, "Crane's The Red Badge of Courage,"
The Explicator, 3 (May 1945), Item 55.
29 '
Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in . . ;
Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Carbondale: ;
Southern Illinois University, 1966), rpt. in Pizer, Norton ;
Red Badge, 2nd ed., p. 297. I
|
30Ibid., pp. 298, 300. j
31 !
Ibid., p. 299. |
32Ibid., p. 300. '
33
Joseph Hergeshiemer, "Introduction," The Red
Badge of Courage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925),
pp. x-xi.
I
34
N[ancy] H. B[anks], "The Novels of Two Journal- ;
ists," Bookman, 2 (November 1895), 219. j
35 I
R.W. Stallman, "Stephen Crane: A Revaluation," i
in Critiques and Essays on Modern Fiction, 1920-1951, ed. - :
John W. Aldridge (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1952), \
p. 267; a portion, of this essay (including the passage
quoted in my text) was first printed as the Introduction
to the Modern Library Edition of The Red Badge of Courage ■ ;
(New York: Random House, 1951). The Critiques and Essays ;
article contains a footnote in which Stallman points out
that Henry "progresses upward toward manhood and moral
triumph" but "the education of the hero ends as it began;
in self-deception." Henry is "deluded" in "believing he
had triumphed in facing up to [the battle of life] shorn |
of all romantic notions" (p. 255, n. 5). Stallman's exact j
position on the growth of Henry has been a point for dis
cussion among some Crane scholars: cf. Stanley B.
Greenfield, "The Unmistakable Stephen Crane," PMLA, 73
(December 1958), 562-72, esp. n. 16; R.W. Stallman (1961)
259
in Bradley, p. 254, Author's note; and Pizer, "Stephen
Crane," p. 124.
3^Harry Hartwick, "The Red Badge of Nature," The
Foreground of American Fiction (New York: American Book
Co., 1934), pp. 25-26.
37
Solomon, Stephen Crane, pp. 82, 87, 92.
3^Cady, pp. 125-26, 142.
39Ibid., pp. 121, 121-22, 129, 127.
40Ibid., pp. 125, 140.
41Ibid., pp. 142-43.
42Ibid., pp. 129-30, 141.
4 3
George W. Johnson, "Stephen Crane's Metaphor of
Decorum," PMLA, 78 (June 1963) rpt. in Stephen Crane:
A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Bassan
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 70.
4 4
Mordecai Marcus, "The Unity of The Red Badge of
Courage," in The Red Badge of Courage: Text and Criti
cism, ed. Richard Lettis et ai. (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1960), pp. 193-94.
43Ibid., pp. 194-95.
46Ibid., p. 195.
48
Of course, this second category of critics
ultimately do make a sense of the text (e.g., Crane
couldn't handle his materials or Crane didn't know what
he wanted), but this is a different level of interpreta
tion than that on which the first and third categories
of critics are working: that is, the second category
cannot provide a coherent interpretation for the story
and therefore tries to explain the lack of coherence by
moving "beyond" the text to the artistry of its creator
, (overlooking the possibility of an expurgated text as an
explanation) and judging the artistic skill negatively.
Thus, the second category of critics provides a diachronic
I explanation while the others provide a synchronic one— !
' see Chapter 2, section I.
!
49
Richard Chase, "Introduction" The Red Badge of
Courage (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960), pp. x-xiii.
50
John W. Shroeder, "Stephen Crane Embattled,"
University of Kansas City Review, 17 (Winter 1950), rpt.
in Bradley, p. 242. '
^■*"Ibid. , pp. 247-48. j
52Ibid., p. 246. !
53 I
James B. Colvert, "Stephen Crane's Magic |
• Mountain," in Bassan, rpt. in Pizer, Norton Red Badge, !
2nd ed., p. 301, emphasis added. |
!
54
Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary ]
Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. of ;
Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 79.
55
Marston LaFrance, A Reading of Stephen Crane
(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971),p . 123.
r / *
John R. Searle, "The Logical Status of Fictional
Discourse," New Literary History, 6 (Winter 1975), 331. j
Cf. Stanley E. Fish, "How to Do Things with Austin and |
Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism," MLN, i
91 (October 1976), 1016. j
~*^Hewitt, p. 58. |
58 !
John Berryman, "Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of *
Courage," in The American Novel: From James Fenimore
Cooper to William Faulkner, ed. Wallace Stegner (New |
York: Basic Books, 1965), 89. 1
^Ibid. , p. 91.
^Walcutt, p. 81.
I
261
Binder, "The Red Badge of Courage Nobody Knows.
Notes for Chapter 7
j ^ '
I Michael Hancher, "Three Kinds of Intention," J
j MLN, 87 (December 1972), 829.
2
G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 42-43.
^Ibid., pp. 84-85. ;
4 i
G. Thomas Tanselle, "Greg's Theory of Copy-Text 1
and the Editing of American Literature, " Studies in
Bibliography, 28 (1975), 205.
5
I W.W. Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies
in Bibliography, 3 (1950-51), 32.
/ r
Fredson Bowers, "Some Principles for Scholarly j
Editions of Nineteenth-Century American Authors," Studies
in Bibliography, 17 (1964) , 227; Fredson Bowers, "Remarks i
on Eclectic Texts," Proof, 4 (1975), 58, 60.
7
See Hersel Parker, "Melville and the Concept of ;
'Author's Final Intentions,'" Proof, 1 (1971), 157; and
. G. Thomas Tanselle, "The Editorial Problem of Final ;
Authorial Intention," Studies in Bibliography 29, (1976), j
169-70. i
i
8 '
An editor is concerned first and foremost with
intended text, while an intentionalist critic is concerned !
first and foremost with intended meaning. An editor uses !
; intended meaning to arrive at intended text; a literary I
critic starts with intended text to infer intended mean
ing. See Tanselle, "Final Authorial Intention," pp. 172- !
73, 179-80.
g
Hancher, "Three Kinds of Intention," p. 830; see
Tanselle, "Final Authorial Intention," p. 175.
i
^See Hershel Parker, "Why Pierre Went Wrong,"
Studies in the Novel, 8 (Spring 1976) , 7-23. In an
insightful footnote (ignored by*Tanselle), Hancher shows
that he is not unaware of the point I am raising here— |
see Hancher, "Three Kinds of Intention," p. 831, n. 10.
11 1
Hancher, "Three Kinds of Intention," p. 831,
n. 10. i
12
See my Chapter 6.
^Cf. Hancher, "Three Kinds of Intention," pp. 830-
31, n. 10: "Though . the activity of writing is diachronic,
the culminating act of meaning-something-by-the-finished-
text (i.e., active intention) is synchronic."
14 '
Tanselle notes that "what editors in the tradx-
tion of Greg are likely to call "final intention" does ;
not correspond to what Hancher here calls "final inten
tion'" ("Final Authorial Intention," p. 175).
i
15
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: !
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), pp. 17, 23. One could :
argue that the effect illustrated here is part of i
Fitzgerald's meaning, and in fact I am quite willing to j
accept such an argument; however, Hancher's formulation '
does not allow this. In passages not quoted by Tanselle, !
Hancher relates his "final intention" to Austin's f t per- ;
locutionary act," clearly distinguishing it from "mean- !
ing" ("Three Kinds of Intention," p. 841).
i a
See Chapter 5, section II.
17
By the use of the term "inferred intention"
here, I do not mean to imply that when an editor is talk
ing about active intention that active intention is some- 1
how not an inference. The positing of an intention is j
always an inference. Rather, I am using the term
"inferred" in (c) to indicate an emphasis on the infer
ential process that an editor uses to posit a specific
active intention for an author. A distinction between
active and inferred intention allows us, for example, to
talk about the active intention an author claimed he had
and the inferred intention an editor arrives at from !
evaluating all the relevant evidence.
l f t
"Final Authorial Intention," pp. 176-77.
19 ■
P.F. Strawson, "Intention and Convention in
Speech Acts," Philosophical Review, 73 (October 1964), 446.
2 0 1
i Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: !
Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature i
■ (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 30. j
I
!
21
See Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," .
Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976), 474; and Norman N. ;
Holland, "Stanley Fish, Stanley Fish," Genre, 10 (Fall
1977).
22
That is to say, all perlocutionary effects are a
result of prior interpretation: a reader cannot react to
a character1s cruelty until he has interpreted that ;
character as being cruel. !
23
John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, ;
i 1969), p. 46. |
24
Tanselle, "Final Authorial Intention," p. 178.
2^Ibid. , pp. 167-68, 179-83.
26Ibid., pp. 183-91, 193-94.
27Ibid., p. 180.
28tW. -
Ibid., p. 210; emphasis added.
29
Ibid., pp. 192-99.
■^Should the phrase "author's final intention" be
retained as a description of the guiding concept deter
mining the goal of the scholarly editor? Or should a
new term (like an author's "most complete" or "fullest"
intention) be adopted to serve this central function,
with the added proviso that the chronologically final is
usually the most complete. (Cf. Parker, "Melville and
the Concept of 'Author's Final Intention,'" p. 157.)
Tanselle adopts a practical course of preserving the
traditional term and its centrality but qualifying its
general application.
31
Tanselle, "Final Authorial Intention," pp. 169-
70, 191-95.
265
32
See Ibid., p. 193, and Parker, "Melville and the
Concept of 'Author's Final Intentions,'" pp. 161-62, for
discussions of the Typee example; for Maggie, see Brian
Higgins and Hershel Parker, "The Virginia Edition of
Stephen Crane's Maggie; A Mirror for Textual Scholars:
A Review Article," forthcoming in Proof, 6.
33
See my Chapter 6.
34
See Chapter 3, section III.
35
Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," p. 475.
O f.
Stanley Fish, "Literature in the Reader:
Affective Stylistics," New Literary History, 2 (Autumn
1970), 126; the original passage is in italics.
37
I wish to express my gratitude to Hershel Parker
for suggesting several of the textual examples that
follow.
38
Greg's general theory of copy-text holds that
"the choice of copy-text depends solely on its formal
features (accidentals)." A copy-text is chosen by an
editor as the basis for his critical edition and then
authoritative readings are emended into it: "whenever
there is more than one substantive text of comparable
authority, then although it will still be necessary to
choose one of them as copy-text, and to follow it in
accidentals, this copy-text can be allowed no over
riding or even preponderant authority so far as substan
tive readings are concerned" (Greg, p. 31, n. 18, and
p. 29) .
39
James L.W. West III, "The SCADE Gatsby: A Review
Article," Proof, 5 (1977), 246.
40
"Discussions of Adopted Readings," in Typee, ed.
Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and The
Newberry Library, 1968), p. 332. E designates the
English Edition (1846-1893), A the American Edition,
Original Text (1846) , and AR the American Edition, Revised
Test (1846-1876). The text of the American first edition
was set from proof copies of the English edition given to
G.P. Putnam (of Wiley & Putnam, the American publisher) by
Gansevoort Melville, Herman's brother. i
i
41
My examples are taken from American literature
but I intend my argument to apply more generally.
42 |
Tanselle, "Final Authorial Intention," p. 198. |
43
See, for example, stages D and G in the genetic
text provided in Billy Budd, Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford
and Merton Sealts^ Jr. (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press,
1962); and see Linton Massey, "Notes on the Unrevised
Galleys of Faulkner's Sanctuary," Studies in Bibliography,
8 (1956), 195-208; Gerald Langford, Faulkner1s Revision
of "Sanctuary"; A Collation of the Unrevised Galleys
and the Published Book (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press,
1972), and Noel Polk, review of Faulkner's Revision of
"Sanctuary" by Gerald Langford, Mississippi Quarterly,
26 (Summer 1973), 458-65.
44
See Tanselle, "Final Authorial Intention,"
pp. 196-203.
^Scribner's Monthly, 15 (November 1877), 44-56;
The Novels and Tales of Henry James, vol. 16 (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), pp. 267-311. Page num
bers following the quotations in my text refer to these
published versions.
46
See Tanselle, "Final Authorial Intention,"
p. 193, and Parker, "Melville and the Concept of 'Author's
Final Intentions,'" p. 161.
47
Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, "Sober Second
Thoughts: The 'Author's Final Version' of Fitzgerald's
Tender Is the Night," Proof, 4 (1975), 136-37.
^Ibid. , p. 136.
^Ibid. , p. 139.
50 . .
Ibxd., pp. 152, 140. For specific examples,
see especially pp. 139-40.
51
For another example from Higgins and Parker, see :
their review article, "The Virginia Edition of Stephen
Crane's Maggie; A Mirror for Textual Scholars." They j
include this observation at the end of section IV: |
The best kind of editor, of course, will
always be a good biographer and critic. He
will carry in his mind a comprehensive sense
of the author's method of writing and will
understand the nature of his interaction
with his publisher. From this editor's famil
iarity with the writer's strategies for
affecting the reader by his words, passages,
whole scenes, chapters, and larger units of j
the work as originally written, the true j
editor— the textualist— must develop special
sensitivity to the effects that any subse- ;
quent alterations, whether authorial or not,
have on those intended responses.
52
Pioneer, 1 (February 1843), 49-55; Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse (New York: Wiley & I
Putnam, 1846), pp. 159-72— this 1846 version was also j
used in the 18 54 edition of Mosses published by Ticknor j
and Fields (pp. 199-215).
53
The editors of the Centenary Edition of
Hawthorne's works write: "Although intended to be cor- i
dial, the original text could be narrowly construed as i
critical, since one's presence in the Hall is not neces
sarily a flattering mark. It seems clear that Hawthorne
removed these passages because of the ambiguity of tone, !
and what might seem to be an air of personal criticism, ]
despite the fact that he liked to honor his friends and ;
fellow authors in print" (Fredson Bowers, "Textual Com- ;
mentary," Mosses from an Old Manse [Columbus: Ohio State
Univ. Press, 1974], p. 539). In spite of this claim about
Hawthorne's non-aesthetic revisions, the Centenary editors
publish the 1846 cut version. Cf. Harold P. Miller,
"Hawthorne Surveys his Contemporaries," American Liter
ature, 12 (May 1940), 228-35. :
54
See the "Historical eolation," in the Centenary
Mosses, pp. 635-37.
55Miller, p. 235.
i
!
26.8J
5 6
Cf. Seymour L. Gross, "Hawthorne's Revisions of
'The Gentle Boy,1" American Literature, 26 (1954), 196-
208.
57
See my Chapter 6 and Henry Binder, "The Red Badge
of Courage Nobody Knows," Studies in the Novel, 9 (Summer
1977) .
C p
See Peter G. Beidler," The Raft Episode in
Huckleberry Finn," Modern Fiction Studies, 14 (1968),
11-20; and Lewis Leary, "Troubles with Mark Twain; Some
Considerations on Consistency," Studies in American
Fiction, 2 (Spring 1974), 100-02.
59
Joseph Katz and John J. Manning, "Notes on Frank
Norris's Revisions of Two Novels," Papers of the Biblio
graphical Society of America, 62 (2nd Quarter 1968), 257.
^ Outlook, 64 (3 March 1900), p. 486, quoted in
Katz and Manning, p. 257.
61
Katz and Manning, p. 259. A similar situation
arose in the case of Norris's MeTeague (1899)— see Katz
and Manning, pp. 256-57. However, in this earlier revi
sion, no inconsistent restructuring of reader response
occurs (though the humor is considerably weakened).
6 2
Parker, "Melville and the Concept of 'Author's
Final Intentions,'" p. 165.
6 3
Hershel Parker, "The First Nine Volumes of a
Selected Edition of W.D. Howells: A Review Article,"
Proof, 2 (1972), 325.
^Ibid., pp. 325-27.
/ * r
Parker, "Melville and the Concept of 'Author's
Final Intentions,'" p. 161.
ft 6 1
Hershel Parker with Bruce Bebb, "The CEAA: An
Interim Assessment," Papers of the Bibliographical Society
of America, 68 (1974), 141.
Notes for Appendix
Cf. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., "The Norms of Interprets- |
tion— A Brief Response," Genre, 2 (1969), pp. 58-60, and j
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., "Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics," ,
New Literary History, 3 (Winter 1972), pp. 246, 255.
2
Quoted in Vernon J. Burke, History of Ethics
(Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1968), II, p. 105.
!
3
"From Ontology to Axiology: A Critical Problem," i
College English, 32 (November 1970), 147.
4
In his chapter "Values in American Society," :
Robin Williams, Jr., defines "values" in a way that comes
close to combining these two senses (significance and i
good); he writes that values are "those conceptions of
desirable states of affairs that are utilized in selective
conduct as criteria for preference or choice or as justi
fication for proposed or actual behavior" (American i
Society: A Sociological Interpretation, 3rd ed. (New
York: 1970], quoted in Walter R. Fisher, "A Normative
Theory of Rhetoric: Its Rationale and Its Logic," unpub
lished manuscript, p. 47). -
5
My use of the present tense in what follows is not .
meant to be misleading. As we have seen in Chapters 2
and 3, Fish himself has moved from the critical descrip- .
tivism of Affective Stylistics to the critical creativity j
and metacritical focus of his theory of interpretive i
strategies. However, Affective Stylistics is still a !
methodology that can be practiced (under what Fish would
now call the fiction of describing what actually occurs j
in reading). I will discuss it then as a "living"
approach and address its exclusively descriptive claims ,
(talking within the fiction not outside it). ;
i
6
Stanley Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affec- j
tive Stylistics," New Literary History, 2 (Autumn 1970), \
126-27. !
I
7 I
Stanley E. Fish, "What Is Stylistics and Why Are
They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" in Approaches
to Poetics, ed. Seymour Chatman (New York: Columbia
Univ. Press, 1973), p. 144.
8
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 125.
g
Stanley E. Fish, "Facts and Fictions: A Reply
to Ralph Rader," Critical Inquiry, 1 (June 1975), 891,
n. 7.
^Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 146.
■^Taped lecture: "On Conrad's Heart of Darkness,
Univ. of Southern California, 21 May 1974.
■^Fish, "What Is Stylistics?" p. 148. Cf. Stanley
E. Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," Critical Inquiry, 2
(Spring 1976), 474: Because the reader's activities "are
interpretive, a description of them will also be, and
without any additional step, an interpretation, not after
the fact, but of the fact (of experiencing)."
13
Earl Miner, review of Self-Consuming Artifacts
by Stanley Fish, JEGP, 72 (October 1973), 536 (emphasis
added).
14
Fish, "What Is Stylistics?" pp. 148-49.
15
Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," pp. 474, 470.
Cf. Fish, "Facts and Fictions," p. 891, where Fish writes
that "as we read we hypothesize comprehensive intentions,
get through- tangles of references, eliminate ambiguities,
exclude or rule out partial and incomplete meanings; but
where [Ralph Rader] believes either that we do these
things only once or that only one of the times we do them
counts, I believe that we do them again and again (as
many times as we are moved to perceptual closure) and
that each instance of our doing of them (not merely the
last) has value."
1
Fish, "What is Stylistics?" p. 148.
17
Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," p. 476.
X8
John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the
Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1969), p. 188.
1 9 !
Fish, "What Is Stylistics?" p. 146, n. 36.
j
20
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 136.
21
Taped lecture: "On Doubts about Affective ,
Stylistics," Univ. of Southern California, 24 May 1974.
Of course it was such questions that ultimately led to
Fish's abandonment of his descriptive claims; see Chapters
2 and 3 and Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting 'Interpreting
the Variorum,'" Critical Inquiry, 3 (Autumn 1976), 19 3.
2 2 i
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 146; earlier J
Fish writes: "The question is not how good is it, but j
how does it work; and both question and answer are framed |
in terms of local conditions, which include local notions ;
of literary value" (p. 146).
[
23
For a flawed but helpful analysis of "comparative
value," see Elder Olson, "Value Judgments in the Arts,"
Critical Inquiry, 1 (September 1974), 71-90; Olson defines
value as "a relative attribute of something in virtue of ;
certain discernible properties as these relate to something
else" (p. 73). j
24
Morse Peckham, Man's Rage for Chaos (N.Y.: '
Schocken Books, 1967), p. 314; Wolfgang Iser, "The Reading
Process: A Phenomenological Approach," New Literary
History, 3 (Winter 1972), 289.
25 I
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 147. |
i
2 6 ■
"A Normative Theory of Rhetoric," p. 29; Fisher
writes further: "Human communication is a phenomenolog
ical, social, perceptual experience . . . and its investi- j
gation, teaching, criticism, and conduct is productive j
of ethical standards which directly affect the human ;
condition" (p. 39).
27 1
Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," p. 4 75. !
2 8 '
Fish, "On Conrad's Heart of Darkness."
29
Fish, "What Is Stylistics?: p. 148.
30 '
Stanley E. Fish, "How Ordinary Is Ordinary
Language?" New Literary History, 5 (Autumn 1973), 52.
^■*-Fish, "What Is Stylistics?" p. 134.
3 2 ^
The literature of Humanistic Psychology is full !
of references to the need for disorientation and reorgan
ization during one's personal growth: e.g., Carl Rogers
writes, "So while I still hate to readjust my thinking,
still hate to give up old ways of perceiving and concep
tualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a consid
erable degree, come to realize that these painful reorgan- ;
izations are what is known as learning, and that though
painful they always lead to a more satisfying because
somewhat more accurate way of seeing life " (On Becoming
a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy [Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1961], p. 25); cf. Fish's Self-
Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth- i
Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1972), pp. 1-4, and Surprised by Sin: The Reader in
Paradise Lost (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971),
pp. xiii, 1-4.
I
^In Self-Consuming Artifacts, pp. 353-373. !
"^Ibid. , p. 371. !
35 !
Fish, "On Doubts about Affective Stylistics." !
3 ft i
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 145. ;
i
37 '
Paraphrase of Wellek by Hamm, "From Ontology to j
Axiology," p. 146. !
o o
Fish, "Literature in the Reader," pp. 147 and 162,
n. 31.
39 .
O.G. Brockett, "Poetry as Instrument," Papers m
Rhetoric and Poetic, ed. by Donald C. Bryant (Iowa City: !
Univ. of Iowa, 1965), p. 16.
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