Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"

Author(s): Stanley E. Fish

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 191-196
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Critical Response
III

Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"

Stanley E. Fish

Together Professor Bush and Mr. Mailloux present a problem i

terpretation not unlike those that were the occasion of the paper
criticize: Professor Bush takes the first section of that paper mor
ously (or at least with a different kind of seriousness) than I do, an
Mailloux complains that I do not take it seriously enough. In their
ferent ways they seem to miss or slight (or perhaps resent) the pla
ness of my performance, the degree to which it is an attempt
faithful to my admitted unwillingness to come to, or rest on, a p
Professor Bush seems to think that I am mounting an attack o
Variorum. Let me say at the outset that I intended no such attack,
am sorry if anything I wrote gave that impression, and that I regr
offense that may have been taken. Professor Bush and I view the
iorum from different perspectives, both of which seem to me to b
fectly legitimate. He views it as a document, while I view it as a text
document, as a record and history of research and interpretation,
model of its kind, full, judicious, and, above all, honest. The editor
us the compliment of not pretending to an impossible objectivity.
leave us the valuable record of their own occasional disagreements,
thus suggest (to me at least) that they know very well that theirs
interim report. My inquiry is into the significance of that report; it
a brief against the compiling of its materials but an attempt to pu
them a question the editors quite properly do not ask: what do
history of the effort to determine the meaning of Milton's poems
In short, I am extending the scope of interpretation to include the
preters themselves and, rather than attacking the Variorum, takin
step further the task it has so well begun.
Even in the context of our differing perspectives, however, Pro
191

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192 Critical Response Stanley E. Fish

sor Bush and I may not be so far apart as he thinks. We both agree that
in Milton's poetry one finds "complex, even contradictory feelings" and
that the poet is "moving, at times, through doubt and struggle, to a
positive resolution." It is just that while Professor Bush wishes to em-
phasize the resolution, I want to emphasize the doubt and struggles, to
argue, that they are ours as well as the poet's, and to assert that they do
not lose their value (in the sense of being significance bearing) simply
because they give way to other "feelings." Like Ralph Rader, Professor
Bush seems to believe that our final understanding (and I admit that we
do in some cases achieve one) of what a poem means should be taken to
be its meaning ("resolved sense"). It is my contention, however, that this
understanding is no more to be identified with "the meaning" than the
understandings which precede it and that an interpretation the reader
entertains and then discards (or revises, or modifies, or expands, or
forgets) has, in fact, been hazarded, and because it has been hazarded it
involves commitments (to propositions, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs)
which, even if they are only temporary, are nonetheless a part of the
poem's experience. It is a question finally of whether perceptual
strategies are regarded as instrumental, in the sense that they are pre-
liminary to the determination of meaning, or as constitutive, in the sense
that they are, at every moment, making meaning, and then, at every
subsequent moment, making it again. It is a question, as Mr. Mailloux
points out, of whether one's critical model is spatial or temporal.
Of course this is to do no more than restate the position to which
Professor Bush is objecting, but what he does not seem to have realized is
that I object to it too, or at least to the claims made for it in the first two
sections of the paper. Those claims are withdrawn at the end of the third
section, when I admit that in the course of defending my procedures I
have given up the right to declare them superior to the procedures I had
been criticizing. That is because the arguments in the later sections un-
dercut the possibility of demonstrating that superiority (of providing
evidence for it) and reduce it to an assertion. It is this that Mr. Mailloux
sees and regrets, although apparently he believes that I have simply
made a mistake. In fact what I have done is allowed two stances that had
up to now been kept separate to come together within the (artificial
confines of a single article. The result, as Mr. Mailloux observes, is a
contradiction ("what Fish now appears to have given us is a self-
consuming criticism"), and it is a contradiction which follows directly

Stanley E. Fish's most recent publication is "How to Do Things with

Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism" (Specia
Centennial Issue of Modern Language Notes, Summer 1976). His The Liv-
ing Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing is scheduled to appear in the
autumn of 1977.

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1976 193

from an equivocation in my own theory and practice. At times, as in the

first half of "Interpreting the Variorum" and in an earlier piece on
"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso," my analyses are presented as if they
were descriptive, as if I were in the business of making available to analyti-
cal consciousness the strategies readers perform, independently of
whether or not they are aware of having performed them. When I am in
this mood, my claim is similar to that sometimes made by linguists-to be
telling people what it is they have always done, even though, as a conse-
quence of their critical principles, they may be either unable or unwilling
to acknowledge that they have been doing it. It is a claim, in short, that
you read the way I say you do, and it won't do you any good to deny it
because I can always explain away your denial as either a devaluation or
a deliberate suppression of what has "really" happened. The other
stance is no less arrogant, but it is arrogant in another direction. It is
prescriptive, and it involves urging readers to read in a new or different
way. When I am in this mood, I do not say "this is the way you read
whether you know it or not," but, rather, "why don't you try it this way."
"This way" means falling in with my assumption that the content of a
reader's experience is a succession of deliberate acts (or perceptual
strategies) and then monitoring the acts which are produced by (rather
than discovered by) that assumption. The procedure will yield results,
but they will have no necessary or demonstrable relationship to a shared
or normative reading experience.
Only if such a relationship obtains can the polemical stance of the
first half of "Interpreting the Variorum" be justified, although the
justification would depend on my ability to provide independent evi-
dence for my analyses. But it is the very possibility of providing such
evidence that is denied in the paper's second half, when, in a wholesale
repudiation of formalism, I cut myself off from any recourse to eviden-
tiary procedures. Mr. Mailloux says that "the claim of affective stylistics"
("that its description/interpretation reflects or dramatizes the way most
readers actually read") is an empirical one "that can be tested against
intuitive, psycholinguistic, and critical evidence." The case, however, is
much less strong: intuitive, psycholinguistic, and critical evidence can be
appropriated by affective stylistics, but it can not serve as a test. By
"critical evidence" I take Mr. Mailloux to be referring to the way I use
previous criticism. Typically, I will pay less attention to the interpreta-
tions critics propose than to the problems or controversies that provoke
them, on the reasoning that while the interpretations vary, the problems
and controversies do not and therefore point to something that all read-
ers share. If, for example, there is a continuing debate over whether
Marlow should or should not have lied at the end of Heart of Darkness, I
will interpret the debate as evidence of the difficulty readers experience
when the novel asks them to render a judgment. And, similarly, if there
is an argument over who is the hero of Paradise Lost, I will take the

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194 Critical Response Stanley E. Fish

argument as an indication that, in the course of reading the poem, the

identity of its hero is continually put into question. There will always be
two levels, a surface level on which there seem to be nothing but dis-
agreements, and a deeper level on which those same disagreements are
seen as constituting the shared content whose existence they had seemed
to deny. In short, critical controversies become disguised reports of what
readers uniformly do, and I perform the service of revealing to the
participants what it is they were really telling us.
As a strategy, however, this will be persuasive only if one accepts the
assumption that criticism is a code that must be cracked rather than a
body of straightforward reporting and opinion (the difference, again,
between the Variorum as a text and as a document). Rather than citing
evidence, I am manufacturing it by stipulating in advance that a scrutiny
of the materials will reveal just the kind of activities that I claim readers
to be performing. In short, for the "evidence" to be supporting, it re-
quires the addition or superimposition of the very hypothesis it would
test. This holds too for psycholinguistic evidence. It is true that the
experiments of some psycholinguists have uncovered perceptual
strategies that are similar to those I describe, but in their analyses these
strategies are in the service of processing meaning, while it is my claim
that they have meaning, not at one point, but at every point. Again, it is
only by assuming what I would prove that the evidence becomes evi-
dence, and indeed if we take as representative Frank Smith's definition
of successful reading as the reduction of uncertainty, then the re-
searches of psycholinguistics would seem to offer more comfort to Rader
and to Bush than to me. All that remains to me is Mailloux's third
category, intuitive evidence, by which he means the evidence prov
by someone who, after hearing or reading me, nods in agreement.
this is evidence of a different kind than is required, for it is not av
to a disinterested observer and therefore will compel assent only f
those who have already assented. That is why the notion of an int
tive community is so important to my argument. It is at once object
the sense that it is the result of an agreement, and subjective, in the
that only those who are party to that agreement (and who ther
constitute it) will be able to recognize it.
This last is a restatement of the final section of "Interpreting
Variorum," and it is an inevitable consequence of my gradual aban
ment in that article of the descriptivist position. This is why it is c
to find Mr. Mailloux speculating that it may be a desire to preserv
"descriptive focus" that accounts for my retreat from the claim of
ity, as if that claim would be easier to make in the absence of any de
tivist pretensions. The case, however, seems to me exactly the rever
is only by maintaining a descriptive focus that a claim of priority co
justified (at least theoretically), for without it there is no basis on w

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 Critical Inquiry Autumn 1976 195

such a claim could be tested. In other words, it is because I have already

done what Mr. Mailloux urges me to do-back off from the assertion of
"descriptive power"-that I can no longer do what he wants me to do
-hold on to the assertion of priority.
This does not mean, as he seems to fear, that I have given up the
distinction between affective stylistics (not the happiest of designations)
and the methodologies to which it originally stood opposed. It isjust that
the distinction cannot be maintained in its strongest form, as a distinc-
tion between what is true and what is not. Mr. Mailloux is right to point
out that by virtue of a metacritical step I have put formalist and affective
analyses on a par, but that is only in relation to the claim either of them
might make to objectivity; and it is also only in relation to that claim that
the distinction between reading strategies and critical strategies is col-
lapsed. With respect to other levels of comparison the differences re-
main. The chief difference, as Mailloux observes, is between a method
which assigns value to the temporal reading experience and a method
which either denies that experience or regards it as merely instrumental.
The difference is not, however, one of fidelity to that experience, since
the act of reading which is the object of affective criticism is also its
creation. Even so, a case for the superiority (if not the priority) of affec-
tive criticism can still be made. First of all, it is more coherent in its own
terms than formalist criticism, which is vitiated, as I have argued, by the
absence of any connection between its descriptions and its interpreta-
tions. Either the interpretation precedes the description and is then
made (illegitimately) to appear its consequence, or a description is
scrutinized until, as if by magic, an interpretation which fills its spaces
emerges. In either case, the procedure is arbitrary. Of course there is
arbitrariness in my procedure too, but it enters at the beginning, when a
set of assumptions is adopted which subsequently directs and generates
the analyses. Affective criticism is arbitrary only in the sense that one
cannot prove that its beginning is the right one, but once begun it un-
folds in ways that are consistent with its declared principles. It is there-
fore a superior fiction, and since no methodology can legitimately claim
any more, this superiority is decisive. It is also creative. That is, it makes
possible new ways of reading and thereby creates new texts. An unsym-
pathetic critic might complain that this is just the trouble, that rather
than following the way people actually read I am teaching people to read
differently. This is to turn the prescriptive claim into a criticism, but it
will be felt as a criticism only if the alternative to different reading is
right reading and if the alternative to the texts created by different
reading is the real text. These however are the fictions of formalisms, and
as fictions they have the disadvantage of being confining. My fiction is
liberating. It relieves me of the obligation to be right (a standard that
simply drops out) and demands only that I be interesting (a standard

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196 Critical Response Stanley E. Fish

that can be met without any reference at all to an illusory objectivity).

Rather than restoring or recovering texts, I am in the business of making
texts and of teaching others to make them by adding to their repertoire
of strategies. I was once asked whether there are really such things as
self-consuming artifacts, and I replied: "There are now." In that answer
you will find both the arrogance and the modesty of my claims.

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