Stanley Fish’s essay is an attempt to understand how we make meaning out of texts and,
by extension, much else.
He relates an anecdote wherein a student asked a colleague of Fish’s on the first day of
class, “Is there a text in this class?” The professor responded, “Yes; it’s the
Norton Anthology of Literature.” The student responded, “No, no,” she said, “I
mean in this class do we believe in poems and things or is it just us?” Fish then
goes on to meditate on the two different meanings of text in the anecdote, i.e. a literal
textbook and a critical approach to texts.
He points out (1396 right-hand column, middle) that “neither meaning was imposed on
a more normal one by a private, idiosyncratic interpretive act…” that is to say, the
professor and student in question were not using the word “text” in a private way (in a
way only they understood). Rather, though they were individually using the word “text”
in different ways, each was using it in a way not all unusual for the situation they found
themselves in, a classroom where English literature is being taught, and which explained
the particular misunderstanding they had. The location (the English literature classroom)
matters according to Fish because it determines the way in which the two of them will
understand certain utterances. He says (1396, right-hand column, middle) “It is just
that these norms are not embedded in the language (where they may be read out by
anyone with sufficiently clear, that is, unbiased, eyes) but inhere in an institutional
structure within which one hears utterances as already organized with reference to
certain assumed purposes and goals” In other words, words are never transparent and
fixed in meaning (always mean the same thing) but, rather, mean what they mean in large
part due to the context in which they heard. This context prepares us to understand what
is said (and not said) in certain ways. For example, if I say, “the arbitrary nature of the
sign” to you in this classroom today, you will understand what I mean because of your
experience in this classroom—though if someone who had not been in this class (or any
theory class) were to hear me say the same thing today, they would not understand
because they would have no context. Likewise, if I had said, “the arbitrary nature of the
sign” on the first day of class, you would not have understood what I said—because of a
lack of context--although you would have understood that it had something to do with
theory, that I was not talking about say, Math or American History. In other words, you
would have already been putting what I said into the context that was available to you,
trying to make it fit in.
This is what Fish means when he says, (1398 top left) “The obviousness of the
utterance’s meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system
that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already
embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can cite as obvious.”
What Fish is saying is, meaning does not exist independent of context. Language does not
function in a separate sphere from the context in which it is uttered. It is not as if you
have a box called “language” from which you can pull words with predetermined
meanings. For example, the word “crank.” Depending on the context this can mean, “turn
something (“crank the handle”), an irritating, and irritable, eccentric (He’s a crank.”), or
it can mean an instance of methamphetamine, “He is on crank.” Depending on the
context you are in the meaning of “crank” will differ. A famous example of this in
literature is the “play within a play” sequence in Hamlet. Most of the people at the play
understand the play as a work of tragic drama, a piece of fiction. Claudius, however, sees
it as the story of his betrayal and murder of Hamlet’s father—in other words as an
allegory of his betrayal and murder of Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark. According
to Fish, you hear, in other words, what you are prepared to hear. You understand what
you are prepared to understand. This preparation comes in the form of what Fish calls
categories, which you might think of as ways / conventions of understanding.
Below are sonnets by the four poets: the Italian poet, Petrarch, the English poets
Shakespeare and Spenser, and the American poet, John Ashberry.
Petrarch Sonnet I
QUANTO più m’ avvicino al giorno estremo
che l’ umana miseria suol far breve,
più veggio ’l tempo andar veloco e leve,
e ’l mio di lui sperar fallace e scemo.
I’ dico a’ miei pensier: “Non molto andremo
d’ amor parlando omai, che ’l duro e greve
terreno incarco, come fresce neve,
si va struggendo, onde noi pace avremo:
perchè co’ lui cadrà quella speranza,
che ne fe’ vaneggiar si lungamente,
e ’l riso e ’l pianto e la paura e l’ ira.
Si vedrem chiaro poi come sovente
per le cose dubbiose altri s’ avanza,
e come spesso indarno si sospira.”
Shakespeare Sonnet 106.
1 When in the chronicle of wasted time
2. I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
3. And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,
4. In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
5. Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
6. Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
7. I see their antique pen would have expressed
8. Even such a beauty as you master now.
9. So all their praises are but prophecies
10. Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
11. And for they looked but with divining eyes,
12. They had not skill enough your worth to sing
13. For we, which now behold these present days,
14. Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise
Sonnet by Edmund Spenser
Sonnet by John Ashberry
The antique Babel, Empresse of the East,
Vpreard her buildinges to the threatned skie:
And Second Babell, tyrant of the West,
Her ayry Towers vpraised much more high.
But, with the weight of their own surquedry,
They both are fallen, that all the earth did feare,
And buried now in their own ashes ly;
Yet shewing by their heapes, how great they were.
But in their place doth now a third appeare,
Fayre Venice, flower of the last worlds delight;
And next to them in beauty draweth neare,
But farre exceedes in policie of right.
Yet not so fayre her buildinges to behold
As Lewkenors stile that hath her beautie told.
Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
After many years he has been brought nothing.
The servant’s frown is the reader’s patience.
The servant goes to bed.
The patience rambles on
Musing on the library’s lofty holes.
His pain is the servant’s alive.
It pushes to the top stain of the wall
Its tree-top’s the head of excitement:
Baskets, birds, beetles, spools.
The light walls collapse next day.
Traffic is the reader’s pictured face.
Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits;
Worms be your words, you not safe from ours.
If you don’t understand Italian, if you lack that context, you cannot read the Petrarch. On
the other hand, you can read the Spenser and Shakespeare—because you have the
necessary context for doing so, the ability to read English. Yet, though you can read both
of these poets, there are probably aspects (vocabulary, symbolism, allusion) of the poems
that are eluding us because we lack the context to grasp them fully. Finally, John
Ashberry’s sonnet is written in contemporary English, but may be the most difficult to
follow because it seems to violate the rules of a sonnet (while some of them) and thus
presents us with a question: what context do we need to understand this sonnet in the
same way we understood (or failed to understand) the other sonnets? In this sense, the
sonnet might be said to “invent” its readers. How so? Imagine a lock to which we do not
have the key. The only way to open the lock is get a key or to “pick” it. A pick is a kind
of key. A key engages the locking mechanism in the appropriate way so as to unlock it. A
pick does the same thing. In both cases, the lock sets the terms of the engagement. In that
same sense that a lock might be said to invent its key or the manipulations of the pick
required to open it. (You could also argue that a key could invent a lock.) In a like
manner, a poem might be said to invent its readers because it requires that the reader
share its context for understanding. The question then becomes how do we discover or
invent a context for reading Ashberry’s poem or understanding anything we initially
don’t understand? It may be we have to let go of the context we used for Shakespeare and
Co. and see what happens. We may need to read other readers of Ashberry (critics) to see
how they solved this problem, i.e. enlarge our context for reading the poem through their
contexts. We may need to read more of Ashberry’s poetry, enlarging our context of
experience with Ashberry. We may read other poets who cite him as an influence or who
were writing contemporaneously with him so that get a feel for his context and so on. It
may be that we have to create a new context for what it means to read a poem and what
we want from a poem.
In short, when you come up against something you don’t understand, Fish is asking that
you ask yourself to imagine what sort of context (what information, what assumptions)
would be needed to understand the work in front of you. In other words, don’t blame the
work—at least not right away—but ask yourself, “What is this work asking of me? What
am I assuming about the work? How do these assumptions shape my approach to the
work? Which of these (and to what degree) do I need to change if I want to engage the
work? What must I share with the work in order for us to enter into dialogue? What is the
key needed to open this particular lock? Or to what lock in myself is this poem / novel /
film / song the key to? It may be more useful to think of yourself as the lock and the
poem as the key or the poem as the answer and yourself as the riddle.
Fish points out that the kinds of meanings we can make are largely predetermined by our
history and the situation we find ourselves in. Interpretation is not wholly relative
because we do not wholly (or, some might argue, even largely) invent our history or the
context we find ourselves in. We are products of our historical moment (and its
opportunities and restrictions) and the choices we made within those restrictions. The
answer to “Is there a text in this class?” Cannot be, say, “Quxikok.” The question may
have several answers (depending on the context we bring), but they are limited in number
and mutually comprehensible.