Stanley Fish’s essay is an attempt to understand how we ...



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 |Shakespeare Sonnet 106. |

| | |

|QUANTO più m’ avvicino al giorno estremo |1 When in the chronicle of wasted time |

|che l’ umana miseria suol far breve, |2. I see descriptions of the fairest wights, |

|più veggio ’l tempo andar veloco e leve, |3. And beauty making beautiful old rhyme, |

|e ’l mio di lui sperar fallace e scemo. |4. In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, |

|I’ dico a’ miei pensier: “Non molto andremo |5. Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, |

|d’ amor parlando omai, che ’l duro e greve |6. Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, |

|terreno incarco, come fresce neve, |7. I see their antique pen would have expressed |

|si va struggendo, onde noi pace avremo: |8. Even such a beauty as you master now. |

|   perchè co’ lui cadrà quella speranza, |9. So all their praises are but prophecies |

|che ne fe’ vaneggiar si lungamente, |10. Of this our time, all you prefiguring; |

|e ’l riso e ’l pianto e la paura e l’ ira. |11. And for they looked but with divining eyes, |

|Si vedrem chiaro poi come sovente |12. They had not skill enough your worth to sing |

|per le cose dubbiose altri s’ avanza, |13. For we, which now behold these present days, |

|e come spesso indarno si sospira.” |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, |Each servant stamps the reader with a look. |

|Vpreard her buildinges to the threatned skie: |After many years he has been brought nothing. |

|And Second Babell, tyrant of the West, |The servant’s frown is the reader’s patience. |

|Her ayry Towers vpraised much more high. |The servant goes to bed. |

|But, with the weight of their own surquedry, |The patience rambles on |

|They both are fallen, that all the earth did feare, |Musing on the library’s lofty holes. |

|And buried now in their own ashes ly; | |

|Yet shewing by their heapes, how great they were. |His pain is the servant’s alive. |

|But in their place doth now a third appeare, |It pushes to the top stain of the wall |

|Fayre Venice, flower of the last worlds delight; |Its tree-top’s the head of excitement: |

|And next to them in beauty draweth neare, |Baskets, birds, beetles, spools. |

|But farre exceedes in policie of right. |The light walls collapse next day. |

|   Yet not so fayre her buildinges to behold |Traffic is the reader’s pictured face. |

|   As Lewkenors stile that hath her beautie told. |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.

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