Introduction
Stanley Fish is a leading exponent of American ‘Reader-response’ criticism. His book on Milton Surprised by Sin was subtitled, ‘The Reader in Paradise Lost’. Fish argues that the reader in the book is constantly lured into mistakes of interpretation by the ambiguities of Milton’s syntax, and thus compelled to recognize his own ‘fallen state’.
INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM
In the essay INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM Fish questions New Criticism’s efforts to locate literary meaning in the formal features of the text, rather than on the author’s intention or the reader’s response— “The intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy”— and argues: Both authorial intention and formal features are produced by the interpretive assumptions and procedures the reader brings to the text. Authorial intention and formal features have no prior existence outside the reading experience. Fish’s arguments have affinities with the reception theory of Wolfgang Iser and with Derridean theories of discourse.
The essay has 3 parts.
1) The case for reader-response analysis
2) Undoing the case for reader-response analysis
3) Interpretive communities
In the first part Fish presents a bad model of interpretation that had suppressed what was really happening. In the second part, Fish says that the notion of “really happening” is just one more interpretation. In the final section , Fish argues the need for interpretative communities. It is an explanation for the differences we see and the fact that the differences we see are not random or idiosyncratic but systematic and conventional.
The Reader
Fish says that in the course of following the meaning of a text, the reader’s activities are at once ignored and devalued. They are ignored because the text is taken to be self sufficient— everything is in it—and they are devalued because when they are thought of at all, they are thought of as the disposable machinery of extraction.
Fish urges a procedure where the reader’s activities are at the centre of attention; where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning. Reader’s activities include—
o The making and revising of assumptions
o The rendering and regretting of judgements
o The coming to and abandoning of conclusions
o The giving and withdrawal of approval
o The specifying of causes
o The asking of questions
o The supplying of answers, the solving of puzzles
Interpretive communities
If interpretive acts are the source of forms rather than the other way round, why isn’t the case that readers are always performing the same acts or a sequence of random acts, and therefore creating the same forms or a random succession of forms? How, in short, does one explain these two ‘facts’ of reading?
1) The same reader will perform differently when reading two different texts.
2) Different readers will perform similarly when reading the same text.
Interpretive strategies are not put into execution after reading; they are the shape of reading, and because they are the shape of reading, they give texts their shape, making them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them. Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than the other way around.
The case for reader-response analysis
The first two volumes of the Milton Variorum Commentary have appeared. Commentators have expressed different opinions on some of the points of disputes in the poems.
o What is the two handed engine in ‘Lycidas’?
o What is the meaning of Haemony in ‘Comus’?
There are many other problems connected with the pronoun referents, lexical ambiguities, and punctuation. The editorial procedure always ends in the graceful throwing up of hands or in the recording of a disagreement between the two editors themselves. In short these are problems that apparently cannot be solved.
Fish says that these problems are not meant to be solved but to be experienced. Any attempt to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail. Fish tries to solve the problems in some of the sonnets. He takes three sonnets of Milton.
Twentieth sonnet:- “Lawrence of Virtuous father Virtuous son”. The poet invites a friend to join him in some of the pleasures. It is a neat repast intermixed with wine, conversation and song, a respite from all hard work because outside the earth is frozen. But the problem is in the last two lines:
“He who those delights can judge, and spare To interpose them oft is not unwise”.
The focus is on the word ‘spare’. Two interpretations are possible—‘leave time for’ and ‘refrain from’. In one reading the ‘delights’ are recommended. He who can leave time for them is not unwise. In the other, they are the subjects of a warning—he who knows when to refrain from them is not unwise. Two critics A.S.P. Woodhouse and Douglas Bush express opposing views on the meaning of ‘spare’. Bush reviews the evidence marshalled by Woodhouse, but draws the exactly opposite conclusion.
Conclusion
Thus, Stanley Fish elaborates the concept of reader and the interpretive communities of readers in his work Interpreting Variorum. He enlighten the relationship among author, text, reader and the interpretive communities of readers.
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