Resistencia durante la década de los setenta: conceptos relacionados

Countering the arguments put forth by stylisticians, transformational

grammarians, and others, Fish avers that a text’s formal features—such as its themes, narrative elements, and structure—are in fact the result of the reader’s interpretation,

103 _{Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 94.}

104 _{In creating this hierarchical distinction between heightened aesthetic language and everyday} language in the text, stylistics echoes the idea of the Russian formalists, who drew a similar distinction.

and do not exist prior to it. The syntax and vocabulary alone on the page are not

sufficient to realize a formal structure—let alone an aesthetic meaning—but are instead assigned significance by the reader. If formal units were to exist prior to the reading, the reader’s role would be limited to selecting or activating those ones that are relevant to him as he creates meaning.105 _{Instead, the reader brings to the text interpretive}

strategies that construct not only formal features (an understanding that the text one is reading is a Bildungsroman or a sonnet, for example), but the textual meaning, and even the author’s intentions. That is, it is through our interpretive strategies as readers that we claim to know what an author “meant.”106

In making this claim, Fish was responding to contemporary scholars who argued that a text has some a priori features that are objective and universally agreed-upon. Fish responds that that argument mistakenly conflates our habituation to certain formal features with their supposed universal objectivity:

We find it easy to assume that alliteration as an effect depends on a ‘fact’ that exists independently of any interpretive ‘use’ one might make of it… But phonological ‘facts’ are no more uninterpreted (or less conventional) than the ‘facts’ of orthography.107

105 _{Ibid., 9.} 106 _{Ibid., 163.} 107 _{Ibid., 167.}

In short, Fish argues that a supposedly “objective” formal feature is in fact an

interpretation, even if it is rarely acknowledged as one. A text’s objectivity is, in fact, a “dangerous illusion,” helped by the fact that the text is a physical object consisting of fixed letters on the page.

More importantly, the interpretive decisions we bring to a text predispose us to look for certain features within it, including themes and relationships that resonate with us. Those strategies, Fish argues, are not applied after we read a text and absorb its pre-existing features, but instead form the shape of our reading.108

However, the contention that the text is effectively created by its reading leads to a further question that has bedeviled reader response theory: namely, the question whether any readings of a text can be dismissed out of hand as unsupportable or incorrect. If the text is a function of interpretation, then we cannot turn to the text itself as a reference in order to reject particular interpretations as invalid. Wayne Booth raised the objection that there are certain formal features in texts that are commonly agreed upon, and that therefore some readings can in fact be collectively ruled out.109 _{To take one example, an Arabic text written in sajʿ (rhymed prose) and}

featuring the picaresque adventures of a character who at the end is revealed to be the

108 _{Ibid., 168.}

trickster Abū l-Fatḥ al-Iskandarī, can with confidence be declared to be a maqāma, while a reading that interprets it as a qaṣīda (or a Shakespearean sonnet, or a work of drama) can be ruled out as invalid. Fish has no argument with Booth’s assertion, but Fish locates the mechanism for ruling out readings not in any of the text’s formal features, but in those interpretive strategies that are collectively and currently recognized as ways to produce a text. A reading can be ruled out of bounds or incompetent not because it fails to hew closely to a pre-existing meaning in the text, but because it fails to adhere to acceptable interpretive strategies. In other words, “no reading, however outlandish it might appear, is inherently an impossible one.”110

Fish’s focus on the interpretive strategies a reader brings to the text counters the usual concern of other theorists to determine what constitutes a valid reader response, which invariably becomes enmeshed in the question of who constitutes a valid reader. The fear that an interpretation will be “anarchic,” “totally relativistic,” or “off-the-wall” is misplaced, since, as Fish puts it,

The mistake is to think of interpretation as an activity in need of constraints, when in fact interpretation is a structure of constraints… within a set of interpretive assumptions, to know what you can do is, ipso facto, to know what you can’t do.111

110 _{Fish, Is There a Text in This Class?, 347.} 111 _{Ibid., 356-7.}

A reader response may be considered fringe or otherwise unacceptable according to current standards of interpretation, but, if the spectrum of acceptable interpretations realign, a fringe interpretation may eventually move to the center, while other reader responses in turn come to be considered passé or eccentric.

1.8.3: Interpretive Communities

Fish’s point is that texts—whether on the level of words, sentences, or full narratives—do not have pre-existing normative constraints on their meanings. But at the same time, his concept of “acceptable interpretive strategies” mentioned in the previous section suggests that readers do not have absolute freedom to assign

idiosyncratic meanings to them—or to be more precise, the rest of us, as students and critics of literary texts, are not obligated to treat an off-the-wall response to a text as equally valid as all other responses.

For communication to occur, there must be a stable, public norm that the text must adhere to and which the reader comprehends (or in Jakobson’s terms, a stable, public Context by which the Addressee can interpret the Message.) The context, as Fish understands it, is a set of shared assumptions and conventional practices that structure

our interpretations.112 _{The fact that these strategies are communal and conventional,}

rather than individual-specific, is what allays “the fear of subjectivity” that underlay the formalist rejection of the affective fallacy.113 _{A group of readers that shares a}

communal set of strategies thus forms an “interpretive community” that structures the reader’s response.

Literature is a conventional category, meaning that what counts as “literary” is a product of a communal decision. We assign a text literary properties—properties that we have collectively already agreed are literary, since a text does not “exhibit[…] certain formal properties that compel a certain kind of attention; rather, paying a certain kind of attention (as defined by what literature is understood to be) results in the emergence into noticeability of the properties we know in advance to be

literary.”114 _{Formal units in the text, in other words, are produced by interpretive acts,}

since the text does not exist as an entity independent of interpretation.

Neither the reader nor the text has an entirely independent status: the text relies on the meaning-making activities of the reader, which “activates” the potential

112 _{Ibid., 318.}

113 _{In the introductory essay which opens the collection Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish traces the} development of his own thinking on reader response over a decade’s worth of essays. In it, he

acknowledges his own fears of reader subjectivity, which he later came to reject, and admits that in his earlier conceptions of reader response, he was “much more dependent on new critical principles than I was willing to admit.” Ibid., 7.

meanings within a text. At the same time, while the reader “makes” literature by making sense of what she is reading, her subjectivity is qualified by her membership in a community of readers that shapes her reading of the text. Her strategies in reading a text are, in effect, the “community property” of the interpretive community to which she belongs.115

The notion of the interpretive community resolves the problem of readerly subjectivity, but the interpretive community itself is not a source of objectivity, since such a community represents “a bundle of interests, of particular purposes and goals,” which can include commitment to a particular theoretical standpoint (Marxist,

postcolonial, poststructuralist, etc.) or to a cultural or historical perspective

(nationalist, religious, etc.)116 _{We can make our way through one of Khuḍayyir’s puzzle-}

like, non-narrative stories because we share a certain understanding of the literary conventions his text are defying. Likewise, his readers can bring to his texts a common understanding of memory, loss, and renewal—or even a familiarity with Basra itself— that causes them to respond to and embrace a text such as Baṣrayāthā.

On one level, the interpretive community explains why different readers can agree on the meaning of a text: it is due to the stability of interpretation that results

115 _{Ibid., 14.} 116 _{Ibid., 14.}

from readers belonging to the same community. It also explains why there can be disagreements over a text’s meaning: “not because of a stability in texts, but because of a stability in the makeup of interpretive communities and therefore in the opposing positions they make possible.”117 _{That stability is always temporary, however, as}

readers can shift positions from one interpretive community to another over the course of the career as readers, critics, or scholars. Likewise, interpretive strategies, which form the basis for interpretive communities, can fall out of favor and be supplanted by new ones. Interpretive communities are stable enough to prevent “interpretive anarchy” and allow different readers to speak comprehensibly to each other about a text; at the same time, they are flexible and mutable because they are learned, not universal.118

In his later collection of essays, Doing What Comes Naturally, Fish responds to criticisms that the concept of an interpretive community cannot account for change. That is, if a reader belongs to an interpretive community because she brings to a text a communally shared set of preconceptions, expectations, and ways of reading, and if texts do not possess pre-existing meaning-making features that exist beyond her interpretive horizons, how is it possible for a reader (or a collection of readers) to alter

117 _{Ibid., 171.} 118 _{Ibid., 172.}

how they read a text—that is, to move from one interpretive community to another? Fish’s response is that interpretive communities are not monolithic, and that a reader’s beliefs and approaches to a text “are not all held at the same level or operative at the same time,” but can affect and displace each other.119 _{An interpretive community, in}

this reading, is not a static, enclosed set of horizons, but “an engine of change”: it permits readers to organize and make sense of the world.

Fish contrasts his approach with what he calls “the old model,” whereby an “utterer” (the author) handed over a text whose meanings were “prefabricated,” and which was communicated by a code that existed independently of the text’s readers, who could either adhere to the code (and thus receive the meaning), or be considered deviant. Instead, Fish proposes that, in his model of interpretive community,

what utterers do is give hearers and readers the opportunity to make meanings (and texts) by inviting them to put into execution a set of strategies. It is presumed that the invitation will be recognized.120

The author in that sense invites readers to respond, and those who already possess shared interpretive strategies will comprise the text’s true readers: the author “hazards his project” of writing, in Fish’s words, “because of something he assumes to

119 _{Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally, 146.} 120 _{Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?, 173.}

be in his reader.”121 _{Readers enact a text by assigning it a meaning, but the text also}

calls into being its interpretive community: in Doing What Comes Naturally, Fish argues that an interpretive community is not simply a group of individuals who share a static point of view about how to approach a text. Rather, an interpretive community should be understood as an “engine of change,” one that interprets a text as being already related to the community’s interests and goals. That is, the community does “the work of transforming the landscape into material for its own project, but that project is then itself transformed by the very work it does.”122 _{This notion of the shared source of the}

reader’s response, and of the mutually-engendering relationship between text and readership goes a long way toward explaining the resonance that a text such as

Baṣrayāthā has had, both in its reception by an interpretive community of readers, and in its formation of that interpretive community.