Stanley Fish Argument

When students are given a work of literature, their immediate reaction is to analyze it, and discover its “deeper meaning”. This is problematic, in that there is not one universal meaning. It is a debate among the critics and scholars of language and literature what, and who, gives a poem meaning. Stanley Fish claims that meaning comes from the interpretive community. A prominent literary theorist, he compared the act of interpretation to following a recipe. Fish claims that readers are instructed to look at texts in ways that will produce what they expect to see. This analysis does not support the suggestion that the individual reader gives the text meaning. Cleanth Brooks, an influential literary critic, does not refute Fish’s idea, but Brooks
does allow room for the individual to give a text meaning. Brooks does so mainly through the idea of the “ideal reader”. While the ideal reader lends itself to the establishment of the individual, there is even more support for the idea that there is a place for the individual in the interpretive community. There is even an argument to be made that the interpretive community itself was conceived by individuals. Readers may have received certain knowledge about how to read and interpret texts from the interpretive community, but specific interpretations and ideas can and should be attributed to an individual reader. In an excerpt from Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish argues that the meanings of texts belong to the interpretive community, rather than independent readers. He attempts to support this idea by quoting an experiment he performed with a group of students in his linguistics course. He told them to analyze a poem that, in actuality, was not a poem at all. Instead, it was an assignment from his previous class. For Fish’s purposes, the act of recognizing a poem comes first, followed by distinguishing features and formal characteristics of poems. His students knew ahead of time that what they were looking at was a poem. By telling his students what they were seeing was poetry, they looked at the words with poetry-seeing eyes. The meanings and interpretations of the words were, for Fish, a consequence of the procedures his students performed once he told them it was a poem. Fish’s explanation for why his students were able to see an assignment as a poem revolves around “an internalized awareness of institutional goals and practices” (330). Fish believes that people see everything as already organized for them in relation to those goals and practices. In his opinion, no work on the part of the individual needs to be done; the interpretive community has already laid the groundwork for all individuals. One simply perceives objects based upon previous knowledge of what is occurring and why it is occurring. The interpretive community is the institution that supplies that previous knowledge. Fish concludes that all objects are made (not found) by the interpretive strategies readers set in motion. Fish’s contention is that the means by which these objects are made are social and conventional, not subjective. The “you” who is doing the interpreting is a communal you and not an isolated individual (331). Human beings are preceded by the institutions that we are a part of, and those institutions inhibit us from having interpretive strategies of our own. The interpretive community gives us categories of understanding, but forces us to understand only in the narrow ways we are given. We are social constructs, just like the poem/assignment Fish gave to his classes. Reader consciousness is not freestanding; rather it is constituted by a set of conventional notions (332). Fish’s students had universal, public knowledge as members of a literary community. As a result, their given interpretation was done in unison. Fish’s view is significant in that it is concerning. Fish is essentially saying that no interpretation is original or manufactured by independent thought. An individual’s interpretation is always formed from previous knowledge given by social constructs of communities. We know what we know because past people have known it, and they have handed down that knowledge to us. The notion that our ideas are not really ours, that they belong to a greater community as a whole, is distressing. It suggests that readers are unable to break free from these constructs, that they will always be pre-disposed to certain ways of seeing. While the idea of the interpretive community certainly is valid, and exists on some level, Fish’s version is not inclusive of the individual at all. Thankfully, Cleanth Brooks creates a bridge that allows the connection between the individual and the interpretive community to exist. Cleanth Brooks falls under the title of a “new critic”.
This means that Brooks is concerned is concerned with formalism. Critics such as Brooks are only concerned with the text itself; they take the content of the text and think of it as form. Indeed, Brooks’ aforementioned article is titled “The Formalist Critics”. In this article, he discusses the importance of removing the author from the text, so that the text can be the primary focus of the criticism. Already, Brooks is paving the way for the importance of the individual reader to be recognized. Brooks points out that to sever the work from those who actually read it is disastrous (247). In response to Fish, Brooks states that, “works are merely potential until they are read- that is, that they are re-created in the minds of actual readers, who vary enormously in their capabilities, their interests, their prejudices, their ideas” (247). This supports Fish’s theory that objects are made, and not found. Texts are all possibilities until someone gives them meaning, rather than discovers their meaning. The area of contention for Brooks seems to be who it is that gives the text its potential. Brooks does not mention an interpretive community. His quote above refers to readers in the plural, each of which is his or her own person with his or her own ideas. Now Fish would argue that each of these individuals’ ideas was influenced from their own interpretive community. He is not entirely wrong. However, this would mean that
there is not ONE interpretive community, but rather, many interpretive communities, consisting of countless individuals, who form their own ideas. Some of those ideas may be formed in the interpretive community, and some may not be. But each member of an interpretive community has their own individual thoughts, and this supports the argument that without individuals, there can be no interpretive community. Brooks says that the formalist critic assumes an “ideal reader”. While Brooks does not seem to believe that there is an ideal reader, he calls it a “defensible strategy” that all critics are forced to adopt (248). The alternatives, Brooks states, are either to deny the possibility of any standard reading (which would likely horrify Fish), or to take the lowest common denominator of the various readings that have been made, which is basically splitting the ideal reader into a group of ideal readers. Neither of these options is desirable, so an ideal reader is assumed. In that is an allowance Fish never makes: that the ideas of individuals can be just that, and not always belong to a larger interpretive community. Fish believes that when it comes to difference of opinion, people’s ideas are steeped in their previous knowledge and exposure to whatever interpretive community to which they belong. Brooks does not directly dispute this fact, but he allows for the discussion of the individual to take place. The argument is not that there is no interpretive community; it is simply that emphasis needs to be put on the individual minds that constitute its existence. So where does the individual belong in the interpretive community? Possibly, in the form of an ideal reader inside the interpretive community, as Brooks seems to suggest. But the identity of the individual can be stretched beyond that. Critics, such as Fish need to push past the idea of the interpretive community as something that cannot be escaped. By Fish’s definition, the interpretive community negates individual originality. Brooks allows for it in a limited sense. However, they need to think bigger. A question Fish never addresses is this: how did the interpretive community come to be? Who originally created the ideas by which interpretive communities define themselves? The answer is not clear, but whose to say it was not an individual? Perhaps, the interpretive community that knows what a student’s raised hand means first formed that idea because one man or woman brought it into being. The interpretive community may now be identified as something that is made up of many people, but it is possible that it was founded on the ideas of an individual. If a group of students were asked to analyze Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”, would they all have the same analysis?
Of course not. Would they all analyze it in the in which they were taught to analyze poetry? Most likely, yes. But what if they were never told it was a poem? What if you could gather a group of people who had never seen or heard of poetry? Then there would be no prior knowledge from an interpretive community for those individuals. They would look at the poem as a million different things: a series of words, a visual description of a scene, a man truly contemplating what a red wheelbarrow means. Fish’s experiment was done only with students at a university, who all came into the class with the same basis of understanding.
They all were given the exact same instructions. They were all told to look at it the exact same way. Of course an interpretive community would present itself. Free from those persuasions, truly individual ideas would be able to present themselves. In closing, Fish’s theory is generally correct. It is, however, too narrow. Fish illuminates the problem of clumping all individuals into interpretive communities, without giving them a way out. And there should and can be a way out. Brooks opens the door with the idea of an ideal reader. While this helps, it is still not enough. Individuals are not merely products of their societies. New, original, and sometimes even radical ideas spring forth all the time. The first abolitionist had a brand new idea that blacks were not property. Benjamin Franklin went against the grain countless times with his inventions and political ideas. Someone first came to the realization that the bible should not be taken literally. All of these interpretations were profound and new. They went against the established ideas of “the interpretive community” of the time. The same can, and should be done with respect to literature.