Stanley Fish
LAST TIME I ended by suggesting that the fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree. This account of agreement has the additional ad vantage of providing what the objectivist argument cannot sup ply, a coherent account of disagreement. To someone who believes in determinate meaning, disagreement can only be a theological error. The truth lies plainly in view, available to anyone who has the eyes to see; but some readers choose not to see it and perversely substitute their own meanings for the meanings that texts obviously bear. Nowhere is there an explanation of this waywardness (original sin would seem to be the only relevant model), or of the origin of these idiosyncratic meanings (I have been arguing that there could be none), or of the reason why some readers seem to be exempt from the general infirmity. There is simply the conviction that the facts exist in their own self-evident shape and that disagreements are to be resolved by referring the respective parties to the facts as they really are. In the view that I have been urging, however, disagreements cannot be resolved by reference to the facts, because the facts emerge only in the context of some point of view. It follows, then, that disagreements must occur between those who hold (or are held by) different points of view, and what is at stake in a disagreement is the right to specify what the facts can hereafter be said to be. Disagreements are not settled by the facts, but are the means by which the facts are settled. Of course, no such settling is final, and in the (almost certain) event that the dispute is opened
What Mak es an Interpretation Acceptable? 339
again, the category of the facts “as they really are” will be reconstituted in still another shape. Nowhere is this process more conveniently on display than in literary criticism, where everyone’s claim is that his interpretation more perfectly accords with the facts, but where every one’s purpose is to persuade the rest of us to the version of the facts he espouses by persuading us to the interpretive principles in the light of which those facts will seem indisputable. There cent critical fortunes of William Blake’s “The Tyger” provide a nice example. In 1954 Kathleen Raine published an influential essay entitled “Who Made the Tyger” in which she argued that because the tiger is for Blake “the beast that sustains its own life at the expense of its fellow-creatures” it is a “symbol of … predacious selfhood,” and that therefore t he answer to the poem’s final question-“Did he who made the Lamb make thee”-“is, beyond all possible doubt, No.”1 In short, the tiger is unambiguously and obviously evil. Raine supports her reading by pointing to two bodies of evidence, certain cabbalistic writings which, she avers, “beyond doubt .. . inspired The T yger/’ and evidence from the poem itself. She pays particular attention to the word “forests” as it appears in line 2, “In the forests of the night:” “Never … is the word ‘forest’ used by Blake in any context in which it does not refer to the natural, ‘fallen’ world” (p. 48).
The direction of argument here is from the word “forests” to the support it is said to provide for a particular interpretation. Ten years later, however, that same word is being cited in support of a quite different interpretation. While Raine assumes that the lamb is for Blake a symbol of Christ-like self sacrifice, E. D. Hirsch believes that Blake’s intention was “to satirize the singlemindedness of the Lamb”: “There can be no doubt,” he declares, “that The Tyger is a poem that celebrates the holiness of tigerness.”2 In his reading the “ferocity and de structiveness” of the tiger are transfigured and one of the things they are transfigured by is the word “forests”: ” ‘Forests’ . . . suggests tall straight forms, a world that for all its terror has the orderliness of the tiger’s stripes or Blake’s perfectly balanced verses” (p. 247).
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What we have here then are two critics with opposing interpretations, each of whom claims the same word as internal and confirming evidence. Clearly they cannot both be right, but just as clearly there is no basis for deciding ‘between them. One cannot appeal to the text, because the text has become an extension of the interpretive disagreement that divides them; and, in fact, the text as it is variously characterized is a con sequence of the interpretation for which it is supposedly evidence. It is not that the meaning of the word “forests” points in the direction of one interpretation or the other; rather, in the light of an already assumed interpretation, the word will be seen to obviously have one meaning or another. Nor can the question be settled by turning to the context-say the cabbalistic writings cited by Raine-for that too will only be a context for an already assumed interpretation. If Raine had not already decided that the answer to the poem’s final question is “beyond all possible doubt, No,” the cabbalistic texts, with their distinction between supreme and inferior deities, would never have suggested themselves to her as Blake’s source. The rhetoric of critical argument, as it is usually conducted in our journals, de pends upon a distinction between interpretations on the one hand and the textual and contextual facts that will either sup port or disconfirm them on the other; but as the example of Blake’s “Tyger” shows, text, context, and interpretation all emerge together, as a consequence of a gesture (the declaration of belief) that is irreducibly interpretive. It follows, then, that when one interpretation wins out over another, it is not because the first has been shown to be in accordance with the facts but because it is from the perspective of its assumptions that the facts are now being specified. It is these assumptions, and not the facts they make possible, that are at stake in any critical dispute.
Hirsch and Raine seem to be aware of this, at least subliminally; for whenever their respective assumptions surface they are asserted with a vehemence that is finally defensive: “The answer to the question … is beyond all possible doubt, No.” “There can be no doubt that The Tyger is .. . a poem that celebrates the holiness of tigerness.” If there were a doubt, if the interpretation with which each critic begins were not firmly in
What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?
place, the account of the poem that follows from that interpretation could not get under way. One could not cite as an “obvious” fact that “forests” is a fallen word or, alternatively, that it “suggests tall and straight forms.” Whenever a critic prefaces an assertion with a phrase like “without doubt” or “there can be no doubt,” you can be sure that you are within hailing distance of the interpretive principles which produce the facts that he presents as obvious.In the years since 1964 other interpretations of the poem have been put forward, and they follow a predictable course. Some echo either Raine or Hirsch by arguing that the tiger is either good or evil; others assert that the tiger is both good and evil, or beyond good and evil; still others protest that the questions posed in the poem are rhetorical and are therefore not meant to be answered (“It is quite evident that the critics are not trying to understand the poem at all. If they were, they would not attempt to answer its questions.”)8 It is only a matter of time before the focus turns from the questions to their asker and to the possibility that the speaker of the poem is not Blake but a limited persona (“Surely the point . .. is that Blake sees further or deeper than his persona” ).4 It then becomes possible to assert that “we don’t know who the speaker of ‘The Tyger’ is,” and that therefore the poem “is a maze of questions in which the reader is forced to wander confusedly.”In this reading the poem itself becomes rather “tigerish” and one is not at all surprised when the original question- “‘Who made the Tiger?”- is given its quintessentially new-critical answer: the tiger is the poem itself and Blake, the consummate artist who smiles “his work to see,” is its creator.6 As one obvious and indisputable interpretation supplants another, it brings with it a new set of obvious and indisputable facts. Of course each new reading is elaborated in the name of the poem itself, but the poem itself is always a function of the interpretive perspective from which the critic “discovers” it.
A committed pluralist might find in the previous paragraph a confirmation of his own position. After all, while ”The Tyger” is obviously open to more than one interpretation, it is not open to an infinite number of interpretations. There may be disagree-
342 Is There a Text in This Class?
ments as to whether the tiger is good or evil, or whether the speaker is Blake or a persona, and so on, but no one is suggesting that the poem is an allegory of the digestive processes or that it predicts the Second World War, and its limited plurality is simply a testimony to the capacity of a great work of art to generate multiple readings. The point is one that Wayne Booth makes when he asks, “Are we right to rule out at least some readings?” and then answers his own question with a resounding yes. It would be my answer too; but the real question is what gives us the right so to be right. A pluralist is committed to say ing that there is something in the text which rules out some readings and allows others (even though no one reading can ever capture the text’s “inexhaustible richness and complexity”). His best evidence is that in practice “we all in fact” do reject unacceptable readings and that more often than not we agree on the readings that are to be rejected. Booth tells us, for example, that he has never found a reader of Pride and Prejudice “who sees no jokes against Mr. Collins” when he gives his reasons for wanting to marry Elizabeth Bennet and only belatedly, in fifth position, cites the “violence” of his affection. 8 From this and other examples Booth concludes that there are justified limits to what we can legitimately do with a text,” for “surely we could not go on disputing at all if a core of agreement did not exist.” Again, I agree, but if, as I have argued, the text is always a function of interpretation, then the text cannot be the location of the core of agreement by means of which we reject interpretations. We seem to be at an impasse: on the one hand there would seem to be no basis for labeling an interpretation unacceptable, but on the other we do it all the time.
This, however, is an impasse only if one assumes that the activity of interpretation is itself unconstrained; but in fact the shape of that activity is determined by the literary institution which at any one time will authorize only a finite number of interpretative strategies. Thus, while there is no core of agreement in the text, there is a core of agreement (although one subject to change) concerning the ways of producing the text. No where is this set of acceptable ways written down, but it is a part of everyone’s knowledge of what it means to be operating
What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable? 343
within the literary institution as it is now constituted. A student of mine recently demonstrated this knowledge when, with an air of giving away a trade secret, she confided that she could go into any classroom, no matter wha t the subject of the course, and win approval for running one of a number of well-defined interpretive routines: she could view the assigned text as an instance of the tension between nature and culture; she could look in the text for evidence of large mythological oppositions; she could argue that the true subject of the text was its own composition, or that in the guise of fashioning a narrative the speaker was fragmenting and displacing his own anxieties and fears. She could not, however, at least at Johns Hopkins Univer sity today, argue that the text was a prophetic message inspired by the ghost of her Aunt Tilly.
My student’s understanding of what she could and could not get away with, of the unwritten rules of the literary game, is shared by everyone who plays that game, by those who write and judge articles for publication in learned journals, by those who read and listen to papers at professional meetings, by those who seek and award tenure in innumerable departments of English and comparative literature, by the armies of graduate students for whom knowledge of the rules is the real mark of professional initiation. This does not mean that these rules and the practices they authorize are either monolithic or stable. Within the literary community there are subcommunities (what will excite the editors of Diacritics is likely to distress the editors of Studies in Philology), and within any community the boundaries of the acceptable are continually being redrawn. In a classroom whose authority figures include David Bleich and Norman Holland, a student might very well relate a text to her memories of a favorite aunt, while in other classrooms, dominated by the spirit of Brooks and Warren, any such activity would immediately be dismissed as nonliterary, as something that isn’t done.
The point is that while there is always a category of things that
‘are not done
(it is simply
the reverse or flip side
of
the
category of things that are done), the membership in that cate
gory is continually changing. It changes laterally as one
moves from subcommunity to subcommunity, and it changes through
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time when once interdicted interpretive strategies are admitted into the ranks of the acceptable. Twenty years ago one of the things that literary critics didn’t do was talk about the reader, at least in a way that made his experience the focus of the critical act. The prohibition on such talk was largely the result of Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s famous essay “The Affective Fallacy,” which argued that the variability of readers renders any investigation of their responses ad-hoc and relativistic: “The poem itself,” the authors complained, “as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.”9 So influential was this essay that it was possible for a reviewer to dismiss a book merely by finding in it evidence that the affective fallacy had been committed. The use of a juridical terminology is not accidental; this was in a very real sense a legal finding of activity in violation of understood and institutionalized decorums. Today, however, the affective fallacy, no longer a fallacy but a methodology, is committed all the time, and its practitioners have be hind them the full and authorizing weight of a fully articulated institutional apparatus. The “reader in literature” is regularly the subject of forums and workshops at the convention of the Modern Language Association; there is a reader newsletter which reports on the multitudinous labors of a reader industry; any list of currently active schools of literary criticism includes the school of “reader response,” and two major university presses have published collections of essays designed both to display the variety of reader-centered criticism (the emergence of factions within a once interdicted activity is a sure sign of its having achieved the status of an orthodoxy) and to detail its history. None of this of course means that a reader-centered criticism is now invulnerable to challenge or attack, merely that it is now recognized as a competing literary strategy that cannot be dis missed simply by being named. It is acceptable not because every one accepts it but because those who do not are now obliged to argue against it. .
The promotion of reader-response criticism to the category of things that are done (even if it is not being done by everyone) brings with it a whole new set of facts to which its practitioners can now refer. These include patterns of expectation and dis-
What M akes an Interpretation Acceptable? 345
appointment, reversals of direction, traps, invitations to premature conclusions, textual gaps, delayed revelations, temptations, all of which are related to a corresponding set of authors’ intentions, of strategies designed to educate the reader or humiliate him or confound him or, in the more sophisticated versions of the mode, to make him enact in his responses the very subject matter of the poem. These facts and intentions emerge when the text is interrogated by a series of related questions-What is the reader doing? What is being done to him? For what purpose?–questions that follow necessarily from the assumption that the text is not a spatial object but the occasion for a temporal experience. It is in the course of answering such questions that a reader response critic elaborates “the structure of’ the reading experience,” a structure which is not so much discovered by the interrogation but demanded by it. (If you begin by assuming that readers do something and the something they do has meaning, you will never fail to discover a pattern of reader activities that appears obviously to be meaningful.) As that structure emerges (under the pressure of interrogation) it takes the form of a “reading,” and insofar as the procedures which produced it are recognized by the literary community as something that some of its members do, that reading will have the status of a competing interpretation. Of course it is still the case, as Booth insists, that we are “right to rule out at least some readings,” but there is now one less reading or kind of reading that can be ruled out, because there is now one more interpretive procedure that has been accorded a place in the literary institution.
The fact that it remains easy to think of a reading that most of us would dismiss out of hand does not mean that the text excludes it but . that there is as yet no elaborated interpretive procedure for producing that text. That is why the examples of critics like Wayne Booth seem to have so much force; rather than looking back, as I have, to now familiar strategies that were once alien and strange sounding, they look forward to strategies that have not yet emerged. Norman Holland’s analy sis of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a case in point. Holland is arguing for a kind of psychoanalytic pluralism. The tex t, he declares, is “at most a matrix of psychological possibilities for its
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readers,” but, he insists, “only some possibilities … truly fit the matrix”: “One would not say, for example, that a reader of ‘…A Rose for Emily’ who thought the ‘tableau’ [of Emily and her father in the doorwayJ described an Eskimo was really responding to the story at all—only pursuing some mysterious inner exploration.”
Holland is making two arguments: first, that anyone who proposes an Eskimo reading of “A Rose for Emily” will not find a hearing in the literary community. And that, I think, is right. (“We are right to rule out at least some readings.”) His second argument is that the unacceptability o( the Eskimo reading is a function of the text, of what he calls its “sharable promptuary” (p. 287), the public “store of structured language” (p. 287) that sets limits to the interpretations the words can accommodate. And that, I think, is wrong. The Eskimo reading is unacceptable because there is at present no interpretive strategy for producingit, no way of “looking” or reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are “ways”) that would result in the emergence of obviously Eskimo meanings. This does not mean, however, that no such strategy could ever come into play, and it is not difficult to imagine the circumstances under which it would establish itself . One such circumstance would be the discovery of a letter in which Faulkner confides that he has always believed himself to be an Eskimo changeling. (The example is absurd only if one forgets Yeat’s Vision or Blake’s Swedenborgianism or James Miller’s recent elaboration of a homosexual reading of The Waste Land). Immediately the workers in the Faulkner industry would begin to reinterpret the canon in the light of this newly revealed “belief” and the work of reinterpretation would involve the elaboration of a symbolic or allusive system (not unlike mythological or typological criticism) whose application would immediately transform the text into one in formed everywhere by Eskimo meanings. It might seem that I am admitting that there is a text to be transformed, but the object of transformation would be the text (or texts) given by whatever interpretive strategies the Eskimo strategy was in the process of dislodging or expanding. The result would be that whereas we now have a Freudian “A Rose for Emily,” a mytho-
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logical “A Rose for Emily,” a Christological “A Rose for Emily,” a regional “A Rose for Emily,” a sociological “A Rose for Emily,” a linguistic “A Rose (or Emily,” we would in addition have an Eskimo “A Rose for Emily,” existing in some rela tion of com patibility or incompatibility with the others.
Again the point is that while there are always mechanisms for ruling out readings, their source is not the text but the presently recognized interpretive strategies (or producing the text. It follows, then, that no reading, however outlandish it might appear, is inherently an impossible one. Consider, for another example, Booth’s report that he has never found a reader who sees no jokes against Mr. Collins, and his conclusion that the text of Pride and Prejudice enforces or signals an ironic reading. First o( all, the fact that he hasn’t yet found such a reader does not mean that one does not exist, and we can even construct his profile; he would be someone for whom the reasons in Mr. Collins’s list correspond to a deeply held set of values, exactly the opposite of the set o( values that must be assumed if the passage is to be seen as obviously ironic. Presumably no one who has sat in Professor Booth’s classes holds that set of values or is allowed to hold them (students always know what they are expected to believe) and it is unlikely that anyone who is now working in the Austen industry begins with an assumption other than the assumption that the novelist is a master ironist. I_t is precisely for this reason that the time is ripe for the “discovery” by an enterprising scholar of a nonironic Austen, and one can even predict the course such a discovery would take. It would begin with the uncovering of new evidence (a letter, a lost manuscript, a contemporary response) and proceed to the conclusion that Austen’s intentions have been misconstrued by generations of literary critics. She was not in fact satirizing the narrow and circumscribed life o( a country gentry; rather, she was celebrating that life and its tireless elaboration of a social fabric, complete with values, rituals, and self-perpetuating goals (marriage, the preservation of great houses, and so on). This view, or some thing very much like it, is already implicit in much of the criticism, and it would only be a matter of extending it to local matters of interpretation, and specifically to Mr. Collins’s list of
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reasons which might now be seen as reflecting a proper ranking of the values and obligations necessary to the maintenance of a way of life. ….
Of course any such reading would meet resistance; its opponents could point for example to the narrator’s unequivocal condemnation of Mr. Collins; but there are always ways in the literary institution of handling this or any other objection. One need only introduce (if it has not already been introduced) the notion of the fallible narrator in any of its various forms (the dupe, the moral prig, the naif in need of education), and the “unequivocal condemnation” would take its place in a structure designed to glorify Mr. Collins and everything he stands for. Still, no matter how many objections were met and explained away, the basic resistance on the part o( many scholars to this revisionist reading would remain, and for a time at least Pride and Prejudice would have acquired the status of the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels) a work whose very shape changes in the light of two radically opposed interpretive assumptions.
Again, I am aware that this argument is a tour-de-force and will continue to seem so as long as the revolution it projects has not occurred. The reading of Pride and Prejudice) however, is not meant to be persuasive. I only wanted to describe the conditions under which it might become persuasive and to point out that those conditions are not unimaginable given the procedures within the literary institution by which interpretations are pro posed and established. Any interpretation could be elaborated by someone in command of those procedures (someone who knows what “will do” as a literary argument), even my own “absurd” reading of “The Tyger” as an allegory of the digestive processes. Here the task is easy because according to the critical consensus there is no belief so bizarre that Blake could not have been committed to it and it would be no trick at all to find some elaborate system of alimentary significances (Pythagorean? Swedenborgian? Cabbalistic?) which he could be presumed to have known. One might then decide that the poem was the first person lament of someone who had violated a dietary prohibi tion against eating tiger meat, and finds that forbidden food burning brightly in his stomach, making its fiery way through
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the forests of the intestinal tract, beating and hammering like some devil-wielded anvil. In his distress he can do nothing but rail at the tiger and at the mischance that led him to mistake its meat for the meat of some purified animal: “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The poem ends as i t began, with the speaker still paying the price of his sin and wondering at the inscrutable purposes of a deity who would lead his creatures into digestive temptation. Anyone who thinks that this time I have gone too far might do very well to consul t some recent numbers of Blake Studies.
In fact, my examples are very serious, and they are serious in part because they a re so ridiculous. The fac t that t hey are ridic ulous, or are at least perceived to be so, is evidence that we are never without canons of acceptability; we are always “right to rule out at least some readings.” But the fact tha t we can imagine conditions under which they would not seem ridiculous, and that readings once considered ridiculous are now respecta ble and even orthodox, is evidence that the canons of acceptability can change. Moreover, that change is not ra ndom but orderly and, to some extent, predictable. A new interpretive strategy always makes its way in some relationship of opposition to the old, which has often marked out a negative space (of things that aren’t done) from which i t can emerge into respectability. Thus, when Wimsatt and Beardsley declare that “the Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results) wha t it is and what it does’ the way is open for an aff ective cri tic to argue, as I did, that a poem is what it does. And when the possibility of a reader-centered criticism seems threatened by the varia bili ty of readers, that threat will be countered either by denying the variability (Stephen Booth, Michael Riffaterre) or by controlling it (Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt) or by embracing it and making it into a principle of value (David Bleich, Walter Slatoff).
Rhetorically the new position announces itself as a break from the old, but in fact it is radically dependent on the old, because it is only in the con text of some differential relationship that it ca n be perceived as new or, for that matter, perceived a t all. No one would bother to assert that Mr. Collins is the hero
350 Is There a Text in This Class?
of Pride and Prejudice (even as an example intended to be ab surd) were that position not already occupied in the criticism by Elizabeth and Darcy; for then the assertion would have no force; there would be nothing in relation to which it could be surprising. Neither would there be any point in arguing that Blake’s tiger is both good and evil if there were not already readings in which he was declared to be one or the other. And if anyone is ever to argue that he is both old and young, some one will first have to argue that he is either old or young, for only when his age has become a question will there be any value in a refusal to answer it. Nor is it the case that the moral status of the tiger (as oposed to its age, or nationality, or intelligence) is an issue raised by the .poem itself; it becomes an issue because a question is put to the poem (is the tiger good or evil?) and once that question (it could have been another) is answered, the way is open to answering it differently, or declining to answer it, or to declaring that the absence of an answer is the poem’s “real point.”
The discovery of the “real point” is always what is claimed whenever a new interpretation is advanced, but the claim makes sense only in relation to a point (or points) that had previously been considered the real one. This means that the space in which a critic works has been marked out for him by his predecessors, even though he is obliged by the conventions of the institution to dislodge them. It is only by their provenience or prepossession that there is something· for him to say; that is, it is only because something has already been said that he can now say something different. This dependency, the reverse of the anxiety of influence, is reflected in the unwritten requirement that an interpretation present itself as remedying a deficiency in the interpretations that have come before it. (If it did not do this, what claim would it have on our attention?) Nor can this be just any old deficiency; it will not do, for example, to fault your predecessors for failing to notice that a poem is free of split infinitives or dangling participles. The lack an interpretation supplies must be related to the criteria by which the literary community recognizes and evaluates the objects of its professional attention. As things stand now, text-book grammaticality is not one of those
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criteria, and therefore the demonstration of its presence in a poem will not reflect credit either on the poem or on the critic who offers it.
Credit will accrue to the critic when he bestows the proper credit on the poem, when he demonstrates that it possesses one or more of the qualities that are understood to distinguish poems from other verbal productions. In the context of the “new” criticism, under many of whose assumptions we still labor, those qualities include unity, complexity, and universality, and it is the perceived failure of previous commentators to celebrate their presence in a poem that gives a critic the right (or so he will claim) to advance a new interpretation. The unfolding of that interpretation will thus proceed under two constraints: not only must what one says about a work be related to what has already . been said (even if the relation is one of reversal) but as a conse quence of saying it the work must be shown to possess in a greater degree than had hitherto been recognized the qualities that properly belong to literary productions, whether they be unity and complexity, or unparaphrasability, or metaphoric richness, or indeterminacy and undecidability. In short, the new interpretation must not only claim to tell the truth about the work (in a dependent opposition to the falsehood or partial truths told by its predecessors) but it must claim to make the work better. (The usual phrase is “enhance our appreciation of.”) Indeed, these claims are finally inseparable since it is assumed that the truth about a work will be what penetrates to the es sense of its literary value.
This assumption, along with several others, is conveniently on display in the opening paragraph of the preface to Stephen Booth’s An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
The history of criticism opens so many possibilities for an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets that I must warn a prospective reader about what this work does and doesn’t do. To begin wi th the negative, I have not solved or tried to solve any of the puzzles of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I do not attempt to identify Mr. W. H. or the dark lady. I do not speculate on the occasions that may have evoked particular sonnets. I do not attempt to date them. I offer neither a reorganization of the sequence, nor a defense of
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the quarto order. What I have tried to do is find out what about the sonnets has made them so highly valued by the vast majority of critics and general readers.
This brief paragraph can serve as an illustration of almost every thing I have been saying. First of all, Booth self-consciously lo cates and defines his position in a differential opposition to the positions he would dislodge. He will not, he tells us, do what any of his predecessors have done; he will do something else, and indeed if it were not something else there would be no reason for him to be doing it. The reason he gives for doing it is that what his predecessors have done is misleading or beside the point. The point is the location of the source of the sonnets’ value (“what about the sonnets has made them so highly val ued”) and his contention (not stated but strongly implied) is that those who have come before him have been looking in the wrong places, in the historical identity of the sequence’s char acters, in the possibility of recovering the biographical condi tions of composition, and in the determination of an authorita tive ordering and organization. He, however, will look in the right place and thereby produce an account of the sonnets that does them the justice they so richly deserve.
Thus, in only a few sentences Booth manages to claim for his interpretation everything that certifies it as acceptable within the conventions of literary criticism: he locates a deficiency in previous interpretations and proposes to remedy it; the remedy will take the form of producing a more satisfactory account of the work; and as a result the literary credentials of the work what makes it of enduring value- will be more securely established, as they are when Booth is able to point in the closing paragraph of his book to Shakespeare’s “remarkable achievement.” By thus validating Shakespeare’s achievement, Booth also validates his own credentials as a literary critic, as some one who knows what claims and demonstrations mark him as a competent member of the institution.
What makes Stephen Booth so interesting (although not at all atypical) is
that one of his claims
is to have freed himself and the sonnets from that very
institution and
its
practices.
“I do
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not,” he declares, “intentionally give any interpretations of the sonnets I discuss. I mean to describe them, not to explain them.” The irony is that even as Booth is declaring himself out of the game, he is performing one of its most familiar moves. The move has several versions, and Booth is here availing h imself of two: (1) the “external-internal,” performed when a critic dismisses his predecessors for being insufficiently literary (“but that has nothing to do with its qualities as a poem”); and (2) the “back to-the-text,” performed when the critical history of a work is deplored as so much dross, as an obscuring encrustation (“we are in dang·er of substituting the criticism for the poem”). The latter is the more powerful version of the move because it trades on the assumption, still basic to the profession’s sense of its ac tivities, that the function of literary criticism is to let the text speak for itself. It is thus a move drenched in humility, although it is often performed with righteousness: those other fellows may be interested in displaying their ingenuity, but I am simply a servant of the text and wish only to make it more availa ble to its readers (who happen also to be my readers).
The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all. The claim, however, is an impossible one since_ in order “simply to present” the text, one must at the very least describe it (“I mean to describe them”) and description can occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention. Thus, when Booth rejects the assumptions of those who have tried to solve the puzzles of the sonnets in favor of “the assumption that the source of our pleasure in them must be the line by line experience of reading them,” he is not avoid ing interpretation but proposing a change in the terms within which it will occur. Specifically, he proposes that the focus of attention, and therefore of description, shift from the poem conceived as a spatial object which contains meanings to the poem conceived as a temporal experience in the course of which meanings become momentarily available, before disappearing
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under the pressure of other meanings, which are in their turn superseded, contradicted, qualified, or simply forgotten. It is only if a reader agrees to this change, that is, agrees to accept Booth’s revisionary stipulation as to where the value and the significance of a poem are to be located, that the facts to which his subsequent analyses point will be seen to be facts at all. The description which Booth offers in place of an interpretation turns out to be as much of an interpretive construct as the interpretations he rejects.
Nor could it be otherwise. Strictly speaking, getting “back-to the-text” is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpreta tion and that interpretation will be presiding over its produc tion. This is not to say, however, that the “back-to-the-text” move is ineffectual. The fact that it is not something one can do in no way diminishes the effectiveness of claiming to do it. As a rhetorical ploy, the announcement that one is returning to the text will be powerful so long as the assumption that criticism is secondary to the text and must not be allowed to overwhelm it remains unchallenged. Certainly, Booth does not challenge it; indeed, he relies on it and invokes it even as he relies on and invokes many other assumptions that someone else might want to dispute: the assumption that what distinguishes literary from ordinary language is its invulnerability to paraphrase; the assumption that a poem should not mean, but be; the assumption that the more complex a work is, the more propositions it holds in tension and equilibrium, the better it is. It would not be at all unfair to label these assumptions “conservative” and to point out that in holding to them Booth undermines his radical credentials. But it would also be beside the point, which is not that Booth isn’t truly radical but that he couldn’t be. Nor could anyone else. The challenge he mounts to some of the conventions of literary study (the convention of the poem as artifact, the convention of meaningfulness) would not even be recognized as a challenge if others of those conventions were not firmly in place and, for the time being· at least, unquestioned. A wholesale challenge would be impossible because there would be no terms in which it could be made; that is, in order to be
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wholesale, it would have to be made in terms wholly outside the institution; but if that were the case, it would be unintelligible because it is only within the institution that the facts of literary study- texts, authors, periods, genres-become available. In short, the price intelligibility exacts (a price Booth pays here) is implication in the very structure of assumptions and goals from which one desires to be free.
So it would seem, finally, that there are no moves that are not moves in the game, and this includes even the move by which one claims no longer to be a player. Indeed, by a logic peculiar to the institution, one of the standard ways of practicing literary criticism is to announce that you are avoiding· it. This is so be cause at the heart of the institution is the wish to deny that its activities have any consequences. The critic is taught to think of himself as a transmitter of the best that had been thought and said by others, and his greatest fear is that he will stand charged of having substituted his own meanings for the meanings of which he is supposedly the guardian; his greatest fear is that he be found guilty of having interpreted. That is why we have the spectacle of commentators who, like Stephen Booth, adopt a stance of aggressive humility and, in the manner of someone who rises to speak at a temperance meeting, declare that they will never interpret again but will instead do something else (“I mean to describe them”). What I have been saying is that what ever they do, it will only be interpretation in another guise be cause, like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town.
