Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser

Semesteroppgave i ENG4369 – Reception Studies, høst 2012. En pdf av oppgaveteksten finnes her.

I have chosen to compare and contrast two theorists from our syllabus, Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser. Albeit both propagandists of the so-called reader response theory of literary criticism, they differ on some central tenets in their respective theoretical approaches: The importance of the primary text, the importance of the author, the extent of the work done by the reader, the importance of the relative situatedness of the reader, and the stability of texts across readers and readings.

I will outline their main contributions to the field of literary criticism, with a focus on their importance for our specific field of enquiry, reception studies; point out where their approaches conflict; and try to tentatively offer my own criticism of their stances. Where I deem their approaches inadequate, I will supplement them with other theorists. My main thesis statement for this essay is thus: In what ways do the works of Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser inform the study of reception?

The theoretical stance of Stanley Fish emerged from a reaction to New Criticism’s formalist and positivist perspective on text, with its focus on locating meaning in formal features rather than in authorial intention or reader’s response – what we today recognize as the authorial and intentional fallacies (Lodge and Wood 382). The point of departure for Fish’s reasoning is a criticism of his contemporaries’ interpretation of poetry, where he argues that an analysis based on the premise that a text is a holistic form fails to account for the sense-constituting importance of the trajectory of assumptions made by the reader when reading: “Everything depends on the temporal dimension” (Fish 350).

Fish offers several examples of readings of poetry where a reader would “[hazard] an interpretation” (352) (a making of sense) at one stage of the reading process (what he calls a “perceptual closure” (353)), and the following line thwarts this initial sense (352); or leads the reader to reformulate his understanding of the poem thus far (351); or depends on and interacts with the initial formation of sense to create a new one (353). Fish’s examples are readily available, and thoroughly commented on, in his article; I will offer another example of the importance of the temporality of reading: A scene from the animated film The Simpsons Movie (Image 1):
 

Image 1: The joke depends on the work done by the “reader.” A double premise: The viewer is a priori familiar with the inherent characteristics of Homer, i.e. his propensity for utter stupidity; and sequential viewing, rather than an analysis of the scene in its entirety as a whole form where all elements are simultaneously known.

Homer is on the roof, repairing the shingles. Hammer in hand, he is ready to strike a finger-covered nail (“steady, steady …”). We are already familiar with the exploits of this character – perhaps an instance of initial closure, albeit on a larger scale and depending on a much broader collection of data than a mere line in a poem – and expect unbridled stupidity on his behalf. When the back of the hammer – with Simpsonesque suddenty – strikes his eye rather than its front molesting his finger, our expectations are both thwarted and met at the same time: Half-way into the clip we filled in (closed) the joke based on our general expectations about Homer and our assumptions made from the unfolding of this specific situation, and are doubly rewarded when Homer, in a surprise twist, does something even more in character than we expected.

Fish extends his argument to all reading of all texts: There is nothing in the text – and certainly not any kind of objective reality – outside of the assumptions the reader brings to it; a text has no existence outside of the reading experience (Lodge and Wood 382). This means that according to Fish there is no distinction between “the form of the reader’s experience, formal units, and the structure of intention […]; they come into view simultaneously” (354). Even highly formalized textual structures, such as line endings in poetry, are placed there by strategies for reading employed by the reader – regardless of whether s/he is aware of this or not (354). To account for systematic similarities of readings across individual readers, Fish posits the existence of interpretive communities, communities that several similarly reading readers are members of, equipping each member with a set of interpretive strategies employable when reading a text, producing same or similar outcomes for members of the same community (355). The example of Augustinian exegesis is a striking one: According to Augustine (according to Fish), every word of the Scripture “points to […] God’s love for us and our answering responsibility to love our fellow creatures for His sake” (356). Everything in the Bible should be taken to mean just this; and whenever you run into text that on the surface (the Augustinian premise being under all surfaces) seemingly indicates otherwise, you should for example consider this figuratively, and use an appropriate interpretive strategy to arrive at the initially decided fundamental principle.

Contrary to the radical approach of Fish – where the work done by the reader by executing the interpretive strategies at his disposal – by virtue of a membership in an interpretive community – is seen as the exclusive source of any one making of sense – Wolfgang Iser contends that when “considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text” (50, my emphasis). According to Iser, a literary work has an artistic pole created by the author and an esthetic pole realized by the reader, and positions the literary work itself between those poles (50). Thus there is a dialectic between reader and text, where literature as such emerges through a response conditioned by “the individual disposition of a reader” (50) to a text – let us already at this stage call it a set of systematized signifiers – created by an author. The dynamic or dialectic between the artistic creation – i.e., the text – and the esthetic response continually recreates a moment of literarity per se, in the image of the receptee.

Iser quotes Laurence Sterne, who insisted that an author should not “presume to think all,” and should “halve this matter amicably” in order to leave the reader “something to imagine” (51). Expanding on the quote from Sterne, and again contrary to Fish, Iser says that a literary text “is something like and arena in which reader and author participate in a game of the imagination” (51, my emphasis). The music video “Motherlover” (Image 2) from the American comedy troupe Lonely Island illustrates this effect nicely, being a very overt and visible instance of leaving something for the “reader” to figure out for him or her self:

Image 2: “This is the second best idea that we’ve ever had” (Lonely Island, lyrics) from 2:50. What is their best idea? Your imagination the only limitation.

Due to recent mishaps, the two male characters in the video have forgotten to buy their mothers Mother’s Day presents. In an inspired moment, they decide that the perfect gift would be a “switcheroo:” “We should f*ck each others [sic] mothers” (Lonely Island, lyrics). When celebrating this excellent idea for a Mother’s Day gift, they compare it with another previously conceived idea, saying that “this is the second best idea that we’ve ever had” (ibid.). What is the best idea that they ever had? This would be what Iser calls an “unwritten implication” (51–2) in the text, having to be worked out by the reader, where the only limitations are the reader’s imagination, conditioned by the information offered about the qualities of the characters as we have gotten to know them in the video thus far.
     

Can one point to instances of literary reception where it is based on the assumption that an author has left Sterne’s “a halve” in order to entice the imagination of the receptee? According to the reception of Patricia Meyer Spacks, Pride and Prejudice offers an example of this. When Jane and Elizabeth return from their prolonged stay at Netherfield, they are being brought up to speed on current events by their sisters, specifically concerning the inner life of the locally stationed regiment:

Much had been done, and much had been said, in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married. (97)

According to Spacks, this is one of the novel’s many “inconspicuous textual moments that seem” – by a cursory reading of the passage – “virtually devoid of importance” (8). However, Spacks contends that this passage is remarkable by being the only mention of enlisted men – which were often subjected to harsh treatment – reminding the observant reader of the larger political circumstances of the story; and moreover, underlining the “self-centered frivolity” (9) of Elizabeth’s sisters, all the more evident on the backdrop of this passing mention of such a gruesome incident, further stressed by Austen ending her paragraph gaily with someone’s marital prospects. This is certainly what Iser would call – when he comments on Virginia Wolf’s panegyric reception of Austen – an “apparently trivial scene” (51) – perhaps not even a proper scene, but a mere trivial (or indeed, by Austen actively trivialized) tidbit mentioned in passing at the closing of a scene – having, at least according to Spacks, important ramifications. These ramifications, however, are in its entirety left for the reader to fill in on his or her own.

Iser goes on to say that as a reader “animates these ‘outlines,’ they in turn will influence the effect of the written part of the text […] Sequent sentences act upon one another,” which is of “especial importance in literary texts in view of the fact that they do not correspond to any objective reality outside themselves” (52). We saw this clearly in the example from The Simpsons Movie above: Assuming that the entire Simpson universe is considered a textual whole (but unfolding sequentially), this one instance of reading points backwards (anaphorically, intratextually, corresponding internally) to previous instances of meaning making, which in turn points forward to this particular scene, partly forming the basis for our interpretation of it.

In this respect, we might here have reached a confluence point between Fish and Iser: They would certainly agree on the importance of the temporality of the reading experience. So: Could one extend this agreement, and perhaps argue that Fish and Iser are saying many of the same things, only cloaked in different lingo, and perhaps with slightly different emphases and approaches? They are certainly both placed under the overall umbrella of reader response criticism, and should have more in common with each other than with, say, Russian formalists, to take just one example. When Iser, in describing the process of making sense through reading, says that “each intentional sentence correlative opens up a particular horizon, which is modified, if not completely changed, by succeeding sentences” (53), it is reminiscent of Fish’s description of a process of doing and undoing of “perceptual closures” (e.g. 352, 353) when gradually making sense of a text (which Fish says does not exist, albeit he refers to its existence repeatedly throughout his text). And Iser, for his dialectic between reader and text, presupposes an “individual disposition” (50), says that “a literary text needs the reader’s imagination” (53), and claims that, whenever one encounters “some kind of blockage […] the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections” (55, my emphasis). Even though he is silent as to the origin of this individual’s inherent and a priori capacities for “establishing connections,” must we not assume that his faculties for reception are conditioned not only by his own personal disposition, but also by his culture and the rules for reading dominant in his culture at the moment of reception – mirroring Fish’s notion of membership to an interpretive community?

Iser expands on the above-referenced quote by Sterne, who says that a writer should avoid boredom among his readers by putting elements in the text that will entice the reader’s imagination. By acknowledging the artist this power to mould his reader’s reception, one must conclude that Iser then presupposes that ordinary literary conventions of grammar, punctuation, style, and perhaps of symbolism and imagery, are considered as already communally received information, and that these elements are employable by an artist when whishing to create certain effects among his audience. Fish would argue that these conventionalized elements also only exist in the reader, and in a text only by virtue of the work done by the reader: “Formal units are always a function of the interpretative [sic] model one brings to bear” (353). However, it is my contention that Fish contradicts himself toward the end of his essay:

Contrary to the impression one could get from a cursory reading of Fish, he absolutely does not annul the importance of the author, or the ability of the author to control reception. When answering his own objections to his reasoning – this objection being that there could be a “formal encoding, not perhaps of meaning, but of the directions for making them” – he says that these are directions only “for those who already have interpretive strategies in the first place,” and goes on to say that “an author hazards his projection, not because of something ‘in’ the marks, but because of something he assumes to be in the reader. The very existence of the ‘marks’ is a function of an interpretive community” (358). But who believed at the time – and, after Saussure, whoever would claim – that there is something “in the marks”? The arbitrariness of linguistic signifiers (and, as far as I know, this was before the (re?)birth of iconicity, contesting (correctly) this inadequate notion) was a well known and established (or why not say “received”) fact when Fish wrote his essay. Obviously, conventionalization of a system of signifiers is contingent on the effort of an interpretive community – let us even call it a language community – and any author wanting to be read and understood must adhere to the conventionalized uses of these signifiers, at least to the extent that any “creative” use is transparent to his or her targeted readers.

It is herein that one might find the most tangible difference between Fish and Iser. When describing the reading process (or perhaps the responding process, the reception process, the making sense process), Iser says that “the written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implications” (51). Fish would probably respond that no such limitations exist, and that the reader, first and last, will place the implications being found in any given text into it. It is on this point that I believe Fish contradicts himself, or is perhaps committed into a corner by his own reasoning. On the one hand, he says that the reader does all the work; on the other, he describes both the existence of relatively stable interpretive communities, and the ability for an author to “hazard” the interpretive strategies of an interpretive community. On a broader scale, Fish is obviously right: There is nothing in a text apart from what a reader puts there – in much the same way that a butterfly only becomes “butterfly” when someone experiences it as such, and goes on to name it thusly – this again being contingent on this phenomenon appearing in the English-speaking world, and not in a German-speaking country, where it (the same phenomenon) becomes a schmetterling. However, authors are also readers: Both authors and readers are people (and they might even be of more or less the same age, speak a same or similar language, live in the same country or continent – all in all, have any number of things in common). And authors and readers may very well belong to the same or similar interpretive community, and employ the same or similar interpretive strategies when reading a text – and all this information will obviously enable the expert author (and what is he really an expert in? Sociology perhaps, or just the general human experience?) to put into his text, as Iser says, elements that s/he knows (to an extent, always, obviously, limited) will elicit certain reactions.

As I read Iser, he posits that there is a level of conventionality that (at any time in literary history) needs to be taken as a given for any one who wants to create – and that a creation will never interest unless the already conventionalized material is composed (in the word’s literal meaning of co-posited) in a creative manner. Here I believe that the New Historicist approach of Stephen Greenblatt can inform this exposition further. His notions of what he called a dynamic circulation or exchange (565) of “social energy” (561) through the processes of appropriation, purchase and symbolic acquisition (562–3) of publicly more or less available signifiers embodying this social energy – perhaps one could call them sense-inducing artifacts – is very suitable to further explain Iser’s position – but also the reception history of some of the most received, and appropriated, texts. Greenblatt would say that already known pre-symbolic material – e.g. paupers, a woman’s body, Nature, a sunset, a Hero, a Dragon – is available to a greater or lesser extent in society, are already imbued with a certain social energy conventionally more or less agreed upon, and can be employed by the expert co-positor in ways that are familiar and new at the same time.

We could perhaps extend this analysis to account for any number of reiterations or reconfigurations of works in another form, medium, setting, or otherwise. The staging of a play will always, by necessity, be an instance of a director using his or her imagination to fill in missing parts of the original score, as an original score will only give a limited amount of information as to how scenes should be designed. The lavish eighteenth century stagings of Romeo and Juliet, where entire funeral processions were incorporated into the play (Blakemore Evans 38), would be a good example of directors using their imagination to fill in what they perceived as gaps in the original score.

But we could also go further, and point to the creative use of earlier texts, or elements from texts, in new compositions. Through extensive reception, some elements of some texts have become what Greenblatt would call objects that “appear to be in the public domain, hence in the category of ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora): there for the taking” (562). There is no cost incurred by using them, and, when used correctly, they can contribute to extend backward Iser’s “sequent sentences” to act upon the ones the artist adds himself, strengthening the correspondence to an already established fictional reality, in turn impinging on a following and newly created one. Sheldon Cooper, from The Big Bang Theory, need only say “curiouser and curiouser” – freely appropriating the “social energy” embedded in this quote – to put into perspective, to make us appreciate even more, his fumbling exploration of a reality that to him is as absurd as Alice’s.

But in my opinion, neither Fish nor Iser nor Greenblatt explains in a satisfying way why some works are more open to creative reception and reconfiguration than others, i.e. why parts of text from e.g. Alice in Wonderland (and not, for example, Sylvie and Bruno) have come to permeate our culture. This, I believe, is sought accounted for by Umberto Eco. In his aptly named article “Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage,” he goes a long way in suggesting both why some works of art are elevated to cultic status, and why elements from these works are reiterated in later works of art. His definition of intertextual frames, “stereotyped situations derived from preceding textual tradition and recorded by our encyclopedia” (463–4), usefully defines elements that we encounter and re-encounter through a reception history; and his rather circular definition of magic frames, “those frames that, when they appear in a movie [and I see no reason why this insight should be limited to movies] and can be separated from the whole, transform this movie into a cult object” (464). Although Eco is annoyingly silent as to why any given frame becomes a magic frame, still his theory goes a long way to show why for example (and this is his example) Casablanca has gained the prominence it has, but so many other movies, perhaps at the time considered equally “good,” are now forgotten. The use of magic frames by an initial artist will create a product that more easily lends itself to quotations in any number of new settings. This could be one explanation not only of the success and endurance of a play like Romeo and Juliet, or a book like Alice in Wonderland – or, indeed other parts of our canon, like the Bible, Greek mythology, superheroes like the Batman (first appearance in 1939 (Wikipedia), still going very strong today) or Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – but also to explain why these texts so often are more or less overtly referenced in later artistic expressions: they contain something that we recognize, something that perhaps appeals to parts of the human experience that transcend any one individual or time.

And here we run into a two-fold problem with Fish. How do we explain the endurance of a work like the Bible, and how do we explain away differing and even contradictory interpretations and uses of a work like Pride and Prejudice, when we just said that Eco’s “magic frames” appeal to inherent characteristics of mankind transcending time, place, and individual? My attempt to reconcile these theoretical stances would be to say that they could be correct to a certain extent, all needed to give a full explanation of the endurance of certain works, and all applicable to greater or lesser extent when analyzing any one reception history. The legacy of Nathaniel Hawthorne seems, according to Jane Tompkins, to have been recreated at any given paradigmatic state of the history of reading by the established interpretive community at the time; whereas the superheroes of Greek mythology or the multiverse of DC Comics may have an appeal to a much more basic part of the human experience, and thus secure their endurance through that.

Contrary to what one might be lead to believe, Fish does actually not (or at least, not in any satisfactory manner) explain the very evident existence of new readings of old texts. The reason is this: Why would an interpretive community change? If there is nothing in the text outside of what readers put there – and (and we must, must we not?) we extend the definition of text not only to spoken text, but also to visual and any other semiotically constituted text, and further (and what stops us?) to all conceivable impressions anyone could have – how could a change in an interpretive community occur? From where would it come? We must posit something biological, perchance a biological change over generations, in order to explain the replacement of old readings for new; certainly, following Fish, there can be nothing in the texts that develops our understanding of them, of new text, or of life as such. Moreover, Fish does not explain surprises when reading, he does not explain new insights gained by reading – for where should they come from, when we, to paraphrase Fish, “understand only if we already understand”? – nor why some instances of literature “move” us when others do not. And finally, Fish does not explain why some works are better than others, why some works are canonized and others are not. How do we know one work from the other, when he makes the text invisible for us? How are we able to distinguish between texts when everything that is in there is something we, and only we, have put there?

Here I would say that the explanatory power of Iser is greater. He would probably argue that the activation of the reader’s imagination is a precondition for the popularity, longevity, level of interest or otherwise of a text – and that an expert artist will be able (or, maybe just lucky) to position signifiers in a way that put just the right amount of demand on the reader’s imagination – no too much, and not to little – thereby securing that the readers is activated, and neither bored nor confused.

However, I would contend that the elevation of the temporality of reading – in the broadest possible sense of the word, i.e. all forms of reception of any form of text – is, refreshingly, antithetical to the essentialization caused by a canonization of instances of art. Thus, Fish posits reading as primary to text, dethrones it, and gives, or perhaps returns, the power of interpretation to the continually shifting reading communities a reader is part of (which, I would strongly argue, could very well be a community of one). In this sense, Fish’s contribution to the study of reception might be invaluable.

Literature

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2010. Print.

“Batman.” Wikipedia. Web. 7 November 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman>.

Blakemore Evans, G. Introduction. Romeo and Juliet. By William Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 1–48. Print.

Eco, Umberto. “Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage.” 1984. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008. 462–70. Print.

Fish, Stanley. “Interpreting the Variorum.” 1976. The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2002. 350–8. Print.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Circulation of Social Energy.” 1998. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008. 557–71. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980. 50–69. Print.

Lodge, David, and Nigel Wood, eds. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. 3rd ed. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2008. Print.

Lonely Island, featuring Justin Timberlake. “Motherlover.” Turtleneck & Chain. New York: Universal Republic, 2011. Album. YouTube. 8 November 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0DeIqJm4vM&feature>.

Lonely Island. “Motherlover” lyrics. Turtleneck & Chain. New York: Universal Republic, 2011. Web. 9 November 2012. <http://artists.letssingit.com/the-lonely-island-lyrics-motherlover-feat-justin-timberlake-xjd8gz3>.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Introduction. Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition. Ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2010. 1–25. Print.

The Simpsons Movie. “Homer strangles Bart on roof.” Screenplay by James L. Brooks and Matt Groening. Dir. David Silverman. 20th Century Fox, 2007. Film. Web excerpt. YouTube. 8 November 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neKmApQGUhY>.

Tompkins, Jane P. “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Literary Reputation.” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. Ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein. London: Routledge, 2001. 133–54. Print.