Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS2306 Notes 11B

STANLEY FISH, INTERPRETING THE VARIORUM (1976)

Fish, Stanley. "Interpreting the Variorum." Is There a Text in this Class?. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1980. 147-173.
Stanley Fish explicitly wants to write the text out of existence altogether as an autonomous
object even partly independent of the act of reading. He also substitutes the word write for
what readers do: the latter rewrite the text (originally written, obviously, by an author) in
line with the particular interpretative strategies that they employ. Fish is of the view that
both the formal structures which critics purport merely to describe in a text and the authors
intention which they claim to identify are the function of the interpretative strategies which
the critic employs. Paradoxically, it is the nature of the interpretative acts employed which
dictates the forms and the intentions thought to be merely identified in a given text.
The Case for Reader-Response Analysis (pp. 148-158)
In this section, stimulated by the publication of the first two volumes of the Variorum
Commentary, Fish addresses the varied critical reception which the work of the Renaissance
poet Milton has elicited over the past two hundred and seventy years (148). In short, a
whole host of critics continue to disagree over the interpretation of Miltons key works. To
illustrate his claim, Fish discusses a particular point of contention with regard to the criticism
of Miltons Sonnet Lawrence of Virtuous Father Virtuous Son: the dispute over the meaning
of the word spare in the last two lines of the poem He who of those delights can judge,
and spare / to interpose them oft, is not unwise (ll. 13-14) for which two readings have
been proposed: leave time for and refrain from (149). What interests Fish is the equal
availability of both interpretations (151). The variety of responses elicited leads Fish to argue
that evidence brought to bear in the course of formalist analyses that is analyses generated
by the assumption that meaning is embedded in the artifact will always point in as many
directions as there are interpreters (150). Fish asks:
What . . . if for the question what does spare mean we substitute the
question what does the fact that the meaning of spare has always been an
issue mean? The advantage of this question is that it can be answered.
Indeed it has already been answered by the readers who are cited in the
Variorum Commentary. What these readers debate is the judgment that the
poem makes on the delights of recreation: what their debate indicates is that
the judgement is blurred by a verb that can be made to participate in
contradictory readings. . . . In other words, the lines first generate a pressure
for judgment . . . and then decline to deliver it; the pressure, however, still
exists, and it is transferred from the words on the page to the reader . . . who
comes away from the poem not with a statement but with . . . the responsibility
of deciding when and how often if at all to indulge in those delights. . . .
This transferring of responsibility from the text to its readers is what the lines
ask us to do it is the essence of their experience and in my terms it is
therefore what the lines mean. (150-151)
Fish continues: the
configurations of that experience, when they are made available by a readeroriented analysis, serve as a check against the endlessly inconclusive adducing
of evidence which characterises formalist analysis. That is to say, any
determination of what spare means (in a positivist or literal sense) is liable to
upset by the bringing forward of another analogue, or by a more complete

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 11B

computation of statistical frequencies, or by the discovery new biographical

information, or by anything else. . . . In formalist analyses the only constraints
are the notoriously open-ended possibilities . . . that emerge when one begins
to consult dictionaries and grammars and histories. (152)
Fish argues that to consult dictionaries, grammars, and histories is to assume that meanings
can be specified independently of the activity of reading (152) but what the example of
spare shows is that is in and by that activity that meanings experiential, not positivist
are created (152). To put this another way, it is the structure of the readers experience
rather than any structures available on the page that should be the object of description
(152).
Over the next few pages, Fish amplifies these points by turning his attention to other
of Miltons sonnets, first Avenge O Lord thy Slaughtered Saints and then When I Consider
How My Light is Spent. In each such sonnet, Fish argues, the significant word or phrase
occurs at a line break where a reader is invited to place it first in one and then in another
structure of syntax and sense (154). This moment of hesitation, of semantic or syntactic
slide (154) disappears in a formalist analysis. In the case of the last sonnet, the interpretive
crux (155) concerns the last line They also serve who only stand and wait which is
variously interpreted as an unqualified acceptance of Gods will (155) and as a note of
affirmation (155) that is muted or even forced (155). At the end of the day, Fish argues
citing a variety of responses to this line, there is no firm perspective on the question of
record: does God deal justly with his servants (157). This is the verdict of what Fish calls
an experiential analysis (157), rather than formalist or positivistic analysis.
Undoing the Case for Reader-Response Analysis (pp. 158-167)
Here, Fish identifies the
assumptions to which I stand opposed: the assumption that there is a sense,
that it is embedded or encoded in the text, and that it can be taken in at a
single glance. These assumptions are, in order, positivistic, holistic, and
spatial, and to have them is to be committed both to a goal and to a procedure.
The goal is to settle on a meaning, and the procedure involves first stepping
back from the text, and then putting together or otherwise calculating the
discrete units of significance it contains. (158)
In such assumptions, the readers activities are at once ignored and devalued (157): ignored
because the text is taken to be self-sufficient everything is in it (158) and devalued
because what readers do is thought of as the disposable machinery of extraction (158). For
Fish, the readers activities are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning
(158) in that they
include the making and revising of assumptions, the rendering and regretting
of judgments, the coming to and abandonment of conclusions, the giving and
withdrawal of approval, the specifying of causes, the asking of questions, the
supplying of answers, the solving of puzzles. In a word, these activities are
interpretive rather than being preliminary to questions of value, they are at
every moment settling and resettling questions of value and because they are
interpretive, a description of them will also be . . . an interpretation, not after
the fact but of the fact (of experiencing). (158-159)
In marked contrast to the positivist-formalist project (159), Fishs so-called affective
stylistics depends on the temporal dimension (159) for which reason the notion of a
mistaken reading vanishes: in a
sequence where a reader first structures the field he inhabits and then is asked

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 11B

to restructure it . . . there is no question of priority among his structurings; no

one of them, even if it is his last, has privilege; each is equally legitimate, each
equally the proper object of analysis, because each is equally an event in his
experience. (159)
There are, in short, no definitive or final interpretations.
All this raises a series of questions: Who is this reader? How can I presume to
describe his experiences, and what do I say to readers who report that they do not have the
experiences I describe? (159). To answer these questions, Fish turns to ll. 46-47 of another
poem by Milton, Comus. Considering different constructions of the meaning of the poem by
various readers, Fish contends that it seems obvious that the efforts of readers are always
efforts to discern and therefore to realise (in the sense of becoming) an authors intention
(161). Fish advocates a broad conception of that realisation (161) less
as the single act of comprehending an authors purpose . . . than . . . as the
succession of acts readers perform in the continuing assumption that they are
dealing with intentional beings. In this view discerning an intention is no more
or less than understanding, and understanding includes (is constituted by) all
the activities which make up what I call the structure of the readers
experience. To describe that experience is therefore to describe the readers
efforts at understanding and to describe the readers efforts at understanding
is to describe the realisation . . . of an authors intention. Or to put it another
way, what my analyses amount to are descriptions of a succession fo decisions
made by readers about an authors intention decisions that are not limited to
the specifying of purpose but include the specifying of every aspect of
successively intended worlds, decisions that are precisely the shape, because
they are the content, of the readers activities. (161)
Fish then considers two objections: first, that the procedure is a circular one (161) in that
I describe the experience of a reader who in his strategies is answerable to an authors
intention, and I specify the authors intention by pointing to the strategies employed by that
same reader (161). Fish believes that this objection has no force because it is impossible to
specify either the authors intention or the readers activities independently of the other:
intention and understanding are two ends of a conventional act, each of which necessarily
stipulates (includes, defines, specifies) the other (161). To construct the profile of the
informed . . . reader is at the same time to characterise the authors intention (161) and to
do either is to specify the contemporary conditions of utterance, to identify, by becoming a
member of, a community made up of those who share interpretive strategies (161). Second,
Fish considers the view that if the content of the readers experience is the succession of acts
he performs in search of an authors intentions (161-162) and if he performs those acts at
the bidding of the text, does the text then produce or contain everything intention and
experience (162), an admission that would compromise Fishs antiformalist position (162).
Fish responds by asserting that only if the formal patterns of the text are assumed to exist
independently of the readers experience . . . can priority be claimed for them (162). Indeed,
the claims of independence and priority are one and the same (162): the question do
formal features exist independently? is usually answered by pointing to their priority: they
are in the text before the reader comes to it (162). By the same token, the question are
formal features prior? is usually answered by pointing to their independent status: they are
in the text before the reader comes to it (162). This is a circular argument.
At this point, Fish turns to ll. 42-44 of Miltons Lycidas to mount an attack on the
putative independence / priority of the formal features of a text. Fish warns us to be wary of
thinking that a poem either encouraging (163) or disallowing (163) an interpretation:
Words like encourage and disallow . . . imply agents, and it is only natural

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 11B

to assign agency first to an authors intentions and the to the forms that
assumedly embody them. What I think happens . . . is something quite
different: rather than intention and its formal realisation producing
interpretation (the normal picture), interpretation creates intention and its
formal realisation by creating the conditions in which it becomes possible to
pick them out. In other words, in the analysis of these lines from Lycidas I did
what critics always do: I saw what my interpretive principles permitted or
directed me to see, and then I turned around and attributed what I had seen
to a text and an intention. (163)
For Fish, readers performing acts (163) become (by sleight of hand) demarcations in the
text; those demarcations are then available for the designation formal features, and as
formal features they can be (illegitimately) assigned the responsibility for producing the
interpretation which in fact produced them (163). In other words, formal units are always
a function of the interpretive model one brings to bear; they are not in the text (164).
Similarly, intention is no more embodied in the text than are formal units; rather, an
intention, like a formal unit, is made when perceptual or interpretive closure is hazarded; it
is verified by an interpretive act (164).
Fish turns once more to Lycidas, this time to ll. 13-14, before pronouncing his thesis
(164): the
form of the readers experience, formal units, and the structure of intention are
one, that they come into view simultaneously, and that therefore the questions
of priority and independence do not arise. What does arise is another question:
what produces them? That is, if intention, form and the readers experience are
simply different ways of referring to (different perspectives on) the same
interpretive act, what is that act an interpretation of? (165)
Formalists try to answer it by pointing to patterns and claiming that they are available
independently of (prior to) interpretation (165). These patterns may be statistical (number
of two-syllable words per hundred words), grammatical (ratio of passive to active, or of rightbranching to left-branching sentences, or anything else) (165). Fish argues that all such
putative objects do not lie innocently in the world but are themselves constituted by an
interpretive act (165). All formal devices thought to exist in the poem exist by virtue of
perceptual strategies rather than the other way around (165) and as such are not a brute
fact (166) but a convention (166).
Fish argues that what is noticed is what has been made noticeable, not by a clear and
undistorting glass, but by an interpretive strategy (166). This may be hard to see when the
strategy has become so habitual that the forms it yields seem part of the world (166). It is
assumed that alliteration, for example,
depends on a fact that exists independently of any interpretive use on might
make of it, the fact that words in proximity begin with the same letter. But it
takes only a moments reflection to realise that the sameness, far from being
natural, is enforced by an orthographic convention: that is to say, it is the
product of an interpretation. (166)
Fish asserts that if we were to substitute phonetic conventions for orthographic ones . . . the
supposedly objective basis for alliteration would disappear because a phonetic transcription
would require that we distinguish between the initial sounds of those very words that enter
into alliterative relationships; rather than conforming to those relationships, the rules of
spelling make them (166). Even phonological facts (166), that is, an attention to the
actual sounds heard when the words are pronounced, are no more uninterpreted (or less
conventional) than the facts of orthography (166) for the distinctive features that make
articulation and reception possible are the product of a system of differences that must be

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 11B

imposed before it can be recognised: the patterns the ear hears (like the patterns the eye
sees) are the patterns its perceptual habits make available (166). The same is true of the
facts of grammar (166-167): the
history of linguistics is the history of competing paradigms, each of which offers
a different account of the constituents of language. Verbs, nouns, cleft
sentences, transformations, deep and surface structures, semes, rhemes,
tagmemes now you see them, now you dont, depending on the descriptive
apparatus you employ. The critic who confidently rests his analyses on the
bedrock of syntactic descriptions is resting on an interpretation; the facts he
points to are there, but only as a consequence of the interpretive (man-made)
model that has called them into being. (167)
This is why the choice is never between objectivity and interpretation but between an
interpretation that is unacknowledged and an interpretation that is at least aware of itself
(167). Fish subjects even his own claims to this standard, arguing that his own argument
earlier that a bad (because spatial) model had suppressed what was really happening (167)
is inaccurate because the notion really happening is just one more interpretation (167).
Interpretive Communities (pp. 167-173)
Here, Fish considers the following objection: if interpretive acts are the source of
forms rather than the other way around, why isnt it the case that readers are always
performing the same acts or a sequence of random acts, and therefore creating the same
forms or a random succession of forms? (167) How, in short, does one explain these two
facts or reading? (167): that the same reader will perform differently when reading two
different texts (167) and the different readers will perform similarly when reading the
same text (167). In other words, Fish acknowledges, the stability of interpretation among
readers and the variety of interpretation in the career of a single reader would seem to argue
for the existence of something independent of and prior to interpretive acts, something which
produces them (167-168). Fishs answer is that both the stability and the variety are
functions of interpretive strategies rather than of texts (168). The act of reading is never
reducible to a process of simply reading (168) nor an act of pure (that is, disinterested)
perception (168). For example, it is the fact that we determine in advance that a poem such
as Lycidas belongs to the pastoral genre and that it was written by Milton (168) (these
claims are also interpretations; that is they do not stand for a set of indisputable, objective
facts [168]) which renders us immediately predisposed to perform certain acts, to find, by
looking for, themes . . ., to confer significances (on flowers, streams, shepherds, pagan
deities), to mark out formal units (the lament, the consolation, the turn, the affirmation of
faith, and so on) (168). My disposition to perform these [and other] acts constitutes a set
of interpretive strategies, which, when they are put into execution, become the large act of
reading (168). It is, in other words, the interpretive strategies which dictate the answers
which we do not extract from but impose upon the text concerning its formal features or the
authors intentions. Rather, interpretative strategies are not put into execution after reading
(168): they are, rather, the shape of reading (168) and give texts their shape, making
them rather than, as it is usually assumed, arising from them (168).
A number of important consequences follow from the preceding. First, the employment
of a different set of interpretive strategies (168), i.e. other particular interpretive (prereading) decisions (168) (e.g. those psychoanalytic strategies favoured by a critic like Normal
Holland in his The Dynamics of Literary Response) upon the same literary text would produces
another text (168). Second, the employment of the same set of strategies (169) used on
Lycidas but on a different text (e.g. George Eliots Adam Bede) would produce similar results

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 11B

would write the text I write when reading Lycidas (169). Third, another reader who employs
interpretive strategies similar to mine (169) on the same poem will perform the same (or
at least a similar) succession of interpretive acts (169), for which reason we would be
tempted to say that we agree about the poem (thereby assuming that the poem exists
independently of the acts either of us performs) (169), whereas what we would really agree
about is the way to write it (169). Fourth, another reader of Lycidas who puts into execution
a different set of interpretive strategies will perform a different set of interpretive acts (169)
with the result that one could complain to the other that we could not possibly be reading the
same poem . . . and he would be right: for each of us would reading the poem he had made
(169). Fish concludes from this that the notions of the same or different texts are fictions
(169) for it will not be because the formal structures of the two poems (to term them such
is also an interpretive decision) call forth different interpretive strategies but because my
predisposition to execute different interpretative strategies will produce different formal
structures (237). The two poems are different because I have decided that the will be
(169-170), the proof (170) of which is the possibility of doing the reverse (170) because
it has always been possible, as St. Augustine has done in Book IV of his On Christian Doctrine,
to put into action interpretive strategies designed to make all texts one (170) which has
given rise to centuries of Christian exegesis (170) designed to prove that everything in the
Scriptures, and indeed in the world when it is properly read, points to (bears the meaning of)
Gods love for us (170). Examples in contemporary literary criticism of such reductive
tendencies, that is, to reduce discrete texts to a single common meaning, include Marxism and
Psychoanalysis.
Fish seeks to know why different readers should ever agree and why should regular
. . . differences in the career of a single reader ever occur (171), that is, to explain both the
stability (171) and the variety (171) of interpretation. The answer is to be found, he
contends, in a notion . . . implicit in my argument (171) all along: that of interpretive
communities (171). These are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for
reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and
assigning their intentions (171). These strategies exist prior to the act of reading and
therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other
way around (171). If it is an article of faith in a particular community that there are a
variety of text, its members will boas a repertoire of strategies for making them (171), while
if another community believes in the existence of only one text, then the single strategy its
members employ will be forever writing it (171). The former will accuse the latter of being
reductive (171) and the latter the former of being superficial (171). The assumption in
each case will be the other is not correctly perceiving the true text (171), whereas the
truth will be that each perceives the text (or texts) its interpretive strategies demand and
call into being (171). Disagreements exist and can be debated 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 (171). This stability is always temporary (171)
in that interpretive communities grow larger and decline (171) and members move from
one to another (172). Though alignments are not permanent, they are always there,
providing just enough stability for the interpretive battles to go on, and just enough shift and
slippage to assure that they will never be settled (172). The notion of interpretive
communities stand between an impossible ideal and the fear which leads so many to maintain
it (172): the ideal . . . of perfect agreement (172), which would require texts to have a
status independent of interpretation (172), and the fear of interpretive anarchy which could
only be realised if interpretation (text making) were completely random (172).
Fish contends that interpretive communities are no more stable than texts because
interpretive strategies are not natural or universal, but learned (172). There is no point at

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 11B

which an individual has not learned any (172) for the ability to interpret is not acquired; it
si constitutive of being human (172). What is learned are the various ways of interpreting
(172) which can be forgotten or supplanted, or complicated or dropped from favour (no one
reads that way any more) (172). When any of these things happen, there is a
corresponding change in texts, not because they are being read differently, but because they
are being written differently (239).
Communication in general, for Fish, is thus a more chancy affair than we are
accustomed to think it (172). If there are no fixed texts, but only interpretive strategies
making them (172) and if interpretive strategies are not natural, but learned (172), the
question remains: what is it that utterers (speakers, authors, critics, me, you) do? (172).
In the old model (172), utterers are in the business of handing over ready made or
prefabricated meanings (239) thought to be encoded (172) and the code is assumed to
be in the world independently of the individuals who are obliged to attach themselves to it
(172). In Fishs model, by contrast, meanings are not extracted but made and made not by
encoded forms but by interpretive strategies that call forms into being (172-173).
Consequently, 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 (173).
Indeed, there takes place on the part of the utterer a projection . . . of the move he would
make if confronted by the sounds or marks he is uttering or setting down (173). Is not this,
Fish wonders, an admission that there is after all a formal encoding, not perhaps of
meanings, but of the directions for making them, for executing interpretive strategies (173).
Fish responds that they will only be directions to those who already have the interpretive
strategies in the first place. Rather than producing interpretive acts, they are the product of
one (173). An author makes projections not because of something in the marks (173) on
the page but on the basis of something he assumes to be in his reader (173): the very
existence of the marks is a function of an interpretive community (173), for which reason
the marks will be recognised (that is, made) on by its members (173). Those outside that
community will be deploying a different set of interpretive strategies . . . and will therefore
be making different marks (173).
Fish concludes the essay by claiming that he has made the text disappear (173) but
not, unfortunately, the concomitant problems (173). He asks: if everyone is continually
executing interpretive strategies and in that act constituting texts, intentions, speakers, and
authors, how can any one of us know whether one of us know whether or not he is a member
of the same interpretive community? (173). Given that any evidence proposed to support
the claim would itself be an interpretation (173), the only proof of membership is
fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community (173).