Shakespeare in the Bush
338
interpretive communities
no meaning"inherent" in the text
"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."
"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"
339
issue with literary criticism
Raine - tyger is evil? silly.
Hirsch - holiness of the Tyger
340
" 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, depends upon a distinction between interpretations on the one hand and the textual and contextual facts that will either support 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."
Creation of facts
341
interpretive principles- "without a doubt"
Ahhahaha: ("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 hispersona").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""
342
"The point is one that Wayne Booth makes when he asks, "Are we right to rule out at least some readings?"7 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 saying that there is som<::thing 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")"
Students I have worked with - image of a father
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.
343
playing the game "things not done"...or done.
344
this is insane:
Twenty years ago one of the things that literary critics didn't do was talk aboyt;the reader, at least in a way that made his experience thefo~~s 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 bbject 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.
switched over 20 years:
"and its practitioners have behind 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."
"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."
345
"reversals of direction, traps, invitations to premature conclusions, textual gaps, delayed revelat.ions, 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 Sll bject matter of the poem."
"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 cOllrse 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 l'llled out, because there is now one more interpretive procedure that has
been accorded a place in the literary institution"'
Some look forward to new strategies that have not yet emerged
346
His second argument is that the unacceptability of 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 producing it, no way of "looking" or reading (and remember, all acts of looking or reading are "ways") that would result in the emergence of obviously Eskiri:lO 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.
347
lenses of reading
A rose for emily
Pride and Prejudice
348
revisionist reading?
349
the canon changes - new from the old
but dependent on the old
350
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.
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.
352
This brief paragraph can serve as an illustration of almost everything
I have been saying. First of all, Booth self-consciously locates
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 valued")
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 characters,
in the possibility of recovering the biographical conditions
of composition, and in the determination of an authoritative
ordering and organization.
353
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.
354
Nor could it be otherwise. Strictly speaking, getting "back-tothe-text" is not a move one can perform, because the text one gets back to will be the text demanded by some other interpretation and that interpretation will be presiding over its production.
Interpretation is only game in town
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