Reader-Response under review: art, game, or science?

Style, Winter, 1995 by Terence R. Wright

Fish's book exudes confidence and a sense of comfort (I don't know what he now drives). Laughing at fellow-critics who worry that their labors may be merely a vehicle for their careers, he urges them to "sit back and enjoy the fruits of their professional success" (256). "Milton's Career and the Career of Theory," the title of one of the essays, are both going well, and so is that of Fish, who reprints here his acceptance speech on being awarded "the highest honor conferred by the Milton Society of America" (27). The dominant metaphor of the book is that of games, from baseball to literary criticism. Chapters 3 through 7, Fish explains, were his side of an ongoing series of debates with Dinesh D'souza in which they "dined together, traveled together, and played tennis whenever we could" (52). When Fish addresses the question over which the New Historicists agonize, "Can you at once assert the textuality of history and make specific and positive historical arguments?" he has no qualms about answering in the affirmative, "because the two actions . . . have nothing to do with one another. They are actions in different practices, moves in different games." He raises for a moment the possible objection that "you will answer the question 'what happened' differently if you believe that events are constructed rather than found," but rejects it, separating this "general . . . belief" from "reference to any facts in particular" (248). This position may be convenient for Fish in particular, but it seems to me doubtful in theory and dangerous in practice. Our general theories do impinge upon our discussion of details or else they are not worth having.

Fish, of course, likes to shock. He reprints here in the Appendix an interview with Gary Olson in which he happily admits, "I don't have any principles" (298). When Ronald Dworkin tries to convince him that theories have consequences for practice, he disagrees, seizing upon Dworkin's example of Ted Williams, the baseball player who wrote a book called The Science of Hitting. But Williams's theories, Fish insists, had no bearing at all upon his practice; he just responded intuitively to each pitch. This may well be true of Fish's literary criticism, which as Holub and Holland have noticed, does bear no relation to his theories. But if it were true of all theory, then the fears and fury of the reactionaries would surely be justified. Why should we spend so much time and energy mastering all these complex theories if they make no difference to what we do when we read? Fish's answer, that it is fun and relatively well-paid if you are good at it, seems to me to ring a little hollow.

Fish is at least fun to read, which is more than can be said for the work of his former opponent Wolfgang Iser. No one in the history of literary theory can have written so much with such seriousness on the subject of play. In his book on Tristram Shandy and in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, he entitled chapters "The Play of the Text." Sanford Budick and he then edited a book subtitled The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory. Now he plays once more with the title "Text Play" in the penultimate chapter of The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Iser's strength, which can also be seen as a weakness, is that he draws from such widely differing fields of knowledge to produce a synthesis that some find rich, but others find incoherent. On the one hand, it is difficult not to respect the extent to which Iser trawls philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and literary theory for useful ideas. On the other hand, it is frustrating to find concepts from all these areas mixed together without adequate recognition of the conflicts between the systems of thought from which they have been taken. The bulls have been let among the sheep and the resulting offspring are unrecognizable and sometimes unreadable hybrids.