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

Style, Winter, 1995 by Terence R. Wright

Fish is mistaken only in thinking this an error he can put right by arguing, as he does in later papers, that the formal features by which the reader is manipulated are the products of interpretive principles brought to bear by the reader. The story of manipulation will always reassert itself, first because it is a much better story, full of dramatic encounters, moments of deception, and reversals of fortune, second, because it deals more easily and precisely with details of meaning, and third, because this sort of reading confers value on the temporal experience of reading. A reader who creates everything learns nothing . . . . (72)

By contrast, Holland is forced to say that the reader only learns things about him- or herself; that may, of course, be true, but it makes for a weak defense of the discipline of literary criticism.

The fact is that Holland does not care very much about this discipline. The best sections of The Critical I are those in which he brings his awareness of more recent developments in psychology and linguistics to bear upon some of the more dubious assumptions literary critics sometimes inherit uncritically from Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Lacan - for example that linguistic systems reside somewhere other than in the minds of native speakers, thus denying people the power to utilize "laws" in order to generate new meanings. "Looked at from the point of view of modern psychology or linguistics," Holland claims (and it is a vantage point he likes to adopt), "the literary criticism and theory of today that claims to be most radical has made no real break with the past" (210-11). He cites the continuities others have noticed between the "New Cryptics," the label Holland attaches to Derrida and his followers, and the much-despised New Critics. Little has changed in "the 'lit-crit' industry," he declares, since he first joined it thirty years ago (least of all, one might add, his own views). In his view, all that deconstruction has done is increase productivity, providing a few new terms for "the assembly line of literary studies" (213). Indeed, Holland provides one more example of what Fish calls the profession's tendency to despise itself, although it could be said that Holland positions himself outside the discipline of literary criticism altogether.

We find a more incisive attack on certain widely-held but flimsily-based theoretical assumptions from a position more firmly rooted in literary criticism on the other side of the Atlantic in Valentine Cunningham' s In the Reading Gaol, whose title plays in Derridean style with ambiguities resulting (unlike differance) not from a homophone distinguishable only in writing but from the difference in pronunciation of identical written words. Reading, the town where Wilde was imprisoned, where biscuits were packed in tins mentioned in Conrad's writing, and through which Derrida passed on his way from Oxford to London while writing The Post Card, represents for Cunningham the real world to which language and literature necessarily refer. This view that they refer to a real world, however, is under attack. As Cunningham observes at the very outset of his book,