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J.F. WURTHEN On the Matter of the Text The following essay deals with one of the questions raised by the work of Stanley Fish, who ranks among the most important figures in North American literary theory over the past thirty years: the question of the status of the text. Fish has been perhaps the most prominent advocate for the thesis that the text is simply the product of the interpretive strategies brought to bear upon it by the reader, thereby reducing the text to the status of a tabula rasa, essentially a nonentity, whlch is nothing more than the (finally arbitrary) occasion for the expression of independently constructed and institutionally embodied norms. Fish developed his case in the context of an attack on 'formalism: meaning any attempt to ground the reader's interpretation in features objectively inhering in the text itself. Interpretation indisputably exhibits certain 'forms' (definable and in principle replicable patterns); whlfe the formalists (at the time the majority of literary critics) found the source of these forms in the text, Fish traced their origin rather to the activity of the reader and denied the text any ultimate role in their production. The position urged by Fish is not, however, acceptable, for three reasons. First, the arguments he uses to support it are fallacious and, therefore, inconclusive. What they in fact suggest - although, of course, Fish would not be satisfied with this - is that the textual object and the interpreting subject are inextricably connected, that the one is always implied by and, therefore, present within the other. To argue, then, that the forms exhibited in an interpretive statement derive solely from either the text or the reader is necessarily to err: one cannot exist or even be conceived of independently from the other. Fish is here misled by his polemical instincts. He constructs a theory that is the mirror image of his opponents' without querying the validity of the question as they have defined it: whlch is the source of interpretation , text or interpreter? This is the second reason why his position is unacceptable, because it is still trying to answer a question .that should not be asked at all; text and interpreter constitute a closed circle, and one cannot be the absolute cause of the other. The third reason for rejecting Fish's position Similarly arises from hls inability to see beyond the parameters of his opponents' thoughts. For Fish, along with the formalists, concentrates exclUSively on the question UNIVERSllY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 60, NUMBER ). SPRING 1991 331l J.F. WORTHEN of form in the text. But to speak of the text as form is to speak of an interpretive process that is already in motion: no form without text, no form without interpreter. Fish along with the formalists neglects the status of the text not as the (contested) bearer of forms but as matter, as blank and formless object. To ask about the text as matter is to ask not about the interpretive process already in motion, but about the moment at the beginning of that motion. That moment is the perception by the subject (who is invented precisely in this perception) of the object as sign, of the res as signum, of the matter as form. We cannot hope to understand the status of the text without first investigating that moment, the moment of the invention of the text, which writers have been writing about from antiquity to the present. And doubtless both before then and hereafter. THE DISAPP E ARI N G TEXT All theory is the prosaic explication of metaphor. That is, of course, itself a theory, but it might be corroborated by a passing glance at Fish's career. In his earlier works, Fish made much of metaphors of disappearance . For instance, in the preface to the paperback edition of Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, he gleefully appropriates the inference of Wimsatt and Beardsley that attention to the reader leads to the disappearance of the text.' The title of his subsequent work, SelfConsuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature, itself contains a metaphor of disappearance, and the central thesis of the book is that the texts under...

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