No wonder when Stanley Fish made a remark: “The objectivity of the text is an illusion”. Dictionaries define text as: the actual words of an author’s work; the main body of printed or written matter on a page; a scriptural passage chosen as a subject. Some also give an extended meaning as ‘theme’ or ‘topic’. Anything that can be interpreted as text. Thus anything that has a scope for interpretation is a text.
Stanley Eugene Fish is one of the chief proponents of a school of literary criticism known as reader response criticism. In fact, the school of reader response critics has even been referred to as the “School of Fish” . As the name might suggest, reader response criticism emphasizes the role of the reader as crucial in determining the significance of a text. To a critic of this type, reading is seen as an activity which makes meaning in a text rather than a passive function which derives meaning from a text. In his book Is There a Text in This Class?, Fish has collected a number of his most important essays and articles in an attempt to chart the progress of his evolving interpretive method.
Reader-response criticism shifts the attention from the writer to the reader. It is based on the assumption that the meaning of a work emerges when the reader responds to it. Needless to say the readers to respond in various ways and their response cannot be regarded as objective enough for the purpose of interpretation. Moreover, the text can never restrain the unexpected interpretations given to it.
The critic Isor, observes that the text being a product of the author’s intentional act and intellectual achievement can restrain its unexpected interpretations, or misreading to a greater extent. Yet the text will surely contain gaps or intermediate areas which the reader can fill with anticipatory and retrospective processes of the activity. The author’s intentional acts can only limit speculation and encourage creative additions.
Structuralists also hold the opinion that sense is to be made out of a text by a competent reader with his assimilation of literary conventions. Jonathan Culler considers diverse interpretations more or less impossible, but Roland Barthes is convinced that as many alternative meanings as the structures permit can be elicited from a work. The structural delusion that meanings are fixed by formal structures are totally annihilated by the poststructuralist theory of deconstruction.
The deconstructionists rest their conclusions on differences. Davis Bleich stresses the subjective nature of interpretation dependant on the attitude and personality of the reader. Norman Holland, a psychoanalyst, affirms that the interpretation is the net result of transaction between the fantasies expressed by the author and those expected by the reader. It does without saying that no two readers can arrive at identical interpretations, for no two personalities are alike.
Stanley Fish, proponent of affective stylistics, analyses the process of reading. The text is taken in word after word , anticipations corrected at the completion of various phases like the end of a paragraph or chapter, and finally anticipations are revised wholly in the light of reading. This is the interpretation of the text by the reader. It may be different from the intended meaning of the author; but if any mistake or misapprehension is found, it can be attributed to the author’s incompetence to communicate himself without any ambiguity. Fish goes to the extent of suggesting formation of interpretive communities with the adequate reading strategies to form a set of community assumptions so that the vagaries of temperament or the competence of the reader is not the deciding factor. Generally the response of the readers vary according to the ideology and the bias of the race or the class to which the readers belong.
Fish’s idea that a text, though fixed at a certain time and place, can change over time brings up the concept of “context”. In other words, everything is always already in a context, and it is because of this context that sentences have meaning.
Fish takes his argument a step further by contesting the distinction between direct and indirect speech acts. Direct speech acts are ones in which the meaning of the utterance is clearly imbedded in its “text.” Indirect speech acts are ones in which the meaning lies outside the “text” but is understood by the hearer due to a shared contextual understanding with the speaker. In both cases the contextual understanding of the utterance is typically considered to be subject to “normal” circumstances. In other words, the hearer knows what the speaker is talking about, whether he uses direct or indirect language, because the utterance and its reception occur in a situation that lies in the realm of both parties’ understanding. It is this idea of normal circumstances with which Fish takes issue. He says,
“ . . . I am making the same argument for ‘normal context’ that I have made for ‘literal meaning’ . . . There will always be a normal context, but it will not always be the same one”
In common use almost every word has many shades of meaning, and therefore needs to be interpreted by the context. But this interpretation itself is an act of producing text. Thus anything can work out as a text. It need not be a written form, instead it can appear in multifarious ways.
Paintings are potent for enabling myriad interpretations. They are the kind which goads us to visit the past, recall moments described in history as tragic and irreparable. The “speaking tree” by the Delhi based Gulam Mohammed Sheikh did exactly that. Here, the artist culminates all his experiences of hope and despair. He mixes the nostalgic past with the painful present.
Signs and symbols are the objective texts. They are accepted by a group and thus given validity. For instance flags, stand for unity, harmony, loyalty, patriotism etc.
Audio and visual media can serve as texts. Sometimes they inspire us, they have the ability to yank us. In fact they create an ideal space for us within which we choose to live. But they can throw us out of this comfort sphere also. Even the zapping of channels can be interpreted, hence the TRPs.
Thus anything that which can be interpreted can be called as ‘text’.
BIBILIOGRAPHY.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Is There a Text in This Class?, Cambridge: Harvard, 1980
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