To the question posed by the title of this book, its author has provided the most succinct answer at the outset. “There isn’t a text in this or any other class if one means by text what E. D. Hirsch and others mean by it, ‘an entity which always remains the same from one moment to the next’ (Validity in Interpretation, p. 46); but there is a text in this and every class if one means by text the structure of meanings that is obvious and inescapable from the perspective of whatever interpretive assumptions happen to be in force” (p. vii). A meaningful text, in short, is the creation (dare we say, fiction?) of a reader, or, more precisely in Fish’s terms, a community of readers. Such an ostensibly forthright view, however, has taken the author ten years for its discovery and elaboration, the process of which is lucidly recapitulated in some twelve reprinted essays which make up the first and longer half of [Is There a Text in This Class?]. The second half consists of four lectures. The book itself thus is less a systematic articulation of a thesis than a series of provocative and engaging explorations, in which Fish argues with himself and his critics.

Why Fish has taken this long to reach his conclusion may be due to the difficulty he had to face in his attempt to dislodge his own evolving theory from New Critical assumptions. In his earlier publications, including the highly acclaimed Surprised by Sin (1967) and Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972), Fish has already sought to substitute the structure of the reader’s experience for the formal structures of the text as “the privileged container of meaning.” His efforts, however, are only partially successful because the text for him at the time still assumes a normative and regulatory role in shaping the reader’s response. Even as he reconceives literary meaning as primarily an “event” unfolding in the reader’s experience, Fish’s desire to claim “universality and objectivity” for his method, as he says, compels him to uphold unwittingly the most cherished principles of New Criticism: the integrity of the text and the aim at “objective” interpretation. To move beyond these troublesome concerns something more radical is needed.

First, literature itself will have to be redefined. Whereas traditional poetics (New Critical or otherwise) have sought to distinguish literature from other human activities on linguistic or ontological grounds, Fish now argues (with John Ellis and others) that “literature is a function of a communal decision as to what will count as literature” (p. 10). While it is still a category, literature “is an open category, not definable by fictionality, or by a disregard of propositional truth, or by a predominance of tropes and figures, but simply by what we decide to put into it” (p. 11). A play or poem is there not because some autonomous individual wills it into existence by the act of composition, but simply because something is recognized as such.

Second, the stubborn fear of subjectivity in criticism must be exorcised. Since such a fear arises directly from the belief that literary meaning is structured in the text, hence critical interpretation may bring either illumination or distortion, this belief must be removed once and for all. For Fish, there are no objective “facts” or “patterns” resident in the literary artifact that require explanation or elucidation. The text, in fact, has no semantic autonomy, no independent existence as a meaningful utterance apart from its perception and reception. Formal characteristics, linguistic and structural, which provide estimable evidence for an objectivist theory of interpretation, are, in Fish’s view, actually products of interpretation. The text, therefore, cannot function as limit or guide in interpretation, because what we choose to hear and see in the text are inescapably “perceptual habits” of a particular reading community. All linguistic constituents (“verbs, nouns, cleft sentences, transformations, deep and surface structures, senses, rhemes, tagmemes—now you see them, now you don’t” [p. 167]) and all formal units are merely descriptive tools, necessary fictions.

Because the text is radically indeterminate and because literary interpretation is in effect the conferral of status and meaning to a text by readers, all utterances may be transformed by the interpretive community into literature. An ancient like Aristotle may want to distinguish scientific or medical treatises written in verse from poetry on philosophical grounds, but for the “contemporary reader” postulated by Fish, this sort of distinction is misguided and ultimately irrelevant. If a person decides that a random catalog of proper names (“Jacobs/Rosenbaum/Levin/Thorne/Hayes/Ohman” [p. 323]) is a poem, it will be a poem, and meanings, appropriate or not, will be created for those names by the observer with vested interests. This was, in fact, what happened in 1971 when a group of students was told by Fish that these names on the blackboard represented “a religious poem of the kind they had been studying” (p. 323). Immediately, the students began to find elaborate allegorical significance in the catalog (“Jacob was explicated as a reference to Jacob’s ladder … [Rosenbaum was] an obvious reference to the Virgin Mary who was often characterized as a rose without thorns” [p. 324], and so on).

Given such a line of argument, does it mean that criticism is finally no more than a kind of sophisticated but solipsistic babble? To the extent that Fish believes that his theory “relieves [him] of the obligation to be right (a standard that simply drops out) and demands only that [he] be interesting” (p. 180), it would appear that such is his tacit admission. Nonetheless, Fish clings tenaciously to the belief that criticism is an art of persuasion (cf. chap. 16), and that communication is still possible—if not between text and reader, at least between reader and reader. Perhaps the inherent contradictions of his position are nowhere more apparent than in the following anecdote, which he uses to establish the dependence of literary understanding not on “the rules and fixed meanings of a language system” but on the “understood practices and assumptions” of various institutions.

On the first day of the new semester a colleague at Johns Hopkins University was approached by a student who, as it turned out, had just taken a course from me. She put to him what I think you would agree is a perfectly straightforward question: “Is there a text in this class?” Responding with a confidence so perfect that he was unaware of it (although in telling the story, he refers to this moment as “walking into the trap”), my colleague said, “Yes: it’s the Norton Anthology of Literature,” whereupon the trap (set not by the student but by the infinite capacity of language for being appropriated) was sprung: “No, no,” she said, “I mean [sic] in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it just us?”

[p. 305]

The point of this story, as Fish correctly perceives, is not whether there is one literal meaning for the word “text” or many meanings, but that the word can take on different meanings when it is used in different contexts. Fish cannot be gainsaid when he asserts that “my colleague was not hesitating between two (or more) possible meanings of the utterance; rather, he immediately apprehended what seemed to be an inescapable meaning, given his prestructured understanding of the situation, and then he immediately apprehended another inescapable meaning when that understanding was altered” (p. 306). Where he strays in his reasoning is in his explanation of how his colleague’s understanding of the situation became altered. Nowhere in his discussion of this incident—and, indeed, throughout the book itself—does Fish allow any role for authorial intention as a determinant of meaning. Such recalcitrance, of course, is understandable and consistent, for if intentionality were permitted in his theory, the entire edifice of reader-criticism would collapse. Since the burden of ascertaining what the utterance—“Is there a text in this class?”—means rests solely on the auditor, Fish must resort to elaborate and tortuous descriptions to account for how his colleague is led to imagine different sets of circumstances in which “text” is used in ways other than when the hearer first heard and received the word.

What the story actually illustrates, however, is that the author of the utterance can specify what she means (“No, no, I mean…”) and that such specification does function as a corrective of misunderstanding. Fish attempts to show that her words are not decisive for altering her auditor’s apprehension, since only someone with privileged knowledge of his own literary theory can fully savor all the implications inherent in the second use of “text” and thus appreciate the “joke.” What Fish seems to fail to realize is that such knowledge can be acquired and transmitted accurately, or there would be no point in telling the anecdote in the first place. By the same reasoning, one can also imagine a third party possessed of this knowledge and present in the classroom saying to Fish’s colleague, “No, no, what she means … etc.” This last kind of activity, one might well argue, takes place in literary criticism all the time.

That a critic of Fish’s charm, wit, and acumen (there are many pages of brilliant analysis of Coriolanus and Milton) should devote so much time and effort to defending such a lopsided thesis is regrettable. After more than three decades of sustained exposure to Heidegger, Bultmann, and Gadamer (not to mention Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud), no student of literature and criticism today would be so naive as to think that one can approach a text wholly without presuppositions, “when consciousness is innocent of any and all categories of thought” (pp. 319–20). On the other hand, to affirm with Fish that the reader’s consciousness is wholly governed by cultural and institutional constraints but not those imposed by the text is equally naive.