M.H. ABRAMS
577
"competent" or " informed" reader ) is tha t, since the " res ponse in–
cludes everything" and is a " total meaning experi ence," you can 't
make valid use of the traditi onal di stinction between subj ect matter
and style, " process and product (the how and the what)" in an
utterance. Another and rela ted conclusion is tha t you can 't di stinguish ,
within the totalit y of a decl arative sentence, wha t is being asserted . H e
excerpts, for exampl e, from Pater's "conclusion" to
The R enaissance:
"Tha t cl ear perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours."
In standard stylisti c analysis, h e says, this is "a simpl e decl arative of the
form X is Y." He then analyzes the experience of reading the sentence
in accordance with the ques ti on , "Wha t does it do?" and finds tha t " in
fact it is no t an assertion a t all , although (the promi se of ) an assertion
is o ne of its components.
It
is an experience; it occurs; it does some–
thing; .. . [and] wha t it does is wha t it means." Turn Fish 's method
of reading back upo n hi s own writing (I find no thing in the method
to prevent our do ing so) and we get the interes ting result tha t hi s asser–
ti on about Pa ter's sentence- " In fact it is not an assertion a t all .. ." -is
in fact not an asserti on a t all, but onl y an evolving experi ence effectu–
ated in a reader.
I want to focus, however, on an important aspect of Fish 's strategy
for transforming accepted meanings. He suppl ements hi s basic equa–
ti o n of meaning with the reader's total response by proposing a start–
stop-extrapola te method in reading:
The basis of the method is a con sideration of the
temporal
fl ow of the
reading experi ence... . In an utteran ce of any length, there is a point
at which the reader has taken in onl y the first word, and then the
second, and then the third, and so on, and th e report of what happens
to the reader is always a report of what has happened
to that point.
(The report includes th e reader's set toward future experiences, but
not those experi ences.)
Wh at happens at each stopping point, then , is that the reader makes
sense of the word or words he has so far read, in large part by surmi sing
what will come n ext. These surmises may, in the text's sequel, turn out
to have been right, but they will often turn out to have been wrong; if
so, " the res ulting mistakes are part of the experience provided by the
autho r's language, and therefore part of its meanin g." T hus " the
noti on of a mi stake, a t least as something to be avoided, di sappears."
And the p oint a t whi ch " the reader hazards interpretive cl osure" is
independent of the " formal units" (such as syntacti cal phrases or
cl auses) or " ph ys ical fea tures" (such as punctua ti on or verse lin es) in
