M.H. ABRAMS
579
with Fish's method. By stern self-discipline, I managed to read word by
word and to impose frequent perceptual closures, resisting the compul–
sion to peek ahead in order to see how the phrases and cl auses would
work out in the LOtal sentence. And instead of suspending judgment as
LO meaning until the semanti c
Gestalt
was compl ete, I soli cited my
invention to anti cipate possibl e meanings and actuated my will to fix
on a singl e one of these possibilities. The result was indeed an evolving
sequence of false surmises. I found, however, that the places where I
chose to stop rarely coincided with the stopping-places of Stanley Fish,
and that my fal se surmises rarely matched his, especiall y in the
startling degree to which they diverged from what actuall y followed in
the text. What am I to conclude? A possible conjecture is that Fish
himself has not always res isted the impulse to peek ahead; that in fa ct
many of hi s novel readings a re not prospective, but retrospective; that
in local instan ces they are the result of a predisposition to generate
surprising meanings between the words; and that in large-scale in–
stances, when he presents a new reading of a LOtal literary work, they
are the result of a predisposition to generate a system of surprising
meanings of a coherent sort.
In his earli er writings, despite some wavering as to what is implied
by hi s use of the term " method," Fish represented his analyses primar–
il y as a description of what competent readers in fact do; its aim was
simpl y to make "ava il abl e LO analytic consciousness the strategies
readers perform, independentl y of whether or not they are aware of
havin g performed them." In hi s recent theoreti cal writings, however,
Fish as ks us to take hi s method not as " descriptive" but "prescriptive";
its aim now is LO persuade us to give up reading in our cusLOmary way
and instead to " read in a new or different way." Fish's current views are
an ex treme form of methodological rel a tivi sm, in which the initial
cho ice of a method of reading is "arbitrary," and the particular method
that th e reader elects crea tes the text and meanings that he mi stakenl y
thinks he find s. " Interpretive strategies" are procedures " not for
reading (in th e convention al sense) but for writing texts, for constitut–
ing their properti es and ass igning their intentions. " " Formal units, "
and even " the 'facts' of grammar," are "always a fun ction of th e
interpretive will one brings to bea r; they a re no t 'in' the text. "
It
turns
ou t, indeed, th a t there is no thing either inside or outside the text excep t
wha t our elected stra tegy brings into being, for "everyone is continu–
all y execu tin g interpretive stra tegies and in tha t act constituting texts,
intentions, speakers, and authors. " Starting with the premi se that the
meaning is all of a reader's experience of a tex t, we have p lunged down
