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PARTISAN REVIEW
rather than a temporal discontinuity is an illicit act of abstraction and
generalization. (Yet Carl Sagan in
The Dragons of Eden
observes that
serial and simultaneous perception belong to different hemispheres of
the brain and are equally natural. ) Fish cites Wittgenstein in an
epigraph, and indeed he does try to write in the spirit of Wittgenstein 's
remark that philosophy is not a theory but an activity. But can
criticism (or the sciences, which are not different from criticism
fundamentally) be conducted in that way? Wittgenstein (I will come
back to him later) questions one's point of departure, the very basis of
theory, whereas critics (and scientists) work back and forth between
some theory and the facts it organizes and is supported and corrected
by.
Fish is a remarkably resourceful literary theorist but also an
ostentatious one, for his theory finally turns into something much less
radical and original than he imagines it does. Although he thinks of
his "affective stylistics" as the very opposite of formalism and although
he belittles the distinction between purposeful and accidental all usion ,
he is really defending an idea of normative judgment based on the
author's intention. He merely adds what we described at the outset as a
now widespread conviction: "Interpretation creates the intention and
its formal realization by creating the conditions in which it becomes
possible to pick them out." (Hirsch had earlier put the point more
clearly: "The object of interpretation is no automatic given but a task
the interpreter sets for himself. He decides what he wants to actualize
and what purpose his actualization should achieve. ") The point itself
is sound but it is not consistent with what Fish elsewhere seems to
think he is saying. Nor is this quite sensible statement: "What is
noticed is what has been made noticeabl e by an interpretive strategy, "
but we are not doomed to relativism because "we share interpretive
strategies.' ,
Fish is only one of a number of contemporary critics who want to
match the boldness of dogmatic relativists like Barthes and Derrida but
who also, unlike them, want to protect literary criticism as a discipline,
and whose arguments in consequence overreach themselves and get
tangled in inconsistencies.
Another is James Kincaid (writing in
Critical Inquiry ,
summer
1977), who argues that the texts of interest to us are incoherent because
they "offer mutually competing coherencies." Conflicting intentions
cannot be comprehended in an overall intention because (here Kincaid
sounds like Fish, although he shrewdly criticizes his theory), in the
