If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud. Malcolm Campbell
Stanley Fish, a prominent, contemporary literary theorist, is best known for his theory of reader-response criticism. Fish believed that the way in which a person will interpret a piece of literature is based on the reader's own personal experience with a text. With this type of criticism, literature can be seen as an art form in which the reader generates their own “performance” within the words. Fish decided that we will determine the meaning of a particular text based upon our own “interpretive communities.” He asserts that Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading [in the conventional sense] but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions (Lodge 304).
It is impossible to know our own interpretive community because even inquiring about it at all would be, as Fish says, an act of interpretation. Fish has been criticized for giving the reader too much control over a text. But he argues that
They are ignored because the text is taken to be self-sufficient-everything is in it-and they are devalued because when they are not thought of at all, they are thought of as the disposable machinery of extraction (Lodge 296).
The control and meaning is always in the hands of the reader. In fact, a meaning will not even exist until the reader creates one. An example of this is baseball umpire, Bill Klem, who once waited a long time to call a particular pitch. The player asked him, impatiently, “Well, is it a ball or strike?” Klem's reply: “Sonny, it ain't nothing 'til I call it.” What Fish is saying is, balls and strikes are not undeniable truths; rather, they “come into being only on the call of an umpire” (Stanley Fish).
If we attempt to apply Fish's theory of reader-response criticism to a piece of literature, it will be easier to understand how the theory actually works. In Raymond Carver's short story, Cathedral, the narrator appears to have it all- a lovely, sympathetic wife, enough food on the table to keep them happy, and the often underestimated gift of sight. But behind this satisfied exterior seems to lie a wealth of blindness, ignorance, jealousy, and a substance abuse problem that the narrator uses to escape the rigors of his reality. This is only one interpretation of the narrator. I view the narrator in this way based on my own personal experiences and what I have learned and extracted from reading the text. My interpretive community is “no more stable than texts because interpretive strategies are not natural or universal, but learned” (Lodge 304). On the other hand, I would say that the pitied blind man is really the one who should be envied. He appears to have a more accurate view of the world than most individuals with two healthy eyes. In addition, he has a closer relationship with the narrator's wife than the narrator does himself. The blind man's high came from his relationship with his own wife, and not mind-altering substances. But to the narrator's surprise, as the story progresses the narrator's eyes are opened to the blind man's world. This seems to be implied by the author, and yet another person may create a completely different interpretation than the one I have laid out here. The way in which I happen to interpret is not perfect, but also not wrong: The ability to interpret is not acquired; it is constitutive of being human. What is acquired are the ways of interpreting and those same ways can also be forgotten or supplanted, or complicated or dropped from favor [‘no one reads that way anymore'] (Lodge 305).
On the outside, it would appear as if the narrator could see and the blind man was the one without sight. But on the contrary, the narrator was blinded by his own ignorance. Although he knew little about the blind visitor, the narrator passed judgment on him before even meeting him. “And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed” (Carver 186). Clearly it shows he had little knowledge about the blind when he says, “I'd always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind” or “I remembered reading somewhere that the blind didn't smoke” (190-191). This shows that we all have different perspectives based on our own experiences. The blind man and the narrator, if given the same exact text, would undoubtedly have a different experience with it because of their unique personalities. Unlike the narrator, the blind man keeps an open mind to new experiences and states that he is always learning something because learning never ends, thus demonstrating his lack of ignorance. Later in the story, the blind man asks the narrator to describe the cathedrals for him. At this point he is introduced into the blind man's world and begins to see what it is like for him to have no sight. This allows the narrator to step outside of his own boundaries and free himself of the ignorant world in which he has been living. In the last few lines of the story, he realizes for himself that he is free. “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything” (196). The idea that both of the main characters, the narrator and the blind man, see the world from different perspectives is much like Fish's theory. The narrator makes up one interpretive community while the blind man constitutes another. They interpret the “literary text” (in this case, the world with or without having sight) differently and are unable to see outside of their own interpretive community.
The binaries working within this story seem to point out that after taking a second glance, the blind man may be better off than was once thought. Robert possesses the physical blindness over seeing, but he has the gift of knowing and understanding people over the narrator's ignorance. He sees through the ignorance of the narrator and looks beyond it to help the young man understand the blind man's own world. In addition, Robert is more compassionate to the wife's feelings and uses people to enrich his life, compared to the narrator's unawareness of his wife's feelings and his hopeless escape into a lifestyle of drug use. Despite their world of differences, both the young man and the old man are able to see each other's point of view. The blind man is able to feel what a cathedral is like in the eyes of the narrator, and the narrator feels the struggle of trying to understand what other people can see. The blindness that separates the narrator from Robert in the beginning of the story brings them together in the end. But if one looks at it from a different angle, the story could simply be recalling a miniscule event in time with no “lesson to be learned.” Not every story needs a lesson and the reader is the only one to determine whether one can be found from this or if it is simply just an entertaining recollection of a blind man's visit.
From this we can safely assume that the reader will see what he or she wants to see. Or maybe more accurately, he or she will see what we have been taught to see. Keeping this in mind, it is important, especially for a teacher, to be careful about preconceived notions in any given work. Someone teaching a piece of literature mustn't just assume that a student understands the same things the teacher does. It will mean much more to a person if they are given the opportunity to tackle the literature themselves and extract the meaning that they find rather than the meaning they were told to find. In Fish's own words,
The meaning they have is a consequence of their not being empty; for they include the making and revising of assumptions, the rendering and regretting of judgments, the coming to and abandoning of conclusions, the giving and withdrawing of approval, the specifying of causes, the asking of questions, the supplying of answers, the solving of puzzles” (Lodge 296).
So whether one believes my own interpretation of Carver's Cathedral, or something completely different, it all comes down to the reader. In other words, the actual act of reading is when the text obtains its meaning. Every question and every thought a reader has while reading a piece of literature is all connected to the meaning of the literature.
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. Cassill, R.V. and Richard Bausch. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2000. 186-196.
Lodge, David. Modern Criticism and Theory. Pearson Education Limited: United Kingdom, 2000.
“Stanley Fish.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish
Further Reading
“Reader-response Criticism.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism
Ryan Morin
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