Quentin Bell
         A "Radiant" Friendship
         This was to have been a confutation. My intention was to rebut and
            for the record's sake to correct certain fashionable errors
            concerning the life of Virginia Woolf. What could be more proper,
            and what, it has to be said, more tedious? If the defence of truth
            had remained my only objet, I should have left these words
            unwritten, or at least should have addressed them to a very small
            audience. But the pursuit of truth sent me back to my sources, and
            there I found a story, in many ways sad, but also funny and
            certainly instructive. It seemed worth extracting this record of a
            friendship from the great mass of evidence in which it is embedded.
            I hope that the reader will agree with me in finding it interesting
            in itself but, just as Prince's Hal's "plain
            tale" is made livelier by being contrasted with
            Falstaff's "eleven buckram men," so too the
            simple facts are made more striking by the intentions of
            Virginia's recent interpreters. Let me therefore begin with a
            quotation from one of them.
            Volume I [of Virginia Woolf's Letters] has a rarely preserved
            portrait of a female artist in the making, love and work intensely
            intertwined in her relations with women who encouraged her to
            write, read, and think, and gave her the nourishment of womanly
            love and literary criticism, which she was to seek and find in
            female friendship all her life. Bloomsbury fades into
            insignificance as an "influence" next to the radiance
            of Woolf's relationships with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head
            of the Cooperative Working Women's Guild, Janet Case, her
            Greek teacher, violet Dickinson, Madge Vaughan, and her aunt
            Caroline Stephen, the Quaker whom she called "Nun."1
            These words were written by Professor Jane Marcus, a person of
            great charm and ability, whose opinions are, I understand, accepted
            by a multitude of admirers. In those articles by her which I have
            read, she hardly disguises her contempt for me as a biographer.
            But, painful though it is to have incurred the disdain of so
            influential a personage, it much be allowed that, if the influence
            of Virginia Woolf's husband, her sister, and her closest
            friends "fades into insignificance" when compared with
            that of Miss Caroline Stephen and Mrs. W. W. Vaughan, then indeed I
            have gone sadly astray.
             
            Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A
            Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous
            contributions to  include "Art and the
            Elite" (Autumn 1974) and "Bloomsbury and &lsquo;the
            Vulgar Passions' " (Winter 1979).
Ralph W. Rader
         The Logic of Ulysses; or, Why Molly Had_to_Live_in_Gibraltar
         "O, rocks!" Molly exclaims in impatience with
            Bloom's first definition of metempsychosis, "tell us in
            plain words" (p. 64). Looking forward, then, we remember that
            Bloom asks Murphy if he has seen the Rock of Gibraltar and (after
            receiving an ambiguous reply, which Bloom interprets affirmatively)
            asks further what year that would have been and if Murphy remembers
            the boats that plied the strait. "I'm tired of all them
            rocks in the sea," replies Murphy (here characterized as
            "the wily old customer" [p. 630]).
             
            Bloom's interest derives from Molly's connection with
            Gibraltar, and Molly herself in her monologue remembers the boats
            well and thinks of missing the boat at Algeciras (opposite from
            Europa point), just before the book ends with her thoughts of the
            awful deepdown torrent," the tide that moves like a river
            through the strait. Imaginatively she moves with that torrent,
            figuratively the torrent of time that plunges from the future to
            the past, which she accepts, with her yes, going deeply with the
            flow of life, and with her goes Murphy/Joyce, touching on Gibraltar
            at last. Molly remembers Ulysses S. Grant getting off a boat in
            Gibraltar, an occurrence that Adams sees as unduly stretching
            probability merely in order to bring Molly in incidental touch with
            a man named Ulysses.19 But remembering that Murphy is a "wily
            old customer," we may remember also that the Ulysses of
            Joyce's favorite Dante cannot rest with Penelope but, in
            search of knowledge and excellence, moves on through the two rocks
            of the straits of Gibraltar, the pillars of Hercules, to further
            adventure and also to destruction; and we may then think that with
            this reference, Joyce took pains to tell us that the Ulysses of
            this book here completes in hidden climax the design and purpose of
            his work, and sails on to oblivion, or rather to dispersion and
            reconstitution as everyone in the new adventure of Finnegans Wake.
             
            19. See Adams, Surface and Symbol, p. 233.
             
            Ralph W. Rader, professor of English at the University of
            California, Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's
            "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. He is currently
            working on a theoretical study of form in the novel and other
            genres. His previous contributions to  include
            "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon
            Sacks" (Winter 1979) and "The Dramatic Monologue and
            Related Lyric Forms" (Autumn 1976).
Larzer Ziff
         Whitman and the Crowd
         On the night of 12 November 1958, Walt Whitman witnessed a meteor
            shower which he later described in his notebook. The lines never
            found their way into a published piece. But when he came to write
            his poem about the year 1859-60, the year in which Abraham Lincoln
            and Stephen Douglas contested the presidency, John Brown was hanged
            in Virginia, and the mighty British iron steamship the Great
            Eastern arrived in New York on its maiden voyage, he remembered the
            heavenly phenomenon of the year before and began his poem,
            "Year of meteors! brooding year!"1
            Brooding, indeed, because this poem, the first version of which was
            completed after the Civil War, is concerned with the year in which
            South Carolina seceded from the United States, thereby plunging the
            union of Whitman's celebrations into bloody divisiveness. Yet
            the onset of that event is never mentioned in the poem. Rather, its
            imminence is expressed in the meteor imagery the portent of
            human history written in the heavens, a fairly rare example of
            Whitman employing a traditional literary convention.
            Among the events of the "Year of meteors," and
            seemingly the least of them, certainly the one that appears most
            unconnected with the "brooding,"
            "transient," "strange" atmosphere invoked
            in the poem, is the visit Edward, Prince of Wales, paid to New York
            on 11 October 1860 (pp. 238, 239). Whitman saw the prince's
            procession, recorded it in his notebook, and introduced it,
            somewhat incongruously, into his poem, devoting three lines to it:
                        And you would I sing, fair stripling! Welcome
                                    to you from me, young prince of England!
                        (Remember your surging Manhattan's crowds as you
                                    pass'd with your cortege of nobles?
                        There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out
                                    with attachment;)
                                                                       [P. 239]
            1. Walt Whitman, "Year of Meteors (1859-60)," Leaves of
            Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York, 1973),
            p. 238; all further references to Whitman's poetry will be
            cited by page number from this edition and will included in the
            text.
             
            Larzer Ziff is Caroline Donovan Professor of English at the Johns
            Hopkins University. He has written several books on American
            culture, the most recent of which is Literary Democracy: The
            Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (1981).
David Marshall
         Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments
         In Smith's view, the dédoublement that structures any act of
            sympathy is internalized and doubled within the self. In
            endeavoring to "pass sentence" upon one's own
            conduct, Smith writes, "I divide myself, as it were, into two
            persons; and … I, the examiner and judge, represent a different
            character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined
            into and judged of" (p. 113). Earlier in his book, Smith
            claims that in imagining someone else's sentiments, we
            "imagine ourselves acting the part" of that person (p.
            75); here he pictures us trying to play ourselves by representing
            ourselves as two different characters. "The first,"
            writes Smith, "is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard
            to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in
            his situation." The second character, according to Smith, is
            "the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of
            whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was
            endeavouring to form some opinion" (p. 113). In the version
            of this chapter that appeared in the first edition, Smith made
            these roles explicitly by stating that "we must imagine
            ourselves not the actors, but the spectators of our own character
            and conduct" (p. 11 n.2). In his final exposition, he makes
            it clear that we are both actors and spectators of our characters.
            We are actors not just because we appear before spectators played
            by ourselves but also because, as Smith describes, we personate
            ourselves in different parts, persons, and characters. The self is
            theatrical in its relation to others and in its self-conscious
            relation to itself; but it also enters the theater because
            "the person whom I properly call myself" must be the
            actor who can dramatize or represent to himself the spectacle of
            self-division in which the self personates two different persons
            who try to play each other's part, change positions, and
            identify with each others. Ironically, after founding his Theory of
            Moral Sentiments on a supposedly universal principle of sympathy,
            and then structuring the act of sympathy around the epistemological
            void that prevents people from sharing each other's feelings,
            Smith seems to separate the self from the one self if could
            reasonably claim to know: itself. In order to sympathize with
            ourselves, we must imagine ourselves as an other who looks upon us
            as an other and tries to imagine us. Indeed, calling the spectator
            within the self the person judged of, Smith writes, "but that
            the judge should, in every respect, be the same with the person
            judged of, is as impossible, as that the cause should in every
            respect, be the same with the effect" (p. 113). Thus the
            actor and spectator into which one divides oneself can never
            completely identify with each other or be made identical. Identity
            is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the
            self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the
            characters of both spectator and spectacle.14
             
            14. Smith's depiction of the impartial spectator and the
            relations it creates within the self suggest that he has been
            reading Shaftesbury. The characterization of the impartial
            spectator as the "man within the breast" (p. 130)
            recalls Joseph Butler's discussion of "the witness of
            conscience" in his sermons "Upon the Natural Supremacy
            of Conscience" (The Works of Joseph Butler, 2 vols.
            [Cambridge, Mass., 1827], 2:52, and see 2:47-65. Smith may or may
            not have read Butler; see Macfie, The Individual in Society, p.
            99). Hume discusses the moral value of considering how we appear in
            the eyes of those who regard us: "By our continual and
            earnest pursuit of a character, a reputation in the world, we bring
            our own deportment and conduct frequently in review, and consider
            how they appear in the eyes of those who approach and regard us.
            This constant habit of surveying ourselves, as it were, in
            reflection, keeps alive al the sentiments of right and wrong"
            (Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 276). It is
            Shaftesbury, however, who expounds a "doctrine of two persons
            in one individual self" as he presents his "dramatic
            method" ("Soliloquy or Advice to an Author," in
            Characteristics of Men, Manner, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John M.
            Robertson, 2 vols. [Gloucester, Mass., 1963], 1:121) …. The terms
            and figures of theater are clearly inscribed within Smith's
            characterizations of sympathy and the impartial spectator but they
            are clearly informed by Shaftesbury's meditation on the
            dramatic character of the self and the problem of theatricality
            that threatens the self as it appears before the eyes of the world.
            This interpretation of Shaftesbury is developed at length in my The
            Figure of Theater.
             
            David Marshall, assistant professor of English and comparative
            literature at Yale University, has written on Rilke and
            Shakespeare. The present essay is adapted from a chapter of his
            forthcoming book, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam
            Smith, and George Eliot.
Anthony Newcomb
         Sound and Feeling
         I do not by any means with to take on the philosophy or aesthetics
            of music as a whole. In his review of Edward Lippman's
            Humanistic Philosophy of Music, Monroe Beardsley lists six areas in
            which an ideal philosophy of music ought to provide guidance: (1)
            an ontology of music, an answer to the question What is a musical
            work of art? (2) a taxonomy of music, a categorical scheme for the
            basic and universal aspects of music; (3) a hermeneutics or
            semiotics of music, an answer to the question What, if anything,
            can music refer to? (4) an epistemology of music; (5) a theory of
            music criticism, an answer to the question What makes one musical
            work better than another? (6) the foundations of a social
            philosophy of music.4 My subject here is the third item. I want
            most particularly to separate it from the fifth item, for to arrive
            at an interpretation of a particular piece is not to arrive at an
            evaluation of it. I shall also try, particularly in my discussion
            of Nelson Goodman's seminal Languages of Art, to avoid the
            first item.5 And I shall try throughout to avoid embroilment in the
            question of how the aesthetic experience can be separated from the
            nonaesthetic.
            My subject is in fact only a part of the third item above, namely,
            current theories of musical expression. "Expression" is
            not equivalent to "meaning"; I understand and shall use
            the word "expression" to indicate a kind of meaning
            that entails some kind of reference outside the internal syntax of
            the artwork itself. As Goodman remarks, "rather obviously, to
            express is to refer in some way to what is expressed."6 How
            this reference is made by the artwork is interaction with the
            listener, and what sort of purpose it serves these concerns
            will be the focus of this essay. To choose this focus is not to
            deny something of which I have no doubt, both from Peter
            Faltin's careful arguments and from my own experience: there
            is a kind of musical meaning that is purely syntactic, that
            operates without reference outside the internal operations or
            procedures of musical systems themselves.7 But through this may be
            ontologically the most fundamental kind of musical meaning, it is
            not the only kind. To listen for this alone is not the only way to
            approach music. Indeed, I should guess it is not the most
            fundamental way for many listeners.
             
            4. I paraphrase and abbreviate from Monroe C. Beardsley, review of
            A Humanistic Philosophy of Music by Edward A. Lippman, Musical
            Quarterly66 (Apr. 1980): 305.
            5. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of
            Symbols(Indianapolis, 1968); all further references to this work,
            abbreviated LA, will be included in the text.
            6. Goodman, "Reply to Beardsley," Erkenntnis 12, pt. 1
            (Jan. 1978): 171; and see Edward T. Cone: "Expressive values
            in any art … cannot arise from analytical values alone. How could
            they? Unless one wishes to explain what it could possibly mean for
            a work of art to &lsquo;express itself,' then one must agree
            that expression, by its very definition, implies a relationship
            between the work of art and something else; while analytical values
            are derivable purely from internal structure" ("Beyond
            Analysis," Perspectives of New Music 6 [Fall-Winter 1967]:
            46).
             
            Anthony Newcomb, professor of music at the University of
            California, Berkeley, is the author of The Madrigal at Ferrara. He
            is currently at work on a book on musica ficta, Understood
            Accidentals in Renaissance Vocal Polyphony, 1450-1600, and a study
            of the relationship between structure and expression in nineteenth-
            century music.
Jonathan Beck
         Formalism and Virtuosity: Franco-Burgundian Poetry, Music, and
            Visual Art, 1470-1520
         Let us look first at poetry. It is well known that by the fifteenth
            century, lyric poetry had undergone a radical transformation; the
            early lyric fluidity and formal variability (the now famous
            mouvance of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries) had
            hardened into the nonlyric and even, some maintain, antilyric forms
            fixeswhich characterize the poetic formalism of late medieval
            France. Dispensing with the details of how and why this occurred,
            the essential point is that by the end of the Middle Ages, the poet
            in France and Burgundy saw himself as an artisan of words, not as a
            singer.6 He refers to himself as a craftsman (a facteur, faiseur,
            rhétoricien), and it is plain, sometimes painfully so, to anyone
            who reads the works that the rhétoriqueur is, indeed, an artisan of
            forms or, if you will, an architecte de la parole, a
            specialist in verbal matter. He works words, sounds, metric and
            strophic forms into intricate patterns and arranges his elaborate
            designs in blocks of exact and harmonious symmetry. He is, in fact,
            from Machaut on, a virtuoso of the verbal equivalent of the
            architectural art of carrelage ("Tile designs") which
            adorned the princely château in which he worked and lived. No one
            familiar with the period will avoid noticing the strikingly similar
            types of patters in the poet's works and in his surroundings.
            I have gathered elsewhere the visual documentation which bears out
            Zumthor's suggestions quoted above ("analogies of
            perception" and "proximity of design") with
            respect to the meticulously constructivist mentality of the Franco-
            Burgundian artisan. But the analogies I found are much more than
            perceptual. It is true that the elaborate designs on the walls,
            floors, ceilings, windows, woodwork, and so forth of the early
            Renaissance château are, indeed, composed of intricate blocks of
            material; but their function is not merely decorative (that is,
            analogously restricted to this simple plane when compared with
            contemporaneous poems), it is also narrative, with emblematic
            motifs and allegorical figures arrayed in linear patterns of
            "visual" discourse the invariable "discours
            de la gloire" (see ML, pp. 56-77) which silently proclaims
            the magnificence of the patron prince and proprietor of the château
            (see figs. 1-4).7
             
            6. A summary of internal and external factors in the transformation
            of lyric to Rhetoric is provided in my review of Die musikalische
            Erscheinungsform der Trouvèrepoesie by Hans-Herbert S. Råkel (Bern,
            1977), in Romance Philology 34 (Nov. 1980): 250-58.
            7. This following collage of fragments from ML was constructed
            (like a Renaissance quodlibet) ôto serve as commentary on
            photographs of tile designs compared with verbal texts, in an
            earlier version of this paper ("Formal Constructivism in Late
            Medieval French Poetry: Lyric to Rhetoric, mouvance to formex
            fixes, canso to carreau"), from which the examples in figs.
            1-4 are taken.
            Culte de l'objet subtilement travaillé, au-delà de toute
            fonctionnalité primaire (28) *** primat du labeur ardu, patient, du
            difficile, de l'inattendu (212) *** les mots mêmes semblent
            travaillés d'un besoin de scientificité fictive,
            d'anoblissement par le savoir (76) *** les … mots ne sont
            plus que les particules d'une parole dont la seule
            signification est globale (50) *** matériau émancipé (autant que
            faire se peut) des contraintes de la phrase, transposé sur un plan
            où le signe devient le nom vide de ce signe (195) *** goût du
            bricolage plutôt que de l'industrie; … du bariolage plus que
            du fondu et de la nuance; de l'équilibre numéral des parties
            plus que de la synthèse; du multiple plus que de l'un. Outil
            forgé martelé d' "aornures" sans fonction
            utilitaire; enchâssements cubiques, coniques, pyramidaux,
            cruciformes du bâtiment … meubles marquetés, forrés de tiroirs
            minuscules et secrets (134) [and so forth].
            For the iconography of these examples (and numerous others), see
            Emile Amé, Less Carrelages émaillés du Moyen Age et de la
            Renaissance (Paris, 1859), pp. 61-108.
             
            Jonathan Beck is associate professor of French at the University of
            Arizona. He is the author of Théâtre et propaganda aux débuts de la
            Réforme(forthcoming in 1984), a sequel to his edition and study, Le
            Concil de Basle: Le Origines du theater réformiste et partisan en
            France.
Walter A. Davis
         The Fisher King: Wille zur Macht in Baltimore
         Interpretation is an institutional activity and that may be the
            most significant fact about it; we are, indeed, a profession, and
            as such we train students to think about literature in certain
            ways. Membership in the community is determined by how well one
            masters the rules of the game. These inescapable facts may be the
            source of our greatest problems or their hidden solution.
            Stanley Fish champions the latter alternative, arguing, in his most
            recent book, that "the interpretive community" is the
            ultimate principle of authority in criticism and is capable of
            resolving all the problems of interpretation.1 If we want to know
            what reading is, how texts achieve determinate meaning, what
            constitutes validity in interpretation, or how to resolve the
            "conflict of interpretations," we must, Fish argues,
            focus on the community itself, for it is here alone that these
            matters are determined.
            Though he has had more than his share of professional attention,
            having developed this argument makes Fish's work worthy of
            further consideration. He quite simply presents the best picture we
            are likely to get of the "mind" of the profession, and,
            in treating him at length here, I am primarily concerned with his
            representative status. His great achievement is to have articulated
            the assumptions and beliefs underlying the practices that are
            favored in our profession: the tacit theoretical position composed
            of ideas and commonplaces that are so deeply held and constantly in
            use that they "prestructure" both our dealings with
            literature and our debates over those dealings. While remaining for
            the most part "unconscious," these ideas nevertheless
            function as self-evident and unassailable truths. (Fish's
            focus on general rules shared by everyone cuts across both the
            debates among theorists of different persuasions and the old
            opposition between theory and practical criticism.) If we are to
            move, as I think we must, toward experiencing a crisis in our
            discipline, we first have to know where we are. And for that, Fish
            is invaluable because he has set out to become the official
            spokesman and efender of the profession.
             
            Walter A. Davis, associate professor of English at the Ohio State
            University, is the author of The Act of Interpretation: A Critique
            of Literary Reason. The present essay is from a recently completed
            work on contemporary criticism. He is currently writing a book on
            modern American drama.
Stanley Fish
         Fear of Fish: A Reply to Walter Davis
         Perhaps the best place to begin would be with the model or picture
            of things Davis opposes to mine. It is a familiar model that has at
            its center an independent text, or at least a text that is
            independent enough to provide "common reference points"
            that serve as a check against, and a means of discriminating
            between, the operation of different interpretive strategies (p.
            681). In my account of interpretation, Davis complains, there is no
            such check, and therefore different interpretive strategies are
            free to "create completely different texts with no point of
            comparison"; as a result, "all attempts to ground
            criticism in commonly observed data are ruled out" (p. 681).
            Davis cites as a piece of "commonly observed data,"
            which in my argument "suddenly become[s] problematic,"
            the fact that "God is represented as somewhat ponderous and
            dull in book 3 of Paradise Lost" (p. 681). Now it is
            certainly the case that much criticism has been grounded in this
            piece of data, and it is also the case that it has been
            "commonly observed," in the sense that many
            commentators begin by assuming it before proceeding either to
            lament it or explain it or explain it away. The question I would
            ask, however, is "What is its source?" Davis'
            answer is already given; its source is the text; but I would
            suggest that its source is a tradition of literary judgment at
            least as old as the pronouncements of Alexander Pope, a tradition
            that over a period of time was consolidated and became so
            authoritative that it acquired the status of a commonplace, which,
            in combination with other related commonplaces, made up the context
            within which the act of reading occurred. In short, I would want to
            historicize (and perhaps rhetorize) the category of commonly
            observed data, and I would do this in part by pointing out first,
            that the category is a relational one formed not by direct
            inspection but by a system of differences that inform
            perception and second, that what is in the category can
            change (although change is one of the things Davis claims that I
            cannot accommodate).
             
            Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and
            the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions
            to  include "Working on the Chain Gang:
            Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism"
            (September 1982) and "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and
            Self-Loathing in Literary Studies" (December 1983).
Walter A. Davis
         Offending the Profession (After Peter Handke)
         Interpretation is an institutional activity and that may be the
            most significant fact about it; we are, indeed, a profession, and
            as such we train students to think about literature in certain
            ways. Membership in the community is determined by how well one
            masters the rules of the game. These inescapable facts may be the
            source of our greatest problems or their hidden solution.
            Stanley Fish champions the latter alternative, arguing, in his most
            recent book, that "the interpretive community" is the
            ultimate principle of authority in criticism and is capable of
            resolving all the problems of interpretation.1 If we want to know
            what reading is, how texts achieve determinate meaning, what
            constitutes validity in interpretation, or how to resolve the
            "conflict of interpretations," we must, Fish argues,
            focus on the community itself, for it is here alone that these
            matters are determined.
            Though he has had more than his share of professional attention,
            having developed this argument makes Fish's work worthy of
            further consideration. He quite simply presents the best picture we
            are likely to get of the "mind" of the profession, and,
            in treating him at length here, I am primarily concerned with his
            representative status. His great achievement is to have articulated
            the assumptions and beliefs underlying the practices that are
            favored in our profession: the tacit theoretical position composed
            of ideas and commonplaces that are so deeply held and constantly in
            use that they "prestructure" both our dealings with
            literature and our debates over those dealings. While remaining for
            the most part "unconscious," these ideas nevertheless
            function as self-evident and unassailable truths. (Fish's
            focus on general rules shared by everyone cuts across both the
            debates among theorists of different persuasions and the old
            opposition between theory and practical criticism.) If we are to
            move, as I think we must, toward experiencing a crisis in our
            discipline, we first have to know where we are. And for that, Fish
            is invaluable because he has set out to become the official
            spokesman and defender of the profession.
             
            Walter A. Davis, associate professor of English at the Ohio State
            University, is the author of The Act of Interpretation: A Critique
            of Literary Reason. The present essay is from a recently completed
            work on contemporary criticism. He is currently writing a book on
            modern American drama.
Stanley Fish
         Fear of Fish: A Reply to Walter Davis
         It may seem that I am simply confirming Davis' assertion (and
            accusation) that in my view of the critical process
            "different interpretive strategies create completely
            different texts with no point of comparison" (p. 681); but
            the differences are not all that complete. While many readers now
            see (and argue for) a God who is more dramatically effective than
            Pope's "school divine," they still see a God who
            exists in a defining relationship with the figure of Satan, a Satan
            who is himself significantly changed from the energy-bearing
            Byronic antihero who was for so long a "given" in the
            interpretive landscape. The point is, again, that changes do not
            occur in isolation, because the facts that have undergone change
            (and, on occasion, dislodgment) did not exist in isolation either.
            In the history of Milton criticism, any judgment against God is
            always and simultaneously a judgment for Satan (of course the ways
            of making thatpositive judgment are themselves varied); and it
            follows that a reversal in one pole of the judgment cannot occur
            without a corresponding that is, related reversal in
            the other. Any increase in the literary "cash value" of
            Milton's God will be registered at the expense of his Satan.
            In short, since literary judgments or observations are not made
            piecemeal, the process of challenging and (perhaps) changing them
            is not piecemeal either. That is why it is not
            "contradictory," as Davis asserts, "to talk about
            recalcitrant features of a text" in the context of a thesis
            that makes the text's features a function of interpretation
            (p. 672). The source of recalcitrance or resistance is not the text
            as it exists independently of interpretation, but the text as an
            authoritative and elaborated interpretation has given it to us. I
            stress "elaborated" because the interpretation is not a
            single assertion but a complex of assertions; and when a challenge
            is made to the interpreted text at one point, its other points
            constitute a reservoir from which objections and
            "counterchallenges" can emerge. Thus, when someone
            offers a revisionist account of Milton's God, a skeptical or
            unpersuaded reader will respond by observing that this account is
            incompatible with what we know to be true about other parts of the
            poem: the characterization of Satan, or of the War in Heaven, or of
            books 11 and 12. It is then the obligation of the revisionist
            critic either to demonstrate there is no incompatibility or (and
            this is the more usual path) to extend his new reading in such a
            way as to recharacterize those parts of the poem that seem to stand
            as refutations of the revisionist's reading. He will then be
            working against resistance, but it will not be the resistance of
            something that stands outside interpretation; rather it will be the
            resistance offered by one interpretively produced shape to the
            production of another.
             
            Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and
            the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions
            to  include "Working on the Chain Gang:
            Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism"
            (September 1982) and "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and
            Self-Loathing in Literary Studies" (December 1983).
Walter A. Davis
         Offending the Profession
         Fish has always been adept at revising his position to incorporate
            what he's learned from his critics while repaying the favor
            by assigning them a position they never took. The latter practice
            naturally helps conceal the borrowings, but as Fish's
            position evolves it becomes progressively difficult to determine
            who is the author of his essays. (Fish Unlimited Inc., abc) I am,
            of course, gratified to see how much Fish has learned from me. It
            is salutary to find that Fish is finally just a humble historian
            working with others at "recovering a system of thought and
            feeling" (p. 697) that will enable us to establish the
            historical context of Milton's most probable intentions and
            realizing, as many historians of literature don't, that we
            can only do so by bringing concepts provided by literary
            theory form, function, artistic purpose, and so
            forth to bear on the mass of historical materials at our
            disposal.3 It is also gratifying to see that Fish has discovered
            the law of context and now realizes that there are no local
            matters. Had he discovered that earlier, we'd have been
            spared Aunt Tilly and the discussion of Mr. Collins as well
            as the general notion extrapolated from those examples that
            anything a sizable group decides to do will fly since nothing else
            constraints interpretation. We'd also have been spared the
            concepts of reading and affective criticism presented in
            Fish's early work and the unchecked linguistic hijinks used
            to sustain those readings. I derive my deepest pleasure, however,
            from finding that Fish has finally discovered the conflict of
            interpretations proper and its primacy "the resistance
            offered by one interpretively produced shape to the production of
            another" (p. 699) though I must sadly abridge this
            progress report by noting that he finds himself powerless to do
            anything with this recognition. That is as it must be, for the most
            interesting thing about Fish's borrowings is where he
            stops and why he has to. Having let me write the first 5 ½
            pages of his reply, he suddenly stops taking dictation so that he
            can simply reassert, in all its abstract glory, his tried-and-true
            resolution of all interpretive controversy by community interest.
            Had he read further, he would have discovered that a good deal more
            emerges if one attempts to preserve and deal with the conflict of
            interpretations rather than to do away with it. He would even have
            discovered my epistemology and would have learned the main
            lesson that his position is not an alternative to mine but an
            early moment it contains and sublates in a larger context.
            Have taught Fish so much, I found myself, instead, poorly repaid by
            the position he foists upon me. Constantly caught up in an effort
            to reiterate the dichotomy on which his entire theorizing depends,
            Fish's fixed need is to rework all disputes into an
            opposition between the party of independent fact-disinterested
            reason and the party of interest so that he might triumphantly
            resolve all difficulties by once again discovering the simple fact
            of interests. Lest this strategy hide behind a common
            misconception, our debate is not a case where distinct frameworks
            are simply misreading one another, as they must, but one where one
            framework must deliberately and seriously misread others since it
            has no other way to sustain itself. If the account Fish gives of my
            argument is the way things must look from his framework, all that
            this fact signifies is the paucity of his framework and its
            inability to achieve even minimal descriptive adequacy.
             
            3. But even here things are a good deal more complex than Fish
            imagines. For a good statement of the logic and problems of
            historical interpretation, see Robert Marsh, "Historical
            Interpretation and the History of Criticism," in Literary
            Criticism and Historical Understanding, ed. Philip Damon (New York,
            1967), pp. 1-24.
