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meaning at all (to be "texte sur rien") and are often more a "free play ofwords" than a
close, coherent, meaningful text.
Another question combined with the question of subjectivity/objectivity is that if we
consider a text as a kind of skeleton that gets "its flesh" only through realisation ofthe
reader, how can I (as a critic and reader) ever get hold of the text itself and of the "pure
meaning" of the text? The only access to a text I have is via reading it, and then it is no
longer the "text itself' but my own interpretation ofit.
Stanley Fish refers to this question in his collection of essays Is There a Text in this Class?
where he comes to the (of course quite polemical) conclusion that there are only the
twenty-five different readings/interpretations of a text in the class and nothing like the
"text itself'. Of course there is the book, hundreds of pages full of black print, but one
should not give way to the temptation to mistake the "material" for the "content". Fish
denies any objectivity:
The objectivity ofthe text is an illusion, and moreover a dangerous illusion, because it
is so physically convincing.{...}A line of print or a page or a book is so obviously
THERE {...}, that it seems to be the sole repository ofwhatever value and meaning
we associate with it,75
The number of possible readings of a text is not limited but infinite, as the number of
potential readers ofa text is infinite. As a consequence the question: "What does a text
MEAN ?" is a question which cannot be answered; there is nothing like a pre-existing
meaning in the text, it is entirely in the hands ofthe reader to decide what s/he wants it
to mean. The question to ask is:"What does the text do to us?", with the help of "an
analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relations to the words as they
succeed one after another in time">', The subject ofcritical attention must be the reader
and hislher reaction and not any "objective structure" that can be found in the text.
Fish also widens the definition of "interpretation". We do not read a poem (=Poem as a
given fact), we interpret it as a poem; the line endings are not important points, we
interpret them as such; and even the author ofa text is no "fact" but our interpretation of
75 Fish, "Affective Stylistics", p. 140.
76 Fish, "Affective Stylistics", P.140.
Chapter 3 -page 122