Subject: Re: Bananastanley Fish
AntiUtopia@aol.com
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 08:13:05 EST
In a message dated 2/20/00 5:04:21 AM Eastern Standard Time,
rbowman@indigo.ie writes:
> And, of course, when it comes to Jim's comment:
> '... The author is important because he is the first reader,
> not because he is the origin ...', words fail me altogether.
>
> In conclusion, let me at least try bravely to congratulate
> you on your elevation to the bishopric. Yet I had such
> hopes for you.
>
> Still, the heart lifts at the prospect of reading Cardinal Hochman's
> felicitations. They should be something.
>
> Scottie B.
When we first had this argument and you said Reader Response was an attempt
to democratize writing, I thought you were being a bit silly because I had no
thought of doing so myself. But then I read Stanley Fish, and while I'm not
sure that he's consciously out to democratize language, without a doubt he's
being driven through and through by this impulse. It's not that he thinks,
"We're too aristocratic and I need to democratize this." It's that he can't
think in any other way than to democratize it, and people who aren't as
thoroughly democratized as he are sub-moral. For example, he questions the
distinction between literary fiction and "other" fiction, at least the way
we're used to looking at it, and much along the lines of Matt's post he says
the differences are not in the literature but in the way we're taught to read
it.
When I was talking reader response, however, I was trying to recognize
specific properties of language and what we do when we read. For example,
the language in this post here, the one you're reading, is only intelligible
because language isn't something I own and create as the author of this post,
but something we both own and, to an extent, shape. So you "create" the
meaning of the post as you read it, just as I create the meaning of this post
as I write it. But neither of us do so out of thin air. We both create out
of this shared thing we have called language.
But since language is something we both share, it's something that exists
outside each of us as well as in our minds, and it's possible (in my
thinking) for one person to use it "better" than another.
Now, when I said the writer was the first reader, I meant that writers write
the way they do because they've been taught to read the way they do. So when
writers write something, they're thinking as readers and not writers. A
writer thinks what **this** sentence would mean to **him or her** as a reader
as he or she is writing it. So that writing is an expression of the methods
of one particular reading community as much as it is an expression of an
individual mind.
Unlike some, I see writing as an expression of both equally. Some writing
may be more to one end of the scale than the other, though.
I'm not out to democratize anything, of course. If a writer hasn't read
anything but mystery novels, the writer's work will read like them. One
thing we both know is that you can tell a person's reading from their
writing...
Jim
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