One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Stanley Fish!

In many ways this week's reading by Stanley Fish complicates my previous blog post about distinguishing between form/author/content - the "trifecta" that I so eagerly wish to preserve given my limited time in the field of literary critique.  While I most certainly welcome many of the assertions that Fish makes about the nature of interpretation and its importance to "what we do" with the written word, I can't help but call into question the ultimately value of the position.  Now, I will make a disclaimer and say that I am not a fan of my last sentence - it gives me that uneasy feeling of "preservation" as if I believe that forms and author intentions are something worth saving - in my scholarly "heart of hearts" I can say that I do not.

I will begin by recalling an example I gave in my previous blog post about the novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. Essentially, I claimed that because the "form" of the text - that it is written entire in second person - is distinct from the content purely because after almost a decade, I can recall the form when I can barely given an account of the content/story.  Of course one can (and will) contend that the form of the text is no different than the content as they are all the choice of the author - in Fish's terms, one might say they are all a function of the author's assumptions about his reader and thus his bend to interpretive communities (or one in particular).

Yes, Tom Robbins chose to write his book in the second person because there was an assumption that his readership would understand the move (that it is "different" and "unique") and thus the book ended up in an undergraduate literature course in which students were asked to "interpret" the use of the narrative form - why might this form be effective? What would the author want, if anything, TO affect? How might the form change the way the reader receives the text and (assuming that authors write for anyone else but themselves) why does it matter and to whom?  And there were all were, members of an interpretive community that understood narration (or now did after the book-as-vehicle for membership into this interpretive community).

And this is what interests me most about Fish's "interpretive communities" - that my earlier privileging of memory insofar as the form of the book is what made it memorable is even more important now when I think of it this way: the form of the book not only made the text itself linger, but it also either A) called forth an already-existing knowledge which proved membership of an interpretive community or B) created membership in an interpretive community - one that could only assist a budding literary scholar in their later endeavors. 

And that's all well and good but for the question of the form itself which I think, still, deserves a closer look.  I say this purely to push the boundary of the difference between interpretive communities which already exist (as in the case of Robbins - the second person narrative form existed as well as a readership/interpretive community to receive it) and the moment that an interpretive community is created.  I wish to draw a distinction between the two and suggest that the moment a form is given a name - and thus becomes a form as we know it - functions differently (perhaps in the ripple-effect of interpretation it causes) than one that is appropriated.  

I would like to believe that even though "...interpretive communities are not natural or universal, but learned" (457) that there is a timeline in which certain forms can be traced and the closer that we might get to that moment of inception (as impossible or laborious the task would/may be), that the notion of interpretive community may, in fact, change.  Or perhaps that's only due to how we choose to interpret it...

Mind=blown.