Let us turn now from the world of linguistics to the world of high theory, while
also keeping in mind the important and foundational position of Derrida’s critique
of Sassure as a connection between linguistics and theory. Despite the connection,
however, the devaluation of the text that is associated with literary theory is of a
very different kind. Rather than turning our attention from texts to the mind as an
object of study, high theory remains in the world of texts, but casts doubt on the
usefulness of approaches to the style and meaning of texts that are central to
textual analysis.
I have no quarrel with the playful and ingenious deconstruction of binaries that is
often found in deconstructive criticism. Nor do I deny the power or value of the
general poststructuralist critique that dismantles the naive view of the text as a
transparent conduit for the transmission of messages. I would like to argue instead
that skeptical doubts about the connection between words and the world are too often
taken to the extreme, that the seductive lure of skeptical relativism and very
reasonable distrust of reductive and global claims often push poststructuralist
arguments past the breaking point.
I will sketch out a few of the ways in which returning our attention to the text can
enhance our understanding and appreciation of literary texts. I will make no attempt
to be comprehensive, but will instead argue that text-centered approaches,
especially now that they can be augmented with computational tools, offer a more
revealing and more productive approach–one that can give access to kinds of
information that is not available through other means, and can at least begin to
reveal how texts are structured and how they work.
Jerome McGann, Deformance, and the Almost Irrelevant Text
Jerome McGann’s
Radiant Textuality: Literature after the
World Wide Web
[
McGann 2004] is an influential, provocative, and valuable book
that forces the reader to confront profound and important questions about the
stability of texts and the nature of interpretation. McGann uses an experiment
involving the scanning and optical character recognition of a Victorian
periodical to show that texts are unstable under one kind of machine-assisted
“reading.” He argues that instability is an inherent feature
of all texts, that texts “are not containers of meaning or
data but sets of rules (algorithms) for generating themselves: for
discovering, organizing, and utilizing meanings and data”
[
McGann 2004, 138]. This is a valuable insight–one that helps
the reader to see more clearly the kinds of problems that textual editors have
long had to deal with (see Peter Shillingsburg’s
From
Gutenberg to Google, 2007 for an illuminating recent discussion). I
have argued elsewhere that McGann overestimates the instability of the text [
Hoover 2006]. Here I want to focus on the way it devalues textual
evidence and turns the critic’s attention away from the text.
One consequence of the definition of texts as algorithms for generating
themselves is that each generation is potentially unique, a product of the
algorithms and the interpreting mind. For McGann, this suggests a recuperation
of an old but recently neglected kind of performative criticism that he suggests
can open the text to interesting new readings. The performative critic practices
what McGann calls “deformance” by manipulating the order of the
textual elements and even changing them. For example, after printing the lines
of Wallace Steven’s “The Snow Man” in reverse order,
McGann argues that deformance accentuates the intelligibility of the text and
“clarifies the secondary status of the interpretation”
[
McGann 2004, 120]. He then prints only the nouns of the
poem, leaving them in roughly their original positions and arguing that doing so
shows it to be a noun-heavy and noun-balanced poem. (The word
“poem” here is intended as uncontroversial shorthand for
“poetic text.” Poems are typically more highly structured
than prose texts, and provide additional opportunities for deformance, so that
it is often important to distinguish them.)
Having practiced deformance (under the name of text alteration) for twenty-five
years, I can hardly object to it in principle. It does seem to me, however, that
the practice of textual deformance is most valuable when it is turned back upon
the original text as a tool of interpretation (see
Hoover (2004a),
Hoover (2006)).
Printing only the nouns is an effective way of focusing attention on them, and
any deformance initially requires close attention to the text. When its aims are
a better understanding of the text, it allows the critic to uncover previously
hidden relationships among the parts of the text and to examine the nature of
its self-generating algorithm. But when the focus is on performing with the
poem, on uncovering “uncommon critical possibilities”
[
McGann 2004, 51], the critic’s attention is turned away from
the text. This turn is crucial, I would argue, precisely because the text
otherwise exercises a powerful coercive effect on interpretation and limits the
critical possibilities. Textual algorithms normally constrain or direct the
reader’s activities. Although the algorithms for generating
Jane Eyre and
Wuthering Heights were
written by sisters and published the same year, they are radically different and
lead to radically different readings. Even the amount and nature of a text’s
instability are at least partly a function of its algorithms.
There is no space here for an extended argument for textual analysis, but
McGann’s deformation of “The Snow Man” suggests an
alternative, text-centered kind of marking that points in a useful direction.
Below are “The Snow Man” and excerpts of about the
same length from two other poems with the nouns highlighted:
As these marked excerpts suggest, “The Snow Man”
turns out to be a noun-average poem rather than a noun-heavy one, as I have
shown by examining the frequency of nouns in twenty-five roughly contemporary
poets [
Hoover 2006].
A fuller analysis of the number, character, and arrangement of nouns in poems is
worthwhile and would almost certainly lead to further insights about the poems
(see [
Hoover 2006] for more discussion; also
[
Hoover 2007]). Even a brief inspection of
these excerpts, however, shows that the nouns in Sandburg’s poem are not only
much more frequent than those in “The Snow Man,” they
are much more concrete and specific. They ground and localize the fictional
world of the poem much more fully than do the nouns of “The
Snow Man,” and their rural and regional flavor is unmistakable. In
Millay’s poem, the nouns are much less frequent than those in “The Snow Man,” and they seem relatively prosaic. The
power of the poem lies elsewhere.
Printing only the nouns of a poem in their original positions in the poem can
lead to a wider investigation into the kinds, frequencies, and placements of
nouns in other poems, via textual or corpus analysis. Such an investigation can
tell us a great deal about Stevens’s poem and about modern poetry more
generally. Instead, however, McGann turns away from the poem toward his own
algorithm, arguing that printing only the nouns “enhances
the significance of the page’s white space, which now appears as a poetic
equivalent for the physical ‘nothing’ of snow”
[
McGann 2004, 123]. Rather than focusing on the poem, he
bases his reading on the white space of a poem Stevens did not write, white
space that is present in any poem deformed in this way, whether or not whiteness
or snow is in any way relevant to its interpretation. This kind of argument
abandons all hope of persuasion or consensus and turns criticism into a purely
subjective and self-indulgent activity.
Consider the following deformation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The
Raven”:
Note how this deformation enhances the significance of the black type, allowing
it to appear as a poetic equivalent of the physical “nothing” of
the blackness of the Raven. If you look closely, you can see the raven’s beady
eyes peeking over the top of the first line. If you look again, you can see how
Poe anticipated the Borg ship from Star Trek: The Next
Generation. Being provocative is just not enough, and the black and
white nature of most printed text assures that symbolism based on black ink or
white paper is unlikely to be more than coincidentally relevant. The currency of
ideas still stranger than those in McGann’s book in published literary criticism
rather proves than disproves my point.
Stanley Fish and the Missing Inuit
Stanley Fish is another provocative thinker whose provocations radically devalue
the text and push the reader away from an important source of insight. Although
Fish’s thought has had many phases, I am concerned here with his early and very
influential book,
Is There a Text in this Class?
[
Fish 1980]. There, Fish reports and critiques a comment by Norman
Holland about unacceptable readings — a comment based on an unusual
interpretation of the following passage from Faulkner’s “A
Rose for Emily”:
That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her.
People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone
completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a
little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite
good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a
tableau; Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father
a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a
horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she
got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but
vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down
all of her chances if they had really materialized.
[Faulkner 1978, 434]
Holland suggests that if a reader believed that the “tableau”
above “described an Eskimo,” he or she would not be
thought of as “responding to the story at all–only pursuing
some mysterious inner exploration”
[
Fish 1980, 346]. Fish agrees that the Eskimo reading is
unacceptable, but argues that it is unacceptable not because the text does not
support it, but because no current interpretive strategy exists for producing
such a reading:
While there are always mechanisms for ruling out
readings, their source is not the text but the presently recognized
interpretive strategies for producing the text. It follows, then, that
no reading, however outlandish it might appear, is inherently an
impossible one.
[Fish 1980, 347]
He imagines someone finding a letter in which Faulkner says he always believed he
was an Eskimo changeling and suggests that Faulkner critics would then “transform the text into one informed everywhere by Eskimo
meanings.”
[
Fish 1980, 346]
Fish’s argument is as specious as it is clever. Holland’s example of an Eskimo
reading is clearly chosen so as to avoid any resonance with the text: most
readers will know only a little stereotypical information about Eskimo culture,
and an igloo would not last very long in Yoknapatawpha County.
(Eskimo is now normally replaced by Inuit. The
changing political status of words like Eskimo is an area in which
Fish’s point about the changing meaning of texts is valuable, though not very
provocative or controversial.) It might be possible to integrate the (widely
misunderstood) practice of wife sharing into the tableau in some bizarre way,
but if Fish’s point is only that we are quite adept at finding what we want to
find, that is hardly a novel or provocative idea, and is certainly not a
critical method that should be encouraged.
A letter from Faulkner revealing that he always thought of himself as an Inuit
changeling is unlikely to be sufficient to support an Inuit reading. How would
being a changeling imbue his texts with Inuit meanings in any case? What is
signally missing from “A Rose for Emily” is any
actual textual reference to Inuit culture, and Holland’s point is far more
specific than the version Fish rejects: being “informed” by Inuit
readings is not much like “describing an Eskimo,” so that Fish’s
imagined letter is simply irrelevant to Holland’s point. (Note that the claim
that the meaning is not in the text effectively insulates Fish against this kind
of criticism.) If critics really reacted as Fish suggests they would, so much
the worse for criticism, but it seems far more likely that, because of the
nature of Faulkner’s texts, either such a letter would be rejected as
a forgery or critics would wonder why being a changeling had so little influence
on his writing. Readings can and do change over time, sometimes radically, and
critics like Fish are partly responsible for the current tolerance for a greater
distance between the text and its interpretation than might have existed in the
past. Still, interpretations are not as independent of the text as Fish
suggests, and he ignores the huge overlap between even the most violently
contrasting interpretations, the sources of which, given the variety among the
interpretive communities that he suggests are responsible for the
interpretations, surely include the text. For that matter, it is difficult to
imagine the formation of the kind of interpretive community Fish posits in the
absence of a body of shared texts.
Professor Fish, is there a textbook for this course?
One of Fish’s most famous examples, “Is there a text in this
class?”, the title of his book, is also deeply problematic. A student
who has just taken a class from Fish asks this question on the first day of
class of another professor who takes it to be a question about whether there is
a required textbook. The student corrects the professor: “No, no . . . I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is
it just us?”
[
Fish 1980, 305]. Fish’s insistence on the importance of
context for interpretation is valuable, and it provides a welcome change from
the single-sentence focus of Chomskyan linguistics. Of central importance here
is his claim that we interpret such a sentence by virtue of belonging to an
interpretive community in which it makes sense and not by virtue of the meanings
of its words or their syntactic relationships. In what follows I will focus on
this claim, but also on the question itself and what he has to say about it.
Fish discusses the two meanings of the question above and suggests a third
possibility — that the student is asking about the location of her misplaced book
(my paraphrases follow each one):
- Is there a text in this class?1 Is
there a required textbook for this course?
- Is there a text in this class?2 Will
this course assume the meaningfulness of texts?
- Is there a text in this class?3 Is
my misplaced textbook in this classroom?
[Fish 1980, 306–7]
He argues that all of these are literal, and that they all arise out of the
context, not out of the text. It is a tribute to Fish’s skill at argumentation
that the extreme form of his position has been taken seriously. It is apparent,
for example, that the words of the sentence and their syntactic arrangement
deeply influence all three of these meanings (how did the professor know it was
a question?), and that the crux of the matter is the ambiguity of “text,”
“in,” and “class” that my paraphrases highlight.
Given the importance he places on interpretive communities, it is surprising
that Fish refuses to acknowledge one of the largest and most important of the
interpretive communities relevant to this example: speakers of English. In that
community, there are such things as meanings of words (of course not Platonic
forms or Aristotelian categories), meanings that are, as he rightly points out,
more or less profoundly affected by the context of use, broadly understood to
include things like the other interpretive communities to which the professor
and student belong.
Given Fish’s valuable emphasis on the contextual nature of meaning, it also seems
surprising that the text should be denied a part in the creation of that
meaning. Fish is surely right that the relationships, contexts, and interpretive
communities that surround or constitute his classroom tableau, as well as the
personal histories of the student and professor are crucial to the professor’s
understanding of the student’s question, and to her ability to produce it. But
the question itself is also an important element in the entire exchange. “What are your office hours?” spoken in the identical
context (first day of class, the same student and professor, etc.) obviously
means something very different and calls for a radically different set of
possible answers. However problematically, the sources of difference must
include the language of the question. The practice of holding office hours,
their nature, their typical format and scheduling and their institutional
status–all of their meaning in the academic interpretive community–is partially
dependent on the words “office” and “hours” and
how those words are used, both in English generally, and within that community.
To put it another way, one of the chief ways one becomes a member of an
interpretive community is by learning to understand and respond to its texts
appropriately.
But let us return to the text. Fish suggests that, while none of the meanings is
the only literal one, “Is there a required textbook for this
course?” is “more normal” than “Will this course assume the meaningfulness of texts?” (he does not
further discuss the third meaning). He argues that the first meaning has a
broader context of understanding (the participants need only know roughly what
is normal in the context of the first day of class), and the second a narrower,
more specialized one (the participants need to know something about Fish’s
literary theory). The fact that the student and the professor could only have
come to the required knowledge through reading and listening to Fish’s ideas,
however, makes his cavalier neglect of the words of the text seem little more
than a debater’s trick.
But if we use corpora to investigate the crucial phrase “text
in this class” and some variants of it, we gain access to evidence
about how that huge interpretive community called “speakers of
English” actually uses the phrase. Unfortunately, the phrase is not
common enough for the BNC to be of much use, though the fact that the only
instance of “text in this class” in the BNC is a reference to the
title of Fish’s book is significant, as will become clear shortly. Turning again
to Google (search for “text in this class”, 7/20/06), we find
that nearly 90% of about 31,200 uses of the phrase are direct references to
Fish’s book, and only about 6% mean “Is there a required
textbook for this course?” (My counts are based on a manual
examination of 500 hits taken from throughout the 1,000 that Google provides;
the results should be taken as suggestive rather than in any way definitive.)
This proportion is a tribute to the importance of the book since 1980. A search
for “text for this class” returns about 18,300 hits,
almost all of which mean “Is there a required textbook for
this course?” Here are the frequencies of some related phrases, with
those already discussed repeated for clarity:
text for this class |
18,300 |
text in this class |
31,200 |
texts for this class |
890 |
texts in this class |
200 |
text for this course |
81,600 |
text in this course |
750 |
texts for this course |
31,100 |
textbook for this class |
19,600 |
textbook in this class |
110 |
textbooks for this class |
450 |
textbooks in this class |
20 |
textbook for this course |
102,000 |
textbook in this course |
80 |
textbooks for this course |
93,200 |
syllabus for this class |
10,300 |
syllabus in this class |
50 |
syllabus for this course |
52,700 |
syllabus in this course |
100 |
Currently, it would seem, “text in this class” is quite an unusual
way of indicating “textbook for this course,” the meaning that
Fish suggests is the most normal. The preposition “for” is normal
while “in” is unusual: overall, not counting “text for/in
this class,” phrases with “for” are almost 200 times
as frequent as those with “in.” Furthermore,
“course” and “textbook” are more frequent than
“class” and “text.” The professor’s initial
interpretation is (obviously) a possible one, and it may be more normal now than
in 1980 because of the influence of the book. The context in which the question
occurs is part of what makes it possible, but the evidence of usage (the actions
of an enormous interpretive community) confirm that the form of the question is
highly relevant to its interpretation and to the context in which it is used.
And even if the evidence presented here is not accepted as definitive, it must
be remembered that Fish provides no evidence at all for his claims about the
three possible meanings for the question. His assertions are based purely on
intuition.
William Golding, Stanley Fish, and the Significance of Shrinking Sticks
Finally let us consider Fish’s famous attack on stylistics, “What is Stylistics and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About
It?”, chapter two of
Is There a Text in This Class?
[
Fish 1980]. I do not want to rehash this old debate, but rather
to discuss one central literary example he raises. Fish rejects M. A. K.
Halliday’s analysis of William Golding’s second novel,
The
Inheritors, and specifically the link that Halliday asserts between
the linguistic characteristics of the text and its interpretation.
The Inheritors is told from the point of view of a
Neanderthal named “Lok,” as his people are invaded and destroyed
by more modern humans, and our sentence for discussion appears in bold type in
the following passage from the novel:
The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his
shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the
middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes
in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that the man
was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach
across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of
the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow
shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again.
The dead tree by Lok's ear acquired a voice.
“Clop!”
His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown
a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter
berries that Lok's stomach told him he must not eat. [Golding 1955, 106]
As this brief excerpt shows, the novel’s limited point of view presents
difficulties of interpretation for the reader: Lok does not know what bows and
arrows are and cannot (yet) imagine one person attacking another, but Golding
must make us see that the man has just shot a poisoned arrow at him. Halliday’s
analysis argues that the reader’s difficulty is at least partly explained by the
peculiar Neanderthal notion of agency, in which a stick might change length by
itself, and by the novel’s limited vocabulary, in which there are no arrows or
arrowheads, no bows or the drawing of them, and no poison, but rather “a
twig,”
“a lump of bone,”
“a stick,” and “bitter berries.” Fish rejects
Halliday’s claim that the unusual features of the text force the reader to
reinterpret “The stick began to grow shorter at both
ends” as the drawing of the bow:
The link between the language and any sense we have of
Neanderthal man is fashioned in response to the demands of the reading
experience; it does not exist prior to that experience, and in the
experience of another work it will not be fashioned, even if the work
were to display the same formal features. In any number of contexts, the
sentence “the stick grew shorter at both
ends” would present no difficulty for a reader; it would require
no effort of reinterpretation, and therefore it would not take on the
meaning which that effort creates in The
Inheritors.
[Fish 1980, 84]
Fish may be right that a reader will not necessarily understand this sentence to
mean that a bow has been drawn without the context in which it occurs, but my
experience has been that the passage alone is sufficient context for many
readers. (It seems pointless to quibble that he has misquoted the sentence; if
the text is not the source of the meaning, that should be irrelevant in any
case.) But in any context, the sentence shapes any normal reader's
interpretation in very definite ways–simply by virtue of its grammatical and
lexical characteristics and the grammar and lexicon of English that the reader
has learned. The reader must find some way of assimilating the fact that the
stick changes length by itself, and most readers will reinterpret this sentence
by adding the agency that Lok does not understand.
I have suggested that this sentence might seem relatively normal in a description
of a magic trick or a campfire [
Hoover 1999, 23–4], but an
examination of its occurrences in large corpora suggests further ramifications
that I had not considered: “grow shorter” is essentially an
oxymoron, and so might be expected to be uncommon. The metaphor of
“becoming larger is growing” is a cognitively grounded one in
which increasing in size is modeled on growth, our preeminent natural example of
increase in size, and one that we have all intimately experienced. Inanimate
objects do not generally increase in size without an external cause, and the
best examples for the metaphor are glaciers, rivers, lakes, lava flows,
avalanches, and objects like snowballs rolling down hills, balloons, or
crystals. The best examples of decrease in size are compression, shrinking,
erosion, melting, and deflation.
Without “stick” the phrase “grow shorter” seems
quite ordinary, in spite of being an oxymoron, and there are ten examples of a
form of “grow” followed by “shorter” in the BNC:
- The architecture of triticale was altered so that it would grow
shorter
- new selection pressure, and will be pushed towards growing shorter
coats again.
- Nevertheless, I worry about you as the days grow shorter
- As the days grew shorter, the Rectory colder, the pleasure they
took
- emotional and intellectual life as the autumn days grew shorter
- [estimates of] around 2,000 million years, have been growing
shorter anyway
- all of them found their attention span had grown shorter
- [nylon cords] may be showing signs of old age, knotted and growing
shorter
- The stick began to grow shorter at both ends
- The stick began to grow shorter at both ends.
It seems quite significant that two of the ten examples even of this relatively
ordinary phrase are quotations from
The Inheritors.
Only the first two of the ten use “grow” in the biological sense.
In all the others “grow” can be replaced by
“become” and only the sentence from
The
Inheritors describes an object changing size in real time. In
comparison, there are thirty-nine examples of a form of “grow”
followed by “longer” in the BNC. Perhaps surprisingly, only nine
of these refer to biological growth, and none of the thirty-nine describes an
object changing size in real time. (Surprises are the norm when reading a
concordance [
Sinclair 2003], [
Sinclair 2004]).
Phrases with forms of “become” instead of “grow”
are even less frequent.
A Google search for forms of “grow shorter” (7/20/06)
returns tens of thousands of hits, but an examination of several hundred of them
suggests that things that grow shorter tend to fall into a few main categories:
- days and other periods of time, cycles, hospital stays
- articles of clothing, hair, body parts and plant parts (become shorter
over time, or from one generation to the next)
- temper, patience
- meetings, lectures, speeches, phone calls, letters, lists, sentences,
words
- distances
- fuses, candles, cigarettes, cigars, wicks
It is easy to see that the predominant meaning of “grow
shorter” is “become shorter”, that the process of
shortening is typically one that takes place in stages (especially for physical
objects), and that many of the things that become shorter are abstract. By far
the most frequent item that grows shorter is “days,” as the BNC
list above also suggests (“grow shorter” returns more than
100,000 hits; “days grow shorter” returns more than 55,000). When
physical objects actually diminish in size, they are usually being consumed by
fire. Finally, there is a smattering of examples that are relevant to The Inheritors: those that belong to the realms of
fantasy and magic, including transformation stories and role-playing games.
Textual evidence shows that even the relatively ordinary “grow
shorter” is significantly constrained, especially when the subject of
the verb is a physical object and the change is taking place in the present, in
real time. And this evidence supports Halliday’s claims about the oddness of
Golding’s sentence and suggests a cause for the reader’s reaction.
Returning to the full sentence makes this point more forcefully. A Google search
for “the stick began to grow shorter at both ends”
(7/20/06) returns only eight hits, all quotations from The
Inheritors, and dropping “at both ends” returns four
additional slightly variant quotations. A more recent search (7/2/07) returns
twenty-one hits, but all are still from the novel, as are the eight additional
hits returned by dropping “at both ends.” Many six-word sequences
from novels will return only quotations as hits, however, so that it seems
reasonable to expand the search by focusing on the crux of the sentence:
“stick grew shorter.” This returns only four additional hits:
one is a paraphrase of Golding, two are duplicates in which a walking stick is
worn away on a long journey, and in the other the stick shortens as it burns.
There is one example of “[observed my searing] stick grow
shorter”, which refers to smoking a cigarette. There are no hits for
“stick grows shorter”, but an earlier search
(12/22/05) returned one example referring to cigarette smoking. A search for
“stick grew longer” returns only one hit, in a
history of hockey, where it describes the use of successively longer sticks, but
there were three other interesting hits in my earlier search, one a dream
sequence in which a sharp stick threateningly lengthens toward the dreamer’s
face and two pieces of fantasy fiction, one of which involves the explicit use
of magical dust. Fish’s claim that Golding’s sentence would present no
difficulty in “any number of contexts” begins to seem
quite doubtful, and a text-analytic corpus approach both provides unexpected
insights and gives us access to evidence about how sentences are used–evidence
that seems far more reliable than that of unaided intuition.
A much larger corpus would be useful in examining how and what Golding’s sentence
means, but the examples I have found suggest that sticks grow shorter only in
extremely limited contexts outside Golding’s novel, either in relatively prosaic
contexts where they are burnt up or wear away, or in the fantastic contexts of
dreams and magic. Golding’s sentence has precisely the effect Halliday claims
for it: it pushes us into a (necessarily fantastic) Neanderthal world in which
inanimate objects are not really inanimate, in which Lok’s feet are
“clever” and can see, in which logs might crawl off on
business of their own. In which passages like this make sense:
“The stone is a good stone,” said Lok.
“It has not gone away. It has stayed by the
fire until Mal came back to it.”
He stood up and peered over the earth and stones down the slope. The
river had not gone away either or the mountains. The overhang had
waited for them. Quite suddenly he was swept up by a tide of
happiness and exultation. Everything had waited for them: Oa had
waited for them. Even now she was pushing up the spikes of the
bulbs, fattening the grubs, reeking the smells out of the earth,
bulging the fat buds out of every crevice and bough. [Golding 1955, 31–2]
Part of the power of “the stick began to grow shorter at both
ends” is in the shape of Lok’s incomprehension. For Lok, the whole
world is alive, so that a stick that changes length is perfectly comprehensible.
Readers of the novel, which is full of passages like the one above, come to see
this animistic view as no mere personification, but rather as an integral part
of Lok’s world view, his mind style. They also comprehend what he does not,
until it is too late–the murderous agency of his enemy, the bender of the bow.
It is true that an appropriate context is required to interpret Golding’s
Neanderthal world, as Fish so forcefully argues, but to focus only on the
interpretive community as a source of possible interpretations of texts is not
only to ignore the creative acts of the writers who created those texts, but
also to deny ourselves access to the most crucial element of the context in
which a reader interprets The Inheritors: the novel
itself. Any theoretical position that ignores, devalues, or rejects the text
merely encourages sloppy thinking and foolish interpretations.