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 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”:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.