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But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish's essay, "Normal Circumstances . . .and Other Special Cases" (Critical Inquiry 4 [Summer 1978]: 625-44), is so agile and compelling that it may seem unduly quarrelsome to raise questions about it. But it presents a picture of the way we understand both events and texts that one would not, I presume, want to accept unless there were no conceivable escape. The essay suggests that literary texts and what they contain change; that two readers with different "interpretive assumptions" do not, indeed cannot, read the same text even if they are reading things called, say, Samson Agonistes, consisting of the same words in the same order; that meaning results from the interplay of our "verbal and mental categories" and "situations" alone and is not constrained by the language used; that there is no difference between direct and indirect speech acts; that the illocutionary force of any utterance is determined entirely by the context in which it is uttered.