Pluralism and constraint in interpretation: Abrams, Fish,
and Derrida
With this conception of the nature of an artist-agent’s reasons for action and
of the nature of articulation (ours or the agent’s own) of those reasons in
place, we can address a number of vexed issues. Different strategies for
understanding can yield widely varying interpretive claims that can be both
about the same artistic object and consistent with one another, for the object
is itself complexly overdetermined by multiple reasons, is itself a complex
solution to multiple problems. We can talk all at once–and coherently–of
Shakespeare’s attitudes toward modern individualism, of his depiction of
gender roles and gender anxieties, of his concern for stagecraft, and of his
power of metaphorical imagination, for thoughts about each of these things
may reasonably be supposed to have entered into his complex artistic
making. If the story we tell about what Shakespeare did–about his reasons
for action in a problem situation –departs too far from anything that
Shakespeare himself might, if queried, have acknowledged as pertinent, then
the story can be rejected as fanciful projection rather than an understanding
of the work. For example, Shakespeare cannot have had thoughts about
either synthetic polymers or spark plugs that entered in any way into his
reasons for action. But thoughts about religion, politics, language, gender,
stagecraft, profit, and fun may all be taken to have entered into what he did.
We can also make sense of some recent controversies about determinacy
of literary and other artistic meaning, where there is, in the end, more heat
than light. In a series of essays in the late 1970s, the eminent literary
historian and critic M. H. Abrams criticized a number of figures, whom he
dubbed Newreaders, who rejected the idea that literary texts have determin-
ate meanings: J. Hillis Miller, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish,
and Harold Bloom. Though these figures each deploy quite different argu-
ments and favor distinct interpretive protocols, each of them, according to
Abrams, undertakes“a systematic dehumanizing of all aspects of the trad-
itional view about how a work of literature comes into being, what it is, how
it is read, and what it means.”^11 They all propose“that reading should free(^11) M. H. Abrams,“How to do Things with Texts,”Partisan Review46 (1979), pp. 566–88,
reprinted in M. H. Abrams,Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, ed.
Michael Fischer (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 269–96 at p. 269.
150 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art