The Role of "Interest" in Literary Theory: Reading as Praxis

Formalist literary theories such as New Criticism and Russian Formalism deny the participation of the reader in the generation of literary meaning. Wimsatt and Beardsley's admonition of the Affective Fallacy, for example, details in no doubtful language the sincerity with which their readings abhor the presence of a motivated reader. All formalist theorists begin with the assumption that the text is a stable object in the world which forces their analysis to assume an equally stable reader. Thus, on the one hand the Russian Formalists' studies of technique and genre allow them to postulate at length on how texts work on readers—Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization serves as a prime example—but on the other hand their exclusive focus on the text and its internal, outwardly-directed components forces the Russian Formalists, and indeed all practitioners of formalism, to fall into two myths of their own: those of the universal reader and of the disinterested critic.

The idea of a universal reader becomes implausible with Stanley Fish's introduction of interpretive communities. If, as Fish proposes, groups of readers generate texts by applying their external and inwardly-directed strategies and concerns to the literary object, then we can no longer assume a truly universal reader. Each reading is only as universal as the interpretive community that generates it. Formal structures that carry meaning exist only as long as our preoccupations allow them to. As soon as our concerns change, so do our strategies, so do the structures and constructions highlighted by them, so does the text itself. Similarly, critics cannot claim or appeal to disinterest and objectivity once the realization is made that meaning is the product of the reader's interests and the application of strategies that best serve those interests. The fact that a critic is proposing a new reading of a text is evidence that he or she has engaged it with a new set of criteria which is inevitably based on that critic's interests and desires. Thus, the idea of a "final reading" or of "fixed meaning" is replaced by the idea of currently-important, internally-valid concerns.

However, as revolutionary as are Stanley Fish's restructuring of meaning (by reintroducing the reader to the process that generates it) and literary criticism (by making the ideological and institutional basis of interpretations explicit), his analysis stops at the institutional level. In his essays, meaning-generation is the product of the reader's education—a product of one's history within institutions such as the university and the strategies for reading one learns there. The effects of social, economic, and cultural realities on the reader's strategies are not considered. The interests of those groups traditionally excluded from or ignored by institutional politics—women, people of color, homosexuals, and other marginalized groups—are not yet part of the new equation. Thus, instead of totally eliminating the possibility of a universal reader, Fish has merely split that singular entity into several such entities. Without a consideration for socio-cultural interests, however, these new universal readers are still without gender, without race or ethnicity, without economic class, and without sexuality, thus falling into the institution's generic heterosexual, affluent, white male.

Feminist critical studies reveal this oversight (or under-sight) by introducing questions of the reader and writer's gender to the discussion of literary meaning. Patrocinio Schweickart calls our attention to the effects of gender on the reader's generation of meaning and on the critic's role as not just an interpreter but as a voice for half the population. This still is not enough, however, because we now have only a doubling of the population of universal readers. Where there was once the generic male there is now the generic male and the generic female. The concerns and interests of many groups are still ignored by these two possibilities. By multiplying these readers with the inseparable variables of race, class and sexuality, Barbara Smith expands this one-dimensional axis into a three-dimensional reality and refutes the validity of universalism entirely. Where Fish's interpretive communities shifted the single dimension of formalism into a two-dimensional plane, we now begin to see a drastic shift from the flat space of institutional concerns and interests to the complex socio-historical reality that is the experience of individuals raised in often vastly different cultures. By tracing this history we begin to see that any appeal to universalism is in reality an assumption of the generic specificity of the reader and therefore and exclusion of any person or group that does not fall within that specificity's parameters.

Interpretive Communities: The Critical Shift From Objective to Objectives

In answering the question "Is there a text in this class," Stanley Fish responds to Meyer Abram's critique of the "Newreader" approaches to literary theory by refuting Abram's claim that theoretical approaches such as Fish's are solipsist and relativist. Fish argues that readers always approach texts from specific contexts, even if those contexts are so common and continually experienced that they seem, from within, universal:

Some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings they enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to see that they are the products of circumstances. (Fish, 309)

Speaking within the specific realm of the utterance, Fish discusses the statement "the air is crisp," originally proposed by E. D. Hirsch as an example of determinate meaning in language. For Hirsch, the utterance "the air is crisp" means "a rough meteorological description predicting a certain quality of the local atmosphere (Fish, 309)" because the words themselves carry meaning. Hirsch never considers or even imagines the possibility that the words may carry a different meaning or be given a different meaning in different circumstances. Fish agrees that the average listener will interpret the statement as a comment on the local climate, but disagrees with Hirsch that it is the words themselves that carry the meaning:

Sentences emerge only in situations, and within those situations, the normative meaning of an utterance will always be obvious or at least accessible, although within another situation that same utterance, no longer the same, will have another normative meaning that will be no less obvious and accessible. (Fish, 307)

If the average listener is placed in a context where the term "the air is crisp" is not likely to be heard as an observation of the weather but instead (to use Fish's example) as a commentary on the quality of a musical piece, we begin to see that it is the context of an utterance that "determines" meanings and not the linguistic units themselves. Indeed,

The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning which Hirsch can then cite as obvious. One can see this by embedding the words in another context and observing how quickly another "obvious" meaning emerges (Fish, 309).

Abrams' fear, which prompts him to accuse Fish of solipsism and relativism, is that the existence of an infinite number contexts in the world will enable an infinite number of readings or interpretations ("meanings"). Abrams insists on an acontextual inherence of meaning within language because he fears that the alternative will be chaos: at the level of the utterance it will make any statement's meaning indeterminate and unreliable, and on the level of the text will make the possibility of a final reading (long cherished by literary theorists) impossible. Fish dispels Abrams' fear, at least for us, by stressing that a stability which allows for communication and interpretation does exist. The possibility for communication—of agreement, disagreement, and principled debate—exists "not because of a stability in texts, but because of a stability in the makeup of interpretive communities and therefore in the opposing positions they make possible. (Fish, 171)." Because the reader or listener always exists as part of a context (his or her specific, immediate circumstances, but also much larger ones: modern American literary discourse, for example) and as a member of an interpretive community (he or she was taught to read in a certain way which shares at least most of its characteristics with other readers taught to read by or in similar institutions), Abram's fear of relativism, of infinite or indeterminable meanings, disappears:

While it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular (for there is no one in a position to speak "generally"), and therefore it is a truth of which one can say "it doesn't matter." (Fish, 319)

What does matter then is the dynamic within and between interpretive communities and the contexts in and from which they interpret texts. Consensus—the agreed upon interests, tastes or methods of a group—and not "rightness," becomes the measure of value for understanding:

Shared understanding is the basis of the confidence with which [interpreters] speak and reason, but its categories are their own only in the sense that as actors within an institution they automatically fall heir to the institution's way of making sense, its systems of intelligibility. (Fish, 320)

For Fish, even the definition of the literary as an object separate from the non-literary is a matter of agreed-upon consensus and not empirical fact:

I might just say (predictably) that I do not believe in the distinction between literature and non-literature (not that it hasn't been made and acted upon but that it is not a real or essential distinction; it is a convention) and that I regard evaluation not as a theoretical issue but as a subject in the history of taste. (Fish, 386)

The literary cannon is the subjective, mutable creation of a specific culture (assumption or definition) and not an objective, stable reality in the world (identity). Since texts are "rewritten" by their readers based on the interests or tastes of their interpretive community there is indeed the possibility of an infinite number of texts as Abram fears—but that possibility is limited and made manageable (intelligible) by the shared contexts or experiences within the culture of individuals who share a language.

Fish poses two examples. The first is of the same reader who reads two texts differently (his or her context or membership in a particular interpretive community shifts from one text to the other based on how he "pre-reads" the text, causing him or her to apply different criteria to each text). The second is of two different readers who both read the same text in the same way (because they share membership in the same interpretive community, which provides them with the same lens through which they call to focus aspects of the text, and with a similar set of concerns, priorities and questions to apply to the text). A third possibility is that of one reader reading the same text differently over time, which occurs as the reader's "repertoire of strategies" (in reality, his or her current set of concerns) changes, allowing the reader to "see" things in the text that were not seen before, or take less interest in things "seen" previously that are now, in the light of the reader's new perspective, not as important. A real life example outside the (standard conception of the) institution of literary criticism is the existence of various Christian sects, each of which is based on a different rewriting of the same text (each rewriting, in turn, brought about by the existence of different lenses: socio-political concerns, geo-historical context, economic stresses, etc.), each of which continues to exist in (relatively) stable form because its members (who share an interpretive community) (re)read the text in the same way. Groups change as their contexts change (as in the third possibility mentioned above): as a group becomes more and more available to a previously alien context (such as how the general American public became aware and therefore a part of the concerns of Black Americans thanks to the context made available by the Civil Rights movement) it becomes more and more inseparable from that context, until what was once nonexistent (the concern for equal rights regardless of race) becomes an increasingly pressing concern and, once assimilated and resolved, becomes such a normal and natural aspect of day-to-day reality that it becomes a matter of common sense (a process Fish illustrates in his reading of Lycidas, which "common sense" tells us is a pastoral [Fish, 168]).

It is this stream of thought (or reinterpretation of critical thought) which allows Fish to open the floodgates of critical theory with his "final thought" in Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum":

My fiction is liberating. It relieves me of the obligation to be right (a standard which simply drops out) and demands only that I be interesting (a standard that can be met without any reference at all to an illusory objectivity). (Fish, 180)

Criticism no longer becomes a matter of "consulting dictionaries, grammars, and histories" or of highlighting one set of formal constructions over another in the attempt to finalize or fix the text's meaning (as in the various formalist techniques). Instead, it becomes a discourse, both within groups (as when a text is discussed within an interpretive community regarding that community's set of interests and problematics) and between groups (as when two groups discuss or debate their assumptions, starting points, and features of interest). The role of the teacher or critic changes from in-forming their students (of particular formal structures, definitions, techniques, all of which suppose a "right" way of reading) to trans-forming their student's contexts (making them aware of and therefore a part of a larger interpretive community that acknowledges different ways of reading). Fish reappraises himself in this new context:

Rather than restoring or recovering texts, I am in the business of making texts and of teaching others to make them by adding to their repertoire of strategies. (Fish, 180)

One can now perceive the American educational system's implementation of Black History Month, for example, as not only the celebration of the success of the Civil Rights Movement and as the acknowledgement of and atonement for the immense difficulties American Blacks have endured in this country, but also as the effort to bring all American school children into the context of American racial issues, not only making them aware of past and present history but also making them a part of that history.

We can begin to see how the word "interest" as Fish uses it means much more than simply "entertaining" or "persuasive." In a world made up of interpretive communities, each defined by its concerns (and therefore the strategies for reading brought to the text and the "meanings" extracted from it), "interesting" takes on the connotation of satisfying a group's specific needs. Readings, particularly those of the critic, become a matter of supply and demand in the economics and politics of literary discourse. However, although Fish's discussion on interpretive communities uses the terminology of the "institution," interpretive communities have long existed outside of the institutions normally associated with literary studies. To return to the Christian example, one can conceive the original Protestant sects as interpretive communities that came into existence outside the institution of the Roman Catholic Church (and the interests of its primary theorist, the Papacy, and its "canon" of established works, the writing of the canonized saints). By developing their own interpretive community with its own set of problematics, axioms, and strategies for reading (the Christian Bible), each Protestant group became an independent community as internally valid as the Roman catholic community. In this manner, many groups previously excluded from the "Institution" of literature have made their concerns or interests public, "creating" through acknowledgement and the consensus of their members new ways of reading and, therefore, generating new texts.

In Towards a Feminist Theory of Reading, Patrocinio Schweickart reflects on Fish's concept of interpretive communities, but in so doing brings her own set of interests to the discussion of literary theory, adding an additional dimension to the construct of reading:

The feminist reader agrees with Stanley Fish that the production of the meaning of a text is mediated by the interpretive community in which the activity of reading is situated: the meaning of the text depends of the interpretive strategy one applies to it, and the choice of strategy is regulated (explicitly or implicitly) by the canons of acceptability that govern the interpretive community. However, unlike Fish, the feminist reader is also aware that the ruling interpretive communities are androcentric, and that this androcentricity is deeply etched in the strategies and modes of thought that have been introjected by all readers, women as well as men. (Schweickart, 50)

Schweickart begins her exploration of the androcentricity of texts with her reading of Wayne Booth's Presidential Address to the 1982 MLA Convention. Booth's presidential speech attempts to tell the story of the "shared experience" or archetypal interest in reading as a common ground for teachers of literature and composition; his own life experience serves as the main narrative for the story. To show how universal the enlightenment brought about reading is, Booth ends his story with a (re)telling of Malcolm X's story of reading, taken piecemeal from the Black leader's autobiography:

From then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk...[M]onths passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life. (As quoted by Booth, p. 317) (Schweickart, 32)

From Booth's quotation it would seem that both he and Malcolm X shared the same (equal, not different) story of reading—the same call to knowledge and "insane love" for books—implying that there is a universal common ground available to all readers:

The principal motif of [Booth's] myth is the hero's insane love for books, and the way this develops with education and maturity into "critical understanding," which Booth defines as that synthesis of thought and passion which should replace, "on the one hand, sentimental and uncritical identifications that leave minds undisturbed, and on the other, hyper-critical negations that freeze or alienate" (pp. 317-18). Booth is confident that the experience celebrated by the myth is archetypal. (Schweickart, 35).

However, Schweickart calls to our attention Booth's editing of Malcolm X's statement, indicated by the ellipsis in the written version of his speech. Booth himself is "alienating" an aspect of Malcolm X's experience to make it fall in line with his own supposedly universal story:

What in the original exceeded the requirements of a Presidential Address to the MLA? Checking, I found the complete sentence to read: "Between Mr. Muhammad's teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and Reginald—and my reading, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned." Clearly, the first phrase is the dissonant one. The reference to the leader of the notorious Black Muslims suggests a story of reading very different from Booth's. (Schweickart, 32)

Schweickart points out that the presence of the "notorious Black Muslims leader" in Malcolm X's story of reading implies a very real difference between Booth's story of reading and Malcolm X's:

Wayne Booth's story leads to the Crystal Ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, where we attend the protagonist as he delivers his Presidential Address to the members of the Modern Language Association. Malcolm X's love of books took him in a different direction, to the stage of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where, as he was about to address a mass meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, he was murdered. (Schweickart, 33)

Booth attempts to use Malcolm X's personal story in his speech to tell a universal story of reading by ignoring the socio-political, cultural-racial (i.e., inseparable) realities of Malcolm X's life. However, Booth only manages to admit the vast differences between his experience and X's by revealing his need to edit the Black activist's quote to make it fit his story. Once race is (re)introduced into the story, we begin to see that universality of experience is an illusion. But Booth's story does not only assume a lack of difference between his experience as a white American and Malcolm X's as a Black American: as Schweickart makes clear it also assumes a similarity with (or, more rightly, ignores the possibility of a difference from) women readers' story of reading.

To illustrate this difference, Schweickart tells us a third story, that of Virginia Woolf's character Mary in A Room of One's Own. Despite searching desperately for the existence and experience of women in the literary and scholastic books of the world, Mary is only able to find confusion and contradiction—equal and equally-damaging amounts of idealization or discrimination:

At last, Mary can draw but one conclusion from her reading. Male professors, male historians, male poets can not be relied on for the truth about women. Woman herself must undertake the study of women. Of course, to do so, she must secure enough money to live on and a room of her own. (Schweickart, 34)

Once we have been given or become a part of the context of Malcolm X's and Mary's stories, we begin to see that

Booth's story is utopian. The powers and resources of his hero are equal to the challenges he encounters. At each stage he finds suitable mentors. He is assured by the people around him, by the books he reads, by the entire culture, that he is right for the part. His talents and accomplishments are acknowledged and justly rewarded. In short, from the perspective of Malcolm X's and Woolf's stories, Booth's hero is fantastically privileged. (Schweickart, 35)

Reader-Response Revisited: The Interest of Women Readers

Fish's revelation of the encompassing centrality of context in the process of understanding reveals the existence of different interpretive communities. The existence of interpretive communities makes possible and necessary discourses within and between groups of their shared concerns or differing interests. Schweickart's reading of Booth's speech reveals two contexts not available to him, which she makes not only explicit but of immediate interest to her reader:

Utopian has a second meaning, one that is by no means pejorative, and Booth's story is utopian in this sense as well. In overlooking the realities highlighted by the stories of Malcolm X and Virginia Woolf, Booth's story anticipates what might be possible, what "critical understanding" might mean for everyone, if only we could overcome the pervasive systemic injustices of our time. (Schweickart, 35)

The necessity of feminist criticism, of a criticism that calls to our awareness the contexts and concerns of women readers and the reality gender differences, becomes implicit through Schweickart's retelling of Booth's story of reading.

Up until this point, Reader-response criticism had remained, as Fish originally postulated it, a recognition of the differences in reading between institutions. Thus it ignored the possibility of differences in gender, race and class in its analyses of readers' activities because institutions were gender-neutral (in as much as they had always been conceived by the white men that populated and defined them). However, once looked at from the context of a feminist reader, it is revealed that the "interests" that drew the interest of literary critics were their own at that time: those of affluent white males, educated in the American university system, and of a generally (at least publicly) heterosexual orientation. Like Booth's story,

Reader-response criticism, as currently constituted, is utopian in the same two senses. The different accounts of the reading experience that have been put forth overlook that issues of race, class, and sex, and give no hint of the conflicts, sufferings, and passions that attend to these realities. The relative tranquility of the tone of these theories testifies to the privileged position of the theorists. (Schweickart, 35)

Once this exclusion is realized and brought into consideration, feminist literary criticism begins to exist not only as an interpretive community as defined by Fish but as an active force with an explicit goal:

Feminist criticism, we should remember, is a form of praxis. The point is not merely to interpret literature in various ways; the point is to change the world. We cannot afford to ignore the activity of reading, for it is here that literature is realized as praxis. Literature acts on the world by acting on its readers. (Schweickart, 39)

Feminist critical theory has two primary interests, "gender and politics—which are suppressed in the dominant models of reading (Schweickart, 39)." By approaching both male- and female-written texts from within this binary set of concerns, the feminist reader seeks to

Speak of the difference between men and women, of the way the experience and perspective of women have been systematically and fallaciously assimilated into the generic masculine, and of the need to correct this error. (Schweickart, 39)

In the case of male texts, Schweickart's feminist reading reveals that the literary cannon is androcentric (a description that would never have occurred to someone not already operating within the context of women's experience). For male students, the accepted (and androcentric) literary cannon is about him and his relation to the world:

To put the matter theoretically, androcentric literature structures the reading experience differently depending on the gender of the reader. For the male reader, the text serves as the meeting ground of the personal and universal. Whether or not the text approximates the particularities of his own experience, he is invited to validate the equation of maleness with humanity. The male reader feels his affinity with the universal, with the paradigmatic human being, precisely because he is male. (Schweickart, 41)

This experience, however, is not shared by the female student. Like Woolf's Mary, the female seeking knowledge about herself, regarding women and their unique experience in the (male) university, is fated to find only men and the (generic) male experience, which she has no option to ignore (because to do so would be to fail) and which she must then assimilate the only way she can:

According to Fetterley, notwithstanding the prevalence of the castrating bitch stereotype, "the cultural reality is not the emasculation of men by women, but the immasculation of women by men. As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny." (Schweickart, 41; quoting Resisting Reader by Fetterley, 13)

Reading male texts from the perspective of a woman willing and able to step out of the male institution reveals that "Androcentric literature is all the more efficient as an instrument of sexual politics because it does not allow the woman reader to seek refuge in her difference (Schweickart, 42)." For a woman reader, the male literature "solicits her complicity in the elevation of male difference into universality and, accordingly, the denigration of female difference into otherness without reciprocity. (Schweickart, 42)"

Thus, the feminist critic's first step "is to disrupt the process of immasculation by exposing it to consciousness, by disclosing the androcentricity of what has customarily passed for the universal (Schweickart, 42)" in the established canon. Simply revealing this androcentricity is not enough, however. The fact that the canon is androcentric is a problem in of itself that is not solved until two further steps are taken. First is the exploration of male texts which have the power to immaculate women readers but which remain, even after their sexism has been revealed, appealing to female readers. Schweickart proposes a tool that will allow that exploration to proceed: feminist reading allows a form of role reversal to its reader, from which the feminist reader can shift the need to conform from her conforming to the text (immasculation of the reader) to the text conforming to her (by the reader acknowledging the text's desire to immaculate her and denying it). In her reading of Lawrence's Women in Love, Schweickart is compelled to identify with the male character (Birkin) because of his centrality in the text, but her feminist reading allows her to force the male character to conform to her: "the identification with Birkin is emotionally effective because, stripped of its patriarchal trappings, Birkin's struggle and his utopian vision conform to my own (Schweickart, 43)." This tool allows for a reading of male texts that acknowledges and assimilates their value without ignoring or compromising the value of the woman reader. In other words,

"the reader can submit to the power of the text, or she can take control of the reading experience. The recognition of the existence of a choice suddenly makes visible the normative dimension of the feminist story: She should chose the second alternative. (Schweickart, 49)

The second step for Schweickart's feminist approach is the reading of female texts by female critics. The initial goal in so doing is to discover those "androcentric critical strategies that pushed women's writing to the margins of the literary canon (Schweickart, 44)." Indeed,

If one reads the critics most instrumental in forming current theories about American literature (Matthiessen, Chase, Feidelson, Trilling, etc.), one finds that the theoretical model for the canonical American novel is the "melodrama of beset manhood." To accept this model is also to accept as a consequence the exclusion from the canon of "melodramas of beset womanhood," as well as virtually all fiction centering on the experience of women." (Schweickart, 44)

But it is not simply an issue of (dominant) male critics marginalizing female texts—the androcentric canon has been established for so long that it has become circular: a self-perpetuating storm-funnel whose inward centrifugal motion prevents the entrance of gynocentric texts into its perimeter:

An androcentric canon generates androcentric interpretive strategies, which in turn favor the canonization of androcentric texts and the marginalization of gynocentric ones. To break this cycle, feminist critics must fight on two fronts: for the revision of the canon to include a significant body of works by women, and for the development of the reading strategies consonant with the concerns, experiences, and formal devices that constitute these texts. (Schweickart, 45).

Schweickart suggests one such strategy, exemplified by Adrienne Rich's reading of Emily Dickinson, which Schweickart summarizes through contrast with the Resisting Reader strategies of Millett and Fetterley:

If feminist readings of male texts are motivated by the need to disrupt the process of immasculation, feminist readings of female texts are motivated by the need "to connect," to recuperate, or to formulate—they come to the same thing—the context, the tradition, that would link women writers to one another, to women readers and critics, and to the larger community of women. (Schweickart, 48)

This final step of a successful feminist reading and writing strategy is "grounded in the interest of producing a community of feminist readers and writers, and in the hope that ultimately this community will expand to include everyone (Schweickart, 56)."

Schweickart's version of the feminist critique of literature and literary theory seeks to identify the androcentricity of the established literary canon. However, she never claims to want to create a totally gynocentric canon separate from that of males. While her theory requires that we acknowledge the very real differences between the two genders, their interests, and their reading strategies, she never crosses the line into becoming what one might call a gender separatist:

Although the woman reader is the "star" of the feminist story of reading, this does not mean that men are excluded from the audience. On the contrary, it is hoped that on hearing the feminist story they will be encouraged to revise their own stories to reflect the fact that they, too, are gendered beings, and that, ultimately, they will take control of their inclination to appropriate the universal at the expense of women. (Schweickart, 60)

Indeed, the hope is that feminist readings and the awareness of gender issues they make available—like the "common sense" that tells us that Lycidas is a pastoral—will become so natural and automatic to readers that the possibility of an androcentric reading (and the androcentric canon that such readings empower) will cease to exist.

Interest Specificity

We can see in Schweickart the different connotations of the word "interest" as Fish used it. Through her analysis of critical theory and of Rich's essay, Schweickart brings the interests of women and of women writers to literary theory, and gives literary theory at least the beginnings of a methodology and ideology to enable it to be interested in gender issues. However, the community of women (in general) is not the only interpretive community traditionally excluded from the institution of literature or denied by the institution's lack of access to contexts and modes of being other than that of the white male. As Schweickart's use of Booth's MLA speech makes clear, American Blacks, no better represented here than by the figure of Malcolm X, are an equally marginalized group within American society and the society of literary studies. Yet beyond the interest of the two genders and beyond the interests of different racial groups lay other interests marginalized even by these groups. Where the circle of women's interests and the circle of Blacks' interests overlap there is an ignored city populated by Black American women, and within that city is an even more ignored neighborhood populated by Black American lesbians.

Returning to Fish's conceptualization of communicators existing as part of the institution:

Shared understanding is the basis of the confidence with which [interpreters] speak and reason, but its categories are their own only in the sense that as actors within an institution they automatically fall heir to the institution's way of making sense, its systems of intelligibility. (Fish, 320)

We must ask ourselves what becomes of those with interests and concerns not shared or made available by any of the current institutions-in-power. If a group has been denied access to the institution of literary theory—or worse, completely ignored by it—with what confidence in shared understanding can members of that group begin to discuss their interests and concerns with each other and with the world around them? In All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, Barbara Smith discusses the difficulties encountered by Black women and Black lesbian readers and writers who are doubly underprivileged compared to Schweickart's privileged Booth. They lack an available institution of literary works of their own, are separated by social and geographical restraints, and they are ignored, dismissed or divided by the established white/male institution and even the white feminist institution, all of which contribute to Smith's frustration in finding or developing a discourse for her interests as a Black woman.

Smith's essay, Towards a Black Feminist Criticism, begins to explore literary theory in a way similar to Schweickart—but Smith's very language shows how much more alienated from and oppressed by the privileged institution she and her community of interested readers are:

Black women's existence, experience, and culture and the brutally complex systems of oppression which shape these are in the "real world" of white and/or male consciousness beneath consideration, invisible, unknown. (Smith, 157)

Unlike white feminist writers, whose interpretive community and social existence is only once removed from the white male institutional ideal, or black men, who again are only once removed on the white/male axis from the center of recognition, acceptance and equality, Black women—especially Black lesbian Women—have no qualities of interest to the established institution, have no shared characteristics with the privileged white male, and have been forced to live so far outside the margins of the established literary circle that Smith can say that for the World-at-Large—and worse, for Black women themselves—Black women writers don't even exist:

All segments of the literary world—whether establishment, progressive, Black, female, or lesbian—do not know, or at least act as if they do not know, that Black women writers and Black lesbian writers exist. (Smith, 157)

Unlike Schweickart—who acknowledges the "difference" of both race and gender but who, as a white woman, can directly respond only to the issue of gender with only a nod towards the existence of the issue of race and its parallels with her own battle—Smith's battle involves issues of race, sexuality and class as well as issues of gender. Where Schweickart describes her feminist criticism as a fight on two fronts, Smith's must rally its forces on several battlefields where the lines are drawn as intertwined, inseparable dichotomies: white/non-white, male/non-male, heterosexual/deviant, recognized/unrecognized, history/truth—and the list could continue indefinitely, until every quality that comprises white Christian males and the world they live in is highlighted at the expense of everything (and everyone) that is not.

For this external and internal non-recognition of Black women writers to be undone, it is necessary to collect a cannon of literary works by Black and third-world woman writers and to develop a body of criticism that makes that "body of literature recognizable and real"—

For books to be real and remembered they have to be talked about. For books to be understood they must be examined in such a way that the basic intentions of the writers are at least considered." (Smith, 158-9)

Although at the time that Smith wrote her essay Black and feminist critical theory had existed, often side-by-side, for several decades, she recognizes that

When Black women's books are dealt with at all, it is usually in the context of Black literature which largely ignores the implications of sexual politics. When white women look at Black women's works they are of course ill equipped to deal with the subtleties of racial politics. A Black feminist approach to literature that embodies the realization that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers is an absolute necessity. (Smith, 159)

Indeed, Smith finds various examples where, in the hands of critics who are not black women, black women's writing is either turned against itself through the lens of white male criticism (illustrated by Jerry H. Bryant's comments on Alice Walker's In Love & Trouble [Smith, 160]), accused of being self-involved in "mere" issues of race (as in Robert Bone's claim that Ann Petry's The Street is too concerned with race instead of the more universal, less "superficial" issue of class [Smith, 160]), or outright trivialized (as with Sara Blackburn's assessment that Toni Morrison, should she continue to write primarily as a "black woman writer," will never "take her place among the most serious, important, and talented American novelists now working" [Smith, 161]). Smith goes on to detail how even feminist critics have allowed racism to creep into their language or their unconscious belief in the mutual exclusivity of race and gender to permeate the structures of their writing:

There is [in the recent critical works of Elaine Showalter, Ellen Moers and Patricia Meyer Spacks] absolutely no recognition that black and female identity ever coexist, specifically in a group of Black women writers. Perhaps one can assume that these women do not know who Black women writers are, that they have little opportunity like most Americans to learn about them. Perhaps. Their ignorance seems suspiciously selective, however, particularly in the light of the dozens of truly obscure white women writers they are able to unearth. Spacks was herself employed at Wellesley College at the same time that Alice Walker was there teaching one of the first courses on black women writers in the country. (Smith, 162)

Having exposed the lack of interest in Black women's writing by the white and black male communities—and the often ineffectual, often bigoted attempts to approach Black women's writing by the white feminist community—Smith proposes a new Black feminist criticism, for and by the Black women and Black women writers interested in the gender and racial issues relevant to their unique experience-culture-context:

A convincing case for black feminist criticism can obviously be built solely upon the basis of the negativity of what already exists. It is far more compelling, however, to demonstrate its necessity by showing how it can serve to reveal for the first time the profound subtleties of this particular body of literature. (Smith, 163)

To return to Stanley Fish's terms, Barbara Smith shows in her writing how a community of readers shares a common interest in a body of literature and in specific concerns raised by the texts or brought to the texts by the group of readers. Or to use Patrocinio Schweickart's terms, Smith has elaborated an interpretation of current literary theory which is "not valid or invalid in itself; its validity is contingent on the agreement of others (Schweickart, 56)" which share the same set of concerns as Smith. For Smith, the Black feminist critic would

Work from the assumption that Black women writers constitute an identifiable literary tradition. Her familiarity with these writers would have shown her that not only is theirs a verifiable historical tradition that parallels in time the tradition of Black men and white women writing in this country, but that thematically, stylistically, aesthetically, and conceptually Black women writers manifest common approaches to the act of creating literature as a direct result of the specific political, social, and economic experience they have been obliged to share (Smith, 164)

And thereby form an internally valid, externally identifiable, text-producing interpretive community made up of Black women writers and all those who share their interests and concerns in the literary and political world. Like Schweickart's critical theory, Smith's Black feminist critical inquiry is a new methodology. The Black feminist critic

Would think and write out of her own identity and not try to graft the ideas or methodology of white/male literary thought upon the precious materials of Black women's art. (Smith, 164)

It is also a form of praxis:

The Black feminist critic would be constantly aware of the political implications of her work and would assert the connections between it and the political situation of all Black women. Logically developed, Black feminist criticism would owe its existence to a black feminist movement while at the same time contributing ideas that women in the movement could use. (Smith, 164)

In a diction of privilege similar to Schweickart's discussion of Booth's "hero," and returning to the difference from the white/mail axis of centrality, Smith describes the risk involved in declaring oneself Black, female and lesbian; but also the necessity of doing so and in the necessity of a body of literature and critical work, and the community that comes with them:

Heterosexual privilege is usually the only privilege that Black women have. None of us have racial or sexual privilege, almost none of us have class privilege, maintaining our "straightness" is our last resort. Being out, particularly out in print, is the final renunciation of any claim to the crumbs of "tolerance" that nonthreatening "ladylike" Black women are sometimes fed. I am convinced that it is our lack of privilege and power in every other sphere that allows so few Black women to make the leap that many white women, particularly writers, have been able to make in this decade, not merely because they are white or have economic leverage, but because they have had the strength and support of a movement behind them. (Smith, 171)

We now begin to see Smith's double-move. On the one hand she has shown the damaging and exclusionary lack of interest in Black women by the white feminist movement that claims to represent all women as well as by the established literary institution that created the (generic-white) feminist theory by excluding its possibility. On the other hand Smith elaborates both Black women's interest in and need for a Black women's literature and the critical study of it. By defining the geography needed—and the needed geography—for a Black feminist criticism, Smith not only creates the land but the city in which similarly interested people can begin to dwell and communicate with each other but, just as importantly, begin to be recognized by and conduct trade with the outside world.

The expansion brought about through the ever-increasing specificity of the reader from interpretive communities to feminist criticism to Black feminist and Black lesbian criticism show us that reading and writing are not just the results of an individual's educational or institutional histories but instead active processes that both create and are created by cultural factors. The inseparable and interrelated aspects of an individual's identity—indeed, all of an individual's concerns and experiences—create the texts written by the author and rewritten by the reader. Any appeal to universalism or a generic reader does so only by ignoring the real universe populated by interested readers who exist in contexts of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and dozens of other qualities that make them who they are and create the books they read.

07/08/2006

Posted on 07/08/2006
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