STANLEY FISH
IN LITERARY ORBITS, TO DUB SOMEONE “ACADEMIC” IS just about the worst thing you can say about him: it means obscurantist and politicizer, an obfuscation expert blind to the beauty, wisdom, and pleasure of imaginative literature, but keen on social agendas, on the isms so in vogue among those who think Melville a bit dull without some political dressing up. Harold Bloom famously dubbed this misplaced lot the “rabblement of lemmings” and the “School of Resentment.” Every corner of the nation needed the overdue social spasms of the 1960s. Literature, however, did not. Literature has always been quite all right just as it is. The complexities and felicities of great fiction and poetry won’t be reduced by the hocus-pocus of theory. But that didn’t keep untold English profs from donning French-made lab coats and smuggling cultural studies clichés into the Melville seminar on a mission to prove Moby-Dick a utensil of the patriarchy. Those profs attempted social reform by dismantling the canon and succeeded only in dismantling their own relevance.
The above narrative, familiar to those of us who live the literary life, usually forgets to credit the multitude of English professors unpolluted by theory, those noble souls dedicated to “the autonomy of the aesthetic,” in Bloom’s words, and who every semester infect their students with a much-needed love of literature. For readers and writers, college isn’t always money ill spent. Good ideas can percolate inside the academy, ideas that enhance rather than impede the pleasures of literature. Bloom’s own “anxiety of influence” is one such lasting idea.
Another such idea rushed out of Berkeley in 1967: Stanley Fish’s book Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost intervened in a long-standing debate about how and how not to handle Milton’s tremendous masterwork. Before Fish, Miltonists tended to join one of two brigades: those who, after Blake, believed Milton to be in the devil’s back pocket, and those who, after C. S. Lewis, believed that Milton’s fealty was to God. Anyone can see that Satan is the beguiling hero-bard of Milton’s poem: he’s like a young Brando—you can’t take your eyes off him, and when he’s not on-screen, you’re not happy. Bloom maintains that Satan doesn’t speak poetry, he is poetry, a matchless embodiment of the poetical sublime, and not to find him enticing and enlarging “is simply to fail to have been found by him.” God and his lackeys, on the other hand: they are supreme dullards who nevertheless comport with what we know was Milton’s own worldview. Fish’s inspired feat was to fuse those brigades by essentially allowing both to be correct. Satan is a seditious and inebriating heartthrob, yes, and God is a baffling bore, true, but that was Milton’s intent, to have us thinking just that, and then to catch ourselves in transgression, surprise ourselves by the sin of siding with the devilish insurrectionist and his legion of harmony-killers.
“My subject is Milton’s reader,” writes Fish, “and my thesis, simply, that the uniqueness of the poet’s theme—man’s first disobedience and the fruit thereof—results in the reader’s being simultaneously a participant in the action and a critic of his own performance.” When someone reads Paradise Lost, he is “confronted with evidence of his corruption” and “is asked to refine his perceptions.” And so: “The poem’s center of reference is its reader who is also its subject.” Why? Because “Milton’s purpose is to educate his reader to an awareness of his position and responsibilities as a fallen man . . . to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the poem’s scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam’s troubled clarity.” That’s quite nice, “troubled clarity,” and Surprised by Sin is rife with such elucidations.
Joseph Epstein, Essayist Rex, once dumped on Fish’s “jauntily confident manner,” but if the inverse of jaunty confidence is slouching self-doubt, who wants that in a thinker? To read Fish in Surprised by Sin and How Milton Works is to commune with a scholar in supreme control of the literature and his own attitudes toward it, a scholar thrillingly authoritative, wholly convinced, giddy with aptitude. This is heaven-sent talent, ladies and gentlemen, regardless of whether or not you’re partial to his assessments: you can’t hit the ball like Serena and you can’t read Milton like Fish. For nearly fifty years, Surprised by Sin has shepherded students and lay readers alike into the momentousness and mastery of a poet whose only overall better is Shakespeare. When you write a book that forever alters the way we read the greatest poem in our language, you can take the rest of your life off.
But Stanley Fish was just getting started.
TO READ ALL of Fish’s books in succession is a somewhat dizzying endeavor, and not because he is by turns entertaining and incisive and yawningly unintelligible, but because Fish isn’t only one Fish. Fish is, in fact, a whole school of Fish: Fish the Miltonist and theorist, Fish the lawyer and dean, Fish the columnist and cultural critic, Fish of the right and Fish of the left, Fish as Strunk & White, Fish the historian and film aficionado, Fish the religious commentator, Fish the philosopher and polemicist and pundit. Across fifteen books and in his New York Times column from 1995 to 2013, he’s dilated on virtually every vital cultural issue—from the point of view of the classroom or the courtroom, the department chair or the armchair—while being both a font of knowledge and a carpet-bombing provocateur. He’s morphed from an astute seventeenth century scholar (in addition to Surprised by Sin, his early books include a study of the poet George Herbert), to an opaque theorist of “interpretative communities,” a reader-response extravaganza that employs linguistics (in 1980, Is There a Text in This Class? was taken seriously by both philosophers and fellow theorists), to a more accessible thinker writing for the common reader on topics such as free speech, academic freedom, and the TV series The Fugitive. He doesn’t mind referencing The Karate Kid while pondering the mechanics of good prose, and he can summon Petrarch and Donne while listening to the platitudinous plaints of country music.
With his New York Times column, Fish added the “public” to “intellectual”; that visible platform permitted him to declaim in whatever register he chose, to rankle all whom he perceived as intellectually complacent or ideologically deluded. In There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, from 1994, he’s clear about his targets: those who give us “overheated and overdramatic characterizations of our situation, whether they come from the left or the right,” and those who betray what for Fish is a capital crime, a “willful disregard of history.” In the preface to that book, Fish warns: “Neither the defender of the status quo nor the proponent of radical change will find much comfort in these pages,” while the flap copy of Save the World on Your Own Time, from 2008—a sermon directed at those who mistake the university for the universe, those who would rather indoctrinate than educate—promises “to incense both liberals and conservatives.”
That nobody’s-safe incensing throughout Fish’s work, the volleys against both left and right—you can hear the hiss just a bit more when he scribbles “denizens of the right”—can look a touch like shtick, an over-insistence on his lone-wolf credentials when everybody knows that the career academic must by definition be a conformist: you don’t get very far without getting along. (Although, judging by how migratory Fish has been, perhaps he doesn’t get along all that well: as a teacher and administrator, he’s occupied posts at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, University of Southern California, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Columbia, Duke, University of Illinois, John Marshall Law School, Florida International University, and Cardozo Law School, among others.) Fish has crafted himself into that sad marriage of contradictory terms reserved for the few: academic superstar.
In Academic Instincts, Marjorie Garber forces this sunbeam upon us: “Teaching and writing at a college or university is a job for optimists and for idealists, whatever discursive or critical mode we may use in trying to shape ideas and the world.” So those are the people to whom Paul Valéry was referring when he wrote that “optimists write badly”—academics. Garber appears to think that the optimist and idealist are separate creatures, but for Valéry they were indistinguishable: he means that the optimist/idealist writes badly because his ideas have been defiled by naïveté, or by the form of naïveté we call ideology.
About Garber’s contention that academics can “shape the world,” Fish has spent decades saying no way. In Professional Correctness, from 1999, he has this counsel for the many Garbers on American campuses: “If you want to send a message that will be heard beyond the academy, get out of it.” Academia can’t compete with the daily avalanches of pop culture in which students are unmindfully entombed. Frederick Crews made this point in The Critics Bear It Away: the university is “Lilliputian terrain compared to the realms of business and popular culture to which those students remain consciously oriented,” which is why Fish believes that a professor’s attempt at political brainwashing is not only a breach of job description but a waste of time. Fish has written that professors are powerless to “fashion moral character, or inculcate respect for others, or produce citizens of a certain temper.” Teachers can and should, however, show students how Milton’s poetical majesty functions on the page, how Milton gives you the language for what happens to you while living, and in doing so, teachers can impart a passion for the personal efficacy of literature. Fish: “Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry. It is not the business of the humanities to save us.” Please let’s post that over the entrance to every English department in the land.
Next to his work on Milton and his support for an unpoliticized purity in academia, Fish might be best known for railing against principle, neutrality, and the lofty ideal of universalism. Free speech, he believes, “is just a name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance,” just “a political prize” and never “an independent value.” To put that another way: human beings are never truly free in their thoughts or speech because everything they think and say is a product of their histories, their “communities,” the undulations and vicissitudes of their selfhood—the very notion that underpins his theoretical work in Is There a Text in This Class? For someone who touts the inevitability of tribalism, Fish can seem incapable of committing to a side. The man listens to both NPR and country music: who does that?
In The Trouble with Principle, he castigates the belief “that abstractions like fairness, impartiality, mutual respect, and reasonableness can be defined in ways not hostage to any partisan agenda.” Neutral principles are, he says, “the empty vehicles of partisan manipulation.” About the liberal program: “As a genuine model for the behavior of either persons or nations, as something you could actually follow and apply, political liberalism is hopeless”—and by “liberalism” he means not the opposite of conservatism, but that rigidly secular Enlightenment notion of governance that favors the autonomy of individuals and remains neutral (he might say “neutered”) toward warring versions of truth.
Fish’s views have slapped a bull’s-eye on his back. He’s frequently shot at with the barbs “sophist” and “relativist,” “fatalist” and “radical subjectivist.” At a speech she gave at MIT in 1990, Camille Paglia, with perfect Paglian venom, called him “a totalitarian Tinkerbell.” Terry Eagleton, British Marxist bloviator and anti-pescatarian, once likened Fish to (I’m not kidding) Joseph Stalin and Slobodan Miloševi´c, and worse: “He is the Donald Trump of American academia, a brash, noisy entrepreneur of the intellect”—asserted with equal parts brashness and noise. For the militantly sensitive Eagleton, Fish’s ideas are “sinister” and “scandalously provocative,” a “mindless tyranny,” and you’ve got to wonder if that is just another of Eagleton’s out-of-place anti-American diatribes, or if Fish might have nabbed Eagleton’s spouse at a cocktail party.
When someone once accused Lionel Trilling’s politics of being “always in between,” Trilling replied that “between is the only honest place to be,” and Fish would assent to that. The conundrums of human living are too multiform and intractable to be pondered by the dichotomies of left or right, liberal or conservative. For Fish, we are all of us fallen, Adams and Eves bumbling through the postlapsarian cosmos. Original sin is real but not in the way Christianity would have you believe: we are fallen in the guarantee of our human imperfectability, our pathetic inadequacy at the utopian task (“utopia,” remember, literally means “nowhere”). In The Trouble with Principle, Fish writes: “The main thing I believe is that conflict is manageable only in the short run and that structures of conciliation and harmony are forever fragile and must always be shored up, with uncertain success,” and all you have to do is peek at your own life—your marriage, your friendships, your workplace—to see the oppressive accuracy of that.
SAY WHAT YOU WILL about him, Fish is unfailingly what the Israelis call “dugri,” a straight-talker who damns all consequences. “Double standards,” he believes, “are inevitable and right” because they are “invoked when you prefer the beliefs you hold to the beliefs others hold,” while “favoritism is good and moral” because you are being “loyal to those who are loyal to you,” those who share your values. Fish knows “this might sound like relativism”—although it sounds much worse than merely that—“but it’s the reverse. It’s standing up for commitments and for your comrades rather than standing up for a principle no one has seen.” What about common ground? “The perpetual search for a common ground, for an apolitical politics, is a fool’s errand, an impossible dream.” His view of spin? “Spin is not an obstacle to thought; it is the engine of thought.”
Fish’s new book, Think Again: Contrarian Reflections on Life, Culture, Politics, Religion, Law, and Education, collects nearly a hundred of his New York Times columns, “all the hard-edged intellectual, cultural, and political analysis one expects from Fish,” brags his jacket copy. About the label “contrarian,” Alexander Cockburn once called it a “silly term, proudly adopted by some as self-description” when it “denotes in reality a discard of principle in favor of reflexive posturing”: a faultless tag, then, for a thinker such as Fish who doesn’t see the halo over principle, who believes that principle varies from tribe to tribe and from age to age. Characteristically profane and probing, allergic to nonsense and compromise, Think Again is a banquet of savvy feuilletons, of all the intellectual sustenance with which Fish has been occupied these last fifty years. “These columns are written under the shadow of the (perennial) ‘crisis of the humanities,’ a crisis to which humanists have responded by mounting ever more elaborate (and unconvincing) justifications of the humanities as a practice that will save democracy, if not the world.”
He’s structured the book into eight blocks of “reflections”: personal, aesthetic, cultural, on politics, on law, on religion, on liberal arts education, and on academic freedom. The personal essays at the head of the book are a pumping hand shake, a welcome which trumpets all of Fish’s average-guy qualities. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1938, Fish was the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, the first in his family to graduate from college. He writes touchingly about his father, Max, a plumber, and about his heroes growing up (Sinatra and Ted Williams), and also about his durable obsessions (basketball and Jews). Inside the ecosystem of academia, humor is an endangered species—congenital humorlessness is usually the first sign that someone has no idea what’s happening in the world—and so it’s always a treat to read a scholar unafraid of being funny. At his most comic and curmudgeonly, Fish gripes about his dread of travel, his aborted efforts at going green, his woes over the proper light bulbs and paper towels. “I don’t want to save the planet,” he writes. “I just want to inhabit it as comfortably as possible for as long as I have.” (Some of the elderly are downright dangerous; they don’t care about tomorrow because they won’t be here to welcome it.) Here he is on the impossibility of winning a domestic quarrel: “You will try to clarify and sanitize your words by producing more words, but of course the more words you produce, the more weapons you provide the person who is sitting across from you at the breakfast table. (And who is he or she anyway? How did I ever get mixed up with anyone like that?)”
Magazine writers and newspaper columnists typically don’t choose their titles. Editors need titles to divert your attention from your life’s hourly online cannonade, the electronic hullaballoo, and often you’ll find that a title doesn’t fit the content of its essay. In Fish’s case, many of his titles are designed both to rile you before you begin reading and to broadcast his coordinates on the issue: “Two Cheers for Double Standards”; “Favoritism Is Good”; “Against Independent Voters”; “All You Need Is Hate”; “Tip to Professors: Just Do Your Job.” But in the introduction to Think Again, and numerous times throughout, Fish remains delusively adamant that although his columns appeared in the Opinion section of the Times, “they are not, for the most part, opinion pieces. . . . If what you want are opinions and protestations of belief, there are plenty of places to find them, but not here.” He somehow thinks that he’s providing us with an unbiased or disinterested assessment of a particular issue, simply revealing the faults in a particular argument, and this from a man who calls neutrality a unicorn. “Although I am writing in plain sight, I am hiding,” he says, and first you wonder how anyone can write a column except in plain sight, and then that “I am hiding” strikes you as the flash of cowardice it is. Fish must be thoroughly deaf to how the tenor of one’s prose reveals the timber of one’s position.
Of course our best reader of Paradise Lost would be interested in the public fracas over religion, so look at his take on the New Atheists, four pieces on those vociferous God-killers Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, and see if you can’t spot Fish’s opinions. “They are the apostles (irony intended) of the religion of science in its most reductionist form.” The religion of science: what stale, shameless palaver that is. Everywhere in his denigrations of Dawkins and company you see the equating of science with faith so that science may be dismissed by the same means by which faith is dismissed. Dawkins’s evidence for evolution, says Fish, “is evidence only because he is seeing with Darwin-directed eyes. The evidence at once supports his faith and is evidence by virtue of it”—just try to find piffle more thunderous than that. “Science requires faith too before it can have reasons,” and you might make that true if you overhaul the definitions of “science” and “faith.”
According to Fish, Milton is always on the side of God, and because Fish is always on the side of Milton, he does not come close to understanding that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris—“shallow . . . schoolyard atheists,” he calls them, withholding his opinion—assault religion on precisely the same grounds on which billions believe it: they don’t bother with the dulling tedium, the meanders and switchbacks of theological argument, because the global throngs don’t bother with them. In Save the World on Your Own Time, Fish rightly asserts that “intellectual work” concerns itself with “the evaluation, not the celebration, of interests, beliefs, and identities; after all, interests can be base, beliefs can be wrong, and identities are often irrelevant to an inquiry.” And that is exactly what Dawkins and company are up to, the evaluation of beliefs as they are believed. (Fish-hater Terry Eagleton, incidentally, commits the identical error in Reason, Faith, and Revolution, his 2009 book of rearguard aggression against New Atheist fervor. In his piece “God Talk,” Fish, apparently unaware that Eagleton once likened him to Stalin, is aglow with praise for Eagleton’s screed.)
Much of Think Again will consternate no one already familiar with Fish’s ideas. “What links the columns . . . is a relentless internality”—a relentless internality?—“a tendency to live ‘in my head,’ a preference for activities that are absorptive”—activities that are absorptive?—“an affinity for enclosures and closure, and a fear of anything new and open”—anything new and open? “My affinity is for self-contained, highly structured artifacts”—he means art, for God’s sake—“that refuse political engagement and celebrate craft.” Fish’s politics are, he says, “antiliberal” because “liberalism, as a form of thought and a mode of political organization privileges impartiality,” and Fish, as you know, does not believe in impartiality. At his most astute—and let it be said how often his astuteness shines—he employs a pitiless realism en route to truth, a loathsome honesty about human living: “There is no road from the precepts of high philosophy to the solution of any real-world problem,” or “Personhood is not what remains after race, gender, ethnicity, and filial relationships have been discounted; rather, personhood is the sum of all these.”
You’ve got to be a discriminating Goldilocks when you go to Fish’s house. When he’s too hot, in Academic mode, he serves up jargon; when he’s too cold, in Everyman mode, he serves up cliché; but when he stirs the best of one porridge into the best of the other—when he’s a pithy steward for his intellect and interests—he’s just right. Here he is trying to explain French theory in a mangled prose only a French theorist could love: “The ‘I’ or subject, rather than being the freestanding originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted—given a transitory, ever-shifting shape—by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, and distinctions that precede it, fill it, and give it (textual) being.” As you can see, each of those words is English, but as you can hear, English it is not.
In How to Write a Sentence from 2011, Fish christens himself a “sentence watcher . . . always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away,” and if he’d spend a minute more watching his own sentences, he might catch the plague of cliché he allows to disfigure many of them. Throughout Think Again, Fish consistently relies upon knee-jerk utterance, the at-hand formulations that are an unmistakable sign of the lazy scribe. He’ll go from “the nick of time” to “only a matter of time” to “nine times out of ten”; from “out of the blue” to “icy blue eyes” to “icing on the cake”; then there’s “every nook and cranny” before there’s “everything under the sun” and “every waking hour.” Nor is he above the decanting of an occasional platitude: “Many terrible things have been done in religion’s name.” But then he’ll unleash a sentence you want to carry around with you always: “Strife, in progress or just around the corner, is the default condition of domesticity,” or “What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair.”
Fish might not always pass Nietzsche’s test of being able to dance with a pen, but he escorts his personality to the page and refuses to traffic in the anodyne, and that’s a welcome antidote to the tranquilizing homogeneity of style among so many American critics and essayists. He is an essential thinker because he confronts your cozy assumptions, your placating pieties, and that confrontation is crucial to the development of ideas. You are not obligated to agree with him and you are not obligated to like him, but if you care about the enlarging necessity of contest in cultural discourse, then you are obligated to read him, not with some magical “open mind”—Fish has no patience for that concept: “An open mind is an empty mind”—but with the full force of the mind you have.
—The New Republic, FALL 2015