Illusory Nature of Reality

There are a number of theoretical and practical connections between Stanley Fish's "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One" and Mary Louise Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone." Primarily, these connections have to do with an agreement about the illusory nature of reality. Both writers question "objective" and "subjective" perception, and note the limitations that human beings face in determining for themselves a free and independent understanding of the self and of the world.

At the same time, Pratt seems to leave much more hope than Fish that an individual can act to shape his or her reality despite the limitations inherent in human existence. Fish seems to be saying that an individual is a literal prisoner of the institutions and society of which he is a part, and which are a part of him:

The mental operations we can perform are limited by the institutions in which we are already embedded. These institutions precede us, and it is only by inhabiting them, or being inhabited by them, that we have access to the public and conventional senses they make (Fish 147).

In other words, according to Fish, the freedom that human beings think they have in interpreting the world (or a poem) is not real. To Fish, the perception of every "individual" in a society is no more free from the society than a fish's perception is free from the water in which it lives.

In fact, according to Fish's strict interpretation, there is not really any such thing as an individual, because every membe

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itutions can be broken, or at least transcended. It would seem that Fish is deliberately trying to provoke his audience. He as much as says that nothing the individual thinks about a poem, for instance, is distinct from what the culture has allowed him to think, as if each individual in society were merely a human computer into which society enters data to be accessed at the appropriate time. The essay is aimed, after all, at an academic audience---students and teachers---and it does not seem outlandish to assume that Fish would be elated if his essay did indeed bring about much lively debate about the nature of poetry, interpretation, individual freedom, cultural determinism, and so on. After all, if he does truly believe that interpreting poetry is so determined, then poetry itself would seem to be just as determined, and the entire enterprises of art and education would seem to be futile. Even Fish's somewhat optimistic conclusion seems to be forced. He concludes that the role of interpreting poetry is important because it brings the interpreters into the "ongoing accomplishment" (Fish 152) of the poetic endeavor. However, this would seem to be little more than the equivalent of people on an assembly line adding a part to a ma

Category: Literature - I