In this book Professor Fish applies his innovative method, reader-response criticism, to almost the entirety of Western civilization, and finds therein a strange and unearthly recurring phenomenon, originating in Plato's Phaedrus and from there descending down the centuries at least as far as Jorge Luis Borges. Too ill-defined to be called a literary genre, or a philosophical doctrine, or the style of a given school, or anything else that scholars and critics have hitherto defined and described, this thing invariably behaves in the same way: with figures of rhetoric, and grammatical structures sound and unsound, and incidents of the plot, and logical non sequiturs, and metaphors both coherent and otherwise, and in short, with any feature of a literary work that a critic might care to mention, this thing, called the self-consuming artifact, fights itself, negates itself, cancels itself out, and, in Fish's phrase, becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment.When I first read this phrase I thought it meant that the reader throws the book away, but in fact, the reader undergoes the humiliation of realizing that his interpretive powers are unequal to their task, and then experiences something suspiciously like the Conviction of Sin that was the first step of salvation in old-fashioned Calvinism--basically a feeling of utter helplessness. After that, he experiences something even more suspiciously like Adoption, i.e., salvation itself. An SCA offers "the way of the good, the way of the inner light, the way of faith... the moment of its full emergence is marked by the transformation of the visible and segmented world into an emblem of its creator's indwelling presence"(p.3).Sometimes this moment of full emergence is overtly Christian. John Donne's Death's Duel, for that is an SCA, makes the death of Christ "the central fact of our existence to which we can give no response but acceptance"(pp.66-67). Fish knows what violence he does his readers with his shoulder-clasping our and we, making us all Christians whether we want to be or not, for he analyzes sentences by Milton that play exactly such tricks with pronouns ("we all agree,"p.272).

After Plato wrote an SCA, he was followed by St Augustine, Donne, Lord Bacon (who published 70 of them as his Essays), Herbert, Bunyan, Robert Burton, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, and possibly by Sterne, Byron, Beckett and Borges.

The solemn talk of the inner light and the way of faith which I have just quoted indicates the weakest feature of the whole flimsy scheme. It is hopelessly didactic. The formal properties of an SCA are ugly and ungainly. It causes pain rather than pleasure. Its content is incoherent and inane. The only reason why it should be read, and enshrined in this book of reverent criticism, is its precious gifts to the reader of humility and faith. That Stanley Fish should send us this message without a word of apology,yet at the same time should be so defensive about the Affective Fallacy, stoutly arguing that reader-response criticism is innocent of it, is bewildering. The same men who invented the name Affective Fallacy, and condemned the tendency it denominates, also named and condemned the Didactic Heresy. Yet Fish inundates me with didacticism, as if I had sought nothing else in Seventeenth-Century literature. His authors, he says, "have designs on us; they are out to do us good"(p.371).Let us remember Keats's words:" We hate a poem that has a palpable design upon us, and when we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket."

A thing that has been found in such far-flung times and places, and under such various forms--here a single narrative, there seventy essays; here poetry, there prose; here a theological treatise, there a medical one--must have very salient characteristics, enabling a person to spot it instantly, at least when he knows what to look for. So how can I tell when a thing is an SCA? Here are some of the signs: the author disclaims responsibility for his book (pp.331-332);"in the absence of an independent center of authority...subjectivity becomes objectivity"(pp.330-331); false promises alternately discomfort the reader and lead him on (304); the author harps incessantly on two polar opposites such as fleshly prelacy and spiritual presbyterianism (292-93); he makes puns such as contrariwise in a context where wise alludes to wisdom (295); words come tumbling out haphazardly when a graduate student tries to recollect them (290); sentences lack verbs, conclusions come before arguments, points are made by declining to make them (290); the structure of a single metaphor keeps shifting confusingly (287); the declarative suddenly becomes the interrogative mood (285);the author employs the trope of deceiving expectation (281); the text repeats itself (278); the figure of antimetabole occurs (273).

And so on and on; to complete the list would be to epitomize the whole book.If Fish had picked a number of texts as SCA's,then searched each one for indications that his pick was good, and finally written down the indications (as in Alice in Wonderland,verdict first, evidence after), he would have got exactly the result he did get.

In his six years of research for this shapeless lump,Fish read Bacon,and may have run across the story of Neptune's temple in Novum Organum. A man denied the power of Neptune, so some believers took him to the god's temple and showed him the votive tablets set up in gratitude by sailors the god had saved from shipwreck. The unbeliever said "Where are the tablets of those who drowned?" The moral, says Bacon, is that in considering a hypothesis, one must seek the negative instance, which indeed is more powerful than the other.

Now how could you prove that something is not an SCA?Fish is no help;if he found one non-SCA in the whole stretch between ancient Athens and Seventeenth-Century England, he fails to name it or its author.He has no idea what a non-SCA might be like. He gives it three different names: self-sufficient (p.75), self-indulgent(p.372), self-satisfying (p.378).He concludes that he sees SCA's "everywhere I look," unaware what a serious charge that is against his hypothesis in point of either Bacon's principles or those of common sense.

The chapter in which Sir Thomas Browne is called "the bad physician" is offered to forestall this objection, but fails. If Fish is right, Browne tries to produce an SCA but fails because he lacks the will to revolt the reader. Browne speculates that the virtuous heathen such as Socrates and Marcus Aurelius burn in hell, but then softens the injustice of this by speculating that perhaps they were not as virtuous as old books record.Fish protests: who would make an SCA must not back away from his own horrifying ideas like that, mottling his Calvinism with streaks of humanism. But this will not do for a counter-example; I need an author who didn't even try to write an SCA.

Fish may have been led into a chimerical theory by a defective method. Reader-response criticism ignores the sources of a literary work and allows its meaning to unfold word by word. Hence, when Fish reads a line about the fallen angels in Paradise Lost,

Nor did they not perceive their evil plight,

he says that the word Nor makes him expect a positive, and when he encounters not he becomes confused. The mental agitation ensuing is calmed when he concludes that the fallen angels both did and did not perceive their plight; they perceived the physical torments but not the spiritual degradation.

Now I deny that a literate reader would experience Nor and not as two separate events, one following in time and coming as a surprise. A literate reader's gaze would fix on two or at most three points in this line of eight words. Nor did they not would probably register in a single act of perception and thought.

But if I am wrong, how will Fish explain the following?

Nor was his name unheard or unador'd (I.738)

Nor doth the moon no nourishment exhale (V.421)

...nor knew I not

To be both will and deed created free (V.548-9)

This is becoming tedious; if we have to devise a new conceit (in a sense, Mulciber's name is both heard and unheard; in a sense, the moon both exhales and inhales nourishment; in a sense, Adam both knew and didn't know he was free) every time we come to this structure, it will be repetitious, as if Donne kept putting his metaphor of the compass into poem after poem.

There is a more elegant solution; Milton deliberately echoed the Aeneid, which contains the same formula:

nec non Aeneas opera talia primus

(Nor was Aeneas not the first in so great a work, VI.183)

nec non et vario noctem sermone trahebat/infelix Dido

(Nor did unhappy Dido not draw the night out in various talk,I.748)

nec non Tarquinium eiectum Porsenna iubebat/ accipere

(Nor did Porsenna not command Tarquin to be received back from exile,VIII.646)

The Aeneid contains twenty-one of these nec-non formulae, as they are called, so Milton is relatively sparing in his use of them. But formulae they are. They are a special case of the device of epic circumlocution,as when Milton calls Moses "that shepherd who first taught the chosen seed." This in turn originates in the need of an oral poet to draw things out, sometimes heightening suspense, sometimes enriching his narrative with florid ornamentation, sometimes delaying while he considers what to use for the next line.

To say all this is not to deny that a difference exists between the exact meaning of Nor did they not perceive and the exact meaning of They perceived, and that a critic must find what it is. But to begin that search in total ignorance of the nec-non formula, both in Paradise Lost and the Aeneid, is to play Blindman's Bluff.

The question arises: is this study of the SCA diachronic?That is, do all SCA's come out of Plato's Phaedrus as all locomotives come out of the one built by George Stephenson?Professor Fish implies that this is the case; on page 4 he says the thing he is examining "begins...with Plato" and on page 373 he calls it a "tradition."That so many great writers down the centuries should have composed, I mean decomposed, SCA's is a sensational discovery, but full of mysteries. There is no SCA between Augustine in the Fourth Century A.D. and Donne in the Seventeenth; 1300 years in which Plato's great idea went unregarded, though interest in his other ideas continued steadily.

And how did Bunyan learn about the SCA? He owned only two books when he married, Lewis Bayly's Practice of Piety and Arthur Dent's The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven .Later he read Luther's Commentary on Galatians and Nathanael Bacon's Declaration of the Fearful Estate of Francis Spira. If Professor Fish has read these books and found one or more of them to be SCA's, he should say so;it would strengthen his case. But if not,he has to explain how Bunyan, living in Bedford, with no income but what he could get making and selling bushy-points,and heavy charges on that to support a family, and lastly in prison, could obtain a book by Plato, Augustine, Donne, Bacon or Herbert.The Bedford Separatist Church, of which he was pastor, strongly disapproved of belles-lettres. Bunyan sets forth at length the opposition he encountered to the publication of The Pilgrim's Progress; his parishioners objected to the elements of fantasy even in a Bible-based, edifying book. As to Plato and Augustine,though Bunyan died in 1688, the National Union Catalogue lists no translation of Plato's works before that of Floyer Sydenham, 1710-1787.It lists no translations of the Phaedrus,as a separate book, until 1868. It lists no English translation of Augustine's works before 1838 and none of Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana as a separate work, before 1873.

Donne, Bacon and Herbert were all Anglicans, members of the church that had put Bunyan in the prison where he was to remain eleven years. Mr. Worldly-Wiseman and Judge Hategood in The Pilgrim's Progress represent Anglicans and the lions outside Palace Beautiful represent persecution. When Bunyan had his Bible, why should he seek, of all things, humility in the writings of these men, whose pride had put him in chains, even if he could buy or borrow the books?"The experience of [an SCA]...is humiliating" writes Fish (p.2).Imagine John Bunyan in the Bedford jail, deciding he wants humiliation, and that he will seek it in Bacon's essays,Donne's sermons or Herbert's poems! So the books from which Bunyan could have learned to write an SCA either were written in languages he couldn't read, or were written by the enemies of his faith.

All this presupposes that the SCA is a literary tradition, invented by one author and then adapted by many others. But perhaps Professor Fish means that it was invented, lost and reinvented again and again. A similar choice must be made in the study of the oral folktale. The great motif-indexes by Stith Thompson and Aante Arneson provide an abundance of puzzling cases of folktales occurring,widely separated in place and time,with mysterious detailed resemblances. For example, a woman is so foolish that when she sees ruts in a muddy road, she thinks they must be painful wounds, and tries to soothe them by putting butter on them. This motif, with the woman, her foolish compassion, the ruts and the butter, occurs in a folktale from Saxony, another from Arabia, and a third told among French-speaking immigrants from Missouri. Such puzzling coincidences are explained by the diffusion theory (the story spread far and wide from a single original center, being translated into various languages) and the polygenesis theory (the human mind, of its own nature, keeps producing the same structures in various communities independently of one another). The polygenesis theory leads to bold speculations such as C.G.Jung's "collective unconscious" and Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" to explain how people all over the planet can spontaneously and innocently duplicate each other's tales and myths.

In like manner, ruling out diffusion from Plato as a theory to account for Bunyan's creation of an SCA, we are left with polygenesis; Bunyan recreated the literary genre independently of Plato. He did so against the grain of the two men's lives and works. Plato, a philosopher so original that Stanley Fish says "everything begins" with him; Bunyan, a completely derivative thinker who received all of his ideas from the Bible, Calvin, Arminius, and other Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Protestants;Plato, an aristocrat determined to keep an elitist society stable by means of fraud and a hierarchy of rigid castes ;Bunyan, a penniless laborer imprisoned for defying the church and state;Plato, calmly contemplating a God too pure and remote to interest himself, or rather itself, with the affairs of mortals;Bunyan, living in terror of a God who condemns nine-tenths of humanity to eternal torture without their having done a thing to deserve it.Yet the SCA, that powerful engine for converting the minds of readers to diffidence of their own powers, was invented by both. It is like saying that the sonnet was invented by Petrarch and then, independently, by e.e. cummings. As with folktale polygenesis, mysterious or supernatural forces soon loom up to explain the multiple origin of the SCA. Fish says the SCA raises the eye of the mind to the point where"it is congruent with Reality"(p. 18).Take heed of the upper-case R; the R in Reality, like the G in God, alerts us to the presence of the divine.To follow the thread of an SCA till you find there is no thread, and then achieve congruence with Reality,--this is a literary Heroic Quest terminating in Salvation. No wonder such books occur by polygenesis. They must be inspired by God, or by some quasi-supernatural power of the human mind such as Jung's collective unconscious.If so, the Eurocentrism of this book is unforgivable. Fish encourages us to seek more SCA's in the works of Sterne, Byron, Beckett and Borges (p.xiii) but he does not recommend that we seek them in the literatures of China, India, or Japan; yet even Eurocentrism is too generous a term, for he omits Russia, Spain, Italy--apart from a token Latin American writer and Beckett's expatriation in France, all is Greece, Rome and England. If the SCA can be co-invented by Plato and Bunyan, it can be co-invented by Tasso, Cervantes, Montaigne, Lady Murasaki, Buddha and Lao Tse. Fish has stuck to the literatures he learned in graduate school in order to describe a universal technique for attaining congruence with Reality. He implicitly categorizes literature as Greco-Roman, English, and Everything Else;and he gives us to understand that only the first two can produce an SCA.