Anxiety of Meaning

     I found a fascinating strain in the readings for this week, the theorists anxiety about the fixity of meaning. For Northrop Frye this anxiety plays out in the need establish a scientific code that can be applied universally to texts. The archetypal structure is perhaps the grandest gesture to fix meaning in a manageable way. If all of literature can be distilled to a few primal structures, then meaning will fall neatly in line as well along one of these four axes. I do not get a sense that Frye is wholly concerned with cornering a few acceptable readings, but he, playing the good Aristotelian, does seek to render literature to distinct and convenient categories. Most importantly the locus of meaning resides in the text as it relates to the archetypes. Sunrise must always, even if ironically relate back to birth and the rise of the hero.
     For Stanley Fish, perhaps in reaction to Frye and other mid century formalists, meaning is ultimately unfixable. The  locus of meaning shifts from the text to the readers interaction with the text. Together in a formula that seems to be equal parts text, interpretive strategy and recognition of that strategy a new dialogue is created and the text is then transliterated and recreated. In that new text is the real significance. One would think then that the meaning must then be fixed only in a different place, but because two parts of that formula the interpretive strategy and the reader’s recognition will always be necessarily different (From reader to reader) the significance must change. But even his move to place meaning in the readers hands reflects an anxiety about who has authority to determine meaning.