Image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press
Stanley Fish. The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
When I was working on Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain (Continuum, 2006) I watched by chance Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s documentary Derrida (2002). An exchange between a South African television interviewer and deconstruction’s patriarch understandably caught my attention:
Interviewer: ‘‘Seinfeld, which is America’s most popular—ever—sitcom. . . . Jerry Seinfeld made this sitcom about a bunch of people living together. Everything is about irony and parody, and what you do with your kitchen cupboard is imbued with as much feeling or thought as whether someone believes in God or the like.
Derrida: Deconstruction, as I understand it, doesn’t produce any sitcom. If sitcom is this and people who watch this think deconstruction is this, the only advice I have to give them is just stop watching sitcom, do your homework, and read.
What a shock! One of the major thinkers of our time dismissive of television!
Now Stanley Fish (Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost [Harvard UP, 1967]; Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature [U of California P, 1972]; Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities [Harvard UP, 1980]; Save the World on Your Own Time [Oxford University Press, 2008]) does not have quite the stature of the late “boa-deconstructor” (Geoffrey Hartman’s nickname for the French philosopher), but the eminent literary and legal theorist certainly ranks as one of the most significant and controversial figures in American intellectual life. Known as an iconoclast, inclined toward perversely unexpected positions (Claire B. Potter characterizes him as “a crank. An erudite crank, an influential crank, but a crank all the same”1), Fish has now clearly gone mental. He has written a book—an obsessive, loving, scholar-fan treatise—about television, a thoughtful meditation on The Fugitive (ABC, 1963-1967).
Not usually ranked as one of the great series in American television history, Quinn/Martin Productions’ 120 episode series has nevertheless been the apple of other small screen eyes as well. No less a figure than Sopranos creator David Chase, a notorious hater of network television (“I loathe and despise almost every minute of it”), remembers The Fugitive as his last great TV love2, and yours truly (four years younger than Chase) spent the summer between his senior year of high school and his freshman year of college obsessing as I had never obsessed before over the quest of Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) for the one-armed man who killed his wife. (In another media era, the series’ two-part finale aired at the end of August, 1967.)
David Chase and I were watching avidly, but the older Fish (1938- ) was not. He would discover it only decades later, as we learn in his introduction:
In the 1990s when I was watching reruns of The Fugitive on the Arts and Entertainment Network twice a day, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. . . . No one in The Fugitive ever relaxes as you watch and you can’t relax either, even though for long stretches absolutely nothing happens. It was the combination of nonstop tension with the (relative) absence of slam-bang action that attracted me, and as I now reflect on it, the same combination characterizes the literary works I have been reading and writing about for more than forty-five years.
The Fugitive in Flight is the sort of television study one might expect from one of the founding figures of the “reader-response” approach, the critic who would argue that the genius of Milton’s epic was its implication of the reader in the fall of man. Fish’s real subject is the way Kimble’s road trip entanglements in strangers’ lives bring them, and the viewer of course, to ponder their own morality.
But why The Fugitive? It is Fish’s answer to that question which may be the book’s most striking revelation. I was fascinated to learn back in my philosophy major days that Bertrand Russell had to drag the great thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein back to Cambridge from the movies he loved much more than rewriting the history of philosophy and the nature of logic. For Fish, however, TV was not escapism.
[I]t has long been my habit to write while watching television. (I’m doing it now.) I don’t use television as background noise. I pay a certain low level of attention all the time, and I pay undiluted attention some of the time. I find that allowing a storyline to occupy a part of my mind seems to free some other part to solve the problems that come up in the course of composing. (6)
The Fugitive, he explains, would not allow partial attention. Stanley Fish—Stanley Fish!—became, as he details, involved with Fugitive fandom, a confidante (until he stepped over a line) of series creator Roy Huggins,3 the author of his own Fugitive script . . . And he would, of course, write a book.
No doubt about it. Television studies has reeled in a big Fish.
1 Potter offers the following useful account of Fish on her “Tenured Radical” blog:
Fish, a literary and legal scholar, and one of the foremost authorities on the work of John Milton, first came to the attention of many of us beyond literary studies during his tenure as chair of the Duke English department, which he either ruined or took to transcendent heights, depending on where one stood in the culture wars. There, he was given an almost entirely free hand to hire and pay extravagant salaries to those who he considered to be the most cutting edge literary theorists: queer studies, for example finally got legs nationally in part because of Fish’s support for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michael Moon. From there, Fish left to become the dean of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago from 1999 to 2004, which gave him an even wider scope to annoy people, and to hire a lot of really interesting people. Faculty hired under Fish’s watch included Walter Ben Michaels (another opinionated literary scholar who has taken to broad-ranging critiques of the academy); and John D’Emilio, one of the finest scholar-activists in GLBT history, who had actually quit his academic job to become a full-time activist. Having read this book [Save the World on Your Own Time], my guess is that Stanley thought that was cool.↩
2 David Lavery and Robert J. Thompson, “David Chase, The Sopranos, and Television Creativity.” This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (New York: Columbia U P, 2002): 19.↩
3 James Longworth offers a valuable interview with Huggins in TV Creators: Conversations with America’s Top Producers of Television Drama, Vol. 2 (Syracuse: Syracuse U P, 2002): 31-54.↩
