Wolfgang Iser: A Companion 9783110245523, 9783110245516

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Comic and Aesthetic Novels
Beyond Geistesgeschichte
Kierkegaard and the Aesthetic
The Prehistory of Modernity
An Applied Philosophy of Life
Example 1: Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb
Chapter 2. Montage and Modernity
The Implied Modernist
The Waxing of the Modern Ages
In the Midst of History
Example 2: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Chapter 3. The Phenomenology of Reading
The Modern Reader
The Quasi-Reality of Fiction
Duration, Imagination, Transformation
Negativity and Harmony
The Sublime and the Screen
Example 3: Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (1)
Chapter 4. Fictions, Roles and Games
The Act of Reading 2.0
The Origin of Fictionalizing Acts
The (In)distinction of Fiction & Imagination
Games and Stagings
Literary Anthropologies
Example 4: China Mieville, The City & The City
Chapter 5. The Recursions of Culture
The Translations of Theory
The Range of Recursion
Rippled Surfaces
Example 5: Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (2)
Conclusion. Modernity, Meaning and Humanity
Wolfgang Iser: A Bibliography
Name Index

Citation preview

Ben De Bruyn Wolfgang Iser

Companions to Contemporary German Culture

Edited by Michael Eskin · Karen Leeder · Christopher Young

Volume 1

Ben De Bruyn

Wolfgang Iser

A Companion

DE GRUYTER

978-3-11-024551-6 e- ISBN 978-3-11-024552-3 ISSN 2193-9659 ISBN

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb-d.nb.de © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.KG, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Universitätsarchiv Konstanz (Photographer: Heinz Finke, approx. 1967) Printing: Hubert & Co. KG, Tübingen Ÿ Printed on acid free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

for Liesbeth and Roselien, my closed figures in the waste without form

Table of Contents Acknowledgments —— IX Introduction —— 1 Chapter 1. Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 9 Beyond Geistesgeschichte —— 13 Kierkegaard and the Aesthetic —— 22 The Prehistory of Modernity —— 31 An Applied Philosophy of Life —— 40 Example 1: Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb —— 42 Chapter 2. Montage and Modernity —— 45 The Implied Modernist —— 48 The Waxing of the Modern Ages —— 64 In the Midst of History —— 87 Example 2: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall —— 90 Chapter 3. The Phenomenology of Reading —— 95 The Modern Reader —— 104 The Quasi-Reality of Fiction —— 110 Duration, Imagination, Transformation —— 120 Negativity and Harmony —— 129 The Sublime and the Screen —— 138 Example 3: Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (1) —— 147 Chapter 4. Fictions, Roles and Games —— 151 The Act of Reading 2.0 —— 157 The Origin of Fictionalizing Acts —— 163 The (In)distinction of Fiction & Imagination —— 170 Games and Stagings —— 183 Literary Anthropologies —— 198 Example 4: China Mie´ville, The City & The City —— 203 Chapter 5. The Recursions of Culture —— 209 The Translations of Theory —— 214 The Range of Recursion —— 227 Rippled Surfaces —— 244 Example 5: Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (2) —— 250

VIII —— Table of Contents Conclusion. Modernity, Meaning and Humanity —— 253 Wolfgang Iser: A Bibliography —— 259 Name Index —— 269

Acknowledgments When I first encountered an essay by Wolfgang Iser, as a student in late 2003, I did not understand a word he was saying. As you are now reading my book about this enigmatic theorist, it will be obvious that I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to many people who have helped me make sense of his writings. I would especially like to thank Dirk De Geest, Jan Baetens, Jürgen Pieters, Pieter Verstraeten, Hilde Moors, Arne De Winde, Pieter Vermeulen and Winfried Fluck for reading parts of the book and offering helpful words of advice and even more helpful words of criticism. Although they did not read the manuscript, I am equally grateful to Wolfgang Iser, Dieter Henrich, Brook Thomas, Gabriele Schwab, Steven Mailloux, Alexander Gelley, Jackie Dooley, Richard van Oort, Anselm Haverkamp and the entire MDRN-group at Leuven University for helping me with practical issues, and stimulating me to push my analysis further. I have also learned many things from the students in my seminars on reception theory in Leuven and Nijmegen, the most important of which is undoubtedly the realization that I still have many things to learn about the act of reading. In practical terms, the Fund for Scientific Research (FWO) provided the financial backing which allowed me to study Iser’s work in such detail. And the scrupulous proofreading of the series editors, especially Christopher Young, and his assistant, Charlotte Lee, as well as the intellectual support of Heiko Hartmann, Manuela Gerlof and Susanne Mang at Walter de Gruyter were decisive in turning this project into a book that other readers might actually be able to read. Apart from these direct sources of advice and support, I would also like to express my sincere thanks to those who have helped me in more indirect ways: Jens, Iris and Kara, my parents Jan and Diane and my parents-in-law Agnes and Miel, my grandparents De´sire´ and Mina and Victor and Anna, and my close friends Ben, Jan, Paul, Alexander and Bart. My last and most heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Liesbeth, and my daughter Roselien. To borrow a phrase from Beckett, one of Iser’s favourite writers, you are truly my closed figures in a huge waste without further form.

Introduction The subject of this book is the literary theory and criticism of Wolfgang Iser (1926–2007), a German scholar whose academic fame originates in the readeroriented approach to literature which he pioneered in the 1970s. Together with his colleagues from the newly established university of Constance, Iser developed a method and theory of reading that proved highly influential. For his ‘reception theory’ and associated notions such as ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘the implied reader’ resonated with similar developments in other countries, most notably the US, and ensured that his publications had a wide audience. Despite the unquestioned importance of Iser’s theoretical reflections, they have never been the subject of a comprehensive study. Scholars including Winfried Fluck and Brook Thomas have noted that his thought is broader and more up-to-date than the continued reference to the work of the seventies might suggest.1 However, these observations have not led to a detailed, book-length analysis of Iser’s multifaceted theory. The similarities and differences between the various phases of his theoretical project have, therefore, not been adequately described. This is unfortunate, because his writings, especially when read in isolation, often appear impenetrable. As his translator, among others, has noted, Iser’s theory explores processes that are important but also defy verbal expression: ‘the “somethings” that take place between text and reader, that emerge from the interaction, that drive us to embrace fictions, that trigger, modify, transform our responses’.2 Considering his publications as a whole helps to dispel some of this confusion. In respect of his literary criticism, many commentators have labeled Iser a modernist, because of his lifelong interest in T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and have therefore ignored other aspects of his writings. Other critics, by contrast, have argued that Iser’s theory not only sheds light on twentieth-century literature but also illuminates crucial aspects of Renaissance and Enlightenment culture. But again, these isolated remarks have not been developed in a systematic fashion. This book fills in these gaps by analyzing and comparing the different aspects of Iser’s literary theory and criticism in detail, and presents us with an alternative Iser, one that may seem new to students and scholars of literary theory. As I will show, his oeuvre ultimately advances a systematic reflection on modernity, meaning and humanity, as well as on the

1 See Winfried Fluck, ‘The Search for Distance. Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 175–210; Brook Thomas, ‘The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What’s Literature Have to Do with It?’, American Literary History, 20.3 (2008), 622–31. 2 David Henry Wilson, ‘Working with Wolfgang’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 19–25 (p. 20).

2 —— Introduction way these phenomena intersect in the novel, a literary form which throughout history has enabled its readers to imagine other realities. As I have noted, Iser’s work is a particular form of literary theory. The question of what ‘literary theory’ means is a complex one, and I will not be able to address it fully here. Instead, let me briefly recapitulate four ways of thinking about the theoretical study of literature that are relevant to my approach. First, Rene´ Wellek and Austin Warren famously argue that literary theory refers to ‘the study of the principles of literature’, whereas literary criticism refers to ‘studies of concrete works of art’.3 Literary theory is the study of general principles, literary criticism that of specific works. Although Iser’s work actually straddles both disciplines, my book (notwithstanding its forays into Anglophone literary criticism) will focus more on general questions than on those which relate to a specific work. Second, Antoine Compagnon, inspired by the use of the term in the 1960s and 1970s, claims that literary theory denotes a sort of counter-discourse, which challenges the premises of traditional literary criticism, including those of Wellek and Warren. Targeting received ideas about literature, ‘[t]heory is opposed to common sense’.4 According to this definition, the literary theorist does not study the general principles of literature, but criticizes the presuppositions that plague the common reader as well as the traditional professor of literature. In line with this definition, both Iser’s work and this book aim to criticize, or at least nuance, certain literary prejudices. Two other proposals offer further clarification, even though they do not use the term ‘literary theory’. Mieke Bal argues that research in the humanities ‘must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than methods’.5 Bal describes her own project as ‘cultural analysis’, and emphasizes its interdisciplinary rather than literary character; but nonetheless, her remarks may be used to develop another definition of literary theory, in which it does not function as a methodological framework, but as a sustained attempt to clarify and revitalize the words and concepts – these ‘miniature theories’6 – used by literary critics and ordinary readers alike. In this spirit, this book sees Iser’s oeuvre as a profound and sustained reflection on the notions of life, the novel, aesthetics, myth, modernity, negation, fiction, culture and theory itself. Finally, Peter Lamarque distances himself from the counter-intuitive literary theory a` la Compagnon, and

3 Rene´ Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (London: Peregrine Books, 1968 [1949]), p. 39. 4 Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. by Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1998]), p. 9. 5 Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (London: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 5. 6 Ibid., p. 22.

Introduction —— 3

promotes the ‘philosophy of literature’, a branch of aesthetics that subjects general questions about ‘critical practice and [...] the special features of reading literature as literature’ to lucid conceptual analysis.7 In a similar fashion, this book strives to give an accessible analysis of the conceptual issues dealt with by Iser. These different – but, to my mind, not necessarily incompatible – ways of thinking about the theoretical study of literature clarify both what is at stake in Iser’s work and the aims of this book, which seeks to describe it. Specific literary works will play an important role, but the principal aim is to nuance literary prejudices – including those of Iser – through a lucid analysis of general principles and important concepts. Each of the following chapters adopts a roughly similar structure. They all focus on the theoretical argument of a specific book or a related set of books by Iser, supplemented by related passages from smaller essays or more literarycritical publications. My analysis is originally based on the German versions of his works, as their chronology and formulation sometimes differ from that of the official English translations. Iser’s study of Walter Pater was translated in the 1980s, for instance, but was originally published in German in 1960. The German table of contents of Iser’s book on Shakespeare contains the phrase ‘Ordnungsschwund und Politik’ [Politics and Loss of Order] – an explicit reference to the work of philosopher Hans Blumenberg –, whereas its English counterpart substitutes the much less specific ‘Manipulation of the World Order’. In many other cases as well, important information is lost if we do not start out from the German versions of Iser’s books, even though he collaborated on and authorized their translations in English.8 For ease of comprehension and reference, however, I will quote from the more easily accessible English translations where they are available and supply my own version where they are not, or a modified version where they are not satisfactory (for long quotations, I have included the original German versions in the footnotes). To contextualize these German books, each chapter also begins with a brief analysis of their reception or the institutional setting in which they were produced. While neither aspect is discussed at length here (a detailed study of Iser’s reception alone would require a book of its own), it is nonetheless important to touch on the reception of different parts of his theory by other critics, and on how his books originated within particular institutional settings or debates. Furthermore, by tracing conceptual similarities and differences with other thinkers, we are not only able to place Iser’s thought in context, but also to pinpoint its specific contribution to literary studies. A good example is the comparison with Ro7 Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 11. 8 For a candid account of Iser’s collaboration with his translator, see Wilson, ‘Working with Wolfgang’.

4 —— Introduction ger Caillois in Chapter 4, which clearly reveals the aesthetic agenda behind Iser’s literary anthropology. The selection of complementary thinkers referred to in this study is obviously limited, and other choices would certainly have been possible. Exploring each of Iser’s intertexts in detail would be a massive and overly complex undertaking, however, which would confuse rather than clarify his argument. Hence, this book draws attention to those links which are crucial for a comprehensive understanding of Iser, including both familiar connections – Booth, Ingarden – as well as equally important but more unexpected links – Kierkegaard, Blumenberg, Caillois, Kermode, Hofstadter. Each of these five chapters also has a more practical component. My analyses always conclude with a brief example drawn from contemporary literature, in order to demonstrate the practical and continued relevance of Iser’s abstract theoretical insights. I have chosen to focus exclusively on novels (albeit novels from different subgenres, including the contemporary novel of manners, the historical novel, the post-colonial novel, the fantasy novel and, briefly, the nonfiction novel) because this was Iser’s main research area, and because I feel that the work of extrapolating his insights to other cultural practices (theatre, film, comic books, videogames) merits a separate study. Even though I have limited myself to a select number of examples, it goes without saying that my brief discussions of these novels cannot do full justice to the works concerned. Since my chief concern is Iser’s theory, I will only discuss those aspects of the texts in question that shed light on his argument, and must neglect their other features. Given that literary theory does not deliver ready-made reading methods, but simply provides us with concepts which illuminate particular textual structures, these examples merely show what happens when we juxtapose Iser’s ideas with contemporary texts. They are meant as illustrations, in other words, not as fullyfledged analyses or blueprints for a methodology. My determination to demonstrate the continued relevance of Iser’s insights should not be misunderstood either. Even though I am convinced that his work is more fruitful than most critics assume, I do not, of course, follow his every word unquestioningly. Rather, this book aspires to a sort of ‘critical charity’, to modify an idea from The Range of Interpretation. I read Iser’s work with W.V.O. Quine’s ‘principle of charity’ in mind – which states that you should interpret the speaker’s statements in the most rational and truthful manner possible – but still accept that certain parts of his theory are flawed and problematic. In addition to highlighting the practical potential of Iser’s insights, each of my chapters therefore identifies some of their problems. Moreover, each chapter discusses a theme or concept central to Iser’s oeuvre by addressing the period in which it was most prominent. There are two methodological issues here. First, as many of Iser’s themes and concepts recur throughout his oeuvre and are conceptually related, the student of his work is

Introduction —— 5

faced with the problems of homonymy and synonymy. If Iser uses the same term in different phases of his career, can we assume that these terms have the same meaning? When his late publication The Range of Interpretation refers to ‘life’, for instance, are we allowed to think of the notion of ‘life’ from his first book Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings [The Worldview of Henry Fielding]? Conversely, when confronted with the different phases and notions of his work, the question arises whether notions such as the aesthetic, negativity, the imaginary and translatability are truly different, or at least partly synonymous. The only adequate way to resolve this issue, I think, is to pay careful attention to the nature and function of these terms within their different contexts. A related problem is the inevitable tension between continuity and change, similarity and difference in his thinking. Read in the light of his entire oeuvre, Iser’s later writings often seem to return to earlier ideas, and earlier works frequently appear to anticipate later reflections. At times, I will therefore deviate from the linear trajectory of my narrative, working both proleptically and analeptically. To put it in an Iser-like fashion, we might say that this book first evokes a chronological narrative and then revokes it by highlighting the recurrence of certain concepts and themes. We should bear in mind, however, that such an approach lends a consistency to this body of writings that is undoubtedly more a construct than a reality. To conclude this introduction, let me briefly survey the five chapters of the book. Chapter 1, ‘Comic and Aesthetic Novels’, sketches Iser’s early academic career and the beginnings of his theory, with particular reference to his two dissertations. As I will demonstrate, Iser’s PhD thesis, Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings (1952), draws on the ‘anthropological’ typologies of the Geistesgeschichte movement to analyze the different comic strategies in Fielding’s work. Paying special attention to the novel, Iser’s account is clearly shaped by Georg Luka´cs’s account of this quintessentially modern genre. In his Habilitation, Walter Pater. Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen [later translated as Walter Pater. The Aesthetic Moment] (1960), Iser discusses the aestheticist novels and essays of Walter Pater on the basis of Sören Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialist work Either/Or (1843). As we shall see, this discussion culminates in Iser’s early account of the aesthetic state, an artistically fruitful but morally problematic condition that remains a central concern in much of his later thinking. Chapter 2, ‘Montage and Modernity’ expounds the view of history and modernity behind Der implizite Leser [The Implied Reader] (1972) by analyzing Iser’s related contributions to the early Poetik und Hermeneutik conferences, looking closely at their accounts of montage, myth and metaphor. The chapter goes on to explore his analysis of Shakespeare’s history plays and their evocation of modern meaning and politics in Shakespeares Historien [later translated as Staging Politics] (1988). Both his contributions to these conferences and his work on Shakespeare reveal the importance of Hans Blumenberg’s thought for Iser’s theory, and call into question

6 —— Introduction the frequent claim that he shows little or no interest in questions of history. Chapter 3, ‘The Phenomenology of Reading’, offers a detailed examination of Iser’s Der Akt des Lesens [The Act of Reading] (1976), the book that truly launched his prodigious career as a theorist. By comparing it with Roman Ingarden’s related work on the structure and reading of the literary work, this chapter revisits important questions concerning the nature of literary fiction, the role of the reader’s imagination, the temporal character of reading, and the artistic uses of indeterminacy and negation. Chapter 4, ‘Fictions, Roles and Games’, unfolds the ‘literary anthropology’ hinted at in the transitional work Prospecting (1989) and fully explored in Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre [The Fictive and the Imaginary] (1991). My reading explains the remarkable sections on pastoral fiction and modern epistemology in the latter work, and examines Iser’s return to the topics of fiction, imagination and reading, as well as his turn to notions such as the imaginary, role-playing and games. Chapter 5, ‘The Recursions of Culture’, concludes my quasi-chronological overview by analyzing Iser’s final studies, The Range of Interpretation (2000) and How to Do Theory (2006). In these highly selfreflexive works, Iser considers the nature of literary interpretation and theory, two practices in which he himself had been engaged for much of his academic career. Implicitly, these books also claim that the recursive procedures of literary reading function as a model for a more dynamic account of culture and a more open-minded form of intercultural exchange. Together, they broaden the range of Iser’s reflections further, for his insights on translation and feedback prove relevant to all forms of human discourse, despite their roots in literary reading and novelistic forms. By discussing the different phases of Iser’s theory in fairly self-contained chapters we risk losing sight of their underlying similarities. In his overview of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, The Classical World (2005), Robin Lane Fox struggles with a similar problem, albeit one significantly larger in scope. Rather than write isolated chapters on topics such as gender and work in classical antiquity, Fox says, he chose to concentrate on the shifting shapes of three fundamental themes that were in the minds of contemporary people, namely ‘freedom, justice and luxury’.9 He feels that giving details of the changing connotations and functions of these three concepts helps him avoid reducing the different periods of classical antiquity to a false unity. For similar reasons, my book not only explains the different phases of Iser’s theory in isolation, but also identifies three fundamental issues of its own, which return in different guises throughout his work. In the final analysis, his various publications introduce different ways of thinking about modernity, meaning and humanity. As the following 9 Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World. An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p. 7.

Introduction —— 7

chapters show, his work on the novel, literary history, the reading process, literary anthropology and cultural recursion invariably underscores the productive nature of the modern age, the semantic potential of indeterminate literary texts, and the dynamic character of human beings. By sounding out the changing connotations of these related concepts, my study simultaneously identifies the terminological and conceptual differences between the various phases of his theoretical reflection. Hence, this book offers both an introduction to and a new interpretation of Germany’s leading literary theorist of the last forty years.

Chapter 1. Comic and Aesthetic Novels I say certain things because they sound better than other things I could have said.1

On 24 January 1976, Wolfgang Iser delivered his inaugural address to the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. The lecture took place between the publication of Der implizite Leser [The Implied Reader] (1972) and Der Akt des Lesens [The Act of Reading] (1976), the two studies that propelled him to international attention; and Iser used the opportunity both to take stock of the past and to map out a course for the future. In line with his intrinsic ‘need for distance [Bedürfnis nach Distanz]’, the lecture identifies his various attempts at putting the past behind him.2 The first impulse he recalls is the desire to distance himself from the world of his loving but commercially minded parents. In the hope that it would provide him with a more satisfactory direction, Iser turned to literature. As German culture was tainted for him by the war, he devoted himself to foreign literatures, especially modernist British writing. At that time, he continues, the study of these works was regarded with suspicion in the academic world. The blithe restoration of German universities after the war had detrimental effects, as it cut students off from modern literary practice as well as important scientific trends.3 Students increasingly demanded courses on structuralism and psychoanalysis, but these were summarily rejected by the retrograde academic authorities, who still favoured an approach to literature steeped in historical detail. Confronted with this situation, Iser says, he had no choice but to become an autodidact, relentlessly searching for answers in the related disciplines of philosophy and psychology, primarily in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Eduard Spranger and Karl Jaspers. Teaching assignments in other countries also provided a valuable antidote to intellectual provincialism in Germany, as did the experimentation that was typical of the newly founded University of Constance. In this account, Iser evidently stylizes himself as a revolutionary figure, who broke with stale traditions and single-handedly inaugurated a radically new perspective on literature. The Heidelberg lecture gives a seductive account of Iser’s origins, and indeed of his entire project, as an ongoing ‘search for distance’ from the stifling ideologies of the German past. This search manifested itself, as Winfried Fluck has ob-

1 Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb (Frankfurt a. M.: Schöffling, 2004), p. 491. 2 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Antrittsrede Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften’, Jahrbuch der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften für das Jahr 1976 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), pp. 27–31 (p. 27). 3 See ibid., p. 28.

10 —— Chapter 1 served, in Iser’s focus on literature, an academic pursuit which was diametrically opposed to the contemporary self-definition of Anglistik, which at that point defined itself principally as a form of historical linguistics. According to Fluck, Iser’s doctoral supervisor Hermann Martin Flasdieck ‘was strictly a linguist and did not hide his distaste for the “unscientific” nature of literary studies’.4 Taking his cue from the Heidelberg address, Fluck’s account stresses the novelty of Iser’s project. This is strikingly apt, not only because Iser is considered an advocate of modernist innovation, but also because his theory may be seen as a consistent attempt to explicate the emergence of novelty. Time and again, his work attests to his fascination with the sudden appearance of something which cannot be reduced to what went before. Yet, paradoxically, Iser’s theory also warns us that radically new beginnings are impossible, innovation always emerging out of tradition rather than ex nihilo. What is more, he argues that beginnings are inevitably inaccessible and can only be known through our potentially misleading imaginings. These reflections suggest that we should be wary about any narrative of origins. In the present case, further analysis shows that Iser’s early work was not as innovative as his lecture leads us to believe, nor was his relationship with Flasdieck wholly antagonistic. Iser explicitly thanks his supervisor for his methodological suggestions in the preface to Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings [The Worldview of Henry Fielding] (1952), and the obituary he wrote for his former supervisor reveals that Flasdieck was not opposed to the study of literature. He may have been a linguist first and foremost, but that did not stop him from wanting to transcend the increasing sub-specialization within the academic study of language and literature by advocating a form of ‘philology’ that integrated ‘linguistics and literary studies’.5 If we want a more nuanced picture of Iser’s origins, we should investigate this connection with Flasdieck in more detail. Flasdieck’s essay Kunstwerk und Gesellschaft [Artwork and Society] (1948) exposes the similarities and differences between himself and Iser. This manifesto outlines a literary-critical programme which aimed to solve the endemic methodological and ethical problems of the post-war years. Focusing on British literature, Flasdieck set out to analyze the influence of social context on the creation and reception of works of literature, arguing that, just as the wide range of possibilities theoretically available to the artist is narrowed down by his specific social position, the reception of a work is determined by the audience its themes are likely to garner.6 Flasdieck clearly feels that the reception of literature is as

4 Winfried Fluck, ‘The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 175–210 (p. 202). 5 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Nachruf auf Hermann M. Flasdieck’, Anglia, 80.1–2 (1962), 1–8 (p. 4). 6 Flasdieck’s sociological approach to literature was shaped by the work of Levin Ludwig Schücking, who developed an early version of the reception history for which Iser’s colleague

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 11

important in this respect as its production, and therefore asserts that the proper approach has to take the reader into account; the study of the history of works [Werkgeschichte] should be complemented by the history of their effects [Wirkungsgeschichte].7 In his view, knowing about the contemporary and subsequent reception makes it easier to understand a past artefact. The manifesto develops the implications of this socio-historical approach to literature, tracing a genealogy of English literature which is underpinned by a rather crude opposition between ‘aristocratic’ and ‘democratic’ literature. This genealogy is nevertheless interesting for our purposes because it mentions many of the authors later discussed by Iser, notably Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Fielding. It also devotes attention to the novel – the early manifestations of which provide, to Flasdieck’s mind, an exceptional illustration of the sociological factors which determine the position of artworks –, and even hints at the literary importance of film. In the rest of his essay, Flasdieck reviews various contemporary methods and their implied ethics. He discards narrowly positivistic and sociological theories, such as the Marxist theorem of base and superstructure (with which Iser would later also take issue), on the grounds that they reduce individuals to mere products of their environment and contribute to the erosion of values, potentially even to the emergence of totalitarianism. Flasdieck believes that Geistesgeschichte and existentialism lead to the same problems, but nevertheless retains some of their insights. The manifesto mentions the ‘either/or’ opposition introduced by the proto-existentialist philosopher Kierkegaard; and Flasdieck is not unappreciative of the views of Dilthey and Spranger either, using the term Weltanschauung and pointing out the complex and mutable character of life [Leben], an argument I will return to later.8 Nor does he completely reject the idea of a Zeitgeist, at least if we take into account the overlap between different eras and the multifaceted nature of national cultures. But ultimately, Flasdieck subscribes to a nuanced sociological approach, which, to his mind, is uniquely able to avert the methodological and ethical confusion of post-war Europe: for it successfully combines a sense of historical relativism with an appreciation of the lasting value embedded in certain ideas and works. Only thus, he feels, can the post-war university be safeguarded from the pernicious threat of ‘politicizaHans Robert Jauß would later become famous. In this respect, see Wilhelm Voßkamp, ‘Literatursoziologie: Eine Alternative zur Geistesgeschichte? “Sozialliterarische Methoden” in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 1910 bis 1925, ed. by Christoph König and Eberhard Lämmert (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993), 291–303 (p. 295). 7 Hermann Martin Flasdieck, Kunstwerk und Gesellschaft. Eine Betrachtung über den Wissenschaftsgedanken der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung (Heidelberg: Winter, 1948), p. 27. 8 See ibid., p. 13.

12 —— Chapter 1 tion’.9 Academics, Flasdieck seems to conclude, should maintain their search for distance. Whether or not this was an adequate solution to the post-war situation, it sounds remarkably like Iser’s account of his own project.10 Despite claims to the contrary in the 1976 Heidelberg lecture, therefore, Flasdieck’s importance for Iser’s development should not be underestimated. This is not to say that Iser and Flasdieck are of one accord.11 There are significant differences between their approaches: although he retains some of their insights, Flasdieck believes that Dilthey and Kierkegaard do not offer any real solutions, and also that positive facts and sociological positions are crucial to any understanding of literature. The latter claims are nuanced, if not rejected outright, in the prefaces to Iser’s dissertation and Habilitation, where he voices his preference for a hermeneutic perspective over the narrow gathering of facts and the reduction of literary issues to sociological concerns. Moreover, Flasdieck pays no attention to the modernist literature which so fascinated his famous student. Iser’s early work is not a mere repetition of older methods then, but neither is it the revolution which his Heidelberg address implies. In these writings, Iser’s preferences may differ from those of his supervisor, but they can still be situated in the same broad field of methodological options (Geistesgeschichte, existentialism, positivism, sociology). This conclusion suggests that the innovative phase of Iser’s work should be situated in the 1960s and 1970s, rather than the 1950s, and that this innovation may perhaps be understood as a reaction to the older methodological traditions in which he himself was raised and which he adopted in his earliest publications. To further pinpoint Iser’s early thoughts on method as well as on meaning, humanity and modernity, I will now turn to Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, his PhD thesis, and Walter Pater. Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen [later translated 9 Ibid., p. 41. 10 Wolf Lepenies has pointed out that the idea of culture as ‘a noble substitute for politics’ quickly re-emerged in German intellectual circles after the Second World War. A new ‘cultural enthusiasm [...] went hand in hand with an almost visceral abstinence from politics’, even though ‘the distance of German artists and intellectuals from the public realm [...] had made them easy prey for the Nazis’. This argument implies that the apolitical attitude of contemporary students and scholars like Iser and Flasdieck was not unproblematic. See Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 9, 136, 143–44. 11 Even in a much later publication, Iser still targets the Young Grammarians [Junggrammatiker], the linguistic tradition of his supervisor. Philology ‘as practiced by the socalled “Young Grammarians” [.. .] strove to become a science by discovering the laws of language and language change’, Iser says, and these scientific aspirations ‘established a hierarchy within the cosmos of disciplines that left the humanities as the poor cousin’. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity and its Feedback: the Two-Sidedness of Humanistic Discourse’, Partial Answers, 1.1 (2003), 1–33 (p. 8).

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 13

as Walter Pater. The Aesthetic Moment] (1960), his Habilitationsschrift. Eight years separate these two publications, and there are a number of conspicuous differences between them. Nevertheless, they share an interest in the novel, being devoted to the oeuvres of two English novelists,12 and grapple with the same methodological problem, one that still concerns us today, even in this very book, namely how can we adequately describe the development of a certain oeuvre? The affinity between these books and earlier methodological traditions also implies that, together, these studies provide a more nuanced picture of Iser’s entry into the academic system than his Heidelberg lecture. As I will show, his dissertations can be connected to Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte and Kierkegaard’s protoexistentialism. My analysis of these books concludes, in anticipation of the next chapter, by identifying the remarkable tension between modernity and its prehistory in both studies.

Beyond Geistesgeschichte No one will disagree if I say that Geistesgeschichte (which may be roughly translated as ‘history of the creative spirit’) is not the most fashionable topic in literary studies. This term refers to a broad movement in the German humanities from the beginning of the twentieth century, which is akin to the so-called ‘history of ideas’ and, inspired by the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, sought to develop a philosophical approach to literature and other arts. Renouncing narrowly specialized perspectives, Geistesgeschichte has a highly interdisciplinary agenda, concentrating neither on a specific cultural practice – religion or art –, nor on the sum total of these practices, but on the human creative forces that underpin them. Geistesgeschichte also consistently shirks approaches derived from the sciences, and unites various non-positivistic approaches for a specifically humanistic project that promotes citizen-building rather than fact-gathering. Hence, Dilthey’s Geistesgeschichte is often portrayed as a response to Wilhelm Scherer’s positivism.13 In addition to these interdisciplinary and humanistic interests, critics associated with this approach also share a fascination with German classicism and romanticism. 12 This emphasis on novels is significant because poetry was still considered ‘the very model of literature’ at the time when Iser was writing his dissertations. See Robert Folkenflik, ‘Wolfgang Iser’s Eighteenth Century’, Poetics Today, 27.4 (2006), 675–89 (p. 676). 13 Critics have argued that the stereotypical opposition between Dilthey and Scherer should be nuanced. For further details, see Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, ‘Dilthey gegen Scherer – Geistesgeschichte contra Positivismus. Zur Revision eines wissenschaftshistorischen Stereotyps’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 74 (2000), 685–709.

14 —— Chapter 1 If Geistesgeschichte is considered to be unacceptably old-fashioned, that is because most critics have only a rough conception of the movement but a clear opinion of its problems. This opinion can be traced back to Wellek and Warren’s influential Theory of Literature (1949). According to their landmark study, Geistesgeschichte confuses philosophy and literature by reducing complex literary works to straightforward philosophical tracts and shifting our attention from strictly literary concerns to a misguided focus on philosophical themes such as the concept of ‘man’ and his relation to death and love. (Not coincidentally, these themes will figure prominently in Iser’s literary anthropology.) Another problem is that the use of the term Weltanschauung, widespread in Geistesgeschichte, reduces authors to a limited and implausible set of psychological types. Most famously of all, the vague and untenable concept Zeitgeist allegedly implies that the movement blurs the differences within the same historical periods and masks the similarities between different epochs. In Wellek and Warren’s concise conclusion, the problems addressed by Geistesgeschichte may be real, but their solutions ‘have been premature and, frequently, immature’.14 Exit Dilthey. The critical consensus teaches us that the movement in question was not only fatally flawed, but was also superseded in the 1940s by the text-based approaches of, for example, Emil Staiger and Wolfgang Kayser, not to mention Wellek and Warren themselves. It is strange, then, that Iser’s dissertation of 1952 still adheres to the tenets of the unfashionable Geistesgeschichte, which might explain why Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings has never been translated into English, in contrast to Iser’s Habilitation on Walter Pater (which has, in fact, recently been republished in paperback). This unexpected connection is easy to understand from an institutional perspective, since many of Iser’s teachers were deeply influenced by the ideas of Geistesgeschichte. As the curriculum vitae appended to the unpublished 1950 version of Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings informs us, Iser’s teachers included Eduard Spranger and Karl Jaspers, influential adherents of Dilthey’s ideas who developed his thinking in the fields of psychology and philosophy. It also mentions that Iser took classes with literary critics such as Korff, Kluckhohn, Beißner and Böckmann, all of whom were involved in some way or other with Geistesgeschichte. More interesting than these biographical links, however, is the fact that Iser explicitly uses many terms and ideas from Dilthey, Jaspers and Spranger. These insights may be more fruitful than the critical consensus suggests. Kurt Müller-Vollmer has argued, for instance, that the traditional criticism of Dilthey’s terminological apparatus fails to do justice to its originality and complexity.15 And the underlying connection be14 Rene´ Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (London: Peregrine Books, 1968 [1949]), p. 122. 15 Kurt Müller-Vollmer, Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Literature. A Study of Wilhelm

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 15

tween Iser’s early work and his later thinking, a connection which is not impaired by the use of Dilthey’s thinking in his dissertation, similarly suggests that Wellek and Warren’s criticism may itself have been premature. Let us take a closer look at the use of Geistesgeschichte terminology in Iser’s dissertation, especially the terms ‘life’ [Leben], Weltanschauung and Zeitgeist, before turning to its modification and disappearance in the Habilitation. In the writings of Dilthey, Leben refers to ‘the individual and the general [. ..] “life” of man’ and is largely synonymous with the ‘historical-human world’.16 In Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, Leben is similarly seen as both the individual process of existence, in which ‘suffering and happiness’ alternate, and a historical force that unsettles stifling conventions as well as productive projects.17 Perhaps we should think of it as the disruptive force that opposes all rigid systems. Unsurprisingly, this dynamic ‘life’ is associated with water. On the one hand, the flow of life undermines reductive conventions: ‘a humanistic outlook concerned with [...] eternally flowing life has to consider suspicious every solidification of character [and] mind, as it is a sign of a diminishing life force’.18 On the other hand, Iser sees Fielding struggling with time, and having to acknowledge again and again ‘how eternally flowing life started to eat away at [unterspülen] him’.19 In the final analysis, life is the individual existence as well as the contingent, historical ‘stream’ that undermines our constrictive and constructive responses to reality. Since it cannot be pinned down, we must continually search for new ways of responding to life’s demands. This leads us to the second concept, namely Weltanschauung. Iser does not use this notion as part of a simple expressive poetics or as shorthand for a rigid worldview (which is why the translation ‘worldview’ is so unsatisfactory), but as a name for the interaction between man and reality, and the position of the subject vis-a`-vis the realities of existence. Iser’s study on Fielding actually maintains, in a move that anticipates Wayne Booth’s take on the ‘implied author’, that the novel forms an organic whole in which ‘the ethics of the creative subjectivity,

Dilthey’s ‘Poetik’ (The Hague: Mouton, 1963). This study also suggests that Iser’s later work remains akin to some of Dilthey’s views. For the latter indicates, like Iser, that literary studies is related to philosophical anthropology and discusses both the temporal sequence of reading and the imaginative activity of readers. Iser’s views on these matters are explored in Chapters 3 and 4. 16 Ibid., p. 137. 17 Wolfgang Iser, Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1952), p. 22. 18 Ibid., p. 99. ‘So muß einer humanistischen Weltsicht mit ihrem dauernden Blick auf [. . .] das ewig fließende Leben jede Erstarrung des Charakters [und] Verstandes [.. .] verdächtig sein, weil sie ein Zeichen nachlassender Lebenskraft ist’. 19 Ibid., p. 237.

16 —— Chapter 1 as revealed in the work’s contents’ functions as a unifying principle.20 This ethical position toward reality is not exclusively subjective, however, but bears the imprint of contemporary ideas. According to the framework of Jaspers, which Iser uses here, the Weltanschauung of any given figure consists of three components, namely the subjective attitude [Einstellung] or life-form [Lebensform], the contemporary world-picture [Weltbild], and the life-process [Lebensprozeß] which results from the interaction between these subjective and historical components. A person’s individual biography initially gives rise to a basic frame of mind, marked by specific ideals: a ‘life-form’. As no single life-form can truly capture an individual existence, however, the individual psyche must inevitably be clarified with the help of different ideal types. Fielding’s psyche, for instance, combines (in Iser’s view) realistic, social and religious traits. Yet this composite psychological attitude is in itself but an empty guiding principle, which requires external material to articulate itself. The author’s personal ideals therefore combine with contemporary ideas to form an intersubjectively accessible ‘world-picture’. Applied to Fielding, Iser’s analysis identifies those eighteenth-century ideas – man, nature and humour – which allowed the author to express his personal life-form in a more objective fashion. The analysis of Fielding’s Weltanschauung concludes with a reflection on his ‘life-process’. In Jaspers’s framework, this notion refers to the process whereby an individual, after developing his personal ideals into a proper world-picture, tries to establish them, realizes that they cannot simply be imposed on reality, and gradually fine-tunes his knowledge of self and world. What is striking about Fielding’s life-process, Iser’s analysis goes on to show, is that it resorts to various comic devices. When reality does not behave as we want it to, it is suggested, all we can do is laugh. In Iser’s interpretation, Fielding uses three strategies to respond to the shifting demands of reality: namely satire, irony, and humour. Importantly, these comic phenomena are not understood by Iser in an eighteenth-century sense, nor in the way Fielding viewed them, but rather ‘in an anthropological sense’.21 In their various ways, each of these strategies brings personal values into conflict with the pressures of reality. For our purposes, the satire of Fielding’s comedies and the irony of Jonathan Wild (1743) are not dissimilar. In both cases the reader’s ordinary reality is placed in brackets. In a process that Iser will later call ‘irrealization’, satire disconnects readers from reality, and irony allows them to transcend temporarily the here and now. Both strategies also create a particular semantic situation. This is clearest in the description of satiric wit, which is supposedly structured in such a manner that we first seem to understand one meaning before, suddenly, ‘a deeper [...] meaning shines through as the real message 20 Ibid., p. 160. 21 Ibid., p. 241.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 17

[Vorstellungsinhalt]’.22 This conception of meaning – according to which the reader has to revise his initial understanding of the text – prefigures Iser’s later, famous view of literary ambiguity and the reading process. A final similarity between satire and irony is that both strategies expose social vices and promote social virtues. These ideals of virtue are still implicit in satire, but they cannot be misunderstood in irony, for the values embraced by the text are here present ‘beneath the veil [unter der Kappe] of ironic negation’.23 Irony is thus superior to satire, because its alternatives are less ambiguous. However, the third strategy, that of humour, is even better, because it not only pokes fun at external reality, but implicates the subject in its critique. Humour is also less harsh than satire and irony, for it accommodates and reconciles different perspectives. This is clearest in Tom Jones (1749), which Iser considers to be Fielding’s greatest achievement. Even though humour is not as acerbic as satire and irony, its awareness of the ways in which reality resists our better selves may nevertheless culminate in ‘a humour of melancholy’.24 Humour is an important human faculty, seeing that it counteracts the rupture between self and world, but apparently, it is not necessarily funny. As these reflections on comedy indicate, Iser’s early studies already discuss the anthropological function of literature, which is understood here as an instrument which helps readers cope with the inevitable tension between personal ideals and worldly realities. The final notion that merits our attention here is Zeitgeist. We recall that this term is frequently considered to be synonymous with Geistesgeschichte, and that critiques of this movement often take the form of an attack against the term. In Theory of Literature, Wellek and Warren define it as ‘some intellectual atmosphere or “climate” of opinion’,25 and take it to task, apart from its vagueness, for its undue emphasis on the unity and individuality of historical periods – every aspect of a certain age supposedly revealing the same Zeitgeist, and every period supposedly showing a Zeitgeist that is radically different from past and future periods. This objection is partly justified in the case of Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, as the notion Zeitgeist here sometimes refers to the way in which a period’s cultural activity reveals a signature focus on specific parts of life. In keeping with the emphasis on the Goethezeit in Geistesgeschichte, Iser maintains that this spiritual homogeneity is especially apparent in the English eighteenth century, when a distinct emphasis on the ‘human’ united all cultural practices. Sweepingly, he contends that, in this period, we find similar tendencies – clarification, particularization and privatization – ‘[e]verywhe-

22 23 24 25

Ibid. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., p. 252. Wellek and Warren, Theory, p. 73.

18 —— Chapter 1 re’.26 However, Iser nuances this monolithic conception of historical periods in three ways. First, he agrees with Dilthey’s claim that ‘[l]iterary works [...] do not derive their “historical content” from the spirit of the age [but] it is rather through them and their creators that this spirit first comes into being’.27 The creative individual is not only shaped by, but also shapes his era: ‘[a]ctive figures, as the vital parts of their century, first create the magic of the Zeitgeist, which channels the constitutive demonstrations of the life of a given era in a similar direction’.28 Second, Iser agrees with Dilthey that every historical situation is characterized by ‘a “multiplicity of particular phenomena” existing “stubbornly side by side” with each other’.29 Apparently, the Zeitgeist is never fully homogenous. Iser is aware of the fact that the eighteenth century, for instance, is not as uniform as he occasionally seems to suggest. This period is unsystematic and multilayered, he concedes, and ‘everything is as complex as that what people were looking for: human beings’.30 (As we will see, the idea that human beings are uniquely complex and indeterminate figures will return in Iser’s literary anthropology.) The Zeitgeist of Fielding’s time is inevitably ambiguous, because in the course of a century ‘[t]he connotations of [...] ideas changed [...], and a modification of the [contemporary] body of thought was therefore an unavoidable consequence’.31 Third, Iser points out that those who shape their era are sometimes ahead of their contemporaries and are therefore at odds with their own times. Because of his concern with social issues and his realistic aesthetic, ‘Fielding was not yet a Romantic, nor was he an Enlightenment thinker of a rational stamp, but rather a subjective, transitional figure’.32 As these observations show, Iser does not necessarily entertain a reductive view of historical periods, even though he uses the term Zeitgeist. We have seen that Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings analyses Fielding’s oeuvre by describing his relationship with the Zeitgeist, his personal life-form, and his unceasing attempt to objectify his ideals into a world-picture and adapt them to the demands of life via the use of comic forms. What happens to this methodological framework in Iser’s second book, Die Autonomie des Ästheti-

26 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 74. 27 Müller-Vollmer, Phenomenological Theory, p. 179. 28 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 256. ‘[d]ie tätigen Menschen als die Organe ihres Jahrhunderts schaffen erst die Magie des Zeitgeistes, der die grundlegenden Lebensäußerungen eines Zeitalters in eine gleiche Richtung lenkt’. 29 Müller-Vollmer, Phenomenological Theory, p. 178. 30 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 80. 31 Ibid., p. 257. ‘[d]ie Begriffsassoziationen der [.. .] Ideen wurden [.. .] andere, und eine Modifizierung des Gedankengutes war eine unausbleibliche Folge davon’. 32 Ibid., p. 229. ‘Fielding war noch kein Romantiker, jedoch auch nicht mehr Aufklärer rationaler Prägung, sondern ein subjektiver Geist des Übergangs’.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 19

schen? In this later thesis, the notion of ‘life’ recurs, but with certain variations. Through the intermediary of Marius, Walter Pater’s prime fictional character, Iser again refers to the idea of suffering. If the Fielding book saw it as an inevitable consequence of existence, however, the Pater study implies that suffering is a matter of choice rather than necessity. Hardship is explicitly associated with a specific way of living. Those who devote their life to aesthetically pleasing moments have two options: either they actively search for a new continuity or they passively experience ‘life [Leben] as suffering’.33 And again, ‘life’ refers to that which eludes systematic thinking. Iser asserts, for instance, that Pater would never accept an ‘all-embracing theory of life, for by definition such theories could only be reductions’, and that art, from his aestheticist point of view, implies the disruption of ‘solidified forms of life’.34 The vocabulary of fluidity returns as well, for Iser again speaks of ‘streaming [fluten] life’.35 What is new in this study, however, is that life is sharply contrasted with the everyday; in contrast to the realistic novels of Fielding, aestheticist art recombines existing realities in order to transcend everyday life, an endeavour which requires forms of expression ‘beyond the everyday use of language’.36 The suffering of existence and the recalcitrance of life recur in Iser’s second book, then, but the former is now seen as the consequence of an aesthetic life and the latter is clearly distinguished from the everyday. The next point of comparison between these two theses is the cluster of concepts surrounding the notion of Weltanschauung. If we consider his argument closely, Iser might certainly have used these concepts in Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen: he discusses Pater’s treatment of contemporary themes – art, history, myth, and nature –, and this could easily have been described, as in the Fielding book, in terms of Pater’s ‘world-picture’ and ‘life-process’. Yet Iser chooses to drop these terms. The reason for their avoidance can be gleaned from his continued use of the other terms from the Weltanschauung-cluster, namely attitude [Einstellung] and life-form [Lebensform]. Importantly, these are no longer applied to Pater, but to one of his characters, especially the eponymous hero from Marius the Epicurean (1885). Iser’s description of Marius’ existential attitude is reminiscent of the typologies of Spranger and Jaspers discussed earlier, even though he does not mention them here. If the study on Fielding analysed the author’s realistic and social nature, we might say, the one on Pater explores Marius’ aesthetic outlook, his ‘optical attitude [Einstellung]’:37 33 Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater. Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1960), p. 207. 34 Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater. The Aesthetic Moment, trans. by David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 [1960]), pp. 17, 168. 35 Iser, Autonomie, p. 90. 36 Ibid., p. 70. 37 Ibid., p. 173.

20 —— Chapter 1 If reality is conceived as an optical phenomenon, it can be encountered from a distance, and Marius as a keen observer need not participate in it, but has only to open himself up to it. As [. ..] observing [is] uppermost in his mind, he must avoid all commitments which will distract him from [this] contemplative attitude.38

In contrast to Fielding’s multifaceted personality, the ‘absolutized life-form’ [Lebensform] of art does not choose a specific course of action to achieve particular ideals, but contemplates fleeting impressions and refrains from making choices altogether.39 Marius is not able to establish a coherent existence, for the story of his life reads like a Bildungsroman in reverse: ‘he repeatedly withdraws from the confident attitudes [Lebensformen], which admit no ambiguity, developed through Epicureanism, Stoicism and Christianity’.40 Iser does not analyse Marius’ Weltanschauung, in other words, because he is unable to do so: casting doubt on Jaspers’s framework, this fictional character refrains from fully subscribing to any specific life-form. Pater’s characters do not attest to a proper lifeprocess either. In contrast to the comic reconciliations of man and reality in Fielding’s work, the deaths of the protagonists in Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887) demonstrate the final ‘impossibility of reconciling the newly formed incongruity between man and world’.41 Bridging the gap between self and world is still important, but it is no longer feasible. A similar pattern can be observed with regard to Zeitgeist. Rather like Fielding, Pater both does and does not fit into his period. Iser’s book points to many similarities between the aestheticist author and his contemporaries. Even the quintessentially Paterian themes of the ‘moment’, the ‘problem of decision’ and the resulting ‘melancholy’ recur in the work of many nineteenth-century authors.42 But these similarities are often relegated to footnotes, which implies that it is the novel qualities of Pater’s position which occupy centre stage. This view of the author’s historical position is consonant with the aesthete’s work, for the theme of being at odds with one’s contemporaries can be found throughout Pater’s novels, which are not concerned with the ‘general conditions [.. .] common to all the products of [a] particular age [but with] what is unique in the individual genius’.43 Hence it comes as no surprise that Iser criticizes the concept of Zeitgeist in talking about Pater’s broad view of the Renaissance:

38 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 130–31. 39 Iser, Autonomie, p. 101. 40 Ibid., p. 175. ‘er entzieht sich fortwährend der Eindeutigkeit und der Bestimmtheit von Lebensformen, wie sie sich in Epikuräismus, Stoa und Christentum herausgebildet haben’. 41 Ibid., p. 207. 42 Iser, Aesthetic, pp. 189, 191, 192. 43 Ibid., p. 93.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 21

Pater is not interested in the central ideas, which give historical periods clearly circumscribed limits. Eras for Pater are, rather, qualities, which acquire a distinguished character when they touch the new and unfamiliar, and through this contact stir a feeling which, as closed totalities, they do not possess. [...] The moment of transition therefore becomes a relational concept, which does not aim to capture the constitutive ethico-religious ideas of historical periods, but rather tries to encompass something which does not pretend to spiritual and moral clarity [Eindeutigkeit].44

To Pater’s mind, ‘periods of transition’ are fascinating because they introduce ‘unknown nuances’ in old ideas and thereby weld past and future together.45 A notion like Zeitgeist, Iser’s argument implies, is not appropriate for investigating transitional periods such as the early Christian times of Marius, the Renaissance of Leonardo Da Vinci or the fin de sie `cle of Pater himself, who is also ‘a transitional figure’.46 However, as we have seen, the idea of Zeitgeist does not necessarily imply the neglect of historical contingency and diversity. In fact, Pater’s interest in the way in which minor adjustments may cause major shifts recalls Iser’s earlier claim that evolving associations ultimately modify ideas fundamental to eighteenth-century thought. And Fielding was, of course, already seen as a figure of transition in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings. Iser’s PhD thesis, then, if not his Habilitation, uses methodological insights from Geistesgeschichte, insights which are perhaps not as reductive as the movement’s later reception implies. More important for our purposes is the reappearance of many of these ideas in different guises in Iser’s later work. The very general claim that authors, novelists especially, take up a certain position with regard to contemporary reality, and appropriate certain ideas from their culture in order to do so, returns in the notion of the ‘repertoire’. Similarly, the thesis that certain aspects of reality show a tenacious resistance to human processing returns in the idea of ‘resistance’. The emphasis on a resistant ‘life’ even comes back at the end of The Range of Interpretation (2000), a book that was published fifty years after Iser defended his dissertation: ‘[l]ife cannot be frozen into a hypostatization of any of its aspects, for it is basically unrepresentable and can therefore only be conceived in terms of the transient figurations of interpretation’.47 44 Iser, Autonomie, pp. 52, 53. ‘Ihn [Pater] interessieren nicht die zentralen Ideen, die den Zeitaltern fest umrissene Linien geben. Die Epochen sind für Pater viel eher Qualitäten, die dort einen ausgezeichneten Charakter gewinnen, wo sie sich mit Neuem und Fremdartigem berühren und durch diese Berührung ein Gefühl verlebendigen, das sie als abgeschlossene Ganzheiten nicht besitzen. [.. .] Das Übergangshafte wird daher zu einem Verhältnisbegriff, der nicht auf das Erfassen konstitutiver ethisch-religiöser Ideen in den Epochen abzielt, sondern etwas zu umgreifen trachtet, das sich einer geistigen und moralischen Eindeutigkeit entzieht’. 45 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 80. 46 Ibid., p. 1. 47 Wolfgang Iser, The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 158.

22 —— Chapter 1 Moreover, the view that the ‘life-process’ shows a clash between individual preconceptions and unfamiliar realities, which gradually refines our knowledge of self and the world, is akin to Iser’s later conception of the reading process. The idea of a melancholic form of humour anticipates his later analyses of Sterne and Beckett, and the typology of comic strategies – satire, irony, humour – prefigures later typologies, such as the overview of theme-and-horizon relationships in The Act of Reading, and that of textual games in Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre [The Fictive and the Imaginary] (1991).48 Finally, Iser’s implicit argument that literary history should pay special attention to transitional periods as well as to seemingly inconsequential semantic shifts gestures in the direction of the Blumenbergian thinking we will encounter in Chapter 2.

Kierkegaard and the Aesthetic In the literary-theoretical climate of the last number of decades, any defence of the aesthetic seemed to strike a false chord. Against the background of Marxism and deconstruction, Iser’s talk of a specific ‘aesthetic response’ in books like Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen and The Act of Reading appeared as an antiquated return to nineteenth-century delusions. Yet it could be argued that his view of the aesthetic remains a fruitful starting point for contemporary critics working on the unique potential, flexibility and ethical impact of literary art. In Beginning Theory (2002), in fact, Peter Barry singles out the ‘new aestheticism’ among recent theoretical developments, summarizing this loose movement as one that ‘emphasizes the “specificity” [...] of the literary text, seeking dialogue with it rather than mastery over it, and seeing the text as part of an on-going debate, within itself and with its readers, rather than viewing it as representative of a fixed position, or as the pre-determined expression of socially conservative views’.49 As Nicholas Shrimpton has argued,50 this resurgence of interest in the aesthetic arose partly from a reconsideration of the nineteenth-century aesthetic movement. This suggests that Iser’s theoretical reflection on the aesthetic, which likewise originated

48 Iser explicitly returns to this comic typology in his study on Laurence Sterne. In the eighteenth century, he says, ‘[h]umour was no longer to be equated with the four constitutive elements of the human body, but had become a form of comedy independent of, though related to, other branches such as wit, satire, and irony’. See Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1987]), p. 106. 49 Peter Barry, Beginning Theory, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), p. 299. 50 For further details, see Nicholas Shrimpton, ‘The Old Aestheticism and the New’, Literature Compass, 2.1 (2005), 1–16.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 23

in a reconsideration of aestheticism, is not at all outdated, but is actually perfectly compatible with contemporary thinking (which may explain, incidentally, why Iser’s book on Pater has recently been republished). For a fuller understanding of Iser’s view of the ‘aesthetic’, we should return to his early study on Pater as well as consider its later echoes. Winfried Fluck has observed that Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen is important because Pater’s aestheticist oeuvre offered Iser ‘a model for the description of the aesthetic mode’ that he was later to elaborate in The Act of Reading.51 This argument is convincing because Iser’s study on Pater explicitly sets out to achieve ‘a definition of the aesthetic whose validity will extend beyond Pater’.52 It is also true that Iser’s view of the aesthetic is shaped by Kierkegaard, as Fluck notes, and that it refers to a seemingly mysterious intermediate realm which provides the blueprint for the flexible attitude of literary readers. To a certain extent, it is even true that Iser ‘cannot accept Pater’s extension of the aesthetic sphere to an aesthetic existence’.53 On the surface, he views the aesthetic as an artistic feat and an existential flaw. If it is to acquire a more definite – and, admittedly, less aesthetic – character, however, we should further clarify Iser’s notion of the aesthetic and its connection to Kierkegaard. More detailed analysis reveals that Iser may be critical of attempts to extend the aesthetic attitude to real life, but nonetheless devotes a great deal of attention to the existential implications of the aesthetic response in his study on Pater, as The Act of Reading does later. In the preface to the English translation, Iser notes that he has ‘borrowed the necessary heuristics from Kierkegaard, especially his Either/Or [.. .] though with the reservation that the aesthetic existence is not to be viewed as [...] a preliminary stage of any other form of existence’.54 In other words, Kierkegaard’s analysis helps us to pinpoint the nature of a life devoted to art, as long as we refrain from connecting his remarks on the aesthetic existence to the subsequent ethical and religious stages of life. A brief summary of the most relevant of Kierkegaard’s insights will be helpful here. His work Either/Or (1843) presents the thoughts of two main narrators who hold a different ‘life-view’ – not unlike Iser’s Lebensform –, a different ‘concep-

51 Fluck, ‘Search’, p. 181. 52 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 5. In his review of a book about Oscar Wilde, Iser argues that ‘Kierkegaard [...] illuminated the problem of aestheticism once and for all’. This claim suggests that, to Iser’s mind, Kierkegaard’s reflections are relevant for the entire aestheticist movement. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Aatos Ojala. Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde’, Review of English Studies, 7 (1956), 215–16 (p. 216). 53 Fluck, ‘Search’, p. 182–83. 54 Iser, Aesthetic, p. viii.

24 —— Chapter 1 tion of the meaning of life and of its purpose’.55 Whereas the first volume sketches the ‘aesthetic’ view of life, the second maps out the ‘ethical’ alternative and briefly hints at a religious perspective in the concluding sermon. Just as Kierkegaard’s work moves from the first to the third view of life, the ideal process of existential development starts with the aesthetic and culminates in the religious perspective. At the end of this process, the different components of the self are supposedly integrated, resulting in a state of moral and psychological equilibrium. Only now are individuals able to make choices in the present which enable them to realize those future possibilities that are consonant with their past, which they have now fully accepted. Since this developmental trajectory can be interrupted at any given point, however, Kierkegaard presents his readers with ‘ideal personality types’ or emblematic incarnations of specific stages to help them perfect their spiritual development.56 That is where the two volumes of Either/Or and their respective narrators come in; the artist and the judge are clear, though not unironic, representatives of the aesthetic and ethical existence, respectively.57 The first volume presents two distinct ways of living aesthetically, namely the ‘sensual immediacy and [...] theoretical reflection’ associated with Don Juan and Faust.58 In contrast to the ideal personality, both attitudes display a disharmonious relationship between the components of the self. They put an excessive emphasis on present pleasures and future possibilities and hence neglect the existential duty of making conscientious choices on the basis of past commitments. The problematic result of an aesthetic existence is thus ‘that the self becomes “multifarious” either as an array of conflicting sensual desires, or as a collection of incompatible possibilities’.59 Perceiving that the pursuit of specific alternatives leads to similar regrets, the aesthete advocates passive indecision rather than committed decision-making. He contemplates rather than synthesizes possibilities, for ‘the true eternity does not lie behind either/or but

55 Sören Kierkegaard, Either/Or, ed. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 [1843]), II: p. 179. 56 Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship. A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 75–6. 57 The distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical life-view provides the blueprint for Iser’s interpretation of Pater, but the straightforward opposition between the unethical narrator of the first and the un-aesthetic narrator of the second volume is thrown into doubt by Kierkegaard’s own text. See Ben De Bruyn, ‘Art for Heart’s Sake. The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser’, Art and Life in Aestheticism. De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor, ed. by Kelly Comfort (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 208–31. 58 Taylor, Pseudonymous, p. 128. 59 Ibid., p. 184.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 25

before it’.60 In this view, we should not actively decide, but passively enjoy or reflect. By contrast, Kierkegaard’s second volume is preoccupied with the decisions that make up the ethical view of life. The ethical self, it argues, has to appropriate itself in its concrete, determined being by first mentally reverting, as it were, his desirable and less desirable actual features into possibilities, and then consciously choosing and accepting all of them. After fully embracing who he or she is, the self can then choose those future possibilities that are compatible with its now properly understood actual self. The choices of the ethical stage unite the fragmented components of the aesthetic self, as they resolve the tug-of-war between Don Juan’s conflicting desires and Faust’s contradictory possibilities: By committing oneself to ethical ideals, one assumes the obligation of remaining loyal to those goals throughout temporal duration. With this decision, the self gains a certain continuity. Some possibilities are excluded, and others are opened. Furthermore, one becomes the master over one’s inclinations, for desires are controlled in light of the goal for which one strives.61

Set against the first volume, the second part of Either/Or therefore contends that the indecision of the aesthetic stage cannot and should not be maintained. If you continually keep yourself ‘on the spear tip of the moment of choice’, the narrator of the second volume suggests, you ‘stop being a human being’.62 Kierkegaard’s work therefore traces a developmental narrative that leads from an uncommitted aesthetic life, devoted to sensuous immediacy or imaginary possibilities, to a conscientious ethical alternative, dedicated to harmony and continuity. Iser draws on these ideas in two seemingly incompatible ways in Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen; he uses the existential meaning of the aesthetic to criticize Pater’s aestheticism, but also elaborates the artistic interpretation of the aesthetic into a literary programme that reveals his affinity with the English aesthete. Let me begin with the critical use of the ‘aesthetic’. According to Iser, the late nineteenth century marked the rise of a mode of art which claimed to be autonomous but still required external means to legitimate it. In his reading, Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance attests to the fact that people were drawn to an ‘art for art’s sake’, because such a practice promised to remedy the problem that human life is but a Heideggerian ‘advance towards death [Vorlaufen zum Tode]’.63 But unfortunately, this heightened existential significance coincided with a downturn in art’s claim to be representative. Art had increasingly become

60 61 62 63

Kierkegaard, Either/Or, I: p. 39. Taylor, Pseudonymous, p. 207. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, II: p. 163. Iser, Autonomie, p. 41.

26 —— Chapter 1 a subjective proposition in the nineteenth century, forcing a supposedly autonomous art to look for external sanctions or sources of legitimacy. As Iser goes on to claim, Pater considers various candidates for this sanction in his essays, but discards them one by one in his fiction. History, for instance, may contain the solutions which previous generations have devised for man’s existential problems, but this sanction is unsuccessful, as Gaston de Latour (1896) shows, because not every problem has a historical antecedent and solution. The encompassing vista of myth may be reassuring, but, as Pater’s Apollo in Picardy (1893) demonstrates, it is irrevocably a thing of the past. The crucial question of his oeuvre therefore becomes how those who devote their life to art cope with the discomforting knowledge that the reassurances they seek in history and myth prove illusory. This, Iser claims, is the main topic of Marius the Epicurean. Through the protagonist, Pater puts the ‘life-view’ from the conclusion to The Renaissance to the test. As this attitude is akin to Kierkegaard’s aesthetic phase, it is not surprising that Marius faces challenges from the ethical and the religious realm in the episodes in the amphitheatre and the house of Cecilia, respectively. The former especially is crucial. Confronted with the mindless slaughter of animals, Marius experiences a clash between the hitherto accepted ‘aesthetic sphere of the moment’ and the ‘ethical sphere of continuity’.64 To arrive at this ethical sphere, Marius would need to move from enjoyment to conscientious decision-making, for ‘[o]nly by means of a decision do the [...] possibilities of the moment reduce themselves to a clear moral attitude’.65 However, Marius proves unable to replace the flow of possibilities with the coherence of an ethical attitude. Given that his further existence exhibits a fatal restlessness, Iser concludes, Pater’s novel reveals the untenability of the aesthetic life supposedly preached by The Renaissance.66 Iser’s study on Pater therefore uses the notion of the aesthetic as a category for ethical and existential evaluation, despite claiming otherwise. This observation may not seem of particular consequence, but it enables us to understand an important, but often neglected, aspect of Iser’s more famous work: the fact, namely, that his analyses often concentrate on fictional characters who are placed in situations that require potentially life-changing decisions. In a late essay on love in pastoral fiction, for instance, Iser observes that, for the characters, ‘[t]he world has grown larger than the one which the oracle inhabited, which is 64 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 144. 65 Iser, Autonomie, p. 194. ‘[n]ur in der Entscheidung reduzieren sich die [. ..] Möglichkeiten der Augenblicke zu einer eindeutigen moralischen Haltung’. 66 The Kierkegaardian model also explains Iser’s description of proper forms of existential development. Consider the footnote on Cardinal John Newman, where he sketches ‘a true existential realization’. Iser, Autonomie, p. 192. The idea of ethical decision-making also crops up in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, as is shown by the frequent allusions to the notion of the ‘Either/Or [Entweder/Oder]’. Iser, Weltanschauung, pp. 128, 156, 205, 265.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 27

why the potential for decision-making begins to open out from an either/or into an array of alternatives’.67 Another late essay notes, even more explicitly, that ‘it is impossible to exist on the tip of a pin as Sören Kierkegaard, another forerunner of modernity, put it’.68 This existentialist concern also recurs in Iser’s analyses of Walter Scott and James Joyce, as we will see. More important still for the rest of Iser’s work is his conception of the aesthetic as an artistic ideal. In Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, the ‘aesthetic’ refers to whatever is interesting, irrespective of whether it is ethically acceptable or not. Of greater significance for Iser, however, is the fact that Kierkegaard also associates the aesthetic attitude with the infinite possibilities opened up by literary reading. As his aesthetic narrator points out, ‘a book has the remarkable characteristic that it can be interpreted as one pleases’.69 This loose, artistic notion of the aesthetic is developed in Iser’s study on Pater, in ways that both distinguish it from the earlier book on Fielding and connect it to his later work on the aesthetic reading process. Inspired by the idea of an aesthetic realm of endless possibilities, Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen shows a positive appreciation of semantic play that differs markedly from the recurring emphasis on clarity in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings. In the latter, Iser frequently stresses the importance of semantic clarity and prefers Fielding’s later plays, for instance, because these convey his moral ideals ‘more clearly [deutlicher]’.70 Regardless of this emphasis on clarity, particularly moral clarity, Iser’s study on Fielding is not blind to linguistic opacity. In a lengthy footnote, he remarks that Enlightenment figures such as John Locke were well aware of the ‘polyvalence [Vieldeutigkeit]’ of words.71 And, in line with his interest in the ambiguity of irony mentioned earlier, Iser observes that Fielding himself drew attention to polysemy by writing ironic dictionary entries, in which words such as love and virtue are explained in ways that reveal their perverted meaning in contemporary society. Because of his stress on clarity, however, Iser’s dissertation remains ambiguous about ambigu-

67 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Liebe und Verwandlung im Schäferroman. Zur Poetologie des Fiktiven’, in Tales and ‘Their Telling Difference’. Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Narrativik. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Franz K. Stanzel, ed. by Herbert Foltinek and others (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), pp. 149–63 (p. 160). ‘[d]ie Welt ist größer geworden als jene, auf die das Orakel noch bezogen war, weshalb sich der Entscheidungsspielraum von einem Entweder/Oder in eine Vielfalt von Alternativen auszufächern beginnt’. 68 Wolfgang Iser, ‘German Jewish Writers during the Decline of the Hapsburg Monarchy: Assessing the Assessment of Gershon Shaked’, in Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. by Emily Budick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 259–73 (p. 267). 69 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, I: p. 374. 70 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 36. 71 Ibid., p. 291.

28 —— Chapter 1 ity. Not so the study on Pater. In Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen, the quality of ‘clarity’ is no longer positively evaluated, but is explicitly opposed to intriguing phenomena such as Pater’s indeterminate style, the transitional periods he is fascinated with and the appeal, whatever its problems, of the aesthetic existence. The aestheticist writer replaces determinate concepts with an aesthetic ‘play of possibilities’, looks at historical developments which are divested of ‘clarity [Eindeutigkeit]’ and ponders an aesthetic existence, which does not commit itself to ‘a clear [eindeutig[e]] moral attitude’.72 This more appreciative view of ambiguity and the aesthetic is crucial for Iser’s better known work, as a brief comparison of the Pater study and The Act of Reading will make clear. In Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen, Iser claims that the aesthetic is a highly relative principle, the value of which depends on the recipient: ‘[b]eauty will vary from one observer to the next’.73 Additionally, the aesthetic is associated with the evocation of the unknown rather than the reproduction of the old: ‘[f]reed from the binding force of [traditional] conventions, art can give access to territories hitherto concealed by them’.74 The logical consequence is that it defines itself in opposition to the existing world: ‘the aesthetic [is] comprehensible only in terms of contradiction to the norms of the age’.75 Iser here also relates the aesthetic to a specific, impressionistic style, which leads to a clash of images. Pater’s descriptions of the Mona Lisa and the shield of Achilles, he feels, ‘giv[e] free rein to the triumphant observer’s imagination’ by their surprising ‘montage of images’.76 We have seen that the indecision of the aesthetic attitude may be problematic in real life, but its flexibility nevertheless approximates the open attitude which befits literary readers. Its embrace of different possibilities is seen, finally, as an attempt to ward off the fear of death, ‘the pain of finiteness’.77 If the Fielding book described the anthropological function of art in terms of a comic reconciliation of self and world, the Pater study therefore argues that art’s endless panorama of lives and meanings – ‘the fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences’, to quote from Pater’s reading of the Mona Lisa – attenuates our painful awareness of mortality. On the basis of these aestheticist writings, in short, Iser initially defines the aesthetic as a relative, exploratory, counter-ideological phenomenon that mitigates our existential fear of death via a flux of mental images and an attitude of open-minded receptivity akin to the activity of the reader.

72 73 74 75 76 77

Iser, Autonomie, pp. 51, 53, 194. Iser, Aesthetic, p. 64. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 30.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 29

This account of the aesthetic returns unchanged in The Act of Reading. As its subtitle indicates, Iser’s theory of reading offers a ‘theory of aesthetic response’. If we reread the book with his early work on Pater and Kierkegaard in mind, several aspects of the aesthetic immediately stand out. In this later study, for instance, the aesthetic still refers to a relative phenomenon that realizes itself in opposition to contemporary reality and charts unexplored terrain. Aesthetic value is ‘an empty principle, realizing itself by organizing outside realities in such a way that the reader could build up a world no longer exclusively determined by the data of the world familiar to him’.78 Once again, the aesthetic is linked to the mental images generated by reading; in line with the description of Pater’s montage-like style, The Act of Reading argues that the reading of literary texts creates and transforms mental images in our minds, derailing the text’s perspicuous development and generating a wealth of semantic possibilities. In a further essay, Iser notes even more explicitly that aesthetic experiences lead to ‘a continual stimulation of the [senses], thus making them yield hitherto unforeseeable possibilities of visualizing and ideating’.79 These later reflections on the aesthetic also return to the connection with the self and his or her reader-like, open-minded attitude: ‘[a]lthough self-fashioning is not in itself aesthetic, the aesthetic manifested in the back-and-forth movement is instrumental in enabling the shifting profiles of the self to emerge’.80 Apparently, the aesthetic may have a beneficial effect as well as a detrimental one on the self’s personal development. Consider the following passage on the relation between aesthetics and politics: Politics [.. .] is decision-based and partisan, whereas the aesthetic is a cascade of possibilities, unbounded in range. [. . .] [P]olitics has to weigh and ponder procedures and alternatives before decisions are made, and this is the door through which possibilities creep in. Possibilizing may either paralyze decision-making, or suppress partisan bias in favor of acknowledging plurality.81

Thus a moderate state of aesthetic indecision may actually be a helpful stage in the process of deciding upon a specific course of action. In a final connection with his later work, the thesis that the aesthetic enables us to ward off our fear of death via its panorama of endless lives and possibilities will be further developed in The Fictive and the Imaginary. Throughout his career, Iser therefore subscribed 78 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]), p. 179. 79 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Resurgence of the Aesthetic’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 1–15 (p. 8). 80 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Aesthetic and the Imaginary’, in The States of ‘Theory’. History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. by David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 201–20 (p. 210). 81 Iser, ‘Resurgence’, p. 14, emphasis added.

30 —— Chapter 1 to the positive notion of the aesthetic proposed as early as his Habilitation. For him, the aesthetic is a relative, counter-ideological and exploratory force that creates mental images, transforms the reader and soothes our fear of death. As this early account of the aesthetic is based on Pater, it appears that Iser’s later project remains indebted to the aestheticist tradition. But in ‘Changing Functions of Literature’, an important essay that was included in the collection Prospecting (1989), he claims the reverse, and points out various problems of nineteenth-century aestheticism. This tradition naively tried to distance itself from reality, Iser claims, but it inevitably remained linked to the real world. Given that it is often associated with a belief in Bildung, it is hopelessly outdated as well, because literature is no longer a credible instrument for acquiring social status in a world which is increasingly dominated by other media. What is more, ‘[h]umanization through culture has been proved by history – especially in Germany – to be an illusion’.82 Yet, these criticisms notwithstanding, Iser’s alternative implicitly returns to nineteenth-century ideas. The observation that ‘any talk of the practical use of literature is a thing of the past’ mirrors the attempt of autonomous art to rise ‘above any practical use’.83 In direct contradiction to its purported absence of practical utility, moreover, Iser has conceded that literature may still function as a form of ‘cultural capital’ and play a role in social recognition.84 The nineteenth-century ideal of the ‘humanistic education’ also returns when Iser defends his own brand of literary studies. Literary anthropology no longer tries to instil pre-given values or encyclopaedic knowledge, Iser points out, but it is still able to offer some form of Bildung through its illumination of our unreflective attitudes.85 His brand of literary studies may be different from nineteenth-century approaches, but it increases our self-awareness and therefore aspires to a ‘humanization effect [Humanisierungseffekt]’ which is not that different from the one which was previously ascribed to the process of Bildung.86 In more general terms, the argument that literature can rehumanize us by revealing ‘the vast number of ways in which human faculties can be used to open up the world

82 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 207. 83 Ibid., pp. 208, 201. 84 See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Why Literature Matters’, in Why Literature Matters. Theories and Functions of Literature, ed. by Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996), pp. 13–22 (p. 15). 85 See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Anglistik. Eine Universitatsdisziplin ohne Forschungsparadigma?’, Poetica. Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 16.3–4 (1984), 276–306 (p. 304). 86 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Literaturwissenschaft in Konstanz’, in Gebremste Reform. Ein Kapitel deutscher Hochschulgeschichte. Universität Konstanz 1966–1976: Gerhard Hess zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. by Hans Robert Jauss and Herbert Nesselhauf (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1977), pp. 181–200 (p. 184).

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 31

in which we live’ is reminiscent of the nineteenth-century claim that art should be seen as ‘the realm of freedom in which [lies] man’s only chance to ennoble himself’.87 The upshot is then, that, even though Iser discusses the ‘Changing Functions of Literature’, the function of literature has not changed at all, at least not fundamentally. To a certain extent, therefore, his work can be seen as a late version of Pater’s aestheticism or, indeed, as an early version of what certain critics have called the ‘new aestheticism’. Kierkegaard’s work plays a crucial role in the study on Pater, for Either/Or allows Iser to elaborate a negative as well as a positive conception of the aesthetic. The aesthetic is perceived as negative when it is seen as an existential attitude which refrains from committing itself to any specific cause and merely contemplates indifferent possibilities. The normative opposition between the aesthetic and the ethical life-view does not reappear in Iser’s later work; but the existential interpretation of the aesthetic still leaves its mark on his thought, insofar as his later analyses frequently return to the thorny problem of how to make important decisions in challenging situations. The aesthetic is perceived as positive, conversely, when it is seen as an artistic programme which prefers ambiguous montages of images to clear meanings and forms. As Iser’s later work discusses in more detail, this artistic notion of the aesthetic has a transformative effect on the society of the artist as well as the self of the recipient. Hence, the positive conception of the aesthetic unexpectedly becomes a blueprint for the proper existential attitude.

The Prehistory of Modernity Although Iser’s dissertation mainly draws on Geistesgeschichte, and his Habilitation mainly on Kierkegaard, both studies share a conspicuous interest in the nature of modernity. In these early studies, the modern condition is consistently described in terms of the disruption of old conventions and the emergence of new liberties. The dissertation on Fielding argues that the eighteenth century reveals a heightened sense of freedom which manifests itself, crucially, in the new genre of the novel. Similarly, the study on Pater maintains that the nineteenth century marks the rise of a highly relativistic outlook that expresses itself in the flexible genre of the essay. Despite insisting on the novelty of their respective ‘modern’ conditions, these books unwittingly reveal that modernity is not that innovative after all. In line with the nuanced conception of Zeitgeist noted earlier, Iser’s writings therefore implicitly subvert their one-sided view of premodern times.

87 Iser, Prospecting, pp. 209, 204.

32 —— Chapter 1 The Prehistory of the Novel The freedom of the eighteenth century, Iser claims in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, is a response to the two preceding centuries. As he reminds us, the aftershocks of the Copernican revolution in the seventeenth century led to the disruption of traditional boundaries and gave rise to an existential fear which made people look for new forms of cohesion. The ensuing Restoration was therefore a period in which artificial boundaries were reconstructed in every area of society. In the realm of literature, this fear and preoccupation with boundaries manifested itself, respectively, in the ‘almost medieval’ concerns of Donne and in Dryden’s emphasis on fictional ‘types’ rather than individualized characters.88 In response to these newly archaic views of society and literature, the Enlightenment marks a ‘liberalization’ from rigid boundaries that can be seen in processes of secularization, humanization, interiorization and democratization – processes which were partly rooted in earlier, sixteenth-century developments.89 The ‘secular spirit’ of the Enlightenment, for instance, is part and parcel of a broader, post-medieval condition, where the ‘theocentric, medieval worldview [Weltbild]’ has broken down.90 A similar remark might be made about modern man, ‘who may have been born in the sixteenth century, but was only truly raised in the eighteenth’.91 The Renaissance may also show a form of ‘humanization’, but it stresses the uomo universale, whereas the Enlightenment highlights ‘the average, everyday human being’.92 The later epoch is also characterized by an unprecedented level of ‘interiorization’ and ‘democratization’.93 In terms of literature, the Enlightenment replaces the rules associated with the imitation of nature with the imagination of the poet. Its primary medium, crucially, is the novel. To understand Iser’s early argument about the novel, we should keep in mind that, for him, there is always an organic link between a particular representational mode and ‘the specific worldview [Weltgefühl] and the specific conception of man [Menschenschau]’ of its author and times.94 Accordingly, modern and premodern times favour different forms of literature because they subscribe to different views of man and reality. Drawing heavily on Georg Luka´cs’s early work Die Theorie des Romans [The Theory of the Novel] (1916), Iser asserts that classical and medieval culture believe in a harmonious cosmology and psychology, a

88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Iser, Weltanschauung, pp. 61, 94. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., pp. 100, 161. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., pp. 70, 104. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 146.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 33

‘totality of being’ and an ‘undivided human being’.95 These views inform the contemporary literary production, and the premodern epic – whether it deals with classical gods or medieval knights – hence portrays a fictional universe where the visible world is harmoniously connected to its transcendent counterpart. When epic works such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) do not portray a realistic and probable course of events, that is because they are only concerned with their transcendent goal and allegorical meaning. To borrow terms from Thomas Pavel’s study La Pense ´e du roman [The Thought of the Novel] (2003), these works offer ‘ideographic’ rather than ‘inductive’ representations.96 Modern consciousness arises, the argument of Luka´cs and Iser continues, when the earlier conception of reality and man, this harmonious cosmology and psychology, disintegrates. From now on, there are seen to be insurmountable gaps ‘between cognition and action, [...] between self and world’.97 In these fragmented worlds, the subject no longer has an identity, but has to acquire one, giving rise to a spiritual productivity that cannot reach a definitive conclusion. This ‘internally divided [...] human being’ is what Luka´cs calls the ‘problematic individual’.98 With the disappearance of cosmological totality and the appearance of a problematic interiority, the novel – the ‘genre of modernity’ – emerges.99 As Luka´cs argues, ‘the central problem of the novel is the fact that art has to write off the closed and total forms which stem from a rounded totality of being – that art has nothing more to do with any world of forms that is immanently complete in itself’.100 In contrast to the epic, the novel no longer represents the entire cosmos, but expresses the ‘position [Stellungnahme] of the poet in relation to this totality’.101 The novel, with its wide-ranging and inclusive form, still acts as if it were trying to capture the totality of reality, but it simultaneously reveals that this ambition can never be realized. The novel also evokes the problematic interiority of the modern self, ‘the fissure between self and world, soul and act’.102 Again, Iser contends that the early modern period anticipates these developments, but that the Enlightenment marks the proper beginning of modernity. In contrast to Tom Jones, he provocatively claims, Don Quixote (1605) is not a real novel, because it does not show a true struggle between self and world and therefore lacks a truly 95 Ibid., pp. 148, 147. In his other work, Iser is critical of Luka´cs, as the latter’s later writings present the negative evaluation of modernism which the former sets out to combat. 96 See Thomas Pavel, La Pense´e du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 111, 115. 97 Georg Luka´cs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. by Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1974 [1916]), p. 34. 98 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 159. 99 Ibid., p. 152. 100 Luka´cs, Novel, p. 17. 101 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 149. 102 Ibid., p. 147.

34 —— Chapter 1 ‘problematic’ interiority. Taken together, these observations have important implications for the history of the novel: If the [history of the] novel is an organic process and the expression of a god-forsaken humanity left to its own devices, then novelistic production has to have taken different forms in different periods; that is, one should discover a different view of life and the world in the attempt to develop a typology of the different developmental stages of this genre [. ..].103

It is no exaggeration to say that this programme prefigures Iser’s later reflections on the relationship between the novel and changing conceptions of reality, which we will examine in the next chapter. What is more, this argument continues to resonate in Pavel’s recent account of the different ‘anthropologies’ behind the novel’s various stages, and the way in which these conceptualize the tension between self and world. Iser’s Luka´cs-like, ‘anthropological’ view of the novel is hence far from obsolete. Even though Iser’s discussion of the Enlightenment stresses the novelty of modernity, his study on Fielding frequently hints at the continued presence of older traits in modern times, and the unexpected presence of modern traits in older times. He describes the modern age in terms of secularization, but admits that the Copernican revolution causes not only the death, but also the rebirth of God: man’s fear of a world devoid of spiritual guidance sent him on his way to look for God once more.104 Similarly, the rise of modern democratization does not prevent the reappearance of obsolete social relations in the eighteenth century, including ‘almost medieval methods of imprisonment’ and a school system where frustrated teachers were allowed to act towards their pupils ‘[l]ike the tyrants of antiquity’.105 If some modern experiences recall older times, certain experiences in the distant past also anticipate modern times. Humanization and humour are not uniquely modern accomplishments, for instance. Iser explicitly contradicts his claims that the comic is a modern achievement and that man becomes the ‘measure of all things’ in the eighteenth century – implicitly contradicting himself, of course, by referring to Protagoras’ dictum – by observing that comedy has always gone hand in hand with a focus on human affairs: ‘since the days of Socrates, there has always been a good deal of laughter in those times when man counted for something and his interests shaped the course of control-

103 Ibid., p. 161. ‘Ist der Roman ein in sich organischer Prozeß und der Ausdruck des gottfernen, auf sich selbst gestellten Menschen, so muß auch die Romanproduktion zu den verschiedenen Zeiten eine in ihrer Gestaltung differenzierte gewesen sein, d.h., man muß bei dem Versuch einer Typologie der verschiedenen Entwicklungsphasen dieser Gattung immer ein anderes Weltund Lebensgefühl entdecken [.. .]’. 104 See ibid., p. 60. 105 Ibid., pp. 75, 208.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 35

lable events’.106 Interiorization also appears to have premodern antecedents. The power of conscience may seem to originate in uniquely modern psychological conflicts, but Iser’s analysis of Tom Jones’s ‘conscience’ refers to the inner voice of a Socratic daimonion as well as a specific classical period: ‘[t]his daimonion only becomes an indispensable part of the world when the criteria for action are no longer given directly, when the world of facts began to detach itself from mankind – in a similar fashion to the time of the Attic enlightenment, when mythos changed to logos’.107 It seems that, despite Iser’s efforts, modernity cannot be disconnected from its prehistory. Similar tensions can be observed in the discussion of eighteenth-century art. In general terms, Iser agrees that the aesthetic theory of Fielding’s time simply recapitulates Horace’s old maxim, which states that art should profit as well as please.108 Furthermore, his argument unwittingly suggests that the quintessentially modern genre might not be that modern after all. We have seen that Iser contrasts the novel with the epic, but his account of their differences actually identifies important similarities between their structures and aims. Both genres ultimately relate the story of how an individual is educated by the realities he encounters; only the means and goals of this quest have changed, and even this argument may be difficult to uphold. For it is not self-evident that the defining features of the novel – the ‘secure order of civic society’ and the subjective ideals of ‘love [and] honour’ – have no counterpart in the epic.109 In a footnote that is crucial for our purposes, Iser discusses the so-called ‘Greek novels’ of classical times in a way that again reveals his undue emphasis on the novelty of modernity: The subjects of these novels were akin to those of the newer comedies [. ..], but they remained trapped in belles-lettres rather than giving expression to spiritual experiences [...], which is why the [. ..] designation ‘novel’ is debatable. It is nonetheless important that the form of poetry was abandoned when the empirical circle of interests widened [...] All of the specified facts [.. .] imply that the attempt [.. .] to understand Fielding’s novels as part of a continuous series [. ..] beginning with Homer, is untenable.110 106 Ibid., pp. 214, 99. ‘seit den Tagen des Sokrates [ist] immer in solchen Zeiten heftig gelacht worden, in denen der Mensch etwas galt und seine Belange den Ablauf des steuerbaren Geschehens bestimmten’. 107 Ibid., p. 187. ‘[d]ieses Daimonion zählt erst dann zu den Unabdingbarkeiten der Welt, als die Maßstäbe des Handelns nicht mehr unmittelbar gegeben waren, als die Welt der Tatsachen sich vom Menschen abzulösen begann – ähnlich wie zur Zeit des attischen Aufklärers, als der Mythos sich zum Logos wandelte’. 108 See ibid., p. 228. 109 Ibid., p. 160. 110 Ibid., pp. 149, 151. ‘Die Gegenstände dieser Romane waren denjenigen der neueren Komödien ähnlich [.. .], sie blieben jedoch mehr in der Wortkunst stecken, als daß sie Seelenerfahrungen ausgesprochen hätten [.. .], weshalb die [.. .] Bezeichnung “Roman”

36 —— Chapter 1 These prose works may show a novelistic interest in empirical reality, but Iser still excludes them from the domain of novels, stressing the innovative character of Fielding’s achievement once more. But what does Iser find so new about it? The designation belles-lettres could equally well be used for the supposedly modern work of Walter Pater. Furthermore, the reference to the daimonion implies that classical antiquity already contained ‘problematic’ psyches in Luka´cs’s sense. In broader terms, Thomas Pavel contends that modernist historians of the novel – including Luka´cs, Auerbach and, I would argue, Iser – unduly emphasize its linear development and qualitative improvement. These historians are wrong, Pavel says, in establishing a decisive break between ‘the modern realist novel, the object of which is the concrete truth of time, space [...] and human psychology’ and ‘the “prehistory” of the novel which is strewn with works [...] which are abstract and lack verisimilitude and are therefore imperfect’.111 Pavel claims convincingly that such a break is a theoretical fiction, for he demonstrates that, even in modern times, prose fiction has an idealistic and unrealistic streak, which manifests itself, for example, in the role of fate, or the implausibly angelic nature of certain characters. If Pavel’s recent research demonstrates the continued importance of Iser’s claims about the novel’s ‘anthropological’ tension between self and world, in other words, it also disqualifies the latter’s one-sided concentration on the novelty of modernity. If we look back at Iser’s Fielding study and its treatment of the Enlightenment, we can represent the tension between its new and old aspects as follows: Enlightenment

Renaissance

Secularization Copernicus Democratization Aesthetic theory: imagination Humanization (everyday) humanization (universal) Interiorization Novel Cervantes

older elements in Enlightenment/ modern elements in antiquity return to religion return to tyranny return to Horace see Protagoras see daimonion see Greek novel

Figure 1: The Prehistory of Modernity, Part 1

Despite repeatedly accentuating the novel character of the Enlightenment, Iser’s account unintentionally shows that modernity cannot be disentangled that easily from its prehistory. bestreitbar ist. Wichtig bleibt jedoch, daß man die Form der Poesie verließ, als sich der empirische Interessenskreis weitete. [...] All die aufgeführten Tatsachen [. ..] machen den Versuch [. ..] Fieldings Romane in eine Kontinuität [. ..] von Homer an aufwärts homogen einzureihen, unhaltbar’. 111 Pavel, Pense´e, pp. 33–4.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 37

The Prehistory of Aestheticism This ambiguous pattern returns in Iser’s account of the fin-de-sie `cle in Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen. This study also aims to capture the specifically ‘modern’ quality of Pater’s context, again using terms such as secularization and relativization. If the eighteenth century witnessed a partial disintegration of religion, for instance, the nineteenth is characterized by an even more radical ‘total secularization’.112 The period is also marked by increasing scepticism. In Pater’s conception of ‘the modern situation’,113 innovative thinkers cultivate the ‘relative’ spirit, whereas ancient times and retrograde thinkers adopt the ‘absolute’ spirit. This shift in perspective has significant conceptual consequences. The absolute spirit believes in a hierarchical universe and unequivocal meanings, whereas its relative counterpart registers ‘an expansion of things and an obliteration of dividing lines’ which is refreshing and troubling at the same time.114 The modern or relative spirit is hence a sceptical force, which targets traditional systems in order to safeguard the fluidity of experience. In modern times, as Luka´cs already suggested, ‘[i]ndividual experience does not submit to a greater order which human beings perceive as a secured reality’.115 The only remaining source of knowledge is the rapid and unpredictable ‘stream’ of experience. Just as Iser’s Fielding study pitted Restoration boundaries against Enlightenment liberties, the Pater study thus confronts the absolute spirit of premodern times with the relative spirit of modernity. The conceptual tension between the absolute and relative spirits can be translated into an aesthetic tension as well. As Iser points out, the modern, relative conception of beauty depends on the recipient rather than a pre-given norm, and discards the old ideal of ‘classical harmony’ in favour of a romantic, ‘anti-classical “fragility”’.116 This second form of beauty no longer offers the reassurance of feeling at home in an encompassing totality, because, in the modern age ‘an all-embracing grasp of the world’ has become impossible.117 Rather, modern art revels in the new and unknown, and is able to do so because it no longer communicates a supposedly objective subject matter but expresses the author’s partial and critical view of the world: ‘[e]xpression implies correction of the world, and it will only reproduce those parts of experience that accord

112 Iser, Autonomie, p. 50. 113 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 15. 114 Ibid. 115 Iser, Autonomie, p. 39. ‘[d]ie Einzelerfahrung fügt sich nicht in eine geordnete Beziehung, die der Mensch als gesicherte Wirklichkeit empfinden könnte’. 116 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 64. 117 Ibid., p. 16.

38 —— Chapter 1 not with the patterns of outside reality but with the secret wishes of the expresser’.118 This relative and subjective art of the unknown manifests itself in a specific style, impressionism, and a specific mode, the essay. The essay is most attuned to the modern condition of flux because it does not proceed mechanically to a predetermined goal but registers the author’s flow of experiences in an associative play of chance. According to Iser’s analysis, nineteenth-century modernity is hence characterized by secularization and scepticism as well as an aesthetic relativism that manifests itself in impressionistic beauty and openended essays. As with the study on Fielding, this overt defence of modernity is unsettled by Iser’s frequent but covert return to tradition. His reference to the ‘total secularization’ of the fin-de-sie `cle notwithstanding, he observes that the loss of religion again triggers a search for new quasi-religious experiences, in the work of Blake and Shelley, for instance. In addition, Iser’s reading of Pater’s Gaston de Latour indicates that nineteenth-century scepticism is not unprecedented. Focusing on Gaston’s fictional encounter with Michel de Montaigne, Iser argues that the latter, sixteenth-century figure embodies the attitude of scepticism, ‘which denies all fixed interpretations and conclusions, thus opening up access to existence itself’.119 In the workings of the modern relative spirit, Iser continues paradoxically, scepticism ‘in the old classical sense’ has a crucial role to play.120 And in contrast to the opposition between ancient philosophy – which supposedly arrested every object in an unchanging definition – and modern relativism – which is assumed to be more attuned to the ‘flow’ of experience, Iser’s description of the modern state of flux continually refers to Heraclitus, the first thinker ‘who considered the basic principle of the world to be the eternal flux of things’.121 As Pater himself noted, the modern interest in the ‘stream’ of experience is ‘but old Heracliteanism awake once more in a new world’.122 In the light of such observations, the qualifications ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ seem to describe recurring types rather than precise periods; in the history of Western philosophy, as Iser grants, ‘absolutists [and] sceptics’ continually vie for attention.123 We can find the same mixture of innovation and tradition in Iser’s discussion of fin de sie `cle art. Although the mode of the essay appears uniquely suited to nineteenth-century conditions, Iser’s account turns out to be based on a study of Montaigne. And he further observes that the modern essay form arose from ‘the

118 119 120 121 122 123

Ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 90.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 39

Platonic dialogues’.124 The relative dimension of modern art can also be traced back to classical thinking. If specific responses to a certain work of art cannot be repeated with absolute certainty, for instance, what better word to characterize the aesthetic sphere than ‘Heraclitan’?125 Moreover, Pater’s Marius the Epicurean alludes to the fact that subjective expression may already be found in John Lyly’s sixteenth-century ‘euphuism’ and Apuleius’ late-classical mannerism. On top of that, Iser suggests, in keeping with the analysis of modernism discussed in the following chapter, that there is a continuity between Pater’s mannerist juxtaposition of ‘incongruous images’ and T.S. Eliot’s twentieth-century montages.126 For Iser, then, mannerism is a periodically recurring attitude rather than a unique historical event.127 And he seems to agree with Pater when he proposes that we understand the opposition between the classical and the romantic in terms of enduring qualities rather than subsequent stages. In Pater’s work, the ‘classical’ is no longer equated with classical antiquity and strict rules, and Romanticism is no longer just a yearning for the Middle Ages, but instead is an avant-garde movement that looks forward with an indefinable longing to a future which will, in turn, render it classical in form – a Classicism which a new Romantic movement will then strive to break away from.128

The ‘classical’ tradition is thus not a distinct heritage beyond which we can definitively progress but a recurring tendency that has to be subverted, again and again, by new ‘romantic’ revolutions. Once more, Iser’s remarkable equivocation regarding the tension between innovation and tradition can be represented in a figure: Fin-de-sie`cle

Renaissance

Secularization Relative spirit Essay Expression Beauty

Montaigne Montaigne euphuism (Lyly)

older elements in Fin-de-sie`cle / modern elements in antiquity return to religion see Heraclitus see Plato see mannerist tendency (Apuleius) see romantic tendency

Figure 2: The Prehistory of Modernity, Part 2

124 Iser, Autonomie, p. 25. 125 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 64. 126 Ibid., p. 59. 127 Which is not to say that, to Iser’s mind, the different historical manifestations of mannerism are similar in every respect. For further details, see Wolfgang Iser, ‘Manieristische Metaphorik in der Englischen Dichtung’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 10 (1960), pp. 266–87. 128 Iser, Aesthetic, p. 68.

40 —— Chapter 1 In sum, Iser’s early studies explain the modern condition in terms of the loss of certainties and the concurrent increase of liberties. Both studies posit that the modern work of art offers a personal reaction to reality, rather than a global and binding representation of the cosmos; and both describe this modern condition in surprisingly ancient terms. This remarkable tension between antiquity and modernity recurs in many of Iser’s later studies, most clearly perhaps in his study on Laurence Sterne, where Iser stresses the innovative qualities of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) but again mentions various older phenomena. This idiosyncratic text may undermine the traditional view that human behaviour can be explained in terms of ‘humours’, for example, but its sceptical anthropology can nonetheless be associated with the Greek god Momus, who complained ‘that men were not transparent’.129 The relationship between sign and idea might appear to be strictly regulated ‘from Stoicism through to the Renaissance’, but the problematic and implicit language of Sterne’s novel can nonetheless be described in terms of ancient rhetorical techniques such as the aposiopesis.130 Many of Iser’s publications therefore unintentionally qualify his emphasis on the novelty of modernity. The following stage of his writing will further develop this early account of the modern age, like his view of method, meaning and humanity.

An Applied Philosophy of Life This chapter has examined Iser’s early studies by concentrating on a number of ideas and concerns which, as we will see in the following chapters, continue to play a role in his later work. Let me briefly recapitulate these ideas. First, life or reality is seen as a recalcitrant, ungraspable phenomenon. Literary works, the novel especially, combine certain ideas from the extra-textual world in order to express the author’s position with regard to contemporary reality. The different stages of the novel embody changing conceptions of the self as well as the world. The aesthetic attitude cannot simply be extended to real life, but aestheticist ambiguity is nevertheless artistically valuable and may even hold the key for the ideal reader’s open-minded attitude. It may be useful to distinguish between different works of art with the help of certain formal and functional typologies. Literature plays an important existential or anthropological function via the workings of comedy and its attempt to provide comfort in the face of death. Human beings are not part of a harmonious world, but have to struggle with reality in order to realize their full potential. When thinking of history, transitional phases are more interesting than stable periods. The modern age marks the rise of new 129 Iser, Laurence Sterne, p. 50. 130 Ibid., pp. 36, 40.

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 41

forms and experiences, which still remain indebted to their premodern precursors. All of these issues return in Iser’s later work. And he will often return to the writings of Fielding and Pater as well, which suggests that they continue to function as unique sounding boards for his thinking. Before turning to the next chapter, a few additional remarks are in order. First of all, we should note that each of the models with which Iser enters into dialogue in his dissertations sketches a developmental narrative structurally akin to the Bildungsroman. Jaspers’s idea of Weltanschauung, Kierkegaard’s view of the aesthetic and ethical phases, and Luka´cs’s account of the novel all map trajectories which lead from a condition of limited awareness to one of increased knowledge. This basic pattern is worth bearing in mind because it returns implicitly in Iser’s later work. To a certain extent, at least, the existential development of the author in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings and of the fictional character in Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen function as blueprints for Iser’s later discussion of the transformation of the reader in The Act of Reading. In both dissertations, he also draws on various philosophical models and theories (Dilthey, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Luka´cs), while nevertheless voicing his suspicion of systematic thinking. He praises Fielding’s creative work, for instance, because it unsettles theoretical dicta, including his own: ‘[w]henever Fielding issues theoretical guidelines [...], these rational media draw strict boundaries, which the poet transgresses in the act of composition’.131 Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen continues the theme: ‘Pater’s stories are nearly all intended to test his theoretical questions in the existential sphere’.132 More generally, Iser contrasts philosophy and literature: What philosophy formulated in a pragmatic and abstract fashion, literature, the novel especially, opened out into a wealth of images, which, continuously enriched by new details, offered an applied philosophy of life. Yes, the wide stream of empirical data flowed with fewer hindrances through the novel than through philosophical wisdom: for the novel was a form derived [...] from the empirical conditions of human existence.133

131 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 225. ‘[i]mmer, wenn Fielding theoretische Richtlinien erteilt [.. .], ziehen sie als rationale Medien enge Grenzen, über die der Dichter im Akt der Gestaltung hinausbricht’. 132 Iser, Autonomie, p. 189. ‘Paters Erzählungen sind fast alle von der Absicht geleitet, seine theoretischen Fragestellungen in der existentiellen Sphäre auf ihre Tragfähigkeit zu überprüfen’. 133 Iser, Weltanschauung, p. 257, emphasis added. ‘Was die Philosophie pragmatisch-abstrakt formulierte, breitete die Literatur, besonders der roman, in einer Bilderfülle aus, die im Reichtum immer neuer Facetten eine angewandte Philosophie des Lebens bot. Ja, der breite Strom empirischer Gegebenheiten floß ungehinderter durch den Roman als durch die philosophische Weisheit, da der Roman eine aus den empirischen Bedingungen des Daseins [. . .] abgeleitete Form war’.

42 —— Chapter 1 Even though this passage deals with eighteenth century culture, Iser’s other remarks indicate that he, too, thinks that literature does what philosophy does, only better. The fact that he requires philosophical guides like Dilthey to understand this uniquely literary function does not appear to bother him. It might seem wrong to associate his philosophical intertexts with systematic thinking – after all, his focus lies mainly on ‘literary’ philosophers such as Kierkegaard. Yet even the work of such philosophers, he suggests elsewhere, does not have the ‘bandwith of discursive experimentation’ available to the writer of literary fiction.134 In any case, this surprisingly anti-theoretical thrust of Iser’s theory is the central subject of his last book, How to Do Theory (2006). In this further sense, his early and late writings are unmistakably related.

Example 1: Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb Many of Iser’s early ideas are still relevant for contemporary literature. Notions such as Zeitgeist, Bildung and aestheticism may not be very trendy, but they still shed light on a recent novel like Juli Zeh’s Spieltrieb (2004). Zeh’s work narrates the story of two exceptionally intelligent high school students, Alev and Ada, who agree to lure one of their teachers, Smutek, into having sex with Ada and to record these events for the purposes of blackmail. By repeating these encounters, the cunning and demonic Alev hopes to create a form of cooperation among the participants which will allow him to test the principles of game theory and the socalled ‘prisoner’s dilemma’. Although Ada appears to be indifferent towards the entire situation, she and Smutek are gradually drawn to one another. When Alev abruptly ends the ‘game’, he is assaulted by Smutek, resulting in a disfigured face and several broken teeth. This storyline is interwoven with the narratives of Olaf and Odetta, two other pupils who are manipulated by Alev, and of Höfi, the old history teacher who commits suicide after the death of his beloved wife. The composite story of the events at the Ernst Bloch high school (the name is not coincidental, of course) are framed by the reflections of Sophie, the female judge who has to pass sentence on the actions of Alev and Smutek at the end of the novel. Zeh’s narrative illustrates several of the ideas we have discussed in this chapter. It is clear, for one thing, that the novel reveals a specific, critical outlook on contemporary issues. Even if it is voiced by fictional characters rather than the actual author, the critique of ‘pragmatism’ toward the end of the novel is clear. There are other reasons as well for connecting this novel to Iser’s early work on Fielding and Pater. 134 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Auktorialität: Die Nullstelle des Diskurses’, in Spielräume des auktorialen Diskurses, ed. by Klaus Städtke and others (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), pp. 220–21 (p. 235).

Comic and Aesthetic Novels —— 43

In line with its setting in a high school, the novel deals with the personal development of characters like Ada and Smutek, and with the insights they derive from the tragic events. At the same time, the story seems to undermine the ideal of Bildung and the belief in a conscientious self. Alev especially is drawn to an attitude that can only be called aesthetic, even if the related notion of ‘play’ is mostly used in an economic rather than strictly artistic sense in this novel. Consider the anecdote Alev tells Ada in order to explain his personality. On a certain occasion during his childhood, he recalls, he was sitting in a car with his father, who was driving out of a garage: We drove at moderate speed towards the concrete divider, neither on the left nor on the right-hand side, but straight in the middle, and before I had time to say anything [...] the car had crashed against the post that separated both lanes. [...] ‘Do you know what happened?’, he whispered, looking ahead all the while, at the concrete and compressed metal. ‘Suddenly I was unable to decide. In truth there is no for or against, no grounds for right or left. Mark my words, son. What people call their decisions, day in day out, is nothing more than a well-rehearsed game [...]’. [...] I had understood. [...] Human decision-making is nothing more than a brilliantly rehearsed game.135

This image, and its aestheticist lesson about decision-making, recurs frequently throughout the rest of the novel; Ada repeats that there are ‘no grounds for right or left’, for instance, and Smutek later seems to perceive ‘that there is no more right and left from now on’.136 Furthermore, Alev’s initial behaviour towards Ada – deliberately avoiding contact in order to arouse her interest – recalls the actions of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic seducer in the first volume of Either/Or. The ‘playful’ attitude of Alev and Ada is even explicitly linked to that of the nineteenth-century decadents.137 Of greater interest still is the fact that their behaviour and the events they participate in are described in artistic terms. Alev contemplates being a ‘writer’ and orchestrates the events as if they were part of a ‘musical piece’.138 Actual objects are described as ‘props’ and real-life behaviour is likened to that of ‘novel characters’.139 Words are uttered and actions undertaken because they ‘fit’ the occasion, not because they originate in an actual belief or emotion. As Smutek imagines Ada saying, ‘I say certain things because they sound better than other things I could have said’.140 In spite of the novel’s seemingly pessimistic thesis, the turn toward the third person plural ‘they’ on the

135 136 137 138 139 140

Zeh, Spieltrieb, p. 179. Ibid., pp. 192, 494. Ibid., p. 350. Ibid., pp. 376, 388. Ibid., pp. 351, 269. Ibid., p. 491.

44 —— Chapter 1 very last page suggests that Ada and Smutek ultimately start a game of their own, in which they cooperate fully. In the final analysis, Höfi’s ‘ethical’ approach seems to have won: ‘[t]wo people, each on his own line, who walk through life hand in hand [. ..] will not fall, even if they know about the abyss beneath their feet’.141 And yet, Sophie the judge (in an interesting parallel with the second volume of Either/Or) seems unable to come to a correct decision about these actions, revealing the destabilizing effects of Ada and Alev’s quasi-aestheticist attitude on conventional morality. This all suggests that Iser’s analysis of aestheticist thinking is still able to illuminate contemporary literature. In addition, Zeh’s novel explicitly reflects on the productive tension between the Zeitgeist and periods of transition. The work clearly examines contemporary issues. Apart from its topical narrative, the work references many recent events and practices, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Erfurt massacre, the videogame Counter-Strike, text messaging etc. Ada is also described as ‘a child of her time’ and even wears shoes that represent the ‘Zeitgeist’.142 In a similar fashion to Iser’s early publications, however, Zeh’s novel is more interested in transitions than periods. For the book often alludes to the sense of being between univocal time periods. Ada refers to her own time as a ‘transitional situation’ and Smutek thinks that Ada ‘has lost her big head in the haze of a newly emerging era’, a new period in history wherein notions such as ‘love’ and ‘soul’ seem to acquire new meanings.143 Just like the main character of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities – one of the important literary allusions in the work –, Ada considers herself a prototype of sorts, ‘less [.. .] an unique individual than [.. .] a distillate of the Zeitgeist’.144 With Iser, it could be claimed that a novel like Spieltrieb both registers a specific Zeitgeist and participates in the creation of new ideas, or the redefinition of old ones. As an aside, we might observe, echoing Pavel’s arguments, that Zeh’s novel not only alludes to recent events, but also shows some remarkably ‘old’ features. Not only are the characters inexplicably and unrealistically drawn to each other from the beginning, but Smutek describes Ada in terms of her ‘angelic radiance’ and feels that she has an effect on him ‘as if she had dropped down [...] like an angel’.145 In contrast to Iser’s emphasis on innovation, we might therefore analyze Zeh’s novel in a way that emphasizes its ancient pedigree. As this brief reading of Spieltrieb demonstrates, the preceding reflections on the aesthetic, on transitional periods and on the prehistory of modern literature retain great interest for contemporary readers.

141 142 143 144 145

Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., pp. 287, 417. Ibid., pp. 552, 421, 478, 545. Ibid., pp. 374–75. Ibid., pp. 493, 526.

Chapter 2. Montage and Modernity [‘]Thomas More says that in the reign of King John when England was placed under an interdict by the Pope, the cattle didn’t breed, the corn ceased to ripen, the grass stopped growing and birds fell out of the air. But if that starts to happen’, he smiles, ‘I’m sure we can reverse our policy.’1

It has become something of a cliche´ to describe Wolfgang Iser as an ahistorical thinker. Most if not all of the secondary literature on his work, on reception theory and on literary theory in general, compares his brand of reader-oriented study with that of his close colleague, Hans Robert Jauß, usually concluding that Iser has little or no interest in history. Whereas his colleague focuses on the collective and historical reading public, the argument goes, Iser devotes his attention to the individual and psychological dimension of reading. To quote from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001), ‘Iser focuses on the individual interactive process – the phenomenology or cognition – of the act of reading, rather than the larger literary-historical concerns that Jauss describes’.2 In other words, Iser is seen as an ahistorical Jauß. This is not an accurate picture, however. For one thing, the two critics’ approaches cannot always be clearly distinguished. Iser’s studies on Fielding, Sterne and Shakespeare, for instance, sketch a ‘reception history’ that is related, and indeed strikingly similar, to Jauß’s work. Admittedly, this type of historical research – focusing on documented responses by real readers – is not Iser’s main focus. But that does not mean that his project does not address any ‘larger historical concerns’. In an early outline of his thoughts on aesthetic response, for instance, he insists that ‘an analysis of effects is bound to take into consideration the historical dimension of literature, which has sometimes been unduly excluded by those who tried to direct our attention to a thorough investigation of literary form’.3 In this chapter, I shall further analyze Iser’s description of this ‘historical di1 Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), p. 350. 2 Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent Leitch and others (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 1671. 3 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Literary Criticism as a Study of the Aesthetic Response’, in Actes des Congre`s d’Aix-en-Provence et de Clermont-Ferrand, 1966–1967. La Critique devant la Litte´rature anglosaxonne (Paris: Didier, 1969), pp. 167–70 (p. 170). In an earlier essay, Iser criticizes not only narrowly positivistic forms of history but also the bizarrely subjective readings which result when the New Criticism ‘discards the historical dimension as a form of control on [the critic’s] fantasy’. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Andrew Marvell: “To his Coy Mistress”’, Die neueren Sprachen (1957), 555–77 (p. 569).

46 —— Chapter 2 mension’ of literature. We shall see that, in sharp contrast to the general perception of his work, his oeuvre contains striking ideas about literary history, which are still of relevance today. The more specialized secondary literature on the subject already provides some valuable insights into how the historical dimension of Iser’s theory should be understood. In the past decade, several critics have explicitly or implicitly investigated the historical conditions of his theory of reading. Although they concede that Iser’s model makes more general claims, it is nonetheless rooted in a highly specific literary period in their view. Commentators such as Winfried Fluck and Gabriele Schwab contend that Iser’s emphasis on indeterminacy is indebted to the negative aesthetics of twentieth-century modernism. In John Paul Riquelme’s telling formulation, Iser is ‘the Beckett of contemporary humanistic theory’.4 In contrast, Robert Folkenflik has maintained that Iser’s reception theory is actually a contemporary articulation of an eighteenth-century aesthetic, ‘a mode of reading largely bypassed by Romanticism and modernism’.5 These critics are right in claiming that Iser’s theory is decisively shaped by literary practices from the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. However, their arguments also require fine-tuning for they are formulated in terms of priority claims, which are unconvincing because they are mutually exclusive. Iser, they suggest, is first and foremost a modernist thinker or he is mainly indebted to an Enlightenment aesthetic. These claims are difficult to accept when his oeuvre as a whole is taken into account. For one thing, Iser’s work is much broader in scope than these critics assume. Given the importance of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare for his thinking, it is surprising that no one has put forward a third hypothesis, that shifts the focus to the sixteenth century. As we have seen in the previous chapter, it would be equally possible to argue that Iser’s ideas are actually a belated version of Walter Pater’s nineteenth-century aestheticism. And one should not forget that Iser also wrote on medieval and seventeenth-century literature, albeit sparingly. It makes sense, therefore, to integrate these different interpretations into a more rounded account of his project. Whilst Iser certainly devoted much attention to Renaissance, Enlightenment, aestheticist and modernist literatures, it is clear that he did not focus on any of these periods to the exclusion of the others, but tried, rather, to comprehend the experience of modernity from the various viewpoints provided by these historical epochs. Iser’s work is not rooted in one specific century, but in a modern condition that manifests itself in various

4 John Paul Riquelme, ‘Introduction. Wolfgang Iser’s Aesthetic Politics. Reading as Fieldwork’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 7–12 (p. 7). 5 Robert Folkenflik, ‘Wolfgang Iser’s Eighteenth Century’, Poetics Today, 27.4 (2006), 675–91 (p. 689).

Montage and Modernity —— 47

ways throughout these periods. He is not a modernist but a modern thinker. In the end perhaps his view of the modern age is a modernist one, but this does not mean that his work only deals with or is only relevant to the literature of the twentieth century. Picking up where we left off at the end of the previous chapter, my argument begins with Iser’s attempts to develop a ‘new’ methodology for literary studies in the 1960s and early 1970s. More specifically, the first section of this chapter reconnects Iser’s first truly influential study, Der implizite Leser [The Implied Reader] (1972), with the early Poetik und Hermeneutik conferences, where he developed his ideas into a methodological apparatus more attuned to the modernist literature of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Revealing the broader historical canvas of his thinking, the second section turns to a much later study, Shakespeares Historien [translated as Staging Politics] (1988), to highlight the importance of early modern thinking for Iser’s project. This chapter will therefore discuss both a specific phase and a recurring theme of his writing. I will demonstrate that much of Iser’s research until the early 1970s was concerned with the emergence and re-emergence of the ‘modern’ at different points in literary history. As with the ‘aesthetic’ discussed in the previous chapter, his interest in modernity and history may become less obvious in his later writings, but the study on Shakespeare clearly demonstrates that it does not disappear. In the final analysis, Iser’s oeuvre evinces a consistent preoccupation with works of a ‘modern’ stamp, develops a unique way of describing historical and literary change, and systematically targets reductive conceptions of history. Contrary to the received view, therefore, the corpus, method and polemical function of Iser’s reflections all have a clear historical dimension. He develops the historical strand of his thought under the influence, mainly, of one of his colleagues from the Poetik und Hermeneutik circle, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg. The importance of Blumenberg’s work for Iser’s thinking on topics such as montage, metaphor, myth, reality, productivity and modernity cannot be stressed enough. This connection has already been studied by Brook Thomas, but his valuable account still does not do full justice to the conceptual overlap between the two thinkers. His analysis of their intellectual exchange correctly notes the importance of such concepts as ‘reality’ and ‘self-assertion’, but it fails to mention the related ideas of polysemy, the inaccessible self, the malleability of myth, discovery and the crossing of boundaries.6 As I will show, this entire cluster of ideas is vital for a thorough understanding of the literary history hinted at in Iser’s oeuvre. 6 Brook Thomas, ‘Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early Work, or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 13–43. Also consider the final chapter of Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 179–218.

48 —— Chapter 2

The Implied Modernist Coining a phrase that was to function as shorthand for the new, reader-oriented approach to literature in the early 1970s, The Implied Reader is one of Iser’s most famous publications. Despite its programmatic title, however, the study does not offer an explicit theoretical argument, consisting instead of a series of discrete literary-critical analyses. Even with the addition of a short theoretical conclusion in the English translation, the book mainly deals with the way in which ‘patterns of communication’ change ‘in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett’, as the subtitle puts it, illustrating Iser’s well-known but surely debatable thesis that ‘since the eighteenth century, indeterminacy in literature – or at least an awareness of it – has tended to increase’.7 Despite their seemingly non-theoretical character, however, these analyses provide valuable insights into Iser’s developing thought. My concern here is less with The Implied Reader per se than with the fact that several of its chapters originated in a debate with other members of the socalled Poetik und Hermeneutik circle. It is often overlooked that this study is actually a combination – a montage, if you will – of largely pre-existing essays that were knitted together in the context of a later argument. This genesis suggests that a clearer understanding of the book may be reached by reading its component essays in the original context of the Poetik und Hermeneutik conferences. As I will show, Blumenberg’s views on poetry, metaphor and myth – and, to a lesser extent, Dieter Henrich’s notions of partial art and the inaccessible self – helped Iser to develop certain ideas and terms that would continue to play an important role in his thinking. Before turning to the interaction between Blumenberg and Iser, however, it might be instructive to sketch the nature, context, and reception of the Poetik und Hermeneutik circle. Founded in the early 1960s by Clemens Heselhaus, HansRobert Jauß, Hans Blumenberg and Wolfgang Iser, Poetik und Hermeneutik was a (West-)German research group which used the new ‘communicative possibilities of the post-war years’ to gather researchers from various disciplines in the humanities.8 Continuing until 1998, it organized seventeen biannual conferences 7 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 15. 8 Julia Wagner, ‘Anfangen. Zur Konstitutionsphase der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, Internationales Archive für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 35.1 (2010), 53–76 (p. 65). Jauß discusses his unsavoury war-time past in Maurice Olender, ‘“L’e´trangete´ radicale de la barbarie nazie a paralyse´ une ge´ne´ration d’intellectuels”. Entretien avec H.R. Jauß’, Le Monde, 6 September 1996, p. viii. Additionally, a recent article in Die Zeit points out that ‘Wolfgang Iser’ was one of many progressive German intellectuals whose name was lately found in the archives of the NSDAP. Until further information in this connection emerges, however, it is difficult to evaluate this important observation. See Herwig Malte, ‘Als wir jung

Montage and Modernity —— 49

and publications on themes as diverse as myth, negativity and fiction. The group’s name refers to the dual agenda of the early years, in which an interest in (Western European) poetic texts, was combined with a hermeneutic perspective inspired by the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer.9 From an institutional perspective, the group’s history can be divided roughly into three phases: the period from the late 1950s to 1970, when different researchers started to work together; the phase between 1970 and 1980, when the fairly restricted focus on poetic and hermeneutic issues was broadened to include sociological, psychological, theological and anthropological questions; and the period from the early 1980s to 1998, when the hermeneutic approach was questioned and even rejected by representatives of a new, deconstructive ‘anti-hermeneutics’.10 Most commentators agree that the group’s activities were important and influential. Apart from the Frankfurter Schule and systems theory, it has been argued, it is the German humanities’ ‘only export’ in the second half of the twentieth century.11 Two aspects of its work are of special importance: its interdisciplinary reflection on the history of concepts [Begriffsgeschichte] and the supposed ‘discovery of reception aesthetics’ during the group’s conferences in the middle of the 1960s.12 Poetik und Hermeneutik is important too because it is considered both a forerunner of interdisciplinary experimentation and a late example of a Golden Age of research, when academics had not yet succumbed to a pernicious over-specialization. Investigating Poetik und Hermeneutik in more detail is not an easy task, because many relevant materials from its beginnings were not published and even now are only accessible at the German Literature Archive of Marbach. Furthermore, these materials consist of disparate texts from different authors, which, to complicate the situation further, do not always provide a reliable account of events surrounding the group.13 Despite these difficulties, however, recent critics have started to investigate and question the view of Poetik und Hermeneutik

waren’, Die Zeit, 12 June 2009, no pagination. I would like to thank Winfried Fluck for drawing my attention to this article. 9 See Petra Boden, ‘Arbeit an Begriffen. Zur Geschichte von Kontroversen in der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”. Ein Forschungsprojekt’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 103–21 (p. 110). 10 Ibid., p. 112. 11 Ellen Spielman, ‘Neu Starten, Spurenwechsel: Poetik und Hermeneutik, ein Exportprodukt’ (interview with Wolfgang Iser), Weimarer Beiträge, 44.1 (1998), 92–103 (p. 92). 12 Walter Erhart, ‘“Wahrscheinlich haben wir beide recht”. Diskussion und Dissens unter “Laboratoriumsbedingungen”. Beobachtungen zu “Poetik und Hermeneutik” 1963–1966’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 77–102 (p. 95). Petra Boden’s essay discusses the connection between Poetik und Hermeneutik and Begriffsgeschichte. 13 See Wagner, ‘Anfangen ’, p. 56–57.

50 —— Chapter 2 which was co-established by the group’s former members and associates. The group may exert an enduring fascination for many critics, but as Carlos Spoerhase astutely observes, there is ‘a strong tension between the somewhat limited reception of the group’s results on the one hand and the large inner-disciplinary and extra-disciplinary fascination for the research group itself on the other’.14 In contrast to the later, nostalgic celebration of its interdisciplinary approach, the initial reviews of the group’s edited volumes criticized their vague terminology and failure to live up to the promise of a ‘philology-transcending interdisciplinarity’.15 At the beginning at least, critics have noted, the group established a clear idea of what it should be and what it wanted to do by ‘a determined sealing off of its subject – literature – from “external” i.e. “extra-aesthetic” and extra-literary factors’.16 For the ‘discussions’ which were included in the first four volumes demonstrate that the remarks of participants who stressed the importance of sociological issues were systematically removed, marginalized or reinterpreted. In broader terms, details of the editorial practice behind these volumes undermine the idea that the group fostered a truly open dialogue. For through editorial interventions, differences of opinion were smoothed over and a false impression of unity was created.17 In fact, this lack of true dialogue may explain why Blumenberg left the group after the initial conferences.18 Nor was the group’s programme wholly without precedent, as is often suggested. Julia Wagner argues convincingly that it is possible to see different aspects of Poetik und Hermeneutik – its catchy title, the publication of collective volumes – as a reaction to the German Research Foundation’s earlier ‘senate commission on the history of concepts’, which was supervised by Hans-Georg Gadamer and operated until 1966.19 This recent research on the Poetik und Hermeneutik archive has established that the group’s dialogue was not always that open, its activities not always that interdisciplinary and its character not always that innovative. However, we should be careful not to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. For it can hardly be denied that the group was important, whatever the exaggerations and self-justifications of its participants. After all, its activities played a crucial 14 Carlos Spoerhase, ‘Rezeption und Resonanz. Zur Faszinationsgeschichte der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, Internationales Archive für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 122–42 (p. 122). 15 Ibid., p. 129. 16 Erhart, ‘Wahrscheinlich’, p. 81. 17 Christopher Möllmann and Alexander Schmitz, ‘Editorial. “Es war einmal ... ” – Einige Distanz wahrende Annäherungen an die Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 46–52 (p. 51). 18 Ibid., p. 52. 19 See Wagner, ‘Anfangen’, p. 73.

Montage and Modernity —— 51

role in the professionalization and ‘modernization’ of German literary studies by cutting its ties with methods narrowly focused on the national corpus, as well as with the broad synthesizing strokes of Geistesgeschichte.20 Jauß is not entirely wrong, in other words, when he maintains that the group exerted a special attraction because it offered philologists ‘the chance [. ..] to develop a modern conception of their discipline [Wissenschaft], one for which there was as yet no place at the universities’.21 These innovations did not stem only from purely conceptual disagreements with earlier scholars but also from broader institutional shifts, such as the separation of literary studies and linguistics, the large-scale recruitment of new academic personnel in the 1960s and – as Iser’s opinion pieces on the nature of Anglistik reveal – the increasing autonomy of literary research in relation to its roots in the vocational training of high school teachers.22 As I will show in the following sections, moreover, the interaction between Iser, Henrich and Blumenberg suggests that a productive and interdisciplinary dialogue was possible during the early Poetik und Hermeneutik conferences, even if it did not always become a reality. In the light of Iser’s oeuvre, we should also adjust some of the claims recent commentators have made about the relationship between reception theory on the one hand and modernism, sociology and Blumenberg on the other. Walter Erhart maintains that the group’s introduction of a reader-oriented perspective in the mid 1960s was a long-avoided attempt to deal with its growing unease with a ‘modernist literature [...] that could no longer be integrated in familiar aesthetichistorical contexts’.23 This claim is hard to accept, however, because Iser had already mentioned Virginia Woolf’s epiphanies and T.S. Eliot’s montages in his Habilitation of 1960. If anything, he was uneasy with critics, such as his supervisor Flasdieck, who were hostile to modernism. Further, it may be true that Iser’s brand of reception theory was shaped by his aversion to a particular type of sociology, but that aversion was present from the very beginning – as we saw in

20 See Erhart, ‘Wahrscheinlich’, p. 90. 21 Hans Robert Jauß, ‘Epilog auf die Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik XVII. Kontingenz, ed. by Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard (Munich: Fink, 1998), pp. 525–33 (p. 531). 22 See Holger Dainat, ‘Faszination, Erkenntnis, Funktion. Zur Erforschung von “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’ im Kontext germanistischer Fachgeschichte’, Internationales Archive für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.2 (2010), 140–49 (pp. 147–48). For Iser’s remarks on the difference between vocational training and academic research in the study of English, see Wolfgang Iser, ‘Überlegungen zu einem literaturwissenschaftlichen Studienmodell’, Linguistische Berichte, 1.2 (1969), 77–87; and ‘Anglistik: Eine Universitatsdisziplin ohne Forschungsparadigma?’, Poetica. Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 16.3–4 (1984), 276–306. 23 See Erhart, ‘Wahrscheinlich’, p. 96.

52 —— Chapter 2 Chapter 1 – and would last until the very end. It seems unlikely, therefore, that the ‘external impulse from the social sciences’ played such a pivotal role in the later emergence of Iser’s form of reception theory.24 Finally, reading these recent essays on Poetik und Hermeneutik might give the impression that Blumenberg left the group when reception theory emerged, and only re-entered the debate when the younger, deconstructionist generation took charge in the 1980s.25 That would be wrong, however: not only because it neglects the links between reception theory and poststructuralism, but also, more importantly, because it ignores the connections between Iser and Blumenberg that I will turn to in the following sections.

The Meaning of Montage In 1966, the Poetik und Hermeneutik group published a volume entitled Immanente Ästhetik, Ästhetische Reflektion [Immanent Aesthetics, Aesthetic Reflection].26 The introduction notes that, if we want to investigate the self-reflexive character and form of modern literature, we should turn to poetry, where formal fragmentation came to the fore most quickly and clearly. In their contributions, Iser and Blumenberg both explore the self-conscious polysemy and montage-like quality of modernist poetry. As a reading of their essays demonstrates, one of Iser’s central ideas about literary meaning – namely, that it arises from the clash between seemingly disconnected textual fragments – derives from poetry, even if he later mainly applied it to novels and prose fiction. In his essay ‘Sprachsituation und Immanente Poetik’ [‘Linguistic Situation and Immanent Poetics’], Blumenberg ponders the relationship between ordinary language and poetry. He asserts that if we want to describe the changing functions of poetic language, we should investigate the view of language implicit in particular works, paying attention to their ‘immanent poetics’ rather than the author’s ‘external poetics’. Blumenberg is particularly interested in the way this text-internal ‘poetics’ conceives of the relation between language and thought. Do words simply represent clear and distinct ideas already formed in our minds, or do they actively shape and potentially distort our views? Does the language of poetry record a pre-existing train of thought or does it in fact redirect this process? The potential answers to this question are related to two broad linguistic

24 Ibid., p. 100. 25 See Boden, ‘Arbeit’, p. 115. 26 Where possible, I have used the English translations of Poetik und Hermeneutik contributions collected in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

Montage and Modernity —— 53

tendencies, namely ‘clarity [Eindeutigkeit]’ and ‘polysemy [Vieldeutigkeit]’.27 If clarity or determinacy is the implicit view of language in science, he continues, polysemy or polyvalence plays a central role in the immanent poetics of many types of poetry. Blumenberg’s view of the poetic function resembles that of the Russian Formalists, the intended effect of this polysemy recalling their notion of defamiliarization: ‘the stepping out of the self-evident out of the sphere of the hitherto unacknowledged “life-world” [Lebenswelt]’.28 Modern linguistic practices invariably navigate between these two linguistic tendencies, Blumenberg continues. When the scientific specialization which began in early modern times leads to an increasing emphasis on the pragmatic function of language, for instance, this heightened clarity prompts equally unprecedented forms of polysemy in the realm of poetry. The work of Pound with its ‘montage’ of unrelated elements is a prime example: The largely intrinsic opposition of objectivizing and poeticizing language will therefore [. . .] be subject to an acute intensification, and one will come to expect a poetic language that is vehemently opposed to any referential function, a language in which the metaphors disturb one another [. ..], in which the images used do not work, which does not allow for a definitive interpretation of its syntax, in which the origins of mythical allusions continually [. . .] change, yes, in which [.. .] the educated reader only too frequently does not know [. . .] from where a ‘quotation’ might be drawn – I’m thinking of Ezra Pound –, where even the most well-equipped cultural education brings no rest.29

This view of the reading experience – where the reader encounters a violent clash of juxtaposed images – is clearly akin to the model of The Act of Reading, which I address in the next chapter. But for now we should stay with the essay Iser wrote for the same Poetik und Hermeneutik volume, which develops Blumenberg’s analysis by comparing Pound’s imagism with the montages of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). When an

27 Hans Blumenberg, ‘Sprachsituation und immanente Poetik’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik II. Immanente Ästhetik. Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. by Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1966), pp. 145–55 (p. 148). 28 Ibid., p. 150. 29 Ibid., p. 153–54. ‘Die wesentliche immanente Gegenläufigkeit objektivierender und poetisierender Sprache wird also [.. .] eine akute Verschärfung erfahren, und man wird eine poetische Sprache von vehementer Obstinanz gegen jede Verweisungsfunktion erwarten dürfen, eine Sprache, deren Metaphern sich gegenseitig stören [.. .], in der die angesetzten Bilder nicht aufgehen, die keine beruhigende Interpretation ihrer Syntax zuläßt, in der die Herkunftshorizonte mythischer Anspielungen ständig [.. .] wechseln, ja in der [.. .] der gebildete Leser nur zu oft nicht weiß [. . .] woher eine “Zutat” genommen sein könnte – ich denke etwa an Ezra Pound –, wo also auch das bestausgerüstete Bildungsarsenal nicht zur Beruhigung verhilft’.

54 —— Chapter 2 imagist poem juxtaposes a conventional and an unexpected view of a certain object, Iser says, this incongruous ‘image’ does three things simultaneously: it articulates the usual perception of this object, destroys it as a restrictive, premature categorization of the object in question, and intimates that there are even more unexpected ways of perceiving it. In a fashion akin to cubist painting, the imagist poem suggests ‘that we can only grasp things as a whole, when their top and bottom sides are liberated from their perspectival reduction and placed next to or on top of one another’.30 Notwithstanding the considerable achievements of this poetic practice, Iser argues it is marred by an important flaw. The ‘image’ is only able to represent one surprising aspect of the represented object and, even though it encourages readers to imagine further unexpected aspects, the surprise generated by the image is inevitably a temporary effect. Without too much difficulty, the contradictory elements of the image may be reintegrated into a harmonious composite, prematurely ending its critical impact on our received modes of perception. For Iser, this is a vital difference from the technique of montage exemplified in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Here, we find a series of ‘broken images’ which may be extended by the reader’s imagination without ever coming to rest, conjuring up a view of reality as something which continually eludes the forms of representation available to mankind. Whereas the surprising combinations of an imagist poem are easily incorporated into a coherent pattern, poetic montage offers an abrupt mixture of images and quotations that lose their ‘clarity [Eindeutigkeit]’, acquire new and unexpected semantic relations, and trigger an unstoppable rereading of represented objects such as love.31 The juxtaposition of fragmentary scenes in modernist poetry is akin to cinematographic montage, Iser maintains, in another visual parallel, but whereas most films show a smooth sequence of images, the direct clash of heterogeneous images in texts such as The Waste Land 30 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Image und Montage. Zur Bildkonzeption in der Imagistischen Lyrik und in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik II. Immanente Ästhetik. Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. by Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1966), pp. 361–93 (p. 374). ‘daß man die Dinge erst dann ganz haben kann, wenn man ihre Ober- und Unterseiten aus der perspektivischen Verkürzung befreit und sie neben- bzw. übereinander legt’. 31 Ibid., p. 378. There is a clear link here with Iser’s literary anthropology. It may seem as though non-emotional poetry such as that of Eliot cannot appeal to ‘feelings about the love of life in youth, and the approach of old age and death, that can be fairly called universal’. Iser’s analysis emphasizes, however, that Eliot’s non-representational images still have an anthropological appeal or ‘“universal” effect [Wirkung]’. See ibid., pp. 376, 377. In the end, this text evokes the heterogeneous nature of love by associating it with Arcadian peacefulness as well as an immoral promiscuity. These images do not capture the true nature of love, Iser’s reading suggests, but are merely pragmatic determinations of an elusive experience. They are merely stagings of love, the later Iser would say.

Montage and Modernity —— 55

creates jarring contrasts. He contends, therefore, that Eliot’s montages are able to extend their disruptive effect, whereas Pound’s images are still too easily normalized by traditional, ‘classical’ expectations. As the following chapter will make clear, The Act of Reading likewise argues that the reading of truly artistic and ‘modern’ works produces a disharmonious and endlessly renewable series of images in the reader’s mind. Even if Iser emphasizes the expansion of our perceptual rather than linguistic capacities, he agrees with Blumenberg that the poetic montages of modernists such as Pound display a form of polysemy that is unavailable in ordinary life. The concepts of polysemy and montage do not only figure prominently in Iser’s analyses of modernist poetry, but also return in his later work. Although this essay on Pound and Eliot was not included in The Implied Reader, it thus provides crucial insights into his conception of literary meaning, including the meaning of novels. Another striking feature of Iser’s analysis is its emphasis on the general view of reality implied by specific parts of these poems, rather than their implicit ‘fabulas’ or their precise rhetorical structures. He is more interested in reference, broadly construed, than meaning. Despite his sceptical epistemology, moreover, he suggests that these self-conscious literary texts are able to represent parts of a supposedly unrepresentable reality: ‘as form relinquishes the constitutive element of its mediation, outside realities make a direct impact on consciousness’.32 This paradoxical contention – that reality can never be captured even though texts which undermine their own form can nevertheless capture part of it – recurs in much of Iser’s writing. Every representation fails, but some fail better.

The Inaccessible Self The early Poetik und Hermeneutik conferences also provide the setting for another productive exchange: between Iser and Dieter Henrich. This second philosopher is important for our discussion because, whereas Iser’s dissertation on Fielding still agreed with Georg Luka´cs that comic novels are able to ‘reconcile’ man and reality, so to speak, Henrich contends that this belief is definitively undermined in modernist literature. Only now, we might say, does the problematic individual of Luka´cs become truly problematic: for Henrich shows that it becomes ‘inaccessible’. In the programmatically titled ‘Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart’ [‘Art and Philosophy of Art Today’], Henrich developed a comprehensive theory of modernist art. In his view, the modern age marks the rise of human self-re32 Ibid., p. 382, emphasis added. ‘[i]ndem die Form das sie konstituierende Element der Vermittlung preisgibt, prallen lebensweltliche Realitäten direkt auf das Bewußtsein’.

56 —— Chapter 2 flexivity, a turn toward the self which promotes not only the autonomy of human beings, but also their anxiety. Self-assertion and self-questioning go hand in hand: ‘the experience that on account of inner principles the being of the self is related to itself and only to itself has as its complement not only the certainty of being based on a foundation not within its arena of control but also the knowledge that this foundation will remain inaccessible to it’.33 This conceptual background explains the peculiar, reflexive and partial nature of modern art. As Henrich reminds us, Hegel thought the advent of modernity spelled the end of art because henceforth it was no longer able to offer a complete representation of reality. In premodern times, it was also thought that art could and should express the reconciliation of consciousness and reality, but this belief is again shaken: as the fragmentary form of modern works reveals, they can no longer be seen as the medium ‘in which spirit comes to itself and in which [...] it has knowledge of its own essence’.34 Henrich agrees with Hegel that neither the total representation of reality nor the complete reconciliation of self and world are still possible, but he does not draw the same, fatal conclusion. That art can no longer represent every aspect of reality is not a problem, since its representation can have a ‘partial character’.35 The fact that art can no longer reconcile the self and the world is not a problem either, for it merely shows that modern art resonates with the uncertain character of modern consciousness. This partial art is not problematic, then, but is perfectly attuned to the modern condition of reflexive subjectivity. For Henrich, Eliot’s and Beckett’s works illustrate the tension at the heart of the modern subject, for whom a reflexive turn inwards coexists with an awareness of the inner self’s ultimate inaccessibility. Henrich’s conception of ‘partial’ art and modern subjectivity sheds a powerful light on Iser’s essay ‘Reduktionsformen der Subjektivität’ [later translated as ‘Self-Reduction’], another Poetik und Hermeneutik contribution that was later included in The Implied Reader and which provides a miniature version of the book’s overall argument regarding the development of modern literary prose. Drawing on Henrich’s reflections, Iser discusses four authors to illustrate the changes wrought by the modernist mindset in the nineteenth-century conception of subjectivity. In Iser’s view, the traditional novel was able to reconcile self and world because it subscribed to a specific view of the subject. This type of novel usually evokes the interaction between a certain historical context and a central character with a particular moral outlook or ideological perspective. This

33 Dieter Henrich, ‘Art and Philosophy of Art Today. Reflections with Reference to Hegel’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 107–33 (p. 117). 34 Ibid., p. 112. 35 Ibid., p. 113.

Montage and Modernity —— 57

ideological ‘content’ could only be conveyed by the traditional novel, however, because it tacitly presupposed the existence of what we might call the subject’s ‘formal structure’, namely ‘his identity, his self-consciousnes, his capacity for intersubjectivity’.36 As long as this formal structure remained intact, the novel was able to reconcile self and world. William Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond (1852) is a case in point. In this novel, the narrator tries to understand himself by remembering and reflecting upon his past behaviour. Taking the formal structure of the subject for granted, the resulting overview of his life enables the narrator ‘to be at one with himself and the world’.37 This harmony between self and world is undermined, Iser claims, when modernist works start to question different aspects of the traditional subject’s formal structure. By challenging these assumptions, he feels, modernist experiments release alternative forms of subjectivity that can no longer be accessed nor definitively reconciled with the external world. Traditional, realistic novels assume that our past can be harmonized with the present, that every character has a clear identity, and that the self is able to tell its own story in a truthful manner. As Iser’s analysis shows, the writings of William Faulkner, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Samuel Beckett do not share these assumptions. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) famously evokes a range of disrupted subjectivities. The crucial section for Iser’s analysis is Quentin’s interior monologue. Presenting a confusing ‘montage’ of memories, thoughts and utterances, this section effectively disrupts the traditional assumption that the self can easily synthesize its past memories and understand itself. The self is not a continuous chain of logically connected ideas but an amorphous ‘force’ that continually creates provisional syntheses of past and present. Unsurprisingly, so shifting a self can no longer be definitively reconciled with the outside world. In Iser’s reading, Quentin’s fragmentary and confused memory reveals that modernist subjectivity is not characterized by self-mastery but rather, in line with Henrich’s claims, by ‘never having the certainty of being completely in possession of itself’.38 Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A Heritage and its History (1959) targets another presupposition of the traditional novel. In contrast to Thackeray’s work, the fully-fledged and clearly delineated character is here replaced with schematic characters who are easily mistaken for one another. These indeterminate char36 Hans Blumenberg, ‘Neunte Diskussion. Provokation des Lesers im modernen Roman. Vorlage: Wolfgang Iser, Reduktionsformen der Subjektivität. Vorsitz: Hans Blumenberg’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik III. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Fink, 1968), pp. 669–90 (p. 669). 37 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Reduktionsformen der Subjektivität’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik III. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Fink, 1968), pp. 435–91 (p. 442). 38 Ibid., p. 457.

58 —— Chapter 2 acters again hint at a conception of subjectivity similar to that of Henrich. What we see of them, Iser observes, does not serve to clarify who they are, but rather exhibits the ‘unclarified character [Unabgeklärtheit]’ of their inner self.39 These strategies are intensified in Samuel Beckett’s highly self-reflexive novels of the 1950s. In these works, the narrator can no longer tell his own story in the fashion of Henry Esmond, for he is aware of the fact that talking about yourself inevitably implies inventing and even lying about yourself. These self-conscious narrators therefore decide to tell stories which are clearly marked as fictional and cannot be taken for truths because the meaning that threatens to emerge from them is immediately questioned in their telling. Highlighting the difference between conventional representations and reality, Beckett continually switches between assertions and their negations. This dual strategy exhibits a self-conscious awareness of the subject’s groundlessness, Iser feels, and indicates that the various manifestations of the self do not determine its nature, but are continually transgressed in a game without a definitive outcome. That he speaks of ‘game [Spiel]’ and ‘transgressing [Überschreiten]’ in this context is interesting, incidentally, because these terms return in his further reflections on anthropology and modernity.40 Beckett suggests not only that the stories we tell about ourselves are inevitably partial, but also that we cannot avoid talking about ourselves. The self cannot achieve self-presence by merely existing. Thus our existence triggers an incessant need for voices and selves which will give us a provisional handle on our elusive inner lives. And yet, the fact that the self can have no knowledge of itself beyond these inventions provides it with the will to carry on its self-fabrication or, to use a term I shall return to, its self-production. What these modernist writings demonstrate, in sum, is that the subject should not be equated with its traditional modes of representation. In contrast to the assumption of realist novels, the modern self does not have a clear and accessible foundation and finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile itself with the outside world. As these reflections show, Henrich’s thoughts on the self’s inaccessible foundation further develop Iser’s view of the novel and the interplay between the self and the world, in ways, moreover, that anticipate literary anthropology.

Style and Metaphor Besides Eliot and Beckett, Iser’s work from this period also considers that other important modernist, James Joyce. His analysis of Ulysses (1922) is especially rel39 Ibid., p. 469. 40 See ibid., p. 481.

Montage and Modernity —— 59

evant here, because it alludes to the conceptions of metaphor and myth developed by Blumenberg. As we will see, these conceptions prefigure Iser’s later thoughts on the ‘stagings’ of literature and the ‘open structure’ of the literary work. In ‘Historische Stilformen in Joyces Ulysses’ [later translated as ‘Doing Things in Style’], an essay that did not originate in the Poetik und Hermeneutik context but was included in The Implied Reader, Iser observes that many commentators have been critical of the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ section in Joyce’s novel because its panorama of different historical styles, intended to mimic the development of English literature, seems disconnected from the plot and draws too much attention to an author who was supposed to have disengaged himself from his own work. Joyce, it seems, had failed to follow his own famous dictum and go and pare his fingernails. This apparent defect, Iser argues, in a clever inversion of the critical consensus, is precisely the point, and ‘Oxen of the Sun’ therefore represents the most characteristic and significant part of the entire novel. What Joyce is doing by continually shifting the stylistic perspective is to remind the reader that representations do not coincide with reality. This incongruous mixture of styles, like the incongruous montage of images in Eliot, thus heightens our awareness of the diverse nature of reality. For Iser, Joyce’s alternation of styles reveals that there can be no definitive description of experiences such as love and birth. An illustration of this procedure from Ulysses may be helpful at this stage: Before born babe bliss had. [.. .] But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour [. ..] il y a deux choses for which the innocence of our original garb [. . .] is the fittest [. ..] garment. The first [.. .] is a bath . .. but at this point a bell [. ..] cut short a discourse which promised so bravely for the enrichment of our store of knowledge. [. ..] Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement.41

As this montage indicates, giving birth may be represented in very different ways, stressing either the prelapsarian innocence of the unborn in the AngloSaxon alliterative style, the pain of women in labour in a medieval-sounding idiom, the sexual act that inevitably preceded it with an aposiopesis in the manner of Laurence Sterne, or the sentimental joy at the child’s successful delivery in true Dickensian fashion. These different historical styles do not simply change the form of the message, Iser proposes, but its very content. Style, he observes in a footnote, describes the object of representation in terms of a historically determined and inevitably limited frame, just as metaphor describes the object of rep-

41 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. by Declan Kiberd (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 502, 510, 530, 550.

60 —— Chapter 2 resentation in terms of another object. This reference to the ‘metaphorical character of style’ is more important than may appear at first sight.42 To understand the full significance of Iser’s association of style and metaphor, we should turn to another publication from this period, namely Blumenberg’s Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie [Paradigms for a Metaphorology] (1960). Here, the philosopher outlines the programme for a ‘metaphorology’ that moves beyond the narrow confines of traditional Begriffsgeschichte. In his programmatic introduction, Blumenberg notes that philosophy, according to Rene´ Descartes, should gradually purify its conceptual apparatus of obscurity and indeterminacy. Forms of speech that do not satisfy the criteria of clarity and determinacy, notably figurative language, will ultimately if not immediately become part of a rigorously defined terminology. In a parallel development, philosophy will gradually lose interest in the historical density of its concepts. According to Giambattista Vico, however, this purification of philosophical terminology is impossible, as only God has access to such clarity and determinacy. The conflicting views of Descartes and Vico can be traced back to two different conceptions of figurative language. In the first, metaphors are seen as residues of a pre-philosophical mode, which still need to be translated into rigorous terms; in the second, they are viewed as inescapable and untranslatable parts of philosophical language. Siding with Vico, Blumenberg rejects the claim that metaphors are merely accidental features of language and argues for the existence of ‘absolute metaphors’ or, perhaps more clearly, irreducible metaphors, figures of speech whose unique expressive potential cannot be translated into unambiguous terms.43 Blumenberg’s study discusses the function of these absolute metaphors in general and analyses specific historical examples. In general terms, he says, such metaphors address questions that cannot be answered in clear ‘terms’. The Copernican transformation of cosmology, for example, may function as an absolute metaphor, since its model of the universe can be used to answer a question that cannot be answered by purely conceptual means: the question, namely, of the place of human beings in the world. Even though such questions cannot be answered in univocal terms, we cannot avoid them either, because posing them is an inevitable part of human existence. Driven by an intellectual horror vacui, the absolute metaphor always fills in a ‘blank [Leerstelle]’ of human existence which cannot be filled conceptually with a provisional, makeshift answer.44 Ask-

42 Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (Munich: Fink, 1972), p. 296. 43 Hans Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998 [1960]), p. 10. 44 Ibid., p. 177.

Montage and Modernity —— 61

ing questions such as ‘what is the world?’ or ‘what is the position of man in the universe?’ may not be a fruitful starting point for theoretical reflection, Blumenberg concedes, but the insistence with which humans return to these questions nevertheless testifies to their inescapable need for existential guidance in a world where experiences can often only be captured in metaphorical approximations rather than conceptual terms. Turning to specific examples and their historical evolution, Blumenberg notes that the meaning of these metaphors may change when their connotations are weighted differently: for example, when the emphasis shifts from ‘verisimile’ [having the appearance of truth] to ‘verisimile’ [having the appearance of truth]. Even though metaphors supposedly belong to a pre-theoretical realm, changes such as these have important theoretical implications. When the world is seen as a book, for instance, human beings are cast in the role of readers who are not really part of that larger structure. But when we conceive of the world as an enormous timepiece, human beings are implicitly seen as cogs in a greater machine. The relevance of these absolute metaphors and metaphorical shifts for Iser’s project will become clearer if we look at a literary example. In one of Herman Melville’s novels, Blumenberg points out, the world is described as ‘a frigate, which has left its harbour for good and steers, with sealed orders, toward a goal that is unknown to all onboard’.45 Here, the philosopher observes, two existing metaphors – human fate as a ship on the sea, and human life as a journey – are combined anew. According to Blumenberg, this combination offers a new, inescapably provisional answer, in the form of a striking image, to the insoluble question ‘what is the world and what is man’s place in it?’. When Iser links his reflections on style to Blumenberg’s argument about metaphors, he therefore suggests that these metaphorical transformations are akin to the stylistic shifts in literary history and in Joyce’s ‘Oxen of the Sun’. If Melville – according to Blumenberg – combines existing metaphors to give a new answer to the question ‘what is the world?’, Joyce – according to Iser – combines existing stylistic techniques to give a new answer to the question ‘what is love and birth?’. What makes these ideas particularly interesting for our purposes is the fact they prefigure Iser’s later literary anthropology. For the claim that an ‘absolute metaphor’ may offer a historically limited answer to unsolvable existential issues anticipates the idea of ‘staging’ which I will consider in Chapter 4. What is more, Iser’s reading of Joyce, like his analysis of Eliot and Beckett, highlights the gap between object and representation, a gap which his anthropological writings will describe in terms of the ‘as if’.

45 Ibid., p. 29. ‘eine Fregatte, die ihren Hafen für immer verlassen hat und mit versiegelter Order einem allen an Bord unbekannten Ziel zusteuert’.

62 —— Chapter 2 Archetype and Myth Iser develops his thoughts on Joyce and the reception of literary texts by drawing on Blumenberg’s conception of myth, which was articulated in yet another volume of the Poetik und Hermeneutik series, one that sought to rethink the function of ancient myths in modern times. According to Blumenberg’s bold argument – which he was to develop in Arbeit am Mythos [Work on Myth] (1979) –, every interpretation of myth can be placed in one of two categories: myth is either seen as a form of terror or a form of freedom, as stifling theology or liberating poetry. He goes on to emphasize the poetical rather than the theological aspect of myth, stating that the late reception of myth concentrates on its ‘essential distance’ from every type of rigidity, be that in faith, systematic thinking or textual fidelity.46 Quoting a remark by Helmuth Plessner that recalls Iser’s view of the aesthetic, Blumenberg argues that myth creates ‘a play-space [Spielraum] inside the possible’.47 Even though he stresses the importance of freedom, the philosopher holds that the threatening undercurrent of myth is never completely relinquished, and that the aesthetic variations of myth can only be grasped against the background of the terrors and pressures it transcends. The work of myth, in other words, consists in the continual reactivation of ‘poetry’ and play in opposition to the constraints of ‘theology’ and terror. Blumenberg’s emphasis on freedom also implies a specific type of myth reception. In line with its opposition to stifling dogmas, he asserts, myth counteracts the practice of literal readings by inviting variation and reinterpretation. What ultimately defines myths is the fact that they cannot be defined, but are adapted and reinterpreted at will. From the beginning, Blumenberg argues, the constituent elements of mythical stories have been reused to tell new ones. These ancient stories were never so densely constructed that new figures and storylines could not be squeezed in, which could then be praised as rediscoveries of materials which had previously been lost or silenced. To Blumenberg’s mind, ‘modern authors’ can still make use of myth in the same fashion.48 This argument about the recycling of older narrative materials is convincing, and not just in the context of myth, because literary history repeatedly bears witness to the fact that well-known stories or settings can be creatively modified by the insertion of new elements. One could think of how Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) rewrites Jane Eyre (1847) or, to give a more recent and surprising example, how Pride and Prejudice

46 Hans Blumenberg, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik IV. Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption, ed. by Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 11–66 (p. 42). 47 Ibid., p. 20. 48 Ibid., p. 50.

Montage and Modernity —— 63

(1813) is turned into Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). As the debate on Blumenberg’s essay among the conference participants shows, Iser agrees with his flexible view of myth: ‘[m]yth offers what might be called the structure of the open situation. [. ..] As the forgetting of its “original meaning” is the procedure whereby myth is constituted, th[is] open situation is capable of many variations’.49 Obviously, this view implies that we should not try to retrieve a myth’s long-forgotten original meaning, but rather examine its malleability or, in a term that is hard to translate, its Wirkungspotential.50 Abandoning the idea that myths are a thing of the past, Blumenberg therefore aims to investigate how mythological content is reused in different contexts to articulate our changing understanding of who we are as human beings and what our place in the world is. In other words, we should scrutinize examples such as Joyce’s allusions to Homer in Ulysses. Enter Wolfgang Iser. The central question of Iser’s contribution to the same volume, ‘Der Archetyp als Leerform’ [later translated as ‘Patterns of Communication in Joyce’s Ulysses’], is disarmingly simple: what is the relationship between the Odyssey and the events in Dublin on 16 June 1904? Northrop Frye had tried to shed light on the matter, but Iser finds his analysis of ‘archetypes’ unconvincing. For in Iser’s reading, Joyce’s work actually undermines accounts such as Frye’s, which play up the continuity with and authority of the original myth, by enriching ancient archetypes with entirely unexpected variations. It is more fruitful, Iser proposes, to consider the archetype not as a stable substance, but as ‘a structured blank that bears all potential realizations within itself and provides the basis for all its own subsequent variations’.51 Iser perhaps overstates the indeterminacy of myth’s ‘open structure’, as Blumenberg suggests in his subsequent analysis of Joyce and myth in Arbeit am Mythos:

49 Odo Marquard, ‘Erste Diskussion. Mythos und Dogma. Vorlage: Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos”. Vorsitz: Odo Marquard’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik IV. Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption, ed. by Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 527–47 (p. 541). ‘Der Mythos hält etwas parat, das man die Struktur der offenen Situation nennen könnte. [...] Weil der Mythos das Vergessen der “Urbedeutung” als “Technik” seiner Konstitution besitzt, ist die offene Situation vieler Variationen fähig’. 50 Blumenberg, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential’, p. 34. 51 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1972]), p. 230. In the original German version, this passage reads: ‘eine Leerform, die die Bedingung dafür bildet, daß er immer anders erzählt werden kann’. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Der Archetyp als Leerform. Erzählschablonen und Kommunikation in Joyces Ulysses’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik IV. Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption, ed. by Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 369–408 (p. 404–5).

64 —— Chapter 2 For Iser [Joyce’s allusions to the epic] are empty forms [Leerformen] [.. .] – forms that the reader has to enter into. But would he enter into them if they didn’t already have their imprinted significance? Rather than to the [. ..] inconsistencies and breaks in style of the modern work, don’t they refer us away from this work and its incapacity for meaning, toward a no longer realizable ground plan in which meaning is validated?52

But despite this difference in emphasis (Iser would no doubt admit that these ‘empty forms’ are not entirely empty), Blumenberg and Iser agree that old narrative structures can be continually reused for new narrative purposes. This analysis of myth is significant for various reasons. Again, Iser’s discussion of archetypes anticipates his interest in existential questions; love and death – two fundamental ‘anthropological’ themes of literature, as we shall see in Chapter 4 – might be seen as archetypal experiences of sorts. In addition, the idea that literary allusions establish an indeterminate but productive dialogue between source and target text is related to the notion of ‘negation’ from The Act of Reading. Blumenberg’s flexible notion of myth also sheds light on Iser’s view of literary reception. For Iser argues that novels like Ulysses no longer convey a specific perspective on the world, but rather present the reader with a series of disconnected signs – an Eliot-like ‘montage of texts [Textmontage]’53 – which can be made to cohere in so many ways that no individual reading can encompass and synthesize all semantic possibilities. Hence, such novels should not be read, but reread. Just as the open frame of myth can be reconstructed in different ways by individual authors, so the open structure of Ulysses suggests a different interpretation to each reader. This structural parallel might explain why Iser later uses the term Wirkungspotential in the context of modern reading.54 And the idea that literary traditions form malleable, myth-like structures also lies behind his later discussion of pastoral fiction, which does not have a clear identity but a complex history that unfolds as a long, myth-like ‘process of reception’.55

The Waxing of the Modern Ages Despite the nuances highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, we have seen that the interdisciplinary approach of the Poetik und Hermeneutik circle led to a highly fruitful exchange between Iser, Henrich and Blumenberg. The group’s 52 Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. by Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988 [1979]), p. 83. 53 Iser, ‘Archetyp’, p. 387. 54 Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich: Fink, 1976), pp. 7, 36. 55 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1991]), p. 27.

Montage and Modernity —— 65

first meetings encouraged Iser to develop his thoughts on polysemy and montage, the problematic or even inaccessible nature of the self, the anthropological function of art and metaphor and the flexible interpretative framework of myth and literature. Since these reflections are partly based on the modernist writings of Eliot, Joyce and Beckett, they seem to reinforce the perception of Iser as a modernist critic. And, judging by many of his early publications, that perception is not unwarranted. For, in accordance with Iser’s fascination with transitional periods, these early texts frequently try to pinpoint the precise nature of the modernist project by comparing it to the achievements of pre-modernist currents and figures. As early as Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen, he connected Pater’s impressionistic montages with ‘the upheavals in literary techniques that were later to be wrought by Eliot and Joyce’.56 Iser’s early essays similarly underline the fact that his work prior to The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading may be seen as an attempt to unearth the historical roots of modernism.57 In fact, he has suggested that the entire project of reception theory constituted a response to the work of Joyce, since Ulysses, by itself, ‘necessitated a shift of direction in literary criticism’.58 It follows that the modernist corpus is indeed, as many critics have claimed, of crucial importance for Iser’s thinking. And yet, there is a persistent problem with this interpretation: many of his writings – the early studies on Fielding and Pater are good examples – also draw attention to the innovative or ‘modern’ qualities of pre-modernist works. Even medieval literature acquires a surprisingly modern quality in his writing. Iser’s essay on the anonymous twelfth- or thirteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale, for instance, concentrates on its refreshing combination and modification of pre-existing genres and conventions. In the end, he stresses,

56 Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater. The Aesthetic Moment, trans. by David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 [1960]), p. 44. 57 For further evidence of Iser’s fascination with modernism, consider the following quotations from his early essays: ‘it appears [. . .] more expedient to elaborate the distinct conception [of Pater and Eliot] of the same questions to capture the transformation which distinguishes the late-romantic from the modern position’. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Walter Pater und T.S. Eliot. Der Übergang zur Modernität’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 9 (1959), 391–408 (p. 394); ‘Brooke’s Grantchester is a noteworthy example for the poetry between Romanticism and Modernity’. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Rupert Brooke: “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (Cafe´ des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)’, Die moderne englische Lyrik. Interpretationen, ed. by Horst Oppel, (Berlin: Schmidt, 1967), pp. 59–70 (p. 70); ‘This characteristic figure of Hopkins’s poetry simultaneously sketches the contours of his singular historical position between Romanticism and Modernity’. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins. Zwischen Romantik und Moderne’, Englische Dichter der Moderne: Ihr Leben und Werk, ed. by Rudolf Sühnel and Dieter Riesner (Berlin: Schmidt, 1971), pp. 33–51 (p. 47). 58 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Ulysses and the Reader’, James Joyce Broadsheet, 9 (October 1982), 1–2 (p. 2).

66 —— Chapter 2 the treatment of these allegorical animals shows a ‘modification of the traditional topos’.59 Iser also refers to another medieval work, in which human perfectibility is conceived in ways that anticipate the modern reflections of Baldassare Castiglione and Edmund Spenser rather than along the lines of orthodox religious prescriptions. This emphasis on innovative and modern qualities returns in an overview essay on medieval English literature. Throughout this text, Iser insists that English works cannot be reduced to their French and Italian sources. This is partly due to their more retrograde aspects: as Iser observes, English adaptations had to resort to older ideas in order to make foreign texts accessible to an audience unfamiliar with recent courtly conventions. Nevertheless, he ventures that The Owl and the Nightingale shows an originality that is remarkable for the period, and that Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century The Canterbury Tales knows no equal in other medieval literatures.60 The literary techniques of Chaucer and John Lydgate are particularly interesting: the former does not so much try to escape from traditional conventions as use them ‘for the formulation of the new situation, his own’; and the latter offers, in a mythlike fashion, ‘a receptacle of [.. .] traditions that have been disconnected from their origins, and, for precisely that reason, [...] can be used for new functions’.61 By unearthing the innovative qualities of these medieval writings, Iser explicitly casts them in the role of the precursors of modernity. Medieval texts are even shown to disrupt ‘clarity [Eindeutigkeit]’, to display a ‘mosaic’ of conventions not unlike a montage, and to engage in the ‘restructuring [Umstrukturierung]’ of older narrative materials.62 At the other end of the historical spectrum, Iser thinks that postmodernist writers such as Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon move beyond the limitations of ‘modern’ authors such as Joyce and Beckett, making these earlier projects appear, in their turn, like ‘a humanistic experiment’.63 At the same time, he indicates that the two projects have certain affinities. Despite certain reservations, for instance, he seems to agree that ‘romanticism, high modernism, and postmodernism’ all make use of a self-reflexive, ‘ironic mode of writing’ and that these different articulations of modernity should not be seen as different 59 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Owl and the Nightingale. Versuch einer formgeschichtlichen Ortsbestimmung’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 33 (1959), 309–23 (p. 315). 60 See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Mittelenglische Literatur und romanische Tradition’, in Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters. Vol. I: Ge´ne´ralite´s, ed. by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Heidelberg: Winter, 1972), pp. 304–32 (pp. 310, 324). 61 Ibid., pp. 321, 332. 62 Iser, ‘Owl’, p. 318; Iser, ‘Mittelenglische Literatur’, p. 319, 325. 63 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Von der dementierten zur zerspielten Form des Erzählens’, in Wohin treibt die Moderne? Studium Generale 1991/1992 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1992), pp. 55–73 (p. 65).

Montage and Modernity —— 67

‘epochs’ but as particular versions of a relatively homogeneous ‘project’.64 These observations imply that the modernist aspects of Iser’s thought may actually fit into a broader ‘modern’ age, which starts in the late Middle Ages and extends into postmodernist times. In his oeuvre, then, he is not primarily concerned with modernist literature, but with innovative literature. Hence, the literary revolution of authors such as Joyce is less important than the process of revolution itself. What makes this aspect of Iser’s thinking even more interesting in the present context is the fact that it was Blumenberg’s work again that offered vital stimuli. Especially in his magisterial study Die Legitimität der Neuzeit [The Legitimacy of the Modern Age] (1966), Iser found a specific view of the modern age as well as a general understanding of historical method that provided him with a clear historical framework. The impact of these ideas on history and modernity can be seen most clearly in his study Shakespeares Historien. Genesis und Geltung [later translated as Staging Politics. The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Historical Plays] (1988), but it also recurs in Iser’s more famous writings, including The Implied Reader.

The Open World of the Novel Before examining Blumenberg’s book on early modern times, we should return one last time to the Poetik und Hermeneutik conferences. In the previous chapter, I demonstrated that Iser’s dissertation on Fielding already argued that the novel is a quintessentially modern genre and reveals a specific view of the world. In the first Poetik und Hermeneutik volume, Iser lifts these insights to the next level by drawing on Blumenberg’s introduction, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans’ [‘The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel’]. As the title suggests, Blumenberg contends that the historical possibility of the novel was contingent on the emergence of a specific conception of reality. Throughout history, he observes, human beings have had different conceptions of reality [Wirklichkeitsbegriffe], but none of these coincide with reality as such, and are rather those views of the world tacitly presupposed in particular periods. Alternative views are always possible, but these have to be explicitly formulated and defended, whereas their dominant counterparts do not. Blumenberg’s account differentiates between four consecutive views of reality. Classical antiquity, to begin with, subscribes to a reality of ‘instantaneous evidence’, believing that the world presents itself immediately and truthfully to the human mind: the 64 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Heide Ziegler. Ironie ist Pflicht. John Barth und John Hawkes – Bewusstseinsformen des amerikanischen Gegenwartsromans ’ (review), Modern Fiction Studies, 43.2 (1997), 486–92 (p. 491).

68 —— Chapter 2 objects of our perception are directly given, after all, and are hence unable to reveal new features after we initially encounter them. This view is abandoned in the Middle Ages, when reality is no longer given in a self-evident fashion, but requires a transcendent entity to guarantee the credibility of our perceptions. The Middle Ages believe, therefore, in a ‘guaranteed reality’. The modern view, crucially, describes reality in terms of its continual self-realization. Whereas the first view stresses the present immediacy of reality and the second harks back to its supposedly pre-existing foundation, this view underscores the future of reality. Modernity considers ‘reality as the result of a realization’, ‘a progressive certainty which can never reach a total, final consistency, as it always looks forward to a future that might contain elements which could shatter previous consistency and render previous “realities” unreal’.65 In short, the modern world conceives of reality as an incomplete task, a forever outstanding project. Modernity also marks the rise of the fourth and final conception of reality, the view that it is a recalcitrant phenomenon which forever evades human conceptualization and should therefore be conceived, in a last-ditch effort, as ‘resistance [Widerstand]’.66 For Blumenberg, history suggests that we can conceive of reality as a self-disclosing order of established entities, a divinely guaranteed presence, an open and unfinished context, or a recalcitrant Ding an sich which successfully resists human conceptualization. These conceptions of reality have crucial implications for the art and literature of the corresponding periods. If reality is seen as a complete and self-contained sphere, as in classical antiquity, art can only mirror or imitate and the artist is unable to add anything truly new. Similarly, the shift from a guaranteed order to a radically open world explains why medieval thinkers mistrust the new and unexpected, while their modern counterparts feverishly celebrate it. This modern view of reality also creates the conceptual preconditions for the emergence of the novel, Blumenberg adds. In contrast to more ancient and regulated forms, this flexible genre conjures up a process of realization that only becomes conceivable ‘when reality is seen as arising from a “process” of consistencybuilding and not as a form of “instantaneous evidence”’.67 This open context of modern reality, Blumenberg proposes, is the underlying subject of the novel, 65 Hans Blumenberg, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 9–27 (p. 12); Hans Blumenberg, ‘The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 29–48 (p. 33). 66 Blumenberg, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff’, p. 13. 67 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Sechste Sitzung. Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans. Kunst und Natur in der idealistischen Ästhetik. Vorsitz: Wolfgang Iser’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 219–27 (p. 227).

Montage and Modernity —— 69

whatever its subgenre. In representing this open context, the novel occasionally leads to the idea of a resistant reality. Discussing one of Iser’s favourite texts, Blumenberg notes that Sterne’s Tristram Shandy actually moves beyond the novel and its basic conception of reality through its self-conscious awareness of reality’s resistance to being contained by the human mind or literary forms. This idea appeals to Iser, for he argues that ‘Blumenberg’s fourth conception of reality’ is a fruitful instrument for thinking about modernist prose.68 Iser and Blumenberg – and, if we recall the previous chapter, Luka´cs – therefore agree that the rise of the novel is related to the modern conception of reality as an unfinished world of ever-new possibilities. Put differently, ‘the modern novel’ is a tautology, since the novel and modernity imply each other’s presence. The fact that this essay ‘strongly influenced’ Iser has already been noted by Brook Thomas.69 But Thomas’s analysis, in keeping with the idea of Iser as a modernist, emphasizes the importance of the fourth view of reality, whereas a detailed consideration of his writings reveals that the third is even more prominent; the idea of the open context recurs more frequently than the idea of resistance, suggesting once again that the modernist dimension of Iser’s thought is but one part of the story. This emphasis on the open world is perhaps not surprising, given Iser’s interest in novels. For, as Blumenberg observes, the novel inevitably evokes an open-ended world and can therefore only hint at the opacity of reality. If we want to understand Iser’s fascination with the modern view of reality, we should consider his contribution to the Poetik und Hermeneutik volume in which Blumenberg’s essay first appeared. Concentrating on Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), Iser’s essay ‘Möglichkeiten der Illusion im historischen Roman’ [later translated as ‘Fiction – The Filter of History’] claims that a novel can only convey an older historical reality to a later readership effectively if it chooses a particular textual form and triggers a specific imaginative response. For Iser, Scott’s work teaches us that a historical novel should neither focus on antiquarian details nor subordinate history to preconceived principles. What it should do is present the reader with a rich array of incompatible ideological perspectives. Furthermore, these can only be represented on their own terms if the narrator is comparatively neutral and ‘wavers’ between these competing ideologies. If we do not want to prejudge the outcome of the historical conflict, as Luka´cs had already noted, these different perspectives should be relayed to the reader via a neutral intermediary, ‘a mediocre hero, who sides passionately with neither of the warring camps in the great crisis of his time’.70 Extending Luka´cs’s analysis, Iser argues

68 Ibid. 69 Thomas, ‘Restaging’, p. 22. 70 Georg Luka´cs, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969 [1937]), p. 37.

70 —— Chapter 2 that the reader has to complement this ‘neutral’ presentation of past ideologies with a two-pronged, imaginative response; he or she needs to integrate the represented aspects of historical reality into a coherent and ‘closed’ mental panorama. Even more importantly, he or she needs to ‘re-open’ and re-experience the depicted events via the imagination. This latter response is crucial, because, for Iser, history evolves from a highly contingent concatenation of situations and reactions, and this contingency (including the concomitant sense that the future we know now might have been quite different) can only be re-experienced if we recreate these moments of uncertain decision-making in our minds. The connection with Kierkegaard’s thought, as discussed in Chapter 1, is clear. In the present context, this essay is not only significant because it discusses the relation between history and literary reading, but also because it is the first instance in Iser’s work which explicitly reveals the influence of Blumenberg’s thoughts on the modern conception of reality. For Iser, Scott reveals his openended view of reality when he likens his story to a journey by horse carriage: ‘[i]f reality is to be uncovered only by means of a long and difficult journey, then obviously it is no longer going to be the clear-cut setting for some underlying, philosophical system’.71 Scott’s novel, like reality itself, can only be read by a travelling reader or be apprehended, to use a phrase that Iser will reuse in The Act of Reading, via a ‘wandering viewpoint’.72 This literary text trains us in the modern conception of reality, we might say, by heightening our awareness of the fact ‘that reality can only be represented through a continual expansion of what we know’.73 Blumenberg agreed that Scott’s novel fits into the modern view of reality, for he responded to Iser’s essay by noting that Waverley reveals the underlying theme of the modern historical novel, namely ’the representation of the multifariously open-ended continuation of history’.74 The influence of these ideas can be traced in Iser’s other writings as well. In describing Samuel Beckett’s modernist novels, for instance, he alludes to the 71 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Fiction – the Filter of History: A Study of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 86–104 (p. 92). Perhaps the Blumenberg connection is even clearer in the original German version: ‘[w]enn Wirklichkeit erst durch eine beschwerliche Reise zu erschließen ist, kann sie nicht mehr als Raum der Anschauung für eine [. . .] apriorische Konstruktion der Welt verstanden werden’. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Möglichkeiten der Illusion im historischen Roman. Sir Walter Scotts Waverley’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 135–56 (p. 144). 72 Iser, ‘Fiction – the Filter of History’, p. 92. 73 Iser, ‘Möglichkeiten’, p. 147. 74 Jurij Striedter, ‘Siebte Sitzung. Möglichkeiten der Illusion im historischen Roman (Sir Walter Scotts Waverley). Vorsitz: Jurij Striedter’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 228–36 (p. 235).

Montage and Modernity —— 71

notion of a resistant reality: ‘it is the distinguishing mark of reality that it resists [cognitive] integration’.75 He also links the idea of resistance to that of the open context. When he says that the abrupt montage of styles in Ulysses, for instance, heightens our awareness of ‘the open-ended nature [Offenheit] of our factual world’, this suggests that the third and fourth views of reality are structurally related; reality resists being pinned down in order to safeguard its open-ended nature.76 His analysis of modernist authors may lead us to believe otherwise, but the idea of the ‘open context’ returns more often in Iser’s oeuvre than that of resistance. In The Act of Reading, he not only mentions the characteristically modern ‘wandering viewpoint’ alluded to earlier, but also the ‘open world’ and especially the ‘process of realization that constitutes reality’.77 Similarly, his monographs on Tristram Shandy and Shakespeare’s history plays allude to a view of reality as ‘the result of a realization process’.78 The Fictive and the Imaginary continues this theme, for here, Iser observes that the performative, creative aspect of representation increased ‘when an open-ended world had to be represented or when reality was considered as no longer given but as continually realizing itself’.79 And his penultimate book, The Range of Interpretation, once again stresses ‘the everincreasing open-endedness of the world’.80 As these passages show, Iser’s oeuvre consistently describes reality in the modern terms of an open-ended context. The claim that novels evoke specific views of reality – or, to modify the argument slightly, that they function as a battleground for different views of reality – is an interesting hypothesis for further research. Consider the following lines from Adam Thorpe’s Hodd (2009), a novel which presents the reader with a fictitious medieval manuscript about Robin Hood: ‘[e]verything the bandit leader said was a revelation to me, as though I were some hideous heretic who yet believes God has more to reveal – when every last morsel was revealed in the divine person of Christ Jesus until the end of the world’.81 Within the fictional world of the novel, different views of reality can be pitted against one another; in this example, a guaranteed and an open reality. What the novel does, in other words, is enable us to explore the nature of reality. And the idea that reality can be further explored is, as we have seen, a modern, not strictly a modernist achievement. 75 Iser, Implied, p. 175. 76 Iser, ‘Archetyp’, p. 400. 77 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]), pp. 109, 206, 68. 78 Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sternes ‘Tristram Shandy’. Inszenierte Subjektivität (Munich: Fink, 1987), p. 26; Wolfgang Iser, Shakespeares Historien. Genesis und Geltung (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1988), p. 126. 79 Iser, Fictive, p. 284. 80 Wolfgang Iser, The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 9. 81 Adam Thorpe, Hodd (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 87.

72 —— Chapter 2 This modern, Blumenbergian dimension of Iser’s literary history becomes even clearer if we turn to The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and Shakespeares Historien.

The Self-Production of Modern Humanity For our purposes, it may be helpful to think of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as an extended analysis of the historical conditions of possibility behind the modern conception of reality which we have just encountered. In his philosophical account of the rise of early modern thinking, Blumenberg argues that modern science no longer believes in the idea of a fully realized cosmos, but rather subscribes to ‘the reality concept of the open context, which anticipates reality as the always incomplete result of a realization’.82 What makes early modern scientists adopt this stance? And what is the conceptual connection between the open context and other parts of the modern mindset such as self-production and curiosity? To answer these questions, we have to start with Blumenberg’s wideranging account of the early modern loss of order. In premodern times, Blumenberg notes in a fashion reminiscent of Luka´cs, the world was seen as an orderly cosmos where the premodern self knew its place and fitted comfortably into the broader scheme of things. This order is partly questioned in classical antiquity, Blumenberg continues, but it could only be truly discarded after its emphatic affirmation by medieval philosophers. In contrast to this affirmation, the work of early modern thinkers reveals that, from now on, this cosmic order is no longer a given, and the position of mankind in the world is no longer guaranteed. Surprisingly, this evolution is also an unexpected consequence of late-medieval developments (and is hence a further example of the overlap between adjacent historical periods mentioned in Chapter 1); the changing view of God in the late Middle Ages sees him increasingly retreating into a transcendent realm and leaving humans to explore the world that is left in his wake. From now on, human beings are left to their own devices and have to take care of themselves, leading to a situation that is characterized by human ‘selfproduction [Selbstbehauptung]’.83 Now that modern man has his hands free, various technological innovations emerge. This newly productive attitude is also as-

82 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983 [1966]), p. 423. 83 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996 [1966]), p. 151. The term is rendered as ‘self-assertion’ in the official translation, but I think the word ‘self-production’ better brings out those connotations that are crucial for Iser’s reading of Blumenberg. See Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 138.

Montage and Modernity —— 73

sociated with a more complex view of language, in which words and objects are no longer inextricably linked. In Nicholas of Cusa’s thinking, as Blumenberg points out, language can only be truthful if it is aware of its provisional nature. It goes without saying that this modern condition also encourages a new view of what it means to be human. As is revealed in the work of Giordano Bruno – the Italian philosopher who was burned at the stake for his heretical views about the infinite nature of the universe and the plurality of planets and worlds –, the meaning of human existence is now seen in terms of ‘the transgression [Überschreitung] of nature as that which is given’.84 In this sense, the notion of the ‘person’ – which is not primarily directed ‘at the core of the real subject but rather at the roles in which it presents and veils itself’85– is crucial, as it will also be in Iser’s later anthropology. Despite these advances in the realms of science, linguistic theory and anthropology, early modern liberty also causes considerable anxiety about the appropriate behaviour and course of action, and this is where science comes in. For the predictions of modern science partly address this widespread sense of uncertainty, Blumenberg argues, even though they cannot provide the reassurance of definitive answers, as they are, by definition, subject to revision. Like modern words and selves, modern scientific hypotheses are therefore linked to the third conception of reality. Only in an open context can human beings produce themselves. This cluster of ideas can also be linked to that other characteristic modern quality, curiosity, the emergence of which Blumenberg describes by analyzing various images and terms. Together, these make up a specifically modern idiom. In Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie, Blumenberg had already highlighted the ‘discovery [Entdeckung] of the terra incognita’, the ‘discoveries [Entdeckungen]’ of poets, and the ‘indeterminacy [Unbestimmtheit]’ associated with the idea of the unfinished world.86 The developments previously mentioned also explain the positive ‘re-evaluation of the notion of the new’, ‘the emerging fondness for the plural of “world”’ and the related defence of ‘fantasy’.87 This idiom receives a fuller exposition in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, where Blumenberg argues that modern curiosity triggers various discoveries which transgress the limits of the known world. In this context, he pays special attention to the modern move ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’, an allusion to the famous symbol of the boundaries of the classical world.88 This image and the associated figure of Odysseus recur throughout Blumenberg’s argument, and they play a crucial role in the

84 85 86 87 88

Blumenberg, Legitimität, p. 694. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 595. Blumenberg, Paradigmen, pp. 78, 79, 87. Ibid., pp. 80, 81, 82. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 234.

74 —— Chapter 2 modern rehabilitation of curiosity. In a thought-provoking analysis (which again illustrates the flexible potential of mythical figures), he considers the ambiguous versions of this image in Cicero, Dante and Bacon, among others. The analysis finishes with Blumenberg’s own reading of the image: The modern age’s initial passage beyond the Pillars of Hercules, its breaking through the Nec plus ultra, was supposed to open once and for all the borders of a hitherto unknown reality. But was the terra incognita that was aimed at there [. ..] the final reserve of the unknown? [. . .] It was to become evident that there could be other systematic orientations toward the unknown and the undisclosed, and thus other possible ways of going beyond boundaries. The beginning of the modern age turned out to be a repeatable, or at least an imitable, paradigm.89

Or, to paraphrase, the ability of curiosity to transgress the limits of the known world is not a unique historical achievement, but a frame of mind that can be activated in different situations. For Blumenberg, the process of modernity is eminently repeatable. These insights crop up in many of Iser’s works, most explicitly in Shakespeares Historien. The early modern period, he begins in Blumenbergian fashion, is characterized by ‘the dialectic of theological absolutism and human self-production [Selbstbehauptung]’.90 However, Blumenberg is mainly interested in the historical shift from medieval order to modern freedom, whereas Iser appears more concerned with the continued struggle between order and freedom. For Iser, this newly gained human autonomy cannot be achieved definitively, because the sense of uncertainty that accompanies it encourages a relapse into tightly ordered thinking as well as rigid forms of politics. This nostalgic yearning for order manifests itself, for instance, in the idea of the ‘chain of being’, a crucial part of sixteenth-century thinking, which states that all layers of being are hierarchically organized and related to God like links in a chain or steps in a cosmic ladder. Drawing on Michel Foucault, Iser claims that this chain of being – with the associated belief in meaningful ‘correspondences’ between the different cosmic layers – creates a new sense of order in early modern times. He goes on to suggest, however, that Blumenberg’s emphasis on freedom prevails over Foucault’s emphasis on order:

89 Ibid., p. 440. 90 Wolfgang Iser, Shakespeares Historien. Genesis und Geltung (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1988), p. 92. Iser’s analysis of King Lear and Macbeth also alludes to the early modern necessity of Selbstbehauptung. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Die Präsenz des Endes. King Lear – Macbeth’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik XVI. Das Ende. Figuren einer Denkform, ed. by Rainer Warning and Karlheinz Stierle (Munich: Fink, 1996), pp. 359–83 (p. 382).

Montage and Modernity —— 75

The Christian God’s withholding of certainty regarding human salvation gave rise to human self-assertion – as Blumenberg has contended – because self-preservation made it pertinent to scrutinize the very world in which this objective had to be achieved. But this brings into focus phenomena that will not automatically fit into the schemata provided by rationalization, even if – as Foucault indicates – the system of ‘similitudes’ has a large capacity for establishing control.91

In other words, the attempts to return to a reassuring order may be powerful, but they cannot fully encompass the open world as explored by humans in this productive age. Despite the presence of new forms of solidification, the early modern age is thus marked by an unprecedented attention to ‘the exploding multiformity of life’, the elusive Leben we already encountered in Iser’s dissertations.92 The tension between order and flexibility returns in Iser’s discussion of early modern politics. In modern times, he claims, the idea of an absolute ‘power’, which is interested merely in continuing its existence, should be replaced with the flexible notion of ‘politics’, which aspires to specific, contextual goals.93 Because of its dependence on context, the nature of modern politics cannot be definitively established, but can only be illustrated via a series of case studies. For Iser, this explains why Shakespeare’s ‘phenomenology of politics’ does not limit itself to a single (history) play; if politics cannot be subsumed under pregiven frameworks, then it can only be represented by evoking different political constellations and contrasting attempts to legitimate the power of the monarchy, ranging from the rise of shrewd kings to the downfall of intransigent monarchs.94 Like the account of history in his essay on Scott, Iser’s definition of politics in Shakespeares Historien – in terms of particular ‘situations’ – reveals the con-

91 Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics. The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Historical Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 [1988]), p. 19. 92 Iser, Shakespeares Historien, p. 44. 93 Given the Foucauldian connotations of the term ‘power’, it could be argued that this distinction amounts to an implicit critique of Foucault’s thinking and the historical literary criticism it inspired. Regarding the work of Stephen Greenblatt in particular, Iser’s Shakespeare study argues that his New Historicism devotes too much energy to social critique and to the historical roots of Shakespeare’s plays, making it unable to fully explain the continued ‘anthropological’ significance of Shakespeare’s work. In a related remark, Iser maintains that Louis Montrose fails to develop significant anthropological insights on the basis of Shakespeare’s work. See Wolfgang Iser, Spielstrukturen in Shakespeares Komödien. ‘Sommernachtstraum’ – ‘Was ihr wollt’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), p. 33. Despite these differences, the long quotation from Greenblatt in the epilogue of Iser’s Shakespeare book reveals the underlying affinities between their projects. In fact, notions such as ‘selffashioning’ and ‘resonance’ are akin to some of the ideas voiced by Iser and Blumenberg. For a more detailed – if not entirely neutral – comparison of Iser and Greenblatt, see the final chapter in Brook Thomas’s The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics. 94 Iser, Staging, p. 70.

76 —— Chapter 2 tinued importance of Kierkegaard’s existentialist thought for his work. Observing that ‘[a]lternatives demand decisions’, he argues that Shakespeare’s history plays reveal ‘that no decision is compulsory, but that everyone has the freedom to choose between options’.95 But how can we make the right choice and avoid the pitfalls of rigid forms of politics, which cling to old conventions in a desperate attempt to legitimate their unfounded power? In Iser’s reading, Shakespeare’s plays demonstrate that the ideal prince neither clings to old conventions – such as the explication of dreams or the feudal code – nor aspires to the unbounded freedom of a ‘free play’.96 Instead, the prince opts for a ‘selective role-play’ that is truly attuned to the everexpanding context of the modern world and to the view of man that was adumbrated by Blumenberg and Henrich (and will be further developed in Iser’s literary anthropology).97 In modern times, ‘[t]he individual is [. ..] only the plurality of its roles, [...] because its own ground is hidden from itself’.98 In Iser’s account, then, Shakespeare’s plays not only evoke the early modern tension between freedom and order, but also propose a moderately playful form of politics which continually modifies the cultural world that surrounds us. After all, this world is not made but remade. As Iser puts it, ‘Shakespeare lifts [.. .] human finiteness out of its theological determination and recasts it in anthropological terms as an endless retailoring of the world to make it fit changing human needs’.99 Modern politics, in other words, continually creates novel roles and realities. Apart from self-production, Iser’s Shakespeare study also picks up on the idea of curiosity. In a section that was omitted in the English translation, he notes that the modern era displays a remarkable ‘passion for discovery [Entdeckerleidenschaft]’.100 This capacity for self-production enables modern man to cross the boundaries of the known world and to explore unfamiliar realms. It follows that, from this point on, unbounded curiosity is a characteristic trait of the human condition. To read and interact properly, as Iser suggests with reference to early modern travel reports, is henceforth to discover: Here a procedure comes to the fore, which to all intents and purposes has become very significant for the modern attitude of man: not to simply mould the unknown to fit the familiar horizon, but rather to modify one’s own horizon in order to form a connection with the foreign and the unfamiliar.101 95 Ibid., p. 161; Iser, Shakespeares Historien, p. 76. 96 Iser, Staging, p. 96. 97 Iser, Shakespeares Historien, p. 174. 98 Ibid., p. 111. 99 Iser, Staging, p. 201. 100 Iser, Shakespeares Historien, p. 45. 101 Ibid., p. 46. ‘Hier tritt ein Vorgang ins Bewußtsein, der im Grunde genommen für das

Montage and Modernity —— 77

Something similar can be observed in Iser’s description of the sixteenth-century, multi-authored Mirror for Magistrates. This didactic work, he notes, does not offer explicit solutions, but only an implicit moral code which the active reader has to discover. In this respect, it is ‘a real Renaissance book, because it allows its readers to discern the standard for their own behaviour themselves, by perceiving the implicit code of conduct’.102 If this form of discovery is typical of the early modern age, then so, surely, is Iser’s theory of reading. For, throughout his work, he places repeated emphasis on the importance of this type of implicit meaning for the reader. As the notion of the ‘wandering viewpoint’ already indicated, then, the implied reader of Iser’s theory is not just a modernist but a modern reader. This hypothesis is confirmed by his other texts, for they use the same modern idiom and give pride of place to notions such as discovery, curiosity and transgression. A few revealing passages will suffice here. In the introduction to The Implied Reader, Iser points out that this book can be summarized in one word: ‘discovery’.103 And it is striking indeed to see that many of the texts discussed in this book describe actual and psychological journeys of discovery and exploration. To a certain extent, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Scott’s Waverley and Joyce’s Ulysses are all travel novels, and quintessentially modern works. Upon closer inspection, we might even say that Iser’s study discusses discoveries on many different levels: apart from those which take place in the fictional world, he also draws attention to discoveries in the mind of the reader and the critic, that fearless explorer who explores the gap, or uncharted ‘no-man’sland’, between text and interpretation.104 Blumenberg’s view of the modern age also sheds light on one of the early sections from The Fictive and the Imaginary, where Iser, paraphrasing Blumenberg’s reflections on curiosity, returns to an inaugural moment of modern thought, namely Francis Bacon’s use of the image of Odysseus. And if we bear in mind that Blumenberg describes the modern age not only in terms of discovery but also as a process of ‘transgression [Überschreitung]’ and ‘boundary-crossings [Grenzüberschreitungen]’,105 the fact that The Fictive and the Imaginary later defines fiction in terms of ‘boundary-crossing [Grenz-

neuzeitliche Verhalten des Menschen bedeutsam geworden ist: das Unbekannte nicht einfach auf den eigenen Horizont einzuformen, sondern eher den eigenen Horizont zu modifizieren, um eine Beziehung zum Fremdartigen zu gewinnen’. 102 Ibid., p. 58–59. ‘ein echtes Renaissancebuch, denn er räumt seinen Lesern die Möglichkeit ein, im Gewärtigen des impliziten Moralkanons sich die Vorgabe für das eigene Verhalten selbst zu erschließen’. 103 Iser, Implied, p. xiii. 104 Ibid., p. xii. 105 Blumenberg, Legitimität, pp. 414, 494.

78 —— Chapter 2 überschreitung]’ becomes charged with significance.106 These connections between Iser’s reflections and the modern age should come as no surprise, however. For, as he informs us in a little-known piece, a latent form of reception theory has been with us, in one way or another, ‘since the Renaissance’.107

The Reshuffling of Systems and Motifs In order to appreciate the full historical dimension of Iser’s theory, we not only need to discuss its historical roots but also its view of historical method. One significant aspect of his methodological agenda is the way in which he develops his earlier remarks about the flexible potential of metaphor and myth by appropriating Blumenberg’s notion of ‘reshuffling [Umbesetzung]’ to analyze the historical development of conceptual systems and literary motifs.108 Apart from its account of human self-production and curiosity, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age criticizes a specific view of modernity as well as a general view of historical method. Blumenberg famously rejects the thesis that the modern age merely produced secularized versions of Christian themes or the Renaissance of Greek motifs, since this claim reduces modern achievements – and their ‘legitimacy’ – to the repetition of ancient ideas. More generally, he takes issue with both a transhistorical perspective that only finds similarities between historical periods and a historicist approach that only discovers differences. What we should do, Blumenberg says, in a move reminiscent of Iser’s argument in Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen, is pay attention to the interplay between stability and change by analyzing ‘zones of transition’ rather than stable periods.109 To perform such analyses, he adds, we should use the notion of ‘reshuffling’, which he defines by contrasting it with the supposedly more static concept of secularization: What mostly happened in the process that is interpreted as secularization [.. .] cannot be described as the transposition [Umsetzung] of genuinely theological contents into their 106 Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 21. 107 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Vorwort’, in Theodore A. Meyer, Das Stilgesetz der Poesie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 13–20 (p. 17). In the passage in question, he refers to ‘einer Auffassung, die als latente Wirkungsästhetik seit der Renaissance unter einem klassizistischen Verständnis der Kunst mehr oder minder ungebrochen hindurchrinnt’. 108 In the official translation, Umbesetzung is translated as ‘reoccupation’. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 65. As the same word is usually translated as ‘reshuffling’ in the English versions of Iser’s books, however, I will use this second translation to underscore yet again the conceptual affinities between both thinkers. 109 Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 147.

Montage and Modernity —— 79

secular self-alienated counterparts; it was, rather, the reshuffling [Umbesetzung] of conceptual positions that had been vacated by earlier answers but whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated.110

If modern times appear to produce secularized versions of Christian ideas, that is not because these ideas have remained constant, but rather because Christian thought introduced questions which still require an answer, even if the original answers have long since been rejected. The idea that older questions continue to play a role after their traditional answers have eroded away can be illustrated with the example of the previous chapter, Zeh’s Spieltrieb, in which characters continue to talk about the ‘soul’, despite its supposed obsolescence. This process of reshuffling is also relevant for literature. For Blumenberg feels that, just as general history should not concentrate on what remains the same throughout history, cultural history should not opt for an overly static ‘topos research’.111 When discussing recurring motifs, therefore, Blumenberg highlights their functional differences rather than their transhistorical similarities. When Petrarch climbs the Mont Ventoux, for instance, his account of this episode draws inspiration from Saint Augustine’s Confessiones (397–398). How should we interpret this passage, Blumenberg wonders? Does it testify to Petrarch’s characteristically modern curiosity or does it reveal a relapse into medieval modes of thinking? The passage may appear, at first glance, to be a repetition of an old topos, Blumenberg notes, but Petrarch’s use of this convention actually hints at its transformation: This astonishing transposition of the category of conversion onto the beginnings of a new awareness of nature and the world [. ..] is an exemplary case of the supposed constancy of literary topoi [.. .]. What Petrarch describes [however] is like a ritual, the meanings and justifications of which have long since been lost, and whose fixed sequence of proceedings can be performed again with the legitimacy of a new and free endowment of meaning. The portrayal of the ascent of Mont Ventoux vividly exemplifies what is meant by the ‘reality’ of history as the reshuffling [Umbesetzung] of formal structures of positions.112

110 Blumenberg, Legitimität, p. 75. ‘Was in dem als Säkularisierung gedeuteten Vorgang überwiegend [. ..] geschehen ist, läßt sich nicht als Umsetzung authentisch theologischer Gehalte in ihre säkulare Selbstentfremdung, sondern als Umbesetzung vakant gewordener Positionen von Antworten beschreiben, deren zugehörige Fragen nicht eliminiert werden konnten’. 111 Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 29. 112 Blumenberg, Legitimität, p. 399. ‘Diese erstaunliche Transposition der Kategorie der Bekehrung auf die Anfänge eines neuen Natur- und Weltbewußtseins [.. .] ist ein Paradefall für die vermeintliche Konstanz literarischer Topoi [...]. Was Petrarca schildert, ist wie ein Ritual, dessen sinngebende Vorstellungen und Rechtfertigungen längst verlorengegangen sind, und das als eine fixierte Prozeßfolge mit dem Recht der freien und neuen Sinnausstattung weiter

80 —— Chapter 2 This example – like that of the Pillars of Hercules, we might add – provides not so much evidence for the stability of literary topoi, but rather for their functional reshuffling. As Petrarca’s use of Augustine – or Joyce’s use of Homer – brings to light, writers often fall back on older symbolic languages to express new meanings. Hence, the mechanism of reshuffling describes not only the way in which conceptual systems rework old arguments, but also how successive literary works reconfigure ancient motifs. This methodological proposal, as we will see, inspired Iser to refine his earlier reflections about transitional periods. Again, this can be demonstrated by considering his study of Shakespeare’s history plays. Like Blumenberg’s book, Iser’s Shakespeares Historien offers a general reflection on methodology, and takes issue with critics who either play up the transhistorical qualities of Shakespeare or who opt for a radically historicist perspective. In proposing his alternative, Iser picks up on the idea of reshuffling. Throughout his argument, he often uses the opposition between ‘schema’ and ‘correction’ – to which I will return in the next chapter – to analyze the productive tension between tradition and innovation: authors can only evoke something new, he says, by returning to existing models or ‘schemata’ and making slight adjustments or ‘correction[s]’ to these old structures.113 This understanding of literary change is already close to the idea of reshuffling. But Iser explicitly mentions Blumenberg’s term as well. His analysis of the ‘reshuffling [Umbesetzung]’ taking place in the scene where Richard II abdicates his throne to Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, is worth considering in detail:114 Rich. Give me the crown. Here, cousin, seize the crown. [.. .] Now is this golden crown like a deep well That owes two buckets, filling one another, The emptier ever dancing in the air, The other down, unseen, and full of water. That bucket down and full of tears am I, Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.115

As Iser reads it, this passage ‘reshuffles’ a conventional pattern of sixteenth-century historiography, namely the belief that historical developments proceed via a pattern of ‘rise and fall’. He argues that Shakespeare retains the idea of the rise

vollzogen werden kann. Die Darstellung der Besteigung des Mont Ventoux exemplifiziert anschaulich, was “Realität” der Geschichte als Umbesetzung formaler Stellengefüge bedeutet’. 113 Iser, Staging, p. 133. 114 Iser, Shakespeares Historien, p. 95. 115 William Shakespeare, Richard II, ed. by Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 135–36.

Montage and Modernity —— 81

and fall, but replaces the conventional image of the wheel of Fortune with the image of the well and two buckets. One would expect the empty bucket to descend into the well while the filled one ascends, but the positions are reversed here, and by changing them, Iser maintains, Shakespeare inverts the conventional pattern, unexpectedly associating the abdicating monarch with the filled bucket at the bottom and the emerging monarch with the empty bucket at the top. By means of this alteration, Shakespeare suggests that Richard ‘rises’ or acquires a regal stature in his ‘fall’ or abdication, whereas Bolingbroke is shown as a limited or ‘fallen’ figure in the moment of his ‘rise’ or ascension to the throne. What is more, the inverted image does not try to identify the moral qualities and deficiencies underlying a person’s rise and fall – thereby taming the unpredictable nature of historical change –, but intimates that the switch in Richard’s and Bolingbroke’s positions is down to pure chance. For Iser, the analysis of such unexpected reshufflings, not the collecting of supposedly unchanging topoi and archetypes, is the proper way to study the historical dynamic of literary tradition. The term ‘reshuffling’ is mentioned in other contexts, too. In The Act of Reading, Iser characterizes the historical shifts taking place in conceptual systems as the ‘reshuffling [Umbesetzung] of certain systemic positions’.116 When he describes historical change in terms of Nelson Goodman’s process of ‘world-making’ in The Fictive and the Imaginary, he appeals again to Blumenberg’s argument; after noting that world-versions should not be explained but reshuffled, Iser claims that ‘reshufflings [Umbesetzungen] are possible only if the system of the present world-version contains at least one empty space [Leerstelle], the occupation of which vacates another space, and hence enables the restructuring of [this version]’.117 The concept also crops up in a more literary-critical fashion when Iser uses it to describe the changing conventions of early modern pastoral literature, or when he traces the conceptual ‘reshuffling [Umbesetzung]’ of the notion mimesis.118 In general terms, he claims, ‘traditions are established by the reshuffling [das Umbesetzen] of significant features of the previous work’.119 These remarks indicate that the concept of ‘reshuffling’ is a powerful and stimulating methodological tool for analyzing changing literary motifs as well as the maintenance of entire literary traditions.

116 Iser, Akt, p. 119. 117 Iser, Fiktive, p. 272. ‘Umbesetzungen [. ..] sind nur möglich, wenn im System der Weltversion zumindest eine Leerstelle vorhanden ist, deren Besetzung eine andere freigibt, um dadurch die Umstrukturierung [dieser Version] zu ermöglichen’. 118 See ibid., pp. 109, 489. 119 Ibid., p. 101.

82 —— Chapter 2 Beyond the Philosophy of History Another component of Iser’s methodological argument about literary history is his insistent plea that rigid conceptions of history are fatally flawed. Again, this pattern recurs throughout his oeuvre, but is most clearly discernible in the study on Shakespeare. In Shakespeares Historien, Iser defends a functionalist approach to literary history. Drawing on the work of the Marxist critic Karel Kosı´k, he proposes that literature never simply reflects or mirrors reality, but always embodies a ‘reaction’ to its historical context. As a rule, he says, ‘a repetition of the world in the work represents a repetition with a difference’.120 As will be shown in more detail in the next chapter, Iser maintains that literature does not deal with reality as such, but with contemporary ways of thinking about reality, with pre-existing systems of thought. Literary texts ‘react’ to these systems by suspending their unquestioned validity and reshuffling them in ways that reveal their conceptual and moral deficiencies. To interpret this ‘reaction’, Iser continues, we should apply R.G. Collingwood’s idea of question-and-answer logic to the literary realm. According to this argument, the thought systems of a specific period attempt to answer pressing conceptual questions: the chain of being, for example, sought to address early modern uncertainties about the place of man in the world. These answers inevitably create new questions, however, as the emergence of new thought systems and, crucially, the critical ‘reactions’ of contemporary literary texts indicate. What is important about this argument is that the question-andanswer model is supposedly more flexible than preconceived views of history: Collingwood’s argument is in opposition to a teleological understanding of history, which regards every situation as a step toward a goal, thereby associating all events with the unfolding of an already existing pattern. [...] Collingwood’s question-and-answer logic [.. .] frees an understanding of history from what are ultimately theologically inspired purposes, which since the eighteenth century have been imposed on history under the guise of philosophy of history.121

By investigating how literary texts react to the inconclusive answers of contemporary thought systems, the literary historian should therefore be able to unearth a form of history overlooked by models which start out from preconceived ideas. How does this argument about literary texts, thought systems and rigid ‘philosophies of history’ illuminate Shakespeare’s history plays? The loss of order in the early modern period, as Iser argues in unison with Blumenberg, led to the rise of human freedom, but also to a radical sense of uncertainty which 120 Iser, Shakespeares Historien, p. 205. 121 Iser, Staging, p. 190.

Montage and Modernity —— 83

prompted the search for new forms of order. In their attempt to bring early modern uncertainty under control, contemporary historiographers such as Edward Hall introduce new explanatory schemes, like the ‘rise and fall pattern’ we encountered earlier, to bring order to the chaos of historical reality.122 Yet the loss of old conventions not only generates pragmatic ‘fictions’, which stabilize the existing order, but also ‘the fiction of literature’, which undercuts these new forms of order.123 With this distinction, all of the necessary elements for the final part of Iser’s analysis are in place: as the different chapters of his book emphasize, each of Shakespeare’s history plays sets out to demonstrate that the conventional ‘rise and fall pattern’ is unable to capture the historical process.124 Instead of subscribing to this cyclical and moralistic pattern, Shakespeare’s literary exploration of various power constellations reveals the unpredictable consequences of historical actions, and thereby hints at a less reassuring understanding of history, one that ultimately accords with Blumenberg’s idea of the open context, the view of ‘reality as the result of a realization’.125 Similar to the work of Eliot and Joyce, moreover, Shakespeare’s plays display the self-disclosing type of fiction that Iser’s anthropology will go on to investigate in more detail. In contrast to the conventional rise and fall narratives, the history plays systematically underline the ‘difference between representation and what is represented’.126 Interestingly, Iser’s analysis of this more circumspect literary historiography often draws attention to Shakespeare’s verbal strategies. The plays highlight ambiguity, first of all, by indicating that truly modern humans no longer believe in the prophetic powers of dreams, but cunningly reinterpret old conventions with the help of the ‘difference between what is said and what is meant’.127 Recalling the idea of montage, Iser also considers Shakespeare’s metaphors, which do not lead to ‘an ordered and harmonious sequence of ideas’ but rather link heterogeneous images in an associative manner.128 In addition, the history plays are seen to anticipate the encompassing perspective of the novel in that they represent the incompatible worlds of courtly and civil societies (which were previously consigned to different genres) within the confines of a single work and introduce us to characters which are able to speak the languages of different social classes. Crucially, these literary strategies – using figurative meaning, metaphor montages and incompatible worlds as well as languages – are part of Shake-

122 123 124 125 126 127 128

Ibid., p. 51. Iser, Shakespeares Historien, p. 44. Ibid., pp. 83, 126, 136, 198. Ibid., p. 126. Iser, Staging, p. 193. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 144.

84 —— Chapter 2 speare’s critical reaction to contemporary thought systems, moralist historiography in particular. For such strategies enable the author to evoke the truly uncontrollable quality of history in form as well as content: The play [Richard III] delves down beyond the history which historiography has presented in a manageable form, and enables us to experience historical events as a live occurrence. This experience is prestructured insofar as the spectator can see each position from the standpoint of others and, through the constant shift of perspective, can witness the constant overturning of the positions. [...] as the characters lose control over events, [...] history as something happening becomes an experience. The very fact that the spectator is denied the reference point that would link the toppling positions with one another proves to be a strategy for turning history into an experiential reality.129

To put it simply, Shakespeare’s literary strategies create the need for a reading process that is structurally similar to the historical process, because both involve many twists and turns and call for constant reinterpretation. Hence, literature evokes history not only by means of its panorama of ideological options or its ability to make us re-experience moments of decision-making (the argument in Iser’s analysis of Scott), but also by making us revise our initial interpretations of events. In the final analysis, then, both history and literature are seen to reshuffle established modes of thinking and to give rise to novel realities – a proposition which clearly reveals Iser’s intellectual commitment to history and the historical dynamic. In fact, Iser maintains that this subversion of reductive modes of historiography, together with the anatomy of modern politics mentioned earlier, explains why Shakespeare’s history plays continue to resonate with later audiences. Discussing the view of history in Richard IV, he notes that: such a depiction of history is by no means obsolete, and indeed it offers a critical vantage point from which to view any attempts [sic] to make history identical with the concept imposed on it. No matter what philosophy of history one may subscribe to, all concepts more or less resemble the pattern to be derived from Shakespeare, insofar as a pragmatically conditioned coherence of historical events is meant to close the open-endedness of the future, though in the final analysis attempts of that kind merely make the world politically controllable.130

Ultimately, it seems that Iser pays so much attention to the ways in which the history plays unsettle the normative view of sixteenth-century historiography, because his literary history is a similar rejection of the normative view of post-

129 Ibid., pp. 66–67. 130 Ibid., p. 165.

Montage and Modernity —— 85

Enlightenment ‘philosophy of history’.131 As an aside, it is interesting to see, in the light of Iser’s supposedly modernist leanings, that he actually prefers Shakespeare to Beckett, because Iser feels the former has more staying power. As he puts it in a publication on Shakespeare’s comedies, the ‘decentered subject of Beckett’s theatre’ and its ‘absurdity’ have become historical, whereas a similar fate has not befallen the representation of love and dreams in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ‘because the subject and absurdity are conceptualizations, whereas vitality, love and dream represent incontrovertible bodily experiences [. ..] whose conceptualizations are already undermined in Shakespeare’s comedy’.132 Whether or not we find this argument convincing, Iser’s fascination with the lasting appeal of Shakespeare’s representation of love and politics, and with the poet’s attack on pre-programmed notions of history, again reveals that he is not simply a modernist. This resistance to inflexible philosophies of history is a staple feature of many of Iser’s writings. In one of his earliest essays on Walter Pater and T.S. Eliot, he already asserted ‘that the meaning of history for Pater cannot lie beyond its actual development; in the negation of a “philosophy of history”, he distances himself from Hegel’.133 Iser voices similar sentiments in later essays (including the essay on Scott mentioned earlier), affiliating himself, for instance, with the systematic attempt ‘to counteract the totalizing discourses which subsum[e] history under preconceived notions considered exempt from becoming historical’.134 The topic returns most clearly in one of his last publications, The Range of Interpretation (2000). In that book, Iser reviews historian Johann Gustav Droysen’s attempt to capture the historical process and claims that Droysen’s method – the nesting of hermeneutic circles – functions as ‘a counterconcept to any transcendental stance that would marshal the historical material into a premeditated order’.135 Reiterating his objections to a ‘Hegelian’ view, he also maintains that ‘[l]iterary history can no longer be conceived in terms of a linear arrangement of literary works that [...] seem to be on the way to an as yet undisclosed telos’.136

131 Ibid., p. 190. 132 Iser, Spielstrukturen, p. 34. ‘weil das Subjekt wie auch die Absurdität Konzeptualisierungen sind, Lebendigkeit, Liebe und Traum aber körpernähe Evidenzerfahrungen darstellen, [. ..] deren Konzeptualisierungen in Shakespeares Komödie selbst schon zerspielt sind’. 133 Iser, ‘Walter Pater und T.S. Eliot’, p. 400. ‘daß sich der Sinn der Geschichte für Pater nicht jenseits ihres tatsächlichen Verlaufs erfüllen kann; in der Verneinung einer Geschichtsphilosophie trennt er sich von Hegel’. 134 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Twenty-Five Years New Literary History: A Tribute to Ralph Cohen’, New Literary History, 25 (1994), pp. 733–47 (p. 737). 135 Iser, Range, p. 68. 136 Iser, ‘Twenty-Five Years’, p. 736.

86 —— Chapter 2 Given that ‘history is an ever-emerging differentiation of itself’, it is more effectively described as a non-linear system.137 Apparently, the true dynamic of history cannot be captured in a linear narrative. Of course, the critical reader might object that Iser’s own account paves the way for an equally rigid account of historical developments. In the light of his critique of rise and fall narratives, for instance, it is remarkable that his work often exhibits similar patterns. After describing their earlier successes, for instance, Iser argues that Fielding’s Amelia and Shakespeare’s Henry V represent artistic failures of sorts. To an extent, Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings and Shakespeares Historien therefore also relate the story of a rise and fall. Similarly, The Fictive and the Imaginary suggests that the tale of pastoral literature and, indeed, that of literature as a cultural practice, are themselves cases of rise and fall; after their remarkable rise to prominence, he argues, the pastoral idiom and the reading of literature gradually disappear. As indicated in the preceding section, we should be wary of such implicitly moralistic tales of individual and cultural rise and fall. Iser’s work also exhibits the teleological patterns he so consistently critiqued. When he reflects on his own historical narrative in The Range of Interpretation, for example, he asserts that his history of interpretation ‘does not proceed as a linear development toward a distant goal’ but ‘is nonlinear insofar as these modes of interpretation are responses to the ever-increasing openendedness of the world, thus focusing on what appears to be pressing in the situation of the moment’.138 Increased attention to situational constraints may lead to a more dynamic account of history, perhaps, but the Blumenbergian reference to the ‘ever-increasing open-endedness of the world’ nevertheless smacks of the teleology Iser so abhors. For it implies that later times and later novels are more advanced than earlier ones (the argument that Thomas Pavel has criticized, as we saw in Chapter 1). Together with his emphasis on the increasing indeterminacy of modern literature, this belief in increasing flexibility is hard to reconcile with Iser’s non-linear conception of history. Apart from his implicit use of teleological and rise and fall patterns, it may be argued that Iser’s methodological alternative simply means trading one reductive system – based on the ‘rise and fall’ or the idea of a historical telos – for another – based on reshufflings and non-linear systems. Iser is aware of this danger, however, and concedes that his alternative may lead to a new, rigid philosophy in which ideas such as non-linear systems become reductive, all-embracing ‘umbrella concepts’.139 A similar danger can be discerned in the notion of reshuffling. Reviewing a work about the history of criticism, Iser again puts the 137 Iser, Range, p. 65. 138 Ibid., p. 9. 139 Ibid., p. 157.

Montage and Modernity —— 87

reader on guard against rigid historical patterns such as causal principles, for ‘principles of this form function as explanatory mechanisms that [...] display a tendency to peel off their historical conditioning when they are required to explain history itself’.140 For similar reasons, he adds, the history of criticism cannot be captured by the pattern of radical ‘reshufflings [Umbesetzungen]’ either.141 Even when confronted with the terms he uses himself, then, Iser is reluctant to accept specific patterns as over-arching principles for historical description.

In the Midst of History The importance of Iser’s intellectual interaction with Blumenberg sketched in this chapter is finally supported by a little-known piece, Iser’s 2003 review of Blumenberg’s Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften (2001). For this late review not only summarizes Blumenberg’s posthumous essay collection, but also provides a record of Iser’s lifelong fascination with the philosopher’s oeuvre, recapitulating the ideas discussed above in the process. First of all, the review reminds us of the claim that aesthetic language displays a remarkable polysemy: most clearly, if not exclusively, in poetry. Iser also mentions Blumenberg’s metaphorology, a project which documents important changes in our understanding of world and self, and has significant implications for a philosophical anthropology. Another fruitful suggestion, Iser finds, is the claim that the basic structure of myth is an ‘open situation’ that can be reinterpreted in various ways. Nor should we forget Blumenberg’s account of early modern self-production, or the argument that the related belief in unrealized possibilities – in possibility as distinct from reality – ushered in the new literary form of the novel and the infinite context which it systematically evokes. And yet, Iser remarks, the most thought-provoking aspect of this oeuvre is its conception of history. As the title of the review indicates, Blumenberg shows that history cannot be pinned down because human beings find themselves ‘Inmitten der Geschichte’ [‘In the Midst of History’]. This explains why the philosopher establishes a fluid phenomenology rather than an inflexible ontology of history. In Iser’s words: ‘linear narration and teleological direction are modellings of history, which does not proceed according to such patterns, but should rather be

140 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das imaginäre Museum der Literaturkritik. Rene´ Welleks imponierendes Werk. Rene´ Wellek. Geschichte der Literaturkritik 1750–1950’ (review), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 December 1978, no pagination. ‘Prinzipien solcher Art funktionieren als Erklärungsnormen, die [. . .] die Tendenz zeigen, ihre Geschichtsbedingtheit abzustreifen, wenn es gilt, Geschichte selbst zu erklären’. 141 Ibid.

88 —— Chapter 2 understood as a “non-linear system”, in which constant reshufflings [Umbesetzungen] take place’.142 History does not proceed via the linear trajectories posited by various philosophies of history, but via the unpredictable reshuffling of existing ideas. Thinking of his own claim that reading and history display a similarly dynamic structure, Iser adds that Blumenberg’s interest in history may ultimately be related to his interest in art. For both the reshufflings of history and the images of artistic works are structures which reveal what is concealed by current dogmas, and thereby allow humans to reconstruct the cultural world that surrounds them. The preceding comparison between Iser and Blumenberg has various implications. First of all, it has shown, in contrast to the claims made by Riquelme and Folkenflik, that Iser is not exclusively a modernist or Enlightenment thinker, but a modern critic in the broad sense of Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age or, to recall the previous chapter, of Pater’s The Renaissance. His early contributions to the Poetik und Hermeneutik volumes may underscore the importance of modernism, but Iser’s systematic interest in the innovative qualities of works from different periods, as well as his repeated use of Blumenbergian ideas, attest to his fascination with the broader modern age. Second, we should note, in respect of this conception of the modern age, that the different ideas we have encountered in this chapter are related conceptually and historically. As Blumenberg notes in his essay on polysemy, there is a connection between his understanding of poetry and the modern view of reality associated with the novel: ‘the freeing of the linguistic tendency toward polysemy [reveals itself] as the correlate of the aesthetic re-conversion of the real into the horizon of its possibilities’.143 Additionally, Blumenberg observes that the disruption of the novel’s traditional subjectivity as described by Iser can be interpreted in terms of his own essay on poetic polysemy: ‘the destruction of subjectivity [is] a procedure of oppositional tendency and in that sense analogous to that which I described earlier as the immanent aestheticization of language in opposition to its objective functionalization’.144 In other words, the modernist questioning of subjectivity aims to replace its former clarity with a new polysemy. Many such links 142 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Inmitten der Geschichte. Hans Blumenberg. Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften’ (review), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 4 (2003), pp. 667–72 (p. 668). ‘Lineares Erzählen und teleologische Zielrichtung sind Modellierungen von Geschichte, die nach solchen Mustern nicht verläuft, sondern eher als “nicht-lineares System” zu begreifen wäre, in dem ständige Umbesetzungen erfolgen’. 143 Blumenberg, ‘Sprachsituation’, p. 153. ‘die Freigabe der Tendenz der Sprache auf Vieldeutigkeit [enthüllt sich] als das Korrelat der ästhetischen Rückverwandlung des Wirklichen in den Horizont seiner Möglichkeiten’. 144 Hans Blumenberg, ‘Neunte Diskussion’, p. 670. ‘die Destruktion der Subjektivität [ist] ein Vorgang von opponierender Tendenz und insofern dem genau analog, was ich früher als die

Montage and Modernity —— 89

suggest themselves in these essays. We might add, for instance, that the ideas introduced in Blumenberg’s Poetik und Hermeneutik texts could all be seen as forms of self-production, boundary-crossing and discovery. Ultimately, both Iser and Blumenberg believe that modern literature discovers new realms, and continues the process of modern self-production by criticizing and crossing the boundaries of older views of reality, rigid forms of language and perception, harmonious forms of self-presence, as well as stifling terms and stable archetypes. For them, this interrelated cluster of ideas captures the modern condition and the literature it produces. Some of the key components of the theories examined in this chapter are also of more general relevance. The claim that the novel is linked to specific views of reality, or that it functions as a battleground for different views of reality, for instance, is a fertile hypothesis for further research, even if Blumenberg’s fourfold distinction needs refining. The concept of reshuffling may help to capture the functional similarities and differences between evolving literary motifs, although more attention needs to be paid to the function of these elements within the broader context of the literary works in which they figure. And the idea that literary texts stage a revolt against official forms of historiography – not only in the sense that they lend a voice to the historically mute, but also that they subvert the forms and explanatory principles of contemporary historiography – is important, especially if we ask ourselves what happens to the ‘rise and fall’ pattern in (literary) biographies, or to the telling anecdote or journalistic report in modern novels. Finally, the claims that the reading process is structurally related to the historical process, and that we might conceive of history as a non-linear system, are fruitful suggestions for future research. To conclude, a brief comparison of these ideas with those expressed in Iser’s earlier dissertations is in order. His later ideas, as they have been analyzed here, could be seen as a sort of ‘reshuffling’ of his earlier reflections on modernity, meaning and humanity. As the discussion of the ‘chain of being’ implies, his later work still investigates the Weltbild of a text, if not a particular author. However, he now also pays attention to the text’s underlying conception of reality. The emphasis on a diverse and recalcitrant ‘life’, moreover, has its counterpart in the open context and the resistance of modern reality. Regarding the Zeitgeist, the transfer of interest from homogeneous periods to transitional moments continues in Iser’s later work. The claim that the shifting connotations of crucial words may end up changing the very face of an era is developed by means of the concept of reshuffling. As far as the aesthetic is concerned, Iser’s interest in difficult decisions returns in his discussion of historical ‘situations’, and the emimmanente Ästhetisierung der Sprache in Opposition gegen ihre objektive Funktionalisierung beschrieben habe’.

90 —— Chapter 2 phasis on artistic possibilities is reformulated in terms of polysemy [Vieldeutigkeit]. In addition, his ambiguous and unsatisfying account of the ‘modern’ quality of Fielding and Pater is replaced with a more coherent perspective on the modern age, which is based on notions such as self-production, discovery and the crossing of boundaries, and which nuances Iser’s undue emphasis on the novelty of modernity (even if he still stresses innovation rather than tradition).145 In fact, his reflections on absolute metaphors and mythical malleability advance an interesting perspective on literary tradition. Luka´cs’s idea of a tension between world and self also returns, but Henrich reinforces Iser’s belief that complete reconciliation is out of the question in modern times. Finally, the claim that art addresses existential themes such as the fear of death has a more flexible counterpart in the idea that absolute metaphors and literary styles provisionally address insoluble but unavoidable existential issues such as the place of man in the universe and, indeed, in history.

Example 2: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall Situated in the early modern period so crucial to Blumenberg and Iser, Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning historical novel Wolf Hall (2009) follows the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell. Originally a wool merchant, Cromwell works first in the capacity of councillor to Cardinal Wolsey, and later becomes the right-hand man of Henry VIII in the tumultuous days of his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn. Several features of this work can be described with the help of Iser’s reflections on history and modernity. It goes without saying that the events narrated in the novel – the questioning by the king of England of the conventions and the power structure of the Catholic Church – recall the Blumenbergian account of the modern age. The modern subversion of old conventions is even clearer in the story that is embedded in

145 In a recent collection of essays, The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages (2010), Blumenberg’s view of the modern age is partly questioned: ‘the title of this collection [...] intends to compete with Blumenberg’s similarly named study by asserting not only that [certain] medieval modes are sustained within modernity, but also that no theory of modernity can be complete or legitimate without a constant reckoning with “the medieval”’. See Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith, ‘Introduction. Outside Modernity’, in The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages. On the Unwritten History of Theory, ed. by Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–36 (p. 2). Although my analysis demonstrates that Blumenberg’s model is not ‘largely one of rupture and discontinuity between historical periods’ as the editors of this collection claim (it actually underscores the connection between late medieval and early modern times), it is true that it might easily inspire critics like Iser to emphasize the modern at the expense of the premodern. See ibid., p. 3.

Montage and Modernity —— 91

this broader narrative, namely Cromwell’s unprecedented rise from his humble beginnings as a butcher’s son to the position of second most important man in the kingdom. The novel clearly registers the increasing sense of uncertainty, as well as possibility, characteristic of the early modern age. Given that it records events which compel those living at the time to reconsider the nature of marriage and might, ‘the compacts that hold the world together’, it is hardly surprising that the novel frequently refers to the shifting nature of reality, this ‘quaking world’ or ‘uncertain world’, where ‘nothing [...] seems steady’.146 This uncertainty goes hand in hand with a sense of possibility that is related to Blumenberg’s idea of the open context. The narrator notes that Cardinal Wolsey ‘never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting, shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities’, for instance, and that ‘[t]here is a world of the possible’ where present certainties can be changed in an instant.147 Unsurprisingly, this new sense of reality is related to the early modern upheavals discussed by Blumenberg: [The astronomer Kratzer] draws the sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to the plan he has heard of from Father Copernicus. He shows how the world is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it. Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocks groaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting and slapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, the forests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free. The world is not what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not what it was even in the cardinal’s day.148

This passage is interesting not only because it refers to Copernicus, but also because it shows that the novel does more than simply describe this sense of an ever-widening world: indeed it evokes it in numerous panoramic scenes, where an entire city, country or world is sketched in a few sentences, creating the sense of an ever-broadening horizon. If this sense of possibility is embodied in Cromwell, the idea of a guaranteed and stable reality is represented by Thomas More, Cromwell’s great opponent: He never sees More [. ..] without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything [.. .] you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, [. ..] what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little [.. .]. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.149

146 147 148 149

Mantel, Wolf Hall, pp. 338, 522, 583, 327. Ibid., pp. 27, 205. Ibid., p. 495. Ibid., p. 39.

92 —— Chapter 2 The belief in possibility and the ensuing sense of uncertainty can also be sensed in Cromwell’s tendency to voice these thoughts in the form of questions rather than statements, of course. Wolf Hall thus reflects upon the nature of reality and the place of humans in the modern world. An unstable world requires flexible minds. In line with Iser’s remarks on the ideal form of politics, Wolf Hall often pits the agile mind of Cromwell and his allies against the unwavering attitudes of people like More. Cardinal Wolsey has a ‘nimble mind’, for instance, and practices a cunning ‘science of ambiguity’.150 Thomas Cromwell himself has acquired ‘flexible’ ideas in Italy – the novel refers to Machiavelli and Castiglione –, teaches his servants and family members ‘the defensive art of facing both ways’, and seems to belong to the second of two categories of people: ‘[t]here are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins’.151 Like the ‘mediocre hero’ of Luka´cs or certain characters from Shakespeare’s plays, Cromwell interacts with and speaks the languages of different nations and classes, including boatmen ‘argot’.152 Ultimately, the unstable world of modernity requires the attitude of the actor, who is able to adopt different roles or personae: [Cromwell] looks down at [his fellow citizens] and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: ‘put on a mask, as it were.’ [.. .] From the day he was sworn into the king’s council, [Cromwell] has had his face arranged. He has spent the early months of the year watching the faces of other people, to see when they register doubt, reservation, rebellion – to catch that fractional moment before they settle into the suave lineaments of the courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man.153

This flexible behaviour also has a disquieting quality, however, as the following description of Anne Boleyn implies: ‘[w]hen she lowers the mask and looks at the King of France, she wears a strange half-smile, not quite human, as if behind the mask were another mask’.154 In any case, this dynamic attitude is diametrically opposed to that of Thomas More, persecutor of heretics, whose opinions are ‘fixed and impervious to argument’.155 However, for Cromwell, a heretic like John Frith is hardly any better. In the end, he repudiates the radically principled attitude of people on both sides of the ideological divide: ‘dear God, he says, More, Tyndale, they deserve each other’.156 Thus, in ways that may be described with the 150 151 152 153 154 155 156

Ibid., pp. 88, 187. Ibid., pp. 109, 259, 228. Ibid., p. 295. Ibid., pp. 320–21. Ibid., p. 408. Ibid., p. 234. Ibid., p. 303.

Montage and Modernity —— 93

help of Iser’s work on Shakespeare, the early modern age witnesses a clash between different views of reality, and between rigid and flexible forms of conduct. This clash between old and new is particularly evident in Cromwell’s flexible reading of dreams and prophecies, those fortune-tellers of the old world. Recalling Iser’s analysis of Shakespeare’s history plays, the novel indicates that the good politician uses these conventions for his own purposes, especially when his king still seems to believe in them: The king turns his head towards him as he enters. ‘Cromwell, my dead brother came to me in a dream.’ He does not answer. What is a sensible answer to this? [.. .] ‘In my dream he stood and looked at me. He looked sad, so sad. He seemed to say I stood in his place. He seemed to say, you have taken my kingdom, and you have used my wife. He has come back to make me ashamed.’ [.. .] ‘Did your brother Arthur speak to you, in your dream?’ ‘No.’ [. . .] ‘Then why believe he means Your Majesty anything but good? [. ..] If your brother seems to say that you have taken his place, then he means you to become the king that he would have been [. ..]’.157

When another character interprets events in the light of astrological theories, Cromwell offers an even more vigorous reply: ‘[h]e says, impatient, we heard very little about the Aries moon when [Henry] was settled with Katherine for twenty years. It is not the stars that make us, [. ..] it is circumstance and necessita `: the choices we make under pressure’.158 In a sort of reshuffling of the traditional reading of comets, Cromwell asks ‘Why are comets bad signs? Why not good signs? Why do they prefigure the fall of nations? Why not their rise?’.159 This flexible attitude toward older systems of thought is radically opposed to that of Thomas More, who still believes in a chain of being where all the layers of existence are organized hierarchically and are interlinked via certain correspondences. Cromwell’s response is telling: ‘“Thomas More says that in the reign of King John when England was placed under an interdict by the Pope, the cattle didn’t breed, the corn ceased to ripen, the grass stopped growing and birds fell out of the air. But if that starts to happen”, he smiles, “I’m sure we can reverse our policy”’.160 In the modern era, we might say, ancient conventions and tightly regulated correspondences are open to the strategic interpretation of mentally agile politicians. If the world is no longer held in place by old conventions, it can be remade. As the novel shows, it is not enough to claim a country once, for ‘[i]t must be held

157 158 159 160

Ibid., pp. 274, 275, 276–77. Ibid., p. 494. Ibid., p. 314. Ibid., p. 350.

94 —— Chapter 2 and made secure, in every generation’.161 In opposition to More, Cromwell believes that such renovations may ‘improv[e]’ the world; after all, ‘what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?’.162 The events of the novel force the participants ‘to say what England is’, not only physically but also symbolically, and without regard for the fraudulent ‘history’ of the nation informed by the prejudices of monks.163 In the future, Cromwell says, the country may move beyond its present state of dereliction: ‘England can be otherwise’ if people decide they want ‘a new England’.164 Because it is in a state of flux, in fact, the nation cannot be definitively mapped: But the trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.165

This passage suggests that history, too, cannot be definitively mapped. In fact, Mantel’s novel participates in the questioning of existing histories by exposing the cruel side of Thomas More: the allegedly saintly thinker is invariably cruel towards women and becomes ‘a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God’ by his persecution of heretics.166 Historical novels not only provide (an often unexpected) insight into the minds of historical actors, moreover, but may actually evoke the experience of historical action and participation in the reading process. Throughout Wolf Hall, Cromwell, and with him the reader, often registers certain things of which the true significance is only revealed later: consider, for example, the gradual disclosure of Cranmer and Rafe’s personal secrets to Cromwell and the reader. Information is fed to readers step by step, forcing them to revise their initial assessments, and thereby drawing them into the experience of dealing with uncertain worlds and uncertain futures. With the help of Iser’s insights, we may thus conclude that Mantel’s novel places the reader in the very midst of history.

161 162 163 164 165 166

Ibid., p. 276. Ibid., pp. 635, 44. Ibid., pp. 338, 219. Ibid., pp. 539, 593. Ibid., p. 649. Ibid., p. 298.

Chapter 3. The Phenomenology of Reading The facts, shattered, are gathered, for your deliberation, like a broken mirror whose final piece has been forced into place.1

Despite the broad range of subjects addressed in his writings, Wolfgang Iser mainly owes his academic fame to his groundbreaking work from the 1970s on the phenomenology of reading and to his famous study Der Akt des Lesens [The Act of Reading] (1976) in particular. In a spirited reaction against contemporary pro- and anti-reader critics, this book introduces a new model of the literary work and the reading process. It draws on many theories (Roman Ingarden especially) and literary examples (for instance, Samuel Beckett), which are all read through the prism of Iser’s ideas about fiction, imagination and negation. The upshot of his argument is that literary works implicitly convey the innovative reaction of their authors to contemporary problems by modifying a particular set of existing ideas, and presenting them to the reader in a carefully chosen sequence. This model remains a powerful tool for describing the workings of literary fiction, even if it is not without its problems. Its positive and negative aspects can be summarized by comparing them to the related model of Roman Ingarden, a familiar connection but one that has still only partly been explored. Before turning to Iser and Ingarden, however, I will briefly sketch the context of their work on the reader by glossing the currents of ‘reader response criticism’ and ‘phenomenology’. The phrase ‘reader response criticism’ refers to a loosely related set of critics who exerted a decisive influence on debates about critical methodology in the 1970s and early 1980s. Uniting critics from different countries and philosophical backgrounds, this movement constituted an attempt to refocus attention on the act of reading after it had been explicitly excluded from consideration by the New Criticism, with its refutation of the so-called ‘affective fallacy’ in 1949. In this latter school, the turn to the reader was seen as an unwarranted move toward arbitrary subjectivism. But in their individual ways, a new generation of critics including David Bleich, Jonathan Culler, Umberto Eco, Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauß, Gerald Prince and Michel Riffaterre discarded the dogma of the literary work as the sole subject of literary study, and sought to recalibrate the conceptual apparatus of literary criticism so that it would no longer overlook the reader. The publications of these scholars in the 1970s shared many concerns, but there were also significant dif-

1 Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (London: Picador, 2010), p. 16.

96 —— Chapter 3 ferences of opinion regarding the nature of the reader and the reading process, which culminated in inconclusive debates on the freedom of the reader and the constraints of the text. Such issues dominated the critical scene at the time, giving rise to several overview studies, including Rainer Warning’s Rezeptionsästhetik (1975), Jane P. Tompkins’ Reader Response Criticism (1980) and Elizabeth Freund’s The Return of the Reader (1987). These studies propelled Iser to international fame, because each of them suggested that if you wanted to study the trendy topic of the reader, he was the man to turn to. And there were many, it seems, who wanted to study the reader. As Stanley Fish noted in 1981, Iser’s books outsold ‘all other books on the prestigious list of the Johns Hopkins Press with the exception of [Jacques Derrida’s] Grammatology (a book that is, I suspect, more purchased than read)’.2 The explicitly theoretical study The Act of Reading was particularly successful, leading to many reactions and translations, and effectively establishing Iser’s reputation as a leading literary theorist. Yet this success also proved to be a failure of sorts. Iser’s argument about the reading process may have received a good deal of attention, but it was not always understood and did not go uncontested. On the contrary, it invoked many critical reactions, and these were partly caused by the remarkable mix of questions the work raised. In the preface to The Act of Reading, Iser claims that his model not only facilitates the intersubjective discussion of individual interpretations, but also advances a theoretical framework for empirical reception research, and forces literary criticism to reflect upon its own presuppositions – an ambitious and heterogeneous programme indeed. Upon closer inspection, the study ranges over a very broad spectrum of questions: ontological (‘what type of object is the literary work?’), epistemological (‘is the work able to control the meaning ascribed to it by the reader?’), general (‘how do readers read?’), historical (‘how do contemporary readers read modernist novels?’), empirical (‘how do the minds of actual readers function during reading?’), methodological (‘how should the academic interpretations of literary critics look?’) and ethical (‘is reading good for you or not?’) ones. As the book addresses these issues simultaneously, it is not always clear at what level its claims are to be understood. For instance, should we take the remark ‘that the selections we make in reading produce an overflow of possibilities that remain virtual as opposed to actual’3 as a general, empirical claim, or is it actually a more particular, methodological one? Does it apply equally to the reading of, say, novels, theoretical texts and occasional poems? It might therefore be argued that one reason why Iser’s work on the reader has elicited criticism as well as acclaim is that it belongs, or acts as if it belongs, to a 2 Stanley Fish, ‘Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser’, Diacritics, 11.1 (1981), 2–13 (p. 2). 3 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]), p. 126.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 97

number of subgenres or types of theory. The Act of Reading can be read as a work of reader response criticism, but also as an instance of phenomenological criticism, a study in the theory of the novel, an early foray into ethical and anthropological criticism, a contribution to narratology or aesthetics, or a study of Anglophone literature. Such generic ‘indeterminacy’ may be unavoidable, but it implies that readers with different expectations will find, and, more importantly, fail to find, different things in the book – a fact that resonates, indeed, with Iser’s own ideas about reading. It has been suggested that another reason for the widespread criticism (as well as praise) of Iser’s views is English-speaking commentators’ lack of sensitivity to Iser’s background and to the distinct character of his brand of reader response criticism, the so-called Rezeptionsästhetik or ‘reception theory’ developed at the University of Constance. Robert C. Holub, for instance, has argued that German ‘reception theory’ should not be conflated with US ‘reader response criticism’, even if Iser takes up a hybrid position between the two.4 For Holub, US theorists tended to downplay the uniquely German dimensions of reception theory because they were not properly acquainted with the intellectual traditions within which scholars like Iser were working, namely the hermeneutics of HansGeorg Gadamer and the phenomenology of Roman Ingarden. US readers, moreover, had not experienced the upheavals of the student and university reform movements in Germany, which led to the founding of the Poetik und Hermeneutik circle and Constance University. Brook Thomas has likewise argued that the objections of certain English-speaking critics originated from a failure to appreciate linguistic and cultural differences. He maintains that crucial terms of Iser’s model, such as Wirkung, Leerstellen and Appellstruktur, were difficult to render in English, leading to mistranslations which distorted Iser’s position and made ‘Iser’s description of the act of reading sound more “subjective” in English than in German’.5 The charge of subjectivism was not the only criticism levelled at Iser’s theory in the English-speaking world, however. Looking back at these de-

4 Consider the preface to Reception Theory. A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen & Co, 1984) and the first chapter of Crossing Borders. Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). Although I cannot go into this topic here, German reader-oriented criticism comprises not only the West-German reception theory of the Constance School but also the empirical work of Norbert Groeben and the EastGerman study of the so-called Rezeptionsvorgabe. 5 Brook Thomas, ‘Reading Wolfgang Iser or Responding to a Theory of Response’, Comparative Literature Studies, 19 (1982), 54–66 (p. 57). Thomas repeats this argument in a later essay: ‘[Iser’s] work crossed the US border with such ease only because some of its key concepts were misunderstood’. See Brook Thomas, ‘The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What’s Literature Have to Do with It?’ (review), American Literary History, 20.3, 2008, pp. 622–31 (p. 622).

98 —— Chapter 3 bates in a later essay, Thomas notes that the objections of Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish had the most impact.6 In his bestselling and hugely influential Literary Theory (1983), Eagleton contends that Iser’s conception of reading implies an ideologically questionable account of the way texts influence the beliefs of their readers; for the Marxist critic, Iser’s model suggests ‘that in order to undergo transformation at the hands of the text, we must only hold our beliefs fairly provisionally in the first place’.7 This model prescribes a specific reading attitude, in other words, that of a fatally uncommitted liberal self. Stanley Fish, in his trenchant ‘Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser’ (1981), argues that Iser’s central notion of indeterminacy is deeply flawed, revealing a naı¨ve epistemology with regard to the reader’s part in the reading process. As Fish points out, Iser is willing to grant that some parts of the text are missing and need to be supplied by the reader, but he also claims that other parts are somehow ‘given’ and thus able to control the reading process. By contrast, Fish argues, the entire text is constructed by readers on the basis of those conventional protocols they have learned in their ‘interpretive community’ of similarly trained readers. In the final analysis, he concludes, the crucial ‘distinction between the determinate and the indeterminate’ will not hold and Iser’s theory therefore breaks down.8 These accounts continue to shape Iser’s image, Thomas notes, but again, they ignore his cultural background: in this case the Blumenbergian view that reality does not coincide with the version given by Marxist or other ‘interpretive communities’, but is actually a recalcitrant and continually reinterpreted phenomenon.9 Holub’s and Thomas’s arguments are not unconvincing and illustrate, ironically, an important concern of Iser’s later work, namely the complex character of intercultural exchange (see Chapter 5). Against the idea that the ‘true Iser’ was only available to readers steeped in the most arcane reaches of German thinking, however, it should be noted that Iser’s work undeniably functioned as part of the reader response movement, however much it differed from the ideas of, say, Holland or Fish. Moreover, it seems that the objections of Anglo-American critics did not differ greatly from those of their German counterparts. If it was the case that these English-speaking critics failed to grasp the finer nuances of Iser’s argument because of their limited knowledge of German terms and traditions, then why did some German critics have the same problem? When Iser tried to address German 6 Brook Thomas, ‘Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early Work, or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 13–43. For a detailed discussion of Iser’s reception in the UK, see Elinor Shaffer, ‘Circling the Reader. The Reception of Wolfgang Iser in the UK. 1970–2003’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 27–43. 7 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 79. 8 Fish, ‘Afraid’, p. 6. Iser’s initial response to Fish is usually considered to have been inadequate. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Talk Like Whales’, Diacritics, 11.3 (1981), 82–87. 9 For further details, see Chapter 2 and Thomas’s ‘Restaging’, p. 22–23.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 99

scholars’ criticisms, after all, he again had to refute the charge of subjectivism, clarify his notion of ‘indeterminacy’, and explain his claim that reading unsettles received opinions.10 The broad similarity of these objections should come as no surprise, given that related text-oriented and Marxist approaches shaped both the Anglo-American and German criticism of that time. It could be argued in fact that these different critics were influenced by similar philosophical traditions. Even if English-speaking critics were unfamiliar with Hans Blumenberg, scholars such as Fish and Eagleton had surely heard of Ingarden and Gadamer. The institutional situation in the US and the UK might also have differed from that on the Continent, but reforms were taking place throughout the academic world in the aftermath of the 1960s, and this fact further complicates the claim that things were radically different in Germany. These nuances suggest that we should not dismiss critiques of Iser’s work out of hand by appealing to vague linguistic, cultural and institutional differences (although these obviously do play a part). Rather, we should confront these critiques head-on. Contrary to the objections raised by Eagleton, Iser does not, in fact, claim that we should refrain from committing ourselves to a specific cause, but rather that literature stands for a form of reading which does not let such causes develop into stifling ideologies. Nor, despite his critique of didactic and politicized literature, does Iser forget that ‘a great deal of “valid” literature precisely confirmed rather than troubled the received codes of its time’.11 And in any case, Eagleton’s overtly political stance is hardly a less prejudiced starting point for a theory of reading. In respect of Fish’s critique, many commentators, including Eagleton, have rightly noted that the dispute over determinacy and indeterminacy is largely a matter of semantics. Certainly, as Fish says, readers have to interpret not only the implicit or indeterminate aspects of a text – for example, the unstated connection between two seemingly disjointed chapters or stanzas – but also the explicit or determinate ones, such as the words which make up these chapters and stanzas. But equally, as Iser suggests, these are two different types of interpretation and they should be distinguished if not disconnected. Iser might underestimate the importance of communal codes, but Fish’s attack is not as decisive – nor his alternative as convincing – as he would like us to believe. Another reason why Fish’s attack is problematic is that critics of the reading process cannot avoid positing something as ‘given’; as Jonathan Culler correctly observes, ‘[s]tories of reading [...] require that something be taken as given so that the reader can respond to it’.12 Nor should it be forgotten that Ingarden, one of

10 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Im Lichte der Kritik’, in Rezeptionästhetik. Theorie und Praxis, ed. by Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 325–42. 11 Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 82. 12 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY:

100 —— Chapter 3 Iser’s prime sources, devoted a lot of energy to precisely these epistemological issues. We have no guarantee that our reconstruction of a work is truly faithful, Ingarden already admitted. But since we have various tools at our disposal to test it, there is no need for outright scepticism: we can fine-tune our reading by consulting the physical text, by rereading the work, and by engaging in critical debate with other readers and their reconstructions. And he notes that reading previous interpretations ‘train[s] the reader to understand the work in a certain way’.13 Iser’s prime theoretical source, therefore, acknowledged these epistemological problems and, as the references to other readers and their training suggest, was not oblivious to the influence of what Fish would call ‘interpretive communities’. The idea that Iser’s phenomenological approach somehow implies, by definition, a naı¨ve epistemology is thus unfounded. The importance of The Act of Reading and its role in the rise and fall of Iser’s reputation cannot be overstated. And yet, the reception of the book has received so much attention in the secondary literature that it has effectively sidelined other questions, including that of how this theoretical study fits into Iser’s oeuvre as a whole. Thomas has already moved in this more promising direction by demonstrating that Fish overlooked the different positions mapped out by Blumenberg in the essay discussed in Chapter 2 and thus misconstrued Iser’s conception of reality. In this chapter, I will tease out more hidden connections between Iser’s reception theory and his earlier work. As we will see, his observations on modern meaning, on the relationship between text and context, between text and reader, and on the function of negation reformulate his earlier claims about the hermeneutic flexibility of myth, the four conceptions of reality, the inaccessible self, and the polysemy of montage. By excavating these connections with Iser’s earlier publications, a fuller picture can be constructed of The Act of Reading and the place it occupies in his broader project. As well as developing earlier insights, The Act of Reading introduces new elements via the phenomenological method, a philosophical approach which took hold from the beginning of the twentieth century. Following on from Edmund Husserl, phenomenologists refuse to study purely objective natural facts and subjective psychological states, and focus instead on the way in which so-called ‘phenomena’ appear to an idealized, abstract consciousness. The phenomeno-

Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 76. For a more recent refutation of Fish’s attack, see Paul B. Armstrong, ‘In Defense of Reading. Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), 87–113 (p. 101–2). 13 Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature; with an Appendix of the Functions of Language in the Theatre, trans. by George C. Grabowicz (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1931]), p. 349.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 101

logical outlook is not an ‘objective’ approach because it does not believe that it can reach a layer of facts uncontaminated by human acts of consciousness. However, it is not a ‘subjective’ approach either, because it is not interested in the distinct ways in which a ‘phenomenon’ appears to specific observers, but in the invariant features which that phenomenon shows in each of its appearances. To arrive at the essential character of phenomena, the argument goes, we have to strip these of their subjective and accidental features through a process of ‘reduction’ or ‘bracketing’. This methodological programme can be applied to literary studies in two distinct ways, and both possibilities can be illustrated by the work of Roman Ingarden, a student of Husserl who extended his ideas to the realm of aesthetics. If we apply phenomenological reduction to the literary work, the result is obvious: ‘[a]s with Husserl’s “bracketing” of the real object, the actual historical context of the literary work, its author [.. .] and readership are ignored; phenomenological criticism aims instead at a wholly “immanent” reading of the text, totally unaffected by anything outside it’.14 If this argument sounds familiar, that is because it informs Ingarden’s first book The Literary Work of Art (1931), which decisively shaped Wellek and Warren’s famous defence of ‘intrinsic’ forms of textual study in Theory of Literature (1949).15 But there is also a second type of phenomenological criticism. As already noted, phenomenologists use the method of reduction to acquire ‘certain’ knowledge about the way our consciousness is directed towards phenomena such as time, imaginary objects or literary works. To refer to this general stance of ‘being directed towards something’, these philosophers introduce the concept of ‘intentionality’, which is designed to underscore that, for them, there is no non-relational object and no non-relational subject, i.e. no object without a subject and vice versa. If we apply this argument to literary works, the conclusion is not that we should focus on a supposedly self-contained text, but, on the contrary, that there is no literary work without a reader to observe it. This explains why Ingarden’s second book, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1937), convinced Iser of the worth of looking more closely at the reading process, despite the fact that Ingarden’s first book seemed exclusively concerned with strictly text-based criticism. There are some contingent reasons for this remarkable, dual reception: Ingarden wrote both his studies in the 1930s, but whereas the book on the literary work was quickly available in German, his study of the cognition of literature was only translated in the late 1960s. One cannot help but wonder whether an earlier translation of his reader-oriented work would have changed the chronology of literary theory in the twentieth century. 14 Eagleton, Literary Theory, p. 59. 15 As the preface to The Literary Work of Art notes, Theory of Literature offers a ‘crucial but problematic continuation’ of Ingarden’s argument. See Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. lxii.

102 —— Chapter 3 The phenomenological agenda is important for Iser’s project for three distinct reasons. First, his writings, especially The Act of Reading, attest to the influence of individual phenomenologists, such as Husserl, Ingarden, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Mikel Dufrenne. In the preface to the English translation, Iser even describes this study – not without a hint of irony – as ‘a book of Germanic phenomenology’.16 Although he hardly considered Ingarden’s model a methodological template for his own critical analyses,17 its influence on Iser’s theory of literary reading is particularly important, and it continued well into his later work. Even in his last book, Iser begins his overview of literary theories with Ingarden, arguing that his phenomenological model offers for the most part a ‘highly persuasive’ account of the way in which works of art are given to human consciousness.18 Second, Iser’s later writings, even when they do not explicitly mention philosophers such as Ingarden, display the abstract perspective of phenomenological thinking. In The Fictive and the Imaginary and The Range of Interpretation, he advances highly abstract and idealized definitions of fiction, play and interpretation, which have much in common with the basic tenets of phenomenology. Trying to capture the way these phenomena are given to our consciousness, Iser defines fiction in terms of ‘acts of boundary-crossing’, play as an abstract ‘back and forth’ movement, and interpretation as ‘an act of translation’.19 Moreover, his characterization of human beings in these studies can be read in a similar way (I will return to this topic in Chapter 4).20 His account of fictionalizing acts is particularly revealing, since it describes one of these acts as a Husserlian ‘bracketing [Einklammerung]’.21 In doing so, Iser suggests that just as the phenomenologist brackets all accidental features of the object under investigation, so the reader brackets all practical attitudes during the reading process. Thus the mindset of the literary reader (not to mention the literary theorist) is akin to that of the phenomenologist. 16 Iser, Act, p. xii. 17 He does not simply apply this model here either, but Iser’s debt to Ingarden is particularly obvious in two early essays: Wolfgang Iser, ‘Andrew Marvell. “To his Coy Mistress”’, Die neueren Sprachen (1957), 555–77 and Wolfgang Iser, ‘Samuel Becketts dramatische Sprache’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 11 (1961), 451–67. 18 Wolfgang Iser, How to Do Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 20. 19 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1991]), pp. 19, 220; Wolfgang Iser, The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 5. 20 Hence, I do not agree with the thesis that Iser’s later work moves from a ‘phenomenological’ perspective to a supposedly different ‘anthropological’ one. See Winfried Fluck, ‘The Search for Distance. Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 175–210 (p. 193). 21 Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 37.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 103

Third, Iser feels that certain forms of literature and philosophy allow us to get in touch with the fluid phenomena of life in a way that is impossible elsewhere (as we have also seen at the end of Chapter 1). In his view, the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett advance ‘not an apology of convention, but rather its phenomenology’, the history plays of William Shakespeare present ‘a phenomenology of politics’, Philip Sidney’s pastoralism lays bare ‘the phenomenality [Phänomenalität] of love’ and philosopher Hans Blumenberg develops a flexible ‘phenomenology of history’.22 Hence certain works of literature and philosophy are seen as modes of writing which bring us closer to the phenomena of actual life. Though the other aspects of Iser’s phenomenological outlook should not be neglected, this chapter is mainly devoted to the relationship between The Act of Reading and Ingarden’s work on the ontology and epistemology of literary art. This connection is well known, but it still remains the best way to introduce Iser’s thoughts on the reading process. Moreover, most of the secondary literature dealing with both scholars was published in the direct aftermath of the debates on ‘reader response’ and therefore tends to focus on issues of meaning and epistemology which, while interesting, do not provide a full picture of the similarities and differences between Iser and Ingarden. Given that these texts often appeared before Iser had started publishing on anthropological issues, for instance, the connection between Ingarden and literary anthropology has not been explored. The existing literature also has a tendency to focus on Ingarden first and Iser second. This is understandable (not least due to the obvious chronology), but it implies that the latter is more advanced than the former, and that Iser’s critical remarks about Ingarden in The Act of Reading are without fault.23 On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that Iser’s account of Ingarden’s argument is skewed in ways that remain instructive for students of the reading 22 See Hans Blumenberg, ‘Neunte Diskussion. Provokation des Lesers im modernen Roman. Vorlage: Wolfgang Iser, Reduktionsformen der Subjektivität. Vorsitz: Hans Blumenberg’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik III. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Fink, 1968), pp. 669–90 (p. 676); Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics. The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Historical Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 [1988]), p. 70; Wolfgang Iser, ‘Liebe und Verwandlung im Schäferroman. Zur Poetologie des Fiktiven’, in Tales and ‘Their Telling Difference’. Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Narrativik. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Franz K. Stanzel, ed. by Herbert Foltinek and others (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), pp. 149–63 (p. 155); Wolfgang Iser, ‘Inmitten der Geschichte. Hans Blumenberg. Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften’ (review), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 4 (2003), 667–72 (p. 668). 23 Many publications discuss the connection between Iser and Ingarden. Extended comparisons are provided in the relevant sections of William Ray, Literary Meaning. From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) and Menachem Brinker’s ‘Two Phenomenologies of Reading. Ingarden and Iser on Textual Indeterminacy’, Poetics Today, 1.4 (1980), 203–12.

104 —— Chapter 3 process. Taking Iser’s book about the reading process as my starting point, I will therefore propose a contrastive reading that allows us to develop a more adequate understanding of their respective positions on the phenomenology of reading.

The Modern Reader As already mentioned, The Act of Reading responds to a particular contemporary situation, and in the first section it does so in two parts. First, it introduces the dual concept of the ‘implied reader’ in an attempt to avoid some of the problems associated with other reader-oriented models. Second, it aims to shake off the lingering ‘classicist’ bias of contemporary criticism and to equip the reader better to deal with the fragmentary literature of modernism.

Implied Readers The Act of Reading opens by pinpointing the deficiencies of existing reader-based models and proposing an alternative that allegedly does not succumb to the traditional problems of reader-based criticism, namely its promotion of an ‘uncontrolled subjectivism’ and an ‘Affective Fallacy’ whereby – as the New Critics argued – the results of a literary work are considered to be more important than the work itself.24 This critique serves a double purpose. Discrediting similar work not only enables Iser to apply all the prejudices about reader criticism to other scholars’ models (and to protect his own alternative), but also to promote the unique and novel character of an approach that is perhaps not so unique and novel after all. This opening therefore effectively anticipates the objections of both pro- and anti-reader critics to his alternative model of the reading process. Iser discusses three types of reader model – historical, linguistic and psychological – before introducing his own concept of the ‘implied reader’. The analysis of the empirical contemporary reader leads to the ‘history of reception’ as practiced by Hans Robert Jauß, Iser’s colleague from the University of Constance. This approach is not very satisfying, Iser feels, because it reveals an affective fallacy; its focus on actual responses means that it is concerned more with the judgments of readers than the structures of texts, with the effects or ‘results’ of texts rather than their formal ‘structure of effects’.25 Moreover, given that we often lack documentation about contemporary responses to literary works, this approach 24 Iser, Act, pp. 23, 26. 25 Ibid., p. 30.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 105

still has to turn to the text, and is not very empirical after all. Attempts at studying the historical reader frequently became studies of the work’s explicit and implicit appeals to the reader, as captured in Gerald Prince’s concept of the ‘narratee’. This narratee (or, as Iser calls it, the ‘fictitious reader’) is important, he concedes, but it is only one aspect of the work’s textual structure and cannot explain how such structures are processed by the reader.26 The second type of approach draws its inspiration from linguistics. Michel Riffaterre introduces the idea of the ‘archi-reader’ to designate the combined attempts of various actual readers to identify a work’s stylistically significant passages. Riffaterre believes that this approach will ‘objectify’ the text’s linguistic structure, but he fails to appreciate that readers from different periods will notice different aspects of style. This type of model, Iser thinks, therefore shows that the analysis of reading cannot be restricted to a linguistic framework. Finally, Iser argues, the psychoanalytic approaches of critics such as Norman Holland are also flawed. These, he believe, reduce literary works to ‘material to demonstrate the functioning or nonfunctioning of our psychological dispositions’, and suggest that private concerns inevitably determine one’s reading of a text.27 In the process, Iser concludes, these models neglect the specifically literary quality of this type of communication, as well as its unfamiliar and unexpected qualities. It follows, therefore, that, even if the reader is important, these readers are not. Each of the previous reader models may be seen as an attempt to anchor theoretical reflection about the reading process in some type of ‘real reader’; Jauß turns to contemporary reviews, Riffaterre to reader surveys and Holland to the reader’s psyche. Iser’s critique shows, however, that the lack of proper documentation, potential changes in the habits of readers and the unsettling dimension of reading conspire to ensure that the real reader remains elusive. Put bluntly: there is no such thing as the real reader. This explains why Iser is disillusioned with the empirical reader, of whatever type, and turns instead to an ideal reader of sorts. This alternative, the ‘implied reader’, was introduced, but not explicitly defined, in the study of the same name, and perhaps this is why it has often been misunderstood. Scholars frequently define Iser’s phrase by returning to Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), which introduced the related notion of the ‘implied author’, and by quoting the famous passage which states that ‘[t]he author creates [...] an image of himself and another image of his reader’ in the literary work.28 As Booth observed, these images of the author and reader do not correspond with the actual author and reader (who might be of different ages,

26 Ibid., p. 33. 27 Ibid., p. 40. 28 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 138.

106 —— Chapter 3 genders, opinions), nor do they correspond with the fictional storyteller and listener of the tale. On the basis of this argument, commentators often conclude that the implied reader is simply the readerly equivalent of the implied author, with the term referring to the type of reader that the text seems to require or assume. Antoine Compagnon, for instance, claims that ‘the reader is simultaneously perceived [by Iser] as a textual structure (the implied reader) and as a structured act (the real reader)’.29 But that is not how Iser defines the implied reader. In The Act of Reading, he proposes the following definition: ‘the concept of the implied reader is a transcendental model which makes it possible for the structured effects of literary texts to be described. It denotes the role of the reader, which is definable in terms of textual structure and structured acts’.30 As this makes clear, Iser’s concept does not refer to an actual reader, to a narratee or to a model reader, but to a conceptual model that not only captures the textual but also the mental preconditions of the reading process. Instead of a biographical or strictly textual entity, it designates those structures in the text as well as the mind which are an integral part of the reading process. The two-part structure of the ‘implied reader’ – with its textual and mental dimension – is clearly indebted to Ingarden’s two-part study of the literary work and its mode of cognition. However, Iser’s account of the textual dimension of reading is more closely related to Booth than to Ingarden. For, in keeping with certain ideas from Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, Iser agrees with Booth that the implied author is crucial to understanding the meaning of a work. To Iser’s mind, ‘every literary text in one way or another represents a perspective view of the world put together by (though not necessarily typical of) the author’.31 This authorial outlook is never explicitly formulated in the work, Iser admits, but can still be pieced together by the reader on the basis of its explicit ideological ‘perspectives’, including those of the narrator, the other characters, the narratee and the plot.32 When Iser speaks of the textual dimension of the implied reader, therefore, he is referring to the way the text’s constellation of perspectives preconditions the reading process by guiding the reader, step by step, toward the outlook of the implied author. Strangely, perhaps, for a critic concerned with the position of the reader, Iser concedes that the implied author and textual rhetoric of a work are crucial to understanding its meaning. Indeed,

29 Antoine Compagnon, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. by Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 112. 30 Iser, Act, p. 38, emphasis added. 31 Ibid., p. 35. 32 His conception of ‘perspective’, Iser notes, does not refer to ‘optic sight’, but to a point of view on a certain state of affairs. See Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich: Fink, 1976), p. 185.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 107

critics have objected that he thereby turns the dynamic act of reading into the preordained pact of reading. Yet in contrast to Booth, Iser does not believe that the ‘rhetoric of fiction’ is the only important part of the reading process. As early as his article ‘Literary Criticism as a Study of Aesthetic Response’ (1969), Iser argued that the study of ‘aesthetic response’ should consist of two, interrelated components: Above all one must analyse closely the rhetoric contained in a text. The interplay of rhetorical devices has the function of [. ..] manipulating the reader. Wayne Booth developed certain classifications for the rhetoric of prose. The same principle applies to [. . .] poetry [. . .]. The effectiveness of a text does not depend solely on rhetoric, however. The critic must also take into consideration the reader’s expectations.33

Thus the proper approach should complement the study of textual rhetoric with an analysis of how the reader’s mind deals with expectations and their fulfilment or non-fulfilment. At this point, Ingarden’s model becomes crucial. As Iser emphatically claims, phenomenology has established that the study of a literary work should discuss ‘not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text’.34 More specifically, he agrees with Ingarden that the literary work is only a ‘schematic formation’ which needs to be fleshed out in the ‘concretizations’ of individual readers. Neither Ingarden nor Iser are interested in the precise mental states of particular readers, however. Ingarden especially does not focus on concrete readings, but traces a general schema of the cognitive procedures that take place during the reading process by imposing certain simplifying conditions. This approach, he states, demonstrates that ‘every “cognition” of a literary work has a stock of operations which are always the same for the experiencing subject’.35 In his turn, Iser claims that the reading process is not only shaped by the rhetorical features unique to this text – it presents these particular perspectives in this particular sequence – but also by mental features shared by all readers – for instance, the unconscious urge to group heterogeneous data into a consistent pattern. Iser’s ‘implied reader’, then, is indeed a transcendental concept, since it aims to unearth the textual and mental preconditions of the literary reading process. Not only the structure of the text but also the structure of the human mind implies a certain way of reading.

33 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Literary Criticism as a Study of the Aesthetic Response’, in Actes des Congre`s d’Aix-en-Provence et de Clermont-Ferrand, 1966–1967. La Critique devant la Litte´rature anglosaxonne (Paris: Didier, 1969), pp. 167–70 (p. 169), emphasis added. 34 Iser, Act, p. 21. 35 Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. by Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1937]), p. 6.

108 —— Chapter 3 Image and Ideology The Act of Reading also contains a more unexpected opening. Beginning in medias res, Iser prefaces the argument just outlined with a programmatic analysis of Henry James’s novella ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ (1896), in which two types of meaning and interpretation are radically opposed. If the status quaestionis we have already discussed implies that Iser’s argument is not that original and radical, the combative tone of this polemical analysis creates an undeniable sense of urgency. Whether its claims are truly convincing is another matter, however. Iser’s reading of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ is important because it develops his earlier insights about mythical malleability and partial art and insists on the visual dimension of literary meaning. In his well-known story, Henry James relates the unhappy tale of an unnamed critic who fails to find the ‘figure in the carpet’ which supposedly underpins the oeuvre of an author called Hugh Vereker. However, the narrator’s friend, George Corvick, seems to have found this figure, and communicates it to his wife, Gwendolen Erme. In an unfortunate twist, Vereker, Corvick and Erme die, leaving the narrator to interrogate the second husband of Gwendolen, who, it turns out, has never been privy to this elusive secret. Unsurprisingly, James’s story strikes Iser as a metacritical parable about criticism and interpretation,36 which hints at two conceptions of meaning and reading. The unnamed narrator believes that interpreters should act like archaeologists, who excavate the text in search of a single meaning that is discursive and didactic in character and exists independently of the work. This approach was typical of the nineteenth century, Iser says, because in this period most disciplines and philosophies ran up against their limits, and people turned to literature for answers to pressing social and existential questions. Corvick approaches the work differently, Iser continues, seeing meaning as a dynamic and emergent process or experience, rather than a pregiven, static product or message. The text does not convey ‘an idea that pre-exists the work’, but is actually a ‘Wirkungspotential’ that continually evokes new meanings in the fashion of Blumenbergian myths.37 Instead of having a discursive quality, moreover, ‘meaning is imagistic in character’.38 The meaning of a text is not a specific treasure which should be unearthed, then, but a stream of images or figures which

36 As Frank Kermode notes, ‘[c]ritics of many nationalities and persuasions have [. . .] tried their hand at “the all-ingenious ‘Figure in the Carpet’”, as James called it, all of them interested in different kinds of critical interpretation – psychoanalytical, narratological, “reader-response”, and all with variations of emphasis’. Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. by Frank Kermode (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 26. 37 Iser, Akt, pp. 42, 7, 36. 38 Iser, Act, p. 8.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 109

should be experienced. Thus when Iser discusses the mental images of the reading process, he observes that: We might remind ourselves [.. .] of Henry James’s story [. . .], where the meaning of the novel could not be pinned down to any specific message, but only appeared in an image: ‘the figure in the carpet’. The mental imagery of passive syntheses is something which accompanies our reading – and is not itself the object of our attention, even when these images link up into a whole panorama.39

Iser’s analysis highlights not only the visual but also the modern quality of meaning. Referring to the idea of ‘partial art’ discussed in Chapter 2, Iser claims that the traditional norms of interpretation assumed ‘that in the work the totality [of reality] always came to light, which required harmonious forms for its adequate representation’.40 Modern art, he argues, has moved away from the all-encompassing content and harmonious forms of classical art, but interpretation has not followed suit, leading to misguided, ‘classical’ interpretations of partial and disharmonious works like those of Beckett. This attack on classical harmony, which we already encountered in Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen, returns throughout The Act of Reading; to a large extent, it provides the basis for Iser’s critique of the New Criticism, the psychological models of I.A. Richards and Norman Holland, the art history of Ernst Gombrich and the phenomenological models of Georges Poulet and Roman Ingarden. In sum, Iser proposes that we no longer focus on the author’s intention, but on the reader’s response; not on a definite message but on a dynamic experience; not on harmonious resolutions but on surprising juxtapositions. This argument returns in much of his later work as well. Iser’s programmatic defence of this visual and modern meaning is not entirely unconvincing: The Act of Reading certainly pays more attention to the mental images of reading and the communicative potential of non-harmonious forms than many other types of criticism. His polemical claims still need to be nuanced, however. As many commentators have noted, Iser’s appeal to an authorial reaction implies that the search for a single meaning is not over yet.41 This worldview

39 Ibid., p. 136. 40 Iser, Akt, p. 35. ‘daß im Werk stets die Ganzheit zur Erscheinung kommt, die zu ihrer angemessenen Repräsentation der Stimmigkeit der Formen bedurfte’. 41 Summarizing Samuel Weber, Robert C. Holub notes that ‘despite all the talk about the reader, the – perhaps unwitting – consequence of Iser’s theory is to reassert the primacy of the author’. Holub, Crossing, p. 31. Note, however, that Iser is thinking of a hypothetical rather than an actual intention. He is not interested in ‘[i]ntention as a biographical fact of the author’, but in ‘intentionality in the phenomenological sense of the word as an act directed towards an intentional object’. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Feigning in Fiction’, in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. by Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 204–28 (p. 226). Additionally, he remarks that ‘[i]ntentions mark [.. .] as is well known only a direction

110 —— Chapter 3 might be filled out or concretized in slightly different ways, perhaps, but the dream of an unlimited semantic potential remains hard to reconcile with Iser’s interest, reminiscent of Booth, in the precise authorial reaction to contemporary situations. In the end, the reader’s newly found freedom remains clearly circumscribed. The reference to the author’s worldview also indicates that meaning is not just an imagistic experience, but also an ideological doctrine. Ultimately, mental images are not seen as the self-sufficient goal of the text, but as the means toward another, not strictly imagistic end. This model’s preoccupation with semantics becomes even more obvious if we compare it to the related works of Ingarden, which are more concerned with the appreciation of aesthetic values than the identification of particular messages. Nor is Iser’s view of the social function of literature radically different from that of James’s narrator. It might be true that in the nineteenth century ‘the importance of fiction as a counterbalance grew in proportion to the deficiencies arising from such conflicts [between different thought systems]’.42 But this does not differ fundamentally from the modern situation, where art no longer offers a ‘representative image of [...] totalities’, but aims rather ‘to reveal and perhaps even balance the deficiencies resulting from prevailing systems’.43 Finally, Iser concedes that the continued hold of harmonious forms over the critical imagination is hard to dispel. As his analysis of the reading process goes on to show, the search for consistent patterns is an inevitable part of understanding. Hence, it is far from certain that Iser’s own model marks a clear departure from the old form of interpretation supposedly criticized in James’s story.

The Quasi-Reality of Fiction To better understand Iser’s account of fiction and textual rhetoric, it is instructive to compare it with Ingarden’s views, even if such a comparison does not seem initially promising. Iser disagrees sharply, for instance, with Ingarden’s ‘ontological’ conception of fiction, and supposedly advances a more flexible, ‘functional’ alternative. Furthermore, his analysis of literary fiction and textual rhetoric in The Act of Reading takes its cue from Booth and others such as John Searle and Niklas Luhmann. Nevertheless, Iser’s and Ingarden’s phenomenological accounts of fiction and textual rhetoric have many similarities. Even though they

[Richtungssinn], the filling in of which remains uncontrollable’. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Auktorialität. Die Nullstelle des Diskurses’, in Spielräume des auktorialen Diskurses, ed. by Klaus Städtke and others (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), pp. 219–41 (p. 226). 42 Iser, Act, p. 7. 43 Ibid., p. 13.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 111

propose incompatible views of the function of fiction, as we will see, it would hence be an exaggeration to say that they advance ‘two totally different conceptions of fictionality’.44

Ingarden’s Quasi-Judgments In The Act of Reading, Iser considers the textual dimension of the ‘implied reader’ by analyzing how literary fiction interacts with extratextual reality, and does so in a way he claims differs radically from Ingarden. For ontological models such as that posited in The Literary Work of Art misleadingly assume, he says, that fiction is the opposite of reality, whereas a fully functional perspective reveals that it is actually ‘a means of telling us something about reality’.45 This critique returns in Iser’s other writings: The Fictive and the Imaginary does not mention Ingarden explicitly, but it again associates his concept of the ‘quasi-judgment’ with reductive views of fictional language; and How to Do Theory notes that the Polish philosopher ‘keeps conspicuously silent’ about how we can decide, on the basis of the text before us, whether its sentences should be read as actual assertions or as fictional, quasi-judgmental utterances.46 As we will see, it is true that Ingarden’s model does not allow us to discuss the communicative function of literary fiction. Nevertheless, a closer examination of their views reveals that the flaws of Ingarden’s model and the dissimilarities between both accounts are perhaps not as great as Iser suggests. First, it is true that The Literary Work of Art focuses on ontological questions, but it is difficult to see why these are irrelevant to literary studies or necessarily imply a reductive view of fiction. Ingarden turns to ontology because literary works do not fit the usual ontological distinction between real objects (trees, chairs, cars) and ideal objects (numbers, geometrical figures, physical laws), where the former are exposed to time and change, and the latter are not. The literary work is clearly not a real object; it should not be equated with the meaningless dots of ink on the page or the psychological process in the mind of an individual reader, for it remains largely the same when different ink or paper is used or when another reader consults the text.47 Even though the literary work remains 44 See Brinker, ‘Two Phenomenologies’, p. 208. 45 Iser, Act, p. 53. 46 Iser, Fictive, p. 22; Iser, Theory, p. 18. 47 In thinking that the material embodiment of literary works is an accidental rather than a vital feature of their make-up, Ingarden and Iser underestimate the importance of the material and sensory dimensions of reading. For a recent account that tries to factor in these dimensions, see Karin Littau, Theories of Reading. Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).

112 —— Chapter 3 accessible to readers from different historical periods, it is not an ideal object either, since it originated at a particular time (in contrast to numbers or geometric figures) and may change in various ways (different interpretations, different typographies, different languages even) while remaining roughly the same work. In the final analysis, the literary work should be seen as an ‘intersubjective intentional object’, which is able to change because it is merely ‘a schematic formation’, an ideal skeleton that always needs to be fleshed out by the human imagination in individual readings.48 On the basis of these considerations, Ingarden differentiates between the literary work, its text (the set of physical letters on the page) and its concretizations (the imaginative realizations of the work in the mind of individual readers). Despite criticizing Ingarden’s ‘ontological’ perspective, Iser agrees with each of these claims, explicitly noting that Ingarden’s distinction between text, work and concretization was a major ‘achievement’.49 What, then, did he see as the problem with this account of fiction? One stumbling block might have been Ingarden’s notion of quasi-judgments. In Iser’s view, this idea encourages a reductive notion of fiction, and sheds no light on the ability of readers to distinguish fictional statements from real ones. If we consider Ingarden’s argument more closely, however, neither claim appears to be truly justified. Confronted with the fact that literary works often contain sentences which appear to be (and sometimes are) about real persons, events and locales, Ingarden remarks that these sentences are always subject to certain ‘quasi-modifications’; they are not judgments, questions or commands, but only quasi-judgments, quasi-questions, quasi-commands.50 The prefix is meant to signify that these statements are quasi-real: ‘[t]hey carry with them [.. .] a suggestive power which, as we read, allows us to plunge into the simulated world and live in it as in a world peculiarly unreal and yet having the appearance of reality’.51 In other words, these seemingly real sentences lend the represented objects ‘a mere aspect of reality without stamping them as genuine realities’.52 Again, this argument is not irreconcilable with Iser who, as we will see, also considers fiction to be a ‘quasi-reality’ of sorts. Furthermore, the claim that fiction does not fool its readers, but merely acts as if it were real, is very close to the idea of selfdisclosing fictions outlined in The Fictive and the Imaginary. In fact, Ingarden explicitly mentions the work of ‘[Hans] Vaihinger’,53 later a crucial intertext in Iser’s anthropological account of fiction.

48 49 50 51 52 53

Ingarden, Cognition, pp. 14, 13. Iser, Act, p. xi. Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 181. Ibid., p. 172. Ingarden, Cognition, p. 13. Ibid., p. 214.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 113

If the notion of the quasi-judgment was not an insurmountable hurdle either, perhaps Ingarden’s silence about the textual markers of fictionality was the real obstacle. Ingarden, Iser argues, should have paid more attention to the question of how readers are able to identify the text in front of them as fictional or factual, suggesting that his analysis may be extended by considering how generic signals incite certain expectations in the reader’s mind. Yet Ingarden by no means neglects these issues, and even anticipates Iser’s observation about genre. It may appear difficult, Ingarden says, to determine the status of individual sentences, as we do not preface them with a ‘quasi-judgment sign’, but this is not a problem, as ‘the title or subtitle informs us that we are dealing with a novel or a drama’.54 Ingarden identifies several other markers of fictionality as well: apart from adopting a different style, literary works use particular types of titles, and are given specific intonations when read aloud (or heard, as it were, in the mind of the reader). I will return to these ‘signposts’ of literary fictionality in Chapter 4. For now, the crucial observation is that Ingarden’s model is less reductive than Iser leads us to believe and that their respective positions are not that different after all. That is not to say that Ingarden’s model is free of problems or that these accounts of fiction and textual rhetoric are the same. On the contrary, there are two significant differences. Whereas Iser describes the way in which the rhetoric of a given work directs the reader toward the implied author’s position, Ingarden disentangles its different ‘strata’ or layers to study how their mutual interaction generates aesthetic value. In looking at a work’s textual structure, Ingarden is therefore not concerned with the implied author, but with the ways in which these different layers (sound patterns, semantic elements, schematic representations and the fictional world) interact to create various aesthetically valuable relations within the work. This first difference already hints at the second. If Iser’s attention to the outlook of the implied author reveals his concern for the social function of literature, Ingarden’s exclusive focus on formal and structural relations implies that the work is ultimately disconnected from its author and context. His autonomous creed is particularly clear in the following passage: It has been said often enough that objects are represented in a literary work so that something else may be attained. [. ..] Thus, it was thought that represented objects [. ..] should arouse in us some emotion or mood, or instruct us, or influence us ethically, or, finally, ‘express’ the author’s experiences [or even] an ‘idea’ apprehended by the author. [. ..] There undoubtedly are literary works and authors which suggest this line of approach (i.e., tendentious literature). However, this effort is misdirected precisely with [.. .] genuine works of art because it apprehends the literary work from a side which [.. .] has subordinate significance in it.55

54 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 179. 55 Ibid., pp. 289, 290.

114 —— Chapter 3 In even stronger, indeed criminalizing terms, Ingarden argues that authors who ‘use their works to smuggle through their own opinions about various problems pertaining to the real world’ misuse their works for non-artistic purposes.56 To a certain extent, Iser concurs, and rightly so. Throughout The Act of Reading, he is critical of authors and critics who consider literary works as unambiguous mouthpieces for political propaganda. But he also stresses that these works interact with their context, laying bare neglected aspects of reality or rallying to the defence of threatened conventions.57 In the final analysis, then, Ingarden and Iser do not so much disagree about the nature of fiction (they both construe it as a form of ‘quasi-reality’ the presence of which is signalled by the use of generic markers), but about its function. Iser’s critique of the ontological account of ‘quasi-judgments’ may be misguided, then, but his call for a more functional view of fiction nonetheless improves on the excessively autonomous alternative (even if Ingarden was surely right in claiming that ethical criteria should not be a decisive factor in evaluating literary works).

Iser’s Quasi-Performatives As we have seen, the literary work, for Iser, presents the reader with a constellation of ideological perspectives (think back to his analysis of Waverley mentioned in Chapter 2, for instance), and these can be integrated by the reader to arrive at the implied author’s position on contemporary issues. In trying to describe fiction’s peculiar ‘reaction’ to the world, Iser turns to John Austin and John Searle’s famous speech act theory.58 Investigating different types of utterances, they introduce a classic distinction between ‘constative’ ut56 Ibid., p. 173, emphasis added. 57 Nevertheless, a remark on Beckett’s Ping (1967) indicates that Iser is not entirely opposed to autonomist thinking: ‘this [text] does not relate to a reality outside itself [.. .]. Rather, it is entirely enclosed upon itself, which is why intentionality and reference are attenuated [.. .]. The text thereby acquires the closed nature of an autonomous system, the operations of which have a self-referential character’. Iser, ‘Auktorialität’, p. 237. ‘dieser bezieht sich nicht auf eine Realität außerhalb seiner [...]. Vielmehr ist dieser ganz auf sich selbst bezogen, weshalb Intentionalität sowie Referenz abgeblendet [...] sind. Dadurch gewinnt der Text die Geschlossenheit eines autonomen Systems, dessen Operationen selbstreferentiellen Charakter haben’. 58 This model has long fascinated literary theorists. According to Stanley Fish, however, most of them, and Iser especially, misappropriate speech act theory. Iser is mistaken, Fish feels, when he associates speech acts with ‘productiveness’; as speech acts are rooted in pre-existing communal conventions, ‘[i]t is simply wrong to think of an illocutionary act as producing meaning in the sense of creating it’. Yet, Fish himself argues that speech act theory is about ‘the power to make the world rather than mirror it’, which surely alludes to a similar idea of

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 115

terances, which merely report an independent state of affairs, and ‘performative’ utterances, which actively create the state of affairs they are describing. Whereas ‘constative’ utterances report facts which can be verified as being either true or false – ‘Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones’ –, ‘performative’ utterances produce facts in a manner which can be characterized only as successful or unsuccessful, depending on whether certain conditions are met – the classic example being ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. As Iser notes, the success of such speech acts is governed by three main types of ‘felicity conditions’: the utterance has to be rooted in a particular situation, it has to evoke conventions that are shared by speaker and listener, and the application of these conventions should follow certain accepted procedures. Unsatisfied with Austin and Searle’s summary dismissal of literature (which is seen as a form of ‘parasitic discourse’) and intrigued by the idea of utterances which create something new, Iser extends this model to the realm of literary fiction, asking what type of situation, conventions and procedures are involved in the creative utterances of literature. Let us begin with the fictional ‘situation’. In ordinary language, speech act theory had claimed, the meaning of an utterance is conditioned by the highly determinate situation in which speaker and listener encounter each other. The exact situation in which a reader picks up a literary work, by contrast, has no such direct impact on its meaning. The objects which surround us during an actual conversation constrain our interpretation, as Iser observes, but the same does not hold for literary reading. Rather, the literary work contains instructions, so to speak, for building a new situation, an imaginary context, in the reader’s mind. This unfamiliar situation cannot be perceived independently of the text, Iser continues, and therefore texts often compel readers to revise their initial assessment to ensure that this situation is not imagined inappropriately. Interestingly, the dynamic character of this experience implies that the activity of reading is related to the third conception of reality introduced in Chapter 2, the idea of reality as a ‘continual process of realization’.59 For Iser, then, literary works encourage their readers to construct and reconstruct imaginary situations and realities in their minds. Turning to the second felicity condition, Iser observes that literary works are permeated by conventional elements. Yet if the conventions of ordinary speech acts are simply applied, they are rearranged and modified in literary texts. The set of extratextual elements in a work, the so-called ‘repertoire’, is made up of two types of conventions: social norms and literary allusions.60 Concerning the

productiveness. See Stanley Fish, ‘How to do Things With Austin and Searle: Speech-Act Theory and Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, 91.5 (1976), 983–1025 (pp. 1003, 1024). 59 Iser, Act, p. 68. 60 Ibid., p. 69.

116 —— Chapter 3 former, Iser claims that literature does not interact with reality as such, nor with the conceptions of reality introduced by Blumenberg (perhaps because they do not allow us to discuss the differences between specific novels in sufficient detail); instead literature interacts with established ways of processing reality, with existing ‘thought systems’. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, does not refer to undifferentiated eighteenth-century life, but to existing systems or philosophies such as Locke’s empiricism. Other examples would include the allusions to the ‘sola scriptura’-doctrine in Wolf Hall or the rise and fall pattern in Shakespeare’s history plays. Each of these thought systems, Iser claims with reference to Niklas Luhmann, reduces the complex and unpredictable character of reality by highlighting certain aspects and relegating others to the periphery, thereby imposing a specific structure on what we perceive to be reality: ‘[e]ach meaningful reduction of contingency results in a division of the world into possibilities that fade from the dominant to the neutralized and negated, the latter being retained in the background’.61 This account of social systems has implications for the literary text, for Iser claims that texts react to such thought systems by altering their internal structure. Recalling the idea of reshuffling analyzed in Chapter 2, he insists that the literary work often accentuates those elements which are muffled by current systems, turning these virtualized elements into dominant ones and vice versa. The reshufflings of fiction may be used in a ‘system-stabilizing’ fashion as well, Iser concedes, but he is, nevertheless, more intrigued by works that take up a critical position vis-a`-vis established systems.62 Literary works refer not only to thought systems, but also to other literary works. Think of the title of Joyce’s Ulysses or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or the fact that Zeh’s Spieltrieb alludes to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada, or Ardor (1969) via the name of the main character. Again, these allusions do not simply reproduce these conventional elements but creatively adjust them. If the confrontation with modified social norms reminded readers of the original structure of the thought systems in question, these modified literary norms recall the meaning they had in their original context. Using systemic terminology once more, Iser argues that the work changes these conventional elements in such a way that aspects which remained ‘virtualized and negated semantic possibilities’ in their original contexts are now brought to the fore.63 A good example of this strategy is Henry Fielding’s response to Samuel Richardson, which adapts

61 Ibid., p. 71. In another publication, Iser describes norms as ‘universal regulators’: ‘[a]ll of them carry the assumption that what they regulate is brought into complete order’. See Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1987]), p. 18. 62 Iser, Akt, p. 129. 63 Ibid., p. 133.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 117

the tale of a virtuous servant, Pamela (1740), into the story of a less upstanding Shamela (1741). Such literary allusions, Iser claims, will be recognized by the reader, who will then try to connect them in a meaningful fashion to that other part of the repertoire, namely the text’s social conventions. In this respect, the differences between the original meaning of these conventional elements – Pamela – and their modification in the literary work – Shamela – provide crucial clues. Concerning the final felicity condition, Iser argues that the literary work also displays accepted procedures. These procedures or ‘strategies’, he says, take the form of various stylistic techniques, such as different types of focalization in the novel or the octave-sextet alternation in the sonnet. In a similar fashion to the conventions of the repertoire, these strategies differ markedly from those of ordinary speech acts because they often disrupt our expectations. To describe these unpredictable strategies and their ability to steer the reading process, Iser examines their underlying structure rather than their specific forms – he is a phenomenologist, after all, not a formalist. There are various candidates to help us delineate the abstract structure of different narrative and poetic techniques, he says. The first option, the deviationist model of Jan Mukarˇovsky´, claims convincingly that these techniques deviate from the standard language and the norms of the literary canon, but it disregards the fact that this deviation depends not on abstract, disembodied norms but on the individual reader’s linguistic and literary expectations. Ernst Gombrich’s distinction between schemata and corrections – which we already encountered in Chapter 2 – initially seems more promising. Recalling Luhmann’s theory, Gombrich argues that we never perceive reality as such but continually use ‘schemata’ to filter unnecessary data. However, a particular schema can never capture every aspect of the perceptual world, and therefore we need to ‘correct’ it in certain respects if we want to bring formerly neglected aspects to light. This account is convincing, Iser says, but it fails to explain how artistic techniques prompt and program the recipient’s reactions. A similar objection is raised to the related distinctions between visual focus and amorphous periphery in perception, and between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ in Gestalt psychology. In a famous example, the latter distinction explains how we can see a single image as a representation of either a rabbit or a duck by considering different parts of the same image as figure and ground. Although Iser introduces different terms, he thinks that similar shifts in perception take place in the reading process, as we will see. Iser proposes two alternatives to these unsatisfactory models in order to explain how literary strategies guide the reader’s processing of its conventional social and literary material, namely the ‘foreground-background relationship’ and the ‘theme-and-horizon structure’.64 For Iser, the literary work steers the reader 64 Iser, Act, pp. 93, 97.

118 —— Chapter 3 towards its take on contemporary problems by instigating a meaningful interplay between the ‘background’, or well-known context, of conventional elements and their ‘foreground’, or unexpected modification, in the text. To aid the reader further in this process, the work already ascribes a certain significance to these conventional elements by associating them with particular narrative perspectives. In other words, it is no coincidence that the work assigns particular ideologies to the narrator, the secondary characters and the narratee. A novel about fascism, for instance, will have a different impact on the reader if this ideology is assigned to the work’s protagonist rather than his antagonist. In addition, Iser emphasizes that the reader encounters these narrative perspectives and their associated ideologies in a particular order. This encounter is regulated by the text, in other words, because our evaluation of the current perspective or ‘theme’ is shaped by the ‘horizon’ of previous themes and perspectives. In The Sound and the Fury, for instance, the work guides readers in a particular direction by first making them live through Benjy’s experiences and only then allowing them to see Benjy through the eyes of another figure, who characterizes him as a drooling ‘trained bear’.65 Similarly, the argument of the introduction to The Act of Reading would change slightly – its urgency would be diminished – if we discussed the analysis of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ after rather than before the overview of reader models, as in the previous section. In short, sequence is related to semantics. This argument has returned in recent thinking about narrative fiction. In Emma Kafalenos’s Narrative Causalities (2006), for instance, Vladimir Propp’s groundbreaking research is revised to produce a model of ten basic narrative functions, which enables us to describe the crucial role of narrative sequence in guiding the reader’s changing interpretation of fictional events.66 In sum, if the relationship between foreground and background ensures that readers cannot simply imagine any thought system and modification they like, the relationship between theme and horizon ensures that they have to process this conventional material in the precise order prescribed by the text. Iser’s redefinition of felicity conditions in terms of the text’s imaginary situation, dual repertoire and dual strategies is compelling, even if the link with speech act theory becomes rather tenuous. His emphasis on the interaction between fiction and reality provides a good corrective to the excessively autonomous approach of Ingarden, and the idea that most works interact with certain

65 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, ed. by David Minter (New York: Norton, 1987 [1929]), p. 164. 66 As Jan Baetens has noted, it is striking to see that Kafalenos does not mention Iser’s very similar argument. Jan Baetens, ‘Une nouvelle version de la narratologie structurale. Re´cit et causalite´ selon Emma Kafalenos’ (review), Acta Fabula, 7.6 (2006), no pagination. I am grateful to Jan for pointing out Kafalenos’ study to me.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 119

ideologies seems broadly correct. Yet, although Iser rightly claims that there can be no access to reality unmediated by pre-existing systems of thought, the idea that every extratextual element of the repertoire can be effortlessly assigned a clear position in one particular system of thought is overly optimistic. That Sterne is mocking Locke’s philosophy may be clear but, as Iser himself seems to perceive, it is much harder to identify the systems of thought with which Joyce’s Ulysses is engaging, not to mention the modifications the work introduces. Another problem is that Iser’s discussion of the textual dimension of the implied reader is somewhat non-textual. His argument looks at abstract, perceptual procedures, not precise, linguistic strategies. In this respect, Ingarden’s model may help to refine Iser’s claims. Admittedly, Ingarden too feels that the reading process does not proceed solely by means of a ‘philological’ attitude that passively decodes linguistic elements, but also via the more active mental projection of a fictional world.67 Yet Ingarden repeatedly stresses that the exact linguistic makeup of the work is of fundamental importance; he is critical of translations, emphasizes that ‘the two strata which together constitute the language element in the literary work’ are crucial,68 and alludes to a sort of transposition method, whereby the effect of a passage is investigated by comparing it with a hypothetical, differently worded version of the same passage.69 Moreover, Ingarden examines textual aspects that are ignored by Iser, such as phonetic patterns, the fact that the reading process does not only lead to an imaginary visualization of the fictional world but also to ‘an imaginary hearing’ of the text, and the important rhetorical function of verb forms and connectives.70 In other words, if Iser shows that Ingarden pays too little attention to the contextual function of fiction, Ingarden reveals that Iser is too little concerned with its precise textual formulation.

67 Ingarden, Cognition, p. 92. 68 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 184. 69 Referring to the extant versions of the same work and therefore anticipating the procedure of so-called ‘genetic criticism’, he notes that we should investigate ‘what kinds of effects can be achieved with the help of certain phrases or words in the literary work of art and what is changed in the aesthetic concretization when we replace them with other words or other phrases’. Ingarden, Cognition, p. 284. If there are no other versions of the text, we can also try ‘to dim certain parts of the work which we have already read and then observe whether changes take place in the aesthetic values which result’. Ibid., p. 329. 70 Ibid., p. 21.

120 —— Chapter 3

Duration, Imagination, Transformation Both Iser and Ingarden argue that the textual rhetoric of the literary work forms a mere ‘skeleton’ that always needs to be realized or concretized by a particular reader. How do they analyze this concretization or, in Iser’s terms, the mental dimension of the implied reader? Drawing upon Ingarden’s analysis of the reader’s memory and imagination, The Act of Reading proposes that every reading process constitutes an attempt to group disparate pieces of textual information, and to imagine fictional and therefore inevitably indeterminate events. If Iser and Ingarden largely agree about the importance of duration and imagination, they disagree strongly about the impact of the work and the reader’s potential transformation.

The Time of Reading In their respective publications, Iser and Ingarden assert that a literary work is made up of a particular sequence of parts, and that reading it therefore requires both an active memory and a continued effort to group elements that are related but distributed across the work. As indicated earlier in the discussion of repertoire and strategies, Iser observes that readers of a literary work need to retain certain information – the original context of the thought systems and literary works alluded to – as well as to connect certain information – the themes and horizons of the various narrative perspectives – in their minds. Iser also demonstrates that the temporal dimension of reading is vital, that local interpretations often need to be integrated into more global patterns, and that initial readings frequently have to be revised. Readers of a literary work can never see it in its entirety, Iser says, and therefore they have to relate its different parts to one another while traversing it in reading. In his view, their ‘wandering viewpoint’ (a phrase which recalls the analysis of Scott encountered in Chapter 2) mainly has to connect sentences and narrative perspectives.71 Drawing on Ingarden, Iser claims that readers do not interpret linguistic signs separately, but focus immediately on groups of signs, such as sentences, and their ‘intentional correlates’.72 This phrase denotes that sentences are not self-contained utterances, but entities that are intertwined; each individual sentence hints at the text’s further development and hence establishes certain expectations in the reader’s mind, which can then be satisfied or frustrated by subsequent sentences. Reading is thus a process in which me71 Iser, Act, p. 109. 72 Ibid., p. 110.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 121

mories of preceding textual passages interact with the reader’s expectations about subsequent passages. Using terms introduced by Edmund Husserl, Iser says that it is characterized by ‘a dialectic of protension and retention’.73 This interplay between memories and expectations implies that the linear sequence of the text, which Iser had emphasized with the theme and horizon relationship, does not give rise to a strictly linear process in the reader’s mind. The reader’s wandering viewpoint not only has to connect sentences, but also different perspectives: for each sentence of a work is embedded within a particular narrative perspective (as we know, Iser distinguishes between the perspectives of the narrator, the characters, the fictitious reader and the plot). As readers, we try to connect these perspectives in a way that takes all of their potential relations into account, but the limitations and habits of our minds mean that this goal is never reached. Only certain aspects of these perspectives are retained by the reader when they are aligned into a meaningful pattern or Gestalt. Those textual passages that are disregarded, Iser notes with a supporting reference to Walter Pater, inevitably create ‘alien associations’, which start to impinge on these initial patterns and threaten their illusory consistency and accuracy.74 This process eventually goads the reader, or so Iser claims, into developing new, more inclusive patterns of meaning. It could be argued that this account overemphasizes the functional quality of such associations. In a recent essay, Peter Schwenger has called attention to what he terms the ‘obbligato effect’, the fact that literary reading is invariably accompanied by a series of random and often quite trivial associations, which nevertheless enhance the vivacity of the fictional world as well as the pleasure of reading, and reveal the multi-track character of human consciousness. This mental ‘wandering’, Schwenger maintains, should be distinguished from ‘Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the “wandering viewpoint”’, for this wandering is less synthetic and task-oriented than Iser imagines.75 Iser’s reference to the ‘alien associations’ of reading indicates, however, that his model may easily accommodate this additional layer of mental processing, even if this phrase was originally designed to capture the way in which readers gradually correct and integrate local interpretations rather than the fact that they engage in a non-instrumental mental wandering.76 73 Ibid., p. 112. 74 Ibid., p. 126. 75 Peter Schwenger, ‘The Obbligato Effect’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), 115–28 (p. 121). 76 In fact, I am unconvinced that Schwenger’s argument differs radically from Iser’s. After all, both critics pay attention to the ‘imaginative seeing’ of reading, the multilayered character of the self and the Barthesian pleasure of the text (which Iser considers in The Fictive and the Imaginary). What is more, they are both mainly interested in aestheticist and modernist novels, works which particularly foreground the ‘obbligato effect’ of our minds. Schwenger contends that similar effects obtain in traditional works, but he nevertheless zooms in on ‘a certain school

122 —— Chapter 3 The reader’s search for consistent patterns is significant, because it can be manipulated via certain rhetorical mechanisms. Crucial in this respect is the fact that some of a work’s passages can make readers produce patterns that are invalidated by other passages, by means of techniques such as interpolated stories (the Man of the Hill-episode in Tom Jones, for example, which undermines the belief in human perfectibility upheld by the main storyline), unreliable narrators (who, like the narrator of Pale Fire (1962), make readers doubt the very plots they are piecing together in their minds), and the remarkable strategy of combining assertions with their negations (as in the famous ending of Beckett’s Molloy (1951)). Such techniques, Iser claims, prompt the reader to create divergent patterns of meaning that cannot be integrated into a harmonious synthesis. Furthermore, he maintains that, even though the reading has to end at some point, this process of revision cannot be truly terminated. In works such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) in particular, the reader’s attempt to interpret the text leads to a ‘spiral of failed interpretations’.77 Like the characters in the play, we might say, the reader is constantly waiting for meaning. Undoubtedly thinking of Albert Camus, Iser concludes that the reader who looks for meaning is ‘like Sisyphus’, a figure who has to begin his task continually anew, despite the fact that this task – reading the text – never changes.78 In another essay, it is suggested that this wandering and erring mode of reading is not down to the misguided search for a single meaning, but is actually part and parcel of the modern view of reality identified by Blumenberg: ‘[a]s the reader is driven to a cyclic repetition of failed meanings, the Sisyphus syndrome highlights an underlying pattern of the modern world, which realizes itself by continually invalidating any kind of reality’.79 In keeping with modern open-endedness, reading consists not only in the grouping of important information, but also in the rereading of the text and the revising of our initial interpretative hypotheses. Iser’s insistent claim that literary works often force their readers to revise their initial interpretations has been picked up by many critics. In developing a similar argument, Emma Kafalenos has

of writing that is deliberately overwrought, that plays dangerously with dandification and excess’ and looks at Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), and Nathalie Sarraute’s writing, an Iser-like corpus if ever there was one. See Schwenger, ‘Obbligato’, p. 124. 77 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 191. 78 Iser, Fictive, p. 19. Another publication conjures up the Dantesque image of ‘thousands of Sisyphuses trundling in vain towards the hidden meaning’. See Iser, ‘Feigning’, p. 223. 79 Wolfgang Iser, ‘German Jewish Writers during the Decline of the Hapsburg Monarchy. Assessing the Assessment of Gershon Shaked’, in Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. by Emily Budick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 259–73 (p. 266).

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 123

nonetheless observed that we should not underestimate the powerful ‘primacy effect’, which ‘guides us to retain our first interpretation of the function of an event after we possess the information to recognize that that interpretation is inaccurate’.80 Hence, our hypotheses may be more difficult to dislodge than Iser suggests. This account of the temporal dimension of reading is again indebted to Ingarden’s phenomenology. As Ingarden notes in The Literary Work of Art, texts are not only made up of different layers or strata, but also show ‘an order of sequence, a determinate system of phase positions’.81 And Ingarden also thinks that reading is characterized by an interplay between memories and expectations and that the reader never fully grasps the work’s many layers, but invariably realizes its semantic potential in a limited and skewed manner.82 There is also a revealing difference, however. For Ingarden’s analysis establishes that there are actually two temporal dimensions at work in the reading process: time not only plays a key role in the reader’s mind, via the interplay between memories and expectations, but also in the work’s structure, through the temporal qualities assigned to its fictional events. As Ingarden astutely observes, these events are placed at different distances from the ‘now’ of reading (a first chapter may take place in the fictional present, a second in the past, a third in an even earlier past, a fourth in the future, et cetera). The text can also manipulate the reader’s experience of this distance, by making remembered events last longer or shorter than they actually did, by drawing them closer to the present than a strict chronology implies, and so on. This manipulation of the reader’s temporal perspective plays an important role in the presentation of fictional events. Concentrating on the various temporal forms of the text’s finite verbs, Ingarden analyzes the shifting forms of ‘temporal distance’ in works such as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900), noting that this novel often weaves different time periods together and presents past events either in the form of a short summary, which distances them from the fictional ‘present’, or as a vivid scene, which draws past events close to readers and turns them into direct witnesses, as it were, of the proceedings.83 Such strategies, Ingarden claims, enable the work to manipulate the reader’s attention. Hence, the reading process has a temporal quality not only because its string of sentences 80 Emma Kafalenos, Narrative Causalities (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006), p. 152. 81 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 309. 82 While Ingarden agrees with Iser that the reader both anticipates later passages and remembers past ones, he speaks of ‘active memory’ rather than the Husserlian ‘retention’, noting that the latter refers to a domain which ‘is still completely within the reach of the vivid present’, whereas the former can also refer to the memory of more distant parts of the work. See Ingarden, Cognition, p. 100. 83 Ibid., p. 128.

124 —— Chapter 3 are encountered by the reader over a certain period of time, but also because these sentences place recounted events across a spectrum of distances from the fictional ‘present’. Notwithstanding his interest in the temporal quality of reading, Iser does not fully appreciate the importance of such techniques in the manipulation of the reader’s activity. Returning to Iser’s argument about the theme and horizon sequence, we may observe that the reaction of readers is not only shaped by the nature and position of the ideological perspectives they encounter, but also by the temporal quality assigned to the represented events. Even if both passages show the same ideological perspectives and are placed in the same position, a passage from early childhood which is recalled in a vivid and proximate fashion, such as Cromwell’s beating by his father in Wolf Hall, has a different impact on the reader from one where the same events are quickly summarized. Again, Ingarden’s closer attention to the linguistic form of the literary work may add further substance to some of Iser’s claims from The Act of Reading.

Imagination and Impact What do both critics think about the visual dimension of reading and its ethical impact? In The Literary Work of Art, Ingarden contrasts physical objects and their perception with the imaginary objects of literary works and their mental recreation. His analysis takes its cue from visual perception, he says, because most literary works represent real objects, and are therefore given to the reader’s consciousness in a way that is attuned to ‘the characteristic features of the primary perceptual reality of real objects’.84 Let us consider these real objects and visual perception before turning to their imaginary counterparts. In Ingarden’s view, real objects appear to us as entities which are ‘unequivocally, universally (i.e., in every respect) determined’, even if we never know every detail of these determining features, and even if, as Ingarden admits, modern science throws the determinability of these features into doubt.85 We usually perceive only one particular side or aspect of a physical object, but the object nonetheless appears as a fully determinate entity, for its hidden aspects are always implicitly co-present in the aspect at the centre of our attention. Real objects also have an inexhaustible set of determining properties. If we visually perceive a real object such as a desk or a red sphere, we experience an unbroken series of aspects or features. The aspect on which we happen to be focusing can, therefore, be further determined by turning to its many adjoining 84 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 256. 85 Ibid., p. 246.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 125

elements, for it always fits into the broader aspect of its implicitly perceived surroundings. And even though we are usually not preoccupied with a concrete aspect in its specific individuality, but only with a stereotypic simplification which enables us to identify the object and its properties quickly, each of the object’s features is in reality not a generic, but a completely individualized property. We are usually satisfied with finding that the desk is red, for example, but we may nevertheless identify its precise variation of red if we so desire. Real objects, it seems, are individualized entities with a continuous series of determinate properties. Things are different, however, with fictional objects and the way they are perceived in reading. As these objects are evoked by a finite number of sentences, they can never be as fully determinate or as fully determinable as real objects. When we read, Ingarden says, we are usually focusing on those aspects which are explicitly identified by the text, and we are thus unaware of the fact that fictional objects contain many ‘spots’ or ‘places’ of indeterminacy. In reading about a bustling street, for instance, we never experience its properties in the same detail as if we had actually seen it, but this does not bother us or detract from our appreciation of the scene. Furthermore, if real objects display a fused and continuous multiplicity of aspects, fictional objects present themselves through disconnected features, which appear and disappear without warning. In contrast to actual objects, fictional objects have no implicit surroundings, but are isolated entities: ‘[i]t is always as if a beam of light were illuminating a part of a region, the remainder of which disappears in an indeterminate cloud but is still there in its indeterminacy’.86 Finally, fictional objects are never as individualized as their real counterparts, because the majority of nouns we use are actually generic, general names. In short: the represented object that is ‘real’ according to its content is not in the strict sense of the term [...] [an] unequivocally determined individual that constitutes a primary unity; rather, it is only a schematic formation with spots of indeterminacy of various kinds [...], even though formally it is projected as a fully determinate individual and its called upon to simulate such an individual.87

Thus, although we are usually oblivious to this remarkable fact during the reading process, fictional objects are never as determinate, continuous and individualized as real ones. Iser largely agrees with this analysis. In The Act of Reading, he also discusses the contrast between perception and imagination, believing that the reader unconsciously synthesizes disparate textual data with the help of ‘mental image86 Ibid., p. 218. 87 Ibid., p. 251.

126 —— Chapter 3 ry’.88 In contrast to Ingarden, however, he stresses the productive potential of these mental images. Referring especially to Jean-Paul Sartre, Iser argues that there are at least three differences between perception and imagination. In contrast to visual perceptions, first of all, literary images do not record an existing object that is physically present, but use the reader’s store of knowledge to conjure up new ‘objects’. Second, whereas we usually perceive a physical object as a whole, we have to build up the imaginary object of a literary work gradually. Finally, the reader’s mental images are poor in visual quality but rich in semantic connotations. It may seem as though Iser’s defence of mental images allows the reader to imagine whatever he likes, given that their exact nature is not constrained by the features of existing objects. That is emphatically not the case, however, for he again stresses that the work appeals to specific conventions and presents them to the reader in a particular sequence. Iser’s own example is drawn from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), but for the sake of variation I will illustrate his remarks here with a contemporary example, from Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). At a certain point in this novel, one of the characters is introduced as follows: Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe’s frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe’s massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn’t make any difference in what you see. [.. .] Landsman has heard that it’s a glandular disorder. [...] But [he] prefers to see the man as distended with the gas of violence and corruption.89

A scene such as this, Iser would observe, does not directly visualize the rabbi, but merely presents the reader with various conventional recipes for imagining this character. The exact nature of the reader’s mental images will differ, since the conventions alluded to – cartoon houses, dough, Rolls-Royces, learned disqui88 Iser, Act, p. 136. The topic of mental imagery has received a lot of attention in the past two decades, as books by Ellen J. Esrock, Elaine Scarry and Peter Schwenger demonstrate. For a recent contribution to the debate, see Daniel W. Gleason, ‘The Visual Experience of Image Metaphor. Cognitive Insights into Imagist Figures’, Poetics Today, 30.3 (2009), 423–70. Like Kafalenos’ work on narrative sequence, Gleason’s essay updates Iser’s insights but fails to mention his work, despite the fact that Iser has discussed Gleason’s two main subjects, namely mental images and imagist poetry. 89 Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 199, 200.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 127

sition and creatures of the deep – are not equally familiar to every reader. Nevertheless, Iser claims, readers of such a scene will have to use these conventions to flesh out the text in their minds. Because of the rapid alternation of images, furthermore, the reader’s imagination cannot sit still and focus on a single image, but has to construct and compare different potential images at speed. Therefore, in contrast to what Iser’s emphasis on the visual quality of meaning might lead us to expect, he would argue that such scenes actually direct our attention away from these visual details and encourage us to look for broader patterns of meaning. As the two last sentences of the passage indicate, this description is not meant (or only meant) to create a vivid illusion in the reader’s mind, but to hint at the thematic concerns of the novel as a whole. Another difference between the two critics concerns the ethical impact of reading. Ingarden is certainly aware of the significant impact that aesthetic experiences may have on the recipient, concluding The Literary Work of Art, for instance, by noting that the work is not merely affected by our mental operations but that, when we concretize it, ‘it evokes deep changes in our life; it broadens it, raises it above the flatness of everyday existence, and gives it a lovely radiance’.90 Anticipating Iser’s observations, in fact, Ingarden adds that readers experience, to a greater or lesser degree, a ‘quasi-forgetfulness’ of the external world during the reading process, and a disorientating ‘return’ to their real concerns and environment afterwards.91 Nonetheless, he maintains that the change provoked by our aesthetic reading does not leave any lasting trace: After a truly tragic situation or after an experience of true happiness, we cannot in our essence remain entirely as before, and accordingly we cannot subsequently behave entirely as we choose. In contrast, after seeing a play that moved us ‘to the very bottom of our heart’, we can calmly go home and occupy ourselves with [. ..] altogether different matters. Undoubtedly, an echo of the shock experienced during the play is discernible for a while; but real life is much stronger, and it demands its rights.92

Apparently, the flatness of everyday existence wins out, and resumes its course untroubled, whatever the intellectual and emotional turmoil the reader has experienced. Clearly, this is not a very satisfying account of the impact of reading. Like Ingarden, Iser is convinced that, in the reading process, we are lifted out of our practical concerns and physical surroundings and experience a momentary ‘irrealization’.93 For Iser, however, this temporary bracketing of the reader’s thoughts and reality is the precondition for some sort of mental metamorphosis: 90 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 373. 91 Ingarden, Cognition, pp. 192, 193. 92 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 295. 93 Iser, Act, p. 140. Although this argument is correct, Ingarden is also right in saying that we only experience a quasi-forgetfulness of the real world. As is also suggested by Schwenger’s

128 —— Chapter 3 Such an impression [of experiencing a transformation in reading] is long established and well documented. In the early days of the novel, during the seventeenth century, such reading was regarded as a form of madness, because it meant becoming someone else. Two hundred years later, Henry James described this same transformation as the wonderful experience of having lived another life for a short while.94

As the reference to earlier times demonstrates, this experience can again be associated with Iser’s broad view of modernity and the emergence of the novel. The experience of having lived another life also resonates with modern thinking about subjectivity, especially the idea that we are never fully conscious but need permanently to become conscious. In fact, this experience can be linked to Dieter Henrich’s views on the inaccessible ground of the modern self, for it discloses ‘how little of the subject is a given reality, even to its own consciousness’.95 The argument that literary reading involves us in an unfamiliar and transformative experience can therefore be seen as a new version of Iser’s thoughts about the ‘problematic’ and ‘inaccessible’ self. These reflections also anticipate his later work on literary anthropology, for, as is suggested by the similarity between the experience of reading in the seventeenth century and what happens ‘two hundred years later’, this part of Iser’s book takes a preliminary step in the direction of the ‘anthropological side of literary criticism’ mentioned in the preface to The Act of Reading and elaborated in The Fictive and the Imaginary.96 Iser’s further description of the reader’s metamorphosis draws on the work of Georges Poulet, a phenomenological critic from the Geneva School. Poulet is correct, Iser says, in claiming that reading enables us to experience the author’s unfamiliar ideas in a quasi-direct, first-person fashion. He is wrong, however, in assuming that such an experience requires the complete suspension of the reader’s own personality. Iser grants that the reader’s disposition should not imperiously direct the reading process, but he still feels that the reader’s habitual views and concerns should remain present in the background if the work is to have a real impact. This explains why Iser distinguishes between two levels in reading: ‘the alien “me” and the real, virtual “me”’.97 What we experience during the reading process generates a tension between our old self and this unaccustomed new self, and this tension cannot be resolved by simply reactivating our former attitude afterwards (as Ingarden and Poulet suggest), but only by modi-

‘obbligato effect’, the reader’s practical concerns and physical surroundings may surely intrude, however temporarily, on the aesthetic experience. 94 Iser, Act, p. 156. 95 Ibid., p. 159. 96 Ibid., p. xi. 97 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1972]), p. 293.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 129

fying this attitude while we are reading. In the end, the reader has ‘to reconcile the as yet unknown experience of the present text with his own store of past experience’.98 Reading is characterized, we might say, by a peculiar form of divided attention, where we inhabit two minds at once. Again, this process is steered in the right direction by a specific textual mechanism. As Iser points out, literary works, novels especially, frequently contain scenes in which the habitual views of fictitious readers are challenged in a way that makes actual readers reflect upon their preconceptions. In other words, what happens to the narratee in the text provides an insight into what should happen to the real reader in the reading process. As these observations indicate, Iser is convinced, in contrast to Ingarden, that reading is not only about aesthetic appreciation or the formation of meaning, but also about personal transformation. Despite his abstract reflections on implied, textual readers, Iser would later remark in an interview that he also aims to illuminate the ‘ethical effects on real readers’ as examined by Wayne Booth’s ethical criticism.99 Revealing his continued belief in the ideal of Bildung (a topic we encountered in Chapter 1), Iser is convinced that literary reading is ‘a learning process’.100

Negativity and Harmony Despite the connections with Booth’s rhetorical analysis and ethical criticism, there is an important difference with Iser’s model. As Booth notes in the opening pages of The Rhetoric of Fiction, our attitude toward the author’s voice in literary fiction has changed dramatically: ‘[d]irect and authoritative rhetoric of the kind we [find] in Job and in Homer’s works has never completely disappeared from fiction’, he says, but ‘it is not what we are likely to find if we turn to a typical modern novel or short story’.101 Booth is appreciative of modernist achievements, and of Henry James especially, but his discussion of narrative rhetoric is nevertheless meant to demonstrate that our modern prejudices have made us all too eager to dismiss the artistically effective technique of authorial commentary in favour of an authorial silence that often confounds the reader and obscures the work’s message. This rhetoric of indeterminacy is associated with a nihilistic outlook, moreover, that allegedly compromises the moral position of many modern works. In discussing Albert Camus’ existentialist novel The Stranger (1942), for

98 Iser, Act, p. 157. 99 Iser, Prospecting, p. 64. 100 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity and its Feedback. The Two-Sidedness of Humanistic Discourse’, Partial Answers, 1.1 (2003), 1–33 (p. 29). 101 Booth, Rhetoric, p. 6.

130 —— Chapter 3 instance, Booth contends that although it contains a positive claim, ‘[i]t is extremely difficult to make out the relation of this affirmative point to the many negations of the work’.102 This dismissal of indeterminacy is indirectly criticized by Iser’s The Act of Reading, since it uses Booth’s insights to support the modern love of the implicit, and the unsuspected productivity of negation. Already in his early lecture on Die Appellstruktur der Texte [later translated as ‘Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction’], Iser defended the artistic effectiveness of a work’s ‘indeterminacy’. However, he later found the notion of indeterminacy still too indeterminate. As such it threatens to remain an undifferentiated category, and therefore ‘a further specification of the notion of indeterminacy’ is paramount.103 This is why, in The Act of Reading, he redefines it in terms of blanks, negations and negativity, concepts that are no longer intended to describe the textual or mental dimension of reading, but the unseen mechanisms which direct the interaction between text and reader. This part of Iser’s thinking is once again related to, but also different from, Ingarden’s theory.

Blanks, Negations, Negativity As Iser noted in his application of speech act theory to literature, the literary work and the reader do not share a determinate situation or a stable set of conventions which might regulate their interaction. At the same time, he argued that the reading experience confutes rather than confirms the reader’s personal prejudices. But how can the work ensure that the reading process is a surprising event when it has no stable procedures at its disposal? To answer that question, Iser concludes The Act of Reading with an analysis of the techniques he believes regulate the interaction between work and reader. These techniques may not be stable, but that is not a fundamental flaw; as his summary of contemporary research on social interaction indicates, there is an ‘indeterminate, constitutive blank’ at the heart of all interactive processes. As we will see in Chapter 5, this observation is further developed in The Range of Interpretation.104 In the case of literary reading, the interplay between work and reader is regulated by two steering mechanisms, which are manifestations of the broader ‘interaction between the explicit and the implicit’, namely ‘blanks’ and ‘negations’.105 In Iser’s account, there are two varieties of negation. The first type

102 Ibid., p. 296. 103 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Im Lichte der Kritik’, in Rezeptionästhetik. Theorie und Praxis, ed. by Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 325–42 (p. 333). 104 Iser, Act, p. 167. 105 Ibid., p. 169.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 131

(‘primary negations’) invalidates the norms or conventions from the work’s repertoire. In doing so, Iser argues, literary works never exhibit blanket rejections of these norms, but always partial negations, which identify the problematic aspects of these norms and thereby hint at the author’s reaction to the associated system of thought. A related phenomenon is the use of so-called ‘minus functions’, a term derived from Jurij Lotman which refers to the author’s intentional omission of a feature expected by the reader.106 By no longer offering a unifying narrative voice, as in Ulysses, or by no longer sketching a clear plot, as in Waiting for Godot, the work does not simply discard these expectations, but uses them in a negative manner, for their shock effect depends on the presence of these very expectations in the reader’s mind. The second type of negation (‘secondary negations’) does not suspend the social and literary conventions of the repertoire, but the habitual outlook of the reader. As Iser’s discussion of the impact of reading suggested, the literary work contains techniques which force readers to inspect and modify their habitual attitudes in the manner suggested by the work in question. These two types of negation are obviously related: by suspending norms which are familiar to readers, the work inevitably makes them reflect upon their usual view of life. Iser’s remarks about negation might be interesting, but his thoughts about blanks are more original and have rightly received more attention. What is especially pertinent in the present context is the fact he defines these ‘empty places’ (a more literal translation of the German term Leerstellen) by contrasting them with Ingarden’s ‘places of indeterminacy’. We have learned that the Polish philosopher introduces this idea to distinguish the indeterminacy of intentional objects, such as literary works, from the determinacy of real objects, such as rocks and stones. Iser finds this argument convincing, but he takes issue with Ingarden’s claim that these indeterminate intentional objects still have to mimic the determinacy of real objects during the reading process in order to create an illusion of visual perception. For the potential consequence of this view is that reading is construed as a wholly passive, pre-programmed completion of indeterminate features. The problem is exacerbated by Ingarden’s claim that the filling in of these details should establish a ‘polyphonic harmony’ between the layers of a work as well as unambiguous links between its sentences. Since these layers and sentences have to be linked smoothly and harmoniously, Iser concludes, Ingarden is unable to account for the fact that ‘“discord” is [...] a basic condition of communication in modern literature’.107 By contrast, Iser is more interested in reading experiences which proceed less smoothly and do not lead to an illusory perception or a formal harmony. That 106 Ibid., p. 207. 107 Ibid., p. 172.

132 —— Chapter 3 explains why he is ultimately less interested in ‘spots of indeterminacy’ – which refer to the unmentioned features of a work’s fictional objects – than in ‘blanks’ – which refer to the missing links in the work’s flow of sentences. Developing his earlier analysis of montage, Iser asserts that literary texts do not show the clearly concatenated sentences of practical texts, or the continuous connection of perceptual data, but a heterogeneous mixture of conventions and perspectives, stanzas and chapters which are juxtaposed without making their relation explicit. However, the work still nudges the reader’s inferences in the right direction because, surprisingly, these ‘empty places’ turn out not to be empty after all. As they are positioned between two determinate perspectives or passages, these blanks decide when and which textual elements will be combined. Hence, readers can only connect these elements if they take the conventional content of these elements, as well as their position along the theme-and-horizon sequence, into account. Such blanks can most clearly be perceived in modernist works such as The Waste Land and Ulysses, Iser admits, but these heightened instances – where ‘the layout of the text’ makes this procedure conspicuous108 – enable us to see that they are, to a certain extent, always present. In line with his earlier thoughts on the aesthetic and poetic polysemy, Iser concludes that these missing links are truly multiplied in the literary text, where they allow the reader to imagine evernew relations between its component parts. These reflections may be further clarified by considering Iser’s notion of negativity and his related response to Luhmann’s use of negation. In the conclusion to The Act of Reading, ‘negativity’ figures prominently, for Iser claims that the work’s negations and blanks ultimately derive from this underlying phenomenon, which is defined as the work’s implicit layer, its ‘unformulated double’.109 Turning the tables on critics who consider authors like Beckett overly negative, Iser maintains that a communicative negativity may actually function as ‘a structure of bringing forth – at least potentially – infinite possibilities’.110 Associated with indeterminacy, this negativity generates ‘a suction effect’: ‘[i]t stimulates communicative [. ..] activities within us by showing us that something is being withheld and by challenging us to discover what it is’ with the help of

108 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Ulysses and the Reader’, in James Joyce Broadsheet 9 (October 1982), 1–2 (p. 2). 109 Iser, Act, p. 226. 110 Iser, Prospecting, p. 141. Developing such remarks, Gabriele Schwab has argued that Iser’s project may be seen as a systematic attempt to develop a notion of ‘productive negativity’. See Gabriele Schwab, ‘“If Only I Were Not Obliged To Manifest”. Iser’s Aesthetics of Negativity’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), pp. 73–89 (p. 74). In more general terms, Winfried Fluck has observed that Iser’s ‘interest in the negating potential of literature [. ..] linked a wide range of intellectual projects in postwar Germany’. See Fluck, ‘Search’, p. 186.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 133

‘processes of imagination’.111 In other words, negativity can be seen as ‘communicative energy’.112 That negativity may function as a productive mode of communication is further shown by Niklas Luhmann’s contribution to the sixth Poetik und Hermeneutik volume, and Iser’s revealing response. Luhmann’s essay sketches his model of communicative systems and argues that negations are not as destructive as they seem, since they are productive mechanisms that enable such systems to respond to the increasing complexity of their environment. He finally concludes that ‘the meaning is by no means lost through the negation, but is merely transformed’.113 In his response, Iser observes that while the literary work may also be considered as a communicative system, we should not lose sight of its unusual character, given the prominent role of negation in this particular type of system. Referring to the text he will return to in The Fictive and the Imaginary, Beckett’s ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ (1965), Iser subsequently proposes the following reading of its ‘secondary negations’: The continued negation of the mental images generated by the [work], indeed the appeal to the reader to negate the imagination itself as the origin of such images, is actually what liberates this colossal productivity of imaginative possibilities. In this type of negation, all of the operations, which Luhmann claimed as the contribution of negation to communicative systems, are cancelled out. [. ..] From the perspective of systems theory, negation reduces the complexity of reality; from the perspective of the given examples, negation produces a multiplicity that defies control.114

In sum, while social systems use negations to stabilize our view of reality, literary systems use them to expand it. This exchange with Luhmann demonstrates that Iser uses terms such as negation and negativity to capture literature’s ability to create something new. Thus in contrast to Booth and in keeping with Sartre’s 111 Iser, Prospecting, pp. 140, 141, 142. 112 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Die Figur der Negativität in Becketts Prosa’, in Das Werk von Samuel Beckett: Berliner Colloquium, ed. by Hans Mayer and Uwe Johnson (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 54–71 (p. 56). 113 Niklas Luhmann, ‘Über die Funktion der Negation in sinnkonstituierenden Systemen’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik VI. Positionen der Negativität, ed. by Harald Weinrich (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 201–18 (p. 201). 114 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Konträre Leistungen der Negation’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik VI. Positionen der Negativität, ed. by Harald Weinrich (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 509–11 (p. 510). ‘Die fortwährende Negation der von den [Werk] erzeugten Vorstellungen, ja die Aufforderung an den Leser, das Vorstellungsvermögen als Ursprung solcher Bilder selbst zu negieren, setzt erst jene kolossale Produktivität an Vorstellungsmöglichkeiten frei. In diesem Negationstyp fallen gerade alle die Operationen aus, die Luhmann als Leistung der Negation für die Sinnsysteme reklamiert. [...] In der Perspektive der Systemtheorie reduziert Negation Weltkomplexität; in der Perspektive der angezogenen Beispiele produziert Negation eine sich der Kontrolle entziehende Vielfalt’.

134 —— Chapter 3 claims in What is Literature? (1947), Iser believes that we should consider this negativity as an ‘aspect of freedom’:115 by means of this productive negativity, literature enables readers to imagine novel realities.

Polyphonies and Pebbles Returning to Ingarden’s work with Iser’s remarks about indeterminacy and gaps in mind, several comments are in order. It should be noted, first, that Ingarden is careful to point out ‘that not everything that is not stated expressly in the text of the work is therefore a “place of indeterminacy” in our sense’.116 It is questionable, for example, whether the trivial example alluded to by Iser – about the unspecified hair colour of an ‘old man’ being grey – is truly what Ingarden means by a place of indeterminacy. Admittedly, the latter uses the examples ‘man’ and ‘an old, experienced man’ in The Literary Work of Art to demonstrate that, even when we add some pieces of information, we can never eliminate every spot of indeterminacy in a fictional entity.117 But when he returns to this issue in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, Ingarden explicitly excludes ‘unambiguous inference[s]’ from this category, mentioning the implicit location of a sanatorium in a story by Thomas Mann, the self-evident inference that one of its characters is a human being, or the unspoken but clearly suggested fact that a character has died.118 We should not focus on every piece of tacit information, in other words, but subject each of these instances to a functional analysis that determines their role within the work’s structure. The point is not simply to catalogue random unspecified features, but to analyze the aesthetically valuable contribution of indeterminacies which have been deliberately introduced. For Ingarden, therefore, we should try to ascertain which unexpressed pieces of information are significant, and how we can best – i.e. in a way that enhances the work’s aesthetic value – fill them in. Other passages reinforce the sense that Iser’s interpretation of Ingarden’s ‘places of indeterminacy’ unduly minimizes the affinities between their respective models. At a certain point, for example, Ingarden notes that the description of indeterminacies is important not only for the reading of individual works, but also for comparative analyses. The subsequent argument sounds surprisingly familiar to readers of Iser’s work:

115 116 117 118

Iser, Prospecting, p. 140. Ingarden, Cognition, p. 242. Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 249. Ingarden, Cognition, p. 243.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 135

it would be interesting to carry out coordinated investigations in the area of the modern novel and to compare in this respect the novels of a Zola, perhaps, with those of Proust, or Joyce’s Ulysses with the novel cycle of Galsworthy [...]. And how would it be if we compared in this respect the works of Thomas Mann, for example, with the writings of Faulkner? If we succeeded in showing that characteristic regularities in the treatment of places of indeterminacy in the literary work of art can be discovered in these cases, then it would also be possible to survey the typical multiplicities of possible aesthetic concretizations of works of the selected literary genre or literary trend.119

It would be no exaggeration to say that this passage summarizes the programme behind The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading. Iser also overstates his case when he claims that, in Ingarden’s account, places of indeterminacy are unthinkingly filled in by the reader and have to generate a visual illusion. Admittedly, the philosopher occasionally suggests that we automatically close these places of indeterminacy, and that our activities as readers seemingly turn indeterminate objects into completely determined entities. Yet Ingarden also observes that we can ‘refrain’ from filling these places in and that, rather than complete them without thinking, we actually compare different ‘completions’ of a work during the reading process to see which one is most aesthetically rewarding.120 Nor does Ingarden claim that readers should always concretize these places in such a way that the associated intentional objects become determinate entities and the reading process culminates in a visual illusion. In fact, he admits that the ‘incomplete’ has an aesthetic effect and value of its own: ‘[t]here are in every literary work of art [...] places where things are left unsaid, are suppressed, undetermined, left open [and where] their artistic function would be destroyed if we were to remove them, filling them out in some way or other’.121 The related objection that Ingarden is a rigidly ‘classical’ critic who is entirely oblivious to the artistic values of disharmony and syntactic gaps should also be qualified, even if many passages of his work admittedly create this impression. For one thing, Ingarden condemns the fragmentary type of poetry celebrated in Iser’s essay on modernist montage: In reading modern lyric poetry we have the impression that the poets are of the opinion that they have to leave their works undetermined as far as possible, so that the reader has at his disposal the widest possible range of permissible concretizations [...]. Contemporary lyric poetry [...] frequently dispens[es] with the formation of correct, complete sentences, for example, in order to leave the reader the freedom to supplement the poem as

119 Ibid., p. 292. 120 Ibid., pp. 241, 291. 121 Ibid., pp. 52, 292.

136 —— Chapter 3 he sees fit. The schematic character of the literary work is then [.. .] driven to the limit of absurdity.122

This impression seems to be corroborated by Ingarden’s famous argument that the various layers of a work and their aesthetically relevant qualities have to be geared towards one another in a ‘polyphonic harmony’ – a notion which appears to imply that, if a work lacks aesthetic qualities, or if they are opposed in a way that cannot be integrated into a higher harmony, the work in question is devoid of value. This is not merely an abstract discussion, since Ingarden feels, in contrast to Iser’s fascination with jarring juxtapositions and mixed genres, that a work which combines an everyday story with abstract psychological reflections, is ‘a variegated whole’ and should therefore be considered ‘a miscarriage’.123 In addition, Ingarden contends that literary reading ideally proceeds via ‘a straight and uninterrupted running-off of all phases of the work from beginning to end’.124 When the connections between sentences are unclear, this natural flow is interrupted and the aesthetic effect of the work impaired, irrespective of whether these gaps are accidental or intentional. Associating sequences of disconnected sentences with the erratic speech of the ‘insane’, Ingarden argues that ‘[t]he succession of sentences in itself requires [. ..] that they be treated from the first, not as inanimate pebbles lying side by side, but as members of a higher whole’.125 If the connections between sentences are missing, the text becomes a mere ‘heap of words’ not unlike Eliot’s ‘heap of broken images’.126 From this perspective, Iser’s analysis of montages and blanks seems like a definite improvement. Yet Ingarden is not entirely oblivious to the aesthetic potential of disharmonious and disconnected works. Throughout The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, in fact, he often refers to the existence of ‘intended dissonance’, intentional ‘disharmonies’, and their ‘special aesthetic effects’.127 More generally, we should correct Iser’s characterization of ‘polyphonic harmony’. This phrase does not mean, as he suggests, that every literary work must possess a harmonious form. For the two-part notion of the polyphonic harmony highlights not only the overall unity of the work but also the underlying heterogeneity of its elements. In other words, Ingarden’s concept merely indicates that the different aesthetic qualities of the work’s strata are interconnected 122 Ibid., p. 298. 123 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 155. 124 Ingarden, Cognition, p. 158. 125 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 145. 126 Ibid., p. 307. 127 Ibid., p. 215. Ingarden, Cognition, pp. 251, 389. Brinker has similarly observed that ‘Ingarden takes care to point out that such [polyphonic] harmony may well be dissonant’. See Brinker, ‘Two Phenomenologies’, p. 204.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 137

in a way that does not eliminate their underlying differences. In this sense, it actually comes close to a notion also employed by Iser, namely Gestalt. As Ingarden notes, writing about the higher-order aesthetic quality which emerges from the relationships between lower-order qualities: This new quality constitutes a kind of clasp which unites the qualitative elements founding it into a whole, by giving the whole a qualitative stamp peculiar to itself. I call it the ‘quality of harmony’; after Ehrenfels, it is usually called ‘Gestalt’ or ‘structure’ [.. .]. It is distinguished by the fact that it does not conceal the founding qualities [. ..]. Therefore, everywhere it appears, we have to do, not only with [. . .] something absolutely simple and unified, but always, in addition, with a qualitative multiplicity [.. .].128

Perhaps ‘polyphonic harmony’ should be understood, therefore, less as a normative plea for tightly regulated works and more, like Iser’s description of Gestalt formation, as an account of the way readers establish meaningful patterns between a work’s features. Moreover, lest we wholeheartedly embrace a normative plea for dissonant works, it is far from certain that literary works qua completed entities can be heterogeneous without also revealing a measure of unity. However ambiguous and fragmentary works may appear on a micro-level, surely they require some form of consistency if they are to remain clearly identifiable works. In fact, Iser’s account of the way readers group information already suggests as much. Again, the difference between Iser and Ingarden should not be exaggerated. His critique of disconnected forms notwithstanding, Ingarden also anticipates Iser’s functional analysis of syntactic gaps. In analyzing literary works, the philosopher says, we should consider the ‘types of connections’ that obtain between sentences, chapters and so forth.129 By way of example, he considers the contrast between the well-connected sentences and state of affairs in Heinrich von Kleist and the more disconnected alternative of Novalis, in whose work ‘every sentence projects [. ..] a single feature of the total state of affairs that [. ..] is constituted from these features as if it were composed of isolated pebbles’, forcing the reader to ‘jump from one state of affairs to another’.130 Thus, in contrast to his earlier remark, Ingarden suggests that sentences like ‘isolated pebbles’ are not fundamental flaws after all. When works do not display the closely interconnected style of Thomas Mann, this is not ‘a shortcoming [. ..] but rather a different artistic intention leading to unique new effects’.131 Likening these disconnected sentences and aspects to photographic flashes – in a clear illustration of the vis-

128 129 130 131

Ingarden, Cognition, pp. 204–5. Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 155. Ibid., p. 205, emphasis added. Ibid., p. 283.

138 —— Chapter 3 ual nature of his register –, Ingarden observes that the abrupt emergence of new aspects through pebble-like sentences may actually have a vivid and desirable effect: ‘[p]erhaps because of this sudden illumination and extinction, this jerky succession, the individual “flash pictures” [. ..] have [.. .] the great power of revealing the objects that appear in them’.132 For a brief illustration of this procedure, consider the staccato sentences in the following passage from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006): On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray [.. .]. Farther along were billboards advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered.133

Contrary to what Iser’s account might lead us to believe, Ingarden is hence not unappreciative of montage-like effects. Indeed, in keeping with his greater emphasis on the linguistic form of a work, the weight Ingarden places on the role of ‘function[al] words’ such as connectives in the establishment (or non-establishment) of syntactic connections could even serve to refine Iser’s account of rhetorical gaps.134 After all, for a critic who has unearthed the function of indeterminate juxtapositions or asyndetic structures in literary works, Iser pays remarkably little attention to the linguistic markers – words such as ‘however’, ‘and’, ‘moreover’ etc. – that make implicit links explicit.135

The Sublime and the Screen To round off this discussion of The Act of Reading, we should consider two final issues: Ingarden’s supposedly problematic notion of ‘metaphysical qualities’, and Iser’s unsatisfying treatment of ‘literariness’, particularly in comparison to film. In both The Act of Reading and How to Do Theory, Iser is critical of Ingarden’s thesis that literary works evoke so-called ‘metaphysical qualities’. This phrase, as Ingarden specifies, does not refer to ‘properties’ of objects or to ‘fea132 Ibid. 133 Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006), p. 7. For a more extensive analysis of this passage and McCarthy’s staccato-like style, see Ben De Bruyn, ‘Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes. Care, Ruin and Vision in McCarthy’s The Road and Harrison’s Ecocriticism’, English Studies, 91.7 (2010), 776–89. 134 Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 150; Ingarden, Cognition, p. 35. 135 The exception that proves the rule is Iser’s brief discussion of the ‘asyndetic’ structures in Beckett’s Ping. See Iser, ‘Auktorialität’, p. 237.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 139

tures’ of some psychological state, but to ‘an atmosphere which, hovering over the men and the things contained in [certain] situations, penetrates and illuminates everything with its light’.136 Examples of these qualities, he says in an asyndetic catalogue which underscores their elusive nature, include ‘the sublime, the tragic, the dreadful, the shocking, the inexplicable, the demonic, the holy, the sinful, the sorrowful, the indescribable brightness of good fortune, as well as the grotesque, the charming, the light, the peaceful, etc’.137 Iser takes issue with this notion not only because it remains vague but also because he fails to understand how the work of art can represent ‘existing’ metaphysical qualities and still bring ‘something new’ into being.138 Even if I have expended much energy in this chapter qualifying the differences between Ingarden and Iser in the areas of fiction, imagination and indeterminacy, this point seems to mark an important difference between both critics. But a closer look at Ingarden’s account reveals more unexpected parallels. In a remark which recalls Walter Pater’s account of aesthetic moments in the conclusion to The Renaissance, Ingarden claims that metaphysical qualities are the highlights of our spiritual existence in contrast to the grey experiences of ordinary life. Whatever the precise content of these qualities or moods, he says, ‘a “deeper sense” of life and existence in general’ is ‘“revealed”, as Heidegger would say, to our mind’s eye’.139 These qualities cannot be grasped rationally, he insists, but are ‘perceivable in their specific, simply incomparable [. ..] uniqueness only when we ourselves live primarily in the given situation or [.. .] when we feel as one with someone who [does]’.140 These qualities cannot be understood, in other words, but only experienced, and Ingarden claims that human beings have ‘a secret longing’ for such forceful experiences.141 This argument is interesting for our purposes, since the claim that literary works have a uniquely attractive quality for human beings because they evoke a deeper sense of life, through an overpowering experience rather than a rational theorem, returns in Iser’s anthropological reflections on ecstasy and staging. There is, however, one important caveat. As we will see in Chapter 4, Iser stresses the overpowering quality of such experiences, whereas Ingarden maintains that literary works have a special charm because they enable us to distance ourselves from these emotionally charged situations via a process akin to catharsis: ‘[n]o matter how much we are [. ..] transported beyond the level of everyday

136 137 138 139 140 141

Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 291. Ibid., pp. 290–1. Iser, Theory, p. 21. Ingarden, The Literary Work, p. 292. Ibid. Ibid., p. 293.

140 —— Chapter 3 life by the metaphysical qualities in an aesthetically modified viewing of them, their actual unreality [.. .] still allows a certain calmness in apprehending them’, a certain ‘distance’ between the reader and the quality in question.142 When Iser returns to such illuminating moments in The Fictive and the Imaginary, the idea that they can and should be contemplated in a calm – ‘classical’ – fashion is nowhere to be found (even though, as we will see, literary stagings also establish a form of distance). In reading truly modern literature, Iser feels, the reader is ‘jerked out of an attitude of passive contemplation’.143 Finally, we should turn to Iser’s account of literature and film in The Act of Reading. As far as literature is concerned, the book constitutes an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to pinpoint the precise features of literary works and aesthetic reading. Iser’s interest in the specific character of literature is hard to miss, for each part of his argument – the interaction between text and context, the mental dimension of reading, the interaction between text and reader via blanks and negations – starts out from an existing non-literary model in order to describe the specific features of literary reading. This indirect approach enables Iser not only to appropriate the authority of existing theories, but also to prove that literature requires specific descriptive tools. The analysis of textual rhetoric starts out from speech act theory, but goes on to claim that literature is characterized by unique situations, conventions and procedures; the analysis of the reading process begins by arguing that literary imaginings cannot be reduced to visual perceptions; and the turn toward blanks and negations is prefaced with a comparison between social and literary interaction, which again highlights the unique quality of literature. The resulting theory of reception states that the ideal readers of a literary work gradually assemble the author’s reaction to other literary works and contemporary situations, and develop and revise their reading with the help of mental images and strategically positioned syntactic and narrative gaps. This reading process is unpredictable, and sheds a critical light on the work’s socio-political context as well as on the reader’s habitual mindset. The different aspects of this model, in line with Iser’s emphasis on the visual dimension of reading, may be represented as follows: Relationship

form of indeterminacy

descriptive tool

Text-text Text-context Text-reader

blank [Leerstelle] negation unfamiliarity

theme-horizon foreground-background experience-attitude

Figure 3: The Act of Literary Reading

142 Ibid., p. 294. 143 Iser, ‘Ulysses and the Reader’, p. 1.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 141

In even more general terms, these three levels of the reading process might be described in terms of productive tensions between two elements (two textual passages, ordinary and modified versions of social conventions, habitual beliefs and new experiences), one of which is placed in the foreground and the other relegated to the background. This is, without question, a powerful and elegant theoretical model; but it does not do what it was supposed to, for this account of literary reading is neither sufficiently general nor sufficiently specific. The Act of Reading is supposed to capture the nature of all aesthetic forms of reading, but the schema above immediately suggests that Iser is mainly interested in ambiguous and socio-critical novels (not to mention the fact that he mostly limits himself to canonical works in English). As his book shows time and again, his chief object of study is the novel. Of course, he refers occasionally to nonnovelistic works, and his view of reading is undeniably shaped by ‘poetic’ and ‘dramatic’ novels such as Faulkner’s and Compton-Burnett’s, not to mention his experience of Eliot’s poetic montages and Beckett’s existentialist plays. Iser himself explicitly contested the claim that he is solely concerned with the novel, arguing that he ‘could just as easily have illustrated [his] arguments through poetry or drama’.144 That may be true, but it is significant that he did not. As with The Implied Reader, The Act of Reading deals primarily with the reading of novels, because, the book suggests, this genre demonstrates most clearly that a literary text appeals explicitly to the reader, conveys the author’s reaction to reality, and does so by offering an overview of divergent ideological perspectives. Indeed, Iser expressly states that he focuses on narrative texts because they ‘provide the most variegated facets pertinent to an analysis of the act of reading’.145 This emphasis on the novel is even more apparent if we compare Iser to Ingarden. For Ingarden reflects on theatre and scientific prose and, despite his emphasis on the temporal extension of the reading process, seems to consider the reading of ‘short works’, such as lyric poems, to be paradigmatic.146 Moreover, as can be gleaned from the many typologies he introduces, Iser does not consider all novels to be equal. These typologies are designed to show that literary works can maintain various types of relation with their context (usually either affirming or negating the current norms), may exhibit many types of perspectival organization (arranging the narrative perspectives in more or less hierarchical and transparent ways), and can use their syntactic blanks for different purposes (covering them up for didactic reasons, exploiting them for commercial purposes, or highlighting them to meet aesthetic and ethical goals). These typologies indicate that Iser is aware of the different forms literary works can take, but their implicitly 144 Iser, Prospecting, p. 54. 145 Iser, Act, p. xii. 146 Ingarden, Cognition, p. 16.

142 —— Chapter 3 evaluative character simultaneously reveals his preference for socio-critical, implicit and non-commercial works. In addition, as we saw in the previous chapter, he believes older works to be less realistic and multivocal than recent ones, despite the fact that works from different periods merely display different types of indeterminacy and verisimilitude, as a properly functional analysis would show. These normative aspects of Iser’s account imply that his definition of literature is not applicable to all types of works. Yet, if his definition is not general enough, it is not specific enough either. The Act of Reading stresses the special nature of literary works in relation to ordinary language, visual perception and social interaction, but Iser’s account of reading might also be applied to non-literary phenomena. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Iser’s study of the act of reading might be described in its own terms, even though it is not a literary work; for it also conveys the specific reaction of its author (Iser) to the contemporary world (literary studies) by evoking other theories (speech act theory, systems theory, phenomenology), which are then partially negated in order to arrive at an alternative perspective (reception theory). In one of his essays, in fact, Iser indicates that his model may also be applied to (certain forms of) philosophy: ‘[t]his virtuality becomes [with Nietzsche], like with Kierkegaard, a form of suction, which incites the reader to flesh out those glimpses which are revealed by the negations’.147 Furthermore, as Iser’s readings of Beckett’s theatre in Die Artistik des Mißlingens [The Art of Failure] (1979) and of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) in How to Do Theory imply, this abstract model also captures certain if not all aspects of dramatic and visual artworks. Simply replace the word ‘text’ by ‘work’ in Figure 3, and you have a model for most forms of art, not just literature. Nowhere is this problematic feature of The Act of Reading more apparent than in its references to film. As we have seen, Iser’s analysis of reading contrasts the active and productive projection of mental images with the passive and reductive reception of visual images. In another publication, he gives the following succinct summary of his position: ‘[i]mages do not ignite images [in the mind] as marks on the page do’.148 Thus it is only logical that Iser should be critical with regard to film adaptations of literary texts, and indeed to film in general. But this opposition between passive and immediate perception and active, fully temporal imagination is profoundly misguided. As Ingarden’s analysis of the Venus of Milo in The Cognition of the Literary Work already teaches us, even the viewers of a visual artwork do not see a real object (a block of marble, say) but actually per-

147 Iser, ‘Auktorialität’, p. 234. ‘[d]iese Virtualität wird [bei Nietzsche], wie bei Kierkegaard, zum Sog, der den Leser in die Ausarbeitung jenes Vorscheins hineinzieht, den die Negationen aufleuchten lassen’. 148 Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity’, p. 27.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 143

ceive an aesthetic object (a girl or goddess, for instance), to which they gradually assign additional attributes. Like the reader, then, the spectator does not see physical objects but imaginary ones. That mental and visual images or literary works and movies have more in common than Iser’s account of the imagination implies is revealed, surprisingly, by The Act of Reading itself. For in other passages, we read that film also confronts spectators with ‘indeterminacies’ and that segments of the literary text and filmic cuts ‘follow precisely the same pattern’, establishing ‘blanks’ in both cases.149 Despite his disparaging remarks concerning visual images and perception, he therefore identifies an important similarity between the novel and the film: ‘[b]etween segments and cuts there is an empty space, giving rise to a whole network of possible connections which will endow each segment or picture with its determinate meaning’.150 Hence, Iser seems to concede that the act of reading is structurally similar to the act of viewing. Contrary to expectations, he might therefore have agreed with film critics who argue, on the basis of his theory of reading, that ‘the blank is just as integral to the activity of the viewer as it is to the reader’.151 In fact, the connection between reception theory and film may prove even stronger. Given the importance of montage techniques to Iser’s view of literature (and his highly visual terminology), it would not be too great a leap to say that his model reveals the impact of cinematographic procedures on modern literary theory as well as literary practice. His awareness of this overlap between literary and filmic techniques is particularly evident in the following passage: Cinema techniques have often been used deliberately in modern literature. They enable impressions to be freed from the one-sided perspectives they are usually caught up in. The pictures are cut and joined abruptly together, so they seem like fragments that need to be completed, though they never could be. Gertrude Stein actually worked out her prose style in accordance with this film technique, using a series of superimposed images in order to convey the various facets of the thing she wanted to depict.152

Since this is precisely the technique of composition identified in Iser’s essay on modernist montage and developed further in The Act of Reading, it is clear that his model deals, implicitly if not explicitly, with the impact of film on modern literature and reading. In fact, his emphasis on the unique and positive character

149 Iser, Act, pp. 177, 196. 150 Ibid., p. 196. 151 Richard J. Murphy, ‘The Act of Viewing. Iser, Bordwell and the “Post-Theory” Debates in Contemporary Film Studies’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 119–45 (p. 139). 152 Hans Robert Jauß, ‘Group Interpretation of Apollinaire’s Arbre (From Calligrammes)’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 182–207 (pp. 185–86).

144 —— Chapter 3 of mental images over and against visual ones could be read as an attempt to counter and stem the encroaching of film upon literature. In any case, Iser’s account of film demonstrates that his description of literature is not specific enough, since the observations on gaps, montage and aesthetic participation also apply to other media. Even if this makes his model inconsistent in certain respects, the potential connection between film and Iser’s account of literary reading might ultimately ensure its durability. In a recent essay, Paul B. Armstrong contends that ‘[r]eading is coming back as a legitimate topic of inquiry’, citing research in the fields of ‘book history, cognitive literary studies, the new affective criticism and reception studies’.153 Nevertheless, he notes ruefully, ‘a concern with the phenomenology of reception is still widely regarded as old-fashioned and passe´ – something that the “reader-response theorists” were interested in three decades ago, but that has since then been discredited [. ..] as the profession has moved on to other topics’.154 Arguing against this consensus, Armstrong points out that critical attention to the ‘lived experience of reading’ or ‘the moment-to-moment experiential unfolding of the text’ in the fashion of Wolfgang Iser is indispensable, even in contextualist times where the hermeneutics of suspicion reigns supreme.155 If we follow Armstrong’s cue and return to the issue of reception, one important area of investigation is undoubtedly the contemporary interaction between literary reading and visual culture. As Jim Collins has astutely observed in Bring on the Books for Everybody. How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (2010), the contemporary ‘lived experience of reading’ has increasingly become a hybrid experience, where reading and viewing can no longer be clearly distinguished. In the twenty-first century, he says, literary infrastructure has changed, owing to the presence of literature on the internet and the increasing synergy between different branches of the entertainment industry, and major developments in literary taste imply that reading is no longer viewed as an individual, intellectual and inaccessible activity that trains our imagination and enables us to become better citizens, but rather as a social, pleasurable and decidedly non-academic practice which provides a refined form of self-help therapy and allows us to become more knowledgeable consumers. Such changes have conspired to create, in Collins’s words, a ‘popular literary culture’. As he shows, one remarkable aspect of this evolution is the fact that TV shows as well as movies increasingly revolve around literary figures and the power of literary reading, giving rise to a hybrid ‘teleliterary’ or ‘cine-literary’ culture which has created what he calls ‘read153 Armstrong, ‘Defense’, pp. 87, 108. 154 Ibid., p. 87. 155 Ibid., p. 90.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 145

ers/viewers’.156 This hybrid form of reception is not only generated by the presence of ‘literary’ experiences in visual cultures but also, we might add, by the pervasive presence of visual practices in contemporary literary fiction, of which the PowerPoint chapter in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) is only one example. Returning to the issue of reception, this interplay between our literary and visual competences is, I think, a crucial topic if we want to get to grips with the contemporary ‘lived experience of reading’. Investigating this topic would inevitably lead beyond Iser’s narrow focus on a specific type of literary reading, but the broad nature of his model means that some of its ideas and terms may be reused for unexpected purposes. In conclusion, this chapter has shown that Iser’s phenomenology of reading not only introduces valuable concepts – ‘implied reader’, ‘gaps’ etc. –, but also offers stimulating suggestions for other critics: for example, the notion that negations may be more productive than assertions in semantic terms, or that the fictional reader functions as a model for the real reader. In addition, the detailed comparison with Ingarden has established that reception theory is more indebted to his reflections than Iser’s critical remarks have led many readers to believe. At the same time, I have argued that Ingarden’s excessively autonomous view of literature leads to meagre accounts of the interaction between text and context on the one hand and between text and reader on the other, and that Iser’s abstract account may benefit from a closer attention to the work’s exact linguistic form. Turning to his broader project, we can again identify several shifts in Iser’s thought. As the programmatic redefinition of meaning in the introduction to The Act of Reading reveals, he applies the idea of mythical malleability to the literary text, and replaces ‘classical’ models with approaches that are more attuned to the peculiar features of modern, ‘partial’ art. Iser also describes the historical function of the text in a way that alludes to earlier notions such as ‘reshuffling’. Instead of focusing on a work’s broad ‘conceptions of reality’, however, he now seems more interested in the particular thought systems that characterize its historical context. Iser’s attention to the mental images of reading recalls his remarks about Pater’s impressionistic style and Pound’s images, and his account of the transformative impact of reading can be linked to notions such as the ‘problematic individual’ and the ‘inaccessible self’. To a greater extent than in his earlier work, however, Iser now emphasizes the fragile nature of the reader’s self rather than the fictional character’s self. The idea of blanks, furthermore, extends his thoughts on modernist montage to all forms of literature. Given that the terms ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘negativity’ represent a new attempt to describe the produc156 Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody. How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 95, 119, 159.

146 —— Chapter 3 tive nature of literary texts, they can also be linked to his earlier views on the aesthetic and literary polysemy. If The Act of Reading recalls Iser’s earlier work, it also prefigures his later views. The observations on fiction, imagination and the repertoire return with certain variations in The Fictive and the Imaginary. His fascination with the surprising experience of reading (which is endlessly repeatable and consists of a rapid stream of images) and the unknown aspects of the subject likewise resonates with his later, anthropological account of human potentiality and literary role-playing. The interest in systems theory and in the flexible interaction between text and reader also crops up in The Range of Interpretation, where Iser draws on cybernetic models to analyze similar forms of dynamic interaction. In addition to these more precise connections, it may be argued that the typologies of The Act of Reading – which sketch different types of relationships between text and context, theme and horizon – are akin to the typologies of comic forms in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, of play in The Fictive and the Imaginary, and of interpretation in The Range of Interpretation. Even more importantly, the ideas of negativity and ‘empty places’ do not disappear in his later writings. As we will see, Iser’s later work describes the function of fiction and interpretation in terms of their ability to close certain cognitive gaps. Just as we need to fill in the gaps in the text’s rhetorical structure in reading, our fictions and interpretations must compensate for the deficiencies in our knowledge of inaccessible phenomena and bridge the gulf between the subjects and objects of interpretation. The notion of negativity recurs as well. In The Act of Reading, Iser already extended this notion beyond the realm of literary texts. Anticipating the insights of critics concerned with ‘theory of mind’, he refers to ‘the negativity of experience (we cannot experience how others experience us)’ and the fact that this ‘gap’ encourages us to assign these people certain views about ourselves.157 In a study of Beckett’s plays, Iser further associates ‘negativity’ with the elusive foundation of the self rather than the text, saying that it ‘stretches beyond the borders of consciousness and yet at the same time provides a base for the states of consciousness, none of which can ever be ultimate’.158 In the light of these remarks, it is not surprising that The Fictive and the Imaginary mentions ‘negativity’ in its account of literature’s playful power to suspend determinacies and enable the reader’s transformation. In another essay, Iser even connects this notion to the topic of emergence, the subject of his final, unfinished project: ‘negation is the

157 Iser, Act, p. 166. For different reasons, Armstrong has also hinted at the potential connections between Iser’s work and literary research concerning ‘theory of mind’. See Armstrong, ‘Defense’, p. 109. 158 Iser, Prospecting, p. 184.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 147

source of emergence’.159 To a certain extent, then, his entire body of work implies that the phenomenology of reading is inextricably linked to the phenomenology of negativity.

Example 3: Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (1) Miguel Syjuco’s novel Ilustrado (2010) narrates the story of the fictional Filipino author Crispin Salvador and the student ‘Miguel Syjuco’, who tries to make sense of his life and work. Throughout the narrative, the student’s quest recalls the predicament of the narrator in Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’. Having just learned that Crispin had a daughter with whom he had little or no contact, Miguel returns to his work: ‘I sat in bed with my books, searching Crispin’s [...] assorted writings, for evidence of his daughter. [...] I fanned his work out on my bed, and looked at it like pieces of a puzzle in which the picture will only be recognized once it is solved’.160 In keeping with James’s story and Iser’s remarks, however, the novel indicates that such puzzles are not crucial. At the end, we still have not met this mysterious Dulcinea – a clear literary allusion, obviously –, nor have we discovered a figure or meaning that fully explains Salvador’s work. This book is an interesting example for our purposes, furthermore, because it illustrates Iser’s views concerning the socio-critical ‘reactions’ of literature, the perspectival structure of literary works and the vital importance of montage-like structures and temporal sequence. The work’s title derives from the ‘ilustrados’, the nineteenth-century expatriates who returned from abroad to dedicate themselves to the struggle for Filipino independence.161 Like these figures, the title suggests, the writings of Salvador, the biography by his student, and the novel Ilustrado itself, critically react to the present state of Filipino (and, to a lesser extent, American) society. In ways both oblique and direct, the book criticizes the corruption of Filipino politics and police, the country’s environmental degradation and the cocaine abuse which is rife among its jeunesse dore ´e. Along the lines described by Iser, this critical reaction is evoked by means of a constellation of fictional voices, which represent different parts of the ideological spectrum. The following passage, in which the protagonist is surfing television channels, is a vivid example of this procedure: Chief Justice Santos is speaking at a symposium. ‘At the heart of law is morality’, he says. ‘But at the heart of morality is spirituality. Our faith in the Almighty is our best guide in interpreting the laws of man.’ I change the channel. 159 Iser, ‘Auktorialität’, p. 231. 160 Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (London: Picador, 2010), pp. 156–57. 161 Ibid., p. 56.

148 —— Chapter 3 [...] A pretty mestiza is rubbing Block & White deodorant into her underarms after she showers. Scene cuts to her in a sleeveless blouse, raising her hand confidently at a university lecture. Her darker-skinned seatmate looks envious before crossing her arms to hide her own armpits. [...] I change the channel. [...] A female presenter on the Weather Channel says the coming storm is very strange. I change the channel. [...] A live pan across a massive crowd [...]. The commentator says a hundred thousand people have arrived in the two hours since Reverend Martin’s arrest. [...] A reporter does a vox pop with a lady in the crowd. What brings you here? ‘My love for Reverend Martin, of course. The Apostle of the People.’ [...] BBC World News: Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix is being interviewed, shaking his head, frustrated at what is being said about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.162

In keeping with Iser’s description, the reader of passages like this has to navigate continually between different ideological positions, bearing in mind earlier information about characters such as Reverend Martin as well as knowledge about cultural repertoires associated with race and politics. This passage also reveals the extent to which contemporary novels like Ilustrado participate in the creation of the hybrid ‘teleliterary’ culture mentioned by Collins, demonstrating the limitations of Iser’s exclusive focus on literature. For it explicitly deals with visual culture, draws on our knowledge of visual conventions (‘cuts’, ‘live pan’) and trains us in the reading of popular images. In contrast to what Iser’s emphasis on the singular character of literary reading suggests, we do not simply read such a scene but read it and ‘view’ it at the same time. Moreover, and returning to Iser’s argument, the socio-critical stance of Ilustrado does not lead readers to an explicit ideological conclusion, for the novel’s final chapter confronts them with three different outcomes to an attempted coup. Although key characters occupy different positions in each of these outcomes, the novel implies that these variations do not make a fundamental difference: in none of the scenarios will corruption and pollution disappear from Filipino society. Ilustrado therefore indicates that the socio-political problems of the Philippines do not have a clear solution, even if they call for a clear reaction. Most importantly of all, Ilustrado is an exceptionally clear example of a contemporary novel structured along montage-like principles. Revealing an unu-

162 Ibid., pp. 132, 133–34, 135.

The Phenomenology of Reading —— 149

sually high density of explicit ‘blanks’, its narrative is made up of highly divergent strands. For one thing, the story of Miguel’s return to Manila is interspersed with episodes from his encounters with Salvador as a student, from the deteriorating relationship with his girlfriend, and from the background of his own, politically active family. What is more, these narrative strands are interwoven with newspaper clippings, blog entries, Filipino jokes and excerpts from Salvador’s writings, which span genres as diverse as popular romance, historical novel, critical essay, travel guide, crime novel, young adult novel and even libretto. To give you a taste of the novel’s montage-like quality, consider the following, representative excerpt: Nation, we must consider deeply: Isn’t the President justified in his attempt to extend his tenure? [...] Full speed ahead, often, is the bravest option, even if not the perfect one. For in democratic politics, there can be no perfection. – from an editorial in The Philippine Sun [...] * Salvador’s father’s father was the son of Capitan Cristobal Salvador de Veracruz, a Spanish garrison officer who emigrated to the Philippines from Albuquerque in the province of Badajoz [...]. [This son] Cristo did not arrive from Europe in time for [the] funeral [of his father and mother]. Their passing bequeathed him land and respect. He was then all alone in a new life, except for a dark family secret, of which everyone in good society knew. – from the biography in progress, Crispin Salvador. Eight Lives Lived, by Miguel Syjuco * Dominador’s face is fierce. His teeth, filed into points, make him look like a wolf. Antonio points and tells him: ‘Ay, punyeta! Look behind you!’ Dominador just laughs. ‘The oldest trick in the book,’ he says. Antonio replies: ‘Not in this book,’ then jumps off the overpass and into the water. When Antonio surfaces, he sees eight policemen chasing Dominador. His nemesis, however, is surprisingly quick for a man of his bulk. ‘I’ll get him in a following chapter,’ Antonio mutters before diving, lest the fuzz spot him. – from Manila Noir (page 58), by Crispin Salvador * I guess what I miss most about Madison is our unique breed of passion.163

As the reader tries to integrate these different strands and texts into a coherent narrative, he inevitably has to remember certain information about each of the narrative threads and fictional characters as well as anticipate future developments. In addition, the clearly visualized gaps or blanks of this novel need to be filled by establishing certain semantic relations between the textual passages in

163 Ibid., pp. 62–64.

150 —— Chapter 3 question. The reader first needs to group related passages (from the biography in progress, for instance) and then to interpret their interconnection (establishing a link, for instance, between the political and personal, the fictional and the ‘real’ aspects of Crispin’s life). In the present case, the reader is aided by the fact that many passages explicitly signal their provenance, being parts of an editorial, a biography, a novel etc (and in that sense, you might say that this passage contains few full blanks). The contrast between the summary of the biography-in-progress and the vivid scene from Manila Noir also provides an example of the way in which fictional prose is able to manipulate the degree of distance between the represented events and the reader’s fictional present; the first sentence from the biography appears to be quite distant from the reader, whereas the scene from the thriller seems to be right in front of us while reading. The endings of the biography and the thriller sections – which refer to a dark secret and a future confrontation with Dominador, respectively – also show how montage is able to generate a sense of suspense in the mind of readers, thereby intensifying their mental activity. Syjuco’s novel further demonstrates that readers may need to revise their initial interpretation during the reading process. At one point, the novel asks us to imagine a stereotypical Filipino expat, ‘one of the millions-strong diaspora’,164 who returns to Manila after earning a lot of money abroad. This figure and his conventional accoutrements are described in detail, but after a couple of pages the resulting mental image is abruptly revoked by the unreliable narrator: That part about my seatmate in the plane and his wad of falling money didn’t happen exactly as I recounted. That last bit about his coming home for his children, that wasn’t accurate either. [...] What I said that he said to me, I could see that in him. But no, I didn’t talk to him. When he tried to strike up a conversation, I closed my eyes and pretended to be dreaming.165

I will return to this passage at the end of Chapter 5. For now, the crucial observation is that Iser’s work allows us to describe the ways in which a novel like Ilustrado manipulates the activity of reading and makes readers revoke as well as evoke certain mental images. In the final analysis, he would argue, the meaning of such works does not lie in any particular message, but in the experience of mentally reconstructing the life of (expatriate) Filipinos in the context of Manila politics and history. In the course of this experience, the work not only forces its readers to draw on their existing stores of knowledge but also to revise their initial interpretations and even some of their habitual assumptions. Reading such works, Iser would undoubtedly conclude, creates novel selves as well as novel realities. 164 Ibid., p. 22. 165 Ibid., p. 47.

Chapter 4. Fictions, Roles and Games They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besz´el with the Besz´ buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbours minimized with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besz´el would recede and Ul Qoma shine.1

Wolfgang Iser’s importance as a theorist of literary reading was undisputed in the 1970s and early 1980s, but his turn toward a so-called ‘literary anthropology’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s failed to have a similar impact on the international scene. Iser’s work continued, of course, to be reviewed and discussed in important international journals and studies, but his research programme did not fire the critical imagination as it had done previously, and concepts such as ‘staging’, ‘the imaginary’ (in Iser’s sense) and ‘ilinx’ never achieved the same impact as ‘the implied reader’, ‘gaps’ or ‘indeterminacy’. The reasons for this dip in fortune may be difficult to retrace in full, but Iser’s transitional essay collection, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989), offers some explanation at least. One reason for the lacklustre international response is that Iser’s later work was still associated with reader response criticism, which as a movement had already run out of steam by the beginning of the 1980s. Indeed, the introductions and anthologies mentioned in the previous chapter not only summarized the achievements of this movement, but also concluded that it had run its course. With a hint of irony in her title, Elizabeth Freund remarked in The Return of the Reader (1987) that ‘[t]his book [...] is not a prolegomenon to the possibility of a future lectocentric criticism, because one of its conclusions is that reader-response criticism [...] has a past rather than a future’.2 Similarly, Jane Tompkins’s Reader Response Criticism set out to map the diverse ways in which the reader had been conceptualized throughout the history of criticism, but ended up highlighting the importance and lineage of critical approaches concerned with power rather than reception. As the final paragraph states: The similarity between contemporary critical theory and the criticism of antiquity [...] lies not in the common focus on literature’s audience, for to the extent that contemporary cri-

1 China Mie´ville, The City & The City (London: Macmillan, 2009), p. 133. 2 Elizabeth Freund, The Return of the Reader. Reader Response Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 10.

152 —— Chapter 4 tics occupy themselves with the responses of readers it is within the framework of a formalist conception of the text. The similarity lies rather in the common perception of language as a form of power. It is this perception [...] that constitutes the real break with formalism and promises the most for criticism’s future.3

In the final analysis, studies such as Reader Response Criticism (1980), The Return of the Reader (1987) and similar books like The Resisting Reader (1978), On Deconstruction (1983) and Literary Meaning (1984), despite underlining the importance of reader-oriented approaches, unanimously conclude that the move towards the reader actually opens up different topics of interest: the play of rhetoric in the work of deconstructionist critics such as Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman; the politics of interpretation in pragmatist critics, notably the later Stanley Fish and Walter Benn Michaels; and questions of identity in the work of feminist critics including Judith Fetterley and Janice Radway. In the course of the 1980s, the reader-oriented approach continued to lose momentum, as Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism effected a move toward context that became increasingly dominant in critical debates.4 In the light of such developments, Iser’s claim that his new project was ‘both an underpinning and an offshoot of reader-response criticism’ was unlikely to entice many followers, even if that project culminated in reflections on politics in the style of Greenblatt (as discussed in Chapter 2).5 In another unfortunate move, Iser’s Prospecting reiterated the awkward debate with Fish – witness the tortuous introduction to the ‘Interview’ – about the limits of interpretative freedom, an argument which had damaged rather than improved Iser’s renown among theorists and was no longer perceived as a pressing issue at the beginning of the 1990s. Hence one reason why ‘literary anthropology’ received so little attention is arguably because the theoretical current with which it was associated was supposedly obsolete. Iser’s new project also suffered from the fact that it was seen as a German project rather than an international one. As Brook Thomas has observed, there is a remarkable ‘disparity between the American and European receptions of Iser’s later work’.6 Indeed, the relevant headnote in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism only mentions his ‘literary anthropology’ in the bibliography, whereas 3 Jane Tompkins, Reader Response Criticism. From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 226. 4 The tensions between reader-oriented criticism and contextualist approaches are discussed and nuanced in Paul B. Armstrong, ‘In Defense of Reading. Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), 87–113. 5 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. vii. 6 Brook Thomas, ‘The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What’s Literature Have to Do with It?’ (review), American Literary History, 20.3, 2008, 622–31 (p. 623).

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 153

Eckhard Lobsien suggests that Iser’s fame in Germany is not only due to his account of indeterminacy, but also to his literary anthropology and the distinction between the real, the fictive and the imaginary.7 There are at least two reasons why Iser’s new programme seemed more at home in a German context. At first, the move ‘from reader response to literary anthropology’ sketched in Prospecting appeared to open up exciting avenues of research, especially at a time when cultural anthropology garnered more attention in literary circles because of Stephen Greenblatt’s interest in the work of Clifford Geertz. Few critics in the AngloAmerican world were eager to join Iser’s new direction, however. In their eyes, ‘literary anthropology’ seemed disconnected from the familiar ethnographical anthropology, and was perceived instead as a continuation of the continental tradition of philosophical anthropology that had no secure footing in the UK and the US. As one commentator points out, Iser’s use of the word ‘anthropology’ is, without any conceptual exaggeration, precisely the opposite of the word’s general meaning in contemporary English. Whereas ‘anthropology’ in most English-language contexts refers to a discipline that explores and emphasizes the differences between various human cultures [. . .], Iser – despite all the relativizations he has offered – uses ‘Anthropology’ to refer to the project of bringing together, into a single concept (albeit a concept of ever-growing complexity) all the various forms and types of performance of which the human mind is capable.8

What is more, Iser’s anthropological reflections were couched in an abstract language stereotypically associated with ‘German’ thinking. This style is probably related to his phenomenological outlook, a method that was already in place in The Act of Reading. It did not at that point provoke similar criticism, however, perhaps because people were more willing to accept a phenomenological framework in discussions of the reading process than in the exploration of the nature of humanity. These points might explain why Iser’s work received most attention from German critics, even if they themselves were not uncritical. His anthropological propositions were at the centre of a Poetik und Hermeneutik volume, Funktionen des Fiktiven [Functions of the Fictive] (1983), and were picked up in works such as Hans Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie [Anthropology of the Image] (2001) and, with important nuances, Ludwig K. Pfeiffer’s Das Mediale und das Imaginäre [The Medial and the Imaginary] (1999). Even though it does not mention

7 The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 1673; Eckhard Lobsien, ‘Literaturtheorie nach Iser’, in Der Begriff der Literatur, ed. by Alexander Löck and Jan Urbich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 207–22 (p. 217). 8 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Literary Anthropology?’, in Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and the Arts, 2000, see 〈http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/iser/gumbrecht.html〉, no pagination.

154 —— Chapter 4 Iser’s literary anthropology, the recent volume Cultural Ways of Worldmaking (2010) can likewise be seen as an illustration of its influence, given the importance of Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978) to Iser’s account of fiction.9 The claim that literary anthropology was only connected to German traditions should nonetheless be qualified. Iser’s project might be seen as a more dynamic version of Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism, for instance, a project which Frye himself called ‘a kind of literary anthropology’; and The Fictive and the Imaginary explicitly develops Frank Kermode’s notion of ‘concord fiction’ from The Sense of an Ending (1967), another staple of Anglo-American criticism.10 Even if these connections do not make Iser’s project appear more trendy, they do show that it is not as ‘foreign’ as it might initially have seemed to English-speaking commentators. Indeed, in recent years, the American scholars Brook Thomas and Paul B. Armstrong have tried to push Iser’s anthropological inquiries further.11 A final reason why literary anthropology failed to make as profound an impact as reception theory is that it simply did not live up to Iser’s revolutionary claims. Notwithstanding his exciting references to a broad anthropological criticism, critical readers will quickly notice that this new project, with its appeal to playful ‘differences’ and the ‘pleasure of the text’, redefines rather than revolutionizes familiar textualist approaches. Most importantly, this phase of Iser’s research does not meet the high expectations raised by The Act of Reading and Prospecting. His work on the reading process already intimated that it would need to be complemented by an in-depth ‘anthropological’ model, and Prospecting goes on to outline this complementary theory, using what we might call a ‘rhetoric of anticipation’. Consider the following excerpts, from the concluding sections of the book’s later chapters: Literature as a means of insight into the workings [. . .] of the imagination [.. .] – [.. .] this no doubt is an area that the literary critic will also be bound to explore.12 The imaginary is a field that is only just opening up to literary theory [.. .].13 Perhaps this form of doubling – having the unavailable through an image of make-believe – may help us to explore given items in our anthropological makeup.14

9 See Cultural Ways of Worldmaking, ed. by Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning and Birgit Neumann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). 10 Northrop Frye, ‘The Archetypes of Literature’, The Kenyon Review, 13.1 (1951), 92–110 (p. 99); Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 191. 11 See especially Paul B. Armstrong, Play and the Politics of Reading. The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 12 Iser, Prospecting, p. 213–14, emphasis added. 13 Ibid., p. 234, emphasis added. 14 Ibid., p. 246, emphasis added.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 155

[P]lay turns out to be a means whereby we may extend ourselves. This extension is [an] ever-fascinating feature of literature, and the question inevitably arises as to why we need it. The answer to that question could be the starting point for a literary anthropology.15 This sketch is a very cautious answer to the question of how literary anthropology might legitimize itself.16

To a certain extent, such claims are simply generic features of a scholarly paper: the inevitably brief concluding gestures which aim to stimulate further thought. These provisional claims and their anticipatory rhetoric are still problematic, however, because Iser’s later work fails to satisfy the inflated expectations which they inspire in the reader. If we compare these essays to his next book, which supposedly provides ‘a systematic view of [...] literary anthropology’,17 the inevitable conclusion is that Iser never moved beyond the stage of ‘prospecting’. For the central ideas of The Fictive and the Imaginary are already present in their entirety in Prospecting and, contrary to what Iser leads us to believe, are not significantly extended in this later work. Another reason why this new approach may have failed to convince other critics is, therefore, its failure to demonstrate its own productivity. That is not to say that literary anthropology is not interesting or does not offer valuable suggestions for further research. Let me first summarize its core ideas before saying what their interest for us might be. On the basis of The Fictive and the Imaginary, the argument of Iser’s literary anthropology can be reduced to the following key propositions: literature is a medium which engages anthropological issues in a unique manner, namely by combining fiction and imagination; fiction is not the opposite of reality, but is a pseudo-cognitive tool which interacts with reality in highly productive ways; there is a fundamental difference between those forms of fiction which hide and those which reveal their fictional status; critics should not discuss literary texts by unearthing specific meanings, but by exploring the underlying condition of those meanings, the elusive potential of the ‘imaginary’; human nature has no definitive form, which is why humans may be described in terms of actors who continually take on different roles; the literary work and the reading process can be described in terms of various types of play; literature is a performative type of ‘representation’, which allows it to evoke or stage important but elusive themes, such as love and death.

15 Ibid., p. 261, emphasis added. 16 Ibid., p. 281, emphasis added. In Funktionen des Fiktiven, similarly, Iser claims that his remarks regarding fictionalizing acts and the imaginary are merely ‘introductory’, and are as yet ‘very unspecific’. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das Imaginäre. Kein isolierbares Phänomen’, in Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 479–86 (p. 479). 17 Iser, Prospecting, p. viii.

156 —— Chapter 4 These reflections, which will be discussed in more detail in the following pages, should be reconsidered for two distinct reasons. First, Iser participates through his literary anthropology in several ongoing theoretical debates, including the debate about the nature of fiction, the inquiry into the connection between literature and play and the question why humans are drawn to art and literature in the first place. These questions have become highly topical, because literary critics such as Joseph Carroll and Brian Boyd have recently begun to investigate the nature of fiction, play and mankind from an evolutionary perspective.18 At the heart of this new approach is the assumption that, because evolution is such a powerful scientific model, literary scholars should take note of it. Even though Iser tackles similar problems and, as we will see in Chapter 5, is not averse to using ideas from biology, he would be sceptical of such an undertaking – not because he is sceptical of evolution per se, but rather because he believes that a narrowly scientific approach reduces literary texts to illustrations or examples of a pre-existing theory. Iser would argue, by contrast, that we can examine fiction, play and human nature by studying literary texts and reading without first turning to biology. Whether we agree with this plea for a distinctly literary methodology or not, the conceptual overlap between recent scholarship and Iser’s literary anthropology implies that the latter merits further attention. A second reason for returning to The Fictive and the Imaginary is the fact that it is a highly complex book which occupies an important position in Iser’s oeuvre. The preceding point-by-point summary does not do justice to its sophisticated structure, for Iser’s theoretical propositions are embedded in a rich historical narrative about pastoral literature, as well as in detailed analyses of many philosophical theories about fiction and imagination. These parts of the book seem extraneous to Iser’s argument, which might explain why they have not yet been discussed in detail. Caroline Pross, for example, has advanced a convincing reading of the main points of The Fictive and the Imaginary, but does not explain the function of the sections on pastoralism and philosophy, focusing instead on the overtly ‘theoretical’ sections about fictionalizing acts and textual play.19 Yet the sections on pastoralism and philosophy offer valuable insights into Iser’s views on modernity, the imagination and society. I propose to read them as Iser’s attempt to ground and refine his previous theoretical work in both histori18 For a detailed discussion of play, fiction and human nature from an ‘evocritical’ perspective, see book one of Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories. Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (2009). 19 See Caroline Pross, ‘Textspiele. Funktionen des Fiktiven bei Wolfgang Iser’, in Szenographien. Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann et al. (Freiburg: Rombach, 2001), pp. 145–67. Similarly, Brook Thomas’s summary of the book only mentions boundary-crossing, the distinction between the real, the fictive and the imaginary, the decentered position of human beings and the role of literary stagings. No mention is made of the other parts of The Fictive and the Imaginary. See Thomas, ‘The Fictive’.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 157

cal and philosophical terms. This implies that The Fictive and the Imaginary functions as a sort of test case of the general reading strategy which I propose in this book. Can the account of Iser’s early oeuvre given in the previous chapters shed new light on the ideas and structure of this strange work? A word, finally, about chronology: by publishing a collection of essays in which he traced his personal shift ‘from reader response to literary anthropology’, Iser acts as though his reader-oriented model gradually developed in a different, anthropological direction. But reception theory and literary anthropology are, in fact, closely related. Literary anthropology does not simply advance beyond ‘reader response criticism’, as Prospecting claims, but actually returns to many of the issues addressed by Iser’s earlier model. If his later views can be read as an updating of reception theory, his earlier work can also be seen as an anticipation of literary anthropology. For, contrary to the idea that Iser’s thinking progressed in a linear fashion, his earlier publications already tackled issues which he claims are new to The Fictive and the Imaginary. The essays in Prospecting already suggest as much, but they still do not disclose the remarkable extent to which the anthropological agenda is present in Iser’s early work. We can only see the similarities between these earlier and later claims, however, if we are familiar with the literary anthropology of The Fictive and the Imaginary.

The Act of Reading 2.0 The beginning of The Fictive and the Imaginary reiterates various conceptual moves from The Act of Reading. Once again, Iser starts out from a sense of crisis in literary interpretation, and takes issue with the idea that reading consists in the search for a single meaning. Again, he targets various conceptual models, despite their affinities with his own project, so as to underscore the unique nature and function of literature. Most importantly, he again attacks existing theories for positing a clear opposition between fiction and reality, attributing this view now to a pernicious ‘logocentrism [Logozentrismus]’.20 Finally, the interaction between these two realms is described in terms of three ‘fictionalizing acts’, which ultimately hark back to the three types of relationships analyzed in his reception theory: those within the literary text, those between text and context, and those between text and reader (see Figure 3, Chapter 3). The introduction to The Fictive and the Imaginary can therefore be seen as a brief primer to Iser’s

20 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Die Doppelungsstruktur des literarisch Fiktiven’, in Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 497–510 (p. 497); Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das Fiktive im Horizont seiner Möglichkeiten. Eine Schlußbetrachtung’, in ibid., pp. 547–57 (p. 548).

158 —— Chapter 4 earlier work, which simultaneously adapts his earlier insights to serve his new, anthropological concerns. This part of the book reads, in an idiom that is admittedly alien to Iser’s thinking, like The Act of Reading 2.0. If The Act of Reading took issue with the practice of certain literary critics, who confuse the specific meaning they assign to a literary work with the work proper, The Fictive and the Imaginary addresses a much broader problem, namely the decline of reading and literature as such. In his alarming preface, Iser argues that a ‘literary anthropology’ might represent the only way out for the struggling disciplines of literary studies and philosophical anthropology. As new cultural forms – ‘visual media’ and ‘mass media’ – increasingly fulfil the functions of instruction and entertainment, the purpose of literature is no longer clear, and it has been relegated to the fringes of contemporary culture.21 Iser feels that the decline of literature is exacerbated, rather than remedied, by contemporary forms of literary studies, because the different projects of deconstruction, Marxism and media studies uphold rather than undermine the belief in literature’s peripheral status. In order to salvage some sense of literature’s importance, he proposes, we should consider its unique strengths, namely its function as ‘mirror of human plasticity’.22 For Iser, literature exhibits the diversity of human behaviour like no other medium, and the crisis of literature can, therefore, be addressed by trading in existing forms of criticism for a literary anthropology. However, the existing forms of philosophical anthropology are unhelpful in this respect, for they are based on preconceived and insufficiently dynamic ideas about mankind. If we want to explain the enduring human interest in literature, he continues, we should turn instead to those human dispositions that play a role in literary reading, namely ‘the fictive and the imaginary’.23 In other words, just as the literary criticism of people like J. Hillis Miller should be replaced with a literary anthropology, so the anthropological reflections of people like Helmuth Plessner should be replaced with a literary anthropology. By attacking critics and

21 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1991]), p. x; Iser, Prospecting, p. 263. As another essay demonstrates, Iser narrowly associates computers, those prime instruments of visual media, with practical rather than ludic purposes: ‘[t]he virtual realities of the computer lend themselves to practical uses; the virtual realities of the imagination [in contrast] are ongoing activities of calling into existence and mapping something hitherto non-existent’. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity and its Feedback. The Two-Sidedness of Humanistic Discourse’, Partial Answers, 1.1 (2003), 1–33 (p. 26). 22 Iser, Fictive, p. xi. In a later essay, he argues that nowadays, literature may function ‘as a procedure of anthropological discovery, as a storage of cultural memory, as a virtual reality, as an epitome of emergence, or as an innerworldly transcendental vantage point’. Iser, ‘ContextSensitivity’, p. 30. 23 Iser, Fictive, p. xiii.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 159

anthropologists alike, Iser means to highlight the unique character of his new paradigm. But the further stages of his argument demonstrate that literary anthropology remains akin to existing research. Despite his critique of deconstruction, Iser’s study mentions Derrida and uses terms such as ‘difference’, ‘play’ and ‘supplement’.24 Similarly, Iser takes issue with ‘the concept of roles (Helmuth Plessner) developed by social anthropology’, but he systematically draws on Plessner’s views to articulate his literary anthropology.25 Literary anthropology is, then, less singular and revolutionary than it claims to be. The two notions mentioned in the title of his book, namely the fictive and the imaginary, are not only introduced to demonstrate the ongoing importance of literature, but are also part of a new attempt to develop a functional rather than ontological account of literary fiction. Targeting Ingarden’s notion of the ‘quasijudgment’ and Searle’s idea of ‘pretended speech acts’, Iser reiterates that such definitions of fiction are unsatisfactory because they ignore the productive interaction between fiction and reality in literature, as well as the extent to which fiction pervades non-literary practices. In order to address these problems, Iser advocates replacing the binary opposition between fiction and reality with the ternary relationship between the ‘real’, the ‘fictive’, and the ‘imaginary’. The use of adjectival forms rather than nouns is intended to emphasize that these components cannot be placed on specific sides of a conceptual divide, but are part of an ongoing and interactive process. Although these three terms might seem like new additions to Iser’s theoretical framework, their meaning is not unfamiliar. The ‘real’, for instance, is merely a new term for what The Act of Reading called the repertoire: real should be understood as referring to the empirical world, which is a ‘given’ for the literary text and generally provides the text’s multiple fields of reference. These may be thought systems, social systems, and world pictures as well as other texts with their own specific organization or interpretation of reality. Reality, then, is the variety of discourses relevant to the author’s approach to the world through the text.26

The ‘fictive’ and the ‘imaginary’, in turn, when combined in a literary text, are roughly similar to the rhetorical structure of the literary text and the mental images of the reader, respectively. The imaginary manifests itself as something formless and unfocused in the dreams and hallucinations of real life, Iser notes, and can only acquire a more definite shape in the act of reading if it is guided and controlled by the intentional structures or fictive acts of the literary text.27 In other

24 25 26 27

Ibid., pp. 29, 237, 274. Ibid., p. xii. Ibid., p. 305. Both Dorrit Cohn and Elizabeth Ströker have criticized the vague character of Iser’s

160 —— Chapter 4 words, the literary text is made up of extratextual or ‘real’ elements, which are organized into intentional or ‘fictive’ patterns that guide the shapeless or ‘imaginary’ projections of the reader in the right direction, that is, towards the author’s reaction to contemporary reality. Even if these terms appear exotic, they are simply part of a new attempt to describe the interaction between, roughly, context (‘real’), author (‘fictive’) and reader (‘imaginary’), this guided form of daydreaming that is the reading process. Iser expands his more positive account of fiction by arguing that the fictive, at least in the literary text, manifests itself in three specific types of ‘fictionalizing act’, each of which moves beyond the ‘real’ and therefore shows a specific form of ‘boundary-crossing’. First, the act of selection sheds light on the relationship between text and context. As Iser points out, the author’s reaction to the context in which he or she writes can be gleaned from the selection and modification of certain social norms and literary allusions in the work. The act of selection crosses the boundaries of existing conventions, in other words, by reconfiguring them. This argument recalls The Act of Reading, but Iser no longer describes the modification of extratextual conventions in Luhmann’s systemic terms, referring now instead to the ‘ways of worldmaking’ identified by Nelson Goodman.28 Second, the act of combination regulates the relationships within the literary text, which are again characterized by various types of boundary-crossing. As is ‘most evident in narrative literature’, Iser maintains, a single literary text is able to combine different languages and incompatible ideological perspectives.29 On a micro-textual level, a neologism such as ‘benefiction’ from Joy-

‘imaginary’. See Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 12; Elisabeth Ströker, ‘Was ist das Imaginäre in Isers Fiktionalitätstheorie’, in Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 473–78. In response to Ströker, Iser remarks that the imaginary is not a separate entity but a contextually determined function, and that it is not a mere construct because we do have actual experiences of the imaginary. To his mind, the term ‘imaginary’, in contrast to ‘imagination or fantasy’, has the advantage of not yet being burdened with traditional associations. Iser, Fictive, p. 305. There is no such thing as a term without traditional connotations, however. In fact, Iser’s opposition between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ invites rather than avoids confusion, as the meaning of these terms in his work is roughly the opposite of that in Jacques Lacan’s more famous model. In a more appreciative reading, Lobsien has argued that Iser speaks of the ‘imaginary’ rather than ‘imagination’ in order to stress that our conception of the imagination never coincides with our imaginative practices. See Lobsien, ‘Literaturtheorie’, p. 221. 28 This part of Iser’s argument makes it hard to agree with Brook Thomas’s comment that ‘[i]n his later work, [.. .] Iser abandoned a functional model because of the difficulty in establishing empirical links between a literary text and concrete social and political effects’. See Thomas, ‘The Fictive’, p. 627. 29 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Feigning in Fiction’, in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. by Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 204–28 (p. 211).

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 161

ce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) illustrates the broader process whereby the boundaries of existing words are transgressed and new meanings evoked.30 In another claim reminiscent of The Act of Reading, Iser describes the resulting intra-textual relations in terms of ‘a figure-and-ground relationship’.31 Finally, the act of selfdisclosure fortifies Iser’s earlier remarks about the gap between representation and reality. As he observes here, literature tends to disclose its fictional status: literary texts inform readers via a conventional set of signals that they should suspend their habitual way of thinking – e.g. paratextual markers such as the generic indication ‘novel’ at the beginning of a literary work. This suspension of belief is necessary, of course, because the world described in the text is not real but is a hypothetical ‘“as-if” construction’, a formula which Iser derives from the philosopher Hans Vaihinger.32 This tripartite model of fictionalizing acts can also be connected to Iser’s earlier claims about the implicit character of literary language. In this new model, the reader still has to ‘complete’ the work, because neither the author’s reaction to contemporary reality, nor the intra-textual network of relations, nor the meaning of this alternative world is made explicit in the literary work. The work, therefore, engenders a ‘double operation of imagining and interpreting’: ‘[i]f the fictional “as-if” is considered to be a medium for moulding the appearance of the imaginary, the semantic operations conducted by the recipient translate this appearance into an understanding of what has happened’.33 Literary practice can thus be described as follows: authors translate their diffuse fantasies into a fictional text; this translates itself into an unfamiliar set of fantasies in the mind of its readers, which they will then translate into a specific interpretation. As the notion of translation indicates (this choice of words is not coincidental, as we will see in Chapter 5), we can never assign a definitive meaning to (our experience of) the text. As in The Act of Reading, Iser is critical of all efforts to determine the hidden meaning of a work, arguing that every interpretation is merely one attempt to come to terms with these unfamiliar fantasies. For him, fantasy or the ‘imaginary’ hence functions as the essential precondition of literary reading. If we compare these observations with Iser’s earlier work, it is clear that we can connect this ‘imaginary’ to notions such as the aesthetic and negativity. The idea that the imaginary functions as the text’s ‘energy’, for instance, directly echoes the claim that negativity is the ‘energy’ of the text.34

30 Iser, Fictive, p. 7. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., p. 13. 33 Iser, Prospecting, p. 250; Iser, Fictive, p. 18–19. 34 Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), p. 47; Wolfgang Iser, ‘Die Figur der Negativität in Becketts

162 —— Chapter 4 The opening of The Fictive and the Imaginary thus repeats many ideas from The Act of Reading. Again, the tone is polemical, the emphasis is placed on the unique character of literature, and the book highlights the interaction between fiction and reality, as well as the inevitably plural nature of literary meaning. As the following figure visually demonstrates, it even sketches a similar account of the three types of relationships central to literary reading: Relationship

The Act of Reading

The Fictive and the Imaginary

Text-context Text-text Text-reader

repertoire strategies experience

selection combination self-disclosure

Figure 4: The Act of Reading and the Acts of Fictionalizing

According to The Act of Reading and The Fictive and the Imaginary, the relationship between text and context can be described in terms of the repertoire or the fictional selections of the real; the juxtaposition of different textual passages is rooted in unpredictable strategies or fictional combinations; and the tension between text and reader may be discussed in terms of an unfamiliar experience, or of the text’s self-disclosure and the ensuing suspension of the reader’s habitual outlook. And yet, there are also differences between the two works. In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser replaces the idea of ‘negativity’ with the notion of the ‘imaginary’, a term which has the advantage of sounding less like some version of a modernist manifesto. Additionally, he now defines fiction in terms of the crossing of boundaries and replaces terms previously used with ‘converted adjectives’ (the real, the fictive and the imaginary) or converted verbs (selection, combination and self-disclosure) to emphasize further their dynamic and interconnected character.35 Finally, the idea of a self-revealing fiction, first hinted at in his readings of Eliot and Joyce, acquires a more prominent position in this anthropological model. In fact, the emphasis on self-disclosure explains Iser’s frequent use of ‘theater imagery [Theatermetaphorik]’ in his anthropological work, an idiom which obviously highlights semblance.36 This initial account of the fictive and the imaginary is elaborated in three steps that remind attentive readers of The Act of Reading: the investigation of the fictive (compare with Iser’s earlier analysis of textual rhetoric), the analysis of the imaginary (which

Prosa’, in Das Werk von Samuel Beckett. Berliner Colloquium, ed. by Hans Mayer and Uwe Johnson (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 54–71 (p. 56). 35 See Iser, ‘Feigning’, p. 226. 36 Iser, Fiktive, p. 178. For a more detailed analysis of this imagery, see Pross, ‘Textspiele’.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 163

resonates with his account of the phenomenology of reading) and the description of their interaction in terms of play (which recalls his account of the interaction between text and reader in terms of indeterminacy). The assumption made here that fictionality is a necessary, if not sufficient criterion, for being a literary work is a problem to which I will return in a later section.

The Origin of Fictionalizing Acts After sketching an updated version of his reception theory, Iser’s study moves swiftly from abstract theorizing to concrete analysis. This would make immediate sense if he were simply to apply the tripartite model of literary practice (real/fictive/imaginary) or the three fictionalizing acts (selection/combination/self-disclosure) to specific examples. But this is not what Iser has in mind. Rather, he devotes roughly a fifth of the book to a detailed analysis of European pastoral literature from the Renaissance. This historical narrative about the ‘rise and fall’ of a specific literary tradition may seem surprising, but it fulfils an important function, both in The Fictive and the Imaginary and in Iser’s oeuvre.37 On the face of it, he considers pastoral literature at this point so that he can contrast this literary use of the fictive with its philosophical use in the next part of his argument. There is another, less explicit reason why he examines Renaissance pastoralism, however: it allows us to witness the emergence of the three fictionalizing acts discussed in the beginning of his book. First, Iser’s chronological narrative illustrates the increasing importance of the political context for pastoral fiction, and thereby suggests that literature only gradually acquired the relationship between text and context implied by the notions of the repertoire and the real. Second, his analysis traces the rise of flexible rather than conventional ways of reading, and unearths the historical roots of his earlier ideas about polysemy and indeterminacy, by arguing that playful semantic relationships or combinations within the text only emerged in early modern times. Third, Iser deems pastoralism a highly self-conscious literary tradition, for it explicitly disclosed the nature of literary fictionality, and thereby helped to acquaint early modern readers with the peculiar practice of literary fiction. Further heightening its relevance for the relationship between text and reader, Iser suggests that his earlier insights into the inaccessible self and the unfamiliar experience of reading have a historical prec-

37 Iser maintains that pastoral literature ‘gradually faded away’. Iser, Prospecting, p. 96. Thus, although he does not use these precise terms, his work sketches the supposed rise and fall of this genre. As we saw in Chapter 2, however, such historical narratives are to be treated with caution. In this case, ecocritics have convincingly shown that the pastoral (and anti-pastoral) tradition is, in fact, far from dead.

164 —— Chapter 4 edent in the early modern masks and disguises of pastoral shepherds. In his analysis, in other words, pastoralism not only illustrates the workings of literary, as opposed to philosophical, fiction, but also reveals the historical roots of his theory of reading, with its contextual selections, polysemous combinations and reality-suspending self-disclosures. In keeping with the argument of Chapter 2, this section of The Fictive and the Imaginary therefore intimates that Iser’s model is not exclusively based on eighteenth- and twentieth-century novels, but is rooted in the unique sense of productivity that emerged in the Renaissance.38 Whether Iser’s reading of different pastoral authors is convincing or not is an interesting question, but not one that is important for our purposes. What I would like to focus on instead is the way in which this reading historicizes the model of the three fictionalizing acts. Following a chronological as well as a generic line, Iser’s narrative begins with the eclogues of Theocritus, Virgil and Spenser, and ends with the pastoral romances of Sannazaro, Montemayor and Sidney. In a sweeping narrative, he explains that pastoral fiction initially represented a specific social custom, namely the singing contest between shepherds, and that this mimetic dimension was complicated by increasingly refined forms of semantic play. What does this story teach us about the combinations, selections and self-disclosures of literary fiction? Iser claims that even the earliest version of pastoralism, the writings of the Greek author Theocritus from the third century BC, did not simply reproduce existing customs; as they were written down, these texts no longer needed to be memorized and could therefore abandon predictable formulae in favour of new and unexpected turns of phrase. Accordingly, these early idylls introduce a form of polysemy which is taken up by subsequent forms of pastoral fiction. In the Latin work of Virgil, this polysemy turns ‘reading’ itself, in a formulation that recalls The Act of Reading, ‘into a game, in which particular constellations establish themselves at the expense of others’.39 This nascent polysemy is temporarily suspended in the Middle Ages, for contemporary readers tried to regulate and constrain the implicit meanings of Virgil’s poems by taking recourse to the fairly strict hermeneutic tools of biblical study. To the medieval mind, with its belief in a ‘guaranteed reality’, to use Blumenberg’s term from Chapter 2, allegorical exegesis seemed to be the only way to make sense of, indeed to control, the implicit semantic connections between let-

38 In a footnote, Pross argues that ‘apart from Renaissance pastoralism, which serves as a paradigm in The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser bases himself above all on nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts for a differential model of subject, text and reading’. This remark is incomplete, not only because it fails to mention Iser’s work on the eighteenth-century novel, but also because it does not clarify the relation between the literatures of these different periods. For further details, see Chapter 2. Pross, ‘Textspiele’, p. 162. 39 Iser, Fictive¸ p. 30.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 165

ter and spirit, ‘the inherent polysemy of the linguistic medium’.40 For Iser, in other words, medieval interpretations tried to regulate the emergent semantic play of antiquity by imposing a stifling form of clarity. This rigid situation gradually crumbled in the early modern age, as is demonstrated in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and illustrated by the further development of pastoralism. Iser contends that Edmund Spenser’s eclogues already release new forms of polysemy, for they suspend the easy solutions offered by allegorical reading strategies, and thereby unleash an unprecedented ‘semiotic game’.41 This intensified semantic play creates the need for new ways of exercising control over the reader’s activities – a work like Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (1579), for instance, conveys a specific, politically sensitive meaning that should nevertheless remain opaque to inattentive readers. As Iser argues in Prospecting, the eclogues surreptitiously warn Queen Elizabeth (and her subjects) of the dangers attendant upon marrying a Catholic. To ensure that this hidden meaning is understood by his readers and is not masked by the text’s playful character, Spenser inserts a ‘commentator’ into the work, who stresses specific semantic relationships, and alludes to particular social and literary norms which, in line with the model of The Act of Reading, are frequently used in a productively negative fashion. The sixteenth-century framework of the ‘chain of being’, for example, and the associated idea of cosmological correspondences break down: at a certain point, the shepherd is thrown into profound doubt while the sun is happily shining, negating the idea of an Edenic harmony between nature and man and reshuffling a central pastoral commonplace. In more general terms, Iser argues that Spenser’s provocative implications can only be grasped against the background of old conventions. This interaction between the old and new forms of these conventions is no longer explained in terms of the foreground-and-background relationship, like in The Act of Reading, but is, rather, described as a structure of ‘doubling’.42 The rigidity of medieval allegory is further undermined by the emergence of pastoral romance. In Philip Sidney’s late-sixteenth century Arcadia, we find a tension between latent and manifest senses, a ‘double meaning’ which turns the loss of guaranteed semantic connections into a source of semantic productivity: here, ‘the area of indeterminacy as a play space is no longer organized in accordance with a given set of rules, as was the case in allegory, typology, and the sys-

40 Ibid., p. 36. 41 Ibid., p. 39. 42 Ibid., p. 45. Regarding this doubling structure, Iser remarks that ‘[i]t is true that perception is also marked by a form of doubling, since it bisects each field of perception into figure and ground, but this doubleness is always hierarchically organized, whereas double meaning is distinguished by the absence of any such hierarchy’. Thus the notion of ‘doubling’ emphasizes that neither part of its structure is to be privileged. Iser, Prospecting, p. 128.

166 —— Chapter 4 tem of correspondences’.43 This conflict between hermeneutic strategies can even be found within the fictional worlds of such works, Iser claims. If the princes of Sidney’s Arcadia use this polysemy to their advantage, the king of the Arcadian realm, not unlike certain kings in Shakespeare’s history plays, does not respect ‘indeterminacy’ and the plurality of ‘double meaning’,44 and this rigid attitude ends up destroying his kingdom. Iser’s analysis of pastoralism implies that the difference between manifest and latent meaning should be explored rather than eradicated and traces, therefore, the gradual liberation of poetic polysemy from the constraints of a reductive exegesis. Iser’s narrative also sheds light on the act of selection, or the interaction between text and context. For Virgil’s eclogues introduce another crucial feature of pastoral literature, namely the fictional realm of Arcadia. As this poetic world is clearly distinct from contemporary political reality, the tension between the two enables pastoral authors to discuss and explore the relationship between the fictional text and its historical context. As Iser emphasizes repeatedly, readers should not prematurely assign the fundamental ‘difference’ between the poetical and the political world a certain meaning, but explore this tension by means of the playful reading strategies mentioned earlier. Pastoral eclogues are unable to develop the relationship between the bucolic and the real world extensively, however, as they represent the Arcadian realm alone, and can therefore only hint at the real world. This is the major innovation and advantage of pastoral romance, Iser goes on to argue, since this genre explicitly represents both worlds, the heterogeneous ‘sign systems’ of the pastoral and the real world.45 In an important formula, it is characterized by the ‘simultaneity’ of two mutually exclusive systems, where ‘simultaneity’ ‘should be taken not as a temporal category but as the copresence of fundamentally different spheres in a manner that exceeds [.. .] both time and space’.46 The growing attention to the relationship between these two systems or worlds in early modern pastoralism lays the foundation for ‘intertextuality’, Iser argues, and it goes hand in hand with the mounting importance of polysemy discussed earlier.47 In these texts, the reader’s search for the precise relationship between the pastoral and the political system is no longer predetermined by rigid hermeneutic rules, but is freed up for speculation by the flexible difference or ‘gap [Leerstelle]’ between them: The difference does not, therefore, stabilize opposition but allows for the readability of two mutually exclusive semiotic systems as their interconnections evolve from and intend to 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid., pp. 62, 65. Ibid., p. 67, 66–67. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., p. 52.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 167

bridge that difference, which – having no content of its own – cannot indicate any particular way of reading, as do the ‘similarities’ of the ternary sign system.48

As this passage makes clear, the ‘difference’ between text and context is a ‘gap’ of sorts, conceptually related to the gaps between textual passages described in The Act of Reading. The hermeneutic freedom created by the gap between text and context should not be taken to imply that this relationship can be filled in at will. On the contrary: just as Spenser’s eclogues have a clear political message, so Iser claims that pastoral romances in general function as ‘mirror[s]’ which increase the reader’s awareness of socio-political reality.49 As he notes in a related essay, it is by virtue of this social function that Arcadia ‘embodies a true model of what literature is or, rather, is able to achieve’.50 In a similar fashion to pastoral romances, we might say, every literary work hints at a political alternative, an Arcadia of sorts. In the course of history, Iser continues, the pastoral realm shrinks and the other system that is the real world increasingly claims the limelight. Because this political realm is represented in ever greater detail, the need arises for a more flexible and precise means of representation, one that no longer alludes to conventional commonplaces but directly refers to ‘contemporary thought systems’.51 We have seen that the reconfiguration of thought systems plays a crucial role in Iser’s account of reading, since it provides the reader with important clues about the text’s position in relation to the context in which it was written. His analysis of pastoralism suggests that such reconfigurations first come to the fore in the explicit two-world fictions of early modern times; and this narrative can therefore be read as an inquiry into the historical roots of the fictionalizing act of selection and, by extension, of Iser’s reception theory. Throughout the history of pastoralism as narrated by Iser, increasing attention is paid to polysemy as well as to the text-context relationship. What does this historical narrative reveal about the fictionalizing act of self-disclosure, and the related idea of the reader’s transformation? Pastoralism is not only important because its history shows the rise of ludic relations within the text and its two worlds emblematically represent the frequently critical relationship between literary text and political context. It is also important because its manifestly fictional idiom, with its Edenic shepherds and flocks, demonstrates that literary fictionality does not cover up, but actively discloses its fictive character. Despite its roots in existing customs, the trappings of pastoralism increasingly function as

48 49 50 51

Iser, Fiktive, p. 100; Iser, Fictive, p. 46–47. Ibid., p. 48. Iser, Prospecting, p. 96. Ibid., Fictive, p. 59.

168 —— Chapter 4 mere markers of fictionality. In the course of history, Iser observes, such explicit signals disappear ‘until, finally, genres and the typographical layout of the text suffice to invoke the contract between author and reader, the latter being reminded that the text provides not documentation but a staged version of it’.52 This self-disclosure is important because it notifies readers that they have to adapt or, rather, suspend their habitual attitude. Once again, Iser continues, we can learn something valuable about this suspension of our real-life attitudes by considering pastoral fiction. For he maintains that the behaviour of pastoral shepherds show us what it is to be human, and to be a reader. In Sidney’s pastoral romance, two adventurous princes penetrate the interior realm of Arcadia. Their presence there is not permitted, and they can only stay if they disguise themselves. At the same time, these princes wish to reveal their identity to the pastoral princesses with whom they inevitably end up falling in love. This duplicitous behaviour not only leads to the double meaning mentioned earlier, but also to a tension between ‘mask’ and ‘person’, an ‘ecstatic state of being simultaneously in and out of oneself’.53 In revealing that tension, pastoralism is of crucial importance, for the idea that human beings may be seen as actors who use different masks or play heterogeneous roles is a central component of Iser’s anthropology. In his view, Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is fundamentally correct in seeing human beings as ‘actors’. This view has important literary implications as well, Iser adds, for readers, not just humans in general, can be likened to actors: because the reading process inevitably casts us into two minds – we experience unknown thoughts against the background of our habitual attitude –, ‘the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform his role must use his thoughts, his feelings, and even his body as an analogue for representing something he is not’.54 Iser hence claims that, just as the shepherd or actor disguises his real self to play an imaginary role, so the reader of literary fiction places his previous self in brackets, as it were, and puts on a new mask. Iser clarifies the remarkable ‘ecstatic’ condition of Sidney’s shepherds and literary readers by comparing their position with what is experienced in dreams and theorized by some branches of modern philosophy. In dreams as well as pastoral disguises, we notice a mix of incompatible elements, namely the real and the fictional world on the one hand, and our unconscious desires and their censured reformulations on the other. Since the real nature of these desires, like the real identity of the transgressing shepherds, needs to be concealed, different forms of disguise proliferate in dreams as well as in pastoral fictions. But whereas 52 Ibid., p. 60. 53 Ibid., pp. 71, 74. 54 Iser, Prospecting, p. 244.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 169

in the dream the disguise needs to remain intact, the princes in Sidney’s text need to reveal their identity. We also remain trapped in the dream, whereas the princes’ masks allow them to assume a new identity. Turning to existing philosophies, Iser claims that the advantage of the role-playing account of subjectivity is that no role takes precedence over the others. In contrast to Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, which sometimes presuppose a more fundamental core self, this alternative account establishes that ‘[a]s their own doppelgängers, [. ..] human beings are at best differential, traveling between their various roles that supplant and modify one another’.55 In such an account, individuality is seen as ‘an operative mode’, a form of ‘emergence’.56 The absence of a privileged role may seem disquieting, but it is this very absence which ensures that we can never be trapped in one of these roles. Each mask may lack authenticity, but that gives our behaviour greater flexibility. This account of what it means to be human can be linked to the ideas of Henrich and Kierkegaard mentioned earlier. Given that it rejects ‘the idea of the self as a coming to itself’, it comes as no surprise that Iser also considers the Subjektphilosophie of Dieter Henrich at this point, alluding to the notion of the inaccessible self we first encountered in Chapter 2.57 As Iser reminds us, Henrich postulates that ‘the self is present to itself only insofar as it is aware that its ground is withheld from it’.58 Although, essentially, he agrees with them, Iser also distances himself from Plessner and Henrich, and argues that literary fiction is less concerned than these philosophical models with the results of our role-playing, and hence allows us to explore our actor-like nature with greater freedom. This emphasis on freedom should not be misunderstood. In keeping with his earlier account of the impact of reading, Iser does not think that we simply dismiss our old roles when we adopt new ones. As he describes Tristram Shandy’s ‘ecstatic’ position, Tristram ‘is able to step out of his subjectivity without ever transcending it’.59 This account of the self can also be connected with Iser’s earlier reflections on Kierkegaard. The flexibility of the actor enables us, Iser asserts, to run through the possible outcomes of our decisions in virtual reality; our masks allow us to imagine ‘the alternatives of possible decisions’.60 This account of hu55 Iser, Fictive, p. 80–81. 56 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das Individuum zwischen Evidenzerfahrung und Uneinholbarkeit’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik XIII. Individualität, ed. by Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp (Munich: Fink, 1988), pp. 95–98 (p. 97). 57 Iser, Fictive, p. 81. 58 Ibid., p. 82. 59 Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1987]), p. 93, emphasis added. 60 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Liebe und Verwandlung im Schäferroman. Zur Poetologie des Fiktiven’, in Tales and ‘Their Telling Difference’. Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Narrativik. Festschrift zum

170 —— Chapter 4 man role-playing, arrived at in part through the study of early modern pastoralism, is a crucial part of literary anthropology. Yet it can also be linked to other theoretical projects. By arguing for a strategic form of ‘inauthenticity’, Iser’s anthropological claims approximate Wayne Booth’s argument in The Company We Keep (1988), which states that ‘a kind of play-acting’, a fictional form of ‘hypocrisy’ may be preferable to an insincere form of authenticity, and may play a vital role in a non-moralistic form of ethical criticism.61 In conclusion, Iser’s reading of pastoral literature not only provides an illustration of the literary uses of fiction, but also traces the emergence of the three fictionalizing acts introduced at the beginning of The Fictive and the Imaginary, and indeed of Iser’s view of reading in general. Ultimately, he considers the particular tensions between pastoral and political worlds, between manifest and latent meaning, and between bucolic mask and actual prince as models for the general tensions between the fictional and the real world, between explicit text and implicit meaning, and between the fictional role and the real disposition of the reader. By tying these general observations to the specific case of pastoral fiction, Iser’s study provides further signals that his model is not a transhistorical affair, but is rooted in the productive condition of the modern age. What is also interesting about this part of his argument is that it reveals a number of terminological shifts away from the model outlined in The Act of Reading. The interplay between foreground and background is replaced with the notion of ‘doubling’, the idea of a productive gap is now described in terms of ‘difference’, and the clash between the unfamiliar experience of the text and the reader’s ordinary disposition is now recast in terms of ‘masks’ and ‘roles’. Most importantly, perhaps, the important notions of polysemy and indeterminacy are rephrased in terms of play. Iser develops this notion of play in detail, however, only after discussing the philosophical uses of the fictive and the imaginary.

The (In)distinction of Fiction & Imagination Like the analysis of pastoral fiction that precedes it, Iser’s discussion of the role of fiction and imagination in philosophy might seem misplaced. For it is striking that a literary theorist devotes roughly half of his book on fiction and imagination to the non-literary uses of these human potentials. Yet we should not forget that this move is part of a broad tradition. In the light of his references to Sid-

70. Geburtstag von Franz K. Stanzel, ed. by Herbert Foltinek and others (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), pp. 149–63 (p. 160). 61 See Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep. An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 252.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 171

ney’s Defence of Poesy (1595) and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), Iser’s quasi-philosophical account of fiction and the imagination may be seen as a more theoretical and academic version of similar passages in those and other literary manifestos. This does not clarify the function of the analysis in Iser’s book, however. Analyzing the role of fiction and the imagination in various philosophical models – in the manner of Begriffsgeschichte, as Iser explicitly notes62 – serves, I think, two important but incompatible purposes. First, Iser maintains that the ways in which fiction and imagination are applied in philosophy will clarify, in a contrastive fashion, the ways they are used in literature. On the face of it, the argumentative function of these analyses is simple: in contrast to thinkers who off-handedly equate literary and non-literary fictions and imaginings, Iser distinguishes between their cognitive and aesthetic uses. In this respect, it is not surprising that he maintains, against his critics, that his analysis of literary fiction is not a ‘plea for panfictionalization [Panfiktionalisierung]’ but rather an attempt to pinpoint ‘special functions of the fictive’ in the literary text.63 This part of his argument sits uneasily with the second function of this comparison, however, which is precisely to attenuate, if not discard, this distinction. As we will see, Iser’s summary of these non-literary models introduces ideas which he then uses to describe the functioning of literary fictions and imaginings. This procedure suggests that there are important similarities, as well as differences, between these literary and non-literary practices. Notwithstanding his belief in the distinct character of literature, he insists that its two fundamental properties can also be found in other domains. For him, ‘[f]ictions also play vital roles in the activities of cognition and behavior, as in the founding of institutions, societies, and world pictures’.64 Similarly, imagination is supposedly of primary importance ‘in such spheres as psychoanalysis, anthropology, and, in recent times, social theory’.65 Fleshing out these claims, The Fictive and the Imaginary draws explicit attention to the fictive and imaginary qualities of law (Bentham), science (Vaihinger) and society (Castoriadis). In the conclusion to Funktionen des Fiktiven, Iser even observes that the fictive appears to be present ‘in nearly all disciplines’.66 These claims inevitably lead him to elide the distinction between literary and non-literary practices somewhat. And importantly, this elision is consonant with his attempt to salvage some of literature’s former social status. If other social domains depend upon the workings of fiction and the imagination, qualities often associated with literature, then literature is perhaps

62 63 64 65 66

Wolfgang Iser, ‘Imaginäre’, p. 483, 484. Iser, ‘Doppelungsstruktur’, p. 510, 500. Iser, Fictive, p. 12. Ibid., p. 205. Iser, ‘Das Fiktive im Horizont’, p. 551.

172 —— Chapter 4 not the endangered species he fears it to be. In fact, the historical trajectory he maps out implies that these literary qualities have prospered in modern times, since his analysis leads from negative and carefully circumscribed notions of fiction and imagination, to increasingly positive and inclusive counterparts. The historical overview of theories of fiction culminates almost in ‘omnifictionalization’ (hence the charge that Iser subscribes to a panfictionalization), and the changing conceptualization of the imagination similarly reveals that ‘the imaginary embarked on an unforeseeable career’ (the rise of fiction and the imagination, as manifestations of human productivity, again fits into the broader story of modernity as discussed in Chapter 2).67 Gradually, it seems, philosophers had to accept their inner authors. Paradoxically, the section on philosophy in The Fictive and the Imaginary therefore implies that literary and non-literary uses of fiction and imagination are both distinct and indistinguishable. The reason for this equivocation, I believe, is that two of Iser’s fundamental intuitions clash here: the idea that literature is an important and distinct practice that should be defined and defended on its own terms (leading to a belief in the distinct character of literary fictions and imaginings), and the idea that literature makes use of certain human faculties which are of such crucial importance that they inevitably crop up in other domains as well (leading to a belief in the indistinct character of literary and nonliterary fictions and imaginings). I will now tease out the connections between Iser’s analysis of philosophical models and two central parts of The Act of Reading, namely its functional account of fiction and its phenomenological description of mental images. I will also use insights from Dorrit Cohn’s The Distinction of Fiction (1999) to clarify and complement Iser’s anthropological account of fiction. As in the discussion of Ingarden in Chapter 3, this brief comparison suggests that Iser’s insights are most relevant to the interaction between text and context and might benefit from a closer attention to literary form.

Self-Disclosure, Worldmaking and Fictional Minds In his overview of theories of fiction, Iser considers Frank Kermode’s notion of ‘concord-fictions’, Francis Bacon’s attack on idols, Jeremy Bentham’s view of fictional modalities, Hans Vaihinger’s broad theory of heuristic fictions, and Nelson Goodman’s account of worldmaking; and he introduces several important ideas here. We have already seen that, for Iser, the literary text is not the only context in which we encounter fiction. In non-literary domains, he argues, fictions serve as

67 Iser, Fictive, pp. 87, 205.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 173

problem-solving instruments which enable the human mind to deal provisionally with problems which it cannot solve definitively. Furthermore, Iser maintains that cognitive fictions became more important in the modern age when mind and matter were disconnected, forcing modern man to develop new technical and cognitive aids to bridge this ‘gulf’.68 By referring to this gap, Iser’s analysis of philosophical fiction recalls his interpretation of pastoral fiction. In both cases a widening chasm – between the pastoral and the political world, or between man and nature – generates attempts to bridge it. These attempts are increasingly refined but they nevertheless generate an ever-more acute sense that the gap cannot be bridged definitively. Iser’s overview of philosophical models also reveals that they frequently distinguish between a negative and a positive form of fiction, by means of oppositions such as myth and fiction (Kermode), idol and experiment (Bacon) and ideological dogma and heuristic fiction (Vaihinger). The main interest of this discussion lies, however, in the light it sheds on Iser’s own model, especially his account of the self-disclosure and selections of literary fiction. These issues are central to his accounts of Vaihinger’s Philosophie des Als Ob [The Philosophy of ‘As-If’] (1911) and Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), which are the focus of my discussion here. After summarizing these accounts, I will complicate and refine Iser’s view by highlighting some important insights from Dorrit Cohn’s narratological study of literary fiction. Hans Vaihinger was a German Neo-Kantian philosopher who engaged with a broad range of non-literary fictions (which include Bacon’s methodological and Bentham’s legal and linguistic fictions), and we can single out two important ideas in Iser’s discussion of his work: the law of ideational shifts and the notion of the ‘as if’. First, Vaihinger observes that our attempts to bridge the gap between ourselves and the outside world can never be definitive, even though the provisional, fictional quality of these attempts is not always equally clear. His socalled ‘law of ideational shifts’ says that any given fictional construct goes through three stages: the pragmatic fiction is equated with reality in ‘dogma’; this dogma is gradually questioned until it is exposed as a ‘hypothesis’; and this hypothesis is finally criticized as a mere ‘fiction’. If the pragmatic success of these fictions is great enough, the process can also move in the opposite direction, transforming fiction into hypothesis and even dogma. As this argument implies, Vaihinger’s theory may be associated not only with the affirmation of ‘heuristic’ fictions, but also with the critique of ‘ideological’ fictions. This brings us to another relevant aspect of his theory, namely the ‘as-if’. In Iser’s summary of Vaihinger, heuristic fictions do not hide but actively disclose their fictional status; they always contain signals of self-disclosure, it is argued, and their very

68 Ibid., pp. 93, 107, 138.

174 —— Chapter 4 form therefore reveals that they should only be seen ‘as if’ they were true, so that a certain practical goal can be achieved. By explicitly indicating that these heuristic fictions do not correspond with reality, the ‘as if’ ensures that they do not relapse into ideological dogmas, and that the productive interaction between mind and reality is not prematurely closed off. In line with the equivocation mentioned earlier, Iser’s account of the as-if structure highlights both the differences and the similarities between literary and non-literary fictions. As he explicitly notes, heuristic fictions have an as-if structure, but they cannot appeal to ‘contractual conditions such as pertain to literary fictionality as staged discourse’.69 However, even if the as-if structure of philosophical fictions is different from – and less perspicuous then – the conventional markers of literary fictions, we have seen that Iser’s discussion of fictionalizing acts in literature still mentions the idea of the ‘as-if’.70 Similarly, his distinction between the explanatory fictions of anthropological research and the exploratory fictions of literary texts recalls that between the ideological and heuristic fictions of philosophy.71 Hence Iser’s use of Vaihinger’s ideas ultimately suggests that literary texts and at least some philosophical constructs are characterized by related forms of self-disclosure. Moreover, Iser not only accepts that a form of self-disclosure can be detected in some non-literary fictions, but also that some literary fictions do not show these self-suspending signals at all. Some forms of literature purport to offer real answers to human questions, and the result is that they ‘come close to what conceptualizations of life intend to achieve’.72 Approximating philosophical rather than literary fictions, Iser remarks critically that such didactic forms of literature do not have the ‘longevity and [. ..] enduring fascination’ of ‘great’ literature.73 Apparently, removing these signals of fictionality is a grave aesthetic error. In the light of such claims, it appears that certain forms of philosophy are actually closer to Iser’s idea of literature than certain forms of literature. In the final analysis, he seems to have two forms of literary fiction in mind, namely ideological mouthpieces and liberating artworks. But surely that is an oversimplification. Iser’s account of non-fiction is also problematic. He assumes that fictionality is a necessary precondition of literature, calling the thesis that literature and fiction are distinct concepts a ‘rath–

69 Ibid., p. 138. 70 Ibid., p. 13. 71 See Wolfgang Iser, ‘What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions’, in The Revenge of the Aesthetic. The Place of Literature in Theory Today, ed. by Michael P. Clark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 157–79 (especially pp. 170–71). 72 Iser, Prospecting, p. 247. 73 Ibid.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 175

er peculiar premise’.74 But surely works like Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened of (2008) demonstrate that fiction may be absent from literature, just as fiction may be present in philosophical works? These nuances are not explored in Iser’s work, notwithstanding his allusion to the existence of the ‘nonfiction novel’.75 Turning to Nelson Goodman, Iser argues that his constructivist philosophy is the most inclusive and positive account of human fiction-making to date. This model contains several ideas that resonate with Iser’s reflections. Goodman dismisses the belief in a single and objective ‘reality’, for instance, and argues that there are only different ‘world-versions’, one of which just happens to be actual. Fiction is not some independent counter-realm, moreover, but a set of procedures which allows us to remake our current version of the world. This redefinition of fiction in terms of worldmaking procedures is obviously consonant with Iser’s notion of fictionalizing acts, and has clear advantages: if fictions are neither concepts nor entities, but ‘ways of worldmaking’, they ‘do not run the risk of possible reification because they merely embody a modus operandi’.76 Hence these fictional procedures are in no danger of succumbing to the threat of ideological reification described by Vaihinger. Goodman’s model is also important because its overview of worldmaking procedures is echoed in Iser’s account of the fictionalizing act of selection, a connection which further attenuates the idea of a clear-cut distinction between literary and non-literary fictions; just as Goodman refers to the ‘weighting, deleting, supplementing, and ordering’ of worldversion components, so Iser mentions the ‘[d]eletion, extension, weighting’ of extratextual norms in literary works.77 Finally, in line with Iser’s implicit argument, Goodman holds that literature is a privileged means of worldmaking. In his view, the creative exploration of ‘ways of worldmaking’ in the work of art is crucial, because these fictional procedures recede from view once a new worldversion has been established. Drawing on Goodman’s ideas, therefore, Iser proposes that the socio-critical function of literature is not limited to its content, but also manifests itself in the evocation of ways in which existing ideas can be rearranged. As this summary reveals, Iser’s analysis of philosophical fictions enriches his account of self-disclosure and selection but, in doing so, it also ends up compromising his belief in the unique character of literary fiction. To conclude this section, I would like to compare and contrast Iser’s account with insights from Dorrit Cohn. In The Distinction of Fiction, as the title indicates, Cohn targets philoso-

74 75 76 77

Iser, Fictive¸ p. 308. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 155. Ibid., pp. 159, 6.

176 —— Chapter 4 phers and critics alike (she explicitly mentions Iser) who use the ambiguous meaning of the word fiction and the existence of borderline cases to dispute the border between fiction and non-fiction. For Cohn, the difference between fiction and non-fiction is one of ‘kind’ rather than ‘degree’, and therefore we should not use a term like ‘the fictive’ to characterize non-literary practices.78 Her argument is relevant to us for two reasons. First, in contrast to thinkers such as Hayden White and John Searle, she maintains that literary fiction has distinct linguistic properties. In her view, Iser is mistaken therefore in his claim that all attempts to define the self-disclosing signals of literary fiction in terms of ‘linguistic signs in the text [...] have proved unsuccessful’.79 In what may be seen as a more concrete exposition of the literary mechanisms of self-disclosure, Cohn identifies the linguistic ‘signal devices’ of fiction.80 Apart from the paratextual markers hinted at by Iser, she calls attention to a set of intra-textual features, namely ‘the set of devices that allows a fictional text to penetrate to the silent thoughts and feelings of its characters, artifactually traversing a visual barrier that remains forever closed to real eyes in real life (and narratives concerned with real life)’.81 Whereas literary authors may use free indirect discourse as they wish, the writers of nonfiction (who do not want to be sanctioned by their peers) are only able to discuss what goes on inside the minds of other people if they have documentary evidence, or must hedge in undocumented thoughts and feelings with modalizing formulae, ‘a language of nescience [instead of omniscience], of speculation, conjecture, and induction (based on referential documentation) that is virtually unknown in fictional scenes of novels (including historical novels)’.82 In contrast to the smooth surface of fictional texts, which can weave in and out of other points of view without clearly marking them off, non-fiction texts are characterized by ‘a highly heterogeneous textual surface’ in terms of narrative voice.83 The book which you are reading now, with its many permutations of ‘Iser thinks’, is no exception. The second reason why Cohn’s argument is relevant here is that her account of the relationship between literature and context is unsatisfactory. In her view, fiction designates ‘a literary nonreferential narrative text’.84 The adjective ‘nonreferential’ does not mean total segregation from the real world, she says, but her account suggests nevertheless that the connections between text and 78 Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 35, 121. 79 Iser, ‘Feigning’, p. 214. 80 Cohn, Distinction, p. 81. 81 Ibid., p. 174. 82 Ibid., p. 122. 83 Ibid., pp. 27–28. 84 Ibid., p. 1.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 177

context are altogether inconsequential. She argues, for instance, that we should postulate ‘a referential level of analysis’ for historical non-fiction and deny this to fictional narratives, radically oversimplifying the problem of literary reference.85 For her, ‘the principal process by which fiction alters the actual world, even when it strictly adheres to the latter’s geographical and historical data, is by augmenting its population [with] the imaginary beings we customarily call characters’.86 If that is all that Cohn’s model allows us to say about the relationship between literature and reality, then it too is problematic. Even if her analysis of ‘self-disclosure’ might enrich Iser’s understanding of literary fiction, I would argue that his analysis of ‘selection’ and ‘worldmaking’ might similarly enrich her view of literary reference.

Mental Images Reconsidered In The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser also discusses different theories of the imagination, most notably those of Coleridge, Sartre and Castoriadis. In Iser’s view, these theories teach us several important lessons about the elusive phenomenon that is the imaginary. First, they indicate that the imaginary is not a self-activating potential, but requires an external activating instance, be it the subject (Coleridge), the conscious mind (Sartre) or the self and the social dynamic (Castoriadis). They also demonstrate that the imaginary invariably manifests itself via a form of play with its activator, a flexible ‘back-and-forth movement’. Furthermore, this play is shown to create a flux of images and to have a destabilizing effect (in this sense it is again similar to ‘negativity’) which helps to reconfigure the human self as well as the cultural world. In the course of these reflections, the fluid register first found in Iser’s dissertations resurfaces; Coleridge uses a ‘stream metaphor’ to capture the workings of the imagination, and Castoriadis notes that the imaginary pulls determinate forms back into ‘the stream of change’ (compare with the Heraclitean thinking of Iser’s Habilitation).87 This register draws attention to the subterranean link, so to speak, between the fluid potential of the imaginary and the flux of ‘life’. Even more importantly, Iser’s reflections on the philosophical uses of the imaginary offer a renewed analysis of the mental images that we experience during the reading process. Coleridge sees the imagination as a tripartite psychological faculty, which knits together the sense data of perception, conjures up earlier sense data 85 Ibid., p. 112. 86 Ibid., p. 16. 87 Iser, Fictive, pp. 187, 211.

178 —— Chapter 4 through the workings of memory, and produces images of things it has never seen before by means of invention. In the terms of the Biographia Literaria, the imagination plays a role in memory via ‘fancy’, in visual perception via the ‘primary imagination’, and in creative invention via the ‘secondary imagination’. According to Coleridge, these faculties are used by the subject in his attempts to relate to himself and to the outside world. The imaginary is activated by the subject, in other words, in order to reconstitute itself and the world that surrounds it. What is also interesting about Coleridge’s account is that it highlights the flux of images which characterizes memory, perception and invention. It seems that, for him, the greatest forms of literature use the imagination not to produce a determinate image, but to encourage a state of mind in which various images intermingle. Iser maintains, for instance, that Coleridge criticized the ‘highly pictorial’ work of contemporary poets because, in their preference for quasi-pictorial representation, they sought to capture a specific product of the imagination rather than the underlying play movement which engenders such images.88 Iser’s account of the aesthetic condition and the reading process shows that he shares this interest in the flux of mental images. For him, to read is to experience a series of images that appear and disappear. The connection with his earlier work becomes even clearer when Iser considers the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, especially L’Imaginaire [The Imaginary] (1940), one of the main sources of The Act of Reading. Here, Sartre observes that one of the ways in which the mind can relate to external objects is the ‘irrealizing’ function of the imagination. Iser’s description of this irrealizing stance clearly recalls the analysis of mental images from The Act of Reading: For Sartre, [. . .] [t]he presence of a mental image means that, as part of being caught up in it, we are lifted out of the condition that we were in before. The ‘nothing’ inherent in the imaginary object becomes ‘creative’ as it causes an almost total turnabout of our condition, and this turnabout may go so far as to make our present existence unreal.89

In the light of Iser’s earlier work, it is obvious that he agrees: the workings of the imaginary extricate us from our habitual world, and this ‘irrealization’ creates the potential for alternative experiences. The function of these irrealizing acts of consciousness is clear, and reminds us of the idea of boundary-crossing; these acts suspend the subject’s existing world to allow for the emergence of novel realities: ‘consciousness that is anchored in the world will be driven beyond the world by what it has posited’.90 In a further link with Coleridge’s model, Iser’s analysis of Sartre alludes to states of mind in which images intermingle. And 88 Ibid., p. 192. 89 Ibid., p. 196. 90 Ibid., pp. 203–4.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 179

again, this description in terms of an uncontrollable ‘flood of unconnected pictures’ reads like an echo of Iser’s account of reading.91 Concluding his overview, Iser discusses The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) by Cornelius Castoriadis. If Coleridge’s model enabled Iser to explore the prehistory of the Sartre-like model from The Act of Reading, the work of Castoriadis gestures in the new directions of literary anthropology. The Greek philosopher maintains that we should not define the imaginary as an image of something, but rather as ‘the unceasing [...] creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of “something”’.92 He contends that, by continually creating new images and forms, the imaginary enables us to transform existing objects and states of affairs. Opposing this fluid potential to all forms of determinacy, he calls it ‘magma’, which is ‘a basic metaphor for the determinate in the state of its being changed’.93 In a similar fashion to Sartre and Coleridge, Castoriadis argues that the workings of magma or the imaginary can alter both ourselves and our social worlds. In the realm of the self, he says, the fact that we can never know our own beginning encourages us to generate provisional images of this unreachable origin, and consequently helps to reconfigure the psyche. Clearly, this argument can be linked to the ideas of Henrich and Plessner noted earlier. In the social realm, Castoriadis continues, we encounter two types of words; ordinary words – tree, cat, table – have referents that can be perceived, but many words with a constitutive function in the social realm – contract, democracy, justice – do not. Castoriadis calls these socially important, but semantically indeterminate referents ‘imaginary meanings’. These imaginary meanings can never acquire a definitive shape, but they nevertheless play a crucial role in the transformation of society because the current ‘image’ or version of referentially void words such as ‘democracy’ ‘can always again be reshuffled [umbesetzt]’.94 The argument that the shifting meanings of such words may change the very nature of society can be connected to Blumenberg’s notion of reshuffling, as well as to Iser’s view in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings that slight semantic nuances may end up changing a particular Zeitgeist. Castoriadis further claims that there are at least two reasons why human beings continue to change themselves and their societies: changing the imaginary meanings of our societies ensures that social institutions do not solidify into overbearing structures and it is the only way for our mortal psyches to make a lasting mark. When Iser turns to the function of literature at the end of The Fictive and the Imaginary, he offers similar reasons for our continued, literary attempts to renew our minds and worlds. 91 92 93 94

Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 211. Iser, Fiktive, p. 369.

180 —— Chapter 4 This discussion of philosophical theories implicitly clarifies Iser’s thoughts on literature, and this literary agenda becomes even clearer when Iser turns from the philosophical to the aesthetic uses of the imaginary. If the dynamic play of the imaginary is restricted in practical contexts, he argues, these constraints are removed when the imaginary is activated for aesthetic purposes. Just as his account of philosophical fictions is preceded by an analysis of pastoral fiction, so his reading of imagination theories leads into a literary application of sorts,95 Iser specifying his claims by contrasting the literary uses of the imagination in modernist and fantasy literature. Briefly put, Iser celebrates the activation of the imaginary in a short story by Beckett and criticizes its instrumentalization in fantasy and science fiction. In his view, there are various problems with the latter (although the corpus remains undefined, as he mentions neither specific authors nor particular works). First, many of these texts concentrate on evoking a visual illusion. This critique is hardly surprising, given that The Act of Reading had championed a form of reading that works against the illusion-forming qualities of literary fiction. Some of these writings, Iser admits, are not simply escapist illusions but also criticize the real world. By confronting their readers with real and fantastical worlds simultaneously, these more subversive texts are even able to fulfil a crucial anthropological function: ‘[b]eing something else within one’s consciousness without giving up what one thinks oneself to be’.96 And yet, Iser feels, even these texts subject the reader’s fantasy to cognitive control and to specific contextual demands, as they try to compensate for those aspects of life that are ignored by contemporary culture. Their socio-critical function and split reading experience may illustrate his own account of reading to perfection, but Iser still considers these generic texts to be ‘light literature’, which is rarely reread.97 In short, fantasy and science fiction are seen to be problematic because they instrumentalize the imaginary. In keeping with the philosophical models mentioned earlier, Iser is more interested in situations where the imaginary is given free rein. Like Coleridge, he privileges texts which generate a flux of images in the reader’s mind rather than a single visual illusion. This argument recalls Iser’s earlier analyses of aestheticist and modernist montages, not to mention the account of reading as a process of 95 His analysis is devoted to twentieth-century texts, but a long footnote on Sidney’s Defence of Poesy again highlights the link with the early modern age. In a related essay, Iser summarizes this argument as follows: ‘[t]here is a noticeable trend to be observed since the sixteenth century: the distinction between feigning and imagining. Sidney’s Defense of Poesie is an important case in point’. See Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Aesthetic and the Imaginary’, in The States of ‘Theory’. History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. by David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 201–20 (p. 201). 96 Iser, Fictive, p. 246. 97 Ibid., p. 240.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 181

impeded image-building, whereby images are evoked and revoked again and again: Instead of taming the imaginary for specific purposes – which are especially evident in science fiction – the imaginary manifests itself as an inundation of cognition. This flood of bizarre shapes that explode into countless images indicates the helplessness of cognition, and gives free rein and visible expression to the imaginary.98

A similar situation obtains, Iser suggests, when literary texts focus on the imaginary itself rather than one of its products. Returning to Beckett’s ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’, he argues that this short story represents not so much a dead imagination as a non-applied imagination. In doing so, Beckett supposedly shows that we can only capture the imaginary as such if we minimize the conscious part of our mental activity, and thereby ensure that it does not instrumentalize the creative potential of the imaginary. However, since every act of consciousness, including writing, inevitably shows a certain intentionality, we can only conjure up the imaginary by using and then undermining our forms of speech. In other words, Beckett’s self-undermining style is able to present the imaginary because it unsettles the intentional character of straightforward forms. Iser repeats this argument in a related analysis of Walter Pater’s work: the imaginary can be truly seen only if we disrupt its ability to function, and this effect can best be obtained by a specific, suggestive style, which incites ‘the recipient’s imagination’ and produces a sequence of readerly images.99 Hence Iser’s anthropology is still concerned with the effects of the aestheticist style first discussed in his Habilitation. In a highly normative gesture, The Fictive and the Imaginary thus proclaims that the best literary texts do not simply use, but actively explore, the uniquely human potential that is the imaginary. Only this dual procedure – evoking as well as revoking the reader’s mental images – enables us to see the imaginary ‘as it is’, and to reflect upon its workings. These remarks imply that literary anthropology is particularly interested in literary passages which reflect on our powers of imagination, and may actually be read as self-reflexive accounts of the reader’s imaginative activity. Consider a passage from Beckett’s Murphy (1938), which Iser does not discuss, but which clearly exhibits the type of reflection he seems to be seeking: 98 Ibid., p. 240–41. 99 See Wolfgang Iser, ‘Walter Pater. Figurationen des Imaginären’, in Das Imaginäre des Fin de sie`cle, ed. by Gerhard Neumann and Christine Lubkoll (Freiburg: Rombach, 2002), pp. 261–77 (p. 268). In this essay, Iser also refers to the cluster of words ‘imagination/imaginative/ imaginary’ (p. 271). Since Iser’s anthropological readings frequently focus on the explicit use of such terms – see the analyses of Beckett’s ‘Imagination Dead Imagine’ and Pater’s Imaginary Portraits –, it might be argued that one of the tasks of literary anthropology is the analysis of the different discursive manifestations of the imaginary.

182 —— Chapter 4 When he was naked he lay down in a tuft of soaking tuffets and tried to get a picture of Celia. In vain. Of his mother. In vain. Of his father [.. .]. In vain. It was usual for him to fail with his mother; and usual, though less usual, for him to fail with a woman. But never before had he failed with his father. [.. .] He tried again with his father, his mother, [.. .] with the men, women, children and animals that belong to even worse stories than this. In vain in all cases. He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had met, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as though reeled upward off a spool level with his throat.100

In other words, Iser draws attention to works such as those of Beckett and Pater because they reflect self-consciously upon the workings of the imagination, and both evoke and revoke their fictional images. The generic texts of science fiction and fantasy literature, by contrast, are deemed uninteresting for literary anthropology, because they allegedly fail to revoke their pragmatic activation of the imaginary and to reflect upon this human potential. We have seen, then, the remarkable equivocation at the heart of Iser’s account of fiction and the imagination. Even though its intention was to reveal their differences, this account brings to light important similarities between literary and non-literary applications of fiction and the imagination. Perhaps because of his tendency to look for phenomenological ‘essences’, Iser’s analysis of philosophical models unearths two common features of the imaginary that also play a role in literature, namely that it ‘is not a self-activating potential’ and that it ‘manifests itself as play’.101 Similarly, Iser’s account of philosophical fiction mentions the ‘doubling structure’ and ‘boundary-crossing’ supposedly typical of literary fiction.102 Furthermore, even though he initially claimed that literary fictions are different from non-literary fictions – because the former reveal their fictional status and the latter do not – Iser’s analysis suggests that some forms of philosophy disclose their provisional character, while some forms of literature conceal their make-believe nature. In this sense, he clearly elides the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, literature and non-literature. This is problematic not only because it flies in the face of certain textual conventions, as Cohn argues, but also because it threatens to erode the unique character of literature, a 100 Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett. The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume I. Novels (New York: Grove Press, 2006), p. 150–51. For a recent example, consider the following passage: ‘George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors [...], but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment’. Paul Harding, Tinkers (London: Windmill Books, 2010), p. 18. 101 Iser, Fictive, pp. 222, 223. 102 Ibid., pp. 131, 170.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 183

practice that Iser is actually trying to defend in The Fictive and the Imaginary. Perhaps that is why the next step in his argument underscores the distinctiveness of literature.

Games and Stagings After discussing non-literary forms of fiction and imagination, Iser turns to the topic of literary play. In order to understand the place of these reflections in the context of The Fictive and Imaginary, we should first remind ourselves of his claims about fictionalizing acts, and about the combination of the fictive and the imaginary in literary texts. In Iser’s account, the three fictionalizing acts of literary texts cross the boundaries of the given, but always retain what they have transgressed, inciting creative forms of interaction between the given and the unknown. The act of selection, for instance, pits existing versions of social and literary conventions against their modified counterparts in the literary text, giving rise to one type of ‘doubling’ and interaction. The act of combination, in turn, confronts different textual passages, and their ‘difference’ creates a second form of interaction. The act of self-disclosure, finally, leads to a form of ‘doubling’ or ‘difference’ between the usual dispositions of readers and the unfamiliar role which they are required to adopt in the reading process, provoking a final form of interaction. Iser’s description suggests that ‘doubling’ and ‘difference’ are new terms for the ‘blank’, the gap that activates a productive interaction between two elements: Difference is therefore no longer a matter merely of distinctions; as an empty space it operates both as a divider and as a stimulus for the linking of what has been divided. These simultaneous countermovements take place as a continual referring of the separated elements to one another; thus difference never disappears through link-ups, and the iteration never ceases.103

However, whereas, in The Act of Reading, the gap or blank simply designated the missing link between two textual passages, the doublings or differences of The Fictive and the Imaginary refer not only to the indeterminate relationship between two textual passages, but also to the implicit connections between fictional and real worlds, as well as between real dispositions and imaginary roles.104 103 Ibid., p. 229. 104 Iser argues that his notion of difference should be interpreted in systemic rather than deconstructionist terms, as he feels that Derrida’s notion of diffe´rance is unable to account for the productive proliferation of differences or gaps in a literary text. For further details, see The Fictive and the Imaginary, p. 251. Nevertheless, he defines this difference elsewhere in terms of a Derridean ‘deferral [Aufschub]’. See Iser, ‘Doppelungsstruktur’, pp. 505, 507.

184 —— Chapter 4 What is the relation between the many differences established by these fictionalizing acts on the one hand, and the fluid potential of the imaginary on the other? We have seen that the imaginary is a vague and chaotic reservoir of images, which can only acquire a determinate and coherent shape if it is cast in a network of forms directed towards the same goal or direction. This is the point at which the various doublings of the fictionalizing acts acquire their significance: for, according to Iser, the network of differences established by selecting certain conventions, by combining textual passages, and by proposing new roles form a finely differentiated medium in which the indeterminate potential of the imaginary can acquire a more determinate shape. The many doublings and interactions of the fictionalizing acts impose their form on the reader’s unstructured imaginings, and this imaginary activity fills in the gaps created by the interactions. In other words, if The Act of Reading argued that the reader’s mental images fill in the gaps in the text’s rhetorical structure, The Fictive and the Imaginary likewise maintains that the contents of the imaginary fill in the gaps established by the text’s doubling structure. In Iser’s later work, therefore, literary reading is still seen as a form of imagining that is controlled, if not fully determined, by the way in which the text contrasts textual passages, world-versions and the roles of the reader. The preceding reflections are systematically reformulated in the final sections of The Fictive and the Imaginary, where Iser claims that the many doublings and interactions of the literary text may be described in terms of play. In contrast to the more limited play allowed by the philosophical models of Coleridge, Sartre and Castoriadis, the non-pragmatic use of the imaginary in literary fiction does not restrict its inherently dynamic character. Literary reading is therefore able to shed powerful light on the very nature of play, this typically if not uniquely human activity. Iser continues that, if we want to understand this dynamic movement as such, we should not subscribe to a ‘philosophy of play’ that predetermines its nature, but rather examine individual forms of play.105 Iser distinguishes between various types of play on different textual levels: between the basic play movement, the linguistic structure, the textual rules, the different games played inside the text, and the different modes of playing. This multilayered account is intended to emphasize its diversity, but Iser stresses a specific type of play on each of these levels. In this section, I will pay special attention to Iser’s account of these levels and his revealing modification of Roger Caillois’ fourfold typology of games. As this description of textual play undermines traditional accounts of literary representation, I will also consider Iser’s turn to ‘performance’ and ‘stagings’, briefly sketching his exchange with Frank Kermode’s influential account of fiction. 105 Iser, Fictive, p. 224.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 185

The Pleasure of Play Iser’s analysis begins by discussing the basic movement of play and the playful transformation of linguistic signs. We have already seen that his analysis of philosophical theories alludes to the ‘back and forth movement’, that fictionalizing acts establish differences between social norms, textual passages and mental attitudes, and that the interactions between these elements hint at new norms, meanings and attitudes by transgressing pre-existing counterparts that are nevertheless retained in the reader’s mind. The first level of play, the ‘back and forth movement’, refers to this combination of transgression and retention, to the very general fact that textual play both moves beyond existing structures and retains them to develop new alternatives. In Iser’s terms, ‘free play’ designates this transgressive movement, ‘instrumental play’ the inevitable retention of and connection with what has been transgressed.106 If this dual play movement is verbalized, he continues, it ends up reorganizing linguistic signs. In an argument that recalls his discussion of sign relationships in pastoral fiction, Iser points out that textual play highlights the difference between signifier and signified, leading to a productively ‘split signifier’.107 This difference or gap is regulated in ordinary language by a conventional code, which enables the sign to denote pre-existing content unambiguously. In another reference to Blumenberg’s view of polysemy, Iser argues that in the literary text, this denotative function is suspended in favour of a figurative meaning that is implicit instead of ‘clear [eindeutig]’.108 Although the sign’s conventional meaning is suspended, Iser says, it still predetermines the way in which the reader is to imagine its new, figurative meaning; since, in his formulation, the conventional content or ‘territory’ of the ordinary signifier now functions as the ‘map’ for the unknown content or ‘territory’ of the fictional signifier. This interaction between old and new contents establishes a ‘structure of double meaning’, which underlies all figurative forms of speech: ‘[t]he play may consolidate itself into specific figures of speech [.. .] that [in several ways] say something different from what is meant; in any case, the repertoire of rhetoric allows the split signifier to take specific forms geared to the intended achievement’.109 In other words, if, according to The Act of Reading, the fundamental structure of literary strategies can be captured by the tension between foreground and background, The Fictive and the Imaginary posits that the tension between map and territory (and the resulting ‘double meaning’) is the abstract structure underlying all rhetorical figures.

106 107 108 109

Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 248. Iser, Fiktive, p. 427. Iser, Fictive, p. 250.

186 —— Chapter 4 Iser also considers what happens when established conventions and rules are placed under the conditions of play. Human beings can use the ‘schemata’ of conventions to accommodate themselves to the demands of reality or, conversely, to assimilate reality to their own demands. As every schema can be employed for both purposes, they are all characterized by a tension between accommodation and assimilation, or between imitation and symbolization (which is roughly the same). Linking these claims to the ideas of Ernst Gombrich again, as well as to psychological research concerning child development, Iser argues that the conventional elements of literary texts are characterized by a similar duality. These elements inevitably lend the text a certain imitative or accommodating quality, he concedes, but their function in the literary text is nonetheless mainly one of assimilation: ‘to symbolize the absent, the unavailable, the ungraspable’.110 Assimilation and symbolization can be linked to self-disclosure, because here, the schema in question explicitly signals that it does not coincide with the object it is trying to represent. Texts which fully embrace the imitative qualities of literary schemata – like, in Iser’s account, the works of fantasy and science fiction – are thus problematic. He also links these observations to literary history, arguing that its innovations proceed via the re-symbolization of those schemata whose imitative success had temporarily suppressed their symbolic, illusory quality. Cervantes’s work, for instance, discloses the symbolic dimension of the chivalric romance. This emphasis on novelty rather than convention recurs when Iser turns to rules, another important feature of games. He distinguishes between ‘regulatory’ and ‘aleatory’ rules: the former ‘function according to stabilized conventions’ and the latter ‘set free whatever has been restrained by conventions’.111 Every work of art has to contain regulatory and aleatory elements, for it inevitably has to have a measure of generality as well as singularity. In line with his emphasis on the assimilative use of schemata, however, Iser gives more attention to the aleatory dimension of textual play.112 After describing the tensions between free and instrumental play, denotative and figurative signs, imitative and symbolizing schemata and regulatory and aleatory rules, Iser turns to the level of textual games. A single literary text can never fully articulate the endless movement typical of play, he argues, so it evokes this movement by combining many individual games. If we want to de-

110 Ibid., p. 254. 111 Ibid., p. 267; Iser, ‘The Aesthetic and the Imaginary’, p. 218. 112 Iser contends that the importance of unpredictable rules has gradually increased. Whereas early medieval games show fairly strict rules, ‘[c]hess, as a related game, is by contrast much freer, so that at the end of the Middle Ages, the application of its rules had become increasingly variable’. Again, this argument fits into Blumenberg’s description of the early modern age. See Iser, Fictive, p. 338.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 187

scribe these games, Iser insists, there is little to be gained from books that privilege a specific type of game, such as Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) with its emphasis on agon. Instead we should turn to Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games (1958), which identifies three additional game types and distinguishes specifically between: the desire to win by one’s merit in regulated competition (agon), the submission of one’s will in favor of anxious and passive anticipation of where the wheel will stop (alea), the desire to assume a strange personality (mimicry), and, finally, the pursuit of vertigo (ilinx).113

The game of agon refers to a contest in which both competitors have equal chances. Alea, conversely, shows a situation in which the player cannot influence the outcome and is hence subject to the workings of fate. Ilinx refers to a game in which the stable perceptions of the conscious state are replaced with trance-like intoxication. Mimicry, finally, is a game in which the player becomes someone else – as during carnival, ‘the subject makes believe or makes others believe that he is someone other than himself. He [...] temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another’.114 When this type of game is driven too far, ‘a kind of split personality is observed [...] between the real personality and the role of the actor’.115 Although Iser might not agree with the idea of the player’s ‘real’ personality, this view of mimicry accords with his interest in the actor’s ecstatic position. It is also important to note that Caillois’ account is not as neutral as Iser claims. Caillois is aware of the problems associated with ‘[d]aily competition’, but he claims nonetheless that ‘the narrow door that gives access to civilization and history (to progress and to a future), coincides with the substitution, as bases of collective existence, of the norms of alea and agon for the prestige of mimicry and ilinx’.116 Alea and ilinx, in fact, are ‘passive and destructive’ and manifest themselves in real life as an addiction to gambling and alcohol, respectively.117 In short, Caillois introduces a fourfold typology, in which games of contest are preferred to those of disguise, chance and intoxication. In The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser turns this typology into a tool for textual analysis by linking it to the fictionalizing acts, and modifying it in ways that again reveal his aesthetic preferences. In the literary text, he concedes, conflicts play an important role. In Iser’s account, the most important function of agon is

113 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. by Meyer Barash (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962 [1958]), p. 44. 114 Ibid., p. 19. 115 Ibid., p. 75. 116 Ibid., pp. 119, 141. 117 Ibid., p. 76.

188 —— Chapter 4 the way it confronts the heterogeneous ideological systems which the text has assigned to specific narrative perspectives. Since it pits the conventions of the repertoire against each other, this textual game can be linked to the fictionalizing act of selection. Furthermore, this kind of game is directed towards a specific result, and therefore requires a clear resolution or univocal interpretation. The game of chance is the inverse of agon, because literary alea refers to the unpredictable aspect of reading, namely the semantic relations that are created and transformed by the juxtaposition of textual fragments. In line with the act of combination, this ‘generator of chance’ connects textual passages in a manner that replaces semantic control with polysemous play.118 The game of disguise is associated with the theatrical ‘play’ of fictional subjects, as well as with the illusion generated by the text.119 This mimicry can also be linked with the act of self-disclosure, for it can either conceal or reveal its illusory aspirations via the ‘as-if’.120 Finally, Iser redefines ilinx by replacing Caillois’ notion of intoxication with a Bakhtin-esque ‘subversion whose “vertiginious” element consists in the carnivalization of all the positions assembled in the text’.121 Through its association with the jester or fool, this form of play undermines every textual position and leads to a disruption of ‘the stability of perception’.122 Even though ilinx cannot be connected to one of the fictionalizing acts, Iser’s argument implies, in direct contrast to Caillois, that it is the most important textual game. Above all, he thinks, literature is a game of disorientation. The importance of ilinx is emphasized in various ways. First, Iser’s redefinition of Caillois’ typology implies that agon and mimicry create a form of ‘instrumental play’ (by focusing on the connection with the existing world via norms and illusions) and alea and ilinx ‘free play’ (by moving beyond the existing world via the generation of new meanings through chance and subversion). Iser also feels that agon and alea are concerned with the outcome of the game, whereas mimicry and ilinx do not lead to a clear winner and loser, and can therefore be played indefinitely. Bearing in mind his interest in the creative potential and endless movement of play, it is only logical that he prefers ilinx to agon. The two aforementioned axes and their implications for his evaluation of these four types of game can be represented as follows:

118 119 120 121 122

Iser, Fictive, p. 261. Iser, Tristram, p. 99. Iser, Fictive, p. 262. Ibid. Ibid., p. 259.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 189

Result-oriented (–) Endless play (+)

instrumental play (–)

free play (+)

agon (contest) mimicry (illusion)

alea (chance) ilinx (subversion)

Figure 5: Iser’s Evaluation of Textual Games

Iser also asserts that the importance of ilinx-like structures has gradually increased. In contrast to the texts of earlier periods, he claims, postmodern literature no longer focuses on the resolution of conflicts: ‘older literature favored agon as the structure of the plot’, he says, but gradually mimicry and ilinx acquired more importance, even though ‘previously they had been rigidly channeled by masks and prevailing rituals’.123 Sketching a development that is the inverse of that mapped out by Caillois, Iser uses his revised typology of textual games to argue that result-oriented games have gradually become less important. In a similar fashion to his analyses of pastoral literature and philosophical theories, his account of play thus sketches a historical narrative which can be linked to the modern idea of reality as an unfinished context. The rise of mimicry and ilinx is a good thing, in Iser’s view, because he believes that such never-ending, self-subverting games approximate the true nature of play. It is also important to note that textual games do not occur separately in literary works. Despite Iser’s preferences, for instance, he does not believe that it is possible for a text exclusively to be made up of ilinx. As these four games appear to a certain degree in every literary text, Iser’s redefinition of Caillois’ typology does not aim to distinguish between texts of contest, chance, illusion and subversion, but to analyze how these different games are combined in specific literary texts and are associated with specific fictional characters and plotlines.124 The final level of textual play is that of the different modes or attitudes of playing. As Iser observes, the reader can deal with the aforementioned textual structures – the tension between denotative and figurative meanings, accommodating and assimilating schemata, regulatory and aleatory rules as well as the different textual games – in at least four ways. First, readers may opt for a semantic mode of playing, which ends when the meaning of the text is discovered. 123 Ibid., p. 264. 124 Iser’s principal example is Tristram Shandy, in which the military re-enactments led by Uncle Toby show a combination of agon and mimicry; Walter Shandy’s unpredictable struggle with reality connects agon and alea; and the carnivalization of literary tradition in Tristram Shandy’s metanarrative reveals an all-subverting form of ilinx. For further details, see Iser, Tristram. Elsewhere, he connects the self-disclosing role-play of Bottom and the unexpected consequences of the magic potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with mimicry and alea, respectively. See Wolfgang Iser, Spielstrukturen in Shakespeares Komödien. ‘Sommernachtstraum’ – ‘Was ihr wollt’. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), pp. 27, 22.

190 —— Chapter 4 Although it tries to achieve a certain result, this type of play still displays a form of endlessness because, as noted in The Act of Reading, interpretations are inevitably selective and open to future revision. Second, readers may choose an experiential mode of playing, in which they temporarily suspend their habitual attitudes in order to experience unknown ideas, emotions and situations. This mode is more dynamic than the previous one, but these new experiences are inevitably normalized and added to our habitual attitude, which again puts an end to the play movement. Third, readers may opt for a quasi-hedonistic mode of playing. In Iser’s view, proper aesthetic pleasure – that is, not entertainment – activates all our faculties, sensory and emotional as well as cognitive, leading to a fairly durable form of self-reflection. Alluding to the anthropological claims discussed earlier, Iser suggests that this approach ‘makes the reader into a player allowed to watch himself or herself playing a role’.125 The final and best mode of reading attends, with a term from Roland Barthes, to the ‘pleasure of the text’, which, according to Iser, leads to the most intense form of reading and playing. This derives from the fact that in this mode, the interactive movement between free and instrumental play, denotative and figurative meanings, imitative and symbolical schemata, regulative and aleatory rules, and the four games of the text, cannot be definitively stopped. In this mode of reading, readers are drawn into the process of textual play, leading to an ongoing modification of their habitual outlook rather than one which happens only once. Experiencing this ‘pleasure of the text’, the reading self slides into its own ‘groundlessness’, experiencing a remarkably malleable ‘condition prior to all becoming’.126 In theory, each of these modes can be applied to all types of texts, but The Fictive and the Imaginary nevertheless implies that the pleasure of the text is a mode particularly attuned to experimental writing such as that of Sterne and Beckett.127 It is clear, therefore, that Iser’s supposedly neutral account of play privileges a particular type of text. On each of the levels we have seen, he distinguishes between two broad options, one negative, one positive. The following table summarizes both varieties of play: 125 Iser, Fictive, p. 278. In an earlier essay, this ‘pleasure’ was still seen as the final and best mode of reading. See Prospecting, p. 259. In The Fictive and the Imaginary, however, this mode is no longer crucial, perhaps because it is associated with a ‘classical poetics’. Note also that Iser takes issue with Vaihinger’s account of artistic fictions because it is supposedly indebted to ‘classical aesthetics’. See Iser, Fictive, pp. 278, 169. 126 Ibid., p. 280. 127 Clearly, Sterne’s interest in ‘the operations of the mind’ and his ‘plumbing of the inner man’ may be associated with Beckett’s self-reflexive plumbing of the imagination. In fact, Iser’s study on Tristram Shandy argues that Sterne laid down the guidelines for ‘the experimental novel of High Modernism’, referring to both Virginia Woolf and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Hence, Iser’s archaeology of modernism continues unabated in the anthropological ‘phase’ of his oeuvre. See Iser, Tristram, pp. 79, 124, 127.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 191

Basic movement Signifier Schema Rules Games Mode

–

+

instrumental denotative imitation/accommodation regulative agon, mimicry meaning, experience

free figurative symbolization/assimilation aleatory alea, ilinx pleasure (of the text)

Figure 6: Negative and Positive Forms of Play

Thus, although Iser contends that the nature of play cannot and should not be defined in advance, he concludes that it should be considered a form of ‘transformation’.128 In a similar fashion to Castoriadis’ notion of magma, the proper form of textual play exhibits ‘the transformative tendency to bring to the fore whatever has been hidden by determinacy’.129 This multi-layered and dynamic account of textual play is important for both historical and methodological reasons. First, bearing in mind Iser’s analysis of pastoral literature, this account may be seen as an attempt to describe the flexible sign-relationships that emerge at the beginning of the modern age and culminate in the works of Beckett and postmodern literature. And it is interesting to note that the discussion of pastoral literature alludes to singing contests, unpredictable semantic connections and disguises, but does not include an equivalent of ilinx. Is a literary equivalent of ilinx only a relatively new, modernist achievement? Second, this account is important on a methodological level because it introduces a new set of conceptual tools with which we can describe both the structure of the text and the act of reading. In contrast to the abstract sections on the fictive and the imaginary, this account of play has clear practical relevance for textual exegesis.130 It also recalls Iser’s earlier work. The argument that Caillois’ four types of game are associated with different ‘anthropological dispositions’ is reminiscent, for instance, of the typology of comic forms from Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings.131 As Iser again uses it to describe the relationship between different narrative perspectives, it may even be linked to the typologies of The Act of Reading. Furthermore, in a section that was omitted in the English version, Iser claims that the interaction between free and instrumental play leads to the emergence of

128 Iser, Fictive, p. 271. 129 Ibid., p. 272. 130 I therefore disagree with Brook Thomas’s suggestion that Iser’s anthropological model does not help to ‘generate readings’. Thomas is only able to come to that conclusion, I think, because his summary of The Fictive and the Imaginary overlooks the crucial section on textual play. See Thomas, ‘The Fictive’, p. 627. 131 Iser, Fictive, p. 259.

192 —— Chapter 4 ‘the aesthetic [. ..], which at best lets itself be described discursively as an empty space in between [ein leeres Dazwischen]’.132 Related publications note that ‘[p]lay [. ..] could be considered the generic manifestation of the aesthetic in the text’ and that the ‘oscillation’, similar to ‘doubling’, triggered by the fictionalizing acts gives rise to the ‘aesthetic potential’ of the text – details which further strengthen the connection between these accounts and Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen.133 Moreover, since Iser emphasizes the unpredictable character of play, this stratified account of different textual levels may be seen as a more dynamic version of Ingarden’s equally stratified analysis of the literary work.134 In keeping with his attack on traditional interpretations in The Act of Reading, Iser also claims that every result of textual play is only a ‘supplement’, a partial meaning which should not be conflated with the text itself, the ‘matrix’ behind these supplements.135 Again, the best approach is not to search for a hidden meaning, but to describe the way in which the textual ‘score’ generates various readings. Finally, the idea that some forms of reading allow us to be simultaneously within and outside our own selves is related to notions such as the ‘aesthetic moment’, the ‘irrealization’ of the reading process, and the ‘ecstasy’ of the actor. Iser’s account of textual play may therefore be seen as a reformulation of his earlier views on meaning, modernity and humanity.

The Sense of Our Stagings As we have seen, Iser claims that fiction and the imagination are used in non-literary as well as literary practices, but in a pragmatic and inevitably truncated fashion; that literary reading, by contrast, makes full use of these human poten132 Iser, Fiktive, p. 409. 133 Iser, ‘The Aesthetic and the Imaginary’, p. 217; Wolfgang Iser, ‘Contemporary Literary Account of the Fictive’, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. by Michael Kelly, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 179–82 (p. 181). For a similar argument, see Iser, Prospecting, p. 247. 134 The emphasis on ilinx and the pleasure of the text may constitute an attack on the classical ideas which Iser associates with Ingarden, but both critics nevertheless describe the aesthetic experience in terms of a similar, quasi-erotic desire. For this ‘erotic model’ of the aesthetic experience, consider Iser’s Barthesian account of the pleasure of the text and Ingarden’s view of the ‘original emotion’. This emotion, Ingarden says, leads to the peculiar experience of ‘being in love with’ the attractive quality that caused it, and creates a form of ‘desire’ which ‘intoxicates us’. One of his examples for the original emotion, tellingly, is that of ‘a beautiful woman passing by’. See Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. by Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1937]), pp. 189, 190, 197, 192. 135 Iser, Fictive, p. 274.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 193

tials through the dynamic interaction between fictive transgressions and vague imaginings; and that the literary work shows various forms of play which navigate between old and new meanings and worlds, and may therefore assist in the development of new roles or masks. We have also seen that these anthropological reflections are used to shed light on the proto-novelistic pastoral fiction of the sixteenth century, the ludic novel of the eighteenth century and the self-reflexive prose of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, we have not yet come to Iser’s stance on what he calls ‘the most far-reaching problem posed by fiction’, namely ‘the question of why it exists at all’.136 The other elements of his literary anthropology already hint at the form his answer will take, but the question is only fully addressed at the very end of The Fictive and the Imaginary. His argument has two parts: first, he redefines the notion of representation, and second, he introduces the important concept of ‘staging’. Adding a final historical narrative to the list which began with his accounts of pastoralism, philosophy and play, Iser claims that the notion of mimesis or imitation gradually acquired more performative connotations through the ages. The performative dimension of representation is still fairly minimal in Plato and Aristotle, but this dimension increases when the closed cosmos of antiquity disintegrates and artists have to capture the open world typical of the Blumenbergian modern age. As Iser maintains in a essay on Shakespeare’s comedies, the relative weight of mimesis and performance already begins to shift in these early modern texts.137 The rise of performance can also be inferred from the twentiethcentury aesthetic theories of Gombrich, Paul Ricoeur and Theodor Adorno, Iser demonstrates in The Fictive and the Imaginary. Because of the growing awareness that imitation does not consist in the simple reduplication, as if in a mirror, of pregiven realities, a theorist like Adorno can conclude that works of art should accentuate their performative rather than imitative character by puncturing the illusions they create: ‘the work of art, when drawn into language, can avoid reifying the nonbeing [i.e. its object] only by destroying its own “imagery”’.138 In Iser’s terms, works of art should be self-disclosing fictions. And, he adds, this performative, self-disclosing quality is especially evident in the representation of objects that cannot actually be imitated. The mimesis of existing objects already has a performative dimension, but this is intensified in literary texts, as they frequently attempt to evoke or ‘stage’ intangible and unknowable phenomena; whereas The Act of Reading implied that literary fictions mainly serve as sociocritical complements to contemporary ideas, Iser’s literary anthropology adds that they also offer anthropological representations or, better, ‘stagings’ of inac136 Ibid., p. 23. 137 See Iser, Spielstrukturen, p. 8. 138 Iser, Fictive, p. 291.

194 —— Chapter 4 cessible phenomena. As he pointed out in The Implied Reader, literary texts respond to two types of gap: those that are peculiar to a specific ‘historical period’ and those that are typical of broader ‘human affairs’.139 This notion of staging, which is associated with ideas such as ‘doubling’, ‘the play of the text’ and ‘the recipient’s imagination’, is a crucial part of literary anthropology.140 The concept of staging is based partly on Frank Kermode’s insights. In his famous study The Sense of an Ending, Kermode observes that the births and deaths, the beginnings and endings, of individuals and societies can never be known. They cannot be ignored, however, if we want to understand the life taking place in between these unfathomable phenomena. In order to make sense of our existence, we need to link these beginnings and endings into meaningful patterns by means of fictional narratives. Kermode names these patterns ‘concord-fictions’, for they assign meaning to these phenomena by establishing a fictional form of ‘concord’ between them. In a similar fashion to the philosophical theories discussed by Iser, especially the work of Vaihinger, Kermode distinguishes between a positive and a negative type of concord-fiction. When they hide their fictional status, they regress into dubious ‘myths’, and when they reveal their inability to provide definitive answers to existential enigmas, they are proper ‘fictions’.141 Iser largely agrees with Kermode’s argument. For he too thinks that fictions enable us to deal with ‘the cardinal points of our existence – the beginning and the end’.142 In addition, he concurs that some fictions (notably the stories provided by myth and religion) profess to capture these phenomena fully, whereas other fictions (especially artistic literary works) truthfully reveal their provisional character. In Iser’s terminology, the former are explanations, the latter stagings. Despite their affinities, these two accounts of fiction do not coincide completely, and it is useful to consider their different emphases. As Kermode himself noted in the second edition of The Sense of an Ending, ‘Wolfgang Iser [...] develops and qualifies the idea of the concord fiction’.143 Upon closer inspection, there are at least two differences between concord-fictions and stagings. First, concord-fictions are formal patterns that contain the incomprehensibility of life, whereas stagings are textual experiences that explore it. If Kermode focuses on 139 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1972]), p. 267. 140 Iser, Prospecting, pp. 246, 260, 243. Regarding the link between staging and mental images, consider also the observation that ‘[o]nly the imagery generated by the imagination can bring to life unfathomable subjectivity and also the other mysteries that Tristram suspects to be lurking behind the appearances of things’. Iser, Tristram, p. 84. 141 Kermode, Sense, p. 39. 142 Iser, Fictive, p. 297. 143 Kermode, Sense, p. 191.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 195

the ways in which narrative patterns enable us to connect and make sense of these unknowable endings and beginnings, Iser is mainly concerned with how the disruption of their conventional representations liberates these ineffable experiences, and reveals the plurality of life. As he notes: literary staging does not aim primarily at capturing the beginning and end in stories or pictures; instead, it seeks to unfold what has been fenced in by the cardinal mysteries. [. . .] Since the ever-expanding range of life defies completion, there is no final limit to what is possible. But it appears that we still want access to this infinity of possibilities, and such access is provided by staging.144

In an argument that appears remarkably similar to that of Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, Iser contends that literary stagings invalidate definitive explanations of the beginning and the end to reveal the wide range of possibilities inherent in ‘life’. For a better understanding of the difference between concordfictions and stagings, consider the problematic beginning of Tristram Shandy. In Iser’s analysis, Sterne’s book disrupts the conventional opening of novels to show that other beginnings are possible and that the plurality of life cannot be captured by established patterns: ‘[w]hat appears to be a disadvantage nevertheless turns out to be advantageous, for the elusive character of the beginning means that it can be imagined and re-imagined without end’.145 Kermode, by contrast, would probably focus on the fact that even such unexpected beginnings are ultimately part of a narrative pattern that allows us to contain the plurality of life and to make sense of the lives represented in the novel. A second important difference is the fact that, according to Iser, the beginning and the end are not the only experiences which call for literary stagings. Apart from our births and deaths, which cannot be experienced, there are, he argues, also existential phenomena which can be experienced but not fully known. Hence ‘being in the midst of life’, not just its origin and conclusion, calls for literary staging.146 Out of a number of possible examples, Iser focuses in particular on love, for ‘[l]ove is probably the most intense of these experiences, and it is also the most central topic of literary staging’.147 And, indeed, it is remarkable 144 Iser, Fictive, p. 298. 145 Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sternes ‘Tristram Shandy’. Inszenierte Subjektivität (Munich: Fink, 1987), p. 22. ‘Was wie ein Nachteil aussieht, erweist sich dennoch als vorteilhaft; denn die Unerschließbarkeit des Anfangs ist Quell seiner unabschließbaren Vorstellbarkeit’. 146 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Fictionalizing. The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions’, New Literary History, 21.4 (1990), 939–55 (p. 952). 147 Iser, Fictive, p. 299. In other publications, he refers to the staging of politics, of dreams and of ‘the identity of the self, the group etc’. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Ist der Identitätsbegriff ein Paradigma für die Funktion der Fiktion?’, Poetik und Hermeneutik VIII. Identität, ed. by Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (Munich: Fink, 1979), pp. 725–29 (p. 728). In addition, Iser’s account implies

196 —— Chapter 4 that ‘love is a compulsive theme of literature, yet the repeated and detailed exploration of love does not become tedious’.148 Iser claims that we do not mind returning continually to this experience because we can never truly grasp it. The staging of love, like that of death and other similarly elusive experiences, does not aim to determine it, but to portray alternative possibilities: ‘the staging of evidential experiences is concerned with laying out alternatives for instantaneous certainty’.149 By confronting us with this endless series of other lives and loves, literature enables us to distance ourselves from these experiences, as it were, and to grasp better what is happening to us in equivalent situations. Iser formulates this argument in a more concrete fashion in his discussion of Montemayor’s pastoral romance: [The fictionalizing acts of literature] put in brackets whatever is, in order to allow a repetition under different circumstances and conditions. In Diana this self-fictionalizing arises out of the lovesickness suffered by the shepherds and shepherdesses, and since their desires cannot be fulfilled, they are driven to distance themselves from what they are inextricably engaged in. By repeating their sorrows in their songs (which is tantamount to staging themselves), they open up ways of exceeding the limits of circumstances that oppress them.150

A staging such as this may only be an illusion, but its distance still allows the shepherds to transcend whatever has afflicted them. The experience of love cannot be definitively described, however, for it always contains an irreducible individuality. Your love, like your death, is yours and yours alone. Clarifying Iser’s thoughts by linking them to Heidegger, Paul B. Armstrong has noted that ‘[e]xistence [...] abounds in experiences that are irreducibly “one’s own”, and one of the incomparable miracles of reading is that it allows us to experience for ourselves the “jemeinig” experiences of others’.151 That, in a nutshell, is what staging does. Apart from death and love, Iser also refers to personal identity in this context. Returning to his claims about masks and actors, he argues that literary stagings also enable us to make sense of the unfathomable ground of man, mentioning Plessner’s idea of ‘the decentered position of human beings, who are but do

that the fictive and the imaginary are themselves unfathomable experiences, and therefore require their own form of staging. In general terms, the set of phenomena which require a literary staging is an open one. 148 Iser, ‘Liebe und Verwandlung’, p. 149. ‘[d]ie Liebe ist eine obsessive Thematik der Literatur, ohne daß ihr ständig wiederholtes Ausbreiten zu Langeweile führen würde’. 149 Iser, Fictive, p. 299–300. 150 Ibid., p. 54. 151 Armstrong, ‘Defense’, p. 113.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 197

not “have” themselves’.152 As Iser notes, the stagings of literature satisfy the deeply-ingrained human need to achieve some sort of self-presence, however provisional and illusory. For Iser, literary staging lays bare ‘the extraordinary plasticity of human beings, who, precisely because they do not seem to have a determinable nature, can expand into an almost unlimited range of culturebound patternings’.153 The impossibility of becoming present to ourselves – of ever fully knowing who we are – ensures the possibility of becoming different from ourselves. Our ‘limitless human self-cultivation’ is made possible, in other words, by our unfathomable foundation, by the fact that the defining trait of human beings is ‘at most a blank [Leerstelle], which has enticed people over and over again to fill it with their speculations’.154 This cultivation can best be seen in literature, Iser continues, as its overview of what is humanly possible is not constrained by the practical limitations which constrain our more worldly institutions. The upshot of these remarks is that literature, by evoking the protean social shapes of human beings, reminds us time and again of the fact that we are players, who continually create and adopt new roles and masks. From the perspective of literary anthropology, then, literary texts are performative representations, which stage intangible existential experiences, such as death, love and identity, by evoking alternative lives. Since a fictional staging targets those areas where knowledge and experience reach their limits, it offers a unique form of quasi-knowledge. In Iser’s view, staging is ‘an anthropological mode that can claim a status equal to that of knowledge and experience insofar as it allows us to conceive what knowledge and experience cannot penetrate’.155 Stagings do not provide us with actual knowledge, of course, for they always highlight their own provisional nature. In this respect, literary works do not propose verifiable ‘theses’, but instead explore existential ‘themes’.156 In addition, literary texts accentuate the provisional nature of these stagings by subverting

152 Iser, Fictive, p. 296. 153 Ibid., p. 297. 154 Iser, Fictive, p. 297; Wolfgang Iser, ‘Kultur. Ein emergentes Phänomen’, Ansprachen und Vorträge anläßlich der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde an Professor Dr. Wolfgang Iser, ed. by Kordula Lindner-Jarchow (Siegen: Universität Siegen, 2004), pp. 19–37 (p. 20). 155 Iser, Fictive, p. 299. 156 According to Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s not dissimilar argument, literary works deal with existential themes, not philosophical theses. Quoting Monroe Beardsley, they argue that ‘[a] theme [is] something that can be thought about, or dwelt upon, but it is not something that can be called true or false. What I [call] “thesis”, however, is precisely something [in] the work that can be called true or false’. The former is important in literary reading, they argue, the latter is not. See Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1994), p. 287.

198 —— Chapter 4 conventional modes of representation. For example, Iser observes with regard to passion that the representation of this ‘basic human impulse’ is of a dual character: it is inevitably based on conventional forms, but these ultimately deprive passion of its nature, and therefore it can only truly be captured ‘through [the] distortion of forms’.157 In different words, experiences such as love can only be represented in never-ending games that do not allow the reader to pinpoint the essence of these experiences: ‘[b]ecause of the shifting of games love appears as a gliding through the variety of its manifestations, which can never coincide with love itself’.158 Moreover, the staging of these elusive experiences leads to the more general lesson ‘that life exceeds its depiction and can, as it were, only be theatrically staged’.159 In this respect, the multi-perspectival genre of the novel is particularly important for Iser, because the diverse character of life implies ‘that writing needs standpoints whose discontinuous multiplicity spotlights the lack of a grand-stand view’.160 Finally, he claims that the form of new stagings is shaped by old ones; stagings ‘can be abandoned again, although then the negated [...] contrivances will imprint themselves on those that follow, imbuing the changing requirements of staging with traces of history’.161 As this remark suggests, literary anthropology investigates the changing ways in which literary texts evoke simulacra of love, death and other limit experiences. In this sense, The Fictive and the Imaginary traces a research programme that still awaits further development.

Literary Anthropologies It should now be clear that The Fictive and the Imaginary occupies a crucial place in Iser’s oeuvre. As his accounts of pastoral fiction, playful textual relationships and human ecstasy indicate, the book offers yet another version of his reflections on modernity, meaning and humanity, but also refines various aspects of his earlier work. It reformulates the model of The Act of Reading in terms of the three fictionalizing acts, emphasizing the self-disclosing nature of literary fictions. Furthermore, Iser’s accounts of pastoral and philosophical fiction, as well as his analysis of the imaginary, shed light on the historical preconditions of his view of

157 Iser, Prospecting, p. 114. 158 Iser, Spielstrukturen, p. 24. ‘[d]urch die Verschiebung der Spiele erscheint die Liebe als ein Gleiten durch die Vielfalt ihrer Manifestationen, die niemals mit der Liebe selbst zusammenfallen kann’. 159 Iser, Tristram, p. 10. 160 Ibid., p. 69. 161 Iser, Fictive, p. 301.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 199

fiction and mental images; and they reveal, once more, the importance of Blumenberg’s conception of the modern age. The model of textual play modifies Roger Caillois’ argument in ways that make it fit into Iser’s theory of transformative reading. In addition, Iser develops Kermode’s notion of concord-fiction, arguing that the performative stagings of literature offer us historically conditioned versions of themes, such as love and death, which are central to human existence. These literary stagings are akin to the absolute metaphors, archetypes and even the metaphysical qualities discussed in previous chapters. And these playful explorations of other lives and loves, Iser concludes, allow human beings to experience fully their actor-like condition. However, as far as Iser’s own development is concerned, the most important aspect of The Fictive and the Imaginary is the way it refines his earlier anthropological reflections. In the previous chapters, we saw that Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings already analyzes the anthropological function of comedy, and that Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen considers the link between art and death. Similarly, Iser’s texts on Eliot and Beckett posit ideas that are central to his later literary anthropology, such as the difference between representation and reality, and the importance of continued play. Furthermore, The Act of Reading already mentions the ‘aleatory rule’ of reading.162 The concept of ‘ecstasy’ might be connected to earlier observations on the so-called aesthetic moment, the problematic and inaccessible self, the impact of reading and the ‘irrealization’ that takes place in the reading process. Finally, in a revealing passage, The Implied Reader already mentions the crucial opposition between fictions that disclose and fictions that mask their false nature, adding that the former are particularly appropriate for evoking experiences which escape our cognitive control: ‘precisely because they are consciously false, they can be adapted to the most diverse situations; especially those which have the character of “borderline-situations” [Grenzsituationen]’.163 This remark anticipates the later notion of ‘staging’, but it is described here using a term from Karl Jaspers, which indicates that this central concept of literary anthropology might even be linked to a thinker who figured prominently in Iser’s dissertation. In other words, many of Iser’s anthropological insights were already present in his earlier work. The need for caution in applying a strict chronological narrative to Iser’s oeuvre is demonstrated further by the following passages from early essays on, re-

162 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]), p. 230. 163 Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (Munich: Fink, 1972), p. 405. ‘[g]erade weil sie bewußt falsch sind, können sie den verschiedensten Lagen angepaßt werden; am besten solchen, die den Charakter von “Grenzsituationen” haben’.

200 —— Chapter 4 spectively, Marvell (1957), Eliot (1958), mannerism (1960) and Shakespeare (1961): wit achieves for Marvell what the imagination would later effect for Coleridge. [.. .] For him, none of these realms of imagery exhausts the poetical truth of love.164 We are continually disturbed and cannot come to rest in full understanding. Gottfried Benn called fascination the most decisive but neglected concept of modern aesthetics. Fascination is the category with which we can grasp [Eliot’s] Four Quartets, which reach deep into us as unrest and continued questioning.165 Only this awareness of the historicity of literary phenomena turns art into, in Novalis’s words, a ‘progressive anthropology’.166 [T]hrough the play in the play the central conception of the play [shrinks] to the ‘As If’ of an adopted perspective [. . .]. The dialectical relationship of these two perspectives yields a decisive insight into Shakespeare’s anthropology. Man is characterized by his protean character.167

As these passages demonstrate, Iser’s work has always been a literary anthropology of sorts. For even these early texts treat issues such as love and the imagination, the fascinating ‘pleasure’ of reading, and the protean potential of man. Given that his famous model of reading only truly emerged in The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading, we could even argue (overstating the case somewhat) that his literary anthropology actually precedes his ‘reader response criticism’. But perhaps it is wrong to oppose these two aspects of his theory; in Iser’s work, at least, the study of literary reception is inextricably linked to that of anthropological play. The preceding ‘anthropological’ reflections are, I think, more compelling

164 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Andrew Marvell. “To his Coy Mistress”’, Die neueren Sprachen (1957), 555–77 (pp. 573, 576). ‘wit leistet für Marvell das, was später für Coleridge die imagination bewirken sollte. [. . .] Keiner der Bildbereiche schöpft für ihn die poetische Wahrheit der Liebe aus’. 165 Wolfgang Iser, ‘T. S. Eliots Four Quartets. Eine Stiluntersuchung’, Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 3 (1958), 192–204 (p. 204). ‘Wir werden ständig aufgestört und können uns nicht im Verstandenhaben beruhigen. Faszination nannte Gottfried Benn den entscheidenden, aber vernachlässigten Begriff der modernen Ästhetik. Faszination ist die Kategorie, mit der wir die Four Quartets greifen können, die als Unruhe und Weiterfragen in uns hineinreichen’. 166 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Manieristische Metaphorik in der Englischen Dichtung’, GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift, 10 (1960), 266–87 (p. 287). ‘Erst diese Erkenntnis der Geschichtlichkeit literarischer Phänomene macht die Kunst, in den Worten von Novalis, zu einer “progressiven Anthropologie”’. 167 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Das Spiel im Spiel. Formen dramatischer Illusion bei Shakespeare’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 198 (1961), 209–26 (pp. 210, 218). ‘[D]urch das Spiel im Spiel [schrumpft] die zentrale Vorstellung des Dramas zum “Als-Ob” einer angenommenen Perspektive [...]. Aus der Dialektik dieser beiden Perspektiven ergibt sich ein entscheidender Hinweis auf Shakespeares Anthropologie. Der Mensch bestimmt sich durch seinen proteischen Charakter’.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 201

than their limited reception outside Germany suggests; but that does not mean that Iser’s argument is unproblematic. First, as we have seen, he seeks to describe the unique function of literary reading in order to counter the rise of other media. As Belting’s Bild-Anthropologie indicates, however, Iser’s anthropological reflections do not apply solely to literature. The different images which we create – from coats of arms to photographs and wax models – also ‘stage’ our deaths and reveal our actor-like nature.168 But if other artistic media can also do what literature does, we may ask ourselves whether the practice of literature as described by Iser is really as distinct and crucial as he would have us believe. Moreover, Iser’s model is also applicable to non-fictional texts. For many, if not all, of his remarks regarding the nature and function of literary fiction could also be applied to a work like Julian Barnes’s Nothing to be Frightened of (2008): a nonfiction novel which explores the diversity of life by cataloguing the death scenes of various famous figures, and by exploring the author’s own impenetrable beginning and ending. If this book demonstrates that there are ‘so many different doors, even if they are all marked Exit’, does this not imply that the function of non-fictional writing can be similar to that ascribed to literary fiction?169 Hence it could be argued that the link between fictional and non-fictional literature is much stronger than Iser’s model allows for. As shown in the comparison with Dorrit Cohn’s narratological work, literary anthropology does not pay enough attention to the linguistic mechanisms of literary fiction and non-fiction either.170 And Iser’s rejection of fantasy writing further implies that his model is not sufficiently general to capture all forms of literary fiction. Given his emphasis on never-ending forms of play, he is obviously most interested in works that call for rereading rather than reading. In this sense, Iser’s anthropological model still

168 At a certain point, Iser himself suggests that the doubling and oscillation of fiction also crop up in visual art. See Iser, ‘Das Fiktive im Horizont’, p. 552. For a more detailed comparison of Iser and Belting, see Ben De Bruyn, ‘Death – Image – Medium. The Anthropological Criticism of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Belting’, Image and Narrative, 15 (2006), 〈http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/iconoclasm/debruyn.htm〉. 169 Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of (London: Vintage Books, 2009 [2008]), p. 122. We might respond to this problem by saying that Barnes’s work has a fictional quality as well, of course. But in doing so, we risk losing the sense of unreality and imaginative production that is so crucial to Iser’s definition of fiction. 170 It might be possible to strengthen Iser’s case for the specific contribution of literature concerning the representation of important existential moments. In discussing the mimesis of a dying consciousness, Cohn remarks that literary fiction ‘is able to represent an experience that cannot be conveyed by “natural discourse” in any manner or form’. See Cohn, Distinction, p. 22. Perhaps literary fiction stages themes such as love, identity and death because of its unique ability to represent the usually inaccessible individual moment of dying, of being in love, of living and so forth.

202 —— Chapter 4 suffers from some of the problems that plagued the reception theory of The Act of Reading. There is also a clear tension between the historical and the anthropological dimensions of his argument. If it is really true that literary fictions play an important anthropological role, not only in the sense that they represent existential issues but also that they actively participate in the creation and transformation of new human roles, why argue that they only emerge in the modern age? Iser might respond by saying that, indeed, literature has always engaged with important existential questions, but has only recently started to reflect critically on the existing representations of these themes. Truly non-conventional, self-disclosing fictions are a relatively new achievement, he might claim. Yet this argument is not entirely convincing. Surely premodern works also undermine conventional representations of phenomena such as love and death? Furthermore, instead of bewailing the decline of literature and reading, a truly anthropological account of fiction, play and reading should consider the ways in which these practices are now being handled, irrespective of whether this corresponds with established conceptions of them. The hypothesis that literary reading offers a distinct form of fictional play that is antagonistic to popular culture, for instance, is challenged by recent research, which argues for the growing interpenetration and cross-fertilization of literary and popular culture.171 In any case, it is clear that Iser does not pay sufficient attention to new media and their implications for our ‘culture of reading [Lesekultur]’.172 Another significant problem is that The Fictive and the Imaginary often claims that a certain object cannot be defined, before proceeding to define that very object. Concerning human nature, for instance, Iser rejects any appeal to ‘anthropological constants’, saying that, as human beings, we are ‘the plenum of our possibilities’.173 Untroubled by the inconsistency, he later argues that literature is important because it evokes experiences which we all share, such as love and death. Whatever our differences, it seems, these experiences are an invariable feature of the human condition. In that sense, I do not agree with the claim that the play of the text described in literary anthropology ‘reveals no constants’; nor am I convinced that an interest in enduring themes would be a fun171 For a detailed account of the interplay between literary and popular culture in the early twenty-first century, see Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010). Also consider Chapter 3, in which I provide a brief summary of his views and their potential implications for reception theory. 172 Rainer Warning, ‘Rezeptionsforschung. Historischer Rückblick und Perspektiven’, Wissenschaft und Systemveränderung. Rezeptionsforschung in Ost und West – eine konvergente Entwicklung?, ed. by Gunter Schandera, Holger Dainat and Wolfgang Adam (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), pp. 57–77 (p. 64). 173 Iser, Prospecting, p. 265; Iser, Fictive, p. 303.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 203

damental problem, even if it is not entirely consistent with some of Iser’s claims.174 To my mind, Terry Eagleton is right when he states that an emphasis on cultural differences alone is misguided, for ‘[h]ow could anyone imagine that the various cultural forms assumed by, say, death matter more than the reality of death itself?’.175 Furthermore, Iser frequently criticizes approaches that reify fiction, the imagination and play, failing to see that his own model privileges a specific reading of each of these phenomena, emphasizing their transgressive, playful and transformative qualities respectively. He claims paradoxically that we can never fully grasp these phenomena, but can still see them ‘as they truly are’ in certain works of literature and philosophy. But if these phenomena are truly elusive, how can we speak of a ‘more genuine form of fiction’, of the imaginary ‘as itself’, of the experiential mode of reading as being ‘undoubtedly closer to the text game’ or of subjectivity ‘as itself’?176 Finally, The Fictive and the Imaginary confuses the reader by introducing many terms that are very similar, or are defined in similar ways. What is the exact difference, for instance, between fiction, doubling and representation, between the aesthetic, play and the imaginary? This flexible use of terms may fit into Iser’s ‘open’ terminology (which will be the subject of the following chapter), but the reader cannot help but wonder whether these closely related notions do not confound rather than clarify the issue. In sum, literary anthropology needs to be adapted and corrected in certain respects, even if it offers stimulating suggestions for future research on the distinctiveness or non-distinctiveness of fiction, the connection between literature and play, and the reason for reading aesthetic fictions.

Example 4: China Mie´ville, The City & the City As its title suggests, China Mie´ville’s The City & The City (2009) is a novel that explicitly concerns itself with issues such as doubling. The novel tells the strange story of two rivalling city states, Besz´el and Ul Qoma, which have separate laws and citizens, but exist in the same physical area and overlap to an extent. Vaguely situated near the real locations of Turkey and the Balkans, the fictional city of Besz´el is made up of ‘total’ areas that are only in Besz´el, of ‘alter’ areas only in Ul 174 Pross, ‘Textspiele’, p. 167. 175 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 193. As Brian Boyd notes, anthropologists have come to the conclusion that ‘their stress on human diversity ha[s] led them to overlook human universals’. Without dismissing contextual and individual differences, he says, we should take into account the ‘psychic unity of mankind’. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories. Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 22, 21. 176 Iser, Fictive, pp. 104, 241, 277; Iser, Tristram, p. 20.

204 —— Chapter 4 Qoma, of ‘crosshatched’ areas that are both in Besz´el and Ul Qoma – with some buildings and people belonging to one city, other buildings and people belonging to another – and of ‘dissensi’, or areas that are disputed. Of particular interest are the crosshatched areas, where the citizens of either city have to pretend not to see, hear, smell or react to people and events in the other city. To ensure they do not interact with citizens who inhabit the same physical space but come from a different legal realm, both locals and foreigners are trained to identify colours, buildings, postures and clothes quickly as belonging to one city or another. This skill enables citizens to decide whether they are allowed to see these sights, or whether they are obliged to ‘unsee’ them. Failure to observe these boundaries – for example, intercity smuggling, unintentional traffic accidents, murders – is called ‘Breach’ and is dealt with surreptitiously by the omnipresent and mysterious power that exists in the unclaimed areas between the cities. Within this remarkable fantasy setting, Mie´ville’s novel relates the story of a Besz´ police inspector who is investigating the murder of a female archaeology student. It is a compelling exercise to read this fantasy novel in the light of Iser’s literary anthropology because, as we have seen, this is the sort of literature of which he is particularly critical. Despite this, I will show that his model sheds light on various aspects of the novel, and that its descriptive reach hence undermines his normative claim about fantasy writing. Clearly belonging to the socio-critical rather than the escapist type of fantasy literature, The City & The City reveals the author’s reaction to contemporary reality by its acts of selection. Illustrating that the boundary between the real and the fictive is indeed far from strict, the novel refers to various elements of reality, including Van Morrison, the Second World War, The Great Escape, Schrödinger etc.177 Literary allusions abound: authors such as Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka are mentioned in the acknowledgments, and the novel itself refers to a fictional passage by none other than Laurence Sterne.178 More interesting still are the many references to objects and events that are slightly modified versions of reality. Making its connections to the real world explicit, the story evokes fictional versions of phenomena such as ‘immigration training’, ‘[r]obust interrogations’, ‘refugee camp[s]’, the illegal trade in historical ‘artefacts’ and political tensions in ‘[s]plit’ cities like ‘Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin’.179 Occasionally, the story even combines words to mark out its fictional modifications, as in ‘half-arrest’ or ‘glasnostroika’.180 In its evocation of non-existent worlds, fantasy literature has to accentuate the modifications it makes to reality; and this implies

177 178 179 180

Mie´ville, The City & The City, pp. 37, 60, 263, 295. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., pp. 56, 165, 227, 272, 74. Ibid., pp. 28, 161.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 205

that it offers particularly perspicuous instances of fictional selection and modification, that is, of the ways of worldmaking that fascinate Iser. What is particularly intriguing about Mie´ville’s story, of course, is the fact that it is an instance of the two-world fictions that Iser discusses in The Fictive and the Imaginary. As we have seen, Iser argues that the evocation of two worlds in pastoral fiction prompts readers to compare these differing universes, training them to reflect upon the differences between reality and its fictional modifications. In a similar fashion, the evocation of Besz´el and Ul Qoma prompts the reader to reflect upon the differences between both cities – the former ancient and dilapidated, the latter an emergent economic power and proto-totalitarian state – as well as their differences with the real world. The novel often draws the reader’s attention to the differences and similarities between its two fictional worlds, as can be seen in its many allusions to structures in one city which are the ‘topolganger’ of structures in the other.181 This duality becomes particularly clear when the Besz´ protagonist has to travel to Ul Qoma, and is subjected to a form of citizen training in which he learns to block out stimuli from his home town and to focus on their Ul Qoman counterparts: They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besz´el with the Besz´ buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbours minimized with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besz´el would recede and Ul Qoma shine.182

This passage can be read as a clear illustration of Iser’s notion of doubling, and the related interplay between background and foreground. He would say that the explicit attention paid to these differences within the fiction heightens the reader’s sensitivity to the points of contrast with ‘ordinary’ reality. These procedures thus trigger a comparison of worlds in the mind of the reader, who not only compares Besz´el and Ul Qoma, but also starts to contrast these fictional worlds with his own reality. Iser’s model may also be used to demonstrate that The City & The City is composed of various text games. As its genre might lead us to expect, this crime novel pays significant attention to agon, detailing the conflict between murderer and investigator, as well as between the different ideological factions that constitute this particular fictional universe. There is also a passage in the novel in which the protagonist experiences an ilinx-like situation. At a certain point, he is able to see both cities at the same time, which is remarkably disorientating, as the asyndetic catalogue of impressions reveals: 181 Ibid., pp. 132, 144, 215, 234, 275. 182 Ibid., pp. 133.

206 —— Chapter 4 I realized I did not know which city we were in. [...] He walked me down the middle of the crosshatched road. My sight seemed to untether as with a lurching Hitchcock shot, some trickery of dolly and depth of field, so the street lengthened and its focus changed. Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up. Sound and smell came in: the calls of Besz´el; the ringing of its clocktowers; the clattering and old metal percussion of the trams; the chimney smell; the old smells; they came in a tide with the spice and Illitan yells of Ul Qoma, the clatter of a militsya copter, the gunning of German cars. The colours of Ul Qoma light and plastic window displays no longer effaced the ochres and stone of its neighbour, my home. ‘Where are you?’ Ashil said. [...] ‘I... [...] He tapped my chest. ‘Breathe’.183

As this montage of sense impressions demonstrates, the protagonist’s very sense of place and identity is subverted. As an aside, the fact that this experience is described in cinematic terms (Hitchcock, dolly, close-up), is arguably an indication that literary culture and popular media are not as distinct as Iser thinks. Most importantly, perhaps, the novel also displays forms of mimicry. At a certain point, the Besz´ inspector disguises himself by wearing ‘a jacket that was a genuine Ul Qoman design’ and both he and an Ul Qoman visitor try to cross the border into Besz´el wearing the ‘disguise’ of Ul Qoman police uniforms.184 These passages are important, because they show that the behaviour of citizens in both cities is a theatrical performance of sorts, requiring the knowledge and use of certain behavioural scripts. The importance of knowing these scripts is driven home at the end of the novel, when their ambiguous use – behaving in ways that are not identifiably Besz´ or Ul Qoman, and that hence may be illegal for citizens from either city – almost allows the murderer to escape. As he cannot be identified as being in one of either cities, agents of neither can apprehend him legally: ‘[h]e shrugged again, with a mannerism neither Besz´ nor Ul Qoman. [...] How expert a citizen, how consummate an urban dweller and observer, to mediate those million unnoticed mannerisms that marked out civic specificity, to refuse either aggregate of behaviours’.185 The passages about disguises also demonstrate that people are able to adopt the scripts and roles of other communities, and are hence flexible actors who cannot be pinned down to a single role. Indeed, at the end of the novel, the protagonist even acquires a new identity and name. By exploring themes of identity and games of social mimicry, Iser might observe, Mie´ville complicates the straightforward agonistic structure of the crime story. Thus Iser’s normative claims regarding fantasy writing fail to convince. The reader of works such as The City & The City evidently does not indulge in an escapist fantasy, but explores crucial anthropological questions about social iden183 Ibid., pp. 252, 253–54. 184 Ibid., pp. 199, 230. 185 Ibid., p. 297.

Fictions, Roles and Games —— 207

tity and perception. The reader is not simply looking forward to the conclusion – who did it and why? –, but is also persistently reminded of the fact that we block out certain parts of our urban experience, neglecting certain buildings, events and persons. The work leads us to wonder whom we habitually see and ‘unsee’ while walking through our cities. What is more, this fantasy novel even features a scene which reflects, in a fashion truly reminiscent of Beckett, on the workings of the imagination: ‘It was not a soundless dark. It was not without intrusions. There were presences within it that asked me questions I could not answer, questions I was aware of as urgencies at which I failed. [. ..] What had touched me sent me not into mindless silence but into a dream arena where I was quarry’.186 Despite Iser’s different aesthetic preferences, then, the model of literary anthropology allows us to describe the fictional selections and modifications of a fantasy novel like The City & The City, as well as its use of doppelgängers and doublings, agon and mimicry, not to mention its evocation of our actor-like identities and chaotic imaginations. If it is shorn of Iser’s normative remarks, literary anthropology may yet have a promising future ahead of it.

186 Ibid., p. 241.

Chapter 5. The Recursions of Culture Manila is untranslatable.1

In a recent essay, Stephan Mussil returns to the Henry James short story we encountered in Chapter 3 in order, once more, to identify the ‘figure in the carpet’ of the title. Before offering his own interpretation, Mussil asserts the inadequacy of all previous readings, irrespective of whether they focus on ‘authorial intention, the reader’s response, ideology, or indeterminacy’.2 Referring explicitly to Iser’s analysis of the story in The Act of Reading, Mussil argues that in this instance the reader’s search for gaps and ways to fill them in is unnecessary: the elusive ‘figure in the carpet’, he claims, is present in the text itself, even though this ‘secret in spite of itself’ is not readily apparent to every reader. Thus, according to Mussil, Iser’s obsolete theory misses the true meaning of James’s short story: ‘Iser uses James’s story as a paradigm [but] the theory does not fit the text’.3 Mussil’s alternative is deceptively simple. He concludes, surprisingly, that the ‘figure in the carpet’ – the enigmatic meaning that both the characters and the readers of this story are trying to grasp – ‘is the whole text “The Figure in the Carpet”’.4 What critics and readers have failed to see, in short, is that the meaning of the text is that text itself. Mussil develops this formalist claim by considering the notion of recursion. This, as he observes with reference to Niklas Luhmann, Francisco Varela and Douglas Hofstadter, is a procedure akin to repetition, self-reference and embedding. As Hofstadter describes it succinctly in his seminal Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), recursion denotes the return of a similar element or pattern on different levels of the same structure.5 Examples of this procedure in literature include the narrative nesting of the mise-en-abıˆme (a story within a story), syntactic subordination (a sentence within a sentence), the use of quotation marks (within quotation marks) or, as in this sentence, parentheses (within parentheses). Broadening Hofstadter’s definition, Mussil claims that recursion is not ‘just the operation of nesting or embedding’, but is better conceived as ‘an operation that is repeat-

1 Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (London: Picador, 2010), p. 59. 2 Stephan Mussil, ‘“A Secret in Spite of Itself”. Recursive Meaning in Henry James’ “The Figure in the Carpet”’, New Literary History, 39.4 (2008), 769–99 (p. 786). 3 Ibid., p. 782. 4 Ibid., p. 787. 5 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid (London: Penguin, 1984 [1979]), p. 148–49.

210 —— Chapter 5 edly applied to its result’.6 His claim that literary meaning is a recursive phenomenon means that it is not determined by the author, the reader or the historical context, but by ‘the successive reapplication of textual elements’ instead.7 Whenever readers encounter a new textual element, in other words, they add it to the sum of the previous textual elements, reconfiguring their provisional interpretation as they go along. Applied to this story, the meaning of James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ derives from the redefinition, throughout the text, of the title’s significance, via such phrases as a ‘secret in spite of itself’, a ‘buried treasure’ and a ‘figure in a Persian carpet’. Mussil concludes that, rather than fill in rhetorical gaps, as Iser proposes, readers should investigate the ways in which texts reapply and reconfigure their constituent elements, disclosing further details about their titles, for example. Although not uninteresting, Mussil’s argument is flawed in two respects. First, he fails to acknowledge that Iser had already proposed a similar theory ten years earlier, in The Range of Interpretation, one, moreover, which also draws on Luhmann, Varela and Hofstadter. Mussil’s essay, therefore, presents us with a ‘caricature of Iser’ and leads us to wonder what the similarities and differences between their respective accounts of literary recursion might be.8 A second problem is that Mussil overstates the autonomy of the literary text and ignores the role of reception. In his view, interpretations which revolve around the author, reader or context imply that the text is in need of ‘an external explanatory context’, whereas that is not the case at all: ‘[a] literary text can only be explained sufficiently in terms of the textual elements themselves’.9 Hence, the literary text is seen as an independent and self-regulating semantic system. Admittedly, this view correctly stresses the importance of a text’s precise formulation (and hence is an improvement on Iser’s reception theory, if we bear Chapter 3 in mind), but it nevertheless ignores the fact that a text is nothing and does nothing unless it is picked up by a reader. The text may very well be a self-regulating semantic system but only if it is read. Both the connection between Mussil and Iser, and that between recursion and reception, can be clarified by closely examining the recursive model from The Range of Interpretation and, to a lesser extent, How to Do Theory. The lack of any in-depth discussion of these books and their intricate and often enigmatic arguments makes re-

6 Mussil, ‘Secret’, pp. 797, 787. 7 Ibid., pp. 787–88. 8 Bill Brown, ‘Reweaving the Carpet (Reading Stephan Mussil Reading Henry James)’, New Literary History, 39.4 (2008), 801–21 (p. 813). Brown mentions The Range of Interpretation, but he does not discuss the book in detail either. 9 Mussil, ‘Secret’, pp. 786, 795.

The Recursions of Culture —— 211

reading them even more essential.10 Until now, justice has not been done to this part of Iser’s thinking.11 Iser’s musings on recursion and related notions such as iteration, feedback and translation might be most perspicuous in his late works, but they are anticipated, in a pattern that should by now be familiar, in many of his earlier writings. To a certain degree, the idea of Weltanschauung from Iser’s dissertation might already be seen as a sort of cybernetic structure, given that it captures the way a person’s ideals are first projected onto the world and then altered by the pressures and demands of life. In The Implied Reader, he argues more explicitly that the stylistic shifts in Joyce’s Ulysses activate ‘a “feedback” effect’ between the chapters or at least between their representations in the mind of the reader.12 Iser generalizes this lesson in The Act of Reading. Drawing on the work of Jurij Lotman, he says we should view ‘the relation between text and reader as a kind of self-regulating system’, mentioning once again the ‘cybernetic [.. .] feedback’ taking place in the reading process.13 These systemic terms re-emerge in The Fictive and the Imaginary, for here Iser characterizes the pastoral romance as ‘an autopoetic system’ and refers to the ‘cybernetic’ structure of the subject’s selfdiscovery.14 As we will see in this chapter, he pursues this interest in cybernetic and recursive structures in his later writings on literary theory and interpretation. This shift toward recursion and interpretation can be traced clearly if we compare two of Iser’s essays on literary theory from the late 1970s and the early 1990s, respectively. In ‘Key Concepts in Current Literary Theory and the Imaginary’ (the essay was later included in Prospecting), Iser already introduced the central topics of How to Do Theory, namely the nature and history of literary theory, the confusion that arises from the plurality of critical methods, and the inevitable shortcomings of theoretical accounts of literature. The essay also identifies 10 The few accounts that exist include Sanford Budick, ‘The Emergence of Oedipus’ Blessing’, Partial Answers, 7.1 (2009), 63–85; and Eckhard Lobsien, ‘Literaturtheorie nach Iser’, in Der Begriff der Literatur, ed. by Alexander Löck and Jan Urbich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 207–22. 11 It is striking to see, for instance, that Brook Thomas and Paul B. Armstrong, two critics who have urged scholars to reconsider Iser’s later work, have themselves failed to address The Range of Interpretation and How to Do Theory. See Brook Thomas, ‘The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What’s Literature Have to Do with It?’ (review), American Literary History, 20.3 (2008), 622–31; Paul B. Armstrong, ‘In Defense of Reading. Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), pp. 87–113. 12 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1972]), p. 227. 13 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]), p. 67. 14 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1991]), pp. 57, 194.

212 —— Chapter 5 three ‘key terms’ of contemporary criticism, namely structure, function and communication, the discussion of which segues into a recapitulation of reception theory. None of these three terms and the associated approaches is fully satisfactory, however, because they all assume that the meaning of a literary text is crucial. In Iser’s view, the existence of interpretative disputes proves that we should not look for a single meaning, but instead for the elusive ‘imaginary’, which enables the text to continue generating new interpretations. He therefore concludes that the best theories of reading are concerned not with ‘interpretation’ or the identification of a specific meaning, but with ‘reception’ (hence the term ‘reception theory’) or the experience of the text’s ‘imaginary’ dimension.15 This argument is modified in Iser’s Theorie der Literatur. Eine Zeitperspektive [Theory of Literature. A Contemporary Perspective]. Once again, this essay distinguishes three broad approaches, arguing that theories of literature can focus on language, function or, interestingly, interpretation. Iser’s account of the first two themes recapitulates his familiar views on literary language and literary anthropology. More important is the discussion of ‘interpretation’, which appears here as an unexpected near-synonym of the ‘reception’ mentioned in the earlier text. The study of this dynamic form of interpretation, Iser says, serves three broad purposes. First, it heightens our awareness of critical presuppositions and arbitrates between the different readings of a literary work. Second, it highlights the ubiquity of interpretation and the flexibility of literary interpretation, in particular. The productive potential of interpretation, Iser proposes, is particularly evident in literary reading ‘as the interpretative reaction to the world is not constrained by pragmatic concerns in literature and is hence able to open out our ordinary interpretative stance into its unlimited potential’.16 Thus the literary uses of interpretation, as with those of fiction and play, are seen as much more flexible than their practical counterparts. Third, this approach transcends the realm of literature in a narrow sense by demonstrating that its flexible interpretations form a good model for non-reductive types of intercultural exchange. For Iser, literary texts teach us how a proper, reciprocal ‘intercultural discourse’ should look, which puts literary theory ‘on the way’, therefore, to a specific type of cultural studies.17 For Iser, this type of literary theory shows once and for all that cultures are not monolithic entities but, rather, interdependent processes.

15 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 234. 16 Wolfgang Iser, Theorie der Literatur. Eine Zeitperspektive (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1992), p. 27. ‘als die interpretierende Reaktion auf Welt in Literatur nicht an pragmatische Zwänge gebunden ist und daher unseren lebensweltlichen Interpretationsgestus in eine unbegrenzbare Vielfalt zu treiben vermag’. 17 Ibid., p. 32.

The Recursions of Culture —— 213

The upshot of this essay is hence that the study of reception is not the final destination of literary studies, but is just one stop on the way to a broader theory of intercultural interpretation. There is another meaningful difference between these essays. Whereas the first publication culminated in the study of the ‘imaginary’, the second concentrates instead on ‘translatability’ and the related notion of recursion.18 Iser argues in the later text that, despite its multiplicity of forms, literary theory has one overriding aim, namely to translate the surprising experience of reading into a cognitive framework. Hence, what unites literary theories is their concern for ‘translatability [Übersetzbarkeit]’.19 The notion of translation also crops up in his discussion of the other approaches, but it is particularly prominent in Iser’s account of hermeneutic theories and intercultural processes. As he puts it: It is imperative to develop a form of discourse which enables the mutual translatability of cultures, without relapsing into the old framework of a comparatist typology of cultures, or the pragmatic stance of appropriation and assimilation. [. ..] The translatability of cultures thus becomes urgent, and therein lie the most decisive practical implications of a theory of translatability which derives from contact with literature.20

Like fiction and play before it, this notion of translatability is not a ‘transcendental concept’ but ‘an operative mode’.21 In Iser’s view, the translatability which characterizes literary texts and should characterize intercultural exchanges has a specific, cybernetic form. Whenever something is transposed into an alien framework, he says, that framework will have an effect on its original character via a kind of feedback loop. Applied to intercultural exchange, he observes that ‘the intercultural relation [has] the structure of a recursive loop [einer rekursiven Schleife]’.22 As so often with Iser, this idiom is already present in the earlier essay on literary theory, as is shown by its references to the ‘translatability’ of a literary 18 The notion of ‘translatability’ clearly recalls Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). That Iser does not mention Benjamin’s work is undoubtedly due to the fact that the latter begins his essay with an emphatic dismissal of the reader and the audience. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator. An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens’, in Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), pp. 69–82. 19 Iser, Theorie, p. 14. 20 Ibid., p. 29. ‘Es gilt daher, einen Diskurs zu entwickeln, der die Übersetzbarkeit von Kulturen aufeinander ermöglicht, ohne dabei auf die alten Raster einer komparatistischen Kulturtypologie oder gar auf die Pragmatik von Aneignung und Assimilation zurückgreifen zu müssen. [.. .] Deshalb wird die Übersetzbarkeit von Kulturen dringlich, und darin gewinnt eine aus dem Umgang mit Literatur erwachsene Theorie der Übersetzbarkeit ihre vielleicht entscheidende Praxis’. 21 Ibid., p. 25. 22 Ibid., p. 31.

214 —— Chapter 5 text, to the ‘homeostasis’ between text and context, and to the ‘self-regulating process’ of reading.23 Yet Iser’s subsequent work fleshes out these isolated remarks into a broad theory of recursion and culture.

The Translations of Theory Like many of his other books, Iser’s How to Do Theory (2006) is actually based on earlier texts, in this case his work for the volume on Theorien der Kunst [Theories of Art] (1982).24 Iser edited this collection of pre-existing theoretical texts with Dieter Henrich, and prefaced it with an introduction explaining aesthetic theory in general, and specific types of modern theory in particular. Although I will refer to the German text at certain points, the chief focus of my argument will be the later English study. The latter is more interesting, not only because it is the last book that was published during Iser’s lifetime, but also because it extends his earlier reflections on theory in general, and updates his overview of theoretical models by omitting some and adding others. Moreover, it no longer simply anthologizes texts by other theorists, but offers Iser’s own summaries of their thought, effectively turning his earlier introductory essay into a book-length study. How to Do Theory is an intriguing but flawed work, marred by an unresolved tension between its pedagogical and programmatic aspects.25 As an introduction to literary theory, it is part of a ‘How to Study Literature’ series, and therefore aims to acquaint students with the most important theories and terms by offering illuminating examples and a helpful glossary. Despite the supposedly neutral character of the text, Iser’s idiosyncratic theoretical agenda is immediately apparent in the selection and discussion of the examples. As he admits in his preface, Anton Ehrenzweig’s psychoanalytic model and Eric Gans’s generative anthropology are far from obvious choices. Iser’s declaration that he ‘ha[s] presented the theories as dispassionately as possible, and ha[s] refrained from judging, let alone criticizing, them’ should also be taken with a pinch of salt,26 for his interests undeniably dominate the discussion. He is appreciative of the 23 Iser, Prospecting, pp. 220, 227 and 229. 24 Given that his most famous texts on literary anthropology were published at a later date, it is again obvious that Iser’s work does not develop in a linear sequence. 25 My argument in this section is an extension and qualification of my initial review of How to Do Theory. See Ben De Bruyn, ‘On Iser and Introductions’ (review of Wolfgang Iser, How to Do Theory), JLT online (2007), 〈http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/reviews/article/view/1/163〉. Highlighting its summary treatment of other models and its unsatisfactory applications, Lobsien has similarly noted that How to Do Theory is ‘not unproblematic’. See Lobsien, ‘Literaturtheorie’, p. 213. 26 Wolfgang Iser, How to Do Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. viii.

The Recursions of Culture —— 215

achievements of deconstruction, for instance, and is critical of both phenomenological theory and postcolonial discourse. This programmatic dimension might prove frustrating for students of literature seeking a neutral presentation of established key works, but it makes the book fascinating for students of Iser. This book not only clarifies the connection between his own theories and those of others, but also extends his work on literary anthropology, and hints at the broader model of interpretation and culture that I will consider in more detail in the next section of this chapter.

The Indeterminacy of Theory In recent years, many critics have noted (sometimes with an unapologetic sigh of relief) that the study of literature has moved beyond theory. As a good number of these publications show, ‘theory’ means different things to different people.27 In How to Do Theory too, ‘theory’ initially appears to be a neutral, descriptive category, but in fact it functions as a flexible, strategically indeterminate notion. Iser’s initial definition implies that the term ‘theory’ has a very broad application: if ‘[e]ach theory translates art into cognition’,28 then surely every attempt to describe a work of art is part of the domain of theory. Yet Iser uses this notion in more specific – often contradictory and strategic – ways in the rest of his study. Sometimes it denotes reflection on all forms of ‘art’ – the book is based on a volume about Theorien der Kunst –, sometimes solely to ‘[l]iterary theory’.29 In certain passages, ‘theory’ refers to the negative ‘restrictions’ imposed by the need for conceptual closure; in others, it designates the positive ‘opening up’ of new conceptual possibilities.30 Thus the fairly indeterminate notion of theory is used to defend and discredit, to include and exclude particular forms of theory from the field of theory proper. We already encounter this strategic use of ‘theory’ at the very beginning of the book, where Iser observes that a handbook should discuss ‘what is widely debated’, before going on to exclude some of the theories that are widely debated by claiming that they are not theories at all: Some readers may wonder why there is hardly any mention of structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and intertextuality. No doubt these phenomena are important, and they are often hotly debated in the humanities. However, they are not theories; they may

27 See for example, Valentine Cunningham’s Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) and Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2004 [2003]). 28 Iser, Theory, p. viii. 29 Ibid., pp. 8, 1. 30 Ibid., pp. 27, 12.

216 —— Chapter 5 have inspired certain theories, slanted their arguments, and shaped their objectives, but in themselves they are movements, [.. .] period concepts, and forces that jostle for prominence, at best raising the hue and cry ‘against theory’. In order to provide an overview of theory formation, I chose to stay clear of all these ‘isms’.31

Whether we should indeed situate these terms on the same level of abstraction as the other theories under discussion or not, it cannot be denied that they too attempt to translate the experience of art into cognition. In a similar vein, Iser contends that deconstruction is ‘not a theory’ because it resists the closure of theory; and that postcolonial discourse is ‘not a theory’ because its closure ‘determines’ or predetermines its subject.32 Apparently, theory both is and is not a form of closure. In another revealing move, the non-theory of deconstruction is included in the book’s chapter-by-chapter overview of individual theories, but the non-theory of postcolonialism is relegated to a postscript outside the overview of theories. As Iser’s allusions to the pre-theoretical state of feminist criticism further indicate, some theories are more theoretical than others. If we include psychoanalysis, another movement of which he is critical, then four of the twelve models discussed in this study are, despite the title, not theories at all. This flexible concept of theory enables Iser to set up several oppositions in his account, namely between theory on the one hand and science, method, aesthetics and discourse on the other. First, he states that we should distinguish between scientific and cultural theories. The ‘hard-core theory’ of the natural sciences develops a coherent and verifiable set of laws, he says, which seeks to predict and master reality. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn, Iser claims that scientists work within a particular paradigm and therefore defend their shared assumptions when these are criticized, potentially leading to a ‘retooling’ of their framework.33 Things are quite different in the ‘soft theory’ of the humanities, he goes on to argue. Cultural theories do not aim to master reality, but rather to chart it in a flexible manner. These theories do not attempt to establish a coherent system of laws, but aspire to a more limited form of closure through ‘metaphors’ (this claim is reminiscent, incidentally, of Hans Blumenberg’s remarks concerning absolute metaphors in Chapter 3).34 These theories do not aim to solve a problem, but to understand and evaluate art and literature as well as to explain our need for them. The soft theories of the humanities are not evaluated by means of verification, furthermore, but by a competition that is directed by the changing interests of society. In contrast to the fairly unified paradigms of sci-

31 32 33 34

Ibid., p. ix. Ibid., pp. 120, 177, 172. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 6.

The Recursions of Culture —— 217

ence, this type of theory is also based on a form of ‘bricolage’,35 in which elements from heterogeneous frameworks are combined in a piecemeal fashion. Instead of the retooling of a shared paradigm, we find ‘a multiplicity of competing tools’.36 Theory, in short, is completely different in the sciences and the humanities. Iser distinguishes, further, between theory and method. In his view, soft theories fulfil various functions. Theories about art are often the abstract foundations of more concrete methods of reading or analysis: ‘[t]heories generally lay the foundation for the framework of categories, whereas methods provide the tools for processes of interpretation’.37 If theory describes its subject in a more general fashion, in other words, method translates these abstract categories into terms more applicable to specific works. Theory does not coincide with method, moreover, because it also has other functions. For instance, soft theories show that art registers and reflects on important intellectual questions. In an observation that resonates with his view of interpretation, Iser asserts that ‘a theory negotiates between the prevailing exigencies and the arts, and whenever this happens, the arts are integrated into a sociocultural context’.38 It follows that the panorama of theories in How to Do Theory also offers an overview of twentiethcentury thought, revealing contemporary ways of thinking about phenomena such as ‘performance [...], absence, [...] experience and politics’.39 Cultural theories are also relevant from an ‘anthropological’ point of view, because they provide ‘an insight into the human condition by answering the question why humans need art’.40 I will return to this anthropological question later. For now, we should simply note that, according to Iser, theories are more abstract than methods; they do not simply provide the groundwork for concrete readings, but also reveal contemporary concerns and anthropological issues. Iser’s genealogy of theory is supposed to demonstrate that theory is different from aesthetics, too. As he explains, there have been three major trends in the history of aesthetic theory. From classical antiquity until the eighteenth century, Aristotelian poetics reigned supreme. This approach offered rules and blueprints, as it were, for making works of art. The situation changed when philosophical aesthetics emerged in the nineteenth century. At that stage, Iser claims, the Romantics elevated art to the central principle of life, and therefore ‘the great philosophical systems felt compelled to extend their speculations to the realm of art by giving the latter a systematic exposition’.41 Hegel, for example, consecrated 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid. Ibid., p. 2.

218 —— Chapter 5 the notion of ‘total art’ that we encountered in Chapter 2 by casting art as ‘a medium for the appearance of truth’.42 In aesthetics, the philosophical system is therefore more important than the work of art. This situation changed once more, Iser continues, when theory emerged in the 1960s as a response to several factors. First, it introduced a more flexible approach to art in order to counter the excessively systematic ambitions of philosophical aesthetics: Theory liberated art from the umbrella concepts that had been superimposed on it by philosophical aesthetics, thus opening up a vast array of facets inherent in the individual work. Instead of formulating an overriding definition of what art is, theories provided an ever-expanding exhibition of art’s multifariousness; the ontological monolith of the work became pluralized.43

Second, and in line with Iser’s account of his own intellectual origins, theory is seen as a response to the literary criticism of the 1940s and 1950s, ‘the impressionistic approach to literature which had reached both its zenith and its nadir in the lecture halls of German universities’.44 Increasingly, Iser reminds us, the conception of the literary work as carrier of a single meaning and as tool to instil important civic values in students came to be questioned. This development, together with the ‘heavy enrollment of the postwar generation’, sharpened people’s awareness of the role of the recipient and of ‘the variety and changing validity of interpretation’.45 There were other reasons too, Iser notes, such as ‘the proliferation of the media and a growing interest in culture and intercultural relationships’; but in his view, at least, these were less important at the time.46 In any case, Iser’s genealogy of theory opposes its flexible character to the rigid approach of aesthetics and the impressionistic, moralizing procedures of earlier criticism. Within the realm of soft aesthetic theories, he continues, we can distinguish between various types of model. For Iser, as his account of postcolonial models makes plain, there is a crucial difference between discourse and theory. When he notes that ‘the two are sometimes bracketed together as if they were the same thing’,47 he is undoubtedly critiquing Foucault’s impact on Anglo-American theory in the 1980s and 1990s. Clearly, Iser does not agree that theory and discourse are the same. Associating discourses with the thought systems that make up our social reality, he claims that they imply a specific view of the world, whereas

42 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid. Ibid., p. 3. Iser, Prospecting, p. 216. Ibid.; Iser, How to Do Theory, p. 1. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 12.

The Recursions of Culture —— 219

theories foster a more open mind: whereas ‘[t]heory explores a given subject matter’, ‘[d]iscourse [...] determines the features of what it charts’.48 This opposition between closure and freedom recurs in the contrast between so-called architectural and operational models. As Iser points out, the presuppositions which inevitably accompany theories may be applied in a flexibly ‘heuristic’ or a rigidly ‘dogmatic’ fashion.49 These different procedures are characteristic of distinct types of theory: ‘[i]f the framework of a theory is architectural, it is basically a grid superimposed on the work for the purpose of cognition; if it is operational, it is basically a networking structure for the purpose of elucidating how something emerges’.50 Architectural or ‘semantic’ frameworks show a clear sense of control and a predominantly epistemological concern; this type of approach ‘subjects art to a preconceived thought system for the purpose of obtaining the knowledge that can be derived from art’.51 By contrast, operational models do not focus on knowledge or meaning but on art’s ‘experiential reality’.52 To recall the discussion from Chapter 4: the former approach would play the text game by looking for a specific meaning, the latter by submitting to the experience or pleasure of the text. In the second case, the ungraspable nature of art imprints itself on the framework. The terminology communicates as much already: ‘[t]ranslating the work of art into cognitive terms is bound to produce indeterminacies that arise out of what a conceptual language is unable to grasp’.53 Hence the optimal approach has an indeterminate quality, which ensures that such models are immune to ‘conceptual reifications [begriffsrealistische Verdinglichungen]’.54 Bearing in mind The Act of Reading, we may conclude that Iser not only prefers indeterminate texts but also indeterminate theories: for both show a more flexible mapping of reality than their more determinate counterparts. In fact, the opposition between rigid and flexible theories is already mentioned in The Act of Reading, where Iser maintains that classical forms of interpretation are normative and ‘referential’, whereas proper accounts are functional and ‘operational’ in character.55 In addition, he argues that proper aesthetic theories should develop open concepts rather than, as with those psychoanalytic critics who do not follow Freud’s flexible example, ‘closed’ concepts or ‘reified concepts’ which ‘are used as tools for systematization and not for explora48 Ibid., p. 172. 49 Ibid., p. 8. 50 Ibid., p. 167. 51 Ibid., pp. 52, 170. 52 Ibid., p. 168. 53 Ibid., pp. 168–69. 54 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Interpretationsperspektiven Moderner Kunsttheorie’, in Theorien der Kunst, ed. by Wolfgang Iser and Dieter Henrich (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 33–58 (p. 45). 55 Iser, Act, p. 14.

220 —— Chapter 5 tion’.56 In How to Do Theory, Iser develops these ideas further, again highlighting the importance of ‘“open concepts”, i.e. those marked by equivocalness owing to conflicting references’.57 In the idiom of Mieke Bal (see Introduction), Iser advocates the use of dynamic, ‘travelling concepts’.58 He also reiterates his praise of Freud’s original method. As psychoanalysis seeks to chart a domain that cannot be captured in language, Iser writes, it ‘has borrowed a great many terms from mechanics, physics, mathematics, biology, [...] and recently even from computer language as heuristic tools for exploring what we might call the territory of the unconscious’.59 Soft theories display such bricolage, in other words, because single-minded approaches would pin down their elusive objects. This stress on flexible models and concepts returns when Iser rallies to the defence of his own terminology: As to the terminology which I used, I was hesitant to commit myself to a clear-cut definition [...]. I’d rather juggle with terms to avoid their reification. Something similar was the case in psychoanalysis as Freud conceived it. He avoided reification of his terms, whereas a great many of his followers converted them into a sort of Hegelian concepts. [.. .] The reason why I used a mixed terminology is due to the fact that I did not want to commit myself to a particular system [. . .]. A mixed terminology [.. .] indicates an awareness that something is being coped with which [. ..] makes fairly well-defined concepts slip.60

However, as critics note in the context of that discussion, Iser’s own model is perhaps not that open either, since it contains so many spatial and visual terms.61

56 Ibid., pp. 25, 39. 57 Iser, Theory, p. 6. 58 Eckhard Lobsien also connects Iser’s ‘open concepts’ to the work of Mieke Bal and even claims that ‘Iser’s system has reached the level of a concept with the notion of emergence’. See Lobsien, ‘Literaturtheorie’, pp. 214, 215. As Lobsien’s own analysis indicates, however, the notion of the imaginary might also be seen as a ‘travelling concept’ of sorts. And why should we exclude notions such as negativity and indeterminacy or even modernity and humanity? What is even more important for my argument in this chapter, is that Lobsien fails to note that Iser’s idea of the feedback loop is similar to that of travel in Bal’s work. In the end, they agree that concepts and theories change through recursive loops or journeys between objects and disciplines. 59 Iser, Theory, p. 83–84. 60 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Wolfgang Iser’s “On Translatability”. Roundtable Discussion’, Surfaces, 6 (1996), 〈http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/iser.html〉, pp. 15, 17. 61 It is hard not to think of Paul de Man in this context. In ‘The Resistance to Theory’ as well as ‘Reading and History’, De Man takes reception theory to task for its perceptual and mimetic rather than linguistic and rhetorical view of literature. Granted, Iser believes that we ‘imagine meaning’ and his theory, like that of Jauß, undeniably tries to tackle the problem of literary understanding ‘by analogy with processes that stem from the psychology of perception’. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 10, 62. However – as the discussion of mimesis and performance in Chapter 4 also

The Recursions of Culture —— 221

Nevertheless, he argues that the best form of theory is not only an operational model, but also one that works with an open terminology. To his mind, his own reception theory is, of course, ‘an operational model par excellence’.62 Iser’s discussion can be summarized as follows: rigid (–)

flexible (+)

hard theory theory aesthetics discourse dogmatic presuppositions architectural theory semantic/epistemological closed concepts

soft theory method theory theory heuristic presuppositions operational theory functional/experiential open concepts

Figure 7: Iser’s Evaluation of the Field of Theory

The Discourse of Theory Even though they help to structure Iser’s argument, these oppositions are not entirely convincing. I will now therefore retrace my steps and nuance some of his more debatable claims. First, Iser differentiates between architectural and operational models. However, seeing that theory is defined as an attempt to translate art into ‘cognition’, every theory is at least partly an architectural model, ‘a grid superimposed on the work for the purpose of cognition’.63 Since every theory has to feature some form of ‘closure’, moreover, they are always characterized by a measure of architectural ‘control’.64 Conversely, every theory inevitably reveals a degree of operational mobility. Iser’s definition of architectural models suggests as much already: ‘[a]n architecturally conceived framework is a fairly stable one, within which everything is more or less under control’.65 That this distinction is actually more of a continuum can also be inferred from Iser’s discussion of

suggests –, I am not convinced that this visual component necessarily implies a naively mimetic view of literary language. Iser’s literary anthropology also indicates, contra De Man’s suggestions, that continued use of the notion of the aesthetic is compatible with an attention to intra-textual play. Even more important in the present context is the fact that Iser’s account of theory is similar to De Man’s: they concur that theory proper began around 1960, that it should not be conflated with method or science, that it encounters its own impossibility, and that it culminates in a reflection on reading. 62 Iser, Theory, p. 68. 63 Ibid., pp. viii, 167. 64 Ibid., pp. 5, 167. 65 Ibid., emphasis added.

222 —— Chapter 5 Gans’s generative anthropology, which he claims is an architectural model that nonetheless ‘allows for certain movements’.66 Similarly, although Ingarden’s theory is seen to be architectural in character, Iser appropriates the idea of ‘the artistic and the aesthetic’ poles of the work for his own operational model.67 The overview of operational theories also implies that the distinction is a matter of degree, for a framework that is open to ‘revisions’ is surely not as operational as a model that is based on a form of ‘free play’.68 Moreover, Marxism is included among the operational models, but one of its versions is nonetheless characterized as an architectural ‘straitjacket’.69 It should come as no surprise, then, that Iser explicitly states that these opposites cannot be disentangled in Theorien der Kunst; among modern theories, we also find ‘a series of mixtures [.. .], through which ontological and operational aspects are brought together’.70 It is, then, more accurate to say that individual theories merely display different compounds of architectural and operational elements, an insight which might have been easier to reach if Iser had discussed the complex relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism in the first place. Let us now return to the distinction between theory and discourse. It is not surprising that Iser separates both terms, as he associates discourse with the reductive thought systems that make up our social reality and to which literary texts, in his view, ‘react’. In this interpretation, it is obvious that discourse is a pre-reflective form of ‘practice’.71 Upon closer inspection, however, things are again more complicated. Iser maintains that the postcolonial discourse of Edward Said is not a theory ‘because charting the consequences of and resistance to imperialism aims to reveal what has hitherto been eclipsed, and this cannot be mistaken for the transcendental vantage point that structures a theoretical framework’.72 But did Iser not define theory earlier as a similar attempt to eradicate boundaries and open up what has been eclipsed? In addition, he proposes that the interaction between discourses may counter their stifling effects; such conflicts ‘involuntarily reveal what has been intentionally excluded in the process of mapping’.73 If that is true, then surely the conflict between competing discourses, as present in postcolonial discourse, approximates the conceptual mobility characteristic of operational theories. Indeed, despite his earlier claims, Iser suggests as much himself, admitting that ‘post-colonial discourse has be66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., pp. 15, 68. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 107. Iser, ‘Interpretationsperspektiven’, p. 36. Iser, Theory, p. 173. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 173.

The Recursions of Culture —— 223

come an indispensable aid in our quest to grasp the essence of human culture’.74 As the pronoun implies, this project is not so different from Iser’s own flexible analysis of culture. The supposedly discursive ideas of Said can thus be incorporated easily into the final phase of Iser’s theoretical project, despite the contrast he perceives between discourse and theory: [A colonial] attitude ignored the stratification of culture in the imperialist nations themselves, implicitly assuming that culture has an identity. [. . .] in confronting [decolonized cultures] with the hegemonic one, they drive home the fact that culture is never a unified system. [. . .] This becomes all the more obvious after the infusion of non-European cultures into the metropolitan center. Instead of taking on an assumed identity, culture is now characterized by hybridity [.. .].75

This argument, made by supposedly discursive approaches, approximates Iser’s theoretical reflections on culture and translation that I will discuss in the next section. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, How to Do Theory itself shares certain features with discourse. Iser, from his ‘playful’ perspective, is critical of the fact that ‘the discursive order not only structures the domain charted, but also preordains its practice’ and therefore creates ‘principles of exclusion’ and ‘constraints’ which control and police the statements of its subjects.76 As its strategic use of the notion of ‘theory’ demonstrates, however, How to Do Theory itself can be seen as a discursive project, in which Iser charts the domain of theory and excludes and includes specific types of statements and positions. The distinctions between poetics, aesthetics and theory require further nuancing as well. For instance, although Iser argues that theory is not a form of poetics, modern theories arguably still prescribe what makes good art, and modern theoretical reflection and creative practice are by no means completely divorced. In fact, we have seen that both The Act of Reading and The Fictive and the Imaginary partly function as aesthetic programmes that prescribe specific creative practices, particularly implicit and playful forms of writing. As Iser himself has observed, ‘literary theory is not independent of the type of literature which it tends to conceptualize’.77 Aesthetics is also different from theory, according to Iser, because the former imposes pre-existing frames on the work of art whilst the latter does not. But surely the idea of architectural models implies that some forms of theory do something similar? Further, he claims that aesthetics differs from theory because it is linked to non-artistic, philosophical systems. The same

74 Ibid., p. 185, emphasis added. 75 Ibid., pp. 184, 185. 76 Ibid., pp. 173, 174, 175. 77 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Twenty-Five Years New Literary History. A Tribute to Ralph Cohen’, New Literary History, 25 (1994), 733–47 (p. 744).

224 —— Chapter 5 observation might again be made about theory, however, for the success of theory can be gauged from the degree to which ‘various disciplines of the humanities’ try to develop their own aesthetic theories.78 And Iser himself explicitly notes that ‘just as the dominant philosophical systems of the nineteenth century developed an aesthetics in order to conceive of art in terms of their own tenets, so basic disciplines in the humanities feel equally called upon to provide an exposition of art’.79 Thus, once again, the distinction between theory and poetics as well as theory and aesthetics is gradual rather than essential. Finally, Iser differentiates between the hard theory of the natural sciences and the soft theory of the humanities. Yet, although scientific theory clearly does differ from cultural theory, his account of this distinction is not unproblematic. It may be true that soft theories do not usually aim to develop laws which can make predictions and be verified, but this is an easy claim to make if the key soft theory that does have scientific aspirations, namely structuralism, is simply omitted from the discussion. Furthermore, Iser’s book indicates that certain soft theories can be described in terms of ‘normal science’. Talking about semiotic theories, he notes that ‘[s]uch a development resembles the process which Thomas Kuhn has described, in which “normal science” [...] runs up against persistent anomalies, so that the paradigm can no longer be defended, and hence has to be given up’.80 Apparently, soft theories can be tested and modified by additional observations after all. Nor is it true that they never show a form of ‘retooling’ when they reach their limits. As Iser himself observes, soft theory ‘can be modified in view of observed data’ if these do not square with the original presuppositions.81 Again, Iser’s rigid distinction fails to convince. Turning from his general claims to his summaries of specific theoretical models, it is again clear that Iser interprets and applies these models in a manner characteristic of his own methods. The arguments of The Act of Reading and The Fictive and the Imaginary very much recur between the lines in these sections, as do concepts from reception theory such as ‘gap[s]’, ‘negations’ and ‘blank[s]’.82 In fact, Iser argues that the different theories under discussion display an important similarity: The diversity of theories gives rise to the question whether there is a general undercurrent operative in all of them. In fact most of them assert that art comes to fruition in the recipient. [...] The work of art, once embedded in a sacred [or] secular setting and then uprooted

78 79 80 81 82

Iser, Theory, p. 3. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., pp. 96, 129, 137.

The Recursions of Culture —— 225

and carried into the museum [...] has found a new location in the recipient as beholder, spectator, and reader.83

In other words, the diversity of the selected theories is only superficial: for, Iser claims, they are all forms of reception theory. Here it is easy to object, of course, that while many of these aesthetic theories pay attention to the recipient, it simply does not follow that feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic and postcolonial models are first and foremost theories of reception rather than production. In a further connection with his earlier work, Iser’s account of theory-building is structurally similar to his account of the reading process. In the same way that, according to The Act of Reading, a single reading can never encapsulate the sense of a literary work but is inevitably followed by new readings, a single theory can never encompass our aesthetic experience but is invariably succeeded by new theories. He qualifies this statement somewhat, but believes nonetheless that ‘theories sequentially take up what appears to have been sacrificed by their predecessors’.84 The work of the theorist, like that of the reader, is never done. How to Do Theory also alludes to Iser’s literary anthropology, even if, strangely, this part of his thinking is not explicitly mentioned. In addition to the use of the notions ‘double meanings’ and ‘carnivalization’, his anthropology crops up in the discussion of both related and unrelated models:85 Iser’s account of Ernst Gombrich points out that representation is ‘a performative act’; his discussion of John Dewey contains the claim, reminiscent of Helmuth Plessner, ‘that the subject is both with itself and outside itself’ in the aesthetic experience; and the reflections of Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller are described in terms of the ‘play movement’ and ‘free play’ from The Fictive and the Imaginary.86 Moreover, Iser’s summary of Elaine Showalter’s feminist model culminates in the rather unexpected and, in this context, frankly irrelevant remark ‘that the imagination is not a self-activating human potential but has to be prodded into action [...] by a stimulus from outside’.87 The ideas of literary anthropology are also crucial to understanding why, according to How to Do Theory, we are so fascinated by art. In Iser’s view, the diversity of theoretical approaches hints at ‘the ultimate unknowability of art’.88 The aesthetic experience, he believes, is an ‘experiential reality’ which provokes attempts to grasp it, but simultaneously refuses to be ‘translated’ definitively into cognition.89 As we will see, the idea that an experi83 84 85 86 87 88 89

Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., pp. 76, 128. Ibid., pp. 47, 149, 168, 170. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid.

226 —— Chapter 5 ence is untranslatable, but still triggers attempts to translate it, is at the heart of Iser’s view of interpretation. This argument also recalls his literary anthropology, however, for the remark that ‘theory confronts us with the paradoxical urge to capture in cognitive terms something which by nature eludes cognition’ sounds remarkably similar to Iser’s argument that literary fictions try to capture, in pseudo-cognitive terms, something which by nature eludes cognition.90 If the provisional stagings of literary fiction aim to ‘represent’ elusive experiences like love, it seems, the operational constructs of cultural theory aim to capture the elusive experience of art. As human beings, in other words, we are fascinated by art because we do not and cannot understand it completely. In this book, Iser also hints at what I consider to be the final part of his project, namely his work on recursion and interpretation. I have already mentioned how he frequently describes the practice of theory in terms of an unavoidably partial attempt to ‘translate’ the artwork into a cognitive register. This terminology recurs in Iser’s early texts on theory, where he often speaks of ‘translation [Übersetzung]’ and ‘translatability [Übersetzbarkeit]’.91 What is more, he frequently describes these translations in cybernetic terms. The interaction between theory and method can be described as ‘a kind of feedback loop’, for instance: ‘[t]heory sets the parameters for the method of interpretation, and the latter feeds back into theory what the practice has yielded’.92 Similarly, in discussing the work of Gans and Dewey, Iser uses phrases such as ‘recursive loops’, ‘thick description’ and ‘circularity’,93 which will play an important role in his reflections on interpretation and culture. Thus Iser’s overview of theoretical models not only offers discrete summaries of divergent projects, but also a sequence of cumulatively developed insights that fit into a precise, if largely implicit, theoretical agenda. One part of this agenda is concerned, as I have pointed out, with the notions of translation and recursion, and these are explored in more detail in the enigmatic work The Range of Interpretation.

90 Ibid., p. 171. 91 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Zur Problemlage gegenwärtiger Literaturtheorie. Das Imaginäre und die epochalen Schlüsselbegriffe’, in Auf den Weg gebracht. Idee und Wirklichkeit der Gründung der Universität Konstanz. Kurt Georg Kiesinger zum 75. Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. by Horst Sund and Manfred Timmermann (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1979), pp. 355–74 (pp. 372, 370); Iser, ‘Interpretationsperspektiven’, pp. 35, 38. 92 Iser, Theory, p. 21. 93 Ibid., pp. 142, 147, 151.

The Recursions of Culture —— 227

The Range of Recursion As we have seen, Iser’s analysis of theory culminates in the idea that literary interpretation proceeds via a flexible form of recursion. This idea provides the blueprint for his account of non-literary forms of interpretation and non-reductive forms of intercultural exchange in The Range of Interpretation (a book only available in English). We should therefore examine this study in detail if we want to compare Iser’s reflections to Mussil’s recent attempt to theorize the recursive character of literary texts. As with The Fictive and the Imaginary, this book merits close reading, since it connects the writings of many difficult thinkers into a particularly dense argument. Although it initially seems to bear no relationship whatsoever to Iser’s original, literary concerns, it actually fits neatly with his work about literary history, the act of reading and literary anthropology. In light of some of his early publications, it might seem strange that Iser devotes an entire book to interpretation and hermeneutics. In the essay on theory discussed at the beginning of this chapter, he explicitly prefers the notion of ‘reception’ to ‘interpretation’, since the former allegedly designates an openminded experience of the literary text, and the latter a reductive search for its meaning. Moreover, his famous lecture on Die Appellstruktur der Texte [later translated as ‘Indeterminacy and the Reader’s Response in Prose Fiction’] opens with the polemical conclusion of Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Against Interpretation’: ‘[i]n place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’.94 Yet, despite these claims, both interpretation and hermeneutics are central to The Range of Interpretation, which, as the title already suggests, redefines these notions in a way that highlights their flexible potential. At the very beginning of the book, in fact, Iser ventures that ‘interpretation is no longer to be identified with hermeneutics, as it has been in the past’.95 In the following, I will focus on four aspects of this posthermeneutic book, namely its account of the productivity, the history and the anthropology of interpretation, as well as its conception of recursion and culture. Even though his book supposedly stresses the diversity of interpretative procedures, we will see that Iser actually privileges recursive structures. Ultimately, The Range of Interpretation suggests that, in place of a hermeneutics of art, we need not an erotics but a cybernetics of art.

94 Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1974), p. 5. 95 Wolfgang Iser, The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. ix.

228 —— Chapter 5 Interpretation as Production In the introduction to The Range of Interpretation, Iser immediately highlights the pervasive and diverse character of interpretation. He begins by observing that interpretation, like the fictive and the imaginary, is ‘a basic human disposition’.96 Yet the forms these interpretations take are highly variable: as the title of his study is supposed to emphasize, there is no such thing as ‘the interpretation’ for Iser.97 He claims that, instead of predefining its form by means of an external ‘interpretation’ of interpretation, we should unfold it, as it were, through an internal ‘anatomy’ of different practices or forms of interpretation.98 This in-depth study of interpretation is necessary for the three reasons outlined in the essay mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: namely, its pervasive character, its inconclusive results in literary criticism, and its vital role in the increasingly frequent exchanges between cultures. As far as the first reason for studying interpretation is concerned, Iser says that we are faced with ‘a burgeoning of its genres’ as well as ‘a growing awareness [. ..] of the way this basic human impulse has been employed for a variety of tasks’.99 Adjusting his earlier claims on behalf of fiction, he now notes that ‘[t]he very world we live in appears to be a product of interpretation, as had been suggested in books such as Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking’.100 A proper anatomy of interpretation also promises to remedy the state of confusion in literary criticism. In Iser’s account, the discipline shows two incompatible developments at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Some critics try to establish ‘[m]onopolies of interpretation’ by claiming that their reading methods have universal validity.101 The political reading strategies of Marxism and minority discourses may arise from a laudable desire to assert the rights of specific social groups, Iser asserts, but they often relapse into the reductive thinking which they purport to counter: ‘[t]he various brands of ideology critique elevate their presuppositions to the status of reality, just as do the ideologies they combat’.102 Another development is the increasing ‘conflict of interpretations’, or the fact that many exegetical paradigms coexist and compete without leading to a clear resolution.103 In contrast to the previous trend, this tug-of-war between critical approaches suggests that none of them will ever establish a methodological mo96 Ibid., p. 1. 97 Ibid., pp. 7, 145. 98 Ibid., p. 2. 99 Ibid., pp. ix, 1. 100 Ibid., p. 1. 101 Ibid., p. 2. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., p. 3.

The Recursions of Culture —— 229

nopoly. The third and final reason for this anatomy of interpretation is that it may help us to describe the increasing interactions and tensions between cultures. Whereas traditional accounts tended to reduce interpretation to a rigid form of decoding, Iser feels that, ‘[i]n view of the growing interpenetration of cultures and the newly emerging concerns of cultural studies’, ‘we have to remind ourselves of what interpretation has always been: an act of translation’.104 In other words, if The Act of Reading analyzed acts of reading and The Fictive and the Imaginary discussed acts of fictionalizing, Iser’s anatomy of interpretation describes acts of translation. Identifying the different ways in which we interpret, he suggests, will lay the conceptual groundwork for a more flexible mode of translation and intercultural dialogue. In Iser’s framework, acts of interpretation are made up of three features and can be used, roughly, in one of two ways. Every interpretation, he argues, applies a certain register to a particular subject matter, without eliminating the difference between them, which is called the liminal space. As Iser’s book will demonstrate, interpretation can tackle different subject matters: texts, but also human psyches, biological systems, and unfathomable entities such as God. The register refers to the framework or metalanguage which tries to capture these subject matters. The most important term, however, is undeniably the ‘liminal space’ between subject matter and register. Akin to earlier notions such as ‘blank’ and ‘difference’, the ‘liminal space’ underscores that the register does not fully capture the subject matter and thereby provokes attempts to erase the residual difference through new acts of interpretation. The difference or space between register and subject matter can be dealt with in one of two ways. There is ‘a sliding scale between extremes’,105 Iser writes: at one extreme, the difference is elided, and it is claimed that the interpretation captures the subject matter completely; at the other extreme, this difference is upheld, and the impossibility of doing full justice to the subject matter conceded. In line with his critical stance towards contemporary criticism, he concludes that: [w]henever the presuppositions of the register are superimposed on the subject matter, the liminal space is colonized by the concepts brought to bear. Such a colonization converts interpretation into an act that determines the intended meaning of the subject matter. When this happens, interpretation ceases. The colonization [. ..] sacrifices translatability and with it the chance to embrace more than was possible before the superimposition.106

Bearing in mind his earlier critique of ideological reading strategies, then, Iser implicitly charges that postcolonial approaches colonize the literary works they 104 Ibid., p. 5. 105 Ibid., p. 151. 106 Ibid.

230 —— Chapter 5 study. In contrast to such reductive forms of interpretation, which consist in the ‘predication’ of their subject matter, Iser’s study favours flexible acts of translation, which lead to the ‘production’ of unexpected results (recall the argument about human self-production from Chapter 2).107 Just like proper acts of reading, then, Iser maintains that proper acts of interpretation do not impose pre-existing frames of reference, but create something new. Of course, he is not blind to the fact that interpretation is simple and fast in offering ‘pragmatic solution[s]’ to ‘pragmatic problems’.108 Nevertheless, he is more interested in productive forms of interpretation. In his view, the liminal space has a ‘generative’ or ‘poetic’ quality,109 for it leads to something that did not exist before. Interpretation, he says, in a formulation reminiscent of his earlier account of mimesis, ‘is not so much an explication but a performance’.110 Like play, interpretation is seen as an endless activity: ‘[i]f interpretation [. ..] were only concerned with achieving pragmatic ends – important as they may be – then whatever it came up with would end this activity, whereas in fact it never ends’.111 The upshot of these observations is that, according to Iser’s rethinking of hermeneutics, proper forms of interpretation invariably have a literary quality; their subject matter needs to be revisited time and again, and this process creates something unprecedented. In the rest of his book, the preceding framework is applied to four practices of interpretation: religious and secular commentaries on canonical texts; the hermeneutic approach to texts or quasi-textual material; the systemic attempt to interpret the workings of culture; and the differential realization of elusive phenomena such as God. He has chosen these examples, he says, because ‘they are instances in which interpretation is [. ..] explicitly reflected on’.112 Because of their self-reflexive character, each of these interpretive practices uses a dual register, as we will see, which explicitly reveals the liminal space that remains between subject matter and register. Or, in the related terminology of literary anthropology, these forms of interpretation are all self-disclosing fictions.

107 Ibid. 108 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Unentwegtes Interpretieren. Struktur und Relevanz’, in Domänen der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Herbert Jaumann and others (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), pp. 3–15 (p. 11). Hence, although he does not discuss such everyday contexts in detail, Iser is not unaware of the fact ‘that there are other humdrum contexts where interpretation is pretty routine’. Peter Lamarque, ‘Making Sense. A Theory of Interpretation and The Range of Interpretation’ (review), British Journal of Aesthetics, 43.1 (2003), 80–84 (p. 84). 109 Iser, Range, pp. 64, 150. 110 Ibid., p. xiv. 111 Ibid., pp. 153–54. 112 Ibid., p. 9.

The Recursions of Culture —— 231

The History of Interpretation In a further parallel with The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser’s study of interpretation offers a fairly linear historical narrative, which highlights – his own critique of teleological models notwithstanding – the increasing complexity of hermeneutic procedures. Admittedly, the chronological sequence is not strict, and the book both begins and ends, in a quasi-cyclical fashion, with theological forms of interpretation. Nevertheless, Iser’s analysis moves from older to newer interpretative practices, and from fairly simple to increasingly complex procedures. As we will see, the complexity of the ‘subject matter’ and the ‘register’ increases with every step of his argument. This historical dimension of the book is especially apparent in the sections that deal with canonical commentary and hermeneutic circles. Although the hermeneutic paradigm itself turns out to be problematic, it is first described as a fruitful reaction to the waning importance of authority in interpretative matters. Like many other critics, Iser traces the beginning of literary interpretation to the study of religious texts. In one of many explicit gestures to Jewish culture in this book, he proclaims that: ‘[i]nterpretation as we have come to understand it in the West arose out of the exegesis of the Torah in the Judaic tradition’.113 Typical of this initial form of interpretation is its connection with a specific and closed set of texts. Via a process of canonization, religious practices identify certain texts as venerable objects that merit sustained attention. This canon is, therefore, sealed. Perhaps surprisingly, this restrictive situation lays the foundation for a flexible form of interpretation. For, even though the set of authoritative texts has been definitively established, the religious community continues to need answers to new problems. These can only be obtained by interpreting this one set of texts, however, and therefore the closed canon is continually reread and invested with new meanings, inspiring a remarkably open interpretative attitude. The more closed the canon, we might say, the more open its readings. It follows that the literal meanings of the canonical texts gradually accrue figurative connotations and that, at times, ‘[w]hat is actually said by the text is discarded in favor of what the text is supposed to mean’.114 Quite clearly, such a practice already requires a flexible register. Developing this exegetical practice, the literary works of the secular canon (Iser’s example, unsurprisingly, is Shakespeare) are also interpreted time and again in order to make them relevant to a contemporary audience. The literary canon is not sealed but open, however, and the status of canonical texts uncertain, since it depends on the commentaries devoted to them. Secular readings therefore imply an even stronger ‘slippage of authority from the 113 Ibid., p. 13. 114 Ibid., p. 17.

232 —— Chapter 5 canon to the reading’.115 Such observations imply, if we think back to Blumenberg’s argument from Chapter 2, that important religious and literary texts have a semantic potential akin to the workings of myth. This gradual erosion of canonical authority prepares the ground for an important turning point in the history of interpretation, namely the invention of hermeneutics by Friedrich Schleiermacher at the end of the nineteenth century. This approach is important for two reasons. First, like Iser himself, Schleiermacher does not focus on a particular subject matter, but develops a ‘general hermeneutics’ which describes the process of understanding behind every form of textual interpretation. Even more importantly, this approach explicitly distances itself from traditional authorities. Schleiermacher’s project was ‘a revolutionary event’, Iser argues, because he discarded ‘the overriding frameworks that provided guidance for interpretation up to the end of the eighteenth century, such as the doctrine of the fourfold senses of the Bible, the episteme of [. ..] correspondences, and the principles of reason’.116 As each of these existing frameworks is increasingly called into question, modern interpreters need to develop new ways of making sense. In a modern climate, which, if we bear in mind Iser’s analysis of pastoralism, is akin to that of the sixteenth century, ‘correspondences’ can no longer be assumed, and semantic relationships have to be actively established, rather than automatically identified. Rejecting these former authorities is crucial, Iser continues, because the removal of this conventional interpretative apparatus lays bare the liminal space. As he puts it, ‘the emptiness of that space might be considered as a trace of the vanished authority that had previously determined the relationship between the text and its reader’.117 If modern interpreters want to deal effectively with these unregulated gaps between subject matter and register, Schleiermacher suggests, they should develop new ways of regulating the interpretation of texts. In a move that supposedly reveals his awareness of the ‘liminal space’, he introduces a dual register, whereby attention is paid to the grammar as well as the psychology of the author. Schleiermacher also introduces the idea of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, which says that we can only grasp parts of a text if we have already developed a hypothesis about the whole and vice versa. This dual and circular register, Iser claims, enables us to navigate the liminal space in a more open-minded and productive manner: Instead of superimposing a register onto the text, as in the tradition of the commentary, the liminal space splits up the register into a graduated duality of mutually controlling posi-

115 Ibid., p. 33. 116 Ibid., p. 43. 117 Ibid., p. 54.

The Recursions of Culture —— 233

tions whose circular concatenation is meant to bridge the difference between them. [. . .] In replacing authority by the hermeneutic circle, interpretation is no longer controlled by any overarching third dimension that would bracket the text with its exegesis, and so it has to become self-reflective.118

If we bear The Fictive and the Imaginary in mind while reading this passage, the liminal space appears to be a new name for the difference that emerges when the rigid relationship between signifier and signified breaks down. In fact, given that related concepts in Iser’s oeuvre – the blanks in the literary work, the difference between pastoral and political realm, the gap between man and reality – may all be seen as places where authoritative connections have vanished and the modern interpreter needs to supply alternatives, the importance of interpretation, and of its monitoring, speaks for itself. Iser’s history of interpretation thus suggests that the constraints of older hermeneutic practices are replaced by more open-ended procedures in modern times. However, he fails to see that these new procedures inevitably create new forms of authority and constraint. Schleiermacher’s model is developed further in the realms of history and psychoanalysis by Droysen and Ricoeur, respectively. When the subject matter is no longer a text but a disparate collection of historical fragments, the work of historian Johann Droysen indicates, hermeneutic procedures again become more complex. In Iser’s view, a single text is inevitably characterized by a certain coherence, but the set of disparate materials confronting the historian cannot be satisfactorily addressed by a single hermeneutic circle and therefore requires a complicated ‘nesting of circles’.119 The subject matter is even more complex in psychoanalysis, which tries to unearth the hidden infrastructure of the human self. With reference to Paul Ricoeur’s reading of Freud, Iser argues that the psychoanalytic interpreter should reveal the patient’s unconscious by analyzing the way in which his dual self – conscious and unconscious – manifests itself in the ‘double meaning’ of his or her utterances.120 Such psychoanalytic interpretations still proceed via a circular movement, Iser adds, but the heightened complexity of their subject matter necessitates a move toward the even more dynamic procedure of the feedback loop: a move which implies that this final hermeneutic model already anticipates the next step in Iser’s history of interpretation. I will return later to these ‘post-hermeneutic’ types of interpretation. For now, the crucial observation is that Iser’s narrative sketches a linear trajectory from rigid and authority-bound forms of interpretation to increasingly flexible and unconstrained alternatives. 118 Ibid., p. 53, 54–55. 119 Ibid., p. 61. 120 Ibid., p. 72.

234 —— Chapter 5 Yet, as we have seen, Iser also believes that contemporary literary criticism displays a return to rigid interpretative modes. At the end of his book, moreover, he notes that the differences between the various modes should not be overemphasized: ‘the hermeneutic circle, the recursive loop, and the travelling differential actually shade into one another whenever interpretation occurs’.121 Hence, in a similar fashion to the text games discussed in Chapter 4, every act of interpretation actually combines elements from different modes. These nuances, Iser thinks, prevent his account from proceeding as ‘a linear development toward a distant goal’.122 As the contrast between commentary and hermeneutics makes clear, however, Iser’s narrative nevertheless implies that the optimal, flexible type of interpretation is a relatively recent achievement, and that the forms of interpretation ‘have burgeoned enormously in the last couple of centuries’, following ‘the ever-increasing open-endedness of the world’.123 Iser’s account is thus not as nonlinear as he would like us to believe. In line with the Blumenbergian model discussed in Chapter 2, Iser’s history of interpretation underscores its flexible and modern quality, which is why he again refers to the idea of ‘reality as realization’ and the ‘plurality of worlds’.124

The Anthropology of Interpretation If Iser’s analysis of hermeneutic models reveals the historical dimension of The Range of Interpretation, the analysis of the differential mode of interpretation draws attention to its anthropological aspect. I will first discuss Iser’s reading of Franz Rosenzweig’s differential evocation of God, and then turn to the broader anthropological agenda of his book. To a certain extent, The Range of Interpretation may be read as a quasi-literary analysis of various books about interpretation. It focuses on the recurrence of certain formal patterns in their registers, especially circles and dualities, and on the way these hint at the elusive character of what they are trying to grasp. This aspect of Iser’s book is particularly evident in the final section, a complex and detailed reading of a single book by Franz Rosenzweig – ‘a Jew and a German’125 – called The Star of Redemption (1921). This book represents the most complex genre of interpretation, Iser holds, because it demonstrates what happens when we try to interpret immeasurable but incontrovertible phenomena such as the world,

121 122 123 124 125

Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 155, 9. Ibid., pp. 124, 154. Ibid., p. 128.

The Recursions of Culture —— 235

humankind and God. This is more relevant for literary studies than might appear at first sight, for Iser implicitly connects Rosenzweig’s project with that of literary anthropology: What is experienced in immediacy is taken for truth, so that there is no need to convert such experiences into knowledge. There are, however, quite a few evidentiary experiences in human life – love, for example – which appear to elude cognition yet make us crave to know what they are, as is borne out not least by literature, which is obsessed with a continual enactment of such evidentiary experiences.126

Rosenzweig’s quasi-theological project sheds light, in other words, on the human attempt to interpret experiences that cannot be definitively interpreted. The philosophy of German idealism had already tried to grasp such evidentiary experiences before Rosenzweig, Iser observes, but it included them under the reductive rubric of the ‘All’, an abstract and all-encompassing notion that pays no heed to the individual entities of which it is composed. When people start to understand totalizing concepts as problematic (Iser refers to the trauma of the First World War), those concepts disintegrate and expose the multifarious nature of God, world and mankind, which Rosenzweig will then go on to explore. In sum, the diverse nature of our experiences of love or God – as staged in literature – is eliminated by the abstract categories of philosophy, but is explored in a more flexible and germane fashion in Rosenzweig’s form of negative theology. Rosenzweig is able to do so because, in contrast to idealistic philosophy, his model functions more or less like the self-disclosing fictions from Iser’s literary anthropology. Rosenzweig’s terminology, especially the notion of the ‘differential’, is of primary importance in this respect. In contrast to the stifling register of idealistic philosophers, he introduces a dynamic one made up of enigmatic notions such as the duality of ‘Nought’ and ‘Aught’. Iser’s account implies that these dynamic notions are similar to the open concepts of How to Do Theory and to the cognitive tool of fiction as described in The Fictive and the Imaginary, not to mention the non-conceptual metaphors introduced in Blumenberg’s Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie: One might even be inclined to say that the words [Nought and Aught] are deliberately not meant to be concepts, because they function as shifters, indicating the transfer of something intangible into perception. Rosenzweig’s whole argument pivots around these terms, if one can call them terms at all. [. ..] Nought [for instance] is not to be mistaken for, or even meant to function as, a concept; instead, metaphorically speaking, it is a chameleon that takes on the hue of its conditional applications [. ..].127

126 Ibid., p. 116. 127 Ibid., pp. 120–21.

236 —— Chapter 5 These flexible notions are well chosen, according to Iser, because they are not strictly defined and have no traditional connotations, enabling them to unfold and refine themselves ad infinitum. They are, therefore, apposite tools with which to explore phenomena such as God, which should not be predicated hastily, but pondered and explored freely. As these remarks imply, the last model discussed in The Range of Interpretation does indeed offer a uniquely complex register. But how does it work? For Iser, Rosenzweig’s negation of the All, i.e. his awareness that idealistic philosophy is unable to capture everything under its abstract rubrics, leads to the affirmation of new forms of knowledge. In Rosenzweig’s terms, the Nought of knowledge gradually leads to the Aught of Knowledge: ‘[s]uch a Nought [is] double-edged insofar as its designation of the All as nothing results in a cancellation of this overriding philosophical concept and thus frees the whole range of what is immeasurable (God), multifarious (world), and particular (humankind)’.128 Much as the productive negations of The Act of Reading, this Nought has a positive result. This modest knowledge does not immediately appear, however, but has to be drawn out via ‘a travelling differential’. Together with the related idea of ‘the infinitesimal increment’, the differential evokes phenomena such as reality – or love – by unfolding them in a never-ending sequence of profiles: ‘the differential, in dissecting essence, converts it into a series of discrete profiles’.129 Hence in contrast to a notion such as the ‘All’, the differential counteracts reductive, essentialist thinking. It is a ‘translation’, Iser says, not ‘an ontological qualification’ of God’s nature.130 Instead of trying to define or predicate the nature of God, world and mankind, the differential allows Rosenzweig to translate or unfold such elusive phenomena in non-totalizing or non-colonizing ways. In line with literary anthropology, then, we should also see the human self as ‘a differential of itself’.131 Just as the unending sequence of literary works forever conjures up new features of love and mankind, as Iser suggested in The Fictive and the Imaginary, the unending sequence of the travelling differential evokes ever-changing aspects of God and mankind. In order to avoid premature determinations of its ‘subject matter’, the differential not only moves forward, but also doubles back and shows socalled points of conversion. Interestingly, Iser’s description of this conversion is reminiscent of The Act of Reading. In a similar fashion to the blank, the point of conversion is an ‘interstice’, which ‘is determinate through its separation of the two segments but indeterminate as regards the outcome of its intertwining’.132 In

128 129 130 131 132

Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., pp. 134–35. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., pp. 131, 130.

The Recursions of Culture —— 237

both literary and theological interpretations, in other words, blank-like structures enable us to adjust our initial readings. In the final analysis, Iser suggests that the differential mode of interpretation is not unique to Rosenzweig’s theological meditations, but is akin to literature’s ongoing interpretation of humanity and love. The analysis of Rosenzweig is not the only place in The Range of Interpretation where Iser’s anthropological interest emerges. For he mostly discusses models which criticize static conceptions of human nature. In his account of secular canons, he notes that Samuel Johnson criticizes Shakespeare’s representation of ‘human nature’ on moral grounds.133 Even more explicitly, Ricoeur’s model implies that the self is deformed ‘when it is frozen into a definitive shape’, as its existence should rather be seen as ‘a potentially unending process’.134 Similarly, the cybernetic ethnography of Geertz, with its emphasis on the interaction between man and culture, exposes attempts ‘to define human nature [...] in terms of an assumed constancy, independent of time, place, and circumstance’.135 In addition to this critique of static anthropologies, Iser explains the function of interpretation in anthropological terms. After arguing that the various interpretative modes – circle, loop, differential – interact via a form of ‘play’,136 he asks a question that once more recalls The Fictive and the Imaginary: ‘[w]hy are we as human beings so incessantly engaged in translating something into something else?’.137 There are three broad reasons, Iser answers. The first and obvious one is that interpretation responds to specific pragmatic needs. But this explanation does not account for the unending forms of interpretation in which Iser is particularly interested. He therefore identifies two more fundamental reasons for interpretation. Highlighting the performative character of this activity, Iser argues that ‘[w]hatever there is would lie forever dormant if it were not made functional, and this making functional is effected by [.. .] interpretation’.138 To interpret the outside – and inside – world is to functionalize this bare matter. Bearing in mind his famous attack on Iser, Stanley Fish would doubtless object that any ‘given’ subject matter is always already made to function in particular ways. There is no ‘lying dormant’ at all. Iser might respond, however, by saying that a productive or literary form of interpretation enables us precisely to wrest the given from its pragmatic interpretation and to refunctionalize it. The final reason for our unend-

133 134 135 136 137 138

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 73, 81. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 154.

238 —— Chapter 5 ing interpretations is that some things are simply not given to begin with. Literary interpretations, like literary fictions, enable us to cope with the elusive anthropological themes identified by The Fictive and the Imaginary. With reference to Henrich and Plessner again, Iser maintains that humans are puzzled by their beginnings and the fact that ‘we are but do not know what it is to be’.139 Ultimately, the endless activity of interpretation reveals that we continually renew our attempts to capture these inaccessible but unavoidable phenomena. Hence, the range of interpretation, like the range of literary stagings, reveals that human beings are ‘an unending performance of themselves’.140 ‘We interpret, therefore we are’, Iser notes at the beginning of his book, and at the end, he suggests that we might further reformulate Descartes’ dictum: we interpret, therefore we can be other than we are now.

The Recursions of Culture Although Iser discusses cybernetic models before rather than after Rosenzweig’s differential register, there are good reasons for placing this part of his argument at the very end of this overview. For, apart from the fact that it sheds light on the important topic of intercultural exchange, the cybernetic register plays a crucial role throughout The Range of Interpretation. From the beginning of the book, Iser claims that interpretation may take many forms, of which the hermeneutic circle is only one possibility. In doing so, he takes issue with the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, which argues that interpretation is inevitably circular in form. Their argument, Iser claims, like the aforementioned ideological reading strategies, threatens to reduce the diversity of interpretative modes. After all, when the hermeneutic circle ‘is made to change from a formal structure that facilitates understanding to an ontological one that underlies understanding, it appears to have voided the liminal space’.141 Iser would probably agree with Heidegger that human beings are inevitably caught up in a hermeneutic circle, but he nonetheless fears that a one-sided emphasis on this circular procedure risks eliminating other potential forms of interpretation. More specifically, he claims that we should not ignore more complex procedures such as the differential-and-conversion and the recursive loop. The latter especially will prove to be crucial. Iser’s analysis of cybernetic models, like his account of hermeneutics, begins by identifying a basic principle before considering two applications and exten139 Ibid., p. 156. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid., p. 69.

The Recursions of Culture —— 239

sions. The fundamental principle of cybernetics is not the hermeneutic circle but the feedback loop. Originally developed by Norbert Wiener, ‘feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance’.142 A feedback loop is an application of the principle of ‘recursion’,143 Iser adds, in which the results of a process are reinserted into that process, giving rise to a multi-layered structure. There are two types of feedback, according to cybernetic theory: With a negative feedback loop, the discrepancy of information between input and output is minimal, and thus it serves to stabilize the system that initiated the recursion. A positive feedback loop has far-reaching repercussions on the system concerned. It may change the original targets and will tend to unbalance the system by bombarding it with uncontrollable factors.144

As the former stabilizes and the latter destabilizes the original system, the negative loop may be associated with the ‘colonizing’ types of interpretation mentioned in Iser’s introduction, and the positive loop with productive types of interpretation. Or, to connect this argument to The Act of Reading, these two options may be associated with texts that restabilize and destabilize, respectively, contemporary thought systems. In any case, Iser points out that such interactions play an important role in Clifford Geertz’s ethnographical interpretations as well as in Francisco Varela’s biological systems theory. Iser’s account demonstrates that these recursive models, which might appear surprising subjects for a literary critic, are highly relevant for literary studies because they allow us to criticize static conceptions of culture. In his work, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz tries to interpret the relationship between man and culture. It is hard to distinguish between the biological and cultural features of human beings, he observes, because unfamiliar environments prompt them to develop cultural forms which end up having an effect on their biological makeup. Hence both parts of the equation are part of ‘a positive feedback system’,145 in which humans create culture, which creates humans, and so forth, ultimately turning human beings into ‘cultural artifacts’.146 This feedback loop can never be arrested, for neither man nor his environment can ever be definitively described. Clearly, this model undermines rigid conceptions of humanity, as I have mentioned earlier. It also hints at a more dynamic view of culture, one which is diametrically opposed to projects like that of Matthew Ar-

142 143 144 145 146

Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 93.

240 —— Chapter 5 nold, whose literary criticism, as Iser reminds us, still appealed to ‘a postulated idea of culture’; Geertz, by contrast, makes us see that ‘we can never identify specific features of culture with culture itself, as all its features seem destined to issue into their own otherness’.147 It goes without saying that such a dynamic subject matter requires versatile interpretive procedures. Since an attempt to grasp culture would entail applying extraneous terms to this ever-changing process, Geertz feels that we should not strive for a ‘cognition’ but a ‘reading’ of culture.148 That, Iser says, is why he introduces a distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ description; the former refers to a meagre ‘reification of abstract concepts that are superimposed on culture’, the latter to a more sensitive and full-bodied search for ‘coherence’.149 This type of interpretation, like the modes of commentary and hermeneutics before it, highlights the interplay between literal and figurative meanings, the structure of ‘double meaning’ which we encountered in the previous chapters. For thick description, as Iser says, triggers ‘a recursive movement between the manifest and the implied, out of which a continually self-refining semiotic web evolves as a register into which culture as symbolic action is translated’.150 This cybernetic register, Iser believes, permits us to capture the flexible process of culture in an appropriately tentative fashion. Similarly, the analysis of Varela’s systems theory introduces several notions – autopoiesis, non-linear systems and structural coupling – that Iser will use to redefine the idea of culture. Originally, Varela’s work tried to interpret the workings of organic systems. These systems are ‘autopoietic’,151 which means that their activity does not simply create new components, but also maintains or regenerates the network of processes by which such components are produced. Despite their many feedback loops, Wiener’s model no longer suffices to describe the complex organization of these self-generating systems. In contrast to ordinary feedback loops, after all, the recursive loops of organic systems proceed in a ‘nonlinear’ fashion and do not yield a specific result.152 Since these systems are composed of different subsystems, moreover, we can no longer distinguish clear inputs and outputs; instead, we witness complex interactions between systems, whereby the external pressures of one system trigger compensating operations within another. Such interactions culminate in ‘structural coupling’,153 that is, the eventual functioning of interacting systems as a composite, higher-order sys-

147 148 149 150 151 152 153

Ibid., pp. 42, 93. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., pp. 98, 97. Ibid., p. 98–99. Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid.

The Recursions of Culture —— 241

tem. In what should by now be a familiar gesture, Iser says that the recursive ‘register’ of systems theory cannot be conflated with its ‘subject matter’, because its dual character – Iser refers to a tension between operational and symbolic explanations – ‘reveals [. ..] that the liminal space that exists both inside and between living and social systems inscribes itself into the very register that is to grasp the subject matter’.154 Since its register is not unitary, its interpretation cannot be either. The reference to ‘social systems’ already indicates that Varela’s model might be applied to cultural as well as biological systems, and that it again gestures towards a more dynamic view of culture. As Iser observes, just as the structural coupling of various organic subsystems creates the composite human organism, so the structural coupling of cultural subsystems (in an argument that also recalls the work of Niklas Luhmann) yields the social or cultural system: We only have to think of society as such a higher-order system arising out of the interlocking of political, economic, cultural, communicative, legal, scientific, and religious systems to recognize that a great many of them are already composite unities themselves. In this respect, culture may serve as an even more vivid illustration. High, popular, and low culture as well as the arts and media are in continual conversation with one another, which more often than not leads to an interchange of components between these unities.155

In other words, culture is no longer a stable, hierarchical entity, but a flexible, composite system that is continually transformed by the dynamic interaction between its subsystems. Iser clarifies this process in another essay: Subculture, for instance, undercuts hegemonic structures of evaluation, and high culture marginalizes such acts of subversion. Minority culture exploits high culture, and the latter turns ethnic culture into exhibits. These cultural levels form relations with one another – just as systems do – by permanently circulating information that is channeled through recursive loops.156

The picture of culture that emerges from these observations is that of a composite system or network which exhibits a recursive ‘circulation process’ between its components and layers: a process which gives rise to ‘a self-organising system’ or a self-transforming ‘emergent phenomenon’.157 This emergent process of culture

154 Ibid., p. 110. 155 Ibid., p. 106. 156 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity and its Feedback. The Two-Sidedness of Humanistic Discourse’, Partial Answers, 1.1 (2003), 1–33 (p. 19). 157 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Kultur. Ein emergentes Phänomen’, in Ansprachen und Vorträge anläßlich der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde an Professor Dr. Wolfgang Iser, ed. by Kordula LindnerJarchow (Siegen: Universität Siegen, 2004), pp. 19–37 (pp. 33, 32, 30).

242 —— Chapter 5 proceeds via ‘ways of worldmaking’ or the ‘continual reshuffling [Umbesetzung] of its subsystems’ – formulations that recall the ideas of Goodman and Blumenberg discussed earlier.158 In addition, Iser notes that different interpreters will highlight different subsystems, and that culture will therefore appear as ‘an interchangeable backgrounding and foregrounding of its coupled unities, out of which the kaleidoscopically shifting panorama of culture emerges’.159 In light of this reference to ‘foreground’ and ‘background’, it might be argued that Iser is using the systemic model to extend his way of reading literary texts to the reading of entire cultures. In both cases, placing different elements in the foreground or background enables us to assess and reassess initial results, making sure that the text or the culture in question is not interpreted reductively. The British cultural system, Iser says, provides a good illustration of the composite, heterogeneous character of culture: Great Britain serves as an outstanding example of this interplay of systems and levels of cultures. The inroads of Norman into Anglo-Saxon culture led to Britain’s medieval culture, which in turn became regionalized through the Irish, the Scots, and Welsh, split into a society of two nations during the Industrial Revolution, and finally unfolded its modernity through the prevalent multiculturalism of our time. Moreover, the impact of British national culture exercised on the non-European world led to encounters that created Anglophone cultures, which in turn diversified cross-cultural relationships in hitherto inconceivable directions.160

This is perhaps an over-optimistic reading of ‘the impact of British national culture’ (some of these ‘encounters’ arguably diversified cross-cultural relationships in wrong directions), but the important observation for our purposes is that, according to Iser, literature fulfils a unique function in this composite system. Compare the following remark with his response to Luhmann, as described at the end of Chapter 3: ‘literature injects something into cultural circulation that other noise-dependent systems are unable to generate: namely, a noise which “keeps us from being so fully integrated into a silently functioning system that we would cease to be aware of it as a system”’.161 Literature ensures that the system does not run too smoothly. It is sand rather than a cog in the machine. For Iser, then, the recursive loop is a concept that enables Geertz and Varela to interpret the workings of human culture and biological systems. At first sight, this loop is therefore only one of many interpretative registers. Yet the cybernetic

158 Ibid., pp. 32, 31. 159 Iser, Range, p. 112. 160 Wolfgang Iser, Stepping Forward. Essays, Lectures and Interviews (Kidderminster: Crescent Moon Publishing, 1998), p. 29. 161 Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity’, p. 25.

The Recursions of Culture —— 243

idiom recurs throughout The Range of Interpretation. On the basis of Iser’s statements, we might assume that subjects such as textual materials and religious experiences can be interpreted solely via circles and differentials. However, when we scrutinize his reading of these interpretative practices, we stumble across notions that, strictly speaking, do not fit. Religious commentary, for instance, is described as an autopoietic or ‘self-reproducing textuality’, whereby the ‘two different systems’ of the canonical text and its contemporary reading impinge on one another.162 Turning to the hermeneutic tradition, Schleiermacher’s register reveals a recursive ‘to-and-fro movement’ between its components, Droysen’s work an ‘endless fine-tuning’ and Ricoeur’s interpretations a process of ‘feedback’.163 This cybernetic idiom also returns in the analysis of Rosenzweig’s differential method: here, ‘different systems are coupled with one another’.164 Even more importantly, this idiom is essential to Iser’s general account of interpretation. On page one, he already defines interpretation in terms of a feedback loop: ‘[w]e continually emit a welter of [. ..] signals in response to a bombardment of [. ..] signals that we receive from outside ourselves’.165 And at the end, this register appears again, for he describes the interplay between the different interpretative modes (circle, loop, differential) in terms of ‘loops’ and even states that, in flexible interpretations, the liminal space forms an ‘autopoietic’ or ‘nonlinear’ system, because the awareness of a difference between subject matter and register generates ever-new interpretative hypotheses.166 In fact, as ‘there is always a structural coupling between subject matter and register’, the conclusion is obvious: ‘there seems to be a recursive undercurrent in the very process of interpretation itself’.167 Apparently, Iser’s own register is ultimately a cybernetic one, and every interpretation proceeds as a recursive loop, whereby the input that is the interpreter’s register leads to a provisional output after the confrontation with the subject matter, which is then reinserted into the process. I have pointed out that Iser is critical both of philosophers who privilege circular modes of interpretation and of critics who emphasize their ideological presuppositions. However, we might ask ourselves whether he is not proposing an equally reductive approach to interpretation himself, given his emphasis on the cybernetic register. If proponents of the hermeneutic circle threaten to preclude other means of interaction between subject matter and register, Iser’s cybernetic 162 Iser, Range, pp. 26, 28. 163 Ibid., pp. 53, 68, 80. 164 Ibid., p. 131. 165 Ibid., p. 1. This sentence returns almost verbatim at the beginning of How to Do Theory: ‘[w]e continually emit a mass of [. . .] signals in response to the bombardment of [. ..] signals that we receive from outside ourselves’. See Iser, Theory, p. 1. 166 Iser, Range, p. 149. 167 Ibid., pp. 151, 84.

244 —— Chapter 5 model arguably runs a similar risk. He is not unaware of this, however. In a similar fashion to circularity, he says, notions such as feedback and recursion may be turned into ‘umbrella concepts’, which are no longer provisional ‘vehicles of mapping’.168 These ‘open concepts’, we might say, might be put to use by theories which aspire after an ‘architectural’ form of closure. That is why Iser is careful to insist that the liminal space is ‘not exactly’ autopoietic and only appears ‘as if’ it were organizing itself.169 The description of interpretation as recursion is, it would seem, just a theoretical fiction. Resisting the temptation of theoretical closure, Iser acknowledges that a cybernetic model of interpretation does not provide a definitive explanation but only ‘a productive mapping of ever-new territories’, and hence ‘prevent[s] us from lapsing into another master narrative of the human condition’.170 As he concludes in the final sentence of his book, our unending interpretations show that human existence remains elusive: This sequence [of interpretations] highlights figuration as a mapping activity, which equally assembles and dismantles territories, thus invalidating any notion that claims to represent human life. Life cannot be frozen into a hypostatization of any of its aspects, for it is basically unrepresentable and can therefore only be conceived in terms of the transient figurations of interpretation.171

As the reference to ‘life’ indicates, The Range of Interpretation concludes with a note that recalls Iser’s very earliest work, on Henry Fielding’s eighteenth-century novels. For this late study asserts, once again, that only literary forms of interpretation enable us to do full justice to the enigma that is life. In the spirit of The Range of Interpretation, we might conclude that Iser’s work has come full circle.

Rippled Surfaces Iser’s broad account of interpretation leads away from literary studies in a narrow sense, for it explores various non-literary theories and aims to provide a better model for productive interactions within and between cultural systems. Yet it is important to understand that The Range of Interpretation has an important literary dimension too. Its plea for flexible forms of interpretation should be situated, as the book’s introduction indicates, in the context of contemporary debates about literary criticism. Its historical and anthropological claims extend Iser’s earlier, literary reflections on modernity and humanity, and its cybernetic

168 169 170 171

Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., pp. 148, 149. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid.

The Recursions of Culture —— 245

register hints at a more flexible, indeed literary conception of culture. This implicit literary dimension of his argument is reinforced by the appendices of The Range of Interpretation, where Iser uses readings of Thomas Carlyle and Walter Pater to show that the work of these nineteenth-century authors enables us to further investigate the flexible interaction between cultures, as well as the provisional status of interpretations. These appendices reveal the practical implications of Iser’s theoretical musings, implications which can be further clarified by returning to the insights of Stephan Mussil and Douglas Hofstadter. The appendix on Carlyle addresses an issue that Iser mentions several times in the other sections of his book but never truly elaborates, namely ‘how cultures or cultural levels are translated into terms that allow an interchange between what is foreign and what is familiar’.172 This issue is important, we recall, because the increasing interaction between cultures was one of the main reasons for turning to interpretation and translation in the first place. That Iser does not elaborate it in the rest of The Range of Interpretation is nevertheless not surprising, for his intercultural reading of Carlyle originally occupied a central position in his argument, as can be seen from an earlier lecture series about interpretation. Here, we find the same sequence of models as in his later book: Iser first discusses commentary, then hermeneutics and finally Rosenzweig. There is one difference, however: the lecture series discusses Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) in the place occupied by cybernetic models in The Range of Interpretation.173 That is because, in Iser’s reading, Carlyle’s work is also characterized by cybernetic loops. This work also tells us something about intercultural dialogue, however. In general terms, Iser’s analysis begins, ‘[r]ecursion’ enables us to encounter the unfamiliar without simply assimilating it:174 any [intercultural] discourse will have to start out from the familiar. At the same time, however, its inevitable miscalculations with respect to the foreign will have to be fed back into its own assumptions, because a foreign culture becomes accessible to the extent that its observers modify their own preconceived notions about it. This reciprocal relation between foreign observers and foreign cultures plays itself out in the form of a feedback loop, in which the insufficient input returns as a revised output that fine-tunes subsequent inputs.175

If we really want to interact with another culture, in short, we cannot cling to the conventions of our original cultural framework, but we need, instead, to recalibrate our prejudices, so as to take the habits of this unfamiliar culture into ac-

172 173 174 175

Ibid., p. 84. See Iser, Stepping Forward, p. 55. Iser, Range, p. 114. Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity’, p. 21.

246 —— Chapter 5 count. Proper intercultural dialogue, like proper reading, is a two-way street. Hence, in contrast to reductive forms of ‘selective assimilation’, we should explore the gap between these cultures by means of a flexible form of ‘translating’.176 We can see such a dynamic recursion or translation at work in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Iser posits, a book that appears to present its readers with the first English edition of the writings of a German philosopher, the fictitious figure Teufelsdröckh. In Iser’s view, this remarkable mock-edition is one of the first attempts to develop a proper ‘cross-cultural discourse’, because here, ‘[t]he concept-oriented philosophical culture of German idealism is transposed into the experience-oriented culture of British empiricism’.177 In contrast to readings which privilege either the idealist or empiricist aspect of Carlyle’s work, Iser argues that Sartor Resartus is able to translate both cultures by encouraging their respective attitudes to interact. This interaction enables us to see, in his view, that Teufelsdröckh’s ‘Philosophy of Clothes’ is not as ridiculous as Carlyle’s irony seems to imply. To Iser’s mind, this philosophy, through the metaphor of clothes, reveals that the human mind often ‘clothes’ intangible phenomena, which ‘can be translated into multifarious aspects by imposing everchanging patternings on it’.178 As the following passage demonstrates in more detail, Iser actually associates this philosophy with his own literary anthropology: Garments, though they are a metaphor for something preexisting, simultaneously pattern what they are meant to represent. This is the plasticity of human nature, which, as such, not only remains intangible but appears to offer itself to being shaped [. ..] into kaleidoscopically changing forms. [.. .] Of course, such a patterning bears its own risks [. . .] by imprisoning the human being in one of the garments in which it has clothed itself [. ..]. The Philosophy of Clothes is a kind of shorthand for the patterning and repatterning of human plasticity.179

Alluding to Plessner, Iser concludes that Carlyle’s cross-cultural book already disclosed ‘the decentered position of the human being’.180 Even though Teufelsdröckh’s abstract speculations are not completely misguided, Iser grants that they might appear strange, even ridiculous, to the empirically minded British reader. How can such exotic ideas be conveyed to an incredulous audience with a different cultural background, he wonders? The solution suggested by Carlyle’s work consists of two steps: first one makes fun of

176 177 178 179 180

Iser, Range, p. 162. Ibid., pp. 159, 163. Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 177.

The Recursions of Culture —— 247

these abstract ideas, and then one suggests that they are not that ridiculous after all. In contrast to common cross-cultural encounters, where existing frames of reference are simply projected onto the alien culture, Carlyle’s work invalidates such projections: ‘[t]o frustrate an almost natural reaction of one culture when confronted with another proves to be a strategy on Carlyle’s part to open the gate for the other culture to enter’.181 In other words, Carlyle acts as if he is approaching German ideas in the self-protective and ironic manner (supposedly) characteristic of British culture, before subverting this standard response and making the British reader see this alien culture in a manner that is no longer predetermined by his parochial presuppositions. Carlyle first applies the standard British attitude to German ideas, but these ideas then start to impinge on and transform the original attitude; a feedback loop is thus created between the familiar and the foreign and the limitations of the assimilationist stance are avoided. Incidentally, it should come as no surprise that Iser is so fascinated by the cross-cultural position of Sartor Resartus, given that he frequently had to navigate between German and Anglo-American concerns and preconceptions, and was sometimes seen as an excessively abstract, literary Teufelsdröckh. As one commentator has observed more broadly, ‘[o]ne of the deepest ground notes in Iser’s work is surely the need and the will to repair the breach that had opened between German and English cultures through the unhappy events of the twentieth century’.182 In any case, the first practical implication of Iser’s reflections on interpretation is that they allow us to discuss the ways in which cultural prejudices are both evoked and revoked in literary texts, leading to a recursive loop between familiar traditions and alien cultures. His argument also redefines the function of gaps. We have learned that, for Iser, interpretations ideally disclose their partial character through a dual register. Importantly, he adds that literary or quasi-literary texts possess rhetorical mechanisms that further highlight the provisional character of their interpretations. In discussing religious commentary, for instance, Iser draws attention to the ‘mashal’, a sort of Judaic parable that reinterprets the canon in the light of specific communal concerns. The mashal achieves this effect by means of its singular rhetorical structure: first a narrative is told, then it is applied in a so-called ‘nimshal’, and finally it is endorsed by a canonical passage or ‘prooftext’ from the Bible. In his characteristic style, Iser claims that the mashal engages its audience through the gaps or ‘empty spaces’ that separate the different parts – narrative, nimshal, prooftext – of its rhetorical sequence.183 These empty spaces are

181 Ibid., p. 170. 182 Elinor Shaffer, ‘Circling the Reader. The Reception of Wolfgang Iser in the UK. 1970–2003’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 27–43 (p. 41). 183 Iser, Range, p. 24.

248 —— Chapter 5 no longer simply seen as the response-inviting structures of The Act of Reading, however, but also as ‘traces of the liminal space’.184 Thus, in addition to guiding the reader’s interpretation, these gaps in the mashal’s rhetorical structure underscore that its interpretation is inconclusive. Iser develops this idea in the appendix on Walter Pater. In this analysis, Pater’s interpretations of Plato and the Renaissance avoid ‘colonizing’ their subjects by inscribing the difference between subject matter and register into the very fabric of their discourse. In a quasi-novelistic fashion, Plato is ‘viewed from a mobile array of standpoints’; and the strands of earlier philosophy that return in his work are not neatly linked but are abruptly juxtaposed, as if in a montage.185 In line with Iser’s account of the mashal, this ‘junction of folded parts invites “connecting thoughts” for the hollow space to be filled’, and thereby allows the recipient to participate in the interpretation, and to recognize the remaining differences between Pater and Plato.186 Just like the circle, the loop and the differential, Iser claims, these ‘fold[s]’ and ‘blank[s]’ are strategies for navigating the liminal space, and do not prematurely end the interpretative process.187 In a phrase that neatly summarizes his earlier as well as his later analysis of blanks, he concludes that ‘Pater’s description is punctured by disconnections or even blanks that not only spur the beholder into action but also manifest the space that is opened up in any act of interpretation’.188 The empty space between textual passages might create interpretative freedom, as it allows readers to connect them more or less as they please; but it also implies that their interpretation can never be confirmed, as there is no textual material to settle the issue once and for all. Hence, the recursive loop between juxtaposed textual passages can never be brought to a halt. Iser’s reflections on interpretation evidently have important implications for the reading of specific literary texts and their rhetorical structures. Through the identification of gap-like structures in historical, psychological and theological writings, his book also suggests that the dynamic activation of such gaps in literary reading might function as a model for more flexible forms of interpretation in other disciplines. As the appendices on Carlyle and Pater demonstrate, Iser’s cybernetic register can be used to describe specific rhetorical structures within literary texts. He maintains that narrative gaps hint at the provisional character of an interpretation, and that cultural prejudices might be both evoked and revoked in texts via recursive loops. If we want to develop these practical implications of his later

184 185 186 187 188

Ibid. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., pp. 189–90. Ibid., pp. 186, 192. Ibid., p. 194, emphasis added.

The Recursions of Culture —— 249

work, however, an important modification is required. As the notion of the ‘recursive loop’ already implies, Iser applies the concept of recursion in a very general sense, almost equating it with the ‘feedback loop’. In an equally broad fashion, Sanford Budick’s attempt to apply the insights of The Range of Interpretation to specific texts culminates in the idea that the principal components of a painting or a literary text ‘interact recursively as an endlessly self-transforming circle of inputs and outputs, or [...] of recursive circulations’.189 And a similarly broad definition of recursion crops up in Stephan Mussil’s essay, as we have seen, for he maintains that we should not interpret this notion as Douglas Hofstadter does because it comprises not only the operation of embedding but also the broader phenomenon of the ‘successive reapplication’ of textual components.190 These definitions are by no means wrong, but they risk ignoring the specific qualities of recursion and its unique contribution to the register of literary criticism. In this broad view, after all, every work and indeed every sentence shows recursion. That might be true, but then why should we bother pointing it out? What difference does it make? I therefore propose that we focus less on the generalized form of recursion identified by these broader definitions (in terms of feedback, circulation, reapplication) and more on the localized forms of recursion that appear in specific textual passages. Hofstadter, for example, stated that recursion is the principle whereby a similar element or pattern returns on different levels of the same structure. This narrower definition suggests that we should examine specific techniques like the play with the work’s title mentioned by Mussil, but also techniques such as mise-en-abıˆme and metalepsis.191 These are interesting in the context of Iser’s work, because they indicate that literary readers not only have to ‘fill in’ the gaps between consecutive sentences and chapters, but also those between different textual layers. Literary texts, we might say, have a high incidence not only of horizontal gaps, or gaps along the horizontal axis of the narrative sequence, but also of vertical gaps, or gaps along the vertical axis of its multiple narrative layers. Furthermore, it is only logical that Iser was drawn to these techniques because they often involve play with the boundaries of reality and fiction, which is an important theme in his literary anthropology. Consider M. C. Escher’s ‘Rippled Surface’ (1950), in which an image of the moon is shown to be a reflection by the ripples on the surface of the pool the spectator is looking

189 Budick, ‘Oedipus’ Blessing’, p. 72–73. 190 Mussil, ‘Secret’, p. 787–88. 191 For a detailed discussion of the mise-en-abıˆme, see Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1977]). To a certain extent, my argument here is that the combined efforts of Iser and Mussil might enable us to update Dällenbach’s work, and in ways, moreover, which take issues of reading and interpretation into account.

250 —— Chapter 5 at. And, of course, even this illusion turns out to be but a reflection, for Escher’s work itself can only offer us an image of a pool. This play with different levels of representation (as well as the image of widening circles) explains why this picture is not only discussed in Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach but also graces the cover of The Range of Interpretation. In this book, after all, Iser is concerned with precisely such recursive and circular patterns. In the context of literary reading, we might say that these recursive structures play a crucial role in provoking and guiding the reader’s interpretation, an activity which is characterized, as we have seen, by its own form of recursion (frequently, reading is rereading). And the sum of such textual and interpretative recursions, The Range of Interpretation finally suggests, is what makes up the broader cultural system. Iser’s How to Do Theory and The Range of Interpretation advance highly selfconscious reflections on the nature of literary theory and interpretation. Regarding theory, Iser pleads for the development of operational models, despite the fact these cannot easily be distinguished from more rigid architectural and discursive models. His observations on theory can be linked to The Act of Reading through the ‘open concepts’ that characterize operational models, and to The Fictive and the Imaginary by dint of the idea that art offers an experience which cannot be fully captured in cognitive terms. Iser’s study on theory also alludes to recursion and translation, notions that are only fully explored, however, in The Range of Interpretation. In this text, he differentiates between various modes of interpretation, namely the circle, the loop and the differential. Each of these interpretative modes highlights the gap or liminal space between their subject matter and register, and they are, therefore, all akin to the self-disclosing fictions of literary anthropology. As this liminal space continues to energize the interpretative process, it can in turn be linked to earlier ideas, such as the rhetorical blanks which permeate literary texts, or the cognitive gaps which confront human beings. On account of the energy it generates, it even resembles notions such as negativity and the imaginary. The study of these distinct interpretative practices, Iser concludes, sheds light on literary criticism, reveals how human beings continually reinterpret their societies and their selves, and might even improve our sensitivity to cultural differences.

Example 5: Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (2) Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado is worth rereading in this context for a variety of reasons. As we have seen, Iser claims that his theory of interpretation is a more fruitful alternative to the reductive reading strategies of Said’s postcolonial approach and similar minority discourses. Hence, it is interesting to confront Iser’s reflections with Syjuco’s novel, which reflects on postcolonial issues in a self-critical

The Recursions of Culture —— 251

fashion. Furthermore, in his work on interpretation, Iser argues that we can only truly encounter other cultures if we are able to see past our own preconceptions. As we have seen, Syjuco’s novel, in a similar fashion to Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, evokes and then revokes the stereotype of the Filipino expat (see the end of Chapter 3). In addition, the book both uses and undermines Filipino stereotypes by incorporating self-deprecating jokes about a Filipino Everyman, Erning Isip, into more nuanced types of discourse. In this way, the reader of Ilustrado is first reminded of cultural stereotypes, and then shown that these fail to square with the complex realities of the Philippines. This issue is not unrelated to the topic of interpretation, of course. We saw in Chapter 3 that Ilustrado is actually a work of interpretation, a continued attempt on the part of the protagonist to unearth the ‘figure in the carpet’ that fully explains the literary work of the fictitious author Crispin Salvador. Moreover, the novel also reflects on the broader process of intercultural interpretation. When he is confronted with his own enigmatic statement that ‘Manila is untranslatable’, for instance, Salvador answers: I meant you can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. [...] It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that? If one writes about its tropical logic, its familial loyalties, its bitter aftertaste of Spanish colonialism, readers wonder: Is this a Magical Realist? So one writes of the gilded oligarchs and the reporters with open hands and the underpaid officers in military fatigues [...]. And readers wonder: Is this Africa? How do we fly from someone else’s pigeonhole? We haven’t. We must. And to do that, we have to figure out how to properly translate ourselves.192

As this passage makes plain, Syjuco’s novel also considers our ability or inability to interpret cultures and people without pigeonholing them and ignoring their individual features. How can we move beyond cultural stereotypes and conventional representations (in terms of magical realism, corruption, and so forth), the novel asks? How can we ‘translate’ our experiences of books like Salvador’s or cities like Manila when we know that such translations are inevitably partial? Syjuco’s book answers this question by creating representations which are permeated by gaps and recursive structures. Ilustrado, we know, presents its readers with a montage of different genres and texts, a patchwork narrative that is permeated by many explicit and implicit gaps. In line with Iser’s reading of Pater, we could say therefore that Syjuco’s novel highlights its gaps to stress the provisional character of its interpretations of Manila and Salvador. Through its clearly inconclusive, montage-like form, it suggests that its interpretations are not and can never be definitive. With the help of Mussil and Hofstadter, moreover, we are able to see that Syjuco’s work energizes (and simultaneously frus192 Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (London: Picador, 2010), pp. 59–60.

252 —— Chapter 5 trates) the reader’s hermeneutic efforts by using specific recursive structures. First of all, the novel illustrates Mussil’s thesis that the meaning of literary works partly lies in the way they specify their titles in the course of the text. Just as Henry James frequently returns to the nature of the ‘figure in the carpet’ mentioned in the title of his story, the notion of the ilustrado or the enlightened recurs many times and on many different levels throughout Syjuco’s novel: it is not only the title of the book, but it is also the title of one of Crispin’s novels, and is mentioned many times in the body of the work. For example, Ilustrado concludes with the sentence ‘[h]ome, with the discovery that we are only enlightened at a new beginning, at what we perceive to be the end’.193 As we read, such passages suggest, we not only have to fill in the horizontal gaps which separate the different sections and chapters of the work but also, however provisionally, the vertical gaps which separate its different narrative layers. Ilustrado also contains examples of the recursive techniques described by Hofstadter. We find many mise-en-abıˆme-type passages, for instance. For example, one of Salvador’s books is said to recreate a tumultuous part of Filipino history, like Ilustrado itself, through ‘a mixture of press clippings, radio and TV transcripts, allegories, myths, letters, and vignettes from the various points of view of characters, factual and fictional, intended to represent Filipinos from all walks of life’.194 In a further meta-fictional twist, which recalls the paradoxical architecture drawn by Escher and discussed by Hofstadter, there is a remarkable shift in perspective toward the end of the novel. We are initially led to believe we are reading a story which is being written by a student who is investigating the death of Salvador, but we find out here that it is actually the other way around: what we are actually reading is a story which was written by Salvador as he was researching the death of his student. Miguel never finds the missing manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze, Salvador’s missing last work, because unbeknownst to him, Miguel’s own story is that very manuscript. In an impossible recursive loop akin to Escher’s drawing of a hand that draws itself, protagonist and author meet: ‘In the hallway mirror, he is naked. He leans toward his reflection. He sees an image of me, as I once was. He reaches out his hand. Or is his hand following mine? Our fingers touch. The mirror ripples’.195 This rippling surface reminds us that what we see is not necessarily real, that our interpretations are not necessarily definitive. Through its blanks and recursions, then, a novel like Ilustrado stimulates us to interpret, while simultaneously ensuring that the meanings we ascribe to it will remain open to challenge and further interpretation. Like Manila, we might conclude, Syjuco’s novel is untranslatable. 193 Ibid., p. 304, emphasis added. 194 Ibid., p. 11. 195 Ibid., p. 283.

Conclusion. Modernity, Meaning and Humanity [R]eception is a simultaneous process of forgetting and discovering.1

In a provocative if not terribly insightful essay, one critic has suggested that in the future, no one will have heard of Wolfgang Iser.2 Let me begin this conclusion by countering this pessimistic view and giving two reasons why everyone should have heard of his work. First, Iser offers a consistent and impassioned description of the nature and function of literature. He shows in detail how literature in the twenty-first century can function ‘as a procedure of anthropological discovery, as a storage of cultural memory, as a virtual reality, as an epitome of emergence, or as an innerworldly transcendental vantage point’.3 In addition to his definition of literature, Iser has, second, proposed a powerful account of reading. In the modern age, he suggests: [r]eading [...] may unfold itself into a variety of activities: [i]t deciphers a palimpsest, projects a meaning, uncovers the hidden, disputes the given, and imagines the possible, to name but a few possibilities for the mutual ‘reading’ of signifiers. Such an iterative movement reintroduces into what is present whatever the present has excluded.4

Iser’s work continues to be important because of the way he has developed and illustrated these powerful definitions of literature and reading. In this book, I have examined the theory behind these definitions by analyzing Iser’s main writings and providing a detailed overview of his thoughts on the novel, literary history, reception theory, literary anthropology, literary theory and cybernetic hermeneutics. As my account of this development has demonstrated, Iser gradually distanced himself from earlier approaches, such as the sociological model espoused by his supervisor, and received vital impulses from members of the interdisciplinary Poetik und Hermeneutik circle. The resulting conception of the implied reader and the act of reading was both celebrated and criticized by the international 1 Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1987]), p. 129. 2 Michael Be´rube´, ‘There’s Nothing Inside the Text. Or, Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser’, in Postmodern Sophistry. Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise, ed. by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2004), pp. 11–26. 3 Wolfgang Iser, ‘Context-Sensitivity and its Feedback. The Two-Sidedness of Humanistic Discourse’, Partial Answers, 1.1 (2003), 1–33 (p. 30). 4 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1991]), p. 226.

254 —— Conclusion community, and this had a decisive influence on the reception of his later, anthropological and post-hermeneutic inquiries. Looking back over the previous chapters, we can also conclude that Iser’s major monographs propose various ways of understanding three fundamental themes: modernity, meaning and humanity (see Figure 8). Original title

modernity

meaning

humanity

Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings

humanization

Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen Der implizite Leser

relative spirit discovery

problematic individual aesthetic existence inaccessible self

Der Akt des Lesens Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre

partial art boundarycrossing open world

clarity (Eindeutigkeit) aesthetic polysemy (Vieldeutigkeit) indeterminacy play recursion

differential

The Range of Interpretation

unfamiliar experience ecstasy

Figure 8: Modernity, Meaning and Humanity in the Theory of Wolfgang Iser

To recap briefly: in Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings, Iser maintains that the eighteenth-century novels of Fielding display moral clarity and a humanizing impulse in their effort to address the problematic condition of the modern individual. Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen maintains that the ‘relative spirit’ of modern times is articulated in Pater’s essays and novels in an artistically fruitful, but ethically flawed, ‘aesthetic’ form. In The Implied Reader, Iser argues that modern literature unearths unknown aspects of reality and the inaccessible self via the polysemy of its montages. The Act of Reading begins with a plea in support of the partial nature of modernist art before describing how the semantic indeterminacy of literary texts provokes an unfamiliar experience that transforms the mindset of the reader. In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser discusses the transgressions of early modern pastoralism, compares different theories of fiction and imagination, and disentangles the different levels of play which enable readers to reach a state of ecstasy. The Range of Interpretation, finally, proposes that the open-ended world of modernity encourages productively recursive interpretations, as well as the differential self-specification of man. Iser’s work and its analysis of modernity, meaning and humanity, then, is systematic but by no means static. This book challenges the critical consensus about Iser in several ways. First, it has established that Iser’s earliest work is not as innovative as has been suggested and actually develops ideas from earlier critics and movements like Flasdieck and Geistesgeschichte. At the same time, however, Iser’s work in this period introduces ideas which bear clear relation to his more famous insights, such as

Modernity, Meaning and Humanity —— 255

the emphasis on the novel and the interest in the anthropological function of art. Furthermore, Iser’s claims about the aesthetic do not simply introduce a positive view of artistic possibilities, as critics have noted; they also point towards the negative existential implications of the aesthetic outlook, as well as express an existentialist fascination with the life-changing decisions human beings often have to make. Further, in opposition to the idea that Iser is a critic with little or no interest in history, the book has demonstrated that he continually returns to the modern project, creatively developing certain ideas of Dieter Henrich and, especially, Hans Blumenberg on montage, myth, reality and reshuffling. On the topic of the reading process, the book has noted that the differences between Iser’s and Ingarden’s accounts of fiction, imagination and negation are not as fundamental as many commentators, following Iser, have argued. A detailed reading of his publications also indicates that, far from forming a later phase in his oeuvre, literary anthropology is present from the very beginning. Moreover, I have suggested that Iser’s anthropology, despite the lukewarm reception it has received, introduces several ideas, such as human role-playing and textual play, which could be fruitfully developed if they were shorn of their normative overtones. Likewise, Iser’s account of culture as a multi-tiered, recursively operating network merits further study, as do his reflections on intercultural discourse and modes of translatability. Whereas the critical consensus mostly focuses on terms like negativity or imaginary, then, this book has argued that Iser’s oeuvre offers stimulating rereadings of many important critical ‘concepts’, including the novel, aesthetics, modernity, myth, fiction, the imagination, negation, play, recursion, culture and, of course, theory. Iser’s work is not without its problems, of course. Although he alludes to poetry and drama in his reflections on montage and anthropology, he is mainly interested in the canonical novel and the ways in which it enables its readers to imagine novel realities. Even when he is not discussing prose fiction, the novel is present in the background. In this respect, Iser’s reflections need to be modified by taking non-novelistic and non-canonical forms of literature into account. The normative dimension of his project – his attack on didactic literature in The Act of Reading and on fantasy literature in The Fictive and the Imaginary, his defence of endless forms of interpretation in The Range of Interpretation – should clearly be viewed critically. In contrast to a purely descriptive model, Iser favours difficult texts, active readings and endless reinterpretations. Moreover, his emphasis on the unique character of literary reading is undermined by the fact that his description of its features and functions might also be applied to other artistic media, most notably film. This inconsistency is especially problematic in the light of Iser’s unwarranted critique of new media and visual culture. His theory does not tell us much about the institutional and material dimensions of literary and cultural exchanges either, the social practices that enable the emergence of moder-

256 —— Conclusion nity, literary meaning or ‘mankind’. And although I agree with Iser that the aesthetic realm should not simply be dominated by questions of politics and ideology, art and interpretation must surely function in less positive ways than his theory suggests as well. Nor is it obviously true that we should embrace any form of otherness and unfamiliarity, as his theory of reading seems to argue. In fact, Iser clearly underestimates the importance of recognition and identification for the act of reading. On a methodological level, finally, his work introduces many near-synonymous terms that sometimes confuse as much as clarify. Having an ‘open’ terminology that is able to adapt to the circumstances and literary work under consideration is a good thing, but it comes at the – considerable – price of unnecessary complexity and obscurity. This book is by no means an exhaustive study of Iser’s thought, and I would like to conclude by suggesting four important areas for future inquiry. First, the reception of Iser’s work could be studied in more detail: not only the immediate reception in reviews and review articles, but also the subsequent reception and broader ‘influence’ of his thought. Investigating the similarities (and differences) between Iser’s theory and the work of critics such as Armstrong, Thomas, Fluck and Schwab would be a good starting point for such an inquiry. Second, the intellectual affinity between Iser on the one hand and Dilthey, Kierkegaard, Luka´cs, Blumenberg, Henrich, Booth, Ingarden, Luhmann, Caillois and Kermode on the other might be even closer than I have been able to show here, and it is important to ask how these and other intertexts make up a coherent philosophical and critical tradition. More specifically, it would be useful to consider Iser’s work in the light of traditions such as Lebensphilosophie and existentialism. Third, as Hans Belting’s work has shown, Iser’s reflections on literary reading can be profitably extended to other media and cultural practices. His thoughts on gaps and role-playing, for example, could clearly be transferred to comic books or videogames. The final avenue for exploration, and without question the most important from the perspective of my own study, would be the edition and analysis of Iser’s unpublished writings – not just the lecture notes and other material from the Critical Theory Archive at the University of California, Irvine, but also, and especially, his unfinished manuscript on ‘emergence’.5 It is not yet clear what this intriguing concept means. Is it another term for

5 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s ‘Iser Lecture’ of 2010 offers a rare discussion of the manuscript on emergence. In his view, Iser’s notion of ‘emergence’ should be seen as an alternative to notions such as ‘history’ and ‘evolution’. Gumbrecht concludes that, even though Iser would probably not have consented to its publication, an edition of his manuscript would still be a valuable asset to contemporary literary and cultural debates. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree. For further details, see Julia Wagner, ‘Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in Konstanz. Bericht der IserLecture 2010’ (2010), 〈http://www.exc16.de/cms/iser-lecture–2010-gumbrecht.html〉.

Modernity, Meaning and Humanity —— 257

the phenomena Iser had already discussed under the rubrics of the aesthetic, negativity, the imaginary and translatability? Do his reflections on emergent phenomena continue the broadening of perspective that began in The Fictive and the Imaginary and The Range of Interpretation? And does it, like those studies, still reveal traces of Iser’s original preoccupation with literature and reading? Time, and further readings, will tell. As Iser would no doubt appreciate, the work is far from over. In keeping with his view of modern meaning, future readers should construct new readings and interpretations of this oeuvre. If reception, as he observed, inevitably entails ‘forgetting’ as well as ‘discovering’, then in future work on Iser, new boundaries will be transgressed, new discoveries made. Only thus can we ensure the continued creation of novel realities, and sustain our cultural work on modernity, meaning and humanity.

Wolfgang Iser: A Bibliography Primary Works* Iser, Wolfgang, Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings (Heidelberg, 1950, unpublished dissertation). Iser, Wolfgang, Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1952). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Aatos Ojala. Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde’ (review), Review of English Studies, 7 (1956), 215–16. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Andrew Marvell. “To his Coy Mistress”’, Die neueren Sprachen (1957), 555–77. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘T. S. Eliots Four Quartets. Eine Stiluntersuchung’, Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, 3 (1958), 192–204. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘The Owl and the Nightingale. Versuch einer formgeschichtlichen Ortsbestimmung’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 33 (1959), 309–23. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Walter Pater und T. S. Eliot. Der Übergang zur Modernität’, GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift, 9 (1959), 391–408. Iser, Wolfgang, Walter Pater. Die Autonomie des Ästhetischen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1960). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Manieristische Metaphorik in der englischen Dichtung’, GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift, 10 (1960), 266–87. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Samuel Becketts dramatische Sprache’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 11 (1961), 451–67. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Das Spiel im Spiel. Formen dramatischer Illusion bei Shakespeare’, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 198 (1961), 209–26. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Nachruf auf Hermann M. Flasdieck’, Anglia, 80.1–2 (1962), 1–8. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Möglichkeiten der Illusion im historischen Roman. Sir Walter Scotts Waverley’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 135–56. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Sechste Sitzung. Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans. Kunst und Natur in der idealistischen Ästhetik. Vorsitz: Wolfgang Iser’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 219–27. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Image und Montage. Zur Bildkonzeption in der Imagistischen Lyrik und in T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik II. Immanente Ästhetik. Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. by Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1966), pp. 361–93. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Rupert Brooke. “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (Cafe´ des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)’, in Die moderne englische Lyrik. Interpretationen, ed. by Horst Oppel, (Berlin: Schmidt, 1967), pp. 59–70. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Reduktionsformen der Subjektivität’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik III. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, ed. by Hans Robert Jauss (Munich: Fink, 1968), pp. 435–91. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Überlegungen zu einem literaturwissenschaftlichen Studienmodell’, Linguistische Berichte, 1.2 (1969), 77–87. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Literary Criticism as a Study of the Aesthetic Response’, in Actes des Congre`s d’Aix-en-Provence et de Clermont-Ferrand, 1966–1967. La Critique devant la Litte´rature anglo-saxonne (Paris: Didier, 1969), pp. 167–70.

260 —— Wolfgang Iser: A Bibliography Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Der Archetyp als Leerform. Erzählschablonen und Kommunikation in Joyces Ulysses’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik IV. Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption, ed. by Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 369–408. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins. Zwischen Romantik und Moderne’, in Englische Dichter der Moderne. Ihr Leben und Werk, ed. by Rudolf Sühnel and Dieter Riesner (Berlin: Schmidt, 1971), pp. 33–51. Iser, Wolfgang, Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett (Munich: Fink, 1972). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Mittelenglische Literatur und romanische Tradition’, in Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters. Volume I. Ge´ne´ralite´s, ed. by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Heidelberg: Winter, 1972), pp. 304–32. Iser, Wolfgang, Die Appellstruktur der Texte. Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1974). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Die Figur der Negativität in Becketts Prosa’, in Das Werk von Samuel Beckett. Berliner Colloquium, ed. by Hans Mayer and Uwe Johnson (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 54–71. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Im Lichte der Kritik’, in Rezeptionästhetik. Theorie und Praxis, ed. by Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 325–42. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Konträre Leistungen der Negation’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik VI. Positionen der Negativität, ed. by Harald Weinrich (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 509–11. Iser, Wolfgang, Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (Munich: Fink, 1976). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Antrittsrede Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften’, in Jahrbuch der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften für das Jahr 1976 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1977), pp. 27–31. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Literaturwissenschaft in Konstanz’, in Gebremste Reform. Ein Kapitel deutscher Hochschulgeschichte Universität Konstanz 1966–1976. Gerhard Hess zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. by Hans Robert Jauss and Herbert Nesselhauf (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1977), pp. 181–200. Iser, Wolfgang, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978 [1972]). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Das imaginäre Museum der Literaturkritik. Rene´ Welleks imponierendes Werk. Rene´ Wellek. Geschichte der Literaturkritik 1750–1950’ (review), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12 December 1978, no pagination. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Fiction – the Filter of History. A Study of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 86–104. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Zur Problemlage gegenwärtiger Literaturtheorie. Das Imaginäre und die epochalen Schlüsselbegriffe’, in Auf den Weg gebracht. Idee und Wirklichkeit der Gründung der Universität Konstanz. Kurt Georg Kiesinger zum 75. Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. by Horst Sund and Manfred Timmermann (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1979), pp. 355–74. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Ist der Identitätsbegriff ein Paradigma für die Funktion der Fiktion?’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik VIII. Identität, ed. by Odo Marquard and Karlheinz Stierle (Munich: Fink, 1979), pp. 725–29. Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Talk Like Whales’, Diacritics, 11.3 (1981), 82–87. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Interpretationsperspektiven Moderner Kunsttheorie’, in Theorien der Kunst, ed. by Wolfgang Iser and Dieter Henrich (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 33–58.

Primary Works —— 261

Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Ulysses and the Reader’, James Joyce Broadsheet, 9 (October 1982), 1–2. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Das Imaginäre. Kein isolierbares Phänomen’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik X. Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 479–86. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Die Doppelungsstruktur des literarisch Fiktiven’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik X. Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 497–510. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Das Fiktive im Horizont seiner Möglichkeiten. Eine Schlußbetrachtung’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik X. Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 547–57. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Anglistik. Eine Universitatsdisziplin ohne Forschungsparadigma?’, Poetica. Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 16.3–4 (1984), 276–306. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Feigning in Fiction’, in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. by Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 204–28. Iser, Wolfgang, Walter Pater. The Aesthetic Moment, trans. by David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 [1960]). Iser, Wolfgang, Laurence Sternes ‘Tristram Shandy’. Inszenierte Subjektivität (Munich: Fink, 1987). Iser, Wolfgang, Shakespeares Historien. Genesis und Geltung (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1988). Iser, Wolfgang, Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [1987]). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Das Individuum zwischen Evidenzerfahrung und Uneinholbarkeit’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik XIII. Individualität, ed. by Manfred Frank and Anselm Haverkamp (Munich: Fink, 1988), pp. 95–8. Iser, Wolfgang, Prospecting. From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Vorwort’, in Theodore A. Meyer, Das Stilgesetz der Poesie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp), 1990, pp. 13–20. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘The Aesthetic and the Imaginary’, in The States of ‘Theory’. History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. by David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 201–20. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Fictionalizing. The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions’, New Literary History, 21.4 (1990), 939–55. Iser, Wolfgang, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991). Iser, Wolfgang, Theorie der Literatur. Eine Zeitperspektive (Constance: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1992). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Von der dementierten zur zerspielten Form des Erzählens’, in Wohin treibt die Moderne? Studium Generale 1991/1992 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1992), pp. 55–73. Iser, Wolfgang, The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993 [1991]). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Liebe und Verwandlung im Schäferroman. Zur Poetologie des Fiktiven’, in Tales and ‘Their Telling Difference’. Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Narrativik. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Franz K. Stanzel, ed. by Herbert Foltinek and others (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993), pp. 149–63. Iser, Wolfgang, Staging Politics. The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Historical Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993 [1988]).

262 —— Wolfgang Iser: A Bibliography Iser, Wolfgang, Spielstrukturen in Shakespeares Komödien. ‘Sommernachtstraum’ – ‘Was ihr wollt’ (Heidelberg: Winter, 1993). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Twenty-Five Years New Literary History. A Tribute to Ralph Cohen’, New Literary History, 25 (1994), 733–47. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Why Literature Matters’, in Why Literature Matters. Theories and Functions of Literature, ed. by Rüdiger Ahrens and Laurenz Volkmann (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996), pp. 13–22. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Die Präsenz des Endes. King Lear – Macbeth’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik XVI. Das Ende. Figuren einer Denkform, ed. by Rainer Warning and Karlheinz Stierle (Munich: Fink, 1996), pp. 359–83. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Wolfgang Iser’s “On Translatability”. Roundtable Discussion’, Surfaces, 6 (1996), 〈http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol6/iser.html〉. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Heide Ziegler. Ironie ist Pflicht. John Barth und John Hawkes – Bewusstseinsformen des amerikanischen Gegenwartsromans’ (review), Modern Fiction Studies, 43.2 (1997), 486–92. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Contemporary Literary Account of the Fictive’, in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. by Michael Kelly, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 179–82. Iser, Wolfgang, Stepping Forward. Essays, Lectures and Interviews (Kidderminster: Crescent Moon Publishing, 1998). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Mimesis/Emergenz’, in Mimesis und Simulation, ed. by Andreas Koblitz and Gerhard Neumann (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 1998), pp. 669–84. Iser, Wolfgang, The Range of Interpretation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). Iser, Wolfgang, ‘What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions’, in The Revenge of the Aesthetic. The Place of Literature in Theory Today, ed. by Michael P. Clark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 157–79. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘German Jewish Writers during the Decline of the Hapsburg Monarchy. Assessing the Assessment of Gershon Shaked’, in Ideology and Jewish Identity in Israeli and American Literature, ed. by Emily Budick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 259–73. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Unentwegtes Interpretieren. Struktur und Relevanz’, Domänen der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Herbert Jaumann and others (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), pp. 3–15. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Walter Pater. Figurationen des Imaginären’, in Das Imaginäre des Fin de sie`cle, ed. by Gerhard Neumann and Christine Lubkoll (Freiburg: Rombach, 2002), pp. 261–77. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Inmitten der Geschichte. Hans Blumenberg. Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften’ (review), Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 4 (2003), 667–72. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Context-Sensitivity and its Feedback. The Two-Sidedness of Humanistic Discourse’, Partial Answers, 1.1 (2003), 1–33. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Auktorialität. Die Nullstelle des Diskurses’, in Spielräume des auktorialen Diskurses, ed. by Klaus Städtke and others (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003), pp. 219–41. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘Kultur. Ein emergentes Phänomen’, Ansprachen und Vorträge anläßlich der Verleihung der Ehrendoktorwürde an Professor Dr. Wolfgang Iser, ed. by Kordula LindnerJarchow (Siegen: Universität Siegen, 2004), pp. 19–37. Iser, Wolfgang, ‘The Resurgence of the Aesthetic’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 1–15. Iser, Wolfgang, How to Do Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). * This bibliography lists only publications cited explicitly in the text.

Secondary Literature —— 263

Secondary Literature Amacher, Richard E. and Victor Lange, eds., New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Armstrong, Paul B., Play and the Politics of Reading. The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Armstrong, Paul B., ‘In Defense of Reading. Or, Why Reading Still Matters in a Contextualist Age’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), 87–113. Baetens, Jan, ‘Une nouvelle version de la narratologie structurale. Re´cit et causalite´ selon Emma Kafalenos’ (review), Acta Fabula, 7.6 (2006), no pagination. Bal, Mieke, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (London: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Barnes, Julian, Nothing to be Frightened of (London: Vintage Books, 2009 [2008]). Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory, 3rd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). Beckett, Samuel, Samuel Beckett. The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume I. Novels (New York: Grove Press, 2006). Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Task of the Translator. An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens’, in Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), pp. 69–82. Be´rube´, Michael, ‘There’s Nothing Inside the Text. Or, Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser’, in Postmodern Sophistry. Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise, ed. by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2004), pp. 11–26. Blumenberg, Hans, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 9–27. Blumenberg, Hans, ‘Sprachsituation und immanente Poetik’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik II. Immanente Ästhetik. Ästhetische Reflexion. Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne, ed. by Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1966), pp. 145–55. Blumenberg, Hans, ‘Neunte Diskussion. Provokation des Lesers im modernen Roman. Vorlage: Wolfgang Iser, Reduktionsformen der Subjektivität. Vorsitz: Hans Blumenberg’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik III. Die nicht mehr schönen Künste. Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen, ed. by Hans Robert Jauss (Munich: Fink, 1968), pp. 669–90. Blumenberg, Hans, ‘Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik IV. Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption, ed. by Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 11–66. Blumenberg, Hans, ‘The Concept of Reality and the Possibility of the Novel’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 29–48. Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983 [1966]). Blumenberg, Hans, Work on Myth, trans. by Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988 [1979]). Blumenberg, Hans, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996 [1966]). Blumenberg, Hans, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998 [1960]). Boden, Petra, ‘Arbeit an Begriffen. Zur Geschichte von Kontroversen in der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”. Ein Forschungsprojekt’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 103–21.

264 —— Wolfgang Iser: A Bibliography Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Booth, Wayne C., The Company We Keep. An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Boyd, Brian, On the Origin of Stories. Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Brinker, Menachem, ‘Two Phenomenologies of Reading. Ingarden and Iser on Textual Indeterminacy’, Poetics Today, 1.4 (1980), 203–12. Brown, Bill, ‘Reweaving the Carpet (Reading Stephan Mussil Reading Henry James)’, in New Literary History, 39.4 (2008), 801–21. Bruyn, Ben de, ‘Death – Image – Medium. The Anthropological Criticism of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Belting’, Image and Narrative, 15 (2006), 〈http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/iconoclasm/debruyn.htm〉. Bruyn, Ben de, ‘On Iser and Introductions’ (review of Wolfgang Iser, How to Do Theory), JLT online (2007), 〈http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/reviews/article/view/1/163〉. Bruyn, Ben de, ‘Art for Heart’s Sake. The Aesthetic Existences of Kierkegaard, Pater, and Iser’, in Art and Life in Aestheticism. De-Humanizing and Re-Humanizing Art, the Artist, and the Artistic Receptor, ed. by Kelly Comfort (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 208–31. Bruyn, Ben de, ‘Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes. Care, Ruin and Vision in McCarthy’s The Road and Harrison’s Ecocriticism’, English Studies, 91.7 (2010), 776–89. Budick, Sanford, ‘The Emergence of Oedipus’ Blessing’, in Partial Answers, 7.1 (2009), 63–85. Caillois, Roger, Man, Play and Games, trans. by Meyer Barash (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962 [1958]). Chabon, Michael, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Cole, Andrew and D. Vance Smith, eds., The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages. On the Unwritten History of Theory (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). Collins, Jim, Bring on the Books for Everybody. How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). Compagnon, Antoine, Literature, Theory, and Common Sense, trans. by Carol Cosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 [1998]). Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction. Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Cunningham, Valentine, Reading After Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Dainat, Holger, ‘Faszination, Erkenntnis, Funktion. Zur Erforschung von “Poetik und Hermeneutik” im Kontext germanistischer Fachgeschichte’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.2 (2010), 140–49. Dällenbach, Lucien, The Mirror in the Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989 [1977]). Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory. An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Eagleton, Terry, After Theory (London: Penguin Books, 2004 [2003]). Erhart, Walter, ‘“Wahrscheinlich haben wir beide recht”. Diskussion und Dissens unter “Laboratoriumsbedingungen”. Beobachtungen zu “Poetik und Hermeneutik” 1963–1966’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 77–102. Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury, ed. by David Minter (New York: Norton, 1987 [1929]). Fish, Stanley, ‘How to do Things With Austin and Searle. Speech-Act Theory and Literary Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, 91.5 (1976), 983–1025. Fish, Stanley, ‘Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser’, Diacritics, 11.1 (1981), 2–13. Flasdieck, Hermann Martin, Kunstwerk und Gesellschaft. Eine Betrachtung über den Wissenschaftsgedanken der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung (Heidelberg: Winter, 1948).

Secondary Literature —— 265

Fluck, Winfried, ‘The Search for Distance. Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 175–210. Folkenflik, Robert, ‘Wolfgang Iser’s Eighteenth Century’, Poetics Today, 27.4 (2006), pp. 675–91. Fox, Robin Lane, The Classical World. An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Freund, Elizabeth, The Return of the Reader. Reader Response Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987). Frye, Northrop, ‘The Archetypes of Literature’, The Kenyon Review, 13.1 (1951), 92–110. Gleason, Daniel W., ‘The Visual Experience of Image Metaphor. Cognitive Insights into Imagist Figures’, Poetics Today, 30.3 (2009), 423–70. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, ‘Literary Anthropology?’, in Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and the Arts (2000) 〈http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/iser/gumbrecht.html〉. Harding, Paul, Tinkers (London: Windmill Books, 2010). Henrich, Dieter, ‘Art and Philosophy Today. Reflections with Reference to Hegel’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism. A Collection of Essays, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 107–33. Hofstadter, Douglas R., Gödel, Escher, Bach. An Eternal Golden Braid (London: Penguin, 1984). Holub, Robert C., Reception Theory. A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen & Co, 1984 [1979]). Holub, Robert C., Crossing Borders. Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). Ingarden, Roman, The Literary Work of Art. An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature; with an Appendix of the Functions of Language in the Theatre, trans. by George C. Grabowicz (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1931]). Ingarden, Roman, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. by Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston, ILL: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1937]). James, Henry, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed. by Frank Kermode (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986). Jauß, Hans Robert, ‘Group Interpretation of Apollinaire’s Arbre (from Calligrammes)’, in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 182–207. Jauß, Hans Robert, ‘Epilog auf die Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik XVII. Kontingenz, ed. by Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard (Munich: Fink, 1998), pp. 525–33. Joyce, James, Ulysses, ed. by Declan Kiberd (London: Penguin, 2000 [1922]). Kafalenos, Emma, Narrative Causalities (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006). Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Kierkegaard, Sören, Either/Or, ed. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 [1843]). Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller, ‘Dilthey gegen Scherer – Geistesgeschichte contra Positivismus. Zur Revision eines wissenschaftshistorischen Stereotyps’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 74 (2000), 685–709. Lamarque, Peter and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1994). Lamarque, Peter, ‘Making Sense. A Theory of Interpretation and The Range of Interpretation’ (review), British Journal of Aesthetics 43.1, 2003, 80–84. Lamarque, Peter, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).

266 —— Wolfgang Iser: A Bibliography Leitch, Vincent and others, eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001). Lepenies, Wolf, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Littau, Karin, Theories of Reading. Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). Lobsien, Eckhard, ‘Literaturtheorie nach Iser’, in Der Begriff der Literatur, ed. by Alexander Löck and Jan Urbich (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 207–22. Luhmann, Niklas, ‘Über die Funktion der Negation in sinnkonstituierenden Systemen’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik VI. Positionen der Negativität, ed. by Harald Weinrich (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 201–18. Luka´cs, Georg, The Theory of the Novel, trans. by Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1974 [1916]). Luka´cs, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969 [1937]). Malte, Herwig, ‘Als wir jung waren’, Die Zeit, 12 June 2009, no pagination. Man, Paul de, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Mantel, Hilary, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009). Marquard, Odo, ‘Erste Diskussion. Mythos und Dogma. Vorlage: Hans Blumenberg, “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos”. Vorsitz: Odo Marquard’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik IV. Terror und Spiel. Probleme der Mythenrezeption, ed. by Manfred Fuhrmann (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 527–47. McCarthy, Cormac, The Road (London: Picador, 2006). Mie´ville, China, The City & The City (London: Macmillan, 2009). Möllmann, Christoph and Alexander Schmitz, ‘Editorial. “Es war einmal . ..” – Einige Distanz wahrende Annäherungen an die Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 46–52. Müller-Vollmer, Kurt, Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Literature. A Study of Wilhelm Dilthey’s ‘Poetik’ (The Hague: Mouton, 1963). Murphy, Richard J., ‘The Act of Viewing. Iser, Bordwell and the “Post-Theory” Debates in Contemporary Film Studies’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 119–45. Mussil, Stephan, ‘“A Secret in Spite of Itself”. Recursive Meaning in Henry James’ “The Figure in the Carpet”’, New Literary History, 39.4 (2008), 769–99. Nünning, Vera, Ansgar Nünning and Birgit Neumann, eds., Cultural Ways of Worldmaking (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). Olender, Maurice, ‘“L’e´trangete´ radicale de la barbarie nazie a paralyse´ une ge´ne´ration d’intellectuels”. Entretien avec H.R. Jauß’, Le Monde, 6 September 1996, p. viii. Pavel, Thomas, La Pense´e du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). Pross, Caroline, ‘Textspiele. Funktionen des Fiktiven bei Wolfgang Iser’, in Szenographien. Theatralität als Kategorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Gerhard Neumann and others (Freiburg: Rombach, 2001), pp. 145–67. Ray, William, Literary Meaning. From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). Riquelme, John Paul, ‘Introduction. Wolfgang Iser’s Aesthetic Politics. Reading as Fieldwork’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 7–12. Schwab, Gabriele, ‘“If Only I Were Not Obliged To Manifest”. Iser’s Aesthetics of Negativity’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 73–89. Schwenger, Peter, ‘The Obbligato Effect’, New Literary History, 42 (2011), 115–28. Shaffer, Elinor, ‘Circling the Reader. The Reception of Wolfgang Iser in the UK. 1970–2003’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 27–43.

Secondary Literature —— 267

Shakespeare, William, Richard II, ed. by Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961). Shrimpton, Nicholas, ‘The Old Aestheticism and the New’, Literature Compass, 2.1 (2005), 1–16. Spielman, Ellen, ‘Neu Starten, Spurenwechsel. Poetik und Hermeneutik, ein Exportprodukt’ (interview with Wolfgang Iser), Weimarer Beiträge, 44.1 (1998), 92–103. Spoerhase, Carlos, ‘Rezeption und Resonanz. Zur Faszinationsgeschichte der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 122–42. Striedter, Jurij, ‘Siebte Sitzung. Möglichkeiten der Illusion im historischen Roman (Sir Walter Scotts Waverley). Vorsitz: Jurij Striedter’, in Poetik und Hermeneutik I. Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos, 1964), pp. 228–36. Ströker, Elisabeth, ‘Was ist das Imaginäre in Isers Fiktionalitätstheorie?’, Poetik und Hermeneutik X. Funktionen des Fiktiven, ed. by Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1983), pp. 473–78. Syjuco, Miguel, Ilustrado (London: Picador, 2010). Taylor, Mark C., Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship. A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Thomas, Brook, ‘Reading Wolfgang Iser or Responding to a Theory of Response’, Comparative Literature Studies, 19 (1982), 54–66. Thomas, Brook, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). Thomas, Brook, ‘Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early Work, or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic’, New Literary History, 31.1 (2000), 13–43. Thomas, Brook, ‘The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology, or, What’s Literature Have to Do with It?’ (review), American Literary History, 20.3 (2008), 622–31. Thorpe, Adam, Hodd (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Tompkins, Jane, Reader Response Criticism. From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Voßkamp, Wilhelm, ‘Literatursoziologie. Eine Alternative zur Geistesgeschichte? “Sozialliterarische Methoden” in den ersten Jahrzehnten des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 1910 bis 1925, ed. by Christoph König and Eberhard Lämmert (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993), pp. 291–303. Wagner, Julia, ‘Anfangen. Zur Konstitutionsphase der Forschungsgruppe “Poetik und Hermeneutik”’, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 35.1 (2010), 53–76. Wagner, Julia, ‘Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in Konstanz. Bericht der Iser-Lecture 2010’ (2010), 〈http://http://www.exc16.de/cms/iser-lecture–2010-gumbrecht.html〉. Warning, Rainer, ‘Rezeptionsforschung. Historischer Rückblick und Perspektiven’, Wissenschaft und Systemveränderung. Rezeptionsforschung in Ost und West – eine konvergente Entwicklung?, ed. by Gunter Schandera, Holger Dainat and Wolfgang Adam (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), pp. 57–77. Wellek, Rene´ and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (London: Peregrine Books, 1968 [1949]). Wilson, David Henry, ‘Working with Wolfgang’, Comparative Critical Studies, 1.1–2 (2004), 19–25. Zeh, Juli, Spieltrieb (Frankfurt a. M.: Schöffling and Co., 2004).

Name Index References in italics see footnotes Adorno, Theodor 193 Amacher, Richard E. 52 Apuleius 39 Aristotle 193, 217 Armstrong, Paul B. 100, 144, 146, 152, 154, 196, 211, 256 Arnold, Matthew 239–240 Auerbach, Erich 36 Augustine 79, 80 Austin, John 114, 115 Bacon, Francis 74, 77, 172, 173 Baetens, Jan 118 Bakhtin, Mikhail 188 Bal, Mieke 2, 220 Barnes, Djuna 122 Barnes, Julian 175, 201 Barry, Peter 22 Barthelme, Donald 66 Barthes, Roland 121, 190, 192 Beardsley, Monroe 197 Beckett, Samuel 1, 22, 46–48, 56–58, 61, 65, 66, 70, 85, 95, 109, 114, 122, 132, 133, 138, 141, 142, 146, 180–182, 190, 191, 199, 207 Beißner, Friedrich 14 Belting, Hans 153, 201, 256 Benjamin, Walter 213 Benn, Gottfried 200 Bentham, Jeremy 171–173 Be´rube´, Michael 253 Blake, William 38 Bleich, David 95 Blumenberg, Hans 3–5, 22, 47, 48, 50–53, 55, 57, 59–64, 67–70, 72–83, 87–91, 98–100, 103, 116, 122, 164, 179, 185, 186, 193, 199, 216, 232, 234, 235, 242, 255, 256 Böckmann, Paul 14 Boden, Petra 49, 52 Booth, Wayne C. 4, 15, 105–107, 110, 129, 130, 133, 170, 256 Boyd, Brian 156, 203 Brinker, Menachem 103, 136

Brooke, Rupert 65 Brown, Bill 210 Bruno, Giordano 73 Bruyn, Ben de 24, 138, 201, 214 Budick, Sanford 211, 249 Bunyan, John 11, 33, 48, 77 Caillois, Roger 3–4, 184, 187–189, 191, 199, 256 Camus, Albert 122, 129 Carlyle, Thomas 245–248, 251 Carroll, Joseph 156 Castiglione, Baldassare 66, 92 Castoriadis, Cornelius 171, 177, 179, 184, 191 Cervantes, Miguel de 36, 186 Chabon, Michael 126 Chandler, Raymond 204 Chaucer, Geoffrey 11, 66 Cicero 74 Cohn, Dorrit 159, 160, 172, 173, 175–177, 182, 201 Cole, Andrew 90 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 171, 177–180, 184, 200 Collingwood, R.G. 82 Collins, Jim 144, 145, 148, 202 Compagnon, Antoine 2, 106 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 57, 103, 141 Conrad, Joseph 123 Copernicus 32, 34, 36, 60, 91 Culler, Jonathan 95, 99 Cunningham, Valentine 215 Cusa, Nicholas of 73 Dainat, Holger 51 Dällenbach, Lucien 249 Dante 74, 122 Derrida, Jacques 96, 159, 183, 225 Descartes, Rene´ 60, 238 Dewey, John 225, 226 Dickens, Charles 59 Dilthey, Wilhelm 9, 11–15, 18, 41, 42, 256 Donne, John 32 Droysen, Johann Gustav 85, 233, 243 Dryden, John 32

270 —— Name Index Dufrenne, Mikel 102 Eagleton, Terry 98, 99, 101, 203, 215 Eco, Umberto 95 Egan, Jennifer 145 Ehrenfels, Christian von 137 Ehrenzweig, Anton 214 Eliot, T.S. 1, 39, 47, 51, 53–56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 85, 136, 141, 162, 199, 200 Erhart, Walter 49, 50, 51 Escher, M.C. 249, 250, 252 Esrock, Ellen J. 126 Faulkner, William 57, 116, 118, 135, 141 Fetterley, Judith 152 Fielding, Henry 5, 11, 15–21, 27, 28, 31, 34–38, 41, 42, 45, 65, 67, 77, 86, 90, 115, 116, 126, 244, 254 Fish, Stanley 95, 96, 98–100, 114, 115, 152, 237 Flasdieck, Hermann Martin 10, 12, 51, 254 Fluck, Winfried 1, 9, 10, 23, 46, 102, 132, 256 Folkenflik, Robert 13, 46, 88 Foucault, Michel 74, 75, 218 Fox, Robin Lane 6 Freud, Sigmund 219, 220, 233 Freund, Elizabeth 96, 151 Frye, Northrop 63, 154 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 49, 50, 97, 99, 238 Galsworthy, John 135 Gans, Eric 214, 222, 226 Geertz, Clifford 153, 237, 239, 240, 242 Gleason, Daniel W. 126 Gombrich, Ernst 109, 117, 186, 193, 225 Goodman, Nelson 81, 154, 160, 172, 173, 175, 228, 242 Greenblatt, Stephen 75, 152, 153 Groeben, Norbert 97 Gumbrecht, Hans 153, 256 Hall, Edward 83 Harding, Paul 182 Hartman, Geoffrey 152 Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich 56, 85, 217, 220 Heidegger, Martin 25, 139, 196, 238 Henrich, Dieter 48, 51, 55, 56, 58, 64, 76, 90, 128, 169, 179, 214, 238, 255, 256 Heraclitus 38, 39, 177 Heselhaus, Clemens 48 Hitchcock, Alfred 206

Hofstadter, Douglas 4, 209, 210, 245, 249, 250–252 Holland, Norman 95, 98, 105, 109 Holub, Robert C. 97, 98, 109 Homer 35, 63, 80, 129 Hopkins, Gerald Manley 65 Horace 35, 36 Huizinga, Johan 187 Husserl, Edmund 100–102, 121, 123 Ingarden, Roman 4, 6, 95, 97, 99–103, 106, 107, 109–114, 119, 120, 123–128, 131, 134–139, 141, 142, 145, 159, 172, 192, 222, 256 James, Henry 108, 110, 128, 129, 147, 209, 210, 252 Jaspers, Karl 9, 14, 16, 19, 20, 41, 199 Jauß, Hans Robert 11, 45, 48, 51, 95, 104, 105, 143 Johnson, Samuel 237 Joyce, James 1, 27, 47, 58, 59, 61–67, 77, 80, 83, 116, 119, 160–162, 190, 211 Kafalenos, Emma 118, 122, 123, 126 Kafka, Franz 204 Kayser, Wolfgang 14 Kermode, Frank 4, 108, 154, 172, 173, 184, 194, 195, 199, 256 Kierkegaard, Sören 4, 5, 11–13, 23–27, 29, 31, 41–43, 70, 76, 142, 169, 256 Kindt, Tom 13 Kleist, Heinrich von 137 Kluckhohn, Paul 14 Korff, Hermann August 14 Kosı´k, Karel 82 Kuhn, Thomas 216, 224 Lacan, Jacques 160 Lamarque, Peter 2, 197, 230 Lange, Victor 52 Leitch, Vincent 153 Lepenies, Wolf 12 Littau, Karin 111 Lobsien, Eckhard 153, 160, 211, 214, 220 Locke, John 27, 116, 119 Lotman, Jurij 131, 211 Luhmann, Niklas 110, 116, 117, 132, 133, 160, 209, 210, 241, 242, 256 Luka´cs, Georg 5, 32–34, 36, 37, 41, 55, 69, 90, 92, 256 Lydgate, John 66

Name Index —— 271

Lyly, John 39 Macchiavelli, Niccolo` 92 Malte, Herwig 48 Man, Paul de 152, 220, 221 Mann, Thomas 134, 135, 137 Mantel, Hilary 45, 90, 94 Marquard, Odo 63 Marvell, Andrew 200 McCarthy, Cormac 138 Melville, Herman 61 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 102 Michaels, Walter Benn 152 Mie´ville, China 151, 203–206 Miller, J. Hillis 158, 225 Montaigne, Michel de 38, 39 Montemayor, Jorge de 164, 196 Montrose, Louis 75 Möllman, Christopher 50 Mukarˇovsky´, Jan 117 Müller, Hans-Harald 13 Müller-Vollmer, Kurt 14, 18 Murphy, Richard J. 143 Musil, Robert 44 Mussil, Stephan 209, 210, 227, 245, 249, 251, 252 Nabokov, Vladimir 116 Newman, John Henry 26 Nietzsche, Friedrich 142 Novalis 137 Olender, Maurice 48 Olsen, Stein Haugom 197 Pater, Walter 3, 5, 14, 19–21, 23, 25–31, 36–39, 41, 42, 46, 65, 85, 88, 90, 121, 139, 145, 181, 182, 245, 248, 254 Pavel, Thomas 33, 34, 36, 44, 86 Petrarch 79, 80 Pfeiffer, Ludwig K. 153 Picasso, Pablo 142 Plato 39, 193, 248 Plessner, Helmuth 62, 158, 159, 168, 169, 179, 196, 225, 238, 246 Poulet, Georges 109, 128 Pound, Ezra 53, 55, 145 Prince, Gerald 95, 105 Propp, Vladimir 118 Pross, Caroline 156, 162, 164 Protagoras 34, 36 Proust, Marcel 135

Pynchon, Thomas 66 Quine, W.V.O. 4 Radway, Janice 152 Ray, William 103 Richards, I.A. 109 Richardson, Samuel 116 Ricoeur, Paul 193, 233, 243 Riffaterre, Michel 95, 105 Riquelme, John Paul 46, 88 Rosenzweig, Franz 234–237, 243, 245 Said, Edward 222, 223, 250 Sannazaro, Jacopo 164 Sarraute, Nathalie 122 Sartre, Jean-Paul 102, 126, 133, 177–179, 184 Scarry, Elaine 126 Scherer, Wilhelm 13 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 232, 233, 243 Schmitz, Alexander 50 Schücking, Levin Ludwig 10 Schwab, Gabriele 46, 132, 256 Schwenger, Peter 121, 126, 127 Scott, Walter 27, 69, 70, 75, 77, 84, 120 Searle, John 110, 114, 115, 159, 176 Shaffer, Elinor 98, 247 Shakespeare, William 3, 5, 11, 45–47, 71, 75, 76, 80–86, 92, 93, 103, 166, 193, 200, 231, 237 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 38 Showalter, Elaine 225 Shrimpton, Nicholas 22 Sidney, Philip 103, 164–166, 168, 170–171, 180 Smith, D. Vance 90 Socrates 34, 35 Sontag, Susan 227 Spenser, Edmund 11, 46, 66, 164, 165, 167 Spielman, Ellen 49 Spoerhase, Carlos 50 Spranger, Eduard 9, 11, 14, 19 Staiger, Emil 14 Stein, Gertrude 143 Sterne, Laurence 22, 40, 45, 59, 69, 116, 119, 190, 195, 204 Striedter, Jurij 70 Ströker, Elizabeth 159, 160 Syjuco, Miguel 95, 147, 150, 209, 250–252 Taylor, Mark C. 24, 25 Thackeray, William 57

272 —— Name Index Theocritus 164 Thomas, Brook 1, 47, 69, 75, 97, 98, 100, 152, 154, 156, 160, 191, 211, 256 Thorpe, Adam 71 Tompkins, Jane P. 96, 151 Vaihinger, Hans 112, 161, 171–175, 190, 194 Varela, Francisco 209, 210, 239–242 Vico, Giambattista 60 Vinci, Leonardo da 21 Virgil 164, 166 Voßkamp, Wilhelm 11 Wagner, Julia 48, 49, 50, 256

Warning, Rainer 96, 202 Warren, Austin 2, 14, 15, 17, 101 Weber, Samuel 109 Wellek, Rene´ 2, 14, 15, 17, 101 White, Hayden 176 Wiener, Norbert 239, 240 Wilde, Oscar 23 Wilson, David Henry 1, 3 Woolf, Virginia 51, 122, 190 Zeh, Juli 9, 42, 44, 79, 116 Zola, E´mile 135