“Ingarden, Inscription, and Literary Ontology”

INGARDEN, INSCRIPTION AND LITERARY ONTOLOGY RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

I hold that a word is something more than the noise it makes; it is also the way it looks on the page. - T. S. Elior

It would be both presumptuous and futile to attempt within the space of a short essay an adequate critical exposition and assessment of Roman Ingarden's theory of the ontological status of the literary work of art. For Ingarden's theory, extensively articulated in The Literary Work of Art and still further developed in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, is probably the most complex, detailed, and exhaustive account ever to be given of the ontological nature of the literary work of art.' In this paper, therefore, I shall concentrate my critical scrutiny on one rather narrow and apparently minor aspect of Ingarden's theory. Indeed, one might waggishly say that I shall be concentrating on an ontological aspect of the literary work which does not really exist for Ingarden, an aspect which he explicitly and repeatedly rejects from the ontological make-up of the literary work of art. I refer to the visual or graphic dimension of the literary work; and I mean by this not the visual imagery which the work's words evoke, but simply the written, printed, or (as we shall for con- venience generally denote it) the inscribed form of the text. Ingarden's rejection of this possible dimension warrants our attention in its own right, but may also shed light instructively on much wider aspects of ~ngarden's thought.

I1 Given Ingarden's taste for ontological complexity and polyphonic

richness, it is hard to accept that the graphic or inscribed aspect of the literary text can find no place among the different strata which Ingarden sees as constituting the ontologically complex, aesthetically rich, and polyphonically harmonious unity which is the literary work of art. Ingarden summarizes the literary work's four constitutive strata as follows:

The literary work is a many-layered formation. It contains (a) the stratum of verbal sounds and phonetic formations and phenomena of a higher order; (b) the stratum of semantic unlts: of sentence meanings and the meanings of whole groups of sentences; (c) the stratum of schematized aspects, in which objects of various kinds portrayed in the work come to a pearance; and (d) the stratum of the objectivities portrayed in the intentional states ofaffairs pojected by the sentences. (CL W, 12)

Ingarden further insists that the literary work's multiplicity of strata, its "complexity and many-sidedness" contribute to its aesthetic power and help make it into something which "enriches our lives to an

extraordinary degree" (LW, 373). For "if a literary work is a work of art having positive value, each of its strata contains special qualities . . . of aesthetic value . . . which lead to a peculiar polyphony of aesthetically valent qualities which determines the quality of the value constituted in the work" (CLW, 13). In other words, the plurality and heterogeneity of the different strata make the literary work a unity which is rewardingly rich and polyphonic rather than monotonously uniform. "The diversity of the material and the roles (or functions) of the individualstrata makes the whole work, not a monotonic formation, but one that by its nature has a polyphonic character," where each individual stratum "is visible in its . - .

own way within the whole and brings something particular into the over-all character of the whole without impairing its phenomenal unity" (LW. 29-30). '

The pl;rality of strata belonging to the literary work contributes to the work's aesthetic richness in two ways. First "the material of each stratum leads to the constitution of its own aesthetic characters, which correspond to the nature of the material" (LW, 58); for example, the phonetic stratum affords qualities of rhythm, tempo, and melody. But, secondly, there may be aesthetic qualities or characters resulting from the synthesis of qualities from different strata; for example, qualities emerging from the synthesis of the phonetic stratum and the meaning stratum, qualities like onomatopoeia and other phenomena where sound and meaning enrich or modify each other. Ingarden, for instance, notes how "the many and various 'emotional' or 'mood' qualities" associated with the sound of literature are "conditioned and influenced by the meaning that is bound to the word sound" (LW, 52). Thus, synthetic aesthetic qualities or characters may occur not only narrowly within an individual stratum, "there may also be syntheses of a still higher order among moments of different groups" of characters belonging to different strata (L W, 58).

Clearly Ingarden emphasizes and celebrates the literary work's "remarkable polyphony o f aesthetic characters of heterogeneous types" emerging from heterogeneous strata (LW, 58). Consequently, for Ingarden, the fact that a given stratum takes part in and enriches the aesthetic polyphony of the literary work of art will constitute "an important argument" that the stratum "belongs" to the work, since "its absence from the work must lead to far-reaching changes in it. The polyphony must then not only be the poorer, lacking a 'voice', but it must also be thoroughly different, since other types of harmonies would have to be constructed" (LW, 58).

However, notwithstanding his commendable openness and largesse in recognizing the rich variety of heterogeneous strata which constitute the literary work or art (and prevent it from being tamely pigeonholed in either of the two traditional ontological categories of 'real' and 'ideal'), Ingarden explicitly excludes the work's inscribed stratum, the written or printed text, from being an element of the literary work. For Ingarden,

"the written word does not . . . belong to the literary work at all"; "neither the real graphic material nor the typical letters founded on it are an element of the literary work of art". Though Ingarden concedes that its real durability provides an indirect, ontic basis of the literary work, the inscribed text is excluded from properly belonging to the work and is relegated to an external subservient tool for the phonetic stratum, being "merely a regulative signal for the reader, informing him which words he is to concretize" (LW, 35n, 367). This exclusion of the inscrib.ed text from the work, and thus from contributing to and enriching its heterogeneous polyphonic aesthetic harmonies, is decisively reaffirmed in The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. "The print (the printed text) does not belong to the elements of the literary work of art itself (for instance as a new stratum . . .) but merely constitutes its physical foundation" and plays "a modifying role in the reading" (CLW, 14).

We may well feel some discomfort at the idea that something which is both a physical foundation of the work and a regulative structure for its experience or concretization is nonetheless firmly excluded in principle from belonging to the work as an element or aspect contributing to its ontological (if not aesthetic) status. In any case, I certainly believe that Ingarden's rejection of the inscribed text is unsatisfactory and highly problematic, and in what follows I shall be examining and challenging the reasons Ingarden brings for it. Some of these reasons are not fully articulated but vaguely suggested by Ingarden and will thus have to be fleshed out by interpretation. Though some seem largely the unconvincing product of unreflective preconceptions, others are more substantial and cogent, even if not ultimately compelling. But before considering Ingarden's reasons for denying the literary pertinence of the inscribed text we must note that however unacceptable we find this view, it is unfortunately very widespread.

First, among continental aestheticians, we find Croce adumbrating Ingarden and treating the written text as merely a sign for producing certain sounds. Mikel Dufrenne still more sharply denies the aesthetic relevance of writing, while maintaining the essentiality of the oral: "l'ecriture n'est qu'un moyen . . . pour la vraie langue qui est la langue - orale", "la poesie est un voix . . . pas un etre ecrit. Among aestheticians of the analytic school, we find Beardsley maintaining that since words are "meaningful sounds", they and the literary works they constitute

I "present two aspects for study: the sound-aspect and the meaning-aspect". Beardsley thus blatantly fails to admit that words consist of letters as well as phonemes and morphemes, and hence that they and the literary works they constitute have a visual aspect as well. J . 0. Urmson is more outspoken in rejecting the significance of the inscribed text, boldly asserting that "literature is essentially an oral art", "the written word being primarily a score for the per f~rmer" .~

Thus Ingarden's rejection of the inscribed text as aesthetically irrelevant to and ontologically excluded from the literary work of art puts him

in very good company. Nonetheless, I think it also puts him in error, because, as I have argued elsewhere, there are compelling reasons to recognise the ontological pertinence and aesthetic relevance of the inscribed text and to place it alongside oral performance as a legitimate, full-fledged end-product of literary art and an adequate object for aesthetic, literary appreciation.'

My position, briefly, is that literary works may exist as either oral or written and that, taking literature as a whole, neither form is primary or more authentic. Literary works are verbal entities and that includes both texts and oral performances. Poems may exist without ever being inscribed and novels may exist without ever being vocalized. Just as we may generally appreciate a poem without being aware of how it would look transcribed in lineation on a page, so we can enjoy a novel without imagining what sounds would be heard if it were read aloud. However, as either the phonetic o r the inscribed provides, in Ingarden's terminology, a material stratum of the work, both can be said to belong to it and both in principle can be relevant to its acsthetic appreciation. Though literary art may have originated as an essentially oral art, with the invention of writing, and further with the invention and development of printing and the consequent growth of literacy, the literary artist was provided with a medium through which he could reach a far larger audience and in which he could convey a far longer and rnorc complex message which could not be adequately conveyed in a standard oral performance. The literary artist began to write more to be read than to be heard; the written text has largely supplanted the oral performance, and we thus find more asides to "the reader of this story" or "the reader of these lines" as opposed to "the hearer of this tale". Moreover, once the inscribed text was firmly estab- lished as a standard, if not the predominant end-product of literary art and typical object of literary appreciation, it was only natural that literary artists would exploit the rich aesthetic possibilities offered by the inscribed medium. Prominent among these possibilities are, of course, visual effects of a variety of forms, examples of which have been analysed e l s e ~ h e r e . ~

Certainly some literary works are best appreciated in oral performances. But others seem best appreciated in inscribed texts, where one can appreciate their visual form and can swiftly skim back and forth to refresh the memory and retrace developing patterns of character, plot, and imagery. My position of phonetic/inscribed egalitarianism is more fruitful for literary appreciation, since it not only encourages the critic to pay more attention to meaningful visual aspects of inscribed literature which would otherwise be excluded as aesthetically irrelevant, but i t would also encourage the critic to examine the phonetic properties of long works of prose which were surely not intended for oral performance. (It may lead him, for example, to notice the heroic rhythms of the prose of Moby Dick and thus help him to apprehend part of the epic nature of this great novel). By so encouraging the critic to scrutinize both phonetic and inscribed aspects of the literary work, my position should lead to the

apprehension of added aesthetic qualities in the work and make it an all-the-more rich and rewarding polyphonic harmony. Thus there seem to be excellent aesthetic reasons for accepting the inscribed text along with the phonetic stratum as belonging to the work and not necessarily irrelevant to its aesthetic appreciation.

Yet, as we have seen, despite his advocacy of the ontological heterogeneity and polyphonic aesthetic richness of the literary work, Ingarden refuses to admit the inscribed text and the aesthetic qualities it helps constitute into this polyphonic chorus. Let us now consider his reasons and arguments for doing so.

The first argument we seem to encounter in The Literary Work ofArt is only very sketchily and vaguely suggested by Ingarden, but may be roughly reconstructed as follows. The inscribed text appears to be a real (versus ideal) entity; and given the literary work's creation, existence, and mutability in time (characteristic of real but not ideal entities), one might be tempted both to attribute real status to the literary work and to regard the inscribed text as belonging to it. However, Ingarden then notes that the literary work of art must obviously be something more than the inscribed text, more than "a manifold of written (printed) characters", for such a conception of the literary work of art could not guarantee the identity of the work. This is because there would be as many manifolds as there are copies of the given work and though "the elements and arrangements of the individual manifolds may be very similar to one another, . . . this similarity . . . would be no sufficient basis for regarding them as 'copies' o f . . . 'one and the same' literary work" (LW, 12).

What for Ingarden is the element which preserves or guarantees the objective identity of the literary work (its remaining one and the same work through its many copies, performances and concretizations) and what is also "the central stratum" which provides the unifying "structural framework for the whole work" with all of its strata is the stratum of meaning, most centrally sentence meaning. Moreover, a literary work is obviously not simply a visual manifold of inscribed letters but is much more importantly "a determinately ordered manifold of sentences" bearing meaning and founding other strata and qualities on this meaning (L W, 29, 11). Therefore we must not identify the work with its inscribed text which should consequently be relegated from the work.

The argument as it stands thus far is obviously defective. It is clear that the mere fact that the literary work consists of much more than the inscribed text does not entail that the inscribed text does not belong to the work as a feature of it. Plainly all that follows is that the inscribed is not the sole aspect of the work and that there are others which are more important. Ingarden, however, tries to make the exclusion of the inscribed text seem a more plausible inference by suggesting that since the work consists of sentences and since "a sentence is nothing real" (LW, 9) but

purely intentional, it seems proper to view the literary work [as Ingarcien does indeed view it) as a purcly intentional formation devoid of any real components. Therefore. the apparent real status of the inscribed text would make it incompatible with the work so conceived, and it must consequently be excluded from the work.

This sketchily suggested argument is problematic and inconclusive. O n e problem is that it seems to work just as well for the souncfs of the work as for its inscriptions. For the sounds of the work as orally performed are certainly a s realas its inscriptions. At first blush. sounds might appear less materially real than inscribed texts, since they are invisible to the naked eye and it is harder to delimit their spatiotemporal location. But invisibility surely does not imply non-physical unreal status.

Ingarden, however, is aware of the problem that the reality of souncls poses for his literary ontology; and hc therefore is careful to insist that the word sounds which belong to thc literary work are not concrete physical sounds but rather typical, intentional entities which are neither real nor ideal. This sort of word sound is not any real "concrete phonic matcrial . . . but a typical phonic form (Gestalt)".

This form shows itself to us only through the concrete phonic material. I t is 2 i~ t .n to us on the b ~ t s ~ s of this material and i t continues in cxistcnce even though q u ~ t c extensi\c differences frequently occur in the material . . . This unchangeable phonic form . . . cannot hc identiiicd with either this phonic matcrial or i t individual concrctiz;~tion\. because i t is one and [he sume, whilc the phonic matcrial carrying its c o n c r c t ~ ~ a t i o ~ i s i \ many and manifold. Nor can it be conbidered something rcal. lor hy i t5 csscncc [lie rcal cannot appcar as identically the same in many rcal ind~v~dua l \ o r real individual occurrences. . . . Whcreah the word may be itttercdcountlc.; nunibcr\ot time\. and thc concrete phonic materials may always be new, the "word sound" remains the same. (LW, 36-38)

Translated into more fashionable Peircean terminology. Ingarden's message is simply that the word sounds which belong to the literary work are not concrete phonic tokens but rather phonic rypes. A phonic type is embodied in, but not identical with, any of its different tokcns (or even all of them), which in turn are nonetheless unitied in their diversity by all being tokens of. instantiations of, one and the same type. (Ingarden naturally assumes that the typical phonic form or word-sound type, like any typc entity. is not a real material entity, and this, of course, neatly tits into the view of the literary work itself as a type entity, which maintains its identity in different material tokens and which cannot therefore be regarded itself a s a material individual. Here we must note that some philosophers have cogently argued for the attribution of real, material, and particular status to type entities in general and works of art in particular. But to so into this issue would mean getting embroiled in ponderous ontological wrangles over such terms as 'typc'. 'real', 'material', 'individual'; while we must pursue a more limited quarry and a more spccitic question.)

Even i f we assume, with Ingarden, the irreality of types. wc must ask the following: If the word sounds of the literary work may be conceived as typical phonic forms o r non-real type entities and thus be incorporated into a purely intentional literary work. why can't lngarden do the same

for the inscribed words of the text'.' What prevents us from regarding the literary work's inscribed text as composed of typical inscribed forms (rathcr than concretely real, physical inscriptions) and as being a type entity which is embodied and presented in the many different real tokens of the text but which cannot be identified with any of them nor with any of its individual concretizations in the reader's perception? In short, what prohibits us from treating word inscriptions like word sounds and thus enabling the inscribed text as a non-real type entity to be included in the literary work'.' The answer, I think, is that there secms to be no logical or ontological prohibition.

Ingarden himself recognizes that the written word can be conceived as "a ccrtain vague type of Gestalt quality" which might perhaps be thought to belong to the literary work, and he sometimes treats the inscribed text and its components as type entities. The inscribed characters of the tcxt, which for him merely serve as a signal for I-ealizing the phonetic stratum, "must be formed typically". "These typical letters, however. must be based on some individual, e.g. visually apprehensible. material" so that the work may be preserved over time. The typical inscriptions must be thus set down and crnbodied "in some real, fixed. relatively little-changeable material", "the concrete graphic material" of the token text (LW, 35 n., 365-367). However, as with the typical word sounds, the typical inscriptions constitutc a non-real, intentional type entity which cannot be identified with any of the real tokens which embody it.

We surely seem to have the ontological apparatus for clearing the way to accept the inscribed text, as type entity, as belonging to the literary work. Yet Ingarden, in the end. firmly and explicitly rejects the inscribed text riot only in its real but in its "typical" form. In contrast to the word sounds and sentences which are genuine components of the literary work. neither the real graphic material nor the typical letters foundeci on it are an element of the literary work. As we have said, they are merely a regulative signal for the phonetic stratum (LW, 367).

Ingarden's rejection of the inscribed text cannot therefore be properly explained in terms o f general ontological principles. so it would seem to be the product of aesthetic considerations. This might be expected since close scrutiny will reveal that the issue of the work of art's ontological status is intimately interrelated and ultimately undetachable from the issue of the work's aesthetic appreciation, i.e., of how we interpret and evaluate the work. To try to put the point briefly, our commitment as art critics and consumers to the view that certain categories of features or elements associated with the art work are relevant to the interpretation and evaluation of the work will compel us to reject an ontological position where these features or elements are incompatible with the ontological status clainied for the work. As intentionalist critics, for example, we

must reject the phenomenalist view of the work as a purely perceptual entity. Thus, as Josph Margolis shrewdly notes, even if we try to avoid the entire issue of the ontological status of the work of art, our principles or practices of criticism "might very well be read back, if we wished, into a statement of the kind of entity a work of art is."h

I. The question which should now claim our attention, therefore, is that of the aesthetic reasons for Ingarden's rejection of the inscribed text from the literary work of art. There seem to be three major reasons or arguments which motivate his rejection. The first is that of aesthetic purity o r unity. Ingarden seems to argue that if we admit the inscribed text as part of the literary work of art, then the work would in some way be "contaminated" or aesthetically marred, and our aesthetic experience of it would suffer. For Ingarden, the inscribed text "introduces a certain contamination into the whole of the literary work of art". and its only saving grace is that "it allows the idcntity of the work to be preserved much more faithfully than is possible with purely oral transmission" (CLW, 15).

Now in considering any argument relating to aesthetic purity, we must be careful to realize that this notion is suspiciously ambiguous and vague. It is sometimes taken as complete uniformity or lack of mixture of elements, but it is also frequently construed as consummate fusion or unification of elements into an organic whole. Obviously, absolute uniformity of elements would make a rather dull work of art, and thus it would seem that the demand for "elemental" purity stems from the aesthetic requirement of unity. But unity is only one side of the classic formula for beauty, the other being diversity or richness, which of course is quite contrary to this first conception of purity.

It is, therefore, only the second conception of purity whose violation in disunity, disorder, or discord implies an aesthetic Haw. Certainly, it is the only one to which Ingarden, with his emphasis on heterogeneity and polyphonic harmony, can appcal. Now though admission of the inscribed aspect of the text surely makes literary art less pure in the first sense. mixing another aspect o r stratum to sound, meaning and the rest, this does not necessarily create impurity in the second and important sense, unless there is a reason why such a mixture cannot be harmonious and unified, that is, unless inscription simply cannot achieve unity with the other strata. This, however, seems precisely to be Ingarden's charge, for he asserts that though "the verbal sound enters into a closc connection with the written word they do not blend to form a unity" (CLW, 13). This is in sharp contrast to the perfect blending of word sounds and meanings which for Ingarden seems to follow as the natural or necessary conse- quence of the essential indissolubility of word sound and meaning, where "a given phonetic material becomcs a word sound only because it has a more o r less determinate 'meaning' " and where reciprocally "the meanings are essentially bound to the word sound", "since meaning units necessarily require a word-sound material" (LW. 35, 59, 61). According to

Ingarden, this intrinsic unity of sound and meaning is reflected in the unity of their apprehension when we experience a literary work.

Simultaneously with and inseparable fro111 the described apprehension of the verbal sounds is the understanding of the meaning of the word; the complete word isconstitutcd for the reader in just this experience, which, although compound. still torms a unity. O n e does not apprehend the verbal sound first and then the verbal meaning. Both things occur at once: in apprehending the verbal sound, one understands the rncaning of the word and at the same time intends this meaning actively. (CLW, 22)

However, even if we grant Ingarden thc thesis that there is an essential o r necessary unity of apprehension of word sound and meaning (and there may be room to question this, e.g. in cases where words are clearly heard but not understood or where meanings are grasped without the word sound being actually heard or imagined), this does not in any way provide any reason for denying that unity can also be achieved between "word sights" (i.e, word inscriptions) and word sounds and meanings. Such unity would admittedly be still more compound by involving a third (viz. the inscribed) aspect. But there seems to bc no general aesthetic or ontological reason for assuming that a trinity of aspects cannot be unified while a duality can be (or alternatively why four strata can be unified but any fifth must sunder unity).

If Ingarden's argument here is that the inscribed text must or is apt to corrupt the work's unity because unlike the phonetic stratum it is detach- able from o r not necessary for meaning (which can be apprehended simply through sound alone), this argument seems a rather transparent non sequitur. Detachability (conceptual or technical) does not preclude aesthetic unity. The fact that I can separate a song's lyrics from its melody does not preclude their being united in aesthetic perception and grasped as a polyphonic unity. Ingarden is perhaps laboring here under a confused. but not unpopular, misconception of organic unity, where the fact that elements can be conceived as separate precludes their being truly ~initied into an aesthetic whole whose qualities cannot be reduced to the mere sum of those of its parts. If the inadequacy of this view of organic unity is not apparent from the above example, I havc elsewhere analyzed its defects and inconsistencies in some detail.'

Moreover, thcrc is cause to question the ineliminability or indispensability of the phonetic stratum to the work's meaning, which Ingarden maintains and employs in arguing for rejecting the inscribed while incorporating the oral into the literary work. For it is most doubtful whether i t is always impossible to understand and appreciate a literary work without experiencing its word sounds. The pervasive phenomenon of silent reading would seem to be a clear counterexample which wc shall soon have 6 examine. First. however, we must treat what seems to be Ingarden's only other argument for the view that admission of (and consequent attention to) thc inscribed text must corrupt the unity of the literary work.

In rightly remarking that our reading typically grasps "whole words" rather than individual letters or marks and that it immediately attends to

the inscribed text as "the carrier of meaning" of a conceptual not visual kind, lngarden further tries to justify this habit as necessary for an adequately unified experience of the work. If we attend to the visuality of the text, Ingarden argues, "that would prove to be a distraction in reading, because our main attention in visual reading is directed at the apprehension of the typical verbal forms" and their meaning. Admission of (or attention to) the inscribed text "would disturb us in our reading" from attending t o word and sentence meaning which. for Ingarden, constitutes the essential and structurally unifying stratum of the work (CLW, 20-2 1 ) .

But there is no reason o r argument given to show why appreciative apprehension of the inscribed text intrinsically does or must distract us from the work's meaning. Ingarden apparently assumes that it is just impossible t o apprehend appreciatively the visual aspect of the inscribed text without being blinded t o the ordinary linguistic meaning it conveys, and consequently that it is impossible to appreciate the rich and meaningful play between visual representation and linguistic meaning in 3

literary work of art. Once articulated, this assumption is obviously and sharply refuted by our not uncommon experience of apprchending both the ordinary ling~listic meaning and the attractive meaningful shape of the many poems which highlight and meaningfully employ the visuality o f their inscribed texts. What thcn motivates or explains Ingarden's unconvincing denial'?

I think part of the explanation is an unsatisfactory and unnecessarily constrained picture of aesthetic appreciation, one that is too much inclosed in a singular, temporally progressive and ephemeral experience of concretization where proper recognition is not sufficiently given to the funding effect and superimposition of previous concretizations o r experi- ences of the work. Ingarden, of course, is basically committed to the view that adequate aesthetic appreciation is a richly synthesizing process which "demands an attentive consideration of all sides of the work of art" where different impressions of different aspects of the work supplement, check. and perhaps correct one another, and are, "in any case, combined syn- thetically into a whole" (CLW, 201). This, for lngarden, iseasy enough to accommodate in spatial, stationary arts like painting and sculpture; but in literature (or music) the problem of synthesis is aggravated by the fact that the work is temporal and sequential, and thus, as i t is experienced sequentially over time, its "previous phases" o r perceived elements tend t o "pass away" (CLW, 201-202, 227, 350n). Because the literary work's "contemplation and . . . concretization . . . unfold in time," with its parts o r phases soon passing away, this requires "the perceiving subjcct to perform particular synthesizing operations" (CLW, 202). "The aesthetic experience which takes place in the cognition of a literary work of art thus demands . . . a much greater concentration and a more dynamic holding- together of the unfolding parts of the work" (CLW, 228).

Ingarden's unwillingness to countenance our appreciation of the

visuality of the inscribed text thus seems to come from the fact that it will too severely tax our powers of concentration and synthesis. T o put the point with blunt simplicity, if we attend to the visual form of the inscribed text while it is read, we will not be rich enough in attentive resources to pay sufficient attention t o the sound and/or meanings of the words and may even miss them as they temporally unfold and disappear.

Two objections are worth making here. First, experience shows that it is not impossible to notice both textual visuality and word and sentence meaning (and sound). Secondly, the view that attention cannot be divided since otherwise improperly apprehended words and sentences will pass and elude us presupposes that we are dealing with an ephemeral oral performance and not a stable text that the appreciator can slowly peruse. pause over, retrace his scrutiny and generally digest at his own speed. Whatever initial and limited plausibility Ingarden's argument from distraction may possess seems to depend upon the assumption that we are and must be dealing with an oral concretization of ephemeral sequen- tiality. But that is precisely what we are challenging.

Moreover, in any case, it is clear that the argument is not one that can be limited to the target of the inscribed text, for it is similarly applicable to the phonetic stratum. Indeed. Ingarden himself revealingly slides this way in elaborating his point about visual distraction by noting that "the same thing happens in hearing a speech or a 'recited' literary work", when. through insufficient attention to the word forms and meaning, although we hear the speaker's voice (and perhaps even because we attended too much to its sound), "we often say we 'didn't hear' the speaker and consequently didn't understand himM(CLW, 20). Since even word sounds may be a distractive threat to adequate apprehension o f the meaning of the passing words and sentences of the literary work. the proper and typical aesthetic response, according to Ingarden, demands that "the phonetic qualities of the work must be heard 'incidentally' " only and thus that we should not "concentrate on this stratum particu- larly" (CL W, 23).

The verbal sound is noted only fleetingly. quickly, and without hesitation; it represents only a quick transition to the understanding of the words or sentences. The verbal hound is then heard superticially and almost unconsciously. It appears on the periphery of the held of awareness and only incidentally does i t sound 'in our ears'. provided, of course. that nothing out of the ordinary draws our attention to it. It is precisely this Meeting way of apprehending the verbal sounds which is the only correct way for the apprehension of the literary work as a whole. This i s the reason onc oiren hears the demand for a 'discreet' declamation, to prevent the phonetic side of the language from coming ro the fore. (Ihid. )

Notice here how the problem of the fleeting passage of words and sentences. whose meanings we must bc ever ready to grasp before they flee. is transferred to and revealingly reflected in thc account of apprehension of sound, which must be grasped "fleetingly, quickly, and without hesitation".

It should be sufficiently clear from the above that Ingarden is extremely anxious lest attention be allowed to stray from the meanings of the words

and sentences which constitute the literary work's central stratum and secure its intersubjective identity (LW, 29, 360-64). One way of trying, through theory, to insure maximal attention to the stratum of meaning is to exclude possibly competing strata from properly belonging to the literary work. This could explain why Ingarden thinks himself justified in rejecting the visual as a contaminating distraction which must mar aesthetic unity, though there clearly seems to be no reason why the visuality of the text cannot be harmoniously synthesized with sound and meaning. The pervasive and obviously successful use of the inscribed text in literary art surely indicates its pragmatic compatibility with verbal sound and meaning. And surely we are not to deny in principle that visuality a s such can be aesthetically united with audible meaningful speech; for think what such a denial would entail for the arts of drama,

and cinema. 2. If Ingarden rejected the visual, inscribed text to protect (by harsh

and unnecessary means) the primacy of verbal meaning, and if similar considerations made him warn against a deep, unhurried appreciation of the work's phonetic qualities, why was the phonetic stratum not similarly stripped from the work? The answer to this question will provide us with Ingarden's second apparent argument for excluding the inscribed stratum as part of the literary work while incorporating the phonetic, and it is this. T h e inscribed text is obviously eliminable from and not necessary for apprehending and appreciating the work (since illiterates can enjoy poetry and stories), but the phonetic stratum of word sounds is not similarly dispensable. Therefore, Ingarden would have us conclude that while word sounds must belong to the work, word inscriptions, by such

I comparison, d o not. The constitutive foundation proper of the individual literary work certainly lies in the stratum of meaning. . . but the meanings are essenrially bound to the word sounds. . . . Without the "word sound" . . . it could not exist at all. . . . [Moroverl because the phonetic stratum forms the external, indispensable shell for the stratum ot meaning units and thereby also for the whole work. i t plays an essent~al role in the apprehension of the work by a psychic subject. . . . [Therefore, lngarden concludes.] the phonetic stratum is an csscntial constituent of the literary work; i t 11 were eliminated the whole work would cease to exist, since meaning units necessarily rcquirc a word-sound material. If it were formed differently than it actually is in a given work, that work would undergo sweeping changes. (LW, 59-61)

This argument is much stronger and harder to challenge than those previously considered. But even admitting, as I think we must, that literary works d o not always require for their apprehension and appreciation the perception of their inscribed texts, we may propose two challenges to the argument. First we might suggest that to count as belonging to the work it is enough for thc inscribed text to be generally suficient and potentially central (as opposed to strictly necessary) for the work's proper aesthetic appreciation. Secondly, making the same initial admission of the dispensability of the inscribed text, we may deny that the case is all that different regarding the phonetic qualities of the work. Let us now concentrate on the second line of challenge, postponing the tirst until it

reemerges in the context of our criticism of Ingarden's apparent third and final aesthetic argument for rejecting the inscribed text from the literary work.

How does one claim against Ingarden that the phonetic stratum is not always and necessarily present whenever we appreciatively apprehend a literary work of art? The obvious, though allegedly disputable, evidence for this claim is the prevalent phenomenon of silent reading. When one reads a literary work silently to oneself one may (and usually does) understand and appreciate it without producing any sounds at all. Several aestheticians. desiring t o rescue the claim of the essential oral nature of " literature (o ra t least poetry), have therefore tried to find some man~festa- tion of the phonetic in silent reading. More extravagant literary theorists, like Barbara Smith, have posited the existence of mysterious, impercep- tible "pseudo-sounds" which are produced in and inform our silent reading albeit perhaps unbeknownst to us. More disciplined philosophers, like Ingarden and Urmson, employ a more subtle tactic, arguing that silent reading essentially involves a process of imagining or becomlng aware of 'what sounds would be heard' in actual oral nerformance. and thus it essentially requires the presence of the phonetic stratum even if it is not physically actualized or produced.* Thus, whether orally performed o r silentiy read, the literary text inescapably directs "the reader . . . to apprehend the work in its phoneticstraturn", "informing him which word sounds he is t o concretize in actual expression (as in recitation out loud) o r in imaginative reconstruction (as in silent reading)" (LW, 367).

However, this argument for the necessary phonetic nature of silent reading is hardly cornpelling. It is not at all clear from introspection that silent reading must o r even always does involve such phonetic imaginings; and o u r frequent surprise as to how texts we've silently read actually sound when read aloud gives further reason to doubt that silent reading is always phonetic imagining. Finally, there are the many cases of the congenitally deaf who surely cannot properly imagine or reconstruct the phonetic stratum of literary texts, yet surely read, understand, and appreciate literarv works of art . I certainlv d o not denv that in one's silent reading one can and (at least with poetry) often frequently does imagine the work's word sounds, and that such imaginative activity may well improve o r enrich our appreciative understanding of the work] lndeed for some texts and/or poor readers of poetry, it may be essential for proper appreciation of the work. But this does not mean that phonetic apprehension is always o r necessarily present in silent readingand that cbnse- quently word sounds, unlike word inscriptions, are always necessary for and present with the apprehension of word meanings. Silent reading shows they are not and that the inscribed text can suffice for concretization of meaning and consequent understanding and appreciation.

There is, then, no compelling aesthetic evidence here for the claim that while inscription is unnecessary and irrelevant for meaning, meaning cannot be conceived or apprehended apart from the apprehension of (real

o r imaginatively reconstructed) word sounds. One therefore suspects that ~ n g a r d e n ' ~ insistence on this claim is a product not of aesthetic inquiry but of a very basic and pervasive philosophical prejudice for the oral over the inscribed, a phonocentrism which perhaps has its proximate source in Husserl and his phenomenological 'living voice', but which reflects a phonocentric metaphysics of presence which stretches back to Plato's Phaedrus. This is a Derridean direction which deep deconstruc- tionist critics of Ingarden might wish to plumb.' But I shallnot explore it here, finding more than enough of interest on Ingarden's richly intricate surface.

3. I shall instead consider one last argument for rejecting the inscribed while embracing the phonetic, which seems to emerge, albeit not very prominently, on the surface of Ingarden's text. This argument should not be confused with the ~ r ev ious one. i.e.. that the honet tic stratum is instrumentally necessky or essential for constitutini and apprehending (the meaning of) the literary work, while the inscribed text is not. The argument now is rather that the phonetic stratum is highly significant or even essential for the work's aesthetic character and its appraisal, while the inscribed text in its visuality is instead totally irrelevant aesthetically to the work. For Ingarden, the phonetic stratum is so important that "if it were formed differently than it actually ir in a given work, that work would undergo sweeping changes"; and, in any case, without the aesthetic value of this stratum "the polyphony of the work would be poorer by a significant element" (LW, 61). The aesthetic significance of the work's phonetic qualities is stressed again in his later book.

Not only do they themselves constitute an aesthetically important element of the work; they are often, a t the same timc, a means of disclosing other aspectsand qualities of the work, for instance, amoodwhich hoversover the situation portrayed in thc work. Thus the reader must have a n 'ear' for the phonetic stratum of the work (CLW, 23).

According to Ingarden, nothing like this could be said for the inscribed aspect of the work, whose only role for him is to serve the phonetic. He does not demand that the reader have an 'eve' for the work's textual form along with his 'ear' for its music, but rather (as we saw) he cautions against visuality as a possible distracting irrelevance. Is the visuality irrelevant because it does not belong to the work, or is it not, rather, that it is claimed not to belong to the work because it is held to be aesthetically irrelevant to it?

There seems to be a circularity here. But whether or not it exists and is vicious is a question we may perhaps put aside, because the claim that textual visuali-ty is always aesthetically irrelevant and insignificant to literary works is simply and obviously false. Just as in certain literary works the phonetic stratum is vitally important to the work's aesthetic character and must be grasped for proper appraisal of the work, so in other literary works the visual aspect of the text is significant or even crucial to its aesthetic character, and must be attended to for the work to be appreciated and criticized aright. Such works include not only poems

by moderns like Malame, Apollinaire, and e. e. cummings as well as the whole movement of so-called "Concrete Poetry", but also include the entire genre of pattern poetry which was so prominent in the seventeenth centurv and whose roots stretch back to the Greek and Roman literam art of inscription. In these numerous literary works, the visuality of the inscribed text is not only significant but perhaps even necessary for a full understanding and aesthetic appreciation of the work. Moreover, count- less other works exploit the visuality of the inscribed text in less dramatic but still quite significant ways. Think, for example, of "eye rhyme" and of the central role of lineation in poetry; imagine what the transcription of a poem's verse lines into prose-paragraph format would do to our aesthetic experience of the work. Nor is the aesthetically significant role of the visual limited to verse. Novels also not infrequently exploit textual visuality in a variety of ways.1°

The empirical evidence of the aesthetic relevance of the visual, inscribed text is enormous and the varieties of its aesthetically relevant employment are manifold. Substantial scholarship has been devoted to this subject, and I cannot try to summarize the findings here." What must be urged, however, is that the very fact that the inscribed text not only provides apprehension of the work but also frequently makes a significant aesthetic contribution to the work should be enough to deter us from excluding it in principle from belonging to the work as Ingarden excludes it. This, of course, represents the first line of challenge mentioned earlier.

Let me conclude by cautioning against a possible misunderstanding of my defence of the inscr~bed text against Ingarden's exclusion of it from the literary work, and by placing my attack on Ingarden's theory (which despite my criticism I greatly admire) into a larger perspective. This should shed light on more general and fundamental aspects of Ingarden's literary ontology which perhaps underlie the narrow point of doctrine I have been challenging at such length.

My somewhat impassioned case for the ontological pertinence and aesthetic relevance of the visual, inscribed text, and my criticism of Ingarden's view that the phonetic stratum is always indispensable and aesthetically essential might be misconstrued as a philosophical attempt to give ontological and aesthetic pride of place to the inscribed over the phonetic. This is not my intention, nor my view, and would only be to escape one distortion by embracing another, perhaps greater, one in a different direction. Nor is my point to deny empirically that over the history of literature and criticism, the aesthetic role of the phonetic stratum has been relatively much more prominent than that of the inscribed text. My point, however, is to emphasize the relative and historical nature of this thesis as opposed to the essentialist, absolutest tendencies which seem to underlie and motivate Ingarden's thought.

When we contrast the traditional centrality of the phonetic to the

greater marginality of the visual, we are speaking about relative tendencies of an historical character, which indeed differ to some extent in different literary genres and periods. We are not talking about the timeless absolute essence of literature, of what does and must always exist in the literary work as an aesthetically relevant element that is necessary for the work's apprehension and appreciation. Philosophy often displays a hoary prejudice to seek and find permanent, absolute, and universal essences even in realms of inquiry where no such things exist to be found. Ingarden, despite some positive steps toward recognition of the historically conditioned and exceedingly variable nature of literary works, remains an essentialist thinker; and his literary ontology consequently suffers.

In arguing for the indispensability of the phonetic and in discussing the question of whether there may in fact be counterexamples to this thesis, lngarden casually but most revealingly remarks. "our question is directed at what belongs in essence, not in fact7'(LW, 54). The remark may cause puzzlement since what belongs to the work in essence must belong to i t in fact, though not apparently vice versa. But the remark does reveal Ingarden's pervasive essentialism which poses for him the following dilemma.

Either thc phonetic stratum belongs to the essence of the work and is therefore a l w a s indispensable to its apprehension and aesthetic character. or , alternatively, it does not belong to the essence of the work and is therefore mercly a dispensable means of apprehension of the work proper and cannot be a constitutive part or aesthetically significant aspect ofit. In essentialism's rigid binary logic, there is not room to say that the phonetic is aesthetically significant or indispensable in some literary works but not in others. Saddled with the essentialist choice of alternatives, lngarden can only be commended for choosing the lesser of two evils and incorporating the phonetic as belonging to the work's essence and as consequently capable of adding to its aesthetic richness. With the inscribed text, his choice was unfortunate but understandable. For given the same essentialist logic and the fact that the inscribed text has obviously not been indispensable (as shown by oral tradition) and has moreover been obviouslG~ess aesthetically significant than the phonetic, the inference must follow that the inscribed does not similarly belong to the work and cannot constitute an aesthetically relevant aspect of it. Dispensability entails non-essentiality which in turn means not belonging to the work proper which finally means exclusion in principle from being an aesthetically significant aspect of the work. The fact that many literary works have been written to be visually appreciated and can only be fully appreciated through attention to the visual aspects of their inscribed texts is apparently dismissed by Ingarden as but mere irrelevant fact, and not essence.

Thus, the promising option for both artist and critic to take the inscribed text as a relevant dimension of the work and as a ~ossible source for aesthetic richness is scratched by essentialism as a non-starter. But traditional aesthetics has long suffered from paying more respect to

essences than facts; and if there is one fact that contemporary aesthetics seems to have profitably embraced, it is that art and literature neither have nor require timeless essences, but rather seem to be comprised of historically conditioned and shifting congeries of heterogeneity. Ingarden, with his welcome emphasis on the heterogeneous constituents and "life" of the literary work, points the way to contemporary theory, but is not quite our contemporary.

Temple University

Keferences I. See R. Ingarden. The Lirerar~~ Work of Art, trans. G . C . Grabowicz (Evanston. Ill..

1973); and The Cognition of the Literor-y Work of Art, trans. R. A. Crowley and K . R. Olson (Evanston. Ill., 1973). These books will be referred to hereafter in my paper as ~. L W and CLW respectively.

2. See B. Croce, Aesthetic, trans. D. Ainslie (New York, 1970), lo(); M. Dufrenne. Le Poetirrue (Paris. 1973). 70-71 ; M. C. Beardslev.Arsrherics (Ncw York. 1958) I Ih; J . 0 . ~ r m s b n . "~ i t e r a tu r e ; in G . Dickie and R. ~ . .~c l a f an i (eds.) (New York, 1977), 338.

3. See R. Shusterman. "The Anomalous Nature of Literature". Brirish Jourrlai of Aesthetics. 18 (1978), 317-329; "Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality" Journal o f Aesfhetics and Art Criticism, 41 (1982). 87-96, For a fuller exposition of my literary ontology, see R. Shusterman, The Object of Literary Criticism (Amsterdam. 1984). 78-109. . .

See, for example. "Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality"; and R. Draper. "Concrete Poetry", New L.iterary Hivtory, 2 ( 1971). 329-40. T o pursue these issues concerning type entities. see E. M. Zcmach. "Four Onto- logies". Jo~trnal of Philosophy, 67 (1970). 231-247: J . Margolis. "The Ontological Peculiarity of Worksof Art". Journtrl ofAesthetic.sandArt Criticism, 36 (1977), 44-49: A. Harrison. "Works of A n and Other Cultural Objects", proceeding.^ of the Ar~stotelir~n Society, 68 ( 1967). 108-124; and R. Wollheim, Arr and its Objects (Harmondsworth. U . K . . 1970). 90-100. J . Margolis. "On Disputes about the Ontological Status of a Work of Art", Brili.s/~ Journal of Aesthetics, 8 (1968). 150. For a detailed analysis o f the logical interdcpen- dence of the issues of the work's identity, ontological status. interpretation. and evaluation, see I<. Shusterman, "Four Problems in Aesthetics". Inrernationul Philo- sophical Quarterly, 22 ( I982), 2 1-33. See R. Shusterman, "Osborne and Moore on Organic IJnity", British Journal c)/ Aesthetics, 23 ( 1983). 352-359. See B. H. Smith. "Literature, as Performance. Fiction, and Art". Joltrnal of Philosophy, 67 (1970). 553-563; and Urmson, 338-340. For detailed criticism of thesc v ~ w s of silent reading, see "The Anomalous Nature of Literature". For Dcrrida on Husserl and thc "phenomenological voice", see J . Derrida. Speech and Phenomena und Other Essnys on Hlrsserl's Theory of Signs, trans. D. D . Allison (Evanson. 111.. 197.11, 15-16.74-80. Ironically, one such way is discussed in D. M. Levin's "Foreword" to Ingarden's LW. with the example o f the following sentence (from Nabakov's Ada) whose visual aspect is shown to he aesthetically significant in enriching comple&ities of meaning. "She looked hack before locking her (always locked) door." (LW, xli) Surprisingly, Levin does not comment on thc dubious relevance of such inscriptional features according to Ingarden'\ thcory. See, tor exam Ie D. M Anderson. The Art of Written Forms (New York. 1969): W. Chappcll. A f h ~ t F!i.srorY of the Printed Word (Boston. 1980): J . Sparrow. VisihLe Worr1.s: A .Study of 1n.scriptions ir~ and cis Books and Works of Arr (Cambridge. 1965). Other studies arc cited in my "Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality".

“Ingarden, Inscription, and Literary Ontology”

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