W O L F G A N G I S E R A N D L I T E R A RY A N T H R O P O L O G Y

A thesis submitted

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

of The University of Newcastle

Presented to The School of Design,Communication and Information

Technology by Mr Benjamin James Matthews BA (Comm) Hons (Eng)

March 2010

Matthews

This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other

degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my

knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another

person, except where due reference has been made in the text. I give consent to this copy

of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library**, being made available for loan

and photocopying subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968.

**Unless an Embargo has been approved for a determined period.

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For Clieve and Joy McCosker

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Prof. Hugh Craig for his professional dedication, hard

work, keen insight, patience, and ongoing enthusiasm for this project. Without his will-

ingness to go “above and beyond” and to reply efficiently and effectively to my requests

for assistance, this dissertation would not have been written. I would also like to recogn-

ise the formative influence of Dr. Keith Russell, whose willingness to engage in energetic

discussion with me has unfolded over a period of several years. I should also like to thank

Prof. John Tulloch for his invaluable comments and for supporting my project during the

final stages of writing.

The contributions of my colleagues in the Communication discipline are less tangible,

but of great significance. I would like to recognise in particular the counsel and advice of

Prof. Lynette Sheridan Burns, Dr. Anne Llewellyn, Dr. Judith Sandner, Ms. Clare Lloyd,

Dr. Steven Threadgold, Dr. Peter Shaw, Mr. Eugene Lutton, Dr. Phillip McIntyre, Mr.

Michael Meany, Dr. Richard Tipping, Mr. Paul Scott, Mrs. Janet Fulton, Ms. Rowan Tan,

Ms. Ros Mills, and Ms. Cathie Taylor.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude for the support of friends and family. I would like

to mention my parents Catherine and Richard, and my siblings Sarah, Jacqueline and

Joseph. The friends I would like to name are those who are most intimate with my strug-

gle. They include John Marsden, Joanne Ford, Justin Worthington, Pegs Adams, Michael

Sala, Andy Costigan, Luke & Mills Wade, Sally Lambert, Evan Gibbs, Luke Graham,

Noel Cook, Lilly Ford, Sean Adams, Mahu, Kel & Justin Eckersley, Tim & Chrissie Eck-

ersley, Lyn “Oracle” Adams, Alice Williams, Fedja Hadzic, Yasmin Matthews, Cezary

Rataj, Chris deSalvo, Jillian Eckerlsey, Niklas Möller, Stephen Faiers, Charles McElroy,

Emil Moujali and the Disco Palace.

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MatthewsTable of Contents

TITLE

Acknowledgements Table of Contents Abstract

Introduction

Literary Fictionality: an exploration Strategy in The Fictive and the Imaginary Three Fictionalizing Acts: selection, combination, self-disclosure How literary fictionality can assist us to explore discourse

The Imaginary Iser’s dual approach in The Fictive and the Imaginary Introducing the imaginary The imaginary and play

The Interplay of the Fictive and the Imaginary The reader, play, and games The imaginary as a critique of methodology Figuring convergence and deforming

The Reception of Iser: Fish Fish’s reception of Iser The “reality” of fiction The reality of literary anthropology Alternate “realities” of Iser

The Reception of Iser: outcomes The reception of Iser and new directions in literary theory: “cognitive reception theory” Iser’s psychology of reading and Tom Jones

The Reception of Iser: literary example Cerny and Iser Toker and “second-degree” fictionalizing

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CHAPTER

1.1.11.21.3

2.2.12.22.3

3.3.13.23.3

4.4.14.24.34.4

5.5.1

5.2

6.6.16.2

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TITLE The Reception of Iser: Gans Comparing literary and generative anthropology Does literary anthropology require an originary hypothesis?

Decline of Literary Studies: a case for exploration Iser, interpretation and translation Gans and van Oort, literary anthropology and the significance of interpretation Discourse of the decline of literary studies Literary critic as “hero”?

Emergence Emergence and defining the human The negative and literary interpretation The text in language Conclusion

Conclusion

Works Cited

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CHAPTER

7.7.17.2

8.8.18.2

8.38.4

9.9.19.29.39.4

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Abstract

This dissertation argues that the literary anthropology of Wolfgang Iser allows us to res-

ituate literary studies in response to the challenges of the “cultural turn” and the decline

of literary studies. These include questions about what defines a literary text, and whether

literature should be bracketed off from the remainder of culture. Iser’s definition for lit-

erature focuses upon the materiality of culture, by defining the text in language rather than

as a concrete object, and as a unique medium we use to meet a basic need. Iser argues that

the “open ended” nature of literature reflects the dynamic human, and favours a defini-

tion of the human that points towards the performative quality of representation, in terms

of the metaphor of “plasticity”. However, he gives no account of the emergence of this

vertical dimension in language. As a corrective measure, an argument is presented for

the adoption of the originary hypothesis articulated by Eric Gans to underpin his genera-

tive anthropology. Here we follow Richard van Oort, who, in pursuing the argument for

an anthropological perspective on the project of cultural interpretation conducted in the

humanities, suggests the necessity for a grounding interpretation of our common origin

in language. This originary hypothesis indicates that culture, language, and thereby, the

human are coterminous. They each begin in a single scene, and a minimal fiction can be

offered to describe this scene and provide a basic structure we can discover in each sub-

sequent scene of human culture. The final phase of this dissertation examines the proposi-

tion that Iser’s anthropology exhibits a generative perspective on literature. The outcome

suggests that the supplement of an originary hypothesis brings stability to his work in

articulating categories such as fictionalizing, the imaginary, play, staging, and emergence,

which undergird an important new way to approach literary studies.

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Introduction

I assume, rather than know, that the possibility of human culture can be traced to

a single event, a moment when the linguistic sign came into being and symbolic

representation began. The linguistic sign was the means by which the human

community of language users could spring up and be maintained, and we can imagine

the scene of this singular occurrence, and hypothesise the conditions that inspired it and

the structure it generated. This structure can be discovered in language, and in each

scene of human culture that makes up the history of our being in that particular

condition through language of no longer being animals. The capacity we have to

generate culture is attributable to this singularity, and human culture can be explained

on the basis of a minimally described hypothetical description of the originary event as

a sequence of scenes. This originary hypothesis is a self-conscious fiction, since it must

employ the only tool at our disposal, that same language which came into being at the

originary moment.

The originary hypothesis just described comes from the work of Eric Gans, and

forms the basis of a sub-field within cultural anthropology known as generative

anthropology. Gans argues that human experience is distinguishable from that of other

animals by virtue of our collective and individual capacity to recall through

representation the sequence of unique events that make up our history. Gans writes that

representations are a primary human characteristic, “the most fundamental of which are

the signs of language” (Scenic 1). The emergence of language and culture occurs during

a self-conscious “scene”, defined by the mutual understanding of the members of the

group that they are indeed participating in a process of representation:

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If the human is indeed a series of scenic events – the notion of event

entailing that its participants are aware that they are, here and now,

participating in it along with their fellows – then the human must have

originated in an event, the representation of which, the first example of

language and “culture,” is part of the originary scene itself. I call this the

originary hypothesis. (his emphasis 2)

Language emerged in order to facilitate the “momentary deferral” of an “outbreak of

violence” in the group (2). This language manifests as a radical break with animal forms

of communication since it no longer serves to simply maintain a hierarchy in the group

by differentiating between individuals, as in the “pecking-order” common to primate

societies. In this transition from the “protohuman” social organisation to the human,

language structures a shift from a strictly one-to-one mode of communication to a

mediated interaction that allows for the group to interact through an object.

My thesis takes Gans’s generative anthropology as a starting point for an

exploration of the implications of a broader anthropological perspective for literary

study. The originary hypothesis is extraordinarily simple, self-evidently fictional, and

breathtakingly wide in its implications. It provides a useful point of perspective on the

literary anthropology practised by Wolfgang Iser, which forms the main subject of the

chapters that follow. I argue in fact in chapter seven that it completes Iser’s theory,

though he explicitly rejected it. The originary hypothesis is also a convenient

introduction to anthropological perspectives, which open the way to considering the

“why” of particular cultural forms, rather than the “how”. Our attention is directed not

so much to the comparison of one cultural output to another, to the categorisation of

these outputs, or to the local effects of a given output on a given audience, but more to

the underlying human significance of culture in general. Generative anthropology

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emphasises that culture begins in a certain fashion, fulfilling certain imperatives, and

these beginnings condition the continued functioning of culture. In turn this provides a

basis for a proper understanding of the function of literature as a key mode of culture, as

I hope to show below.

Gans asks us to imagine a scene, at the centre of which is an object that focuses

the “appetitive attention” of the group. In the protohuman group, mutual desire for the

object is strictly imitative, which is “generally unproblematic” until this imitation

involves “a scarce object that we both desire to possess” (Signs 16). Mutual desire, born

of imitative animal behaviour’ has now produced rivalry, or “mimetic conflict,” and the

“mimetic model” of behaviour becomes an obstacle. Mimesis has become paradoxical,

since imitating a model animal’s behaviour is no longer possible, and a “pragmatic”

paradox results “when the mimetic relation to the other-mediator requires the

impossible task of maintaining the latter as a model while imitating his appropriative

action toward a unique object” (20). Under these circumstances, it becomes too

dangerous for even an alpha animal to appropriate the object and as such, any and all

gestures of appropriation must be aborted. Gans posits in The Scenic Imagination that in

the circumstances of the originary scene:

this aborted gesture is performed and understood first presumably by a

single member of the group (perhaps the dethroned “alpha” himself)

whose interpretation spreads through the group by mimetic contagion, as

both designating the object as desirable and at the same time renouncing

its exclusive possession. The aborted gesture is thus a sign that re-

presents or names the central object in its inaccessibility. (his italics 3)

The aborted gesture is the first linguistic sign, and as the members of the group

spontaneously duplicate one another’s interpretation of the aborted gesture as a sign that

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designates the central appetitive object as desirable and inaccessible, the object is

simultaneously made sacred. Gans’s hypothesis suggests that human language is made

up of a “centre and periphery”, and that the mediation generated by the emergence of

the sign allows all the members of the group (at the periphery) to “imaginarily possess

the object” at the centre. The sign does not indicate the object directly, but the mutual or

“mimetic” desire to possess the object. This “shared” possession of the object “permits

its division into equivalent parts in the subsequent tearing-apart or sparagmos, where

each can take part in both the appropriating and destroying the object without fear of

giving the appearance of desiring its totality for himself” (3). This division of the object

of desire through the possession of the sign allows for the mediation, or “discharge” of

the mimetic tension that preceded the originary event, which was “deferred, not

eliminated” and now “the central object, through the sacred interdiction conferred on it

by the sign, becomes a focus of still greater desire and therefore of potential violence,

which must in turn be deferred” (2).

This ritual of dismemberment reminds us that Gans shares ground with René

Girard. As he says himself, his early work used Girard’s model of “‘emissary murder’”

but Gans later saw this murder as a way of averting conflict (Signs 131). This key

difference is centred on nothing less than the emergence of language, since for Gans

mimetic rivalry becomes discharged as the originary sign replaces the object of desire,

while for Girard it is the victim of this “originary murder” who must give their body up

as originary sign. Gans explains this difference – along with the irrationality it suggests

– as the basis for his choice of the terms for the violence associated with the originary

scene:

It is to emphasise the resentful nature of this violence that I have used

“sparagmos” here rather than Girard’s “emissary murder.” The term also

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connotes a subtle but fundamental difference with the Girardian

interpretation of the scene. Girard speaks of the body of the victim as

“the first signifier,” implying its continued existence as a figure; but in

the sparagmos, the figural nature of the victim, the object of originary

resentment, is precisely what is destroyed. (Signs 134)

The survival of the would-be victim of a process of “scapegoating” is necessary here, as

the guarantor of language itself. For Girard, the mimetic tension that results from

competition over an appetitive object is transferred to an individual who becomes the

scapegoat, and who is murdered before the emergence of the sign. In Gans’s hypothesis,

the emergence of the linguistic sign – and therefore language and the human – occurs

before the violence that manifests during the originary event. The discharge of mimetic

tension, or “originary resentment” that is an “equivalent of the scapegoating agression”

in Girard’s terms, occurs after the emergence of the sign, and importantly “within the

originary event” itself (Signs 133-4).

Girard commented when interviewed on the topic of the difference between his

and Gans’s projects, that “the problem of representation is second to the sacred” in his

work (Müller 1). Furthermore, for Girard the process of achieving human representation

would not involve the singularity Gans imposes through his minimality, and as such

“[m]oving towards representation would be an extremely slow process and one cannot

say anything about it in a concrete historical way, to be sure. It would be a long series of

‘scenes’” (2). This longer process would begin slowly and unfold over time, and is “not

one that can be defined in a clear-cut way…. Before representation, rituals and

prohibitions would be born” where prohibitions “tells us not to do again what the victim

did to put us in trouble” (2). These rituals and “prohibitions” do not require a stark

transition into representation, relieving Girard of the philosophical difficulty involved

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with Gans’s singular “scene”. Girard concludes that as a result he is freer to pursue a

self-conscious investigation of the transition itself, since as he claims “what interests me

most in this genesis of ritual and prohibition is that it does not demand full

representation yet, just as the sacred does not demand an understanding of

scapegoating.” (2)

As we have seen, in Gans’s theory, the originary hypothesis necessitates the co-

origin of the human and language in a single scene. The “deferral” of violence involved

in this singular event provides the structure for the subsequent sequence of scenes which

make up the history of human culture. Gans presents his “deferral” in terms of Derrida’s

neologism “différance”, which Gans describes in terms of the French word “différer”,

which means “both differ and defer” (Scenic 2). Gans writes that Derrida’s neologism in

his translation employs this double meaning to “suggest that the differences that

constitute language serve to defer violence” (2). Of central importance to this thesis

however, is not Derrida’s notion of language as manifesting a dual quality of difference

and deferral, but the way Gans’s originary hypothesis defines the “symbolic” sign. As

he writes in The Scenic Imagination:

Symbolic reference cannot derive from the horizontal relation of

appetite; it entails a “vertical” relationship of différance that is at the

same time one of interdiction. The sign substitutes for the thing only

because the thing itself cannot be appropriated…. All ritual, including

the secular rites of art, reproduces the same originary formal structure.

Similarly, what we call the imaginary is a mise-en-scene before an

implicit audience on a scene of representation internalized within the

mind. (3)

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The “vertical” dimension of the sign relation manifests as the symbolic order, and gives

itself across to the human as the possibility of “history” in culture: “as derivatives of the

originary configuration, all cultural phenomena have the same underlying structure; it is

the historical implementations of this structure that reveal the possibilities latent within

it” (Scenic 5). The sign is “symbolic” in the human sense only because it stands for

what cannot be appropriated. The deferral of violence is then carried forward in the now

human community as culture, since the symbolic order that has emerged is not

attributable to the appetitive object, but to the communal recognition of a willingness to

relinquish the object in favour of the group. Now we have arrived at an important

differentiation: the “vertical” dimension unique to the symbolic order of the human

linguistic sign. Gans describes this in Signs of Paradox as having necessarily emerged

as part of an event that differentiates the human from other animals:

The crux of the origin of language is the emergence of the vertical sign-

relation from the horizontal one of animal interaction. The originary

hypothesis claims that this emergence is conceivable only as an event

because the communication of the new sign-relation to its users gives

them a conscious, directly manipulable access to the sign as a

transcendent form of representation. One cannot be given access to the

sign without knowing it, which does not mean knowing what this access

is – what language is – in our terms. (15)

Gans solves the philosophical complication of knowing what language is before it

emerges: one does not need to understand the nature of language in order to begin using

it. But the sign is now – because of the event during which it first referred to the

mediation of violence as an aborted gesture of appropriation – the possibility of the

human and accessible as a form of representation that is independent of the object to

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which it refers: it is transcendent. This structure defines generative anthropology, since

the “scene of representation generates the meaning and structure that characterise the

human” (Scenic 4). Human consciousness is structured in terms of this originary event

as consciousness of the object and other through language, a condition not predicated

upon a capacity to describe language using language. However the capacity to do so has

already emerged with the sign, and as Gans elaborates in The Scenic Imagination,

“[a]mong the representations that can appear on the scene of representation is that of the

generative scene itself. I shall call the faculty that carries out this self-representation of

the scene, the scenic imagination”. For Gans this capacity to represent the scene of our

origin has far reaching consequences. The “faculty” made up of our capacity to imagine

such scenes of origin can be discovered in our use of analogy to explain the “giraffe’s

neck or the elephant’s trunk”. Such a fundamental imaginary capacity becomes for Gans

a means by which to interpret such representative phenomenon, since this is how

“culture has always operated”. In effect, this capacity to imagine collective scenes is a

definition for the human. Gans argues that this “scenic imagination” is too easily

dismissed as “unscientific” since it is assumed that the “the scenic could be reduced to a

set of simpler neurological of genetic phenomenon” that can be studied in an empirical

mode (4). While there is no evidence for the originary scene, this does not diminish the

worth of the originary hypothesis for the generative anthropologist who discovers the

structure of the scene throughout culture.

The role of the literary critic is to interpret a material form of culture that

manifests the scene of representation. The outcomes to this interpretation are

represented through the modern institution of the university, where these outcomes are

subject to challenge. These challenges can be summarised in the form of an empirical

question: how do you substantiate this interpretation? “Theory” has developed –

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primarily in the era beginning after WWII – as a means by which to assess and conduct

the interpretation that constitutes critical analysis of literary texts, as it describes and

substantiates the worth of methods by which interpretation might be conducted. But

theory itself is subject to ongoing challenge and interpretation, resulting in a complex

interplay of criticism and theory. When weighed one against another the efforts of

literary theorists and critics become absorbed in a history of negotiation that make up

the mainstay of literary discourse. These negotiations, however, are made difficult by

the nature of the objects studied. In the case of literary studies, the object of study is not

some clearly demarcated phenomenon against which our interpretive conclusions can be

measured. This difference separates the humanities from the sciences where that which

is investigated can be presented independently of the investigation itself. In the

humanities the object of study is the “text” which is described during the process of

interpretation. The focus of this process is to describe the manner in which the text in

question symbolises something of importance to humanity. The empirical question

cannot be answered through this process, since the question of symbolic significance is

necessarily context bound, indicating that the premise for the question should be

investigated. In applying an empirical measure to interpretation we attempt to reduce

the investigation of human culture to the discovery of “objects”. But if culture, and the

human, is understood as only possible through language, how can we transcend this

language in order to describe the objective domain of culture we have now left behind?

For in leaving it behind, we have also left behind the means by which to understand the

domain in the first instance.

From our origin the consciousness we have of being human compels us to

employ the only means available to describe this condition, in language. The study of

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literature is a study of this use for language, while being an example of this

phenomenon. Richard van Oort takes up the argument in Gans’s terms as follows:

Culture is both a representation and a performance, a “model of” and a

“model for.” Scientific definitions of the human ignore this paradox as a

matter of course. From a purely scientific vantage point, attributing an

exceptional status to human origin seems like false hubris. But from an

anthropological viewpoint, we have no choice but to consider human

origin as exceptional because the very fact that we are self-conscious of

this origin, in a way that other species are not, compels us to seek an

explanation for it. Whether the explanation for human origin be

conceived in the form of a myth, a science, or a literary anthropology, all

are equally attempts to respond to the fundamental mimetic paradox that

led to the origin of the cultural scene of symbolic representation. Only

humans are self-conscious of themselves as historical beings because

only humans have evolved the paradoxical ability to represent their own

origin. (“Critic” 653)

What is the nature of this paradox? It is the paradox of culture and of language,

such that these phenomena are simultaneously performative and representative. As Gans

describes it:

The classical example of pragmatic paradox is the mother telling her son

to “be spontaneous,” but in the originary event, what is paradoxical in

the signifying act is not that it gives an order that cannot be obeyed, but

that it designates as (already) significant an object that perforce

preexisted significance itself. (“Hermeneutics”)

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Human consciousness is not present in the build up of mimetic tension that leads to the

aborted gesture of appropriation during the originary event, which comes to a head

when we see the imitation of a model Other break down as the attention of both subject

and model is drawn to a common appetitive object. As van Oort puts it:

The shift from imitation (“model for”) to representation (“model of”)

occurs when each rival’s “aborted gesture of appropriation” is

understood by both individuals as no longer a movement to be

unselfconsciously imitated, but as an intentionally and collectively

produced sign indicating the presence of the object to the other. (“Critic”

652)

Here van Oort draws the parallel to Clifford Geertz, who deals with the co-origin of

anthropology and culture by defining “somewhat cumbersomely, symbolic

representation as the ‘intertransposability of models for and models of,’” and

subsequently asserting “that this capacity for symbolic transposition is the ‘distinctive

characteristic of our mentality’ compared to animal cognition” (631). Van Oort

characterises Geertz’s attempt to make such a link in terms of his description of the

origin of culture as a straightforward transition in which “culture continues a process

that is inherent in the natural biological process of evolution” (628). After claiming this

is problematic, since a scientific model in the form of evolutionary theory is simply

extended into the domain of culture, van Oort asserts that Geertz “does not recognize

this distinction between scientific explanation and cultural interpretation” (636). Gans’s

originary hypothesis represents a significant alternative. In the structure hypothesised by

Gans, the mutually understood abortive gesture of appropriation remains in the

“triangular” situation of subject and model, who are positioned in relation to the central

object, establishing the centre-periphery modelling of culture and language. For van

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Oort, the “false hubris” that a scientific attempt at defining the human bestows on the

significance of a scene of origin is attributable to the disparity in predisposition between

a “generative” anthropology and science. He argues in “The Culture of Criticism” that

“scientific theory presupposes a stable ontological and epistemological difference

between subject and object” (461). The anthropologist, who “takes the human capacity

for symbolic representation seriously” cannot assume such a stable delineation between

object to be observed and the subject enacting the process since “culture is not an object

like the stars or DNA. There is a self-referentiality to cultural explanation that makes it

impossible for the inquirer simply to propose a theory and then submit it, like the

scientist, to an arena where it is objectively tested” (462). This is so, since the

explanatory ambition of the cultural anthropologist in question is staged in language,

and conducted inside the culture they attempt to explain. As Gans describes it, such

fundamental reflection on the human is like generative anthropology, “a bootstrapping

operation” that paradoxically employs language to explain “the origin of human

language” (Signs 13). The tacit assumption in cultural anthropology of an originary

hypothesis leads van Oort to conclude that any “anthropology is simply a faith in the

general project of human representation” (“Critic” 655). If human representation

emerged as a means by which to defer the destructive “mimetic crisis”, then “deferral of

this crisis via the originary sign is the first moment in the never-ending historical project

of representing – and therefore attempting to understand – this originary crisis” (655).

For van Oort the necessity for appreciating that representation is central to a

definition for the human in all of cultural anthropology also links the interpretation of

literature with anthropology. He asks whether “literary criticism and cultural

anthropology are ultimately concerned with the same thing” (639), and answers in the

affirmative.

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An anthropological approach provides a basis for defining the broader human

significance of literary studies. In van Oort’s words, “if culture is defined as that object

which invites symbolic interpretation, then it follows that literary studies stands at the

center of an anthropology founded on these assumptions” (622). The importance of

adopting an “originary” definition for the human becomes clearer when we examine the

growing tendency in the humanities toward the interpretation of texts drawn from

culture in general. Van Oort describes how the discipline of literary studies has itself

extended to include in its attention texts drawn from beyond literature, including such

things as “oral testimonies, rituals, advertisements, pop music, and clothing” (621). In

answering the question as to what defines such objects as “texts”, van Oort returns to

the originary account of human “symbolic” representation by answering that quite

simply “[t]hey are texts because they invite interpretation” in the first instance (621).

Van Oort defines interpretation here as “the symbolic process whereby we translate the

significance of one thing by seeing it in terms of another” (621). “Texts” are objects that

attract this process of translation, which is conducted through the uniquely human

symbolic interpretation of signs. In order to establish the relevance of anthropology to

literature, and specifically anthropology based on Gans’s originary hypothesis, I assert

that van Oort’s hypothesis is correct, and that literary studies is indeed built on an

anthropological concern with symbolic representation. In van Oort’s view, this can be

discovered most directly in the common preoccupation in the humanities with

interpretation:

what takes primacy in the study of culture is the necessity of textual

interpretation. Translated into a definition of the human, this premise

becomes the basis of a literary anthropology or, as Greenblatt likes to put

it, a cultural poetics. The human is a text to be interpreted, not because

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there is “nothing outside the text” but because without the text there is no

humanity. To the biologist or physicist (as for any natural scientist), it is

certainly absurd to claim there is nothing outside the text. But to those

concerned centrally with the study of the human (that is, those in the

humanities and the “anthropological” social sciences), it is literally quite

true that without the mediating presence of the originary scene of

symbolic representation – “textuality,” if one likes – there is no humanity

and therefore no object of study. (638-9)

To summarise then, I follow van Oort by defining literary anthropology in terms

of an originary hypothesis. This hypothesis is understood to be a minimal “fiction”,

rather than a starting point that can be verified by empirical means. Such a literary

anthropology is affirmed in its refusal of adherence to a scientific approach to

understanding culture and:

begins not with an empirically testable hypothesis of origin, but with a

minimally conceived heuristic fiction or “originary hypothesis” that is

tested not by what precedes it empirically, but by what follows from its

minimal anthropological assumptions (628).

Gans comments that his “heuristic theoretical construct is necessary to mediate between

the necessary specificity of cultural experience”, since anthropology relies upon the

implicit assertion of “a single logos of the human that explains the universality of all our

moral intuitions, the intertranslatability of all our languages, the mutual

comprehensibility of all our customs” (“Universal Anthropology”). The singularity

described by the originary hypothesis is the ultimate gesture of vulnerability, in that it

reduces all humanity to this event and levels all. This is antithetical to the “prejudice”

such a universal perspective might be accused of, in that it both has no precursors in

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human terms, and excludes no culture. Indeed, it is utterly inclusive. In the context of

literary studies, this originary perspective on culture suggests that the process of

conducting interpretation upon literary texts is similarly concerned not to exclude, but to

best understand that which is fundamental to the human experience. Such cultural

explanation is described by van Oort as an attempt to “recognize that, like high culture

itself, a literary anthropology is concerned not merely with the ephemeral consumer

products of the present, but with the enduring works of the past” (“Critic” 655).

In Chapters seven and eight I examine the relationships between the arguments

of Gans, van Oort, and Iser. All three explain culture in terms of interpretation, but

Iser’s writings are distinctive in the distance he attempts to maintain between his theory

and any local application of it. Chapter nine attempts to locate Iser’s description of

cultural “emergence” in the terms of an originary perspective, as set down in chapters

seven and eight. Chapters four, five, and six are devoted to a discussion of this

important distance in Iser’s work, by exploring examples of the frequent

misinterpretation of his work that seems to have resulted. His theory has had little

traction especially in Anglo-American literary studies departments. This is in part

attributable to Iser’s reluctance to participate in what he viewed as problematic practices.

Indeed, Iser actively discouraged followers. Van Oort reports that “Iser himself resisted

discipleship, and more than once he cautioned me against identifying too closely with

Gans’s way of seeing things” (“Memoriam” 3). In keeping with this attitude, Iser

maintains that there is a necessary distance between his own literary anthropology and

the project of generative anthropology. He discusses key examples of cultural

anthropology that deal explicitly with fiction as a means by which to define his own

“literary anthropology?” (“What is” 157). Iser argues the need for explanations of our

becoming human are the primary objective of cultural anthropology. These explanations

Matthews 16

are most commonly based on ancient empirical evidence resulting in a theoretically

dense approach:

As long as the process of hominization constitutes its objective, the

evaluation of fossils is of paramount concern. These factual remains call

for inferences, and these inferences have always been theory-laden, with

evolution being the dominant explanatory model in modern times.

(“What is” 157).

For Iser, these explanations have a “basically heuristic character” and cautions that they

should be understood as “fictions” (160). He argues that if they are “taken for reality,

the result is reification” (160) of an explanation, elevating an explanation to the status

of the explanation. He concludes that there is an important distinction to be made

between what he regards as “explanatory” and “exploratory” fictions. Expository

fictions are largely explanatory, and in the anthropological context they are a best guess

as to the most appropriate explanation of cultural phenomena. Literary fictions are

primarily exploratory, a position reliant upon Iser’s thesis that literary fictionality

manifests “as-if” it were real, rather than as a direct representation of the real since it

does “not have such an operative drive” (173). For Iser, the “interplay of literary

fictions” does not indicate some concrete structure in the text we can discover and use

to explain literature, but instead “a generative matrix of emerging phenomena that can

be qualified as ontological novelties. They are novelties insofar as they did not hitherto

exist, and they are ontological insofar as they provide access to the hitherto unknown”

(173). In short, the “reification” Iser is concerned to avoid in his literary anthropology

would present literature in a fashion that did not satisfactorily discriminate between

literature and the remainder of culture, with the effect of foreclosing on the

fundamentally open-ended nature of the medium. The “emerging phenomena” literature

Matthews 17

is capable of generating are fundamentally new, and any attempt to explain this process

of emergence would foreclose upon the potential in the literary text for novelty. For Iser,

it is dangerously reductive to set down a final description of the relationship between

the literary medium and the real. Furthermore, the manner in which such a procedure

reduces the generative potential of literature is, for Iser, tantamount to the difficulty of

defining the human. I discuss this point of departure in greater detail in chapter seven,

where I conclude that despite Iser’s resistance to the adoption of an originary hypothesis,

it would seem to be a necessary condition for the success of his literary anthropology.

One means by which to summarise this, is Iser’s own definition for the human animal,

in the form of the metaphor of “plasticity”. For Iser this is a metaphor that denotes and

connotes a dynamic creature; a creature which rather than being able to be defined in a

concrete fashion is best understood in terms of the “continual patterning of human

plasticity” (Prospecting xiii).

My own objection to Iser’s literary definition is that rather than offering a self-

conscious recognition of its own heuristic status and offering a hypothesis which

minimises the paradoxical outcome, it claims to be heuristic while employing a “literary

fiction” in an expository context. The result is a maximally fictive portrayal of the

human that does not directly account for the fact that we have language as the marker

and means of our humanity, the language which is the necessary precondition to the

manifestation of the literature Iser seeks to explore (rather than explain) as a

fundamental human activity. The irony is that a convincing argument can made on

behalf of Iser’s perspective on literature by employing the originary hypothesis offered

by Gans, for whom a “literary” fiction comes to be the primary means of explaining

humanity. Any literary anthropology that does not intend to become more literary than

anthropological must take account of this fact: we have language and so language must

Matthews 18

have an origin. As van Oort points out, we must in any anthropological endeavour take

responsibility for our definition of the human and:

[o]riginary thinking forces us to make a decision about what is

historically significant and, moreover, to do so in terms that are not

simply left to individual intuition but are rigorously traceable to the

terms of our anthropology, which is to say, to our definition of the

human implicit in the formulation of the hypothesis. (“Critic” 652-3)

I return to this issue in Chapter seven, where I argue that Iser’s categorical

descriptions will not be undone by the adoption of an originary hypothesis. Instead the

latter will provide a necessary definition for the human and a clearer structure for his

differentiation between literary fictionality and expository fictions. For like the human,

the playful, stochastic context of the literary medium carries this inevitable debt to

language irrespective of how great the violence our attempts to explain it are. In chapter

three of this thesis, I examine in more detail how this approach to language and

literature influences Iser’s writing. Riquelme provides an admirable account in “The

Way of the Chameleon in Iser, Beckett, and Yeats: Figuring Death and the Imaginary in

The Fictive and the Imaginary”:

Iser’s book may be as close an enactment of its subject as anyone is

likely to achieve by means of language that is ostensibly discursive. The

study’s own processes and terms become a staging of its subject. At the

end of the section that deals with “Imagination Dead Imagine,” Iser

remarks that “only language that consumes itself can give articulation to

the imaginary” (FI 246). He has Beckett in mind, but in another mode

The Fictive and the Imaginary is itself an example of that self-consuming

articulation. (59)

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In other words, Iser has taken on a curious bridging role, straddling the gap between

literary author and theorist.

Iser’s work is often misunderstood and undervalued. I argue that in fact it offers

a very helpful perspective on the general question of the importance of literary studies.

The observation that the literary medium holds a position of particular importance in

explaining the human in language is central to this argument and unfolds throughout his

writings, and is described in this thesis inside two general thematic areas. The first of

these argues that Iser’s work both figures and describes the human significance of

literature, and the second that Iser describes categories that advance the project of

literary anthropological enquiry. The combination of these two outcomes indicates the

ongoing relevance of Iser’s theory to the study of literature in an institutional setting.

Later in his career, Iser’s attention changes from a primarily reception-oriented theory

to literary anthropology, and eventually to interpretation as translatability by drawing on

a cybernetic modelling of human communicative activity. His central focus throughout

is the interaction of reader and text, and while at times his emphasis necessarily shifts to

the former or latter, the activity of interpretation continues throughout his writings as a

particular fascination. In the preface to The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser argues that

the compulsion to interpret literature “as evidence” has bred an “elaborate network” of

hermeneutic systems devoted to two dominant trends: “to grasp what is literary about

it… and the view of it as a representation of society” (ix-x). For Iser focusing on the

“medium” of literature has led to definitional discourse which “hypostatizes it” and

attempts to promote “social enlightenment” that “reduce it to the status of a document”

(x). He asks “whether literature as a medium can be anything other than the object of

textual interpretation” (ix)? The answer is that there is a “substratum… of a rather

Matthews 20

featureless plasticity” in literature that “gives presence to what would otherwise remain

unavailable” (xi).

The claim that the literary medium is capable of generating fundamentally new

phenomena during the interaction of reader and text is made throughout Iser’s writings,

featuring prominently in his late-career discussion of “emergence”. In the introduction

to the collection of his very early work The Implied Reader Iser maintains that the

reader “discovers a new reality through a fiction which, at least in part, is different from

the world he himself is used to” (xiii). At this time, Iser’s discussion is focussed in the

reader’s process of discovery, which he saw as shifting with the literary context. He saw

the novel of the eighteenth-century as guiding the reader “toward a conception of

human nature and reality”, while in the nineteenth century the reader was not so clearly

directed, since the reader “had to discover the fact that society had imposed a part on

him” (xiii-xiv). However, this was a relatively naïve reader to be cunningly nudged

“unknowingly into making the ‘right’ discoveries”. In the twentieth century, however,

the novel had begun to direct us toward “our own faculties of perception”, with the

consequence that the reader was “forced to discover the hitherto unconscious

expectations that underlie his perceptions” during a process of a self-exegetical kind,

leading to “the chance of discovering himself, both in and through his constant

involvement in ‘home-made’ illusions and fictions” (xiv). This discovery of self and

world is a process that begins with negation, and develops to allow the subject as

individual reader to construct “a new reality through a fiction”. Iser posited that a

history of “discovery as an esthetic pleasure” would necessarily treat this discovery as

involving an “esthetic blank that is filled in differently in accordance with the nature

both of individuals and of historical periods” (xiii). For Iser then, the aesthetic pleasure

to be derived from the process of interpretation is bound to the possibility of both self-

Matthews 21

discovery, and reflection upon the historical context of text and individual reader, where

the reader fills the blanks in self and text simultaneously through a contingent process

Iser called “consistency-building” (xiv).

This potential of the text was to “lay the foundation for a theory of literary

effects and responses” (xi), whilst in the preface to the later collection The Act of

Reading Iser claims he will explore the readerly act as the “ground-plan on which a

theory of literary communication may be built” (ix). Here the literary work is “a form of

communication” since it “impinges upon the world”, but his focus is primarily upon the

reader since the text “represents a potential effect” only realized upon reading (ix).

Though Iser uses the terms “work” and “text” fluidly, the “text” is a reference to the

immediacy of a “repertoire” of “instructions” that become apparent in that they are the

manifestation of a reorganization of “thought systems and social systems” into a new

order that must “come to fruition” during reading (ix-x). The “work” is a larger

description of this communicative function. Iser maintains that while this is a reader-

oriented account, it is a theory of:

esthetic response… to be analysed in terms of a dialectic relationship

between text, reader, and their interaction. It is called aesthetic response

because, although it is brought about by the text, it brings into play the

imaginative and perceptive faculties of the reader, in order to make him

adjust and even differentiate his own focus. (x)

For Iser, the aesthetic dimension of the text remains the possibility of the individual

reader bringing to bear during the act of reading, their subjective possibility. The

progression here, from The Implied Reader to The Act of Reading, is from a functional

examination of how the reader is facilitated through the text and of context during a

process of discovery by grounding the discussion in literary examples, to a more

Matthews 22

abstracted examination of this process which looks toward a more direct account of the

reader, who has also become more abstract. Iser’s use of literary examples represents a

changing emphasis, for in The Implied Reader, if his theory of effects and responses “is

to carry any weight at all” it “must have its foundations in actual texts” (xi). The

“implied reader” of the title indicated the reader’s “actualization” of the “potential” in

the “prestructuring” of the text, and Iser’s use of examples was intended to illustrate the

“active nature of this process” by taking up the novel in a variety of historical contexts

which would not involve a reductive “typology of possible readers”(xii). But in The Act

of Reading, this “discovery” has become less directed, and indeed Iser, in striving to

liberate the text and reader from constraint, is already suggesting “literary criticism”

should reflect on and “take stock of its own approaches to literary texts” (xi). Indeed, he

had already begun to make an anthropological turn, writing that:

If it is true that something happens to us by way of the literary text and

that we cannot do without fictions – regardless of what we consider them

to be – the question arises as to the actual function of literature in the

overall make-up of man. This anthropological side of literary criticism is

merely hinted at in the course of the thoughts developed here, but it is to

be hoped that these hints will suffice to draw attention to an important

and as yet very open field of study. (xi)

In effect, Iser anticipates the project of his later literary anthropology with these

comments, and it is safe to say that he had been wrestling with these issues before he

wrote his main treatise on the topic, in the form of The Fictive and the Imaginary. In the

final essays in his previous book, Prospecting he introduced the topic of the changing

role of literature, and the use of the terms “fictive” and “imaginary” in the mode which

he employs in The Fictive and the Imaginary. The goal is a move away from

Matthews 23

hermeneutic, definition-oriented, methodological approaches to understanding the

significance of literature, and towards new means by which to explore the human

interaction with the text. Rather than focussing upon the mimetic quality of literature in

his discussion of representation in literature, for example, he is interested in

representation as a performance. But this is representation in the German sense, or

“Darstellung, that is, as not referring to any object given prior to the act of

representation” (Prospecting 236). The resulting investigation uses literary fictionality

as an access to what representation can “tell us about ourselves” (236). He is also

interested in play, and how “the ludic nature of literature is basically unlimited”, as

against the more limiting approach to literature which conceptualises it as a mode of

“explanation” (Prospecting 245). Here Iser makes the point that literature is of

fundamental importance to humans partly due to its explanatory capacity, or its ability

to give us access to the inaccessible, and thereby compensate in some way for the

“impossibility of knowing what it is to be”. But literature does more than this, since it

never forecloses on reality and literary fiction is always allowed to lie, it stages “the

constant deferment of explanation” (Prospecting 245). This retreat from definition into

deferral is linked to Iser’s critique of interpretation tasked to evidence the sociocultural

function of the literary medium. His rationale is that while literature is clearly of a

reduced significance it remains with us, and sociocultural function is not the only

measure of the human significance of literature. The challenge is to:

penetrate beyond former, widely accepted forms of legitimation: its

autonomy, its mimetic reflection of social conditions, and even its

generative force in constituting reality, as enlightened Marxism (Kosík)

would have it. What then comes into focus is the anthropological

Matthews 24

equipment of human beings, whose lives are sustained by their

imagination. (Fictive x-xi)

Once we dispense with the notion of literature as an autonomous form, as a simple and

direct mirror to contemporary society, and as generative cultural format, we are left with

the decision to focus in a more fundamental way upon what the literary medium reveals

about our makeup:

Since literature as a medium has been with us more or less since the

beginning of recorded time, its presence must presumably meet certain

anthropological needs. What are these needs, and what does this medium

reveal to us about our own anthropological makeup? (Prospecting 264)

Iser claims that the scope of his question lies beyond existing anthropological

studies. Cultural, philosophical, social, structural, generative and historical

anthropology all provide accounts of human involvement with the arts that “explain

functions” of literature in a “basically ethnological” mode, and share the assumption

that “Art appears to be indispensable, because it is a means of human self-exegesis. If

we see literature in these anthropological terms, then from the start we must dispense

with all axiomatic definitions of humanity” (Fictive xiii). Why? Because these

axiomatic definitions have been developed through a non-literary focus. For Iser, a

literary anthropology attempts to provide a “heuristics for human self-interpretation

through literature” (Fictive xiii). The specific conditions of literature should “be linked

to those human dispositions that are also constituents of literature” (Fictive xiii). For

Iser, the means by which we attempt to understand literature must be of literature. They

must not in any way hinder the mode of literature. Any attempt to employ a definition

of literature as a medium, for example, would be to contravene this strategy. He argues

Matthews 25

that literature is dynamic and capable of a unique function, best understood in terms of

his metonymic portrayal as a requirement for “human plasticity” (Fictive xiii).

Iser argues that the separation of texts into fictional and non-fictional categories

is based on a simplistic understanding of their relationship with reality, for literary texts

certainly contain elements of the reality a reader experiences, otherwise they would be

in no way interpretable (Fictive 1). In the light of this observation, Iser introduces a

third element to the real-fictive relationship: the “imaginary”. Here the categories

“fiction” and the “imaginary” are not uniquely literary phenomena; on the contrary

these are a part of the day to day reality of the lived human life. For Iser “the special

character of literature is its production through a fusion of the two that marks off its

parameters as a medium” (Fictive xiii). But in typical fashion, Iser won’t allow us to

rest on this triad as though it were a firm, definitive grounding, adding the qualification:

The fictive and the imaginary are not in themselves conditions for

literature, whose emergence from their interaction is due not least to the

fact that neither the one nor the other can be definitively grounded. It is

precisely because any assumed origin eludes cognition that they gain

salience by becoming contexts for one another in ways that issue into

differentiated manifestations. (Fictive xiii-iv)

Iser asserts that we are not to understand these categories in ontological terms, as having

boundaries which are definitely stated in some way, and we are not to place a historical

or originary account upon them, since to do either of these things would intervene in the

potential they hold for us to characterise the literary text. In his assessment, any attempt

to define the “imaginary” or the “fictive” would be as absurd as attempting to define the

“real”. Iser’s whole project is motivated by the recognition of a need to refrain from

such definitional discourse in developing a theoretical approach to literature. The goal

Matthews 26

of this shift in emphasis toward the relationship between the real, the fictive and the

imaginary is to focus upon fiction as an anthropological phenomenon. Subsequently, the

literary medium can be “explored” as the context for understanding how fiction

facilitates the human. For Iser, fiction cannot be defined; instead it is discovered in

operation in particular circumstances, such as in the setting of literature: “Context-

bound, fictions in general elude clear cut definitions, let alone ontological grounding.

Instead they can be grasped only in terms of their use” (Fictive xv). In The Fictive and

the Imaginary Iser begins with literary fictionality, which he explores in the setting of

literary discourse, before exploring the role of fiction – in general, as against purely

literary – in philosophical discourse. He then moves on to a contextualising discussion

of his use of the imaginary, before returning to play and performance in the literary

setting. During the exposition of this somewhat complex description of the reader’s

interaction with a literary work, Iser draws upon the significant corpus of his earlier

writing to unfold insights into the human needs literature meets. The result is a complex

text that manifests a mode of interaction with literary discourse which “explores” the

anthropological significance of the medium by employing few literary examples, and a

style of writing that at times borders on itself becoming “literary”.

Some mention of a rationale for the works selected from Iser’s oeuvre for

analysis in this dissertation is necessary1. For over fifty years Iser published writings in

a variety of formats, amassing a considerable corpus of works written in German and

English. The scope of the current dissertation includes Iser’s work on reception

aesthetics and literary anthropology. A notable omission from this discussion is Staging

Politics: the lasting impact of Shakespeare’s Histories (1993), translated from the

publication of a lecture series delivered in German in 1987 at Konstanz University. Iser

Matthews 27

discussion of the enduring quality of the political history Shakespeare’s Henry plays

represent is a reflection of the dynamic quality of the “world making” capacity of the

literary work. Following Collingwood’s suggestion that historical situations are

“characterised by their openness” (190), Iser interprets Shakespeare’s plays as historical

mirrors, held up to “reflect a decentered human condition” (200). Earlier drafts of this

dissertation contained lengthy discussion of these lectures, but these were eventually

removed in favour of analyses of the more highly contested, broadly read and coherent

monographs and essays in Iser’s oeuvre. In sum, while the historical analyses in Staging

Politics are relevant here, they were elided in favour of discussions better suited to the

context of our attempts to ground his literary anthropology in his earlier theoretical

writings.

This dissertation interprets the English translation of several works Iser

originally wrote in German. It is interesting to note that Iser did not simply hand over

his works to a translator, but instead, generally worked with a translator on the process.

In point of fact, all of the work considered in detail by this dissertation has been

officially translated by Iser himself. The difficult and ongoing question as to the

veracity of translations of theoretical works is certainly important to this dissertation,

and translatability is directly engaged during my argument in chapter four that Iser’s

work has often been poorly understood by Anglo-American scholars because of their

very different – context-dictated – philosophical perspective to that of Iser. Chapter four

focuses on the debate between Stanley Fish and Iser in order to open for examination

the manner in which Iser positions and understands the “real” as a category in his

literary anthropology. The scope of the difficulties inherent in the process of

“Anglicising”, or, “Americanizing” Iser’s theory are not fully encompassed in this

1 A useful bibliography of Iser’s works is published (not complete) on the UCI library website at

Matthews 28

dissertation, however, and have yielded a great deal of discussion elsewhere. Professor

Brook Thomas, in particular, has published three pieces on the topic of Iser’s reception

by North American scholars (“Reading Wolfgang Iser”, “Re-staging the Reception”,

“The Fictive”). All three of Thomas’s articles pay particular attention to examples of

how the process of translation has led to misinterpretation of Iser’s theory, and how it is

that this misinterpretation has led to scholars underestimating the significance of Iser’s

theory.

Translation is thematised in this dissertation by the through-running discussion

of the central challenge offered to cultural anthropology by the question of

translatability. For example, and as mentioned above, Gans describes the implicit

assumption in anthropology that there is a universal quality in human culture, and that

human language is defined by its “intertranslatability”. It is not surprising that

translatability becomes a recurrent theme in the later – more “anthropological” – works

written by Iser, and naturally the topic receives extensive attention in this dissertation.

As mentioned above, Iser describes the process of translation as a primary human

activity, choosing translation as a category by which to understand that which underpins

the ongoing human activity of interpretation. Chapter three of this dissertation discusses

how it is that as early as 1979, in his article “The Current Situation of Literary Theory:

Key Concepts and the Imaginary” Iser argued that “[t]he aesthetic object is produced in

the recipient’s mind as a correlate of the text, and as such it is open to inspection by acts

of comprehension; hence the business of interpretation, which translates the aesthetic

object into a concrete meaning” (19). Here, Iser places translation at the centre of the

business of interpretation, presenting translation as the key to the human capability for

rendering concrete (and novel) outcomes during reading. This process reflects, for Iser,

<http://www.lib.uci.edu/about/publications/wellek/iser/> (last visited 13 Mar 2010).

Matthews 29

a basic anthropological insight into how humans generate and update their sense of

reality. This insight would come to play a significant role in his literary anthropology.

In his 1994 essay “On Translatability”, he writes: “Coming to grips with an otherness

hardly to be known requires a continual looping from the known to the unknown in

order to make the unknown fold back upon what is familiar” (11). It is likely that Iser’s

preoccupation with the movement from the known to the unknown – and translatability

in general – has its roots in his own life, during which he moved frequently between the

contexts of his first home in Germany, and the USA, where he would spend much of his

writing career.

Iser’s attention to the significance of translation is, therefore, an interesting

context for an introduction to his key texts, and how they came to be published in

English. As mentioned above, Iser was not one to simply hand over his work to a

translator. The earliest of his work examined in detail in this dissertation is, in English,

The Implied Reader; Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to

Beckett, published in 1974. The original German publication occurred in 1972 under the

title Der implizite Leser; Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett.

Iser is listed as the author for the English version, with no translator being officially

mentioned. Iser himself writes in the acknowledgements, however, that the English

version of the collection of essays “could never have been written without the

indefatigable assistance of David Henry Wilson, who enabled me to give an English

shape to a German book” (ix). Iser emphasizes that he is the author, and that the book is

a German book. As a result, the reader is left in no doubt as the context of its writing,

nor as to the identity of the intending author. The second text considered at length was

published in English in 1978 as The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response.

This book was originally published in 1976 in German as Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie

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ästhetischer Wirkung. Again, Iser is listed as the only author, and he makes mention in

his preface this time, of David Henry Wilson, writing “this English version would never

have been possible without the patience and linguistic ingenuity of David Henry Wilson,

to whom I am incalculably indebted for giving an anglicized form to a book of

Germanic phenomenology” (xii). The recurring theme in these two comments is Iser’s

clear intent that it be recognized that these are works written from his perspective as a

theorist trained in the German tradition, but that these are his own words, constructed as

they are with the assistance of David Henry Wilson. Finally, and most significantly, the

book to which most attention is given in this dissertation was published in 1993 in

English as The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. This book

was first published in 1991 in German as Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven

literarischer Anthropologie. Iser writes in his acknowledgements:

I am indebted to David Henry Wilson for providing a translation of the

German original, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre. Perspektiven

literarischer Anthropologie, on which I was able to work so that the

English version is the result of a collaborative effort. I received further

assistance from Professor John Paul Riquelme, Boston University, who

carefully read the manuscript and made many valuable suggestions as to

the phrasing of certain issues and, above all, the critical terminology….

Professor Emily Miller Budick, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, was kind

enough to go over the manuscript, trying to weed out a few of my

German abstractions that David Wilson was prepared to condone. (xxi)

In the chapters that follow, the insights of Professsors Riquelme and Budick are

presented during analyses of Iser’s book. I think the mention Iser makes of the

collaboration with Wilson, and his collegial interaction over the critical terminology

Matthews 31

employed reflect Iser’s perspective on translation, and indeed on scholarly endeavour in

general. What seems clear from these comments is that any act of translation must

generate something new, and Iser has an urgent need to recognise this phenomenon. But

more than this, the process of translation updates more than the material to be translated,

it updates the context for translation itself. The scholars mentioned above, and Iser

himself, have clearly participated in a negotiation (“collegial”) that reflects how it is that

the activity of translation can itself present opportunities to generate new insights and

new knowledge. As discussed above, in theme, content, and presentation, the issue of

translation is a key feature of Iser’s works, and his recognition of the fundamental

challenge generated by the question of translatability does not stop at the level of a

cursory acknowledgement. We return to this discussion throughout this dissertation, in

which the English “translations” of the three key texts mentioned above are employed in

a manner designed to be reflexive of the questions and insights highlighted by the theme

of translatability.

This dissertation has not examined in depth the complex issue of just how the

German philosophical context interacts with the North American context of literary

studies, and has impacted the larger significance and reception of Iser’s work. Instead,

the focus here has been on the context of literary anthropology. As mentioned above,

with the example of Professor Brook Thomas, these issues have been examined in depth

elsewhere. In 2000, NLH devoted a special edition to Iser’s writings, and of the eleven

essays included in this edition, three are explicitly devoted to an exploration of how

Iser’s writings have been misinterpreted and treated with aggression by American

readers in particular. These are: Gabriel Motzkin’s “Iser’s Anthropological Reception of

the Philosophical Tradition”; Brook Thomas’s “Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Early

Work, or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic”; and Murray Krieger’s “The

Matthews 32

‘Imaginary’ and Its Enemies”. In each case, the author’s make an argument that

incorrect assumptions about Iser’s employment of the key categories of the aesthetic

and the real have problematised his reception. In 2008, Professor Thomas provided his

précis of the context of Iser’s reception by raising a particular example, as follows:

For instance, in a 2004 essay called “There Is Nothing Inside the Text, or,

Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser,” Michael Bérubé claims that by

1990 “poor Iser had disappeared so completely that some worried

theorists of reading wondered if he would ever be seen again save on

milk cartons” (12). Trying to be witty, Bérubé exaggerates. Someone

who, to cite two examples, gave the 2000 Stanford Presidential Lectures

in the Humanities and Arts and had a special issue of New Literary

History devoted to him in 2000 had not disappeared. Outside the US, he

certainly had not. International conferences were devoted to his work,

universities gave him honorary degrees, and the British Academy asked

him to serve as a Corresponding Fellow. Nonetheless, it is true that the

American reception of Iser’s later work has been nothing like that of the

earlier work. According to Bérubé, “Iser’s interment” (13) was brought

about by Stanley Fish’s attack on him in a 1981 Diacritics essay. Bérubé

may be right that Fish’s essay contributed to Iser’s diminished reputation,

but it did so by perpetuating the misunderstanding of some of Iser’s most

important concepts, concepts developed and clarified in the very work on

literary anthropology that people like Bérubé have ignored. The reasons

for such neglect are complicated, yet it may not be an accident that it

coincided with clarifications that make the “foreignness” of Iser’s work

more apparent. Indeed, whereas Bérubé registers no awareness

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whatsoever of The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary

Anthropology (1993), in the obituary announcing Iser’s unfortunate death

on 24 January 2007, the University of Constanc called Das Fictive und

das Imaginäre: Perspektiven Literarischer Anthropologie (1991) a

“monumental work” that is the “culmination of his thinking.” This

disparity between the American and European receptions of Iser’s later

work opens up a paradoxical possibility. Precisely because it has not

been so rapidly assimilated into the American context, Iser’s later work

might actually have more potential to offer new perspectives for

Americanists than the earlier work. That possibility would certainly be in

keeping with the spirit of The Fictive and the Imaginary, which describes

how new possibilities become imaginable through a process of boundary

crossing. (“The Fictive” 622-3)

In this dissertation the matter of this disparity of interest between Iser’s later work and

his earlier work inspires an approach that is biased toward his anthropology. I begin

with Iser’s literary anthropology, and work backwards to discover how this later

development in Iser’s oeuvre is reflexive of the context of his reception in North

America, and what this reflects of the contemporary context of literary studies. I focus

in particular, upon the relationship between the projects of Iser and Gans, taking key

issues in cultural anthropology as a primer for the discussion of a literary anthropology.

This emphasis must be at the expense of a careful historical account of such centrally

important, early influences upon Iser as his involvement in the famous “Konstanz

school”. Here, Iser, along with leading members Hans Robert Jauss and Jurij Stiedter,

developed and promoted a methodology Paul de Man described in his introduction to

the English translation of Jauss’ Toward an Aesthetic of Reception as follows:

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The methodology of the Konstanz school is mostly referred to as

Rezeptionsästhetik, a word that does not lend itself easily to translation

into English. We speak, in this country, of reader-response criticism or,

more imaginatively (though also more controversially) of “affective

stylistics”. These terms stress reading as a constitutive element of any

text but, except for the implicit connotations of “stylistic” or “poetics”,

they put less emphasis on the far-reaching, traditional word “aesthetics”

that remains of central importance to Jauss and his associates. (viii)

This allusion to “affective stylistics” is to the work of Stanley Fish, and as mentioned

above this comparison is taken up in in chapter four. De Man’s suggestion that there are

primary differences between the American and German context that originate with the

role of aesthetics is further discussed in chapters four and five of this thesis. Again, the

focus here is upon the distinctions Iser draws for his anthropology, between the various

contexts he inhabits and role of a key category in his theory, rather than on the complex

interaction between his work and the work of his fellow Konstanz theoreticians. Iser

writes, for example, in The Act of Reading, that his own theory is not able to be

described by the English term response, but that he selects it as one of (rather than the

less of) two evils:

The German term ‘Wirkung’ comprises both effect and response, without

the psychological connotations of the English word ‘response’. ‘Effect’

is at times too weak a term to convey what is meant by ‘Wirkung’, and

response is a little confusing. Confronted by Scylla and Charybdis I have

finally opted for ‘response’. (ix)

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But his caveats do not simply distance his theory of aesthetic response from the

American context; they also qualify the German context from which they emerge. He

writes that his work is,

to be regarded as a theory of aesthetic response (Wirkungstheorie) and

not as a theory of the aesthetics of reception (Rezeptionstheorie). If the

study of literature arises from our concern with texts, there can be no

denying the importance of what happens to us through these texts. For

this reason the literary work is to be considered not as a documentary

record of something that exists or has existed, but as a reformulation of

an already formulated reality, which brings into the world something that

did not exist before. Consequently, a theory of aesthetic response is

confronted with the problem of how a hitherto unformulated situation

can be processed and, indeed, understood. (x)

Iser explicitly places his own theory, therefore, not against an American context, but

alongside both German and American contexts. There is available here a complex

interplay between Iser and both the Konstanz school methodology of Rezeptionsästhetik,

and the American context of “reader-response”. For Iser’s anthropology, however, it is

of primary importance to investigate the development of his theory through such works

as The Act of Reading, by focusing on integral thematic concerns like the attention paid

to how it is that reader-text interaction “brings into the world something that did not

exist before” (x). Iser certainly seems to be inspired by the difference between his and

Fish’s “reader-oriented” reception theory, and invesetigating this difference is the

project of chapter four. The conflict between Iser and Fish appears to have contributed

to Iser’s anthropological investigation of the novelty that emerges for the human subject

through the literary medium. As will be argued – particularly in chapters one through

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four – Iser’s positioning of the literary reality as a “reformulation of an already

formulated reality” that demands the agency of the reader without dissolving the

significance of the text, is translated into his insistence that the real cannot be thought of

as utterly opposed to the fictive. Indeed, it seems that the “imaginary” in Iser’s

anthropology is an extension of his argument that the literary work be understood as a

virtual possibility, or potential, only actualized during the act of reading.

In this dissertation I present the writings of Iser as significant groundwork

already completed toward articulating a literary anthropology in which literary studies is

centrally positioned. His descriptions of such primary human categories as the “fictive”,

the “imaginary” and “play” unfold as the evidence of this claim. I discuss the fictive in

Chapter one, the imaginary in Chapter two and play in Chapter three. However, it is not

simply in Iser’s writings, but in their reception that we are able to appreciate his

contributions. Chapter four examines Iser’s infamous debate with Stanley Fish, which

opens a significant difference over ideas about the “real” in literary studies. Chapter five

relates cognitive reception theory to Iser’s work. Chapter six examines a long-running

debate over Iser’s use of literary examples. Chapter four thus focuses on the reader-text

interaction, while Chapters five and six examine empirical aspects of interpretation.

Chapter seven focuses on an exchange between Iser and Gans on the performative

metaphor of “staging”, which both authors have taken up as an “anthropological

category”. Chapter eight introduces van Oort’s attempts to articulate the ground for a

literary anthropological resolution to “the end of literature”, while the concluding

comments offered in chapter nine turn to the concept of “emergence” which, it is argued,

indicates a pathway forward for research in the relatively new but important field of

literary anthropology.

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1. Literary Fictionality: an exploration

This dissertation begins with an exposition of Wolfgang Iser’s articulation of

literary fictionality as an anthropological category. The purpose of this exposition is to

commence the project of demonstrating how the groundwork already completed by Iser

in the field of literary anthropology can contribute to contemporary literary studies. In

1993, Iser published his most significant work on the topic of literary anthropology, in

the book The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. This chapter

begins in section 1.1 by examining how Iser employs the term “fictive” in his book and

without limiting itself to that text, discusses how he developed his approach to this

category of human endeavour during previous and subsequent writings. Section 1.2

discusses Iser’s description of literary fictionality. It focusses upon the three

fictionalizing acts identified by Iser as constituting literary fictionality: selection,

combination, and self-disclosure. Section 1.3 is devoted to a discussion of the relevance

of Iser’s conceptualisation and employment of literary fictionality to his engagement

with literary discourse in an exploratory mode.

In The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser sets out to discover and navigate a

pathway which falls in the gaps between existing understandings, charting and mapping

as he goes in order to provide a better access to the territory even as he explores it.

Therefore the activity of writing in The Fictive and the Imaginary is generative,

conducted before the eyes of the reader, and this activity yields the chart by which we

are to understand territory of Iser’s literary anthropology. This is how we are to

understand his title, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology.

Literary anthropology is literally made up of the exploratory mode Iser demonstrates,

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and the courses plotted by the book are reliant upon Iser’s particular characterisation of

the fictive and the imaginary. So how are we to approach and understand the substance

of his “chart”? Iser’s writing does not provide a methodology, in that it yields no ready

explanation of a technique, nor a theoretical justification for a technique. Indeed Iser’s

approach is designed to avoid being available in this manner, and to actively dissuade

proselytic followers. This leaves the analyst of Iser in the difficult position of requiring

a “way in” to his theory. One strategy, as employed in later chapters, is to examine how

his writings have been received by literary studies practitioners with the goal of opening

key critical issues inside his work, and better appreciating the significance of these

issues to literary studies in general. In the current chapter, however, it is proposed that

despite his fluid delivery, Iser does more than demonstrate an exploratory mode of

engagement with literature and literary discourse. He also provides a heuristic account

of the fictive and the imaginary, i.e. a pragmatic and provisional account. These are the

categories that provide the main organising narratives in The Fictive and the Imaginary,

and offer salient points upon which to build a description of Iser’s literary anthropology.

We turn our attention to fiction in this, the first chapter of the thesis concerned

with an explication of Iser’s theory, since as we shall see, it is the primary feature of his

literary anthropology. Iser identifies fiction as a fundamental human mode, and

fictionalizing as an indispensible human procedure. He seeks to separate literary fiction

and literary fictionalizing from the everyday experience of fiction as a means by which

to explore the literary medium and evade the ontological complications of beginning

with the definitional question as to what literature is, or the functional question as to

what literature does. The early part of Iser’s career was spent writing upon the topic of

reader-text interaction, examining how this unfolds and how the text impacts upon the

reader even as the reader generates the text. But in this latter phase, beginning with a

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focus upon literary anthropology, he is concerned with exploring why literature is used

by humans. He attempts to shed light on why it appears to be an indispensable human

phenomenon, and what this necessity reveals of our makeup.

1.1 Strategy in The Fictive and the Imaginary

In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser begins by challenging the tradition in

literary discourse of describing reality and fiction as being in a state of binary

opposition with one another. This distinction has allowed us to separate and distinguish

“fictional” texts from nonfictional texts, since the former are understood as not being

concerned with describing reality, while the latter are concerned with describing reality.

Iser argues that this is an easy rather than a complete account of fiction:

Convenient though this distinction may be, is it in fact as cut at dried as

it seems? Are fictional texts truly fictions, and are nonfiction texts truly

without fictions? The implication and ramifications of this question are

such that it is doubtful whether our tacit knowledge can help us

overcome the difficulties. (1)

It is evident in this challenge that Iser does not agree that either texts or fictions can be

easily located in respect of the real. Neither expository nor literary texts maintain a

simple arrangement with the real, and a simple portrayal of fiction that holds it in

opposition with reality cannot explain the role of fiction in any kind of text. Here, Iser’s

playful question, “Are fictional texts truly fictions, and are nonfiction texts truly without

fictions?” figures the absurd quality of the real-fiction binary and shows us how he

enters the field he intends to explore. Iser’s question does so by emphasising the fact

that we label the text under inspection by employing one element of the text: fiction.

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The second phase of the playful question renders salient the manner in which we

employ fiction to define the text’s relationship with reality, in order to challenge the

foundation of our definitional assumption. The result is a very typical Iser moment,

wherein the reader is challenged to question both the logic of, and presuppositions

behind, an orthodox approach to defining literature, by challenging the function of the

very terms employed toward achieving such a definitional account. For Iser, the

orthodox understanding and employment of fiction demonstrates the need for a more

complete account of the relationship between the literary text and reality. But it also

demonstrates a means by which to challenge our understanding of fiction itself. As he

goes on to point out, the interaction of the real and the fictive in literature is well

illustrated in our attempts to understand the interaction of a reader with a literary text.

There are certain things we know about how a reader approaches a literary text.

We are aware, for example, that they already have knowledge and experience of reality,

and that this existing sense of reality dictates how much of the contents of the literary

text are fundamentally new to them. Iser describes this as follows:

The literary text is a mixture of reality and fictions, and as such it brings

about an interaction between the given and the imagined. Because this

interaction produces far more than just a contrast between the two, we

might do better to discard the old opposition of fiction and reality

altogether, and to replace this duality with a triad: the real, the fictive,

and what we shall henceforth call the imaginary. (Fictive 1)

Here the “given” is a complex of the known elements of the real described in the text –

based on the experience of reality of the reader – and the imagined is that which is be

generated by the reader based on the given. Since the literary text facilitates a process

by which something new is imagined, and whereby something new has been produced,

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the reader’s reality has been updated. Subsequently, upon any later return to the reading

process, the literary text is reproduced and the given and the imagined have been

updated. In other words, the literary text is always already dynamic; its meaning always

new.

The relationship between the categories “reality” and “fiction” cannot be

understood as a dualism, nor do these phenomena commingle in a simple and

preordained manner in the literary text. In the moment we introduce a human reader to

the equation, we understand that something rich, dynamic, and complex is unfolding. In

order to portray this dynamic interaction between reader and text, Iser suggests the

introduction of a third category to our understanding of literature: the imaginary2. Given

that these three categories are not mutually exclusive, distinguishing between and

separating them for the purposes of explicating Iser’s meaning is problematic. However,

our discussion can give emphasis without distorting the concepts inordinately. In the

case of the fictive, we see a phenomenon that participates in a dynamic portrayal of the

human. We can extrapolate a heuristic description from the introduction of Iser’s triadic

account above, one designed to portray human reality formulation. This heuristic places

no special emphasis upon the role of fiction, which manifests as only one element in a

three-part portrayal.

Of central concern in this portrayal is the question as to how something new can

be introduced to the reality of an individual, through thought rather than direct

experience. Iser argues that his introduction of the triadic arrangement of the real, the

fictive and the imaginary can be understood in terms of the dilemma inspired by the

influence of “Cartesian thinking: How can something exist that, although actual and

present, does not partake of the character of reality?” (Fictive 2). Iser suggests that it is

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this dilemma which “provides the heuristic justification for replacing the customary

antithesis of the fictional and the real with the triad of the real, the fictive, and the

imaginary” (2). This replacement of a binary with a triadic model allows us to

understand the fictive in terms of its capacity to generate the new, via the activity of

fictionalizing. This is described as follows in the opening pages of The Fictive and the

Imaginary:

[R]eproduction of items within the fictional text brings to light purposes,

attitudes, and experiences that are decidedly not part of the reality

reproduced. Hence they appear in the text as products of a fictionalizing

act. Because this act of fictionalizing cannot be deduced from the reality

repeated in the text, it clearly brings into play an imaginary quality that

does not belong to the reality reproduced in the text but that cannot be

disentangled from it. (2)

Iser’s “heuristic” account of the fictionalizing act is demonstrated in detail in section 1.2

below. He highlights the fact that in the context of the literary, the human experience of

what is not present can become real, and he sees fiction as a phenomenon that may be

understood in terms of its capacity to actualize human possibilities. The “reality” of

fiction in this account is such that the reality of being human is subjected to our

immediate exploration, since fiction participates in a human process that is generative of

the real. This fundamental anthropological claim on behalf of literature clearly requires

further explication.

Our interaction with the literary text in the mode of fictionalizing is revealing of

our basic human machinery. Iser makes the argument that literature can provide us

access to the conditions of thought itself as it illustrates the detail of the fundamental

2 The imaginary is the primary focus of chapter two of this thesis.

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human activity of interpretation3, and Iser’s writings continue to return to exploring this

potential. One year after the publication of The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser was

invited to deliver the 1994 Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at The University

of California, Irvine. In 2000 he published a book based on this series entitled The

Range of Interpretation. In the first chapter of the book he locates his preoccupation

with interpretation and cognition in what is a reassessment of Cartesian terms:

We continually emit a welter of signs and signals in response to a

bombardment of signs and signals that we receive from outside ourselves.

In this sense we might rephrase Descartes by saying, We interpret,

therefore we are. While such a basic human disposition makes

interpretation appear to come naturally, however, the forms it takes do

not. And [as] these forms to a large extent structure the acts of

interpretation, it is important to understand what happens during the

process itself, because the structures reveal what the interpretation is

meant to achieve. (1)

Interpretation is a fundamental feature of being human in that it is the fundamental

activity of our consciousness. The processes of interpretation are largely structured by

the forms they inhabit. These forms demonstrate the purpose of interpretation. Iser

employs a mechanistic term (structure) as a metonymic portrayal of his own systems

oriented account of interpretation, and takes as his focus the dynamic relationship

between process and objective status, whereby one is revealing of the other in respect of

the human. To return this to Cartesian thinking: we need to interpret in order to be

human, therefore our interpretive activity manifests a very direct portrayal of the

3 In his essay “What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions” (2000) Iser gives a detailed account of this in anthropological terms; see chapter three for a detailed discussion of this piece.

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behaviour and capabilities which would set us aside as beings. Iser’s main focus is not

processes or forms, but the dynamic condition which unfolds as a result of the

unresolved necessity to move between the two during cognition and reflection, in

simultaneity. The structure of the human activity of fictionalizing is an example of the

phenomena which might be understood to unfold in this manner.

The literary context then sheds light on what Iser clearly considers to be a

shortcoming in an understanding of interpretation that slavishly aligns itself with

Cartesian thinking. This is a typically playful gesture on behalf of Iser, and he seems to

be at times, exercising an ironic form of “metaphysical doubt”. As Iser pointed out in an

interview in 1998 with Richard van Oort:

The fact that we are conscious of literature as a form of make-believe

means that in assessing it we do not abide by what one might call a

Cartesian principle, namely, that what we have seen through as make-

believe should be discarded. However, we don’t discard it, although we

know it to be an illusion. Obviously there seems to be a need for this

type of fictionality. And as this is the case, we could use fiction as an

exploratory instrument in order to investigate this human urge. (“The

Use of Fiction” 1)

He sees a direct relationship between fiction and this use we seem to have for “illusion”.

In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser describes this instrumental use for fiction, by

arguing that the text signals its own fictionality – a phenomenon he entitles “self-

disclosure” – and in this way admits to its own “deception”. In sum, he removes the

fictive from the real by dismissing the traditional dualism, only to rebuild fictionality as

a fundamental human mode by articulating the mediation of the imaginary. Literary

fictionality lies to us, and confesses to the lie simultaneously; in a literary setting,

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fictions point toward their fictionality. For Iser, we seem to require this mode of

engagement with the self and universe, this means of access to a process of

interpretation, one which lies beyond a simple sense-mind apparatus testing

representations against direct experience. Literature brings before consciousness new

elements of the real. When located in a literary setting, fiction points toward the purpose

of our ongoing use for literature and consequently, the human significance of literature.

Literary fictions reveal how thought is not generative of the human in respect of some

simple contact with a determining, and concrete reality. Indeed, they offer us the

opportunity to examine the question as to why a literary context has been a suitable

location for humans to explore a complex interplay between self and universe, since

they are examples of our human response to the challenges reality throws up. This

element of literary fictionality reveals a great deal about us all.

1.2 Three Fictionalizing Acts: selection, combination, self-disclosure

In order to examine Iser’s account of fictionalizing in further detail, we return to

a brief history of the development of the concept in Iser’s work with the goal of further

exposing the foundations of his literary anthropology. His response to the role of the

real-fictive binary in literary theory is central to these foundations and developed across

the majority of his writing career. This is in no small way linked to his preoccupation

with the interaction of reader and text, a theme that would continue to appear in his

writings throughout his career. In 1972, in one of his early and influential contributions

to reader response theory, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” , he

makes the point that the reality of the literary text must be activated by a reader, and

must therefore be understood as a virtual possibility:

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The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into

existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but

must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the

reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. (279)

The term “convergence” is discussed in more detail in chapter three in relation to Iser’s

conceptual approach to the imaginary. For now it is suffice to interpret it literally, as the

possibility of the reader-text interaction; the reader and text converge to produce the

literary work, since both bring elements of reality to the interaction. The necessity of

this interaction being understood as “virtual” can be traced to the fact that neither

provides an explanation for the outcome to an act of reading, which must always be

different. The emphasis here is upon the dynamic quality of this interaction, and the

dynamism is such that something new is produced upon the occasion of each act of

reading. This understanding of the reader-text interaction informs Iser’s work in The

Fictive and the Imaginary where, as seen above, the virtual location of the literary work

finds its explication in the imaginary, which completes a triadic description of the

interaction of the real and the fictive. The conclusion to this very early development in

Iser’s writings is that the “virtual” reality of the literary work can only be understood in

terms of the process of fictionalizing, a conclusion articulated in The Fictive and the

Imaginary as it “brings into play an imaginary quality that does not belong to the reality

reproduced in the text but that cannot be disentangled from it” (2).

Iser’s follow up to “The Reading Process” in 1975 was “The Reality of Fiction:

A Functionalist Approach to Literature”, a paper that shows us more early evidence of

Iser’s challenge to the tradition of defining literature by relying upon an unfettered

arrangement of reality and fiction into a state of opposition. In this essay Iser expands

his process oriented account of how fiction and reality interact, arguing that “‘fiction’

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and ‘reality’ have always been classified as pure opposites, and so a good deal of

confusion arises when one seeks to define the ‘reality’ of literature” (7). Reflected here

are Iser’s ongoing wrestle with the possibility of a definitional account of literature, and

his preoccupation with the human experience of literature. The latter is his response to

the former, such that his response to the difficulty of defining literary fiction is to focus

upon the human experience of literature. The premise for his arguments in “The Reality

of Fiction” is that the placement of reality and fiction in an antonymic relationship has

inspired a generative discourse which constructs definitions for literary phenomena. The

outcome of this reliance upon a false dualism serves as evidence that we should turn

toward an emphasis upon the mediative function of literature during the activity of

communication:

In view of the tangled web of definitions resulting from this juxtaposition,

the time has surely come to cut the thread altogether and replace

ontological arguments with functional arguments, for what is important

to readers, critics, and authors alike is what literature does, and not what

it means. (7)

This emphasis upon the communicative function of literature – upon mediation – during

this early phase of his writings, leads Iser to focus upon reader-text interaction. Later,

we see him turn to the search for anthropological constants, but throughout his writings

he is always-already ferreting away at the differences and similarities between the

everyday, “extra-literary” human experience of reality and our experience of “literary”

reality. For example, in “The Reality of Fiction” he discusses the speech act theory of

Austin, Searle and Ingarden, exploring how these theorists saw a strong relationship

between literary speech and ordinary speech: “Austin and Searle called it ‘parasitic’.

Ingarden too, found that the similarity posed an intriguing problem” (15). Iser sees that

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everyday speech must be involved in literature, but that the difficulty of locating a

speech act description of language employed in the literary context presents to us a

moment which clearly demonstrates the difficult nature of explaining, rather than

exploring, what makes language employed in literature “literary”. He goes on in “The

Reality of Fiction” to provide a sophisticated systems oriented account of the

relationship between reality and fiction.

We return to this discussion in some detail in chapter two, but for now we are

interested in the removal of the definitional problem that emerges in defining literature

in terms of language use. Simply put, language is a common element of the human

experience of both a literary, and an extra-literary reality. Similarly, language

interpenetrates thought itself. This makes it difficult to qualify literature in terms of

fundamental human modes of representation, such as speech-acts. It also distributes the

rationale for a shift in the “reality” of fiction across the very nature of the means by

which we formulate the real, and suggests that the traditional boundaries which dictate

to the “being” of human be re-examined. A question emerges from this challenge, as to

how being human is mediated by literature? One pathway forward is to ask what

literature “does and not what it means”. In order to determine what literature does, we

must also answer how it is done, and subsequently why we have chosen literature to fill

this role. If Iser expended the efforts of his early career on the former, or the “how”, his

literary anthropology is committed to the latter, or the issue of “why” we have literature.

Integral to any response to this question is an account of the role of fiction.

Because it is not enough to ask what literature does, Iser cannot and does not

limit fiction to a literary setting. In the mid-eighties in the essay “Feigning in Fiction”

Iser writes that “fiction is not confined to literature: fiction plays a vital role in the

activities of cognition and behaviour, as in the founding of institutions, societies and

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world-pictures” (215). Subsequently, he presents a description of the act of

fictionalizing and separates literary from everyday fictions. He does so because once

fiction is not considered to be exclusive to literature the conditions under which fiction

is to be considered “literary” are available to our exploration, and become a means by

which to better understand “literature”. The observation that fiction is not limited to

literature is not a new or uncommon one. But it leads Iser to an important conclusion in

“Feigning in Fiction”, where he comments on the work of Hans Vaihinger, who:

put together a voluminous work proving that virtually everything that

had ever been thought in science and philosophy was fiction. But none

of the fictions that he exposed led him to recognize the special attribute

of the literary fiction – namely, that it discloses its own fictionalizing.

(215)

For Iser this is a key moment, and the means by which we might understand the human

significance of literature. That literary fiction discloses its own fictionalizing process

allows us to place literary discourse in contradistinction with philosophical discourse.

Given that Iser sees fictionalizing as a fundamental process in human representation and

reality construction, the attempt to represent this means of representation during

philosophical discourse is bound to a dilemma. It is precisely when philosophical

discourse attempts to expose the “fictionality of fiction” – as in the case of

“philosophers from Bacon to Vaihinger” – that the dilemma unveils itself acutely: “in

its attempt to gain a cognitive grasp of that which seems to constitute cognition” (215).

For Iser, fiction is a basic feature of the human, so much so that it might be thought of

as constituting cognition. Iser is challenging the notion that such a basic constituent of

the human can be described in philosophical discourse. However, since literary fiction

discloses its own fictionality, it manifests a uniquely direct medium in which we might

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grasp fiction. In this way, literature can provide us with an access to our own condition

that philosophical – or direct expository discourse – cannot.

This leads us to a further observation of why humans appear to need literary

fictions. The self-disclosure of literary fictions manifests for Iser in the “staged” quality

of literature, as they indicate their own performance of a possible reality. Iser posits

“staging” as an anthropological category in The Fictive and the Imaginary, a metaphor

he employs in the final pages of his book to emphasise the value of literature to human

beings who “cannot become present to themselves” (296). He argues the context of

literature meets a need we have to play out our own possibilities, to “play ourselves out

to a fullness” in a context not bounded by the pragmatic limitations of being human

(297). In chapter eleven of Prospecting, “Representation: a performative act”, Iser

examined this notion of literature as a means of making “accessible the inaccessible” on

behalf of a human creature that is, and here he follows Plessner4, fundamentally

decentered: “we are, but do not have ourselves. Wanting to have what we are, that is, to

step out of ourselves in order to grasp our own identity, would entail final assurances as

to our origins” (244). In The Fictive and the Imaginary, he argues that the need to

“stage” our possible selves is also attributable to the inaccessibility of “the cardinal

points of existence”, which cause us “disquiet” since they are “ungraspable certainties”

(297). In other words, we know we will die, and that we were born, and since we do not

have access to these events we seem compelled to perform them, to “stage” them, and

literature allows us to observe in a very direct fashion how this unfolds. These

observations lead Iser to conclude that “[s]taging in literature makes conceivable the

extraordinary plasticity of human beings, who, precisely because they do not have a

4 see Fictive and the Imaginary (80-2).

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determinable nature, can expand into an almost unlimited range of culture-bound

patternings” (297).

Iser argues that like human beings, these self-revelatory literary fictions are both

“indeterminable” and entangled in the detail of the particular historical conditions in

which they are staged. Therefore, like humans, literary fictions are both open-ended and

“culture-bound”. Iser argues that as a result all attempts to employ literary fiction as the

basis of a generalised account of the signals which denote that the literary text is indeed

“literary” have been unsuccessful. Yet it is in the particular nature of the “literary” set of

conditions and the signals these conditions inspire that we find the key to Iser’s

separation of literary discourse: “the signals do not invoke fictionality as such, but

conventions, which form the basis of a kind of contract between author and reader, the

terms of which identify the text not as discourse, but as ‘enacted discourse’” (Fictive

214). It is typical of Iser to appear to want to have his cake and eat it too in this fashion.

He is arguing that the literary work, by announcing itself as literary, sets down and

employs a set of contemporaneous conditions based on the conventional understandings

evident in the idiomatic “literary” language of the time. But just as he provides this

structure, he removes it by suggesting these cannot be isolated outside of the particular

conditions of the discursive context examined, which must itself be “enacted”.

Therefore, the definition of the literary text offered through fictionality is always

conditional. The text can only manifest as part of a performance, and like all

performances it is ever context-reliant.

Literature is significant, for Iser, not because of any particular conditions, but

because of the possibility of those conditions. His account of fictionalizing presents a

category that describes the detail of the human activity underpinning such significance.

This heuristic account is consonant with Iser’s overall contention that we must discard

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the idea of a determinable human “nature”. The definition of the human presented by

Iser is that there is no definition; instead we are chameleonic, ever-changing performers

of our own possibilities, of our “extraordinary plasticity” (Fictive 297). Iser argues that

despite not being able to transcend ourselves in order to describe ourselves, we are

displaced from ourselves. We are our own doppelgangers, and this is reflected by the

“doubling” in fiction through which we are able to perform our own possible selves.

Iser writes in the opening to The Fictive and the Imaginary that the “fictionalizing act

converts the reality reproduced into a sign, simultaneously casting the imaginary as a

form that allows us to conceive what it is toward which the sign points” (2)5. During our

interaction with the literary text, we enact this doubling. We see in the author’s

language the form of the imaginary, even as we are enabled to mirror her activity, and

are enabled to ourselves imagine. “Doubling” is therefore a function which is

fundamental to our use of fiction. In a lecture delivered in 1997, “The Significance of

Fictionalizing”, Iser points out that “we cannot talk of fiction as such, for it can only be

described by way of its functions, that is, the manifestations of its use and the products

resulting from it” (2). At its most fundamental level, this observation seems to reflect

the structure Iser attributes to fiction in The Fictive and the Imaginary, where the

fictionalizing act generates a “sign” through the process of reproducing elements of

reality. During this generative process, the imaginary takes on a form that indicates the

meaning of this sign, though the phrase “what it is toward which the sign points” seems

to contain a doubled meaning. Here the intention of the sign – or the “product” – is

described by Iser in a turn of phrase that is itself open-ended.

5 See chapter seven for a detailed discussion of this complex statement, which Gans has argued is “tantamount to” the emergence of the linguistic sign described in his “originary hypothesis” (“Staging as and Anthropological Category”).

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Iser pursues the goal of describing the “functions” of fiction by separating

literary fictionality from other fictions. In “Feigning in Fiction” Iser identifies “two

fictionalized acts pertaining to the fictional text – those of selection and combination”

(214). He later identifies a third act, in the “disclosure of its [the text’s] own

fictionality” (214). This final bracketing of the reality of the text from the reality of the

“world” leads to an important distinction. Iser argues that the literary work contains

elements of the extra-literary world, and previous literary worlds, but that:

These recognizable ‘realities’… are marked as being fictionalized. Thus

the incorporated ‘real’ world is, so to speak, placed in brackets, to

indicate that it is not something given but is merely to be understood as if

it were given” (217).

He does so in order to begin to articulate the relationship between the reader and the text

in a fashion that does not privilege either one. Indeed, the literary text is for Iser a set of

aesthetic possibilities. The literary text organises elements of the extra-literary real such

that the reader brings to bear their own experience and peculiarity of affect to render

something fundamentally new upon the thought stage of the mind. During the process

of writing, the author has selected and combined elements of the reality that surrounds

them in the language of the text. In Iser’s account, this leads to an interaction between

the literary and the extra-literary, to the degree that boundaries within and without the

text are challenged. The reality reproduced in the text is always and already subject to

the conditionality of the “as if”, such that reader, text nor author is privileged under his

account.

In “The Significance of Fictionalizing”, Iser summarises this interaction of

authorial intention and reader-text interaction in terms of an extra-textual footprint. This

interaction is a functional product of authorial intention and the appropriation of the

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elements of the extra-literary by the author. As the author demonstrates in his or her re-

structuring of the elements chosen, the literary text necessarily “makes inroads” into the

world beyond the text, and it must disrupt this world by taking and organising these

elements in the meaningful order of the text. The “structure and semantics” of that

which is taken from the extra-literary fields of reference are “subject to certain

deformations” (“Significance” 2). The new form these de-formed elements of the

“given world” take on in the literary text remain reliant upon the extra-literary fields of

reference they draw upon. But since these elements of the given world have been

rendered virtual, their function in the extra-literary world becomes the context, or the

background against which the intention of the author figures forth in the fictionalizing

acts of selection and combination. In other words, the literary text virtualises the given

world in as part of an activity which presents a restructured reality, “as-if” it were real.

This “as-if” – an expression he borrows from Vaihinger – function is only possible

because of the fashion which the literary text discloses its fictionality. The substance of

this self-disclosure is made up of the intentional selection from fields of reference in the

extra-literary world, and the re-structuring – or combination – of this material by the

author.

In the very short first chapter of the The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser expends

the majority of his effort exploring what he entitles the “Functional Differentiation of

Fictionalizing Acts: Selection, Combination, Self-Disclosure” (4). Iser suggests that the

virtual presentation of elements of the given world in the text via intentional selection

and combination executed by the literary author has the structure of an event, rather

than the status of an object. Since the activity of selection and combination involves the

process of “deforming” elements of the given world, the systems and their constituent

units are highlighted via these fictionalizing acts. Iser describes this as an imposition of

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a new state of observability: “selection… disassembles their given order, thereby

turning them into objects for observation. Observability is not a component of the

systems concerned” (5). This process of highlighting occurs because of the disturbance

to existing systems generated. Since this is not a direct attempt at a representation of

systems from the given world, but instead a repatterning of constituent units that make

up these systems, they serve to highlight both the constructs presented in the literary

text, and that which has been disturbed or excluded. Consequently, Iser suggests it can

be asserted that the literary text “defies referentiality” (5), and that in this defiance is the

very structure that allows us to presuppose that literary fictionality relies upon processes

that have “the character of an event” (5).

If Iser’s description is accurate, this structure unfolds a paradoxical quality in

literature, since boundaries that occur in the extra-literary world are transgressed in and

of this defiance of referentiality. This transgression ensures that the extra-literary can be

maintained in distinction to the “as-if” it were real manifestation of the literary world.

Since the process of selection is not governed by any particular rules – for example,

dictating that the author must slavishly follow or contravene existing systemic orders

from the given world – the idiomatic selections made by the author are revelatory of the

self-positioning, or attitude, of the author in respect of the given world. If the author

followed a set of rules they would, instead of performing a fictionalizing activity, be

“actualizing a possibility with the framework of a prevailing convention” (5). It follows

that in the event of fictionalizing acts being performed toward the construction of the

literary text these acts are not subtended to existing frameworks; instead they are

generative of new patterns and discoverable only in this repatterning. As Iser puts it,

“The specific form of the ‘event’ of selection exists, however, only in and through that

which it produces” (5).

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For Iser, fictionalizing acts are marked by boundary crossings. He cites Nelson

Goodman who in his Ways of Worldmaking (1978) describes a parallel for Iser’s

suggestion that the literary setting removes elements of the given world from their

existing relationship with systems from the extra-literary. In the literary work, the

selected material is “extended into new patterns” as boundaries are crossed, and

“elements are differently weighted” as they are removed from their existing systemic

context (Fictive 6). For Iser, this is tantamount to the ways of worldmaking Goodman

describes, in terms of deletion, extension and weighting (Fictive 6). The goal of this

parallel is to direct our attention toward the notion that the fictionalizing act of selection

indicates a purpose in the text, and the mutual contrasting of the extra-literary with the

literary generated by the author’s activity highlights the intentionality of the text. Since

the discussion of intentionality is subsequently bound to the action of the text – in

generating the contrasting relationship between the literary and extra-literary – rather

than to the mind of the author, intentionality is examined in terms of what the text does

and is therefore not limited by attempting to uncover a singular intention on behalf of

the author. This account is not in denial of the activity of the author, but maintains

access to the intention of the text. Relieved of the burden of investigating the mind of

the author for an exact determination of intention, Iser posits intentionality as a matter

of contextual application: “The intention, therefore, is not to be found in the world to

which the text refers, nor is it simply something imaginary; it is the preparation of an

imaginary quality for us – a use that remains dependent on the given situation within

which it is applied” (Fictive 6). Iser argues that intentionality is to be understood in

terms of the selection and recontextualising of the “empirical elements that have been

torn away” from their previous systemic location and function and repositioned within

the literary text. This transgression of boundaries gives rise to the phenomenon of

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intention, which cannot be located in terms of the systems challenged or generated, any

more than it can be located in the imaginary of the author or reader.

Iser turns to Winnicot’s famous “transitional object” from his Playing and

Reality (1971) in order to present this event based description of intentionality. If

intentionality is thought of as a “transitional object” between the real and the imaginary,

it is actualised in terms of its status as an event:

Actuality is the basic constitutive feature of an event, and the

intentionality of the text is an event in the sense that it does not end with

the delineation of referential fields but breaks these down in order to

transmute their elements into the material of its self-presentation. The

actuality lies in the way the imaginary takes effect on the real. (Fictive 7)

Here Iser draws together his account of literary fictionality in terms of reality. Since an

event must actually occur, and we have located intentionality in terms of the

transgression of boundaries in “reality”, it follows that intentionality in the literary text

is an event. As Iser summarises above, this manifests as the fields of reference called

upon are then held up for inspection by the contrast generated when existing systems

are deformed and represented. This event changes the elements of that which is selected,

and that which is excluded, into the materiality of intention. The actual substance of this

event subsequently manifests in the relationship between the imaginary and the real: it

can only be located in the terms of this transitional action. Intentionality then, is

generative of meaning, but can only be understood in generative terms, via an account

of what the text does.

“Combination” is also an activity that relies upon the crossing of boundaries.

Iser describes how it is that the scope of the “different elements that are combined

within the text range from words and their meanings through encapsulated extratextual

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items to the patterns in which characters and actions, for example are organised”

(Fictive 7). This is an activity of boundary crossing since the organising of the basic

constituents that make up the text involves the combining of elements from the

extratextual world such that the contrasting relationship with existing systems imposed

by selection is made possible. The organising of the selected material during

combination enacts the distortion implied by the process of selection. Iser employs the

example of Joyce’s neologism (portmanteau) “benefiction” to illustrate his point, by

suggesting it conjoins benefaction, fiction and benediction, and has the effect of

generating the new, without destroying the existing, whereby: “lexical meanings are

used to derestrict semantic limitations. The lexical meaning of a particular word is faded

out and a new meaning faded in, without the loss of the original meaning” (7). The

lexicon of the reader is altered, and thereby a semantic analysis of a word, sentence or

larger meaningful unit of linguistic formality is subject to this lexical alteration. The

effect is such that a figure-ground relationship is established, with emphasis shifting

from the new meaning to the originating terms as the context of use shifts. This

dynamic interaction is generative of a semantic oscillation, whereby the amalgamation

cannot produce an erasure of the precedent word components. The new word is reliant

upon the stable meaning of the old, though it does not mean and cannot be reduced to

any or all of the existing words. It means something new, and something new with each

instance of contextual application.

For Iser, this oscillation has application beyond the immediacy of a lexical

analysis, and the observation of a figure-ground relationship generated by

“combination”, “holds true on all levels of the extratextual and intratextual items that in

narrative literature organise the constellations of characters and their actions” (Fictive 8).

“Combination” manifests in the text as selected elements of extra-textual systems are

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positioned within “semantic enclosures”6 that are built up within the text. The

meaningful order that makes up these semantic enclosures is not strictly observed by the

characters that inhabit the text. As Iser points out, “the hero will step beyond” the

boundaries implied by the internal structures of the literary text (8). This characteristic

in literature suggests that the possible combinations available are not strictly prescribed

or demonstrated in the specificity of “articulated patterns in the text”. Instead,

“combination” is a fictionalizing act that is generative of “relationships within the text”

that manifest the potential for “a whole network of possible combinations” (8). These

“networks” of “relationships” lead Iser to observe that while intentionality emerges

through “selection”, “combination” leads to the “factualness” of the text: “just as in the

process of selection these relationships yield the intentionality of the text, so in the

process of combination they lead to the emergence of the ‘factualness’ of the text, of

what Goodman has called ‘fact from fiction’” (8). In sum, “combination” is a

fictionalizing act that places the text in a dynamic relationship with the given world.

Since the real and the fictive are bound together in the text, they enter a relationship

with the real that indicates the role of fiction in our human access to reality. Facts from

the world may also be facts in the text, and vice versa, without any challenge

necessarily being offered to the structure of either factual context. But as the reader

must encounter one in respect of the other, the reader enters a dynamic interaction with

the text that is revelatory of a larger world, by standing in for it, “as-if” it was real. It

follows that for Iser the facts of the literary text are engaged in the negative potential of

boundary crossing: “The factualness of the text is not, therefore, a quality of the

elements the text puts in combination. Rather it is constituted by what the text

produces” (8). And what it produces is a relational dynamic, wherein the new is

6 Iser notes that this concept is drawn from the work of Jurij M. Lotman, who employs the term in The

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generated during a process of overstepping. The intentionality of the text is generative

of new relationships, as the selected elements are linked in a manner that contrasts with

that which has been excluded. The contrasting set of possibilities highlighted in this

process means that the “factualness” of the text must always already exceed the limits,

or boundaries it establishes.

The final fictionalizing act Iser identifies in the literary text is the “self-

disclosure” described above, or “the fictional text’s disclosure of its own fictionality”

that unfolds via “a range of signals to denote that they are fictive” (Fictive 11). It is

important to note that the relationship between the text-and-world leads to a central

presupposition Iser relies upon in order to substantiate his assertion that these signals

“are not to be equated exclusively with linguistic signs in the text” (11). He argues that

those signals which enable self-disclosure can only become so “through particular,

historically varying conventions shared by author and public” (11). This reader-author

contract perspective upon literary convention is far from original, but leads Iser to adopt

the perspective that the text should be understood as “enacted” discourse (12). In Iser’s

heuristic account, this is fundamentally important. His literary anthropology must turn

on this point: that the literary text is capable of separating itself by signalling its own

literariness, and doing so by virtue of a fictionalizing act. Again, this historical

orientation is of “relationality”. In the discussion leading up to his analysis of “self-

disclosure” in The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser suggests that there are at least “three

levels of derestriction or boundary-crossing that must be discerned in the literary text”

(9). We might summarise these processes as follows: firstly, the arrangement of

extratextual elements into the text, drawing upon “conventions, values, allusions,

quotations and the like”; secondly, the establishment of intratextual systems, leading to

Structure of the Artistic Text (Fictive 306 n9).

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“semantic enclosures” that delineate boundaries (which may subsequently liberate the

hero to cross and become “revolutionary”); the third manifests at the level of “lexical

meanings”, in that the newly established context of the literary text allows the

“derestriction” of meaning, even though this liberation is not explicitly articulated in the

text (9).

These three support Iser’s argument for a perspective on the literary text that

transcends the linguistic sign. In the first instance, the arrangement of extratextual

elements in the literary text need not adhere to exisiting systemic orders, and is

necessarily selective and is thereby always already standing in relation to the

extratextual as a radical presence. The transgression of the boundaries that establish

order in extratextual systems implied by this “arrangement” signals the text’s

relationship to the extratextual. In the second instance, the relationship between those

extratextual elements introduced and arranged in the text sets down an internal structure

that allows for a means of understanding the movement of the subject through the

textual world. Iser argues this structure is common to poetry and narrative fiction,

instancing the lyrical self as a means to display the fashion in which these internal

relationships are drawn together. He points out that the hero of the novel or the lyrical

self of the poem must necessarily exceed the boundaries set down through the internal

structure established by the selection and combination of extratextual elements: the hero

can only emerge as the hero by exceeding the boundaries imposed by the text, just as

the lyrical self can “emerge only by breaking out of and thereby moving beyond the

semantic topography established in the poem” (Fictive 10). This emergent quality of the

subject in the novel or poem signals the fictionality of the literary text. Here the lyrical

self or the hero exceeds the semantics of the text itself, in an event that establishes the

fact that this is not a determining combination. Instead this is an indication of the

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“extent to which elements, set up in different networks of relationships, may be

transformed” (10). The third level of relationship occurs at the level of lexical meaning

– we recall the example of Joyce’s “benefaction” – whereby we witness the

derestriction of word meaning by virtue of the new relationship established between

them in the fictionalizing act of combination. The relational process here is generative

of an event made possible through explicit linguistic signs, but in which the “effects are

not themselves articulated” (10). Here the meaning of individual words is backgrounded

in favour of the relational interaction itself. The new order stands in a state of contrast

with the established meaning, relying upon the established meaning for the stability of

the new relationship and possible meaning. The outcomes of this event are not made

explicit, just as the event itself is not articulated in the text. Yet, in an act of self-

disclosure this event generates the “relational process” that signals the fictionality of the

literary text. Iser concludes that the derestriction of meaning combination generates,

means the “literal meaning of words is faded out in the same way as their denotative

function” (10). Thus, the denotative function of language is transformed into “a function

of figuration” (10). “Combination” therefore unfolds on two levels simultaneously, as

new fields of reference are established within the text, and these fields establish links

with one another. The “selection” of elements of the extraliterary world and their

“combination” in these new relationships within the text implicate – and are made more

complex by – the third fictionalizing act, “self-disclosure”.

Non-literary fictions are distinguished from literary fictions by “self-disclosure”.

For Iser, this differentiation extends to the function of literary fiction:

It is a commonplace that the fictive is not confined to the literary text.

Fictions also play vital roles in the activities of cognition and behaviour,

as in the founding of institutions, societies, and world pictures. Unlike

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such non-literary fictions, the literary text reveals its own fictionality.

Because of this, its function must be radically different from that of

related activities that mask their fictional nature. (Fictive 12)

As we have seen above, Iser argues that the function of self-disclosing fictions

manifests in the relational elements of “combination”. Thus the signals that facilitate the

fictionalizing act of “self-disclosure” are implicated with “selection” and

“combination,” and exceed direct linguistic signification. Iser argues that the

conventions invoked by the signals which manifest as self-disclosing fictionalizing acts,

are “most durable” in the case of literary genres. As an example of self-disclosure, genre

points toward the contract between author and reader. Iser writes that genre allows a

wide range of formally agreed upon conventions to be presupposed by reader and author,

and argues that such a tradition-oriented means of classification has a central role to

play in defining “[e]ven such recent inventions as the nonfiction novel” which reveals

“the same contractual function, since they must invoke convention before renouncing

it” (12). Unlike more orthodox descriptions of genre, the affiliation of reader and author

in a literary and historical context presented by Iser does not rely on an assertion that

fiction is not to be discovered beyond the literary text. In point of fact, it relies upon the

manifestation of fiction in an extra-literary setting. The “radical” functional difference

Iser refers to is mapped to the manner in which extra-literary fictions are employed in

an explanatory mode, “masking their fictional nature” even as they attempt to represent

reality directly. The extra-literary fiction must conceal its fictionality, since “the fiction

is meant to provide an explanation, or even a foundation, and would not do so if its

fictive nature were to be exposed. The concealment of fictionality endows an

explanation with an appearance of reality” (12). Since expository discourse is

concerned with providing a direct representation or explanation of the real, to concede

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in any way that the fictions employed are fictive, would be to admit to a possible lie.

The lie would imply a doubtful quality that brings the entire representational project

into question. However, in the literary setting – which is predicated upon fiction that

signals its own fictionality – the reader must adopt an alternative perspective on the

“reality” presented. Since any element from the extra-literary world employed in the

literary text is now “placed in brackets” by the fictionalizing act of self-disclosure, it is

no longer presented as part of a given world and is instead “to be understood as if it

were given” (13). The world of the text is therefore, an “as-if construction” (13), and we

were to adopt our usual perspective or attitude toward this world we are doing

something inappropriate. We must suspend this existing attitude, just as we must

suspend any assumptions we make about this “as-if” world. Thus, literary fictionality

varies significantly from everyday fictions, in that it necessarily challenges our existing

attitudes.

For Iser, this radical difference presents a qualification of the significance of

literature. As he goes on to conclude:

Self-disclosure has a twofold significance. First, it shows that fiction can

be known as fiction. Second, it shows that the represented world is only

to be conceived as if it were a world in order that it should be taken to

figure something other than itself. Ultimately, the text brings about one

more boundary-crossing that occurs within the reader’s experience: it

stimulates attitudes toward an unreal world, the unfolding of which leads

to the temporary displacement of the reader’s own reality. (Fictive 19-

20)

Let us then briefly unpack what this entails. For we have already established that Iser

considers “self-disclosure” to entail the presentation of a world “as-if” it were real. He

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suggests that what is “represented” in this “as-if” mode can only be “taken to figure

something other than itself”. The world of the text is itself figurative, since it cannot be

completely literal. This figure is generative of “attitudes toward an unreal world”,

meaning the reader has experienced, at least temporarily, a fundamental challenge to

their existing understandings and attitude. They have had to engage an alternate reality,

and the contrast between the reader’s attitudes toward this “as-if” it were real world, and

the existing world renders a dynamic interaction built around boundary crossings. Why

does the “as-if” figure something other than itself? Because the world presented in the

literary text is not presented as an actual world. It is only the possibility of a world. This

possible but impossible world is never denoted through “selection”, “combination” and

“self-disclosure” as a “given world”. If we consider that the “as-if” world of the literary

text primarily figures a possible world, rather than denotes a given world, Iser claims

that we might observe it serves a dual purpose:

The reaction provoked by the represented world could be directed toward

conceiving what it is meant to ‘figure forth’. The analogue, however,

could simultaneously direct the reaction to the empirical world from

which the textual world has been drawn, allowing this very world to be

perceived from a vantage point that has never been part of it. In this case

the reverse side of things will come into view. The duality of the

analogue will never exclude either of the two possibilities; in fact, they

appear to interpenetrate, making conceivable what would otherwise

remain hidden. (Fictive 16)

This interpenetration results in a reader-text interaction that sees the reader experience

not just an analogue of the real world, or a world presented “as-if” it were real, but a

dynamic contrast between the analogue “textual” world and the “empirical” world it

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stands in a necessary comparison with. This contrast is only feasible because of the

fictionalizing act of self-disclosure. If the textual world were purporting to be an

analogue, it would only render a testing of its own capacity to represent the empirical

world on the basis of other sources of information the reader had or will experience.

This contrast generates the dynamic interaction of text and world Iser comes to

understand in terms of the reader attaining a perspective upon each world that would not

have been otherwise possible. But this perspective does not erase what had come before,

indeed they are necessary to one another, they “interpenetrate”. So much so that in order

to make sense of one or other, the reader must conceive of new information, of what

would “otherwise remain hidden”.

In order for this to be understood in terms of the reader’s capacity for movement

beyond their own “habitual predispositions” Iser employs the language of Gestalt7

psychology (Fictive 17). He argues that the “grouping activity involved in both mental

and physical perception always tends toward closing off gestalts” and that this is the

same as boundary setting and transgression that unfolds during the activity of

fictionalizing. Since an object can only come into consciousness once a gestalt is closed,

it is through the iterative process of organising data until it is structured in a satisfactory

manner that the determining elements available through perception are “pattern[ed] in

such a way that the tension is resolved”, and the gestalt may remain closed. He

suggests that as the fictional “as-if” enters the stage of the imaginary as an event, it

manifests via perception as “open-ended, giving rise to a tension that demands to be

resolved” (17). This resolution can only be achieved through meaning making; as the

reader generates a meaningful order from the determining elements presented in the “as-

if” of the fictive world, the reader experiences and transgresses the boundaries set via

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the text. In sum: the reader is compelled by the open-ended quality of literary

fictionality to achieve the closure available in the meaningful resolution of the tensions

generated by the textual world.

This account of literary fictionality, turning on the issue of self-disclosure,

represents a fundamental element of the substance of the rationale for Iser’s strategy in

The Fictive and the Imaginary. His project is built on the dialectic of exploration versus

explanation. Later, in the essay “What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference

between Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions” (2000) Iser seeks to clarify his position

in relation to this important point of departure. In order to do so he goes into further

detail in this paper than he does in The Fictive and the Imaginary on the topic of just

how his work relates to the history of cultural anthropology8. He argues that while

anthropology has traditionally employed fiction in an explanatory mode, he resists this

purpose in order to better understand literary fictionality: “instead of instrumentalizing

the explanatory capabilities of fictions, fictionality in literature functions basically as a

means of exploration” (“What is Literary Anthropology” 170). In other words, he is not

writing against this history of explanatory fiction by examining the human using fiction,

but instead attempting to provide an account of the role of fiction in literature. The

exploratory function of literary fictionality presupposes for Iser the “self-disclosure”

discussed above, such that:

Whenever fictions are used for explanatory purposes, they function as a

means of integrating the data to be grasped. Whenever fictions

deliberately disclose their fictionality—thus presenting themselves as

mere “as if” constructions—they function as a means of disordering and

disrupting their extratextual fields of reference. Explanatory fictions are

7 We return to a closer examination of Gestalt psychology in chapter five.

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integrative, whereas literary fictions, as instruments of exploration, are

dissipative. (“What is Literary Anthropology” 170)

In Iser’s anthropology, literary fictionality does not meet the need for representation in a

direct or expository mode. Literary fictions are instead a means of exploring the

possibilities in disintegrating elements of the given world, and since they are “as-if”

constructions, the intentionality of the text challenges the reader to establish new

boundaries, even as they are compelled to transgress them. We will explore this matter

in further detail in chapter seven of this thesis, “The Reception of Iser: Gans”; where a

closer account of how Iser responds to the key relevant figures working in cultural

anthropology and dealing with fiction is provided. Before we move on to a discussion of

a second key element of Iser’s literary anthropology in chapter two below – namely the

imaginary – we must note one final outcome to Iser’s discussion of literary fictionality:

namely, that the strategy of de-emphasising linguistic signs in favour of an historical

perspective on the reader-author contract invokes a generative perspective on literature.

As Iser concludes, literary fictionality is not explanatory, and it is not made clear within

the text why “certain choices through which intentionality manifests itself” are made.

The relationship between the “semantic enclosures” set up within the text are not

“verbalized”, nor is the purpose of the “figure” of the “as-if” world of the text. For Iser

this entails the open-ended quality of the the text, in that “the cardinal points of the text

defy verbalization” (Fictive 20). This has a significant outcome for our understanding of

the role of the imaginary in the literary text, which manifests as a product of an open

ended structure, of these “open structures within the linguistic patterning of the text”

(21). But more than this, the radical conclusion Iser draws is that literary fictionality

“brings about the presence of the imaginary by transgressing language itself. In

8 We examine this history in greater detail in section 2.3 below.

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outstripping what conditions it, the imaginary reveals itself as the generative matrix of

the text” (21). We explore this conclusion in greater detail in chapter three below,

examining how the exploratory function of literary fictionality is of this generative role

for the imaginary, in that self-disclosure issues forth into the “as if” world of text. The

fictionalizing act of self-disclosure is signalled in a complex of functions that transgress

“language itself”. Indeed, the very meaning of individual words is placed under the

conditions of this challenge, and the “analogue” world of the text manifests as the open

territory that unfolds as an event upon the stage of the imaginary of the reader.

1.3 How literary fictionality can assist us to explore discourse

Before moving on to a discussion of Iser’s conceptualisation of the imaginary,

and having gained a foothold in Iser’s account of literary fictionality, a qualification is

required. Iser makes frequent reference to his “exploratory” approach to literary

discourse, but this claim is far from self explanatory. This is so because his distinction is

carried across disparate layers of abstraction, and draws upon a particular perspective on

the methods of cultural anthropology, and particularly ethnographic methodologies. The

following discussion attempts to briefly encompass this distinction, though it should be

noted that the exposition of an anthropological context for his work is completed in

more detail in chapters seven, eight and nine of this thesis, where a closer account of

relevant anthropological endeavour is provided, focussing upon the relationship

between the work of Eric Gans and Iser.

In “What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between Explanatory and

Exploratory Fictions” Iser provides a description of a history of cultural anthropology

that deals explicitly with fiction and places his own work in that context in order to

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answer the question “What is literary anthropology?” (157). Iser argues that in order to

answer this question, he must first examine the “aims and methods” of anthropology

(157). This is a task he begins by asserting that hominization is the primary focus of

anthropology. As a result of the need for explanations of our becoming human based on

ancient empirical evidence, anthropology has generated a theoretically dense approach:

As long as the process of hominization constitutes its objective, the

evaluation of fossils is of paramount concern. These factual remains call

for inferences, and these inferences have always been theory-laden, with

evolution being the dominant explanatory model in modern times. (157).

This explanatory project has consequently been extensively influenced by the theory of

evolution. Since evolution is not available to direct inspection, and neither is the origin

of the human, these two key features of explanatory discussion of hominization under

the banner of anthropology have given rise to a wide array of theoretical structures.

Despite the fact that this heritage casts a long shadow across the history of anthropology,

Iser points out that “a critical inspection of the explanatory procedures employed is only

of recent vintage” (157). For Iser this process of inspection has led to a

“departmentalisation” of a previously whole discipline, but that ethnography remains as

a common concern. He argues that ethnography:

is basically what the practitioners of anthropology are concerned with,

but we now also have philosophical, social, cultural, and historical

anthropology, distinguished by their respective objectives and by their

methodological presuppositions. Even ethnography has changed its focus,

no longer dwelling exclusively on origins of hominization, but also and

especially on what happened after the hominids had launched themselves.

(157)

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In discussing the changing focus, Iser cites Clifford Geertz’s conclusion that the

diaspora of ethnographic methods and aims has led to “a study of human culture

becoming self-reflexive” (157). This self-reflexive quality is central to Iser’s

observations about ethnography, which is something we “do” rather than simply

describe. As the process of self-inspection has become central to the study of the human,

the process of “doing ethnography” has taken on a “two tiered” character, wherein “it

makes culture the prime focus of anthropology, and simultaneously initiates a self-

monitoring of all the operations involved in this study” (158). Following Geertz, Iser

argues that culture is not an additive to an almost complete human animal but is instead

generative of the human and consequently definitive of the human. Geertz writes,

“‘[w]ithout men, no culture, certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without

culture, no men’” (qtd. in Iser 158). This influential perspective on culture is

presupposed by important anthropologists, and Iser instances Arnold Gehlen, Andre

Leroi-Gourhan and Eric Gans as having in common the view that culture arises as “a

response to challenges, and the response as a revelation of what humans are” (158).

This explanatory perspective on culture places it as both an output from the human

animal’s activity, and a primary feature of the processes that are generative of the

human, “insofar as they are molded by what they have externalised” (158).

For Iser the explanatory methods of cultural anthropology are bound to a

“virtually insoluble problem” (159). They must provide explanations of culture based

on evidence available to them through field work, even though there is no means

available by which to test these hypotheses. As Iser describes this double bind:

On the one hand the ethnographical approach—based on field work—has

to draw controlled inferences, either from the fossils found or the

observations made, in order to establish a fact …On the other hand, such

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generalizations are indispensable to the filling of gaps even if there is no

evidence for their validity. (159)

For Iser this process has led to an inevitable emphasis upon the arts, and wonders if “the

prominence accorded to the arts brings a hidden teleology out into the open” (158).

Here the arts are not necessarily elevated as the “epitome” of culture; nevertheless they

seem to provide a very clear evidence for the notion that culture is a response to

challenges. Iser uses the example of Leroi-Gourhan who argues that the decoration of

tools is necessary to the function and construction of these artefacts, concluding that

“ornamentation represents the way in which the producer relates to the product,

indicating that it has been made” (158). This indication for Leroi-Gourhan is that use

relates to ornamentation, and therefore the construction and use of the tool is articulated

in this cultural facticity.

For Iser, the implication of these theoretical descriptions of the purpose revealed

in the materiality of culture is that “literature as an integral feature of culture is bound to

have an anthropological dimension of its own” (159). Since this anthropological

dimension is distinct from other cultural artifice as a potential focus for anthropological

inquiry, Iser argues that literature also demands a particular approach. Additionally, he

insists that it is not sufficient to develop a literary anthropology that functions on the

basis of the predominantly explanatory methodology of cultural anthropology. The

theoretical justification for the techniques employed in this explanatory mode highlight

the problem ethnography faces, of finding its hypotheses beyond the usual capacity for

grounding in direct observation. Iser concludes in a fashion that indicates a cornerstone

of his theoretical efforts, pointing out that a process of myth building is enacted when

an explanatory hypothesis:

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is taken for reality, the result is reification, which makes self monitoring

of these explanatory activities all the more pertinent, so that their

basically heuristic character will never be eclipsed. Such an awareness is

bound to qualify the methodological guidelines of anthropological

research as fictions by nature. (160)

Since their “heuristic character” reflects the “best possible” nature of these explanations,

the gaps must remain, at least in our assessment of the methodological boundaries of

ethnography. And certainly, this doubt must persist as a warning against the reification

of an explanation to the position of the explanation. For Iser, the conclusion can only be

that the boundaries of such an endeavour are set in fictional terms. Their heuristic

character is just so: an explanation that carries an implicit caveat, and one functioning

on the basis of the absence of a capacity to render it factual in the usual experimental

manner.

The fulcrum of Iser’s contextualising discussion is his thesis that there is an

important distinction to be made between what he regards as “explanatory” and

“exploratory” fictions. These two form the boundaries of a dialectical interaction

between Iser and other key cultural anthropologists, wherein Iser argues that literary

fiction is distinct from expository fiction. This distinction is based on Iser’s argument

that literary fictionality manifests “as-if” it were real, rather than as a direct

representation of the real. Iser employs the example of Geertz’s strategy of “thick

description” in order to illustrate his argument, an approach that Iser sees as indicative

of the recognition by Geertz that anthropological research has boundaries that are

“fictions by nature” (160). He cites Geertz’s self assessment, when he writes that

anthropological writings, as a result of the fact that they are interpretations of cultural

landscapes, are “fictions, in the sense that they are ‘something made,’ ‘something

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fashioned’ – the original meaning of fictiō – not that they are false, unfactual, or merely

‘as if’ thought experiments” (qtd. in Iser 160). While Iser agrees with this in principle,

the failure on behalf of Geertz to draw a distinction between literary fiction, and the

boundaries of the explanatory fictions (manifest in the form of anthropologists

interpreting cultural phenomena) leads to a sleight of hand that ignores a functional

distinction involving intention. He writes that “[f]ictions… are not independent of those

things that have to be found out, and this fact is somewhat obscured when the difference

between explanatory fictions and literary fictions is ignored” (160). This distinction

leads Iser to favour play over any particular model of literary fictionality, such that:

the literary text does not represent anything located outside the text, but

rather produces something that arises out of all the fictions playing with

and against one another. Continuous gaming creates disturbances and

clashes between the fictions involved. (173)

As we have seen, Iser is convinced that the “as-if” of the literary world

presented in literary fictions is bracketed off by virtue of its self-disclosure. This

bracketing off ensures that the literary text is not representative, but instead generative

of a new set of possibilities. In this articulation is manifest Iser’s systemic portrayal of

literary fictionality; it is made up of many fictionalizing acts that constitute literary

fictions. The structure is such that the fictions within the literary text interact in a

playful fashion precisely because they are not purposefully representative of the extra-

literary world, and are not explanatory. Instead they are exploratory; they are generative

of possible worlds that continue to emerge because they do not have a particular

representative purpose:

The interplay of literary fictions does not have such an operative drive; it

issues into a continual transgression of what each of the fictions implies.

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Instead of reducing the text play to an underlying pattern which is

supposed to power it, the play itself turns out to be a generative matrix of

emerging phenomena that can be qualified as ontological novelties. They

are novelties insofar as they did not hitherto exist, and they are

ontological insofar as they provide access to the hitherto unknown. (173)

This returns us to the notion that while literary fiction is not representative of a

particular set of socio-historical circumstances and a particular cultural epoch, it is

capable of appropriating these elements of the given world and subsequently, of

generating a fundamentally new experience in the imaginary of the reader9. This

unpredictable quality of literary fictionality manifests as “[t]he plurality of

interconnecting fictions in the text” that give “rise to a complex dynamic order of

phenomena” (174). For Iser, the “ontological novelties” generated by this interplay

cannot be explanatory, but must be instead exploratory.

The transgression of boundaries implicit in the reader-text interaction mediated

by literary fictionality implies for Iser a radical set of “unpredictable possibilities of an

emerging order as the signature of literature” (177). Since literature mirrors both human

cultural memory in its appropriation of elements of a given cultural world, and is

generative of possible worlds in the “as-if” of literary fictionality, literature appears to

facilitate a radical mode of self-perception. Iser argues that in the face of the apparently

feigned quality of literary fictionality, we continue to employ it as a mode of self-

exegesis. This leads him to conclude that despite the challenge to authenticity or

facticity complicit in the “as-if” nature of literary fictionality:

9 This unpredictable quality of literary fictionality gives rise to a phenomenon that leads Iser to a theme that would dominate his thought in the very last phase of his life: emergence. He was working on a book on the topic at the time of his death. We take up this concept in the final chapter of this thesis.

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Such a view of oneself may not result in any immediate practical

consequences, especially since this self-perceiving is inauthentic,

highlighted by the fictional “as if.” This inauthenticity, however, does

not seem to invalidate this self-examination, since humans never cease to

perform it. (177)

The outcome of this observation of an exploratory predisposition to literary fictionality,

manifesting in the form of an open-ended and unpredictable set of interacting

possibilities, is a series of anthropological propositions articulated by Iser as follows:

What might be the reason for such self-confrontation? Is it an unfulfilled

longing for what has been irrevocably lost, or is it a prefigurement of

what it might mean to be and simultaneously to have oneself? In the end,

neither of these alternatives may apply. Instead, it may be the duality into

which the human being is split, suspended between self-preservation and

self transgression, that makes us wander with undiminished fascination

in the maze of our own unpredictable possibilities. With literature as

Ariadne’s thread, human beings try to keep track of their self-exploration,

always on the verge of losing themselves between their alternatives.

(177)

Here Iser illustrates the “duality” of his own approach in The Fictive and the Imaginary,

demonstrated in the figural portrayal of literature presented via the mythical character

and narrative of Ariadne. As we will continue to discover, he often employs the

exploratory mode he ascribes to literary fictionality. This is presupposed in his

characterisation of the text as a “charting” of the territory of literary anthropology, and

his ongoing insistence that this is a “heuristic account”.

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The series of inconclusive possibilities listed in the quote above direct our

attention to what Iser’s concept of literary fiction can provide our discussion of the

significance of literature. And in the questioning title to his essay, “What is Literary

Anthropology?” we suppose that he is being playful, just as he concludes that literature

is itself constituted by the playful interaction of fictions. A precise definition of a

literary anthropology is not offered as a particular methodology by Iser, but instead as a

critique of such a closed-ended approach to an open-ended medium. Indeed, it appears

that for Iser it is precisely the dynamic, unpredictable quality of literary fictionality that

allows for both a representation and figuration of the human animal via the literary

medium. Indeed, what we have uncovered during this expository discussion is that Iser

considers literature to be significant precisely because it thematizes the human

“plasticity” he insists upon. This open-ended medium, whose “cardinal points” defy our

description, parallels the human inability to step outside ourselves in order to describe

ourselves. We cannot know our death or birth. We assume the scene of our origin, since

it is necessary to our reality, but we can only hope to stage its occurance. Similarly,

since we cannot describe ourselves, we must perform our possible selves. Iser argues

that since fiction is a fundamental human mode of world-making, it too cannot be

described. Fiction can only be grasped as being “enacted” in various contexts and the

literary context is unique since it allows fiction to disclose itself. Here, the relational

dynamism that unfolds between the as-if it were real world of the literary text and the

extra-literary world opens a figurative dimension in language that stages the human

possibility. Iser chooses the metaphor of “plasticity” to represent this potential, and

literature as Ariadne’s thread in the manifestation of our self-exploration. These figures

are attempts to grasp a potential that cannot be but fleetingly grasped, and in the chapter

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that follows we discuss Iser’s attempt present this potential in his articulation of the

imaginary.

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2. The Imaginary

The following chapter sets about introducing the “imaginary”. It begins in

section 2.2 with a summary of Iser’s discussion of “The Imaginary” in chapter four of

The Fictive and the Imaginary, and attempts in 2.3 to demonstrate how this leads to his

emphasis upon play in the literary context in chapter five of that monograph, “Text

Play”. A brief segue is necessary beforehand however, and in section 2.1 we note how it

is that Iser conducts his discussion in order to both portray and describe the human

“self-exploration” through literature, as marked by the indeterminacy, or the “maze of

our own possibilities” mentioned above. Iser’s approach to the writing of The Fictive

and the Imaginary reflects his employment of the imaginary, as an attempt to present

this exploratory element of human experience through literature, rather than in literature,

for it is only in our interaction with literature that the imaginary potential unfolds.

2.1 Iser’s dual approach in The Fictive and the Imaginary

Iser’s “exploratory” strategy is in part motivated by a concern that explanatory

approaches can take on a totalising agency, and an accompanying tendency to reify

what should be considered a “heuristic” engagement. “An explanation” is in danger of

ascending to the level of “the explanation”, for Iser, and he observes this danger not just

in anthropology, but also in the construction of interpretive methodologies for the

conduct of literary critical interpretation. This concern to maintain a level of

indeterminacy in describing the fictionality of the literary text is reflected in Iser’s

approach to the writing of The Fictive and the Imaginary, which in its language use and

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form seems to “stage” that which it describes. Reviewers have frequently noted this

“figurative” quality of The Fictive and the Imaginary, and it is noteworthy that in an

edition of NLH (Winter 2000) devoted to the work of Wolfgang Iser, several

contributors comment on this characteristic. Indeed, Jean Paul Riquelme writes that:

Any attempt to describe the book’s methods and procedures that does not

attend to this supplement is incomplete, since the supplement is not a

distraction or digression from the study but rather an integral part of it.

(61)

In the same issue, Paul Armstrong describes how in The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser:

reflects in part the realization of hermeneutic phenomenology that

epistemological and ontological constants, if they exist, cannot be

grasped through immediate reflection but must be teased out through

cultural interpretation of their varying manifestations. (212)

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan argues in her contribution, “A ‘Figure’ in Iser’s ‘Carpet’”

that Iser’s work progresses through a continuum which self-reflexively enacts the core

concerns of her oeuvre:

for example, early discussions of the reader’s to-and-fro oscillation tend

to take the shape of approach-avoidance formulations in the later work.

True, this increases the difficulty of reading Iser, but – more importantly

– it endows theoretical discourse with the performative nature

characteristic of literature (according to Iser), at once depriving it of a

claim to truth and perpetuating the quest for the inaccessible. (92)

Iser’s work seems to take up a stance that involves features of the literary

medium he seeks to “explore”, in order to explore it. In the chapters that follow – three

and four – this thesis endeavours to explore literary discourse toward an exhibition of

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how Iser’s approach has been misinterpreted, both because of false assumptions and

because of a limiting account of this mode. As we shall see, his description of the

“imaginary” forms the ground upon which this discussion will be conducted.

Chapter four of The Fictive and the Imaginary, “The Imaginary”, concludes with

the words “only language that consumes itself can give articulation to the imaginary”

(246). What does this mean? Riquelme provides an excellent summary in his essay

“The Way of the Chameleon in Iser, Beckett, and Yeats: Figuring Death and the

Imaginary in The Fictive and the Imaginary” where he highlights several developments

and strategies employed by Iser in discussing what he regards as an “integral part” of

The Fictive and the Imaginary:

Iser’s book may be as close an enactment of its subject as anyone is

likely to achieve by means of language that is ostensibly discursive. The

study’s own processes and terms become a staging of its subject. At the

end of the section that deals with “Imagination Dead Imagine,” Iser

remarks that “only language that consumes itself can give articulation to

the imaginary” (FI 246). He has Beckett in mind, but in another mode

The Fictive and the Imaginary is itself an example of that self-consuming

articulation. (“The Way of the Chameleon” 59)

Iser has taken on a curious bridging role under this account, straddling the gap between

the dual figures of literary author and theorist. As Riquelme summarises, Iser employs

the figure of the chameleon to conclude chapter three of The Fictive and the Imaginary,

under the subheading “The Chameleon of Cognition: Some Conclusions about Fiction”,

at the halfway point of the book. Here he makes a distinct transition from discussing the

theme captured in the title of chapter three as, “Fiction Thematized in Philosophical

Discourse” – and as Riquelmes points out – begins a figurative portrayal of the shifting

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and “elusive target” (Fictive 164) fiction became from the eighteenth century forward.

Iser argues that fiction began at that time to be used “for purposes of cognitions”

without the provision of a clear ontological foundation, and it “owed its protean

character to the variety of attempts that were made to grasp it” (Fictive 164). After this

section of the book, the chameleon leaves Iser’s writing, but for Riquelme:

it only changes colour, recurring later in a variety of hues (as protean,

kaleidoscopes, shifts, transpositions, self-transposings, boundary

crossings, dual counterings, contraflows) and in numerous oppositional

pairings (decomposition and composition, nullification and enabling, free

and instrumental play, and the like). (“The Way of the Chameleon” 60)

Iser commonly redeploys such “everyday” terms in his writing rather than generate

neologisms. This has a doubling effect, in that it challenges existing definitions for the

terms, even as he describes a challenge to definitional discourse itself. The necessary

oscillation back and forth between our existing understanding of these commonly used

expressions, their employment in existing theoretical writing, and in Iser’s own work

sets up a dynamic interaction with a set of historical preliminaries that plays upon Iser’s

own articulation of fictionality. We recall his example of Joyce’s “Benefiction”,

whereby the selection and combination of fiction, benediction and benefaction generate

a dynamic interaction of the text with the stability of existing meaning structures, to the

extent that both are challenged even as the new meaning is generated. The reader is

bound to a constant movement between the stability of the existing understanding and

the liminality of the new.

If the double strategy of Iser emerges in the language he employs, it also unfolds

for Riquelme in the very structure of his book, where the introduction of the chameleon

is “an early note of an eventual crescendo” (“The Way of the Chameleon” 60). As he

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introduces and removes the figure of the chameleon, Iser indicates a difference in his

own writing from how it is that fiction is thematized in philosophical discourse. For

Riquelme, the chameleon invites us to participate in Iser’s “abstract, cognitive” writing,

which extends upon a “tradition of philosophical speculation about creativity and

culture” (60). Iser figures and employs the doubling that he continues to return to – even

as he introduces a triadic relief from the traditional literary duality of the fictive and the

real – what Riquelme describes as “mutually illuminating, reciprocally defining figures”

that ensure The Fictive and the Imaginary turns at very important points toward a mode

that is “not discursive”(60). Riquelme employs the key example of the final and late

introduction of the anthropological category of “staging” in the epilogue to the book,

and his use of the terminology:

“fractured ‘holophrase’” (FI 302). The unusual term holophrase denotes

a single word that stands for a complex of ideas. The term appears three

times in the final two pages, first simply as “‘holophrase’” (cited from

the work of Sir Richard Paget), then as “fractured ‘holophrase,’” and

finally, in the antepenultimate sentence as “ever-fractured ‘holophrase.’”

The increasingly emphatic repetition marks the maximum moment of the

book’s rhetorical and conceptual crescendo. This is the point in the

book’s final paragraph at which Iser asserts that, because “cognitive

discourse cannot capture the duality” of staging, “we have literature” (FI

303). (60)

This analysis of Iser takes on some of the rhetorical strategy of literary criticism itself.

Here Riquelme speaks of The Fictive and the Imaginary as though it were a novel, with

turning points and patterns of language use that have a rhythm and purpose, and an

intentional provocation through the use of lacunae, as he argues that the text is “not

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discursive at crucial points”. He argues that Iser’s deliberate exclusion of the

terminology “chameleon” as he shifts from a more literal mode to a primarily figurative

portrayal is alluded to and resonates with the latterly introduced “staging”. The structure

of the concept of staging is figured not just with the employment of the tropic

“Fractured ‘holophrase’”, but is also figured in Iser’s own radical gesture as he seeks to

illustrate the primary arguments he wishes to make about literary fictionality with a

transgression of the boundaries he has established for himself. As Iser cannot describe

the duality of staging, he falls back upon a literary strategy. Riquelme argues that since

Iser executes a turn toward a complex figurative portrayal of staging, “in so far as the

argument has relied on cognitive discourse, it is an act of stepping back from that

argument” (61). Riquelme goes on to summarise his argument as follows:

The synecdoche (holophrase) that stands for a metonymy (the complex

of ideas) is transformed by “fractured” into an irony (something that is

not identical with itself), or into another metonymy (the fractured parts).

No matter whether we understand “fractured” as creating an irony or a

metonymy, the synecdoche of holophrase has been countered. In the

compound trope, figures with contrary implications have been conjoined

in a way that poses difficulties for cognitive discourse. In this case, it

pushes the discourse in directions that it otherwise could not go. Having

climbed as far as possible up the rhetorical and conceptual ladder of

cognitive discourse, Iser here kicks off from the top rung. (61)

The figure of speech “fractured ‘holophrase’” is placed in this gap between modes of

discourse, challenging the reader to question their assumptions about the literary

medium, literary theory and the human interaction with both. We rejoin this discussion

in chapter seven, when we take up the role of this figure in Iser’s articulation of

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“Staging as an Anthropological Category”. For now however, we note that his

description of the “imaginary” is marked by this attempt to “push off from the top rung”,

and to – if only for a moment – allow us to explore the literary medium without

containing the human creature in a reductive and inaccurate explanatory definition. In

this complex exploratory mode, Iser employs both literary and expository discourse to

build a picture of the human possibilities realised in the context of our interaction with

literature.

2.2 Introducing the imaginary

Of the real, fictive and imaginary, the latter is least amenable to a direct

exposition, let alone an efficient précis. Since Iser’s account of the imaginary is limited

to the fictionalizing acts discussed above, it can only be understood in respect of these.

And since the imaginary must remain a potential in order for Iser’s anthropology to

remain faithful to its own presuppositions, it can only be described in these relational

terms. Specifically: the imaginary is a potential triggered by the fictive, and the latter

provides the medium for the manifestation of the former.

In the opening chapter of The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser writes that there is

no “verbalization” of the boundaries of the literary text in respect of the world. Unlike

other representative efforts, literary writing does not explain directly the selection of

certain elements of a larger, extratextual reality for inclusion in the work. Also

incomplete is the manner in which we are to understand the interaction of internal

“semantic enclosures, let alone the revolutionary event of their transgression”, as is the

purpose of having bracketed off this “as if” it were real world in the first instance. The

result is that:

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the cardinal points of the text defy verbalization, and it is only through

these open structures within the linguistic patterning of the text that the

imaginary can manifest its presence. From this fact we can deduce one

last achievement of the the fictive in the fictional text: it brings about the

presence of the imaginary by transgressing language itself. In

outstripping what conditions it, the imaginary reveals itself as the

generative matrix of the text. (21)

The imaginary is the generative matrix of the text, since it is only through the

interaction of text and reader that the aesthetic potential of the literary work can

manifest. The imaginary is therefore made possible by the gaps that are maintained in

the open structures of the text. These linguistic characteristics cannot – paradoxically –

be understood inside of a set of clearly demarcated boundaries. The literary work

transgresses language itself in this open-endedness, and it is this quality that dictates the

necessity for the introduction of the imaginary to Iser’s anthropologically underwritten

account of the aesthetic dimension of literature. As he writes in his preface to The

Fictive and the Imaginary, the imaginary is a “featureless and inactive potential, which

accounts for the failed attempts to grasp it cognitively” (xvii). Instead of being directly

observable the imaginary “discloses itself” as the fictive “compels the imaginary to take

on form” (xvii). The imaginary therefore is not to be thought of as a human faculty,

complete with an identifiable intentionality, but instead as externally motivated, as

“brought into play from outside itself by the subject (Coleridge), by consciousness

(Sartre), or by the psyche or the sociohistorical (Castoriadis), a list that by no means

exhausts the stimulants” (xvii). The featureless imaginary is mediated through and

compelled to take on form by the fictive in the activity of play. Consequently Iser

devotes chapters four and five of The Fictive and the Imaginary to an exploration of this

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interplay, beginning with a contextual account of the imaginary in chapter four and

moving onto play in chapter five.

Chapter four begins with a characteristic deferral and the quelling of any

anticipation of a definition in favour of “some basic conceptualizations” of the

imaginary, which for Iser “largely resists definition” (171). This deferral extends to

literature itself, and here an account of the dynamic “interplay” between the fictive and

the imaginary must replace a traditional telescoping of fiction with literature itself,

writing that “[i]n spite of the common practice of calling novels ‘fiction,’ fictionality is

not literature; it is what makes literature possible” (171). This is important because as

mentioned above, the imaginary is limited to the literary setting under this account and

is only understood to be applicable to the fictionalizing acts of selection, combination

and self-disclosure. The structure of the chapter unfolds as follows: it begins as Iser

grounds his account of the imaginary in foundational discourses under the heading of

“Historical Preliminaries”, concluding that there are three “guiding” concepts emergent

from this grounding, “Faculty, act and the radical imaginary”; he then employs these to

explore manifestations of the imaginary, aiming “less at a definition” than at the events

that unfold through these manifestations; Iser then examines the “Interplay between the

fictive and the imaginary”; and finally a mutually expository discussion as “Excursus:

Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine and Fantasy Literature”. Chapter two of this thesis

focuses upon all but the last of these sections, as the latter moves forward to a

discussion that involves a closer account of play, which we will leave to chapter three

below.

Iser begins with the observation that imagination tends to defy complete

description, and has demonstrated a history of “irreconcilable discourses… concerned

sometimes with its grounding, sometimes its status as an ars combinatoria, and

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sometimes with its status as a faculty” (171). Grouping fantasy with imagination, he

argues that this realm of fantasy was understood as a perfect and transcendent domain

we could only gain access to via art before Nietzsche “for whom art was to transform

itself into perfection” (172). These competing discourses manifest a deeper assertion

that perfection is by definition outside of existing realities, and subsequently generated

“by means of something that has to be overcome” (172). Similarly the romantic ideal of

inspiration and invention frames “fantasy as otherness” (172). This is an alienating

potential that creates the new from other worldly sources, since that which is invented

cannot be predicted on the basis of elements of existing realities. Psychoanalysis on the

other hand “links fantasy to the unconsious” (172). Under such a structured account,

fantasy is necessarily secondary to deeper processes manifesting in the unconscious and

“as desire, fantasy needs a ‘mirror stage’ (Lacan’s term) of the self in order to bring to

light the reverse side of the ego” (172).

For Iser this summary of possible definitions for fantasy demand differing

historical contexts, but each:

reveal fantasy to be an event: It runs counter to imperfection, it changes

the world it enters, it roams around the mind, or it offers the mirror

image of frustrated desires. Repeatedly, fantasy appears not as a

substance but as a function preceding what is, even though it can

manifest itself only in what is. (172)

The possibility of a clear definition of this event based phenomenon is hampered by the

stochastic nature of fantasy. Since this quality invokes the necessity for an examination

of context, the outcome has been such that “purposes are often confused with

definition” (172). Iser examples Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, who

suggests imagination allows for the bonding human experience of projecting oneself

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into the position of the other, thus “the eventfulness is almost humanised” (172). Iser

reminds us that Hume and Goethe warned against the dangers this sleight of hand points

toward. The imagination, stripped of the task of performing a humane role in a

particular context, and of providing us with access to our own experiences, holds the

potential to destroy. Iser describes Goethe as having viewed this “split faculty” as a

possible “source of terror” (173).

Once again Iser’s emphasis is upon the dual nature of human experience – of

being but not “having oneself” – and the unpredictable potential in the human creature.

The imagination and fantasy are then marked by what appear to be a history of

attempting to envelope “a doubleness” with some kind of controlling structure, and that

this event with its threateningly “ambiguous potential” has also manifested in and of its

“potential ambiguity” (173). Indeed, he follows the usage of the term in philosophical

discourse from the 17th century forward, concluding that:

in both idealist and empiricist philosophy the imagination was on its way

to becoming the ground of all cognition. But while foundational

discourse - regardless of the context used as reference – always set

imagination/fantasy in relation to something else, the various functional

descriptions led only to its unfathomableness. A function whose basis is

inexplicable and a grounding that dwindles into a regressus only serve to

bring out the ambiguity of the imagination. (175-6)

It is not surprising then, that he draws upon the figure of the chameleon in portraying

the ambiguity of this integral human component. In fumbling toward the imaginary, Iser

shows us a complex, groundless phenomenon, always reliant upon context for its

portrayal as an event that unfolds, which cannot “produce its own salience, which

comes about through interplay of the various factors that have mobilized it” (184).

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The guiding contexts of faculty, act, and radical imaginary begin for Iser with

Coleridge, who provided the “last significant attempt to grasp the imagination as a

faculty”. Quoting from Coleridge’s essay “On Poesy or Art”, where he wrote that

“natura naturans… presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul

of man” whereby the mind makes “the external internal, the internal external, to make

nature thought, and thought nature – this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts” (190-

1). While this perspective on the imagination is now obsolete, Iser considers that

elements of this context driven account of the imaginary are relevant to his discussion.

These elements include that the imagination:

is not a self-activating potential, and when it is mobilized by an outside

stimulant, it reveals itself as a differentiated play movement described by

Coleridge as “wavering.” Furthermore, imagination is characterised by a

duality; since production is preceded by destruction, the idea of creatio

ex nihilo is revealed to be pure mythology. (194)

Since Coleridge held that the imagination is a faculty, and that faculties are groundless,

as existence is groundless and incomprehensible, “what is cannot be of the same quality

as the source from which it springs” (186). Integral to Iser’s exposition of Coleridge is

the oscillation between mind and nature this groundlessness necessitates for subjective

human experience to manifest. For Coleridge “the mind cannot become conscious of

itself of its own accord” and therefore “[c]onsciousness needs something else that in

itself has to be groundless so that it will not define the mind according to its own terms”

leading a “to-ing and fro-ing between mind and nature, with the mind being revealed as

the interior of nature and nature being revealed as the unconscious mind” (190). This

movement is however, only a “primary” domain of imagination at work. Coleridge had

borrowed from thought “as far back as the Aristotlean concept of memoria” (188) a

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tripartite division of the imagination into “fancy”, “secondary” and “primary”

imagination, in order to articulate a model of the imaginary that could underwrite what

Iser describes as a “subject’s self constituting” (189). The secondary imagination, whilst

barely distinguishable from the primary imagination, “decomposes the world of objects

and then creates this world anew in such a manner that the hitherto inconceivable

structure of consciousness becomes present to the mind” (191). Fancy involves making

“empirical choices” that “facilitate the combining of data to meet the needs of the

situation” (p188). This confluence of faculties mitigates the imaginary and the real in an

infinite cycle of self-generation. The subject “wavers” or oscillates between the process

of self-constitution and the information discovered in the “empirical world” (191). For

Iser the “hall mark” of this tripartite division manifests in a three part oscillation:

“between mind and nature (primary imagination), between decomposition and

recomposition (secondary imagination), and between combination and separation

(fancy)” (191). The relevance of this account is built about the observation that the

subject is not coextensive with a cognate being’s access to the empirical world that

precedes its self creation. The groundless faculty of the imagination Coleridge presents

“plays with and against the very agent that has mobilized it” (194), revealing that the

imagination is not a traditionally manifesting faculty that can be employed toward a

predicted and intentional end.

This faculty oriented imaginary allows the subject to grasp itself, and the

stochastic potential of such a process suits Iser’s discussion of the human imaginary.

But as Iser notes under the second sub-heading “The Imaginary as Act” Sartre rendered

the portrayal of the imagination as faculty “virtually obsolete” by removing this link in

L’Imaginaire (1940). For Iser Sartre’s phenomenological psychology of the imaginary,

like Coleridge’s imagination, “was unknowable” and able to be “grasped only in stages

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that lead from what appears to be the ‘certain’ through to the ‘probable’” (195). Here

the imaginary manifests “relations of consciousness to objects as mental images” (195).

The imaginary is of particular importance given that for Sartre, we know nothing of

consciousness outside “its relation to objects” (195). The capacity to generate objects as

mental images is an effort under the command of consciousness, but the creative

process whereby this unfolds is beyond direct control since “[t]hese may range from the

illusion of having a perception to having a hallucination” (196). By employing

“memory, knowledge, and given information” the imaginary object is described by

Sartre as “‘being grasped as nothing’” (qtd. in Iser 196). Here the imaginary generates

an object that negates what can be directly observed as a mental image and “makes way

for the irreal presence of the absent” (196). So Coleridge’s subject is very different from

Sartre’s, in that the groundless faculty that allowed the subject to grasp itself has now

given way to the “nothing”, such that the object that orients consciousness and provides

our means of a phenomenal access to consciousness “causes an almost total turnabout of

our condition. And this turnabout may go so far as to make our present existence

unreal” (196). As a result, the mental image precedes the imaginary recomposition of

our world as “nothing”, so that the imaginary object is held at arm’s length by

consciousness. Through perception “consciousness can direct itself” toward objects in

the given world, but then “the act of imagining posits its own object” (196). This is of

great importance, since consciousness is only able to manifest as “consciousness of

something” (196). Consciousness resists being enfolded into its own mental images, by

virtue of the “nothing” that precedes them. If this “nothing” were to dissipate,

consciousness would reach an end as the activity of relating to the object is complete.

The paradoxicality of the “Imaginary as Act” is constituted by this dislocation between

consciousness and the imaginary. Consciousness may call upon the imaginary, but it

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also “slides into the mental image and becomes an ideating consciousness” as against a

“perceptual consciousness” (196-7). As Iser points out, “there is no such thing as

consciousness in itself, since consciousness can only be consciousness of what it has

made conscious” (197). The relationship between consciousness and the imaginary

offered by Sartre implies a “continual sliding and tilting” between stances in respect of

the given world which is “unpredictable” (204). The subject anchored in respect of this

world inevitably participates in its production, such that the subject does not simply

move beyond the given world, but is “driven” beyond it by virtue of its own

manifestation. Therefore, speaking of a singular consciousness or imaginary becomes

irrelevant.

This discussion inspires Iser to posit the “kaleidoscopically shifting” and the

“unfathomableness” of the imaginary as “an endlessness of gaming”. The unpredictable

interplay between consciousness and the imaginary is for Iser “what first makes gaming

possible” (204). As these two approaches – as faculty and as act – to the imaginary

become increasingly anachronistic, Iser questions just how we are to “grasp the

imaginary” (205)? He points out that the imaginary has become, if anything, more

significant in a range of disciplines, including psychoanalysis, anthropology and social

theory. The third approach Iser examines, under the the title “Radical Imaginary”, is

Castoriadis’ shift in scope from subjectivity or consciousness to society in general. If

Sartre’s liberation of the imaginary from the limiting role of faculty invoked an array of

possibilities for instances of the imaginary, for Iser Castoriadis was placing the

constitution of society itself in this domain: “now, not only the subject but also society

are ‘made’ into what they are, first and foremost by the imaginary” (207). Institutions

that function to undergird an individual’s experience do not supercede the imaginary,

but are constituted by virtue of the imaginary being activated. The functionalist

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explanation for the manifestation of institutions is based on the presupposition of a

possible explanation of and for these human “needs”. However, Castoriadis questions

what these “real needs” might be in his Imaginary Institution of Society (1987)10, “‘once

we leave the company of higher apes, human groups provide themselves with needs that

are not simply biological?’” (qtd. in Fictive 207). Iser’s summary concludes that since

the criterion for the description of these needs is not exacting, the conditions which

precede the institutionalisation of society are not known, and this “leaves an empty

space, which is now to be occupied by the imaginary” (208). Since our ancient mythical

explanations – what Iser calls an “Ur-foundation” – that point beyond consciousness are

perhaps more apt to this unknowable set of precedent conditions, excepting that the

shifting historical exigencies that issue forth into institutional structure would also

demand updates to this mythology. The social imaginary, or radical imaginary that

Castoriadis suggests as a replacement is “an ultimate that needs society as a medium for

its appearance, just as society needs it in order to become institionalized” (208). The

goal of this shift is to open this development to our inspection and analysis. The

character of the imaginary for Castoriadis in Iser’s analysis is “unfathomable” (206).

Lacan and other “current psychoanalytic trends” have tended to contain the imaginary

as an “unreal double” to the Platonic “eidos”, and under the conditions of this

conceptual approach the formation of the latter cannot be co-incidental with the

functioning of the former. Castoriadis in Imaginary Institution wrote “[t]he imaginary

of which I am speaking is not an image of. It is the unceasing and essentially

undetermined (socio-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images…

‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are its works” (qtd. in Fictive 207). So Castoriadis removes his

perspective from the Lacanian “image of” perspective on the imaginary, as in Platonic

10 Iser cites the Kathleen Blamey translation (Fictive 328 n59).

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ontology whereby the very possibility of such an imaginary “mirror”, or other as mirror

are a part of the suite of outcomes to the functioning of an “unfathomable” imaginary.

And while the social imaginary as a replacement for myth does not seem like a radical

shift, or a change at all, this is a convenient similarity for Castoriadis, who employs it to

emphasise how his analysis of institutionalisation distances his work from traditional

social theory. Iser describes this in terms of the generative potential in origin: “What

distinguishes current social theories from those positing myth as their origin is the fact

that they are conceived in terms of an ‘identitary logic’” (209). Here Iser describes

Castoriadis as tracing the origin of contemporary social theories to an “originary being”,

in order to set his theory in contrast to an underpinning determinacy he identifies in

existing theory: the primordial foundation of myth does not produce a mythical society,

and an originary being does not produce being. Under such an analysis, the imaginary

becomes the “‘other’ of determinacy”, rather than indeterminate (209). Castoriadis is

attempting to escape a tendency he identifies in Western thought, toward associating

being and determinacy, and so the imaginary is not to be thought of as the ground of

being, “instead it is unfolded by way of projection, violation, and change” (210).

Castioriadis then replaces determinacy in his description with “magma”, a metaphor

employed to portray the range of possible transformations the “determinate” can

undergo, where the radical imaginary “causes its constitution, decay and rejection”

(211). As Iser describes it, the radical imaginary is “always present in the magma as the

‘other’ of the determinate”, but must be activated, just as the subject activated the

faculty of the imaginary, and the act of imagining was activated by consciousness (211).

In the case of the fluidity of the radical imaginary, caught up on the magma of modes of

being, this ephemeral category is activated and takes on more lucid form – “its fluid

gestalt” – only under particular socio-historical and psychical contextual conditions:

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a gestalt that, in relation to society solidifies into “imaginary

significations”; in relation to the psyche, it becomes a “Vorstellung”

which as “representation (Vorstellung) is not re-presentation

(Vertretung); it is not there for something else or in place of something

else, to re-present it a second a time”. (211)

So representation manifests as an imaginary phenomenon. If “[s]ociety and psyche…

exist only through the imaginary, while the imaginary can be manifested only through

them”(218), this process of solidification into “imaginary significations” is integral to

the bridge between Castoriadis’ radical imaginary and language. Iser argues that for

Castoriadis, signification is not limited to particular word meaning, and though it may

be codified in terms of a lexical definition, the possibility of such a code is underwritten

by the notion that meaning is “magma”. Meaning achieves momentary concretisation in

its use of symbolic orders that lead to the codifying of meaning for words through their

use as a representation for some arbitrary meaning. But the word could mean other

things. In this use, Iser compares the “magma” portrayal of signification in Castoriadis

to Bakhtin:

Each meaning consolidates itself through what it excludes, and whatever

is said, adumbrates something that is not meant. The more a meaning

tends to figure something, however, the less important is what it

designates, and its reference begins to shift away from denotation toward

connotation. What is figured can only be imagined, and its conceivability

orients itself by what is being said in order to grasp the adumbrations.

(216)

Representation as an extension of the imaginary is operating in the negative, toward

what can only be described in fluid terms itself. Language then, as an extension of this

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understanding, extends fluidly through the imaginary and into the figures we employ

toward representation, just as the codification of meaning operates in the removal of

meaning. The resulting interplay of the imaginary and language generates a movement

toward the figurative, even as use becomes more vigorous. As Iser concludes:

[t]his interplay between what is said and not meant, meant and not said,

serves to shape the figuration. Imaginary significations are those that

privilege figuration. The code-regulated relationship of signifier and

signified is outstripped, because imaginary significations are devoid of

any reference to the world of objects; instead, as signifiers, they are

instructions for bringing about what they figure. (216)

This recursive picture of the functioning of the radical imaginary in language brings Iser

to conclude that the imaginary in Castoriadis “unfolds as a play movement on all levels,

and makes levels play against one another” (219).

2.3 The imaginary and play

So how is play a means of linking these various descriptions to the “Interplay of

the Fictive and the Imaginary”? Under that sub-heading Iser begins to draw together his

critical history of the imaginary by examing how they each relate to the issue of

intentionality. Since the imaginary is a potential that is activated from without in each of

the contextual accounts raised by Iser, he argues that “it follows that the imaginary has

no intentionality of its own” (Fictive 223). Iser is at pains to remind the reader that his

three main points of focus “by no means exhaust” (223) the range of “potential

stimulants” (223) to the imaginary, but concludes that in the contexts explored the

“subject (Coleridge)”, “consciousness (Sartre)”, and the “psyche or the socio-historical

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(Castoriadis)” are all stimulants to the imaginary. In his examples at least, a pattern

emerges. In all three they act as triggers to the imaginary potential and irrespective of

which activator is identified in a given context, are therefore not equivalent to the

intention that mobilizes the imaginary. Rather, it is the case that as a result of this

triggering, “something will ‘happen’ to the activator” (223). But this activation of the

imaginary is therefore changeable, and of context, in the sense that it will always

manifest “in interplay with its different activators” (223). This suggests a complex

interaction of the intention of the activator, and the outcomes as they may manifest

through the various ways the imaginary then interacts with its activators. Iser concludes

that the imaginary therefore becomes evident via a dual process involving play as an

outcome and as a necessary characteristic of the imaginary interacting with its

activators: “play may be seen as a product of activation as well as a condition for the

productivity bought about by the interaction it stimulates” (223). The imaginary, which

can never be directly perceived for Iser, is not to be construed as interchangeable with

play. While the imaginary is drawn together through play, and this involves a “cognitive

statement”, the imaginary is not to be considered as manifesting in any particular state

or form, whole or otherwise, just as play is not to be “taken as an ontological foundation

of the imaginary” (223).

There is a similarity between the structure of Iser’s real-fictive-imaginary triad

and Lacan’s “real-symbolic-imaginary”. The “Borromean knot” Lacan uses to describe

the interdependence of his three “orders” is tantamount to the interplay of the real, the

fictive and the imaginary in the context of the literary. As Bowie writes, the Borromean

knot is made up of “two separate links joined to each other by a third, and in such a way

that if any one of the links is severed the whole thing falls apart” (194). While, as

discussed above, Iser distances his own categorical description of the “imaginary” from

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Lacan’s, there seems a strong similarity to the synchronic, and thereby futile, attempt at

direct description of the orders Lacan undertakes. Iser’s imaginary is described as a

potential, or as a virtual possibility, and this is certainly a synchronic presentation of the

phenomenon, though it is not entirely clear how this category may be mobilized and

employed toward a larger (universal) understanding of the human, or in a generalized

account of the human subject. Moving beyond the bounds of the literary is not Iser’s

business in The Fictive and the Imaginary, though, like Lacan, his description of the

real, fictive and imaginary does seek to become “a way of exploring what it is that these

three orders have in common” (Evans 19-20). For Iser, this common ground between

his categories is realized as a playful (liminal) space, articulated in terms of the ludic, as

games. However, for Lacan, there is a great deal more at stake in his “orders”, where

“[t]he three orders together comprise a complex topological space in which the

characteristic disorderly motions of the human mind can be plotted” (Bowie 98-9).

On the basis of this fundamental division, whereby the imaginary is understood

in terms of play but the latter is not to be aligned with or taken as the ground for the

imaginary, it is “aspects and not the totality” of play that will allow us to grasp the

imaginary. Consequently:

Every statement about the function of play is eo ipso a philosophical one,

and there is no shortage of philosophies of play. But the philosophical

statement seeks to define the function of play, while the basic to-and-fro

play movement within which the imaginary bodies itself forth can never

be defined a priori through any particular functions. (223)

It would therefore be a mistake to suggest that by virtue of the fact of philosophical

statements about the function of play being available or necessary, we can presume to

employ these to predict a particular pathway down which the imaginary will travel in

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manifesting itself. The imaginary remains subject to the conditions of its manifestation,

such that “the imaginary unfolds itself as play but can never be thematised as such”

(224). Furthermore, play is tasked to fulfill particular purposes and once these are

fulfilled it comes to a halt. As a result, play is to be understood as transitory, and in its

versatile range of possibilities moves “to and fro” across a range of fields of reference.

Iser describes these as follows:

These may be the mind’s internalization of nature, the kaleidoscopic

sliding and tilting of conscious attitudes, psychogenesis, or changes in

society. Once the purpose is fulfilled, play ends, appearing

retrospectively, in relation to the results achieved, as a transitory phase of

extreme latency. Such latency of continually differentiating play

movements, triggered by various agents that mobilize the imaginary,

makes play into a matrix for production. (224)

Since this purposive element is salient, any philosophical account of play would require

a clear statement of pragmatic boundaries and it follows that such a statement must

“dissipate rather than capture” so transitory a phenomenon as play. Predictions of this

kind are not conducive to a portrayal of the “fecundity” of play, which must instead of

simple presupposition of purpose be assessed in terms of “the variety of games” that

play consists in (224).

Now when the imaginary is mobilized and “discloses itself as play” (224) in a

fictive setting something very interesting unfolds. Since the the imaginary is activated

by an agent in a purposive fashion, and the fictive element of literature reveals “far less

of the pragmatic orientation” an extra-literary agent will display, the play that results

“will be given freer rein” (224). Iser describes this difference as one which opens up a

greater potential for “play variations”, but warns similarly that the “fictive is not to be

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understood as a definition of play but functions rather, as a means of making the

imaginary accessible to experience outside its pragmatic function, without allowing it to

swamp the mind in the manner of dreams or hallucinations” (224-5). For Iser this freer,

less clearly purposive triggering agent of the imaginary must issue forth into a greater

potential for variation in game play. Now no longer married to the pragmatism of a non-

literary setting, this transitory play “discloses” the imaginary and unfolds dynamically

without overtaking the mind as other forms of such non-pragmatic imaginary

phenomenon must. Importantly, this is so since the fictive as a trigger to the imaginary

in respect of the real, differs from other “activators” by virtue of its “doubling structure”

(225). As characterised in chapter one of this thesis, the fictionalizing acts that unfold in

the literary setting function to contrast the extra-literary or given world with its

particular socio-historical parameters, with the “as-if” world of the literary text.

Elements of the given world are selected and combined in such a fashion as to disclose

this “as-if” re-presentation of elements of particular socio-historical epoch employed, in

a doubling structure that underpins “the co-existence of two mutually exclusive sign

systems” (225). In chapter two of The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser presents

“Renaissance Pastoralism as a Paradigm of Literary Fictionality”. He selects this

example because pastoralism links “an artificial, deliberately concocted world with a

socio-historical one”, and thereby “epitomizes doubling as a hallmark of literary

fictionality” (225). His concern in this chapter on pastoralism is “less to interpret

pastoral poetry than to extrapolate a basic structure that is a generative matrix” (225),

since the fictive element of literature is not to be equated with the literary work, but

instead as a phenomenon that allows the work to manifest. For Iser “pastoralism may be

taken as a metatext of literary fictionality” because “since Virgil the unmistakable

tendency to make art itself the subject matter of pastoral poetry prevailed” (225). This

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unfolds as a doubling of two worlds, namely, the “concocted and the socio-historical”.

Iser cites Schlegel, who in a different context described such reflexivity as the dual

presentation of “two centra, or the constitutive duality of a work, [which] can be viewed

as an ideal rendering of reflexivity in its essence, namely as dual play between two

poles of reflexivity” (qtd. in Fictive 225). Literary fictionality manifests this doubling

structure and “makes room for play” (226), such that the apparently paradoxical

coexistence of mutually exclusive worlds, the “artifical and the historical” (225), via the

fictionalizing acts of selection, combination and self-disclosure.

Distinguishing the nature of the doubling each of these acts manifests might also

open up play to our inspection:

the nature of their doubling… produces different areas of play. Selection

opens up one area between fields of reference and their distortion in the

text; combination opens up another between interacting textual

segments; and the ‘as-if’ opens up another between an empirical world

and its transposition into a metaphor for what remains unsaid. The

doubling structure of these fictionalizing acts creates the area of play by

holding on to everything that has been overstepped, thus making it a

partner in the game of countermoves. Each overstepping multiplies the

difference that constitutes the play area. (229)

As Iser employs his account of these fictionalizing acts to begin to open up the space of

play to analysis, his emphasis is upon a series of doubling actions. Here world and text

are bought into relief as elements are selected for inclusion, just as the intra-textual

order is doubled by virtue of its own interacting “textual segments” realised via

combination, and the world presented by the text “as-if” it were real necessarily reduces

the extra-literary setting up a dynamic that ensures what is left behind is also

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highlighted. This structure self-multiplies even as it includes, by emphasising what is

withheld, and in this activity both generates the space of play and multiplies this

possibility by virtue of the generative difference between the artificial and the historical

worlds that co-exist through the text. Iser invokes Derrida in order to portray the

“difference” in the “writing” as having the means to “specify and extend” which is “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” (229). This difference

provides the potential for play to unfold, in that it is maintained in the paradoxicality of

the simultaneous manifestation of the mutually exclusive spheres that interpenetrate text

and world. For Iser, this difference is not overcome by the iterative “referral of the

separated elements to one another”, but is instead underwritten by this back and forth

movement, such that the origins of this movement are not deffered but constitute “a

structure that enables the text to play itself out beyond the boundaries of its own

individual world” (229).

The result is that the fictive itself has a double application in its interaction with

the imaginary. It both opens up the spaces of play and simultaneously “compels the

imaginary to take on a form while at the same time acting as the medium for its

manifestation” (230). Here the imaginary is triggered by the fictive, and the

intentionality behind this triggering is relatively open-ended. But what makes the

literary fictionality peculiarly interesting is that intentionality, regardless of context and

the pragmatic boundaries of purpose behind the imaginings triggered, cannot determine

the imaginary directly. Instead they shape it with various levels of success, according to

the purpose as dictated by context. Fictionalizing acts are for Iser appropriate

mechanisms by which to mediate such processes. As he places it:

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Imposing form, therefore, entails determining what is otherwise

indeterminate, and such an attempt becomes successful to the degree in

which an indeterminable imaginary is shaped by differentiating contexts.

Fictionalizing acts are ideally suited to such a task, and the question

arises as to whether the fictive in literature is not bound to divide itself

into such acts if it is to provide the basis for the moulding of something

that by its nature is featureless. (230)

In the concluding remark above Iser seeks to attach his own subdivision of the

fictionalizing acts to the interplay between the fictive and the imaginary by suggesting

this division of effort is a kind of best fit to the featureless imaginary. If Iser is to

maintain the open “potential” of the imaginary, it cannot be consigned to a particular

activity, but must be available to the subdivision of the kind he describes in his account

of selection, combination and self-disclosure.

Such a division casts the emphasis back upon dynamism, and the necessity for

context to be the delimiting factor in our understanding of the doubling perspective the

literary context allows. To be both in the historical circumstances of one’s immediate

experience, and to have simultaneous access to the “as-if” worlds available via the

literary medium this doubled status must be maintained through Iser’s description. He

begins such a process by describing “selection” in terms of “coherent deformation”, a

term taken from the theory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As with many of Iser’s key

terms, this was employed in his writings as early as 1975. In “The Reality of Fiction: a

functionalist approach to literature” he cites Merleau-Ponty who wrote that “A meaning

is always present when the data of the world are subjected by us to a ‘coherent

deformation’” (qtd. in “The Reality of Fiction” 31). Iser discussed this concept in

respect of Ulysses. Here Iser argues that “Joyce projects all his Homeric and

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Shakespearean allusions onto everyday life in Dublin” and a “two-way” effect unfolds

leading to “deformation of both elements: the literary repertoire encroaches on everyday

life, and the archetype is encroached on by a plethora of unstructured material drawn

from the address books and newspapers of the day” (31-2). This early precursor to his

articulation of such a dual process in The Fictive and the Imaginary carries the same

preoccupation with the mutually altering “as-if” world of the text, and the given world,

or the socio-historical with the synthetic real. In The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser

argues that the fictionalizing act of selection “cancels out the original organisation of

the realities that recur in the text”, and this alteration leads to “eventful disorder, or

‘coherent deformation’” (231). This apparently destructive re-ordering is thereby

generative of the “as-if” reality of the text, and the generative potential of the

fictionalizing act in producing the new order. As we have seen, extra-textual reality is

maintained as the reference for the various acts of fictionalizing, even as they are

“overstepped”. Combination, similarly with selection participates in this action, as it

oversteps “encapsulated items from external fields of reference, the linguistic

designations, the relations between characters, textual schemata, and semantic

enclosures” (232). Importantly though, it is the potential of the imaginary that manifests

this possible re-ordering, or overstepping of existing realities with their formal and

informal systemic features, and the overstepped are maintained because of this potential.

They “remain present, they mirror one another, and whatever they have denoted or

represented becomes latent – not nullified but derestricted” (232) and since they are not

cancelled, they are “opened up”. Existing terms, for example, with meanings established

by a context, by a conventional usage, are derestricted for use in “manifold

applications”. Finally then, the fictionalizing act of self-disclosure underwrites the

proposition that the world of the text is to be taken only “as-if” it were real so that the

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new can be generated, or the “nonexistent can be visualised as a reality” (232). This act

opens up a necessary space for the imaginary to manifest, for the imaginary needs a

medium but “cannot coincide with its medium”, the act of self-disclosure facilitates the

imaginary manifesting since it “turns the textual world emerging from selection and

combination into pure possibility”, as a “model for the production of new worlds” (233-

4). Meanwhile selection and combination demonstrate how this productive difference is

maintained in a playful interaction of the copresent fictive and imaginary. Selection, for

example, Iser claims as unfolding “the imaginary as counterplay between past and

present” whilst combination “sets of the given against otherness” (232).

This “simultaneity of the mutually exclusive” underpins Iser’s theoretical

position, and must substantiate his later conclusion that “Play arises out of the

coexistence of the fictive and the imaginary” (238). The latter assertion is integral to

Iser’s account of the imaginary, since he views the initial circumstances of play as being

made possible by the manner in which the fictive compels the “featureless” imaginary

to manifest and supplies the “medium for its manifestation” by providing the potential

for boundary crossings to occur. The doubled structuring of the fictive “unfolds” the

imaginary as a “dual countering of simultaneous decomposing and enabling” (234). The

terms “dual countering”, “decomposing and enabling” require some further explanation.

The concept of “dual countering” is drawn from Heidegger, who employs the concept

of Gegenwendigkeit in his famous essay “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks”. Iser translates

the term to mean dual countering in the context; he commented to J. Hillis Miller during

a round-table discussion in 1996 that:

You remember, Hillis, we once tried, I think, successfully to correct the

Heideggerian term “Gegenwendigkeit” in the essay on “Ursprung des

Kunstwerks”, which in English is rendered by “contradiction.” “Dual

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countering” – that’s what we came up with and this at least grasps

something of what “gegenwendigkeit” in this particular context implies.

(“Ernst Behler’s ‘The Contemporary and the Posthumous’” 39)

The important philosophical delineation made here by Iser is integral to the success of

his literary anthropology. Iser maintains a distinction between the imaginary, the fictive

and the real. He simultaneously engages the manner in which the subject oscillates

between the “as-if” world an interaction with the literary text unfolds, by activating the

imaginary potential via fictionalizing acts. The “dual countering” invoked here, is

between contradictory but mutually reliant elements. “Dual countering” then is an

action that invokes simultaneous and mutally reliant processes that Iser describes as

“enabling by decomposing”, concluding that “nullification and enabling go hand in

hand” (Fictive 234). In Heidegger’s terms, and emerging during Heidegger’s discussion

of the “origin of the artwork” mentioned in the quotation above (“Ursprung des

Kunstwerks”), this manifests as “not a rift (Riss) as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather it

is an intimacy with which opponents belong to each other” (qtd. in Fictive 234). The

imaginary remains in all this, a potential, and though the fictive enacts this rift by

activating the imaginary, it remains reliant upon the imaginary for the degree to which

this manifests. In Iser’s terms, the:

extent to which the fictive ‘splits’ the imaginary into such a dual

countering is the extent to which it remains, in its turn, dependent on the

imaginary. For as a boundary-crossing, fictionality is an act of pure

consciousness whose intentionality is punctured by indeterminacies, and

therefore it can maintain only the general direction toward its target.

(234)

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The problematic ontological features of intentionality, consciousness and the “sublime”

imaginary are restrained in Iser’s account since he stops short of completing the

imaginary. He maintains its potential by arranging it in a dynamic interaction with the

fictive which is both synchronic and diachronic. On the one hand, the imaginary is

reliant on the fictive for its mediation and activation, on the other the fictive relies upon

the imaginary to fill the empty consciousness that renders it the potential medium for

the imaginary in the first instance. The imaginary, then, manifests as this dual

countering, mediated by the fictive, and as the various acts of fictionalizing unveil, this

unfolds as the simultaneous manifestation of an action that decomposes and enables as

boundary-crossings are underwritten and enacted through the doubled phenomenon of

the fictive. Fictionalizing involves the removal of elements of an extra-literary reality

from their existing contexts and combined in a new order, that both reflects what is left

behind, and sets up contrasting and dynamic interaction between the “as-if” it were real

world of the text, and the contexts from which its elements are removed.

In the issue of NLH devoted to “The Writings of Wolfgang Iser”, Gabriel

Motzkin’s contribution, “Iser’s Anthropological Reception of the Philosophical

Tradition”, includes the following comment on the broader issue of the philosophical

underpinnings of Iser’s approach:

At the beginning of this century, German Idealist philosophy dissolved in

(at least) three distinct ways. Iser is obligated to two of them directly,

and to a third indirectly. These three ways are signified by the names

Emil Lask, Hans Vaihinger, and Edmund Husserl. Lask appears in Iser's

work in the guise of Constantine Castoriadis, who, like Lucien

Goldmann and Martin Heidegger, was affected by his modern

Neoplatonism. Vaihinger appears as Vaihinger, a second-rate

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philosopher who happened upon, malgré lui, a very interesting theory

which has continued to serve as a reference point. Husserl is rarely

discussed explicitly in Iser’s work, but it is unclear how Iser’s work

could have been written without presupposing Husserl. (164)

German Idealism plays a key role in Iser’s work, and his dogged insistence on the

maintenance of the open category of the imaginary, with its countervailing, but dynamic

interaction with the fictive in respect of the real, finds its roots in an important

distinction between consciousness and the creation of consciousness. Motzkin suggests

that Lask, Vaihinger, Husserl, and Iser all hold in common a view of consciousness as

being an act, but not an imaginary act. However, without detailing the specific

arguments, we leap straight to Motkin’s conclusion that “all three philosophers succumb

to what could be called the philosopher’s temptation, from which Iser saves himself.

Namely, they are unable to distinguish ontologically between the act of consciousness

and its creation” (166). We do so since the point here is not to attack Lask, Vaihinger

and Husserl, but instead to recognize a mutual philosophical challenge to maintain the

productive potential of the imaginary as a simultaneously decomposing and enabling

“dual countering”, whereby the fictive is a form of consciousness that mediates this

potential. This dual countering involves a capacity to maintain a doubled structure for

this consciousness in the fictive, such that the subject as an individual experience of this

decentred self, maintains the means by which to make sense of a heterogenous array of

meaning structures:

Both Heidegger and Derrida criticize the philosophical tradition for its

preference for a presentist philosophy of identity. I think that this cursory

examination shows that the objection is well-taken if we understand

identity as meaning homogeneity, that is, the denial of the experience of

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heterogeneity as being itself a founding experience of consciousness. For

a philosophy that accepts heterogeneity, however, there can be no good-

faith investigation of the ways in which the mind transforms its inputs in

order to know them because such a philosophy would have to deny the

possibility that things can be known through their homogeneous

transformations. (167)

For Iser, the literary medium allows via the fictionalizing acts and the dual countering

of the imaginary, for the expansion of an array of possibilities in a very real experience.

But this expanding array, facilitated by the interplay of the fictive and the imaginary, is

also countered by this interplay. And so, freed of the “pragmatic burdens of the

empirical world” (Fictive 235), the heterogeneity that makes up the pure consciousness

of the fictive is able to be counterbalanced by the imaginary, and so denied

simultaneously, as “destruction and enabling” (235). Iser’s structuring of this possibility

in the literary setting via the imaginary led Motzkin to ask in his paper whether or not

his position opens up a simultaneous convolution of ontological dimensions:

in that case the question arises of whether the imaginary only exists for

the fictionalizing act, or for example whether a doxic imaginary exists as

well. One could argue that all acts draw from the same imaginary. I do

not think that this is Iser’s position. One could argue that what the doxic,

the act of belief, confronts, is quite different from what the fictionalizing

confronts, so different that it cannot at all be called imaginary. Finally

one could argue that there are different imaginaries that make themselves

available to different acts, just as there are different possible worlds, and

that following Iser we have to understand these as different ontological

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worlds. We thus find ourselves in a limitless set of different ontological

worlds all the time. (168)

Though belief is a necessary structure of identity, since Iser limits himself to

fictionalizing acts, this broader challenge does not need be met here. However, it does

beckon us toward a deeper issue for Iser’s theory, as to how it can contain the

“limitless” potential he identifies as a basic human characteristic. The imaginary can

only be grasped in the fleeting manifestations of play, and Iser deals with play unfolding

in the literary setting through language. Here, the basic structure of language is invoked

to demonstrate the manner in which the fictionalizing act of self-disclosure opens the

figurative dimension of the text. As we have seen, Iser argues that the literary world

manifests “as-if” it were real. The fictionalizing acts and the imaginary do not denote a

given world, but instead figure a possible world that simultaneously stands in relation to

the given world. This dimension of the text operates beyond the denotative function of

the linguistic sign, and manifests the “possible worlds” of the literary text. Therefore,

the basic structure of language allows Iser to articulate how the literary text permits

humans to stage their possible selves in a self-exploration that reflects the performative

nature of representation. The human, and the literary text, are open-ended in terms of

language. But left unanswered, are the questions as to what contains language itself, and

from where does this basic structure in language emerge? This will be further discussed

in chapter seven of this thesis, where we examine the reception of Iser’s work by Eric

Gans, who proposes that the “staged” element of Iser’s literary anthropology requires an

originary account of the sign.

For now we conclude our account of the imaginary by noting that Iser does view

this interplay of the fictive and the imaginary as a process of “staging” possible realities,

and “nullifying” realities, in a process we appear to need. He takes as his premise the

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observation that “reality is not to be conceived as a limitation of the possible” (235).

The latter can “become a horizon to realities” (235), but then realities are constantly

updated, and if there are no distinctions to be made between possibilities and realities,

then Iser asks where these issue from? Following Globus, Iser argues that we are the

“plenum” of our own possibilities: that humans bear “all their possibilities within

themselves” and not identical to any particular one, but “left dangling between them”

(235). Then modifying this model of the human that precedes itself in an apparently

self-limiting fashion, Iser suggests the plenum “cannot be purely given” and is instead

“only conceivable as a continual process of emergence” (236). He argues for a

“profound anthropological significance” on behalf of the interplay between the fictive

and the imaginary, since this emergence manifests as yet unknown possibilities, and the

unfolding of these indicates that they “can never be fully present to themselves” (236).

But here is the necessity of play to the unfolding of human possibilities, in the:

playing out of the plenum of possibilities through a constant alternation

of composing and decomposing fabricated worlds. As there is no way to

grasp how this alternation operates, the playing out can be enacted only

in its potentially innumerable variations in order for it to be perceived as

it happens. This, in turn, is brought out by the fictive mobilizing the

imaginary as a dual countering. (236)

The enactment of fictionalizing triggers the imaginary to manifest, to become tangible

and even as it slips away into the issue of new possibilities. The play that sustains this

self-unfolding activity of the plenum of possibilities forms our next point of attention, in

the opening section to chapter three below.

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3. The Interplay of the Fictive and the Imaginary

The following chapter is initially concerned with extending our discussion of the

fictive and the imaginary in order to examine how Iser charts their interaction in terms

of play and games. But the precedent to this eventual focus upon the play based staging

of human possibilities in the literary setting is his dissatisfaction with the lack of rigor

displayed in the development of method and the employment of theory as means by

which to establish empirical proofs for particular interpretations published under the

disciplinarity of literary studies. The second and third subsections, 3.2 and 3.3, conduct

a selective examination of how such a concern influenced Iser’s development of the

category “the imaginary” as a key element of the triadic real-fictive-imaginary his

literary anthropology employs. The outcome is intended to be a bridging discussion that

draws our attention back toward the disciplinary context for his theory, before we turn

our attention to an examination of instances of how the practitioners of this context have

received his work. This discussion also carries forward the larger goal of examining two

key features of Iser’s writings. These are firstly, the relatively faint impression his later

works have made upon literary studies and literary theory; and secondly, the

misinterpretation of his work. The latter relates to the former, and will lead us in chapter

four below back to some of the philosophical underpinnings of his work that developed

from the early seventies to manifest in The Fictive and the Imaginary.

Chapter three is made up of three subsections. The first is “The Reader, Play and

Games” and follows Iser’s development of this relationship by focussing upon The

Fictive and the Imaginary, elaborating upon his structured account of how play unfolds

in the particular structure of games, and his use of Roger Caillois’ categories of play

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toward this end. The second then returns to “The Imaginary as a Critique of

Methodology”, in a discussion of how it is that the imaginary is reflexive of

methodology. Finally, we examine how Iser’s writings unfold as “Figuring

Convergence and Deforming”, exploring examples of his early use of these central

concepts from The Fictive and the Imaginary.

3.1 The Reader, Play, and Games

Despite the continuity discussed above, there is a definite change in The Fictive

and the Imaginary from Iser’s concern with the reader in earlier writings. This becomes

apparent when we examine his use of play. The imaginary, as we have seen, is not the

imagination. The imaginary is not an act, and is therefore not primarily intended by Iser

to describe the act of reading. Rather, it allows for and maintains the potential in the text,

and is a means by which to track the intentionality of the author through the

fictionalizing acts. The temporary gestalt the imaginary takes on as form results from

the interplay of the fictive and the imaginary in the setting of the text, where the

fictionalizing acts are not acts of reading. Therefore, the reader does not participate in

this interaction, this interplay, in a fashion Iser deals with directly. Instead, the role of

the reader is playfully absent from the discussion.

The reader is always present, in that the fictionalizing acts have no means by

which to manifest beyond the reader-text interaction. However, the detail of this

interaction is not provided. Earlier, in his introduction to The Fictive and the Imaginary,

Iser wrote:

The fictive in the text sets and then transgresses boundaries in order to

endow the imaginary with that degree of concreteness necessary for it to

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be effective; the effect is to trigger the reader’s need to close the event

and thus to master the experience of the imaginary. (17)

The role of the reader is stated quite clearly here, though throughout the chapter on the

imaginary the reader is not invoked. The reader’s “need to close the event” is implied by

the grouping activity described in gestalt psychology, in that the reader is subject to a

process of organising and testing “arrangements of data” in order to achieve this closure.

The transgression of boundaries involved leads for Iser to an over-stepping of existing

understandings and is coupled to the imaginary as the “generative matrix of the text”, so

that the reader is prompted by virtue of the requirement for closure to “pragmatize the

imaginary” (18). These “two interlocking phases” facilitate our capacity as readers to

“assimilate” the new; the otherwise chaotic outcome of “stepping beyond ourselves”

(18-9). But this does not manifest with clarity, until the final chapter or “Epilogue”, in

which Iser explores the mimetic and performative elements of the literary medium,

before moving on to his introduction of “staging” as an anthropological category (296).

Perhaps this is Iser “unfolding” the anthropological portrayal of the reader text

interaction by allowing the chapters on the imaginary and play to primarily allude to the

reader’s participation in the “interplay of the fictive and the imaginary” and the “play of

the text”. As the latter expression, which Iser commonly employs in this chapter, shows

he is locating play in the text, rather than in the reader’s use of the text.

Iser eventually takes as his focus in The Fictive and the Imaginary the

“performative character of representation” (291) in a literary setting. In his epilogue he

demonstrates how the reader participates in this interaction, when he writes:

Play also occurs between the changing figurations and the reference

extrapolated from them, for the reference is not a pregiven; it can come

about only cybernetically. The reference arises from the feedforward of

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the status of change of figurations, and these in turn are guided by the

feedback of the developing reference. This performative interplay

unfolds a graduated process that has to be finalized by the act of reading.

(290)

So in the endgame, regardless of how little attention is paid to the act of reading –

presumably the extent to which Iser writes upon the topic earlier in his career excuses

this minimalism – it is precisely this act that brings about the closure, or the finality

available under any modelling offered in The Fictive and the Imaginary. The systemic

representation makes “reference” to a reality that is heterogeneous but available if not

all at once “[f]or objectification and extrapolation are not given in Nature. If they were,

imitation of Nature would be superfluous… as everything real and everything possible,

Nature cannot present all her possibilities as things already realized” (283). The means

by which we generate our copies of the given world ensure that these are not copies.

Instead these are built on processes of extrapolation and objectification that lead to the

event of a representation, and extrapolation and objectification are synthetic activities,

not to be discovered in Nature. Ultimately these performative phenomena involved in

representation are met in the literary text at the act of reading.

As discussed in chapter one, in chapter eleven of Prospecting (1989),

“Representation: a performative act”, Iser examined this notion of literature as a means

of making “accessible the inaccessible” on behalf of a human creature that is decentred:

“we are, but do not have ourselves. Wanting to have what we are, that is, to step out of

ourselves in order to grasp our own identity, would entail final assurances as to our

origins” (244). Iser adopts Plessner’s division of the human self rather than Lacan’s

“decentered subjectivity”, since he cannot accept the mirror state of coming to oneself.

Instead, human “doubling” is akin to the actor who performs “a possibility of himself or

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herself” and is thereby “potentially unlimited” (qtd. in Fictive 81). Iser concludes that

“identifying oneself with a phantom in order to bring it to life entails no longer being

what one was, even if the new shape is partially conditioned by what one was before”

(82), such that an accumulation of roles does not lead to the whole self manifesting.

Since we are always already unable to take this step, we do not have ourselves,

and we subsequently strive to explain ourselves. This manifests for Iser in our “many

ideologies” (Prospecting 245), but the continual updating and renewal of the latter

evidences the futile project that underpins such an attempt. These are all eventually

attempts at an explanation of our origins, but literature is not such an attempt. It is

instead “the constant deferment” of explanation, and this difference is realised in the

play of the text. For Iser, explanations cannot incorporate play, for they are singular.

Explanations take the multifarious real and render it too singular, as he writes

“[r]epresentation arises out of and thus entails the removal of difference, whose

irremovablity transforms representation into a performative act of staging something”

(245). The paradoxical activity of removing difference in the literary setting generates a

playful interaction with the given world, such that the games that unfold on the literary

stage are continuous. The “ludic nature of literature is basically unlimited” (245), and it

stages the inaccessible human being via an “aesthetic semblance” (245) which “neither

transcends a given reality nor mediates between idea and manifestation; it is an

indication that the inaccessible can only be approached by being staged” (243). The

performative act of representation in a literary setting then, is not a mimetic portrayal of

a given reality; it is a playful response to a human urge to step outside ourselves, and

thereby have ourselves.

Play becomes for Iser an effective means by which to portray this fluid activity,

which he claims in chapter twelve of Prospecting, “The Play of the Text”, as an

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umbrella term that he intends to raise “above representation” in order to “cover all the

ongoing operations of the textual process” (250). The discussion points raised above as

to the location of play are clarified here as follows: “Authors play games with readers,

and the text is the playground. The text itself is the outcome of an intentional act

whereby an author refers to and intervenes in an existing world” (251). So the reader

does not simply look on, but appears to be somehow the subject of the author’s

intentionality, though he updates this a few pages later writing that the:

more the reader is drawn into the proceedings by playing the game of the

text, the more he or she is also played by the text…. The staged play of

the text does not, then, unfold as a pageant that the reader merely

watches, but is both an ongoing event and a happening for the reader,

enabling and encouraging direct involvement…. For the play of the text

can be acted out individually by each reader, who by playing it in his or

her own way, produces an individual “supplement” considered to be the

meaning of the text. (258)

In Prospecting the reader has a role to play in the games of the text. Indeed, the

meaning of the text is a result of the supplement each individual produces by playing

the games of the text in their own way. Though as Iser concluded chapter ten, “Key

Concepts in Current Liteary Theory”, the primary thesis of the book was that

prospecting “the regions of the imaginary entails conveying the experience of an

intangible pot of gold… which offers us such wealth that even the coveted treasure of

meaning is devalued to the level of a mere pragmatic concept” (235). In the interests of

this exploratory emphasis, Iser is at pains in Prospecting to delineate a role for the

reader in play, though in The Fictive and the Imaginary this is not so patent.

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The emphasis is instead upon the mediating role of play. One assumes the focus

upon “Text Play”, as the chapter in The Fictive and the Imaginary is entitled, is due to

his description of play as performative in the text. Iser argues that play is at least

initiated by the author, and employs Beckett as a doubly illustrative and evidentiary

means of substantiating this position. For Iser, Beckett is both object of attention, and

the purveyor – nay performer – of a particular perspective on the human. This

discussion of Beckett concludes by suggesting that “only language that consumes itself

can give articulation to the imaginary” (246) and it is this perspective on language that

underpins Iser’s account of play. For if the movement of play is “transposed into

language”, it reveals itself as the basic source of “the smallest, though most universal”

of “language games” (247) by influencing linguistic function in a fundamental fashion.

This movement is based on what Iser describes as the “contraflow of free and

instrumental play” (247), where free play acts against a conclusion to the flow of play

or “play against endings” (237), and instrumental play has some end to the games of

play as its goal. The contraflow of play splits the signifier, so that the ordinary division

of language into signifier and signified is subject to a further differentiation. The “as-if”

element of the literary context splits the signifier since in this context, it is “freed for

unpremeditated uses” since it is no longer limited to the particular circumstances of a

“convention governed” denotation (247).

In a larger sense, “contraflow” is a description of the competing types of play; a

competition inspired in the literary medium by fictionalizing. This play is effectively a

form of free play since fictionalizing acts overstep “what is, and turn in the direction of

what is not” (Fictive 237). However, since fictionalizing acts also keep “in play what

has been overstepped”, a goal is revealed. It is in the selection from the given world,

and combination within the literary text, that a differential relationship is established,

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and an intention pointed toward. This intention would reveal the “motivation for the

overstepping” but since this intention is not yet known, fictionalizing “opens up a

difference that can no longer be eradicated by consciousness, because there can be no

knowledge as yet of what intentionality targets; consequently, difference is revealed by

way of countervailing movements of free and instrumental play” (237). In the literary

setting, free play is not completely free, since it cannot liberate itself of what it has

overstepped, and instrumental play cannot realise a goal, since such a pragmatic

endgame can never be completely established. Iser frames this contraflow in terms of

the interplay of the fictive and the imaginary, and warns against a reductive alignment

of free play with fictionalizing and instrumental play with the imaginary as follows:

It would seem at first that overstepping favors free play, whereas

imaginability of constitutive conditions goes together with instrumental

play. In fact, however, fictionalizing retains the presence of the worlds

overstepped as fully as the dual countering of the imaginary – with its

cancellations, derestrictions, and irrealizations – appears to be free play.

But the very interaction between the fictive and the imaginary becomes

palpable in this play movement when free and instrumental play enter

into a relationship…. Play arises out of the coexistence of the fictive and

the imaginary. (238)

As with every other layering of his theory in The Fictive and the Imaginary, the

component parts cannot be divided and defined as they cannot be conceived of

independently. Indeed, under Iser’s definition play is a dynamic interaction of

possibilities; it is the movement “to-and-fro” or the dynamism that results from the

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contraflow of free and instrumental play. Following Gadamer, who wrote in Truth and

Method11:

The movement of playing has no goal that brings it to an end; rather, it

renews itself in constant repetition. The movement backward and

forward is obviously so central to the definition of play that it makes no

difference who or what performs this movement. The movement of play

as such has, as it were, no substrate. It is the game that is played – it is

irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The play is the

occurrence of the movement as such. Thus we speak of the play of

colours and do not mean only that one colour plays against another, but

that there is one process or sight displaying a changing variety of colours.

(qtd. in Fictive 237)

This definition is focussed for Iser in the literary setting, where the fictionalizing acts

underwrite his subdivision of play into the doubled phenomenon made up of the

contraflow of free and instrumental play. This contraflow issues forth into games, but

the play itself has “no substrate”; instead the dynamism of play is a container for what

Iser terms its own “unfathomableness” (237). This unfathomable quality has somehow

to be contained, and in the setting of the literary text this unfolds by virtue of the nature

of language, and the structure provided by games. Intentionality of language “works

against the endlessness of play”, and even in the case this resistance is the object of

games, “the text itself is limited” (257).

However, these limits do not end play; instead they indicate the necessity for

games to structure the contraflow of play. The text “stages the games” which interplay

and act against the flow of play “playing the end of play” (Fictive 260). Iser employs

11 Iser quotes from the edition trans. and rev. by Joel Wiensheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (New

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four categories of textual games in order to divide and organise his account of the

manner in which games structure the contraflow of play. These he takes from Caillois,

in the form of “agōn, alea, mimicry, and ilinx” (258)12. Naturally these four contribute

to a structure made up of components that are the “offshoot[s] of the interpenetration of

the fictive and the imaginary” (260). As a result they tilt the gaming toward either free

or instrumental play, since each bears an implicit bias based on the textual setting

engaged. Agōn is played in response to the “strife and rift” that results from

“antagonistically arranged” referential realities and “antithetically arranged” intratextual

positions which come to clash with the reader’s expectations (260). Alea involves

chance, and is integral to the “unforeseeable” quality of the literary text. It is an

inevitable game of the text, since it must result from any first move, “whose

consequences can never be totally foreseen” (261). Agōn and alea are natural opponents

since the latter “breaks open the semantic networks formed by referential worlds”,

where the former reduces chance by aiming to overcome “the difference that arises out

of antagonistically arranged positions” (261). Mimicry, on the other hand, “aims to

make difference disappear” (262). As with the other games, this basic structure is

paradoxical, since the removal of difference would render mimicry invisible, given that

it is the difference that “actually constitutes mimicry” (262). For Iser, mimicry is also “a

counter to alea, which shows the text neither as pretended reality nor as a mirror image

of something given, but as the setting for the unpredictable” (262). Finally, ilinx is

described by Iser as “a game of subversion”, as “anarchic” (262), and despite the

challenge of following Caillois’ portrayal of ilinx in terms of vertigo – which for Iser is

“difficult to apply to the text” (262) – this category of game unfolds as a vertiginous

“carnivalization of all the positions assembled in the text” (262). Ilinx is integral to the

York, 1989).

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play of text, since it manifests by virtue of the “absent” playing “against the present”,

and in those elements that are present ilinx opens a “difference that makes whatever has

been excluded fight back” (262). As a result, ilinx ensures that whatever is present is “as

if mirrored from its reverse side” (262). Given that the contraflow of instrumental and

free play is built on the irreconcilable nature of play, ilinx “remains a game”, despite its

aggressive presentation as the game in which “free play is at its most expansive”(262-3).

The key anthropological insights Iser arrives at through literature continue to

manifest in terms of a paradoxical portrayal. The fundamental paradoxicality of each of

these categories of gaming is to be discovered in the manner in which they structure

play; as they channel play to play against itself. This fits very well with the linguistic

qualification of the imaginary Iser offers in The Fictive and the Imaginary: “only

language that consumes itself can give articulation to the imaginary” (246). For Iser, the

play of the text is seated in the extraordinary use of language, and this begins with the

“split signifier” generated when the ordinary denotative use of the signifier is

“bracketed off” by the “as-if” it were real world of the text. As discussed above, the

signifier is freed from the usual conventions that govern its use, it is “fictionalized”, and

since this process involves “self-disclosure” the radical displacement of the signifier

becomes the signal that “this is play” (248). Indeed it is in this openness, in this

suspension of the particular conditions of denotation that “the imaginary begins to

develop its dual countering” (248). Iser points out that Bateson borrows Korzybski’s

“map-territory” portrayal of the relationship between language and what it denotes,

which “resembles that of a map to the territory it charts” (248). The process of

fictionalizing the signifier alters relationship, such that the split-signifier now underpins

the map-territory relationship, and the latter has been effectively inverted. Now the

12 Iser draws upon Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games.

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“suspended denotation becomes the map…. The territory will coincide with the map

because it has no existence outside this designation” (248), but this interaction unfolds

into a paradox, since the territory is separate to the map, as it is generated by the split

signifier, rather than the signifier. Iser points out that Bateson illuminates this difference

by pointing toward “such phenomena as dreams and daydreams” wherein the difference

between the signifier and signified “often vanishes completely” (248). This removal of

difference allows us to be immersed in the images we generate, and highlights the

fundamental feature of play in text that generates the paradoxical structure of games and

points toward the initial point raised in this discussion, Iser’s use of play to explore the

relationship of the fictive and the imaginary in the literary setting. Just as difference is

removed as the fictionalized signifier is map and territory, it is maintained “as the

signifier supplies the condition under which a territory has to be imagined for a map”

(249). Therefore the paradox is built around difference, which is at once “removed and

preserved” by virtue of the “as-if” presentation of the literary text. The signifier moves

“to and fro between its code governed determinacy and a signified to be brought forth”

(249) as it generates the signified and builds the “as-if” world of the text. Here the

reader must clearly participate, by enacting the play of games, to complete the

“imagined territory”, which cannot be predicted with any accuracy, but is instead

completed “with various nuances by means of play” (249). Instead of a code-governed

signifier then, we have a play based split-signifier. The role of the reader in this process

coalesces in The Fictive and the Imaginary, not in a direct exploration of the

participation in play, as discussed above, as a “supplement” to the performance supplied

by the author in the language games of the text. Instead it is more fully articulated in

terms of staging. Since the activity of employing language to describe language is a

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paradoxical gesture, for Iser there is no alternative; the “performance has to be staged”

(249).

Iser asserts that play “allows for metacommunication of what happens in

linguistic action, because this is primarily a performance which ends with the

achievement of its aims” (249). By this Iser means to highlight the fact that literary texts

are open ended. The metacommunication referred to here is only feasible via a play

based linguistic activity. This integral point in Iser’s exploratory strategy underpins a

literary anthropology preoccupied with literature’s capacity to “stage” language

describing language. This claim is examined is some detail in chapter seven of this

thesis, when we investigate the implications of Iser’s rejection of an originary

explanation in his articulation of staging.

We have followed the mediating function of the imaginary by relating the fictive

to the real. Beginning from Iser’s rejection of a binary arrangement of these latter two

categories, we have moved forward to his replacement of a determining code-governed

language in the literary text with a play based split-signifier. We turn now to a

discussion of a set of precursory features in Iser’s writings in order to present more

clearly some presuppositions about literary studies his literary anthropology employs.

This discussion will allow for a clearer presentation of the reception of Iser’s work, as it

unfolds in chapters four, five and six of this dissertation.

3.2 The Imaginary as a Critique of Methodology

The prehistory to Iser’s turn toward the imaginary is characterised by

dissatisfaction with the limits placed upon literary theory and interpretation by the

normative influence of method, and the interaction of methodology formulation with

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literary theory. Below we investigate how this unfolds in his earlier writings, and

eventually manifests in his use of the imaginary to mediate the traditional binary of the

real and fictive, and generate the fictive-real-imaginary triad. The book that preceded

The Fictive and the Imaginary was Prospecting: from reader response to literary

anthropology. This is a collection of essays Iser published during the seventies and

eighties, and as the subtitle suggests they take the reader on a journey through Iser’s

work from the very early reflection upon reader-text interaction through to the latter

proposition of a literary anthropology. Chapter ten, “Key Concepts in Current Literary

Theory and the Imaginary”, first published in 1978, reviews literary theory and criticism

from the preceding decade. The concluding comments of the essay sum up Iser’s

“exploratory” approach to understanding the significance of literature. As partially cited

above, he closes “Key Concepts” thus:

Prospecting the regions of the imaginary entails conveying the

experience of an intangible pot of gold which is always within our reach

whenever we need it and which offers us such wealth that even the

coveted treasure of meaning is devalued to the level of a mere pragmatic

concept. (234-5)

If the imaginary is a response to the notion of the endless potential of human plasticity,

then any exploration of this potential in the literary medium requires an account of the

imaginary that does not reduce it to a particular “meaning” lest it constrict the imaginary

and detain human potential in the reified domain of an explanation.

In order to avoid such a reduction, Iser emphasises the need to re-evaluate

existing methodological boundaries. His assessment of the methods of anthropology is

after all based on his suggestion that a literary anthropology can assist in a reassessment

of the methods of literary studies, and more particularly, the direction and purpose of

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literary theory itself. The explanatory hypotheses generated by anthropologists as a

feature of ethnography have fictional boundaries, and these hypotheses are imagined

and written as interpretations of empirical data in the form of artefacts that come to

evidence a history of human culture. Similarly, literature stands as a form of evidence,

or cultural memory, from which can be generated – based upon the activity of

interpretation – engagements with cultural histories. But for Iser, to examine the “as if”

worlds manifest in literature by virtue of the activity of fictionalizing as though they

were explanations of particular epochal phenomena is to reduce, by virtue of method,

the potential of the imaginary.

In explaining the detail of this relationship we return now to Iser’s discussion of

the category “imaginary” in his 1979 essay, “The Current Situation of Literary Theory:

Key Concepts and the Imaginary”13. Here he raises a set of core concerns which form

ongoing themes in his oeuvre, and continue in The Fictive and the Imaginary a decade

and a half later. The following section of this thesis conducts a close reading of these

concerns, which include a critique of the lack of attention by practitioners toward

separating and defining core features of literary discourse. Most prominently, this

involves a challenge to the role of methodology and a questioning of the focus chosen

for literary theory. Specifically, this challenge examines the urgent demand for literary

studies practitioners to seek an objective means by which to conduct interpretation. Iser

argues that the influence of literary theory on literary criticism during the seventies had

assisted in a resurgence for literary studies, and redeemed “a discussion that was losing

itself down a very blind alley” (“Current 1”). But Iser was not satisfied and he raised the

problem of the lack of attention paid to defining literary theory at that time, asking:

“What exactly is literary theory? Does it mean theorizing about literature, or about

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possible means of access to literature?” (1). We might paraphrase Iser to ask, if literary

theory is primarily concerned with explaining literature, at what point does it become a

way of interpreting literature? And given the ontological complications of the former,

how can the latter be activated in and of literary theory? This is the same literary theory

that informs our understanding of both ontological accounts of the literary medium, and

its representation in formal interpretive efforts.

By way of a beginning to a contextualized answer to this question, Iser

highlights that the early success of literary theory was driven by a shift in broader

attitudes toward the significance of literature, and a need to clarify the relationship

between society and the medium. In the 19th century, literature had “formed the

keystone of education in middle-class society” (“Current” 2). But by the mid-twentieth

century, post war Western Europe and American universities were heavily populated,

and the elitism and exclusiveness of an individuated and impressionistic account of

literature had become outmoded:

the postwar generation of critics began to query the validity of such

personalized adventures. The need was to find intersubjective means of

access to literature that would make it possible to separate

comprehension from subjective taste, and to objectify insights into

literature. Such attempts entailed putting emergent theories into practice,

and this very ‘practice’ shows clearly that literary theory is concerned

primarily with approaches to literature and not with literature itself.

Consequently literary criticism strove to become a ‘science of literature’

as borne out by the unfolding of a broad spectrum of methods, which in

turn were hotly debated as regards their criteria. (2-3)

13 This essay was republished in a slightly altered form as chapter ten of Prospecting: “Key Concepts in

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As the institutions that provided for literary studies expanded their resource base, the

discipline became answerable to a larger momentum which carried with it the ethos of

scientificity. Literary studies was expected to uncover insights which might be tested

according to larger institutional criteria. Iser writes that the only conclusion available is

that the resulting practice demonstrates how literary theory became the means by which

to conduct methodology driven interpretation, and therefore literary theory was

primarily about approaches to literature. It is not surprising that (as discussed above)

this lack of attention toward the medium itself eventually became the central feature of

criticism levelled against literary studies. Questions emerge: how can a discipline which

creates its object of study through its practice be thought of as objective? And

consequently, under such conditions, how may formal literary interpretation become

significant in human terms? And in terms of the purpose of the discipline of literary

studies: how will such a model of interpretation inform our appreciation of the

significance of the medium?

We might précis this history as follows: the production of literary theory during

this era can be thought of as being driven by the institutional attempt to escape an

outmoded and bourgeois subjective model of engagement with literature. In order to

evidence the ongoing relevance of a formal study of literature a demonstration of the

sociohistorical importance of the literary medium was attempted and this attempt

employed the concrete evidential processes of empiricism. For Iser, the problems

emergent from this prehistory served to transform literary endeavour into a remorseless

“politics”. In this environment, literary critical practice came to be coloured by an

ongoing and problematic confusion of theory and methodology. Methodology

construction involves the coupling of theory and technique in establishing an objective

Current Literary Theory and the Imaginary”.

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means by which to interpret. The circular relationship between the theoretical defence

of a technique for interpretation, and the techniques applied in interpretation itself is a

central topic for debate in literary discourse. Where the object to be interpreted is

defined independently of the methodology, this “scientific” approach is to some extent

free of ontological complication. In literary studies however, the imperative to seek

objective means of interpretation has led to the push-pull of polemical negotiation over

methodological shortcomings wherein the object of study has itself not been clearly

defined. This process of negotiation is further complicated by the hermeneutic

interaction of method and theory, where method is a technique employed during

interpretation, and theory is used to justify a technique. Methodology formulation

necessarily involves justification of an interpretive approach, and this justification

invokes literary theory. However, in employing theory to defend a particular approach,

the theory itself is interpreted. Therefore an interpretive engagement with literature is

bound with a hermeneutic competition over theory itself. Iser argues that this dynamic

coupling leads to a situation in which “methods prevail for a while and then lose their

position of dominance” (“Current” 4). The specificity of application of theory in its

employment toward substantiating a methodological rationale requires that theory itself

be interpreted, for no theory can be complete enough to meet the individuated

requirements of application in practice. A double hermeneutics is thus enacted in a

context where the object of study is constantly renegotiated. We return to this matrix of

interacting forces below.

For Iser, formal interpretation of the literary medium must be attentive to the

nature and role of method. Method is involved in the dynamic renegotiation of its own

boundaries to the extent that as mentioned above:

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The fact that methods prevail for a while and then lose their position of

dominance shows that their very achievements are based on the

exclusion of facets which gradually begin to demand attention, thus

invalidating those methods. This reactive process highlights the

limitations and the conditionality of each method – and it is inevitable

that any solution should ultimately be pushed aside by the material that it

has failed to encompass. (“Current” 4)

This processing of method continues to engender a combative negotiation in respect of

the possibilities offered in the act of interpretation, the nature of the acts, and the deeper

invocation of the validity of an interpretation built upon a given methodological engine.

The eventual outcome of the history described by Iser was pluralism. His critique of

pluralism as a methodological trajectory relies upon his observation that the theoretical

tolerance it is predicated upon conflicts with the motivation for constructing an engine

to drive methodology:

As a methodology, pluralism is a sort of sterile hermeneutics, for it

cannot even pinpoint the relation of one method to another, let alone

theorize about them. If one defines methods as means of solving

problems, one need only glance at the present-day mass of critical

methods to see the extent to which solutions in turn produce new

problems. (4)

Here Iser maps an institutional process which forms the core of a modern history of

literary critical practice. The attention of method constructors is directed toward a

cyclical processing of theory and practice. For Iser, the obeisance offered to tolerance in

pluralism inhibits interpretation. Instead of engaging the dynamic mode of methodology

as a problematising force, literary discourse has at times treated it as a means by which

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to interpret and resolve theoretical impasses. Highlighting its reliance upon relativism,

Iser’s critique of pluralism as methodological preoccupation indicates that there is a

general lack of attention paid toward the formal features of methods by the practitioners

who employ them. The validity of a methodology might be assured by requiring that its

attention be fixed specifically upon the reactive variation of methodologies and their

vantage points. The resultant method would no longer call upon relativism, but instead

be preoccupied with the possible methods and how they are deployed. However, the

categorical removal of method from method entails the dissolution of the former,

implying that one cannot evaluate method with method. Since one must call upon the

other in the context of the methodology of pluralism, sheer relativism ensues.

Consequently, a meta-gesture of this kind will only indicate the shortcomings of the

approach, and a need for the removal of the translation of theory into interpretive

mechanism from methodology itself. It follows then that by its own method, pluralism

cannot result from pluralism. Iser points out that such a comparative analysis:

necessitates a distinction not only between methods, but also between

method and theory. Theories generally provide the premises, which lay

the foundation for the framework of categories, whereas methods

provide the tools for processes of interpretation. (4-5)

This once removal (of method from method) will not suffice to invigorate the “sterile

hermeneutics” of pluralism. Interpretive methodologies are further undercut by the

precursory indecision of pluralism. Iser describes pluralism as “not a concept in itself.

As eclectic syncretism, it is an implicit confession of indecision in the face of a

multiplicity of competing theories and methods and the need to relate them to one

another” (6). This indecision is for Iser further confused by the hermeneutic relationship

between theory and method. This mutually supporting interaction is borne out for Iser in

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the articulation of theory itself. He discusses three major contemporary theoretical

genres: phenomenology; hermeneutics; and gestalt theory. Each displays reliance upon

metaphor in order to move toward completion:

Theories generally assume plausibility through closure of the framework

provided, but in the realm of art they often only attain closure through

the introduction of metaphors. Polyphonic harmony (the strata of the

work merging together) is the favourite metaphor of phenomenological

theory; the fusion of horizons (between the past experience embodied in

the text and the disposition of the recipient) is a metaphor basic to

hermeneutics; and the interrelation between making and matching

(adapting inherited schemata to the world percieved) is a metaphor

favoured by gestalt theory. (“Current” 5)

This figural exposition of theory completes the circular interaction of theory and

method, since methodologies, apropos appropriation and interpretation, translate these

metaphoric portrayals into specific examples and “lend stability to theory at precisely

those points where their efficacy reaches its limits” (5-6). Here the premises provided

by theory are presupposed by a particular method, and must be understood as

independent of this method. The literary studies practitioner investigates the premises of

a methodology under the particular circumstances of individual acts of interpretation.

Iser’s précis (partly quoted above) is as follows:

Theories generally provide premises, which lay the foundation for the

framework of categories, whereas methods provide the tools for the

processes of interpretation. Thus the phenomenological theory, for

instance, explores the mode of existence of the artwork; the hermeneutic

theory is concerned with the observer’s understanding of himself when

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confronted with the work; the gestalt theory focuses upon the perceptive

faculties of the observer as brought into play by the work…. Distinctive

assumptions are made which reveal a particular mode of access to the

work of art, although they do not represent a technique of interpretation.

Theories must undergo a definite transformation if they are to function as

interpretive techniques. (5)

Theory is oriented toward a general approach to works of art and by virtue of its

determination to establish “a framework of categories”, it necessarily works toward the

abstraction of the material it seeks to categorise. Iser seeks to separate method and

theory in order to point out that theory provides these categories, and by their nature

they serve to override “individuality”. On the other hand, methods and the subsequent

application of these operate to “bring out and elucidate this very individuality” (5)

through a particular technique of interpretation. Therefore the transformation Iser

suggests above involves an extension of the hermeneutic interaction between theory and

method since the literary studies practitioner must modify the theory. The premise of

this theory can only support the adoption of a “mode of access”, which by its general

nature is not directly applicable as a technique involved in a particular method. Where

the articulation of the theory itself calls upon “the introduction of metaphors” in order to

“attain closure”, there is an obvious shortfall of the assumed concrete quality

methodology infers. This is a strange set of circumstances given that theory is meant to

justify the techniques employed during interpretation. Foundational presuppositions and

the categories these underpin are drawn from theory as the justification for a particular

mode of access to the literary text. In appropriating the foundation offered by the

abstraction and generalisation of theory, method completes a circle by returning the

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theory to a particular articulation in its application, “thereby utilizing the explanatory

potential of the theory to chart the territory which the latter had already signposted” (6).

For Iser this is problematic, and the outcomes had clearly manifested. For

example, methodological confusion as a subset of a process which sees an ambiguous

relativity interpose between method and theory produced pluralism, revealing model

building as a force distracting from its own purpose of interpretation. As Iser

summarises:

so long as a mere collection of assumptions and presuppositions

masquerades one minute as theory and the next as method, and receives

official blessing on both its assumed identities, literary criticism will

continue to be in a state of confusion which the pluralists seek to

preserve in the name of freedom. (“Current” 6)

If importing an empirical interpretive stratagem had allowed literary criticism to speak

to a broader institutional context more readily, it had also inspired an explanatory model

of literary interpretation with the tendency to alter the literary text by predetermining its

boundaries. The beginnings of Iser’s dissatisfaction with this explanatory approach are

clearly articulated here, and he sees flow-on effects in the role of literary theory in

critical practice. These practices contributed to the filtering down of a common set of

core concerns that manifested among the various methods. Iser corrals this core set of

theoretical concerns into the key terms “structure”, “function”, and “communication”.

He viewed this as a trend that accompanied the influence of the scientific approach, and

argued that given their significance in a wide array of spheres, “they are indicators of

the intellectual climate of our time” (6).

So the opening up of literary criticism to a larger intellectual world had

simultaneously seeded the literary practitioner’s endeavours with a disadvantageous

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influence, inspiring an indesirable continuity with other domains of endeavour and

“[t]hrough this homology the disadvantages come to the fore, as the very translatability

by way of the key terms tends to obscure and distort an important potential of the

literary text” (“Current” 6). But then for Iser this particular diversion from the

“important potential of the literary text” also propels the literary into a broader domain,

and provides the basis for the publication of a wider range of interpretations of literary

texts. This paradoxical arrangement inspired Iser to conclude that relying upon a

process that derives “meaning” during a semantic reduction of the literary text reveals

the need for a clear emphasis upon the diffuse character of fictionality:

Our intentional acts of understanding will always result in an

unavoidable reduction of the potential contained in the literary text, and

this holds true for one reason in particular: these very acts are

semantically oriented. The structure concept describes the production of

meaning, the function concept gives concrete definition to the meaning,

the communication concept elucidates the experience of the meaning. In

all cases, then, meaning – in spite of the different facets illuminated – is

seen as the “be-all and the end-all” of the literary text. (16-17)

The very possibility of interpretation calling upon such a diverse array of strategies

indicates to Iser the limited nature of a semantics-oriented interpretive practice, driven

by the concept of an integral meaning. Iser’s resolution to this limiting practice is the

introduction of his own concept, the “imaginary”. As discussed above, for Iser literary

theory and practice are heavily reliant on metaphor, and this is indicative of a

shortcoming in the reliance upon a “meaning”-oriented account of the literary work.

The dynamic nature of the literary work is made rigid and reductive in this semantic

interpretive context.

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However, Iser does not deny the complex interaction of theoretical development

with interpretive context. The figurative potential of language is the final indicator of

how it is that the depth of foundation for theory is such that it cannot become complete

without deployment in methodology. The circularity implied by the requirement for

method to complete theoretical construct by interpretive appropriation in turn indicates

the strength of this interaction. An interaction which is necessitated by the boundaries

all theory must eventually decide upon. Typically, it is at these interstices that theory

eventually calls upon figurative language to demonstrate that there is something more

out there, beyond the edges of what is described directly. It is not surprising then, that

the metaphors are employed to figure a mode, and lay down the possibility of something

more. In effect, this critique of method and context for theory is the ground work for

Iser’s elaboration upon the imaginary, and therefore, is central to his literary

anthropology.

3.3 Figuring convergence and deforming

Iser’s use of metaphor forms the ground for the imaginary. He had during earlier

writings introduced the concepts of “convergence” and “deforming”, which would

prove to be ground work for his articulation of the imaginary. In his essay from 1972,

“The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”, he nominates convergence as a

process responsible for creating the literary work via a fusion of text and reader that can

never be isolated and reduced to a definitive moment:

The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into

existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but

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must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the

reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. (279)

The potential for closure, whereby convergence ceases to manifest as a virtual scene, is

also a potential neutering of the category itself. As briefly discussed in chapter one,

convergence is only useful while it can be maintained as a virtual category that defers

the problem of defining the literary work and maintains a difference between reader and

text. This deferral holds in abeyance the issues associated with representation of the

literary work, as neither the “reality” of the text nor the mind of the reader are required

to be finalised in convergence. This mode of deferral has also led to criticism of Iser’s

work. Dimitar Kambourov, for example, accuses Iser’s theory of a deceptive circularity

that renders it detached to the point of irrelevance. This dissertation argues instead that

Iser’s deferral of ontological problems arising from definitional discourse demonstrates

the relevance of an “anthropology of literature”. The question as to why we interpret

literature (what human needs are met) does not require an account of a particular

interpretation, excepting as an illustration of an explanation of the mechanisms which

allow for interpretation. These mechanisms simultaneously unveil something of our

makeup, and of the human need for literature. It follows that literary anthropology can

substantiate the importance of formal literary discourse. In The Fictive and the

Imaginary, Iser presents this dynamic interaction of reader and text as an extension

upon the triadic structure of the fictive, the real and the imaginary. The imaginary is

described by Iser in terms of the basic structure of language, as figuring, rather than

denoting a world since the literary world is presented “as-if” it were real. What is

represented is itself always already virtual, and is predicated upon the difference of the

literary and extra-literary worlds. For Iser, we appear to need this “as-if” it were real

literary world because language does not allow us to step outside ourselves, in order to

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describe ourselves. Therefore, we have to stage our own possibilities, and literature

presents a unique opportunity to grasp this human plasticity through language.

This very early observation of the virtual location of the convergence of reader

and text draws upon the work of Roman Ingarden, which Iser translates into a dynamic

of constant movement, of iterative shifting between points that are context bound:

Roman Ingarden confronts the structure of the literary text with the ways

in which it can be konkretisiert (realised). The text as such offers

different “schematized views” through which the subject matter of the

work can come to light, but the actual bringing to light is an action of

Konkretisation. If this is so, then the literary work has two poles, which

we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text

created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished

by the reader. From this polarity it follows that the literary work cannot

be completely identical with the text, or with the realization of the text,

but in fact must lie halfway between the two. (“The Reading Process”

279)

As Ingarden argues in The Literary Work of Art, this means we,

can deal aesthetically with a literary work and apprehend it live only in

the form of one of its possible concretizations.... Nevertheless, ultimately

we do not turn our attention to the concretization as such, but to the work

itself” (336-7).

This view of the literary work resonates through Iser’s later work. In his 1997 lecture

entitled “The Significance of Fictionalizing” he describes fictionality in some detail,

concluding that under his structured approach to fictionalizing it can be seen as:

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a dynamic oscillation resulting in a constant interpenetration of things

which are set off from one another without ever losing their difference.

The tension ensuing from the attempt to resolve this ineradicable

difference creates an aesthetic potential which, as a source of meaning,

can never be substituted by anything else. This does not imply that the

fictional component of literature is the actual work of art. What it does

imply, however, is that the fictional component makes the work of art

possible. (3)

This emphasis upon dynamism as a feature of fictionalizing is very clearly related to the

notion of convergence. Both rely upon an attempt to characterize an “aesthetic” process

in terms of difference, and delineate this subjective activity from the finality of an

objective version of the literary work of “art”. Oscillation forms part of a pathway

which leads Iser’s conceptual preoccupation toward dynamism, away from the

limitations of a tradition of “meaning”-oriented literary critical practice and toward

deferral of meaning.

Iser’s more contemporary attempts to explore the concept “translatability” are

also preoccupied with movement, placing the broader anthropological and subsequently

cultural inference of his modelling of such human behaviours as fictionalizing inside an

alternate conceptual framework, drawn from cybernetics. For example, in his 1994

essay “On Translatability”, he writes: “Coming to grips with an otherness hardly to be

known requires a continual looping from the known to the unknown in order to make

the unknown fold back upon what is familiar” (11). And two years later, in his “Coda to

the Discussion” of the book The Translatability of cultures: figurations of the space

between that he co-edited with Sanford Budick, he wrote of culture: “binarisms of levels,

pairings, and switches indicate that culture is not a static and definable entity but a

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galaxy of mobile features that dwarf every attempt at reducing culture to a conceptual

point of view” (299). His introduction of the imaginary enacts this preoccupation with

dynamism, and the irreducible perspective of the literary work. For Iser, attaching

human phenomena to a concrete anchor point and utilising this as a means by which to

explain human culture denies the significance of such strategies as figurative portrayals

of human experience. These are representations which simultaneously manifest the

human experience and describe it. A key example is the movement back and forth

between the orthodox and the avant garde the literary critic executes during

methodology formulation. As discussed above, theory is interpreted and facilitates the

use of particular techniques in particular methods. These methods are then taken up to

facilitate further instances of interpretations of literature.

Iser’s follow up to “The Reading Process” in 1975 was “The Reality of Fiction:

A Functionalist Approach to Literature”14. “The Reality of Fiction”15 sees Iser explore

the deeper structure of “convergence”, bringing a clearer shape to his description of the

reader’s aesthetic response to the literary text. He deploys the speech act theory of

Austin, Searle and Ingarden in exploring the relationship between literary speech and

ordinary speech: “Austin and Searle called it ‘parasitic’. Ingarden too, found that the

similarity posed an intriguing problem” (“Reality” 15). Already, Iser is exploring the

broader significance of fiction, and posing a challenge to the traditional binary

opposition of the fictive and the real by questioning how it is that such an arrangement

can be definitively explained: “‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ have always been classified as pure

opposites, and so a good deal of confusion arises when one seeks to define the ‘reality’

of literature” (“Reality” 7). He notes a shift in emphasis away from the ontological and

14 Republished in The Act of Reading.

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toward the functional in literary discourse, as directed by a movement amongst

practitioners toward discovering “what literature does and not what it means” (7). He

argues that this can only be achieved if we in turn move away from the opposition of

fiction and reality, and toward an understanding of the dynamic relationship between

these two categories: “If fiction and reality are to be linked, it must be in terms not of

opposition but of communication, for the one is not the mere opposite of the other –

fiction is a means of telling us something about reality” (7). In prescribing a turn to

communication, Iser also appreciates that we must attend to the detail of the literary

medium’s role in mediating the human experience. The necessity for this attention to

mediation would uncouple the traditional binary arrangement of the real and the fictive,

and it is as part of an attempt to explore this mediative context that Iser later employs

the imaginary. There also appears to be a strong precursor here to Iser’s replacement of

the code-governed language of the literary text with play in his conclusion that, like

illocutionary acts,

[l]iterary texts also require a resolution of indeterminacies but, by

definition, for fiction there can be no such given frames of reference. On

the contrary, the reader must first discover for himself the code

underlying the text, and this is tantamount to bringing out the meaning.

The process of discovery is itself a linguistic action insofar as it

constitutes the means by which the reader may communicate with the

text. Austin and Searle excluded literary language from their analysis on

the grounds that from a pragmatic standpoint it is void. (“Reality” 13)

15 See van Oort “Three Models of Fiction” for a discussion which finds a meeting point for anthropological, phenomenological and logical modelling of fiction in an examination of Searle, Ingarden and Gans.

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Indeed, Iser argues that for Austin the measurement of the success of a speech act

outside the literary work involves an “emphasis on sincerity” (12). So here we can

observe Iser in his early preoccupation with how it is that the literary text extends on the

given world through language by altering the basis of language use. The signifier need

not refer any longer to a convention-governed code, here the reader “must first discover

for himself the code underlying the text”. Here also is the observation that Austin and

Searle excluded literary language since is not purposive in the way that everyday

language is. Iser’s articulation of the imaginary and play, as we have seen, is based on

the assertion that in the literary text, the lack of a clearly determined purpose – as it

manifests in the intention of the author – opens the space of play and triggers off the

“dual interaction” of the imaginary. The contraflow of free and instrumental play can be

mapped to the same “lack of given frames of reference” indicated in this quote. Also as

discussed in section 2.2 above, in respect of the imaginary, the “as-if” world available

via the literary manages the simultaneous co-presence of the world of the literary text,

and that which the selected elements point toward from the overstepped given world.

He describes “selection” in terms of “coherent deformation”, a term taken from the

theory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that: “A meaning is always present when the

data of the world are subjected by us to a ‘coherent deformation’” (qtd. in “Reality” 31).

Here a “two-way” effect unfolds leading to the “deformation of both” that which is

included in the text, and that which is left behind (31-2). In The Fictive and the

Imaginary Iser notes that selection “cancels out the original organisation of the realities

that recur in the text” leading to an “eventful disorder, or ‘coherent deformation’” (231).

Deforming figures the generative potential of the fictionalizing act, as it eventually

succeeds in producing the new order available in the text.

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Derrida offers a parallel argument during the well known debate between

Derrida and Searle published in Glphy 1 and Glyph 2 during 1977, and republished in

Limited Inc (1988)16 sans Searle’s contribution, who declined to be republished. The

debate began with Derrida’s essay “Signature Event Context”, focussed on Austin’s

How To Do Things With Words (1955) in which he expounds his theory of the

“illocutionary act”. “Signature Event Context” was first delivered in 1971 as a

conference paper (Limited vii), and republished in Glyph 1 in 1977 in English, and

therefore pre-dates Iser’s above-mentioned arguments. Searle responded angrily to

Derrida’s arguments in his “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida”. The latter,

and Derrida’s essay in reply, “Limited Inc abc”, were published in Glyph 2, also in 1977.

In “Signature Event Context”, Derrida sets down a definition for communication in

order to make the argument under the heading “Parasites. Iter, of Writing: That It

Perhaps Does Not Exist”, that Austin’s theory of illocutionary acts is faulty. Derrida

insists that the written sign “carries with it a force that breaks with its context... This

breaking force [force de rupture] is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of

the written text” (9). Derrida argues that this structure is generalisable, and “valid not

only for all orders of ‘signs’ and for languages in general but moreover, beyond semio-

linguistic communication, for the entire field of what philosophy would call experience”

(9). He writes that he wants to insist on,

the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the

structure of every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of

semio-linguistic communication; in writing, which is to say in the

possibility of its functioning being cut off, at a certain point, from its

‘original’ desire-to-say-what-one-means [vouloir-dire] and from its

16 References here taken from the English translation, Limited Inc. (1988).

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participation in a saturable and constraining context. Every sign,

linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this

opposition), in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation

marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an

infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This

does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the

contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute

anchoring [ancrage]. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this

iterability of the mark is neither an accident nor an anomaly, it is that

(normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function

called “normal”. What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one

whose origins would not get lost along the way? (12)

The breaking force, the force de rupture that Derrida insists is the structure of the

written text, is therefore able to be understood only in respect of context. Derrida breaks

down and discards the barriers between contexts for the employment of the sign

(paradoxically), by insisting that the symbolic can always-already be bracketed off.

Since the sign can be captured, or appropriated for use it is without boundary. For

Derrida, this means any thought of origin, or limitation on the sign, is nonsense. The

only sensible way in which to understand the basic structure of the sign, is in

recognizing that each context establishes the normal use of the sign. The division that

Searle and Austin would insist on between literary and non-literary speech falls by the

same logic that Iser employs in Derrida’s account, and Iser’s conclusion (cited above)

that during reading “[t]he process of discovery is itself a linguistic action insofar as it

constitutes the means by which the reader may communicate with the text” is primarily

an argument on behalf of the determining role of the context in which the act of reading

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takes place. There seems a strong parallel here between Derrida’s and Iser’s

understanding of the symbolic as underpinning a dynamic, endlessly variable human

experience of the real, and as is argued in chapters 7-9, Iser’s own refusal of a concrete

account of an origin for the sign. We return to this in particular detail in chapter 9.

Iser goes on to argue that the literary medium facilitates a communicative

process that sees the reader engage with the text in respect of boundaries that emerge

from a complex history. This history inspires the makeup of a “repertoire” of literary

possibilities: “The different elements of the literary repertoire supply guidelines for the

‘dialogue’ between text and reader” (“Reality of Fiction” 30). This dialogue is charged

with the possibility of “deforming” the reader’s relationship with their own history,

opening for the reader a problematic dissonance in their systematic retrieval of memory

and the resultant reality formulation:

literary allusions impose an unfamiliar dimension of deep-rooted history

which shatters the monotonous rhythm of everyday life and ‘deforms’ its

apparent immutability into something illusory; the realistic details, on the

other hand, bring out all that the idealized archetype could not have

known, so ‘deforming’ the apparently unattainable ideal into an

historical manifestation of what man might be. (32)

As such, the real and the fictive intermingle in the literary text and the reader. The

resultant “convergence”, or outcome of an engagement, sees gaps in coherence –

systemic flaws – resolved in the imagination of the reader, who must “react to its [the

text’s] own ‘reality’” (35). This process of resolving the coherence of the text in turn

inspires the potential for transformation in the reader, whose: “own store of past

experience may undergo a similar revaluation” (35). The outcomes reflect for Iser, a

significant feature of what the literary text “does” when it: “allows for such adaptations,

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and indeed encourages them, in order to achieve its intersubjective goal: namely, the

imaginary correction of deficient realities” (35). Here the process of deforming figures

the human use of the literary in discovering and rediscovering the real.

While this account of Iser’s systemic portrayal of the interaction of reader and

text is abbreviated, it serves to highlight the significance of his use of the imaginary in

describing how the fictive and the real interplay in the literary medium. His account of

the translation of theory into method as a part of interpretation forms the context for this

use of the imaginary, and thereby allows us a clear insight into how his literary

anthropology is positioned in respect of literary critical practices. In the following

lengthy quote from “The Current Situation of Literary Theory”, Iser unites

translatability, interpretation, aesthetics, and the literary work under the term imaginary

in the context of literary critical practice:

experience of the text is aesthetic insofar as the recipient produces the

object under the conditions that do not or need not correspond to his

habitual disposition. The aesthetic object is produced in the recipient’s

mind as a correlate of the text, and as such it is open to inspection by acts

of comprehension; hence the business of interpretation, which translates

the aesthetic object into a concrete meaning. Reception is therefore one

step closer to the imaginary than interpretation, which can only seek

verbally to give a semantic determination to the imaginary. This is why it

is even possible to make reception – the experience of the imaginary – an

object of interpretation. The diffuseness of the imaginary is further

evinced by the concepts of interpretation themselves, which if not always

open are very often highly metaphorical. These metaphorical concepts

are not, in the last analysis, signs of a missing but findable precision;

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they are an expression of the imaginary which a code-governed discourse

can only bring to view by offering metaphorical approximations. The

imaginary is a field that is only just opening up to literary theory, and

there is no doubt that it is dependent upon all the factors that we have

discussed here. However, charting this field requires the development of

cultural-anthropological frames of reference which will enable us to

inspect the imaginary as well as its protean manifestations in our

innumerable fictions, and which consequently will enable interpretation

to reflect upon itself. (19)

The absence of a definition for the imaginary remains, reflecting the experiential nature

of this category. And though Iser describes the imaginary as the “ultimate dimension of

the text” (17), this is only the case since the imaginary reflects the possibility of the

mental stage upon with the aesthetic object of the literary text – however fleetingly –

takes on a concrete form. As he argues above, the interpretive landscape that makes up

the endeavours of formally published literary interpretation itself reflects this hierarchy.

Here, the practitioner continues to produce new interpretations, and these interpretations

are themselves built about metaphoric portrayals of the means by which to interpret, and

the outcomes to this interpretation. Meaning is therefore not the endgame of Iser’s

investigation of the literary medium. Instead, the potential for our interaction with the

text to generate worlds is the true seam of gold. Indeed it seems his critique of the

existing practice of literary criticism and its foundation finds its manifesto in The

Fictive and the Imaginary, where Iser explicates the detail of this aesthetic account of

the literary work during his “heuristic” introduction to a literary anthropology. The

imaginary is as much the focus of the The Fictive and the Imaginary as literary fiction.

And while the real, the fictive and the imaginary are not so readily separated as this

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observation would seem to imply, it is certainly the case that The Fictive and the

Imaginary is designed toward the goal of “the development of cultural-anthropological

frames of reference” that allow for an inspection of the imaginary in both figurative and

descriptive modes.

Having conducted this initial exposition of Iser’s literary anthropology we have

discovered that the deferral of a definition for and the maintenance of a difference

between key categories including the reader and the text, and the human and literature

are central. The latter are captured in figurative descriptions by Iser, such as plasticity,

and maintained as distinct by virtue of the introduction of categories, such as the

imaginary. We have also discovered that Iser argues for an understanding of both

literature and the human in terms of performance. Through the structure of language,

which provides the virtual boundaries we may transgress, literature allows us to conduct

explorations, or “stage” the performance of our possible selves. The literary text allows

us to play out our possibilities in games that manifest the interplay of the fictive and the

imaginary. This play has no “substrate”. Indeed, it is “unfathomable”, and “occurs

between… changing figurations and the reference extrapolated from them, for the

reference is not a pregiven” (Fictive 290). Since we can only present the imaginary in

language that “consumes itself”, fictionalizing acts in the literary context allow us,

however fleetingly, to grasp the potential of the imaginary. But in this interplay and in

the structure of figuration is indicated an origin that resides with the basic denotative

function of the linguistic sign. For if transgression is to be conducted, boundaries

(however temporal) must have an origin in language whether the reference is pregiven

or a product of a dynamically shifting context. The initial expository phase of this thesis

continues therefore, to beckon the question as to the origin for this basic structure that

appears to emerge from language.

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4. The Reception of Iser: Fish

Having discussed Iser’s central concerns about literary critical practice and their

influence on his literary anthropology, we turn to an examination of the reception and

contestation of his theory. The reception of Iser’s earlier major works by influential

theorists like Stanley Fish had a profound influence on later analyses and on the uptake

of Iser’s theory, especially among Anglo-American literary studies practitioners. We

begin in section 4.1 with an examination of Iser’s debate with Stanley Fish, before

returning in sections 4.2 and 4.3 to flesh out the philosophical underpinnings of Iser’s

theory that Fish seems to overlook. Finally, in section 4.4 we briefly review Iser’s

reception by Steven Mailloux and Terry Eagleton. Chapter five will then incorporate an

analysis of Lothar Cerny’s critique of Iser’s theory, a critique that accompanies and is

facilitated by Cerny’s critical reception of Iser’s use and interpretation of Henry

Fielding’s Tom Jones. The debates inspired by Fish and Cerny are of particular interest

as examples of a polemical mode Iser has attempted to avoid. The discussion will

necessitate an assessment of Iser’s response to the position of Cerny and of the

misgivings of both Iser and later commentators on the reception of Iser’s work. This

will support the assertions made at the conclusion of chapter one above that The Fictive

and the Imaginary is the resolution of Iser’s attempts to fuse literary theory and practice

in an aesthetically self-conscious movement that calls for an exploratory approach to the

central activity of anthropology: ethnography. His anthropological turn is designed to

allow us to examine literary discourse with the goal of discovering the human

significance of the literary medium. So to begin with the end, we observe that Iser’s

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exploratory strategy is also a refusal of the shortcomings of polemical interaction in

favour of a playful approach.

4.1 Fish’s reception of Iser

We begin three years after the debate, with Iser’s essay “The Interplay between

Creation and Interpretation”, a commentary on the Winter 1984 volume of New Literary

History – devoted to “Interrelation of Interpretation and Creation” – which includes

papers from Hilary Putnam, Richard Wollheim, Umberto Eco, René Girard, David

Tracey, Richard Shiff, and Norman Holland. In this commentary Iser points out that

critical discussion in the humanities tends to be combative, and observes that the

protagonists are typically “concentrating on showing up the shortcomings of positions

put forward by the opponent, implying one has the answer which he, however, refrains

from divulging” (387). This comment is no doubt influenced by his public debate with

Fish, by whose efforts of interpretation he perceived himself to be mishandled. As we

have seen, Iser had already argued that literary studies practitioners often demonstrate a

failure to recognise their own presuppositions by not dealing in a clearly demarcated

fashion with theory and method. For Iser, this tendency also plays itself out in the

publicly conducted polemical battles staged by these practitioners, and his debate with

Fish is no exception.

Stanley Fish’s review of Iser’s book The Act of Reading is entitled “Why No

One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser”. Iser’s response is “Talk like Whales: A Reply to

Stanley Fish”. From the titles alone it is evident that these two important and original

thinkers were engaged in a reflexive performance of their rival perspectives on the

nature of the literary text. Iser pointed out that he was “sure that Professor Fish knows

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something of the history of literary theory, and that it is often characterized by

misplaced distinctions and untenable oppositions” (82). He was clearly less than

impressed by Fish’s historical perspective. His epigraph was taken from Boswell’s Life

of Johnson, where Oliver Goldsmith responds to Johnson, who had laughed at the idea

that there was skill in making the creatures in fables talk like humans: “‘Why, Dr.

Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think; for if you were to make little fishes

talk, they would talk like WHALES’” (82). In what appears to be an aside to the drama,

Iser addresses the reader directly with this quotation. Perhaps it is useful to consider this

a kind of soliloquy, whereby Iser points toward the public staging of a debate, even as

he steps into the fray. The full passage is as follows:

‘For instance, (said he,) the fable of the little fishes, who saw birds fly

over their heads, and envying them, petitioned Jupiter to be changed into

birds. The skill (continued he,) consists in making them talk like little

fishes.’ While he indulged himself in this fanciful reverie, he observed

Johnson shaking his sides, and laughing. Upon which he smartly

proceeded, ‘Why, Dr. Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think;

for if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like WHALES.’

(Life of Johnson 151)

If there is a moral to the story then for Iser it is to be discovered in the confusion that

results when one makes assumptions about the language of another. And this Fish does

of Iser.

The maritime theme is consonant with Fish’s opening salvo: “At a time when we

are warned daily against the sirens of literary theory, Wolfgang Iser is notable because

he does not appear on anyone’s list” (“Why No One’s” 2). Fish points his normative

gaze in Iser’s direction, concluding that the latter practitioner is to be thought of as

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obscured by history: “at a moment when everyone appears to be choosing up sides, he

seems to be on no side at all or (it amounts to the same thing) on every side at once” (2).

The pluralistic position Fish ascribes to Iser is not clearly substantiated in Fish’s critique,

and simply not being on a team does not mean you support all the teams. Fish makes no

mentions of Iser’s own critique of pluralism, which agrees that a methodology which is

on “every side at once” is problematic. For Iser pluralism is a predictable conclusion to

the logical momentum methodology formulation inspires. As discussed in chapter three,

he argues that when theory is not clearly distinguished from method, the categories

employed as techniques justified by theory can become confused with the theory itself.

In “The Current Situation of Literary Theory” he argues that pluralism: “is a sort of

sterile hermeneutics” (4). The methodological tolerance of pluralism tends to generate

the very problems it sets out to resolve, and Iser saw the evidence of this in the

increasing numbers of methods emerging during the seventies. Iser describes pluralism

as “eclectic syncretism” (6), and argues that it complicates an already confounding

process of providing a theoretical rationale for the techniques employed as methods of

interpretation in the process of methodology formulation. As we have seen, Iser sees

this unfolding through a complex hermeneutic circularity, where critics use “the

explanatory potential of the theory to chart the territory which the latter had already

signposted” (6). The irony is that Fish himself recognises this recursive tendency. In his

Is There a Text in this Class, recently published at that time, he writes “strategies exist

prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than,

as is usually assumed, the other way around.” “Interpretive communities” shape the

interpretive strategies of their members, and therefore “the writing” of texts (14). He

states emphatically a few pages later:

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Whereas I had once agreed with my predecessors on the need to control

interpretation lest it overwhelm and obscure texts, facts, authors and

intentions, I now believe that interpretation is the source of texts, facts,

authors, and intentions. Or to put it another way, the entities that were

once seen as competing for the right to interpretation (text, reader,

author) are now all seen to be the products of interpretation. (16)

The writing of not simply texts but the entire range of categories which make up the

literary field occurs through the activity of a convention-bounded interpretation. There

is indeed a strong synergy between this and Iser’s emphasis on the act of interpretation

and reader text interaction. His concept of “convergence” of reader and text, however, is

not so concrete as Fish’s, and the latter’s “text” is certainly not Iser’s. Fish would have

the text and reader become indistinguishable, an eventuality Iser struggles against.

Fish’s attempts to normalise and categorise Iser, to discover him in a context of

reception, can be seen to have its roots in his own theory with its textual monism that

demonstrates a tendency toward the problematic practice of boldly formulating the

assumptions of others, and which leads Fish to misread Iser.

Iser compliments Fish upon the fact that “[h]e has a genuine talent for précis

writing” (“Talk like Whales” 82). However, précis is reductive, and always geared

toward a pragmatic goal. This is a compliment that seems to entail a sidelong glance at

the rhetorical shortcomings of Fish’s often persuasive – and oft times quoted – writings,

and certainly at his reductive treatment of Iser. The most prominent example is his

assertion that Iser presupposes a very particular concept of reality and as we will see,

Fish’s idiosyncratic description of the ground upon which Iser’s theory is built brings to

the fore the shortcomings of his monism. Jonathon Culler summarises this disparity in

his introductory essay to the book The Identity of the Literary Text:

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The recent career of Stanley Fish, as recorded in the twists and turns of

his recent book, Is There a Text in this Class?, might serve as a

cautionary tale for anyone hoping to solve the problem of the identity of

the literary text. In trying to answer the question of what is ‘in’ the text,

stable and unchanging, and what is contributed by the reader, Fish has

run through a series of positions. Each change of position attributes to

the activity of the reader something that had previously located in the

text…. This radical monism by which everything is the product of

interpretive strategies, is a logical result of analysis that shows each

entity to be a conventional construct; but the distinction between subject

and object is more resilient than Fish thinks and will not be eliminated

‘at a stroke’. (5)

The telescoping of subject and object that sees Fish locate his literary text entirely

within the conventions that dictate the particular context of interpretation also makes

him a “cautionary tale” about the side-effects of taking a particular explanation to be the

reality of the text. As Culler points out, each occasion of reading must return to examine

and distinguish a discrete reader and text, for “interpretation is always interpretation of

something” (5). Culler goes on to assert that Iser’s “eminently sensible” (5) account of

the literary text attempts to maintain a “dualistic theory” (6) that includes the

participation of a reader and the structure provided by the “determinate” text ultimately

fails because it collapses on itself such that: “the distinction between text and reader,

fact and interpretation, or determined and undetermined breaks down and his theory

becomes monistic” (6). Here Culler agrees with Fish’s assessment of Iser, who had

earlier concluded that:

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The theory, in short, has something for everyone, and denies legitimacy

to no one. And yet, in the end it falls apart, and it falls apart because the

distinction on which it finally depends – the distinction between the

determinate and the indeterminate – will not hold. (“Why No One’s” 6).

And with this Fish stands as the boy who has removed his digit from the dyke,

describing the water flooding in. He sees the binary array of determinate and

indeterminate as the fatal flaw of Iser’s theory, and that the capacious and liberating

potential in the theory evaporates simultaneously with the collapse of the spatial

metaphor of “gaps”. Fish claims that Iser’s arrangement of “the

determinacy/indeterminacy distinction” is “in other words, between what is already

given and what must be bought into being by interpretive activity” (“Why No One’s” 6)

is met with stern opposition by Iser who sees this as a reduction of his triadic

arrangement into a binary. He points out that in the above quoted passage, Fish

overlooks a third category: “the given”. He describes Fish’s misreading as follows:

Professor Fish’s confusion is caused by the fact that he has telescoped

three ideas into two. I draw a distinction between the given, the

determinate, and the indeterminate. I maintain that the literary world

differs from the real world because it is only accessible to the

imagination, whereas the real world is also accessible to the senses and

exists outside any description of it. (“Talk like Whales” 83)

As will be discussed in more detail below, the given is the extra-literary world. The

physical form of the literary text is therefore a part of the given. The “literary world” on

the other hand, is a virtual reality. These two categories are not to be thought of as

clinically opposed. The imagination in Iser’s theory is at this point not yet so developed

as it would later become. Perhaps this critique of his work was a key motivator in his

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movement toward a careful articulation of the imaginary – as against the difficulty of a

“faculty” of the imagination – as a third element in the triadic modelling of the fictive,

real and imaginary. Iser does not describe his objection in a convincing fashion in his

response to Fish, due in part to a lack of detail in his explanation of the above-made

distinction. However, Iser presupposes a relationship between the literary and the extra-

literary world that manifests complexly in his account of reading and, as we will

discover, Iser’s central complaint about Fish’s critique would have been identical to his

response to Culler, if he had made it. Namely, both commentators rely on a limited

interpretation of how Iser describes the relationship between the extra-literary world and

the reality of the text.

Fish is openly cynical of Iser’s phenomenology, as might be observed in Fish’s

description:

When he is at his most phenomenological… it sometimes seems that the

very features of the text emerge into being in a reciprocal relationship

with the reader’s activities; but in his more characteristic moments Iser

insists on the brute-fact status of the text. (“Why No One’s” 6)

When Iser is “at his most phenomenological” he operates within a field or system which

is for Fish characterized by dynamic exchange or reciprocity. This simultaneous

contribution of text and reader is a feature of a process, but Fish suggests that Iser

undoes this process-oriented account when he reduces the literary text by assigning it a

concrete value, and he quotes Iser’s astronomical metaphor in order to describe this. He

writes of Iser that “he declares in one place ‘the stars in a literary text are fixed; the lines

that join them are variable’” and concludes “Iser is able to maintain this position

because he regards the text as a part of the world… he regards the world, or external

reality, as itself determinate” (6). This distinction allows for the literary text to be

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described only in response to a set of binaries, which are for Fish, a final death-dealing

blow:

the familiar distinction between the determinate or given and the

indeterminate or supplied… fall by the same reasoning which makes that

distinction finally untenable: what must be supplied in literary

experience must also be supplied in the ‘real life’ experience to which it

is, point for point, opposed. (8)

Iser does not align the determinate with the given, anymore than he holds that the given

reality is in an utterly oppositional relationship with the readerly experience. In his

essay “The Reality of Fiction” published several years earlier in 1975, Iser writes: “no

literary text relates to contingent reality as such, but to models or concepts of reality, in

which contingencies and complexities are reduced to a meaningful structure” (22). Iser

sees this as a feature of the aesthetic appraisal he articulates in The Act of Reading:

It is characteristic of aesthetic effect that it cannot be pinned to

something existing, and, indeed, the very word “aesthetic” is an

embarrassment to referential language, for it designates a gap in the

defining qualities of language, rather than a definition…. The aesthetic

effect is robbed of this unique quality the moment one tries to define

what is meant in terms of other meanings that one knows. (22)

In this appraisal the real is not a determinate presence, with a fixity based on a set of

assumed parameters for reality. Instead it is a category which defines the “literary

world” in terms of the aesthetic. Iser describes the results of this connectivity in “The

Reality of Fiction” as follows:

It is this indeterminate position that endows the text with its dynamic,

aesthetic value – “aesthetic” in the sense described by Robert Kalivoda:

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“In our eyes, the paramount discovery of scientific aesthetics is the

recognition of the fact that the aesthetic is an empty principle which

organizes extra-aesthetic qualities.” As such, aesthetic value is

something that cannot be grasped. (22)

Here the literary aesthetic is granted its dynamism by virtue of its capacity to structure

and organise the “extra-aesthetic”. The aesthetic dimension of the text then, is a

negative category, it is an opening, it “cannot be grasped” since it is a potential. The

reality of fiction, for Iser, is not clearly demarcated but “suspect” (22). The aesthetic is

imagined as a gap, which mediates and organises the extra-aesthetic and the relationship

between the given, the literary text, and interpretation in this sense is not limited as Fish

argues it is. Iser locates the text in relation to a mediated understanding of the real, as he

explains in his response to Fish:

The words of a text are given, the interpretation of the words is

determinate, and the gaps between given elements and/or interpretations

are the indeterminacies. The real world is given, our interpretation of the

world is determinate, the gaps between given elements and/or our

interpretations are the indeterminacies. The difference is that with the

literary text, it is the interpretation of the words that produces the literary

world – i.e. its real-ness, unlike that of the outside world, is not given.

(“Talk like Whales” 83)

Here the “real-ness” of the literary world is not for Iser simply a part of the broader

reality, as Fish has concluded. Instead, it is as Fish himself argues, only feasible through

the intervention of the unique conditions of a human imaginary act, in the performance

of interpretation. However, it is not simply possible in and of the communal

conventions that govern interpretation, as Fish’s monism would have us conclude. It is

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instead punctured by indeterminacy, by gaps that must manifest if the subject and object

are maintained in contradistinction.

Fish is guilty of the crime he accuses Iser of committing, since Fish reduces

Iser’s account of the “given” to a simplistic version of the real-fictive binary. Iser points

out that his theory is instead an account of how the layering of categories confuses the

location of the literary work. With the introduction of the virtuality of interpretation via

the imagination, Iser highlights the parallels between – and implicit separation of – his

conceptualization of the “real world” and the “literary world”. Both are imagined in

response to a dynamism generated through the determinate processing of a real – in the

case of the literary, the literary real – which invokes another level of interpretation. The

subjective creation of the reality of the literary world responds to the “given” words

themselves: the given status of which is not simply responsive to the “real-ness” of the

“outside world”, it is the result of the mediation of an imaginary act. We interpret the

words to produce the literary world, the “reality” of which cannot be tested against a

given category which is available to the senses, and which unfolds in and of the human

imaginary. This is not least because indeterminacy is a key feature of the reading

process, taking the form of “the gaps between given elements and/or our

interpretations” (83).

Fish’s conclusion that “there is no distinction between what the text gives and

what the reader supplies; he supplies everything; the stars in a literary text are not fixed;

they are just as variable as the lines that join them” (“Why No One’s” 7) is relying upon

an assertion about Iser’s theory which is false, namely that Iser begins from the

perspectival arrangement of the real into a state of self-evidentiary presence, as a

“given”. He responds to Fish’s assertions by placing his conceptualization of the

imaginary between this given and the subjective:

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I claim only that the world arising from the literary text (apart from the

printed pages as a physical object) is accessible to the imagination but

not the senses, whereas the outside world exists independently of the

imagination, even though in perceiving it we cannot avoid also

imagining it. (“Talk like Whales” 85)

It would have been a more effective criticism, had Fish pointed out that Iser’s key

category “imagination” is not effectively explored. Indeed, he appears to imply here that

the imagination is a faculty, since it is co-extensive with perception. However, the

imagination is instead the potential that remains open by virtue of the individuated

experience of the subject-as-reader. Arguably this distracts Fish from the fact that Iser

assumes nothing of the subjective real, aside from its role in a process described via a

triadic array. As such, the metaphor Fish predicates his assumption on is anticipated in

Iser’s assertion in 1979 of the utility of the imaginary. Here he points out that:

“Theories generally assume plausibility through closure of the framework provided, but

in the realm of art they often only attain closure through the introduction of metaphors”

(“Current” 5). Iser’s theory moves toward including this figurative dimension of theory,

while Fish’s critique moves toward a foreclosure upon the possibilities implicit in such

a practice. Fish commits the sins Iser describes: the fixity of stars in Iser’s universe is

figurative. The fixity of stars in Iser’s universe is literal inside a dynamic portrayal of

the “literary world”. The fluidity of Iserian stars in Fish’s universe is a precise

indication of Fish’s own assumptions about the real: namely, that the real can be

isolated in Iser’s universe. We might observe Fish furthering the point Iser attempts to

make: that the removal of the aesthetic potential, and its replacement with a fixity

inspired by binarisms, involves a denial of the conditions of human imagination. As

Culler concluded of Fish’s “radical monism”, it must ignore that in each act of

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interpretation there must be a subject and object, for something is interpreted. As Iser

concludes, deploying his own metaphorical sleight of hand, his detractor employs “The

piscine technique of putting words in my mouth then arguing against them”.

4.2 The “reality” of fiction

Iser and Fish’s trading of metaphorical insults may have led at least indirectly to

Iser’s growing preoccupation with a literary anthropology. His essay “The Interplay

between Creation and Interpretation” published a few years later in 1984 provides a

commentary offering a pathway ahead that suggests a rationale for the use of cultural

anthropology. Iser writes that he is determined to “trace the underlying trends

concerning creation and interpretation and find out why it proves so hard to

conceptualize the issue” (387). He demonstrates how the contributors to this volume of

New Literary History (devoted, as mentioned above, to the “Interrelation of

Interpretation and Creation”) tend to telescope creation and interpretation, and argues

that when one does manage to think of them separately, one discovers the requirement

for an account of the “imaginary”.

Iser presents his conceptualization of the imaginary as a resolution to the

complex problems that emerge when we attempt to understand what unfolds as

creativity and interpretation are bought into play with one another. Iser sees “creation”

here as an “act of transgression” (392). In the act of creation, the subject engages in

violent “actions, ranging from defamiliarization through pattern breaking to scandal”

(392). Interpretation is to be understood in terms of “an attempt at translating events

brought about by creation into existing frameworks for both their comprehension and

manageability” (392). So while creation disrupts and even scandalizes, interpretation

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attempts, to “control the uncontrollable” (392). These two are not just opposites for Iser,

but are discovered in a “constant interplay” since creation is context-governed, and

while it overcomes the conventions dictated by the context of its conduct it must rely

upon such conventions for the very scandal it creates, such that “creation is a negative

interpretation” (392-3). Meanwhile, interpretation is not simply an activity of cognition,

since translation often involves dealing with the unfamiliar (that which is beyond

cognition) in a manner which requires an “imaginative leap” (393). Iser concludes,

therefore, that interpretation is “guided creation”, though the dynamic interaction of

these two categories is best understood as the interplay of two diametrically opposed

activities that must be “approached through anthropology” (393). Since these are such

basic human functions, “the interplay in question reflects something inherent in the

human situation” that cannot be measured from some transcendant perspective (393). In

support of this suggestion of an anthropological turn, Iser raises two assertions about the

human animal that he draws from anthropological discourse. The first is that:

The human being, as Arnold Gehlen maintains, is inferior to the animal,

since its instinctual system is defunct, in consequence of which there is a

pressing need to repair this deficiency. Hence we build institutions

designed to substitute for what we have lost in our biological makeup.

(393)

In the second, Iser draws upon the treatment of myth by the German philosopher Hans

Blumenberg as “a basic effort to humanize an otherwise unmanageable world” (393).

Myth is “one of the first ‘institutions’ man has ‘invented’” in a response to the world

that is for Iser a pragmatic one, designed to establish frameworks for interpreting the

alien features of a world beyond our immediate confirmation:

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Institutions are just one of the products of interpretation by means of

which we situate ourselves in the world…. Propelled by the impulse to

familiarize the unfamiliar, it [interpretation] imposes cognitive

frameworks on what appears to be incommensurable, thus naturalizing

an otherwise unmanageable experience. (394)

The “naturalizing” process is a mythologising process, since it takes the unfamiliar and

enfolds it into the familiar via the structuration offered in our institutions. Thus our

experience of the world with its complex daily offerings of the unfamiliar becomes a

salient point in the history of institution building. This is a process that has developed to

the point that the emergent structures are beginning to inhibit the initial purpose, since

the explanations of the unfamiliar participate in a process of myth building. Iser sees the

progression of institutional models yielding a culture in which “The more successful…

these attempts prove to be, the more we tend to equate our interpretations with the state

of affairs interpreted. Reification then becomes the new danger” (394). This

“reification” is an outcome to myth building, whereby the explanation of the real

becomes so central to our understanding we begin to mistake the explanation for the

reality concerned. Here Iser seems to hold common ground with both Barthes’ and

Baudrillard’s assessments, published at around this time. The former’s earlier writings

in Mythologies (1957) focuses on image cultures that “naturalize” a particular

articulation of deeper, commonly held contemporary social attitudes that are implicitly

valorized, rather than examined. Baudrillard’s examination of the “precession of

simulacra” borrows Borges’ fable of a great empire so obsessed with facsimile, or

cartography, that they construct a one-to-one map of their territories. The map

eventually comes to precede the territory, under which “it is the real, and not the map,

whose vestiges subsist here and there” (Simulations 2). For Baudrillard, using our

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institutional devices, we have mediated our way to a position wherein the interpretation

and construction of the real is pointed toward the mediation itself. Arguably,

Baudrillard inscribes the same process Iser and Barthes critique: whether by

mythologising, reification or simulation, the process leads to a paradox. That is, a

process beginning with the pragmatic goal of representing the real comes to generate the

real it purports to represent. This process distorts both the structures by which we would

assemble an understanding of the real, and the detail of our emergent understanding.

This is a constant theme in Iser’s work, and as we have seen, he argues that it involves a

convolution of institutional responses to the world, and intermingles with subjective

cognitive structuring. He eventually concludes, here in “Creation and Interpretation”, as

well as in later writings, that this phenomenon points toward the need for a cultural

anthropology which might explore the complex web of interpretive strategies which

emerged from institutionalising our relationship with the real. For Baudrillard, the

figure of the map presumes a preceding territory, known, and eventually completely

represented by the one to one “map”. Over time the map has become almost completely

telescoped with the territory, and only remnants of the map remain distinct, here and

there appearing to confound the mediated real which makes up a contemporary human

consciousness (Simulations 1-3).

For Iser the real is a potential, mediated in an ongoing fashion, manifesting as a

“given” category, but never completely determined. In identifying the dangers involved

with “reification”, he discriminates between immediate sensory relationship with reality,

and the reality of the “literary world”. This discrimination necessitates the imaginary for

Iser: and in the later articulation of his literary anthropology the real, the fictive and the

imaginary interact in a dynamic triadic relationship to generate the literary world. With

his emphasis of the imaginary in his literary anthropology, and the given in his

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phenomenology of reading, Iser is making overt his design to deal with the telescoping

of categories such as creation and interpretation, reader and text, or fiction and literature.

This manifests in literary discourse where orthodox interpretations of a literary work

come to appear as “natural”. As a result the potential interpretations of the “literary

world” are adumbrated. Here a set of assumptions on behalf of how the reader will

encounter the “real” world are fed forward into the literary discourse, with the effect of

reifying a particular account of the text. In Iser’s terms, we come to “equate our

interpretations with the state of affairs interpreted” (“Interplay” 394). Iser’s concern

over the direct opposition of reality and fiction in literary discourse is exhibited by this

precession. The complex interplay of “reality” and “fiction” is exchanged in the

discourse for a binarism which requires a concrete description of the “real”. This is a

description of hermeneutic circularity; but it is also an application of an anthropological

perspective to literary critical interpretation. Iser’s suggestion that “reality” requires

closer inspection in literary discourse is based on a long view of the role of

interpretation in the basic human procedure of reality formulation.

Iser and his colleague Hans Robert Jauss were influenced by Blumenberg’s

philosophy as they built their “Rezeptionästhetik”, which was influential through the

late sixties and early seventies. In order to examine Iser’s position more closely, we turn

to a 1979 essay by Hans Blumenberg entitled “The Concept of Reality and the

Possibility of the Novel”. Published in English in a book entitled New perspectives in

German literary criticism: a collection of essays, in the first of five sub-sections entitled

“Imitation and Illusion”– given over to essays concerning changes over time of larger

understandings of the function of literature – Blumenberg’s is the first and gives a

history of western approaches to conceptualising reality. He examines how these relate

to art, eventually focussing upon the novel. He describes how a larger historical shift in

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conceptualizing the real had led western thought to locate the literary in respect of a

mediated reality, observing that human beings can now “naturalize, but no longer can

we do this by representing or imitating Nature; we must instead claim ‘naturalness’ for

our works” (46). Being “natural” is a mode, rather than an imitative versioning of a

broader given “reality” available to the senses. He goes on to describe the emergence of

this “reality” through phenomenology, beginning with classicism, and arriving at an

observation of the “mediated” history of novelistic endeavour, as follows:

The reality concept of the context of phenomena presents a reality that

can never be assured, is constantly in the process of being actualized, and

continually requires some new kind of confirmation. This idea of reality

even when transformed into the reality of an esthetic object, remains a

sort of consistency which is, so to speak, open at both ends and

dependent on continuous proofs and accomplishments, without ever

achieving the finality of evidence that characterized the classical concept

of reality. This is one reason for the uneasiness and dissatisfaction that

have been a constant critical undercurrent throughout the history of the

novel. One way out of this dissatisfaction is to resist the need for an

endless actualization by deliberately breaking through set patterns of

formal consistency. (47)

The real may be knowable, but confirming that it is actually known involves an ongoing

process of actualizing and confirmation. Even in the objective form of the artwork, or

the “esthetic object”, this understanding of reality as open ended maintains its demand

for “continuous proofs and accomplishments” without ever becoming finalized via

some evidencing process, which would necessarily rely upon a “classical concept of

reality”. This relationship with “reality” resonates through Iser’s work, which often

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deals directly with the complex nature of the interaction of the “real” and the “literary”

worlds. For example, in The Implied Reader Iser describes this concern as follows:

“Within a limited space, the author has to try and portray an illimitable reality” (251).

The modelling of a “reality concept of the context of phenomena” which “presents a

reality that can never be assured” invokes a philosophical presupposition Iser had been

influenced by in his earlier descriptions of the reader-text interaction. Blumenberg’s

suggestion of an urge toward “actualization” via “breaking through set patterns of

formal consistency” seems closely aligned with Iser’s warnings in “Creation and

Interpretation” against the “reification” which may emerge from “every successful

interpretation” (394). Iser argues that when we forget the “pragmatic” nature of the

strategy we employ during interpretation, “we are on the verge of imprisoning ourselves

within our interpretive frameworks” (394). This entails the certainty that there are

moments when we must engage with a “dismantling not only of what interpretation has

brought about but also of what governs the respective interpretation” (394). For Iser,

this is the “nature” of creation, and this breaking down of the previously interpreted – in

contradistinction to the traditional vision of creation – “is basically ‘decomposition’, as

Beckett worded it, because we live in an interpreted world which stands in need of

constant rearrangement in order to prevent it from lapsing into deadening immobility”

(394). A paradoxical portrayal of the relationship between creation, interpretation and

reality is presented by Iser on behalf of the human subject. Calling upon Beckett, Iser

describes interpretation in the context of a larger human experience in which we are

subject to and participate in subjective interpretation which is bound up with the history

of its own institutional endeavours. In order for this bound figure to move forward, the

subject must simultaneously “decompose” a history of interpretive stratagems. The

departure from Fish’s “radical monism” is striking at this point, and it is little wonder he

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misreads Iser, given that his own conclusions to a similar analysis of what he describes

in terms of “convention governed” interpretation is to embrace fully the creation that

interpretation would generate. Their disparate philosophical presuppositions, however,

dictate that for Fish, interpretation precedes and collapses all into one. For Iser, such an

outcome is the “danger looming large” (394), and a possibility that would result from

allowing our interpretations to become “reality” by identifying too closely with them.

One cannot imagine their positions developing in any more divergent a manner.

4.3 The reality of literary anthropology

In terms of Iser’s work in developing a literary anthropology, this differentiation

from Fish is important. Blumenberg writes that the “breaking through” of formal

patterns of consistency does not “spring from any failure or exhaustion of creative

powers” (47). Challenging the traditional vision of the “poet as liar”, he concludes that

the only pathway forward is to “no longer set out to prove its antithesis – namely, that

poets tell the truth – but concentrate on deliberately breaking the bonds of this antithesis

and indeed all the rules of the reality-game itself” (47). Blumenberg sees the need to

refuse the dialectic of binarisms such as truth versus lie, and their grounding in a

classical reality, which manifest as an “unwanted limitation on form, an esthetic

heteronomy wearing the mask of authenticity” (47). If we cease the activity of

attempting to locate the “poet” in respect of the “real”, we can begin to escape a limiting

model of the aesthetic. The conclusion we might draw to these series of observations, is

that we can begin to “decompose” a history of interpretive endeavour to the extent that

we might create an understanding of interpretation as a human activity if we refuse the

“rules of the reality-game”. For Iser, this is significant not just in terms of conducting

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interpretation of literature itself, but in terms of interpreting interpretation. The question

of the human significance of the literary medium is engaged in his literary anthropology

at this level of discourse: inviting questions of its sign function. It does so in an

engagement with literary discourse itself, which might offer us an approach to such

significant questions as to how we access and understand the real via the literary. As he

writes in The Fictive and the Imaginary:

fiction will differ according to the categories chosen for defining it. It

would be advisable, then, to take literary discourse itself as a context for

exploring literary fictionality. Such a context will bring to light the

historical shifts of fictionality’s manifestations and may in the end

change the manner in which these manifestations are viewed. Perhaps the

most far reaching problem posed by fiction is neither its status nor its

communicative function but, rather, the question of why it exists at all.

(23)

The flux of theory with its shifting definitional accounts is placed in a position

secondary to discussion of the manifestations of literary fictionality, not in terms of

communication, but in terms of why it has been an important human activity.

Blumenberg suggests a movement away from a conception of reality that constricts our

appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of the art work. Reality is not opposed to

unreality as part of an interpretive process that seeks its own authentication via a

concrete account of the work as object. Instead of locating the “truth” of the art work in

respect of this binary arrangement of reality and unreality, he would insist on a rejection

of the “rules of the reality-game” such that:

Commitment to reality is rejected as an unwanted limitation on form, an

esthetic heteronomy wearing the mask of authenticity. Herein lie the

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roots of an esthetic concept that can now present as “true” what all the

previous concepts of reality would have designated as unreal: paradox,

the inconsistency of dreams, deliberate nonsense, centaurian hybrids,

objects placed in the most unlikely positions, the reversal of natural

entropy, refuse used to make objets d’art, newspaper cuttings to make

novels, the noises of technology to make a musical composition.

(Blumenberg 47)

Truth, in this use, is deployed as a means by which to describe that which has escaped

the limiting modality of a particular ideologically-influenced understanding of authentic

human experience. Rejecting this commitment to the real/unreal dialectic is designed to

recalibrate the process of discovering the “true” human significance of aesthetic

potential in the context of any artistic format. Blumenberg expands upon this

observation by arguing that modern art continues to attempt to actualize itself via

refuting a “Nature” which is enmeshed with a deterministic concept of reality. However,

this reflexive rejection of a both figurative and literal classic “reality” is not achieved by

modern art. Indeed, the resultant openness to interpretation in modern art creates

“hermeneutic ambiguity” (46). Blumenberg argues that “human art presents itself

neither as an imitation of Nature nor as a ‘piece of nature’… it must be at one and the

same time, both novelty and fossil” (46). This is a description that leads to an

assessment of the aesthetic dimension of the novel as being capable of offering us

“aspects of ourselves” by not being “objects that depend on subjects”, but by being

“things in themselves” (46). This is not a model of the work as self-contained, since the

work should “not represent aspects but should offer us aspects of ourselves” (46). This

arises from a “perspective structure systematically prepared and laid out in the novel”

(46), which is capable of stimulating a particular historical perspective without actually

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determining it, since “that is stimulated by the work but not fulfilled by it” (46). The

hermeneutic ambiguity manifests most clearly for Blumenberg from Romanticism

onward, as from this time we recognized “the openness” in modern art to a variety of

interpretations (46). It is this ambiguity which evidences for Blumenberg that the

“‘reality’ of the work of art” is independent of our subjectivity (46). Subsequently, we

historicize the work of art in order to “strip it of its dependence on ourselves and to

‘reify’ it” (46).This indicates a deterministic relationship with the “naturalizing” effect

of the “reality” of an art work, and ultimately yields an interpretive culture geared

toward the reification of the object. The reality of the text then, is not identical to reality

in general. Blumenberg summarises this as “[t]he novel has its own ‘realism’, which has

evolved from its own particular laws, and this has nothing to do with the ideal of

imitation, but is linked precisely to the esthetic illusion which is essential to genre” (48).

The aesthetic then, is illusory, and bound to convention, but beyond the mimetic quality

of representation, and participates in the organising structure of a novel which has its

own “reality”. This reality is both convention-governed, and generative, “Fixing (or

causing) a world (Welthaftigkeit) as a form, overriding structure is what constitutes the

novel” (48). This is why Blumenberg suggests that we do not locate the literary “object”

in relation to “reality”, and must also refuse to refuse the reality offered in the tradition

of interpretation given that the fictive does not respond to the real, but instead, it

becomes “as a fiction of the reality of realities” (48). He suggests that the novel, as a

fictive model, “takes its own possibility as its subject matter, thus demonstrating its

dependence on the concept of reality” (48).

The nature of this “dependence” seems close to Iser’s own concept of fiction. In

the description above, the “reality” of the literary work when it is taken to be in a binary

arrangement with the extra-literary reality, finds itself located in a reified domain. On

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the other hand, if we conceptualize a literary world made up of a “fiction of the reality

of realities”, we can – to employ Iser’s term – begin to “decompose” the hermeneutic

circularity which has formed its precedent. Iser’s move to a triadic model in his literary

anthropology is based upon this mode of conceptualizing literary fictionality. As seen

above, he argues that the “interplay” of “creation” and “interpretation” cannot be

accounted for by employing an epistemological approach, an observation that relies

upon a conception of our approaches to reality as being both historically contingent and

complexly realised. In Iser’s anthropological terms, we might summarise this as

follows: when the literary work is understood as being in possession of a reality which

(beyond the sensible features of the narrative) is placed in opposition to a larger

concrete reality, it is subject to an unacceptable reduction. This limiting isolation is a

feature of the reification which would see us adhering to interpretive frameworks that

restrict, rather than liberate, creative interpretation.

The imaginary then is positioned so as to facilitate a dynamic interplay between

creativity and interpretation that must “testify to something in the human makeup”, and

point toward the relevance of cultural anthropology in the study of literature. Here the

imaginary manifests in terms of potential that is unpredictable, beyond the conceptual,

and defies cognition. The pragmatism that motivates interpretation is challenged by

creation in that “[a]lthough creation defies cognition, it nevertheless is conditioned by

the context to be decomposed, which links it to the form of interpretation it is meant to

disrupt” (“Interplay” 395). This pragmatism is not predictable, though, and as in the

case of the ambiguous intentionality of the literary text, the act of creation liberates the

imaginary as a potential that is beyond the immediate control of consciousness:

Interpretation indicates the dominance of the conscious over the

imaginary, and creation swamps the conscious by the imaginary. As

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these two activities interlink, they testify to something in the human

makeup… the interplay between creation and interpretation could be

conceived as a vantage point for opening up a perspective on the as yet

widely unexplored territory of cultural anthropology. (“Interplay” 395)

Interpretation suggests consciousness commands the imaginary, and creation overcomes

the conscious by virtue of the imaginary potential, and these two dual systems interplay

to generate a dynamic human possibility. In 1984 then, close to a decade prior to the

publication of The Fictive and the Imaginary, central elements of the imaginary were

certainly very advanced in Iser’s writing. His preoccupation with the potential liberated

by the mode of “contraflow” between opposing yet mutually sustaining activities is

presented here as a means by which to articulate the dynamic interaction of the human

subject with the institutions they generate and maintain in managing the complex

processes that become our reality.

4.4 Alternate “realities” of Iser

We may conclude that the positions of Iser and Fish are not able to be reconciled,

and this demonstrates an important feature of both Iser’s theory and literary studies.

Neither “side” of the argument has been invalidated in this discussion, instead we have

focussed upon the context for Iser’s position and how this may have led to a misreading

of Iser. That the presuppositions of Iser are lost to the debate reminds us that the context

for theory is indeed a marketplace of ideas. The following is the conclusion to Steven

Mailloux’s paper on “Literary Theory and Social Reading Models”, which indicates this

context when it agrees with Fish:

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The Act of Reading is persuasive because it appears to be safe: it gives

the American critic just enough of the reader but not too much. More

exactly, it provides an acceptable model of the text partially disguised as

an innovative account of reading. Very economically, then, it fulfills

both needs of current American theory: it incorporates the reader into a

theory of literature while it maintains the traditional American

valorization of the autonomous text. Iser allows American theorists to

have their text and reader too. (56)

Mailloux sees this openness as cynical speaking very deliberately into a context with a

voice tailored to the ear of the listener. Iser’s success in America, therefore, was largely

driven by the force of his “theoretical” capacity to stop the gaps in a leaky boat.

Mailloux’s explanation of Iser’s success is persuasive, and though the tone of the

writing implies an intentional deception, the conclusion that Mailloux reaches is more

convincing than that of Fish. The rather cumbersome accusation that Iser’s account of

reading is not innovative, and simply adopting an innovative pose as means by which to

disguise a “model of the text” is another matter. It is difficult to adjudicate on a debate

like this, and of no great relevance to the current discussion, though Mailloux’s

conclusion that Iser’s is “a “text-centred theory of reading… at its foundation” (56) is

hardly a sweeping critique. As we have seen, Iser is certainly not afraid to locate his

reader in respect of the text, though he hardly allows for an “autonomous text”: Iser’s

literary text is ever context-dependent, as is his reader. Iser’s account of the reader-text

interaction contains a refusal to concretize the boundaries to the text or reader; both

remain contingent. As we have seen, Iser’s “phenomenology” of reading does not seek a

“meaning” of the text in some final location, in either reader or text. In The Act of

Reading, Iser isolates the “wandering viewpoint” as a means of capturing this

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perspective on literature, where he writes that the reader and text are in very different

relationship to that of the observer and an ordinary object. The reader and text as subject

and object interact complexly, since the text does not simply denote “empirically

existing objects”, and the “whole text can never be perceived at one time”. Instead,

there is an intersubjective structure to the process by which the text is “translated”

marked by the “wandering viewpoint” of the reader that makes this literary context

unique: “instead of a subject-object relationship, there is a moving viewpoint which

travels along inside that which it has to apprehend. This mode of grasping an object is

unique” (109). It is of interest that Mailloux praises Iser’s attempts in The Act of

Reading to point toward the need for an account of literature that employs an

anthropological strategy: “Within today’s critical discourse, these are admirable goals”

(55). As we have seen, Iser’s rationale for an anthropological approach to literature is

based upon the complex interplay of processes commonly employed and described in

literary discourse, but rarely clearly separated and contextualised on the basis of their

function. If his “autonomous text” had been taken up widely in an American context,

then this is a problem his anthropological leanings were intended to overcome.

For Fish, the only feasible position is to conclude that the reader brings

everything about the text into existence. For Iser, there is a third element to this

interaction. Beyond the accusations that Iser is simply giving an American audience

what it wants, or that Iser’s theory is a text-centred argument are indications that Iser’s

readers struggle to find the point of origin to his theory. The prevailing criticism of his

theory of reading is that it relies on a concrete literary object. The reasons for this

conclusion are made apparent in his literary anthropology, where Iser articulates the

imaginary as a description of a third category to supplement his conviction that reader

and text must be maintained as distinct, mutually shaping agents. This third category

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manifests throughout Iser’s theory, and always as a potential. As we have seen in Iser’s

debate with Fish, and will see again in chapters five and six, the strategy of not defining

a key category in this fashion does not suit literary theory or literary critical

interpretation. In order for Iser to have his text and reader too it is the only possibility. If

Iser were to ground his account in the manner demanded of him, he will have limited

the dynamic he attempts to describe.

But what provides Iser’s groundlessness? The potential has, paradoxically, as its

ground, groundlessness. This groundlessness can always be discovered as the

manifestation of human “plasticity”. Quite simply, we always discover that language

mediates this potential in the literary setting. Since the figurative always intervenes at

the edges of linguistic signification to generate this potential, the origin of the deferral

that inspires the critic to argue Iser’s theory originates with the text, is the origin of

language. In her excellent summary of Iser’s reluctance to concretize his description of

human interaction with literature in The Fictive and the Imaginary, Gabriel Schwab

notes that Iser refuses to “ground us” since he is “never satisfied with the unavoidable,

temporary manifestation of a particular thought or argument” (87). She goes on to quote

from the The Fictive and the Imaginary and to describe an interesting “encounter” with

Iser’s open-ended description of our interaction with literature:

“[Literature] allows us, by means of simulacra, to lure into shape the

fleetingness of the possible and to monitor the continual unfolding of

ourselves into possible otherness” (FI 303). But in “othering” us, does

literature only project us toward the “fleetingness of the possible” or

does it not also connect us to what appears as “other” to us – be it outside

or inside, internal or cultural alterity? In providing a space of

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transference that facilitates imaginary encounters with otherness, doesn’t

literature transform us in order to ground us in a larger world? (87)

Schwab’s playful question demonstrates the manner in which the interpreter of Iser’s

theory must find a point of origin. Iser continues to indicate that this point of origin

must remain in the dynamic movement literature inspires through language. His readers

frequently require this to be translated to the reality that surrounds us. But of course,

Iser suggests that grasping this world is only feasible in a temporary, subjective mode,

as mediated through the language that maintains our difference from this world by

permanently deferring our diminution and absorption into it. Literature is significant

because it allows us to enact this possibility. Language allows us the experience of the

aesthetic dimension of the literary text, where the aesthetic is an open-category, which

organises the extra-aesthetic. In otherwords, the aesthetic exhibits the structure of

language itself, since in the negative (the “gaps” and “blanks”) we find the potential for

aesthetic experience. In sum, the reader of Iser must relinquish not only an Anglo-

American perspective on defining literature and the manner in which it relates to

“reality”, but the very notion that this can be achieved in terms of a meaning-oriented

process of interpretation. Iser is interested in what is beyond interpretation, not the

immediacy of how best to do so. We pursue this argument in more detail in chapter five.

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5. The Reception of Iser: outcomes

The following is an account of an essay by Craig A Hamilton and Ralf

Schneider entitled “From Iser to Turner and beyond: Reception theory meets cognitive

criticism”. For Hamilton and Schneider, cognitive criticism has “hidden roots in

reception theory” (655). They set out to establish this by drawing out the similarities

between the work of Iser and Mark Turner, having selected the former as a key

proponent of reception theory and the latter as a key proponent of cognitive literary

theory. They argue that reception theory is the “hole” in a contemporary history of

literary criticism leading to the “cognitive turn”. Their conclusion emphasises the

possibility of the development of a “cognitive reception” theory:

For his part, Iser was on the right track by stating that the hard topic in

research is “not what meaning is, but how it is produced” (Prospecting

65). Turner would agree, but the problem remains to be solved. Even so,

Iser paved the way for a theory of literary reception to be considered.

However, after the cognitive turn, the questions that Rezeptionsästhetik

formulated in the past regarding the cognitive and emotional conditions

of reading, and the effects and constraints of literary reading, need to be

approached once again. Old questions still need to be answered despite

advances made recently by cognitive critics. Cognitive science in general

may update reception theory, but cognitive psychology in particular

should enable a cognitive reception theory to take shape. (655)

In building their argument for cognitive reception theory Hamilton and Schneider

provide a useful example of the uptake of Iser’s theory in literary discourse. Because

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they subject Iser’s work to a series of reductions in order to facilitate their own

perspective on literary theory, the authors overlook central presuppositions of Iser. By

filling the gaps in the detail that will have prevented them from misinterpreting Iser’s

theory, we can achieve two ends. Firstly, we can highlight common misconceptions of

Iser amoung Anglo-American readers, and secondly, we can focus our discussion of the

underpinning to Iser’s literary anthropology in the context of literary theoretical

discourse.

Hamilton and Schneider acknowledge that Iser was uncomfortable using the title

“reception theory”: “In the 1970s, rather than use the terms Rezeptionsästhetik or

Rezeptionstheorie, Iser reluctantly used reader response theory to refer to what he felt

instead was Wirkungsästhetik” (641). Though they do not explain this difference, which

Iser describes in the preface to The Act of Reading as potentially telescoping a reference

to both effect and response:

The German term ‘Wirkung’ comprises both effect and response, without

the psychological connotations of the English word ‘response’. ‘Effect’

is at times too weak a term to convey what is meant by ‘Wirkung’. (ix)

Iser therefore settles on one of (the lesser, perhaps) two evils. Roderick Watt raised the

issue of confusion generated in the German to English transition almost two decades

before Hamilton and Schneider made their assessment of Iser. He noted that “major

problems” had emerged during attempts to differentiate the terms Rezeptionsästhetik

and Wirkungsästhetik, “two terms not infrequently confused by English and German-

speaking academics alike” (58)17. Watt notes that the term Wirkungsästhetik was created

by Harald Weinrich in 1967 and that the concept “can clearly lead back into the text

rather than away from it, demanding literary analysis of its form and language rather

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than sociological speculation about its reception” (58). Wirkungsästhetik owes a debt to

the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte, first articulated in 1960 in his

Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Here Gadamer

writes:

If we are trying to understand a historical phenomenon from the

historical distance that is characteristic of our hermeneutical situation,

we are always already affected by history. It determines in advance both

what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object

of investigation, and we more or less forget half of what is really there –

in fact, we miss the whole truth of phenomenon – when we take its

immediate appearance as the whole truth. (300)18

Gadamer argues that given the manner in which the context from which we interpret

effects our understanding, we must attempt to be reflexive of our own historical

circumstances. This contextual information and reflexivity he described in terms of the

concept of “horizon”, writing “the concept of ‘situation’... represents a standpoint that

limits the possibility of vision. Hence, essential to the concept of situation is the concept

of ‘horizon’” (301). That which we can encompass from a “particular vantage point”

describes the “range of vision” available to the observer, and for Gadamer this bounded

description of our reflexive possibilities relates to the argument that,

faith in method leads one to deny one’s own historicity. Our need to

become conscious of effective history is urgent because it is necessary

for scientific consciousness. But this does not mean it can ever be

absolutely fulfilled. That we should become completely aware of

17 Hamilton and Schneider were from the Universities of Nottingham and Tübingen respectively. 18 All references are to the 1989 English translation, Truth and Method (Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall).

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effective history is just as hybrid a statement as when Hegel speaks of

absolute knowledge, in which history would become transparent to itself

and hence raised to the level of a concept. Rather, historically effected

consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) is an element in the

act of understanding itself and, as we shall see, is already effectual in

finding the right questions ask. Consciousness of being affected by

history (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) is primarily consciousness

of the hermeneutical situation.To acquire an awareness of a situation is,

however, always a task of peculiar difficulty. (300-1)

In Iser’s writings, the continuing return to the danger of “reifying” an explanation of a

set of historical circumstances is an example of how this notion of “historically effected

consciousness” has influenced his work. The context of Iser’s theory is itself “effected”

by the doubled contexts of effect and response telescoped in the term Wirkungsästhetik.

He writes in The Act of Reading, that his theory is:

to be regarded as a theory of aesthetic response (Wirkungstheorie) and

not as a theory of the aesthetics of reception (Rezeptionstheorie). If the

study of literature arises from our concern with texts, there can be no

denying the importance of what happens to us through these texts. (x)

The Konstanz school is to a large extent defined by this attention to the historical

situation of hermeneutics, where as Paul de Man argued in the introduction to the

English translation of Jauss’ seminal Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, the

“methodology... is mostly referred to as Rezeptionsästhetik, a word that does not lend

itself easily to translation into English” (vii). De Man argues that for the Konstanz

school, aesthetics remain in a position “of central importance” (vii), and it is clear that

in Iser’s own theory, the interaction of reader and literary text during the act of reading

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is described in a manner that attempts to recognise the “historically effected

consciousness” of the reader and theoretician. The term Wirkungsästhetik comprises a

turn “back into the text rather than away from it”, but not at the expense of a

consciousness of the historical situation of the reader, or theorist.

Having accepted that Iser takes as his premise this emphasis on reading as a

process that finds its roots in the form and language of the text, Hamilton and Schneider

assert that “As far as we are concerned, we prefer to speak of reception theory when

referring to research in this area, an area with many affinities with cognitive criticism”

(641). This suits their goal of emphasising the requirement for a clearer account of the

cognitive dimension of the act of reading, and their description of Iser as a reception

theorist by whom the act of reading is problematically described. For Hamilton and

Schneider Iser’s eventual arrival at the use of play in his literary anthropology

“prefigures recent concerns” in cognitive criticism, and this is one of the few areas in

which “Iser is worth heeding” (647). They find the remainder of his writings to be

difficult to interpret and they consider his attempts to delineate between the worlds of

text and reader to be frequently marked by contradictions. Central to their exception to

Iser is the absence of clear applications of his theory by him, during an evidentiary

process of interpretation of actual literary texts in his own writings. Such an evidentiary

process is precisely what Iser avoids. His phenomenology intends an exploration, and

this is evident in his employment of Gestalt psychology to describe, rather than explain,

the cognitive activity that unfolds the literary work during reader-text interaction. This

account is of an open-ended process, any examples of which are not evidence of a

literary theory, but instead illustrations of a perspective on literature adopted through

the construction of the theory. Iser does not adopt an empiricist’s approach to literature,

and the scientific method that would underpin the development of a “cognitive

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reception” theory does not fall within the scope of Iser’s concern. He does not explain

the particular meaning of literary works and then use this explanation to substantiate a

necessarily general theory of how literature “works”. His literary anthropology emerged

in a context made up in part of the kind of reduction of his theory, and literature in

general, that Hamilton and Schneider offer here, such that Iser’s central concern is to

stay at the level of an exploration of literary discourse with a view toward uncovering

its human purpose.

5.1 The reception of Iser and new directions in literary theory: “cognitive reception

theory”

The premise of Hamilton and Schneider’s paper is an assertion that reception

theory manifests as an “inexplicable bibliographic hole” that “remains in cognitive

criticism” (641). They attempt to explain the hole nonetheless, arguing that it must be in

part due to the lack of popularity of reception theory, a lack due in its turn to the failure

of one of its primary proponents – Wolfgang Iser – to convince an Anglo-American

audience of its worth. Fish’s review of Iser’s The Act of Reading was one primary

reason for this failure, given that “Once Fish told the entire profession that reception

theory was doomed, many believed him” (641). Hamilton and Schneider point toward

“the disappearance of Iser’s theory” being “less common in Germany”, and that the

fashionable characteristics that made Iser initially popular have foreshortened his “shelf

life” outside Germany. The author’s suggest quite correctly, that Iser’s success in

Germany would seem to be attributable to a deeper understanding of the historical and

critical context that underpins his work. Hamilton and Scheider go on to observe that

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despite his appeal to an American audience, and having been central to the founding of

reception theory:

Iser’s version of reception theory essentially vanished from view

although New Literary History (Cohen) nevertheless dedicated a special

issue to him recently. Ironically the disappearance of Iser’s theory is less

common in Germany than it is in Anglo-American universities. Iser is

conspicuously absent, for instance, from a recent collection of important

contributions to reception study (Machor and Goldstein), in which none

of Iser’s essays is included (though one by Hans Robert Jauss is) and in

whose index his name does not appear. In Germany, however, Iser’s

books from the 1970s have never gone out of print. (641)

Hamilton and Schneider argue that the work of German theorists in developing

reception theory tended to favour the text over the newly empowered reader, by placing

emphasis “on texts not readers” (642). From this movement it is Iser’s writing, with his

familiarity with psychology and his direct account of the act of reading, which is of

primary relevance to Hamilton and Schneider. They argue that the central role of play in

Iser’s literary anthropology evidences this relevance, since here:

an important claim is made. Stories and games are universal. As such,

they must be products of basic human psychology. If so, they need to be

adequately theorized. By aiming to do so, Iser prefigures cognitive

criticism’s recent concerns with fiction, play, and evolution (Abbott;

Richardson and Steen). In this manner, Iser’s later work leads nicely to

cognitive criticism. (647)

If this is true however, it is due to the fact that Iser’s writings are grounded in a

sufficiently rigorous articulation of the act of reading. Neither his writing nor his theory

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makes concessions in the interests of an easy process of consumption or the

convenience of later appropriation, and Hamilton and Schneider offer a reading of Iser

that exhibits a frustration not dissimilar to that expressed by Fish and Mailloux. The

authors’ central criticisms include Iser’s failure to offer a concrete methodology by

which to conduct his act of reading, and what they consider his vague description of a

reader, which “relegates to the stratosphere” his discussions of the act of reading, and

results in what they describe as “the mystification that plagues Iser’s style” (645). They

also argue that throughout The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading, Iser’s position

in relation to the agency of the reader is so limiting that in the end, the literary

practitioner is not permitted to interpret the text at all:

In The Act of Reading in 1978, Iser begins by attacking those who insist

on finding “hidden meanings” in texts. If it is good to work things out

when reading, but bad to try to find meaning, Iser’s position is unclear.

As many like Fish saw before, why champion the reader who works

“things” out and then punish him for doing so when making meaning?

Iser, however, still grinds this axe in The Act of Reading, where he

complains that literary criticism often “proceeds to reduce texts to a

referential meaning” (5). Afterwards, he claims that endless interpreting

“reduced [literary texts] to the level of documents, and this robbed us of

that very dimension that sets them apart from the document, namely, the

opportunity they offer us to experience for ourselves the spirit of the age,

social conditions, the author’s neurosis etc.”(13). The most loaded word

in Iser’s lexicon is reduction…. Simply put, we cannot interpret. (642-3)

This portrayal of a reader for whom the literary text is able to facilitate both a self-

exegetical process, and access to the particular conditions of the context from which the

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elements included in the literary text have emerged, frustrates Hamilton and Schneider.

They complain that the literary critic is not allowed to employ the literary text as a point

of focus in a search for the “referential meaning” of the work in order to substantiate a

particular stance on literary theory, which would also authenticate the detail of a

particular definitional stance in respect of the medium itself. For the authors, this part of

Iser’s work epitomises the central flaw in this early period of the development of

reception theory:

This was the Achilles’ heel of 1970’s reception theory: its true object of

study eluded definition. Moreover, Iser’s mystifying style makes The Act

of Reading rather unreadable. He often avoids direct quotations from the

literary texts he turns to for examples, reporting indirectly instead what

Fielding wrote in the passage in Tom Jones under discussion (214). This

tactic… robs us of the chance to run Iser’s reading experiments for

ourselves. (643)

This reflexive conclusion is not based on a close examination of Iser’s arguments,

however, and is an example of the very reduction he would seek to avert. It is this

particular criticism, the lack of an object definition for literature, which readers of Iser

seem to find frustrating. However, Iser’s writings hold to this resistance of a reduction

of the literary text to the status of a particular objective format. The conditions of such a

reduction are bound to ontological complications that would immediately situate Iser’s

portrayal of a reader reading an open-ended literary text in an unacceptable process of

concretisation. Iser’s work is difficult to appropriate for the construction of a theoretical

amalgam such as this “cognitive reception”, since he continually attempts to overcome

the reductive process of definition in favour of a process oriented theory. The authors

dismiss Iser’s “prescient” (643) portrayal of the reductive features of New Historicism

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in his resistance of lowering texts to “the level of documents”, because “he does not ask

why the interpretive activity exists at all” (643). However, Iser does not completely

disallow or even dismiss interpretation in The Act of Reading, or any part of his oeuvre

for that matter. Instead his writings are concerned with foundational issues in the

discipline, such as a history of endeavour that has seen a transition “in which an

interpretation originally subservient to art now uses its claims to universal validity to

take up a superior position to art itself” (Act 13). The attacks on those who would seek

the “hidden meanings” in the text referred to by Hamilton and Schneider above, are in

fact an attempt to suggest that the means of interpretation must be responsive to the

shifting “conception of itself” the artwork manifests. Claims to “universal validity” are

therefore historically problematic, as Iser argues:

The interpretive norm that sought for the hidden meaning pinned the

work down by means of the prevailing systems of the time, whose

validity seemed to be embodied in the work concerned. And so literary

texts were construed as a testimony to the spirit of the age, to social

conditions, to the neuroses of their authors and so forth; they were

reduced to the level of documents. (Act 13)

Iser’s concern here is that interpretation should maintain an awareness of the medium,

that the literary text has an archetypal feature he describes as follows: “they do not lose

their ability to communicate” (13). He observes that literary-critical practice in

“resolutely refusing to acknowledge the limitations of the norms that orient it… begins

to interpret itself instead of interpreting the art” (13). This eventuality prompts Iser to

become concerned that interpretive practices are examined closely, and in The Act of

Reading this is pursued in a communication-oriented investigation of important features

of the reader’s interaction with the literary medium. Despite Hamilton and Schneider’s

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claims, Iser is not interested in hampering their attempts to conduct the activity of

literary critical interpretation. On the contrary, he is about the business of investigating

their activity by redeeming the object for interpretation. That his theory provides a

critique of criticism, and does not supply the literary critic with tools for further acts of

critical interpretation, are consequences of his movement toward an understanding of

why we interpret. It is difficult to accept Hamilton and Schneider’s complaint that they

cannot “run Iser’s reading experiments for ourselves” as anything less than testimony to

the success of Iser’s project.

Since Iser does not offer the literary critic a satisfactorily concrete definition of

the phenomena he describes, his theory is difficult to take-up and employ during literary

critical endeavour. Below we attempt to demonstrate that the conflict between Iser and

those who would appropriate him is primarily caused by the resistance to definition-

oriented literary theory demonstrated in The Implied Reader, The Act of Reading,

Prospecting and The Fictive and the Imaginary. We focus this investigation by

discussing Hamilton and Schneider’s reception of Iser’s account of the aesthetic

dimension of literature, and the particular conditions of his attempts to separate speech

acts in the literary world from the extra-literary world. Hamilton and Schneider’s

criticisms open to inspection the particular issues raised already in this dissertation,

generated by Iser’s presuppositions about the interrelation of the literary medium and

reality, and his conceptualisation of the aesthetic dimension of the text. We investigate

these critical narratives concurrently as they interrelate, such that we move back and

forth between the two in the passages below.

Hamilton and Schneider argue that in The Act of Reading “The aesthetic is

another of Iser’s problems” (643) and that “Iser cannot be pinned down on the

‘aesthetic’” (644). They become more derisive in arguing that Iser seeks to dissociate

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“the aesthetic and the everyday…. Such waffling continues when Iser aims to

distinguish everyday language from literary language” (644). Hamilton and Schneider

give an account of Iser as paradoxically objecting to a “deviationist” theory of the

aesthetic (based on a dissociation between the experience of the everyday and higher

cultural forms), since Iser earlier affirmed his belief that the two intermixed would

undermine the definitive position of the literary aesthetic. In order to establish this, the

authors quote Iser’s argument in The Act of Reading that,

If aesthetic and everyday experiences are bracketed together, the literary

text must lose its aesthetic quality and be regarded merely as material to

demonstrate the functioning or nonfunctioning of our psychological

dispositions. (40) (qtd. in Hamilton and Schneider 644).

They conclude that therefore Iser asserts “Only elite cultural artifacts, not the everyday,

are aesthetic. On the other hand, it is good to join the aesthetic in art to the aesthetic in

real life” (644). Our analysis of this series of criticisms begins with Iser’s attempt to

distinguish between the literary text and everyday experiences in terms of a literary

aesthetic. Hamilton and Schneider cite page 40 of The Act of Reading, where the quoted

passage forms a subset of a critique of the theory of Norman Holland in his The

Dynamics of Literary Response. For Iser, the problematic feature of Holland’s account

is his seeking to exclude the process of communication from the “experience effected

by literature” (Act 40). Holland claims his goal is to describe literature as an experience,

such that it is “not discontinuous with other experiences” (qtd. in Act 39). For Iser this is

problematic, and he argues that:

even if one simply takes texts as programmed experiences, these must

still be communicated before they can take place in the reader’s mind. Is

it really possible to separate the experience from the way in which it is

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communicated, as if they were two quite different subjects of

investigation? This might be possible with everyday experiences in life,

but aesthetic experiences can only take place because they are

communicated, and the way in which they are experienced must depend,

at least in part, on the way in which they are presented, or prestructured.

If aesthetic and everyday experiences are bracketed together, the literary

text must lose. (Act 40)

Iser argues that levelling the experience of reading literature with everyday experience

is for Hamilton a matter of convenience, such that Hamilton might call upon “terms

culled from psychoanalysis” in the name of an objective study of response (40). Iser

warns against a reductive aesthetic account of the literary work that, like Holland’s, is

based upon a process of analysing his own responses to literature employing

psychoanalytic theory. Not only does this lessen the potential worlds unfolding in the

literary work to the conditions of a particular interpretation, it generates an account of a

literary world “lessened to point zero” by retrospection, since that which is investigated

is “already at one’s disposal” (40). In Iser’s account the everyday and the literary are to

be distinguished by virtue of a requirement for communicative context to precede and

therefore contribute to our experience of literature, allowing literature to become party

to a rich aesthetic experience, and more than simply a basis for the demonstration of our

“psychological dispositions”. However, this is not an argument that only “elite cultural

artefacts” are aesthetic. This is instead a warning that borrowing the terms of

psychoanalysis to discuss the experience of literature in the mode that Holland adopts

tends to remove the aesthetic dimension of literature since the structure the literary text

offers the reader is left unattended to. The aesthetic experience is structured by the text

in this account, rather than limited to the text.

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Hamilton and Scheider remark that “Iser finds the dichotomy between ‘literary’

and ‘everyday’ language to be rather false. Later on, however, it becomes a useful

dichotomy for his argument when he finds little similarity between the two” (644). In

response to this observation, we will uncover the detail of Iser’s critique of this

dichotomy, in order to show that he does not dispense with a productive analysis of the

contrast between literary and everyday language. Instead of rejecting then employing a

dichotomous relationship between the two, as Hamilton and Schneider claim, he

consistently discourages a simply portrayed dichotomy. He argues instead for a richer

portrayal of the similarities and differences of these two distinct modes of language use,

since they are not in a dichotomous relationship, but are, like literature in general,

subject to the conditions of a peculiar context of mediation. The third element here is

not directly articulated and consequently confuses Hamilton and Schneider, and as this

dissertation has already suggested it is tempting to argue that this kind of mistake

encouraged Iser toward a more completely articulated triadic portrayal in The Fictive

and the Imaginary. Hamilton and Schneider refer to a discussion beginning on page 62

of The Act of Reading where Iser describes the speech-act theory of Ingarden, Austin

and Searle. He observes of their descriptions of literary language that “they all regard

this mode of language as an imitation of and not a deviation from ordinary speech” (63).

This means that they do not have to account for literary language “in terms of norms

and the violation of norms” (63). He sees this as problematic – given that these theorists

refer to literary language as both “parasitic” and “mysterious” (63). The contradiction

here is for Iser the evident differentiation between everyday and literary language, and

the fact that an imitation:

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ought to produce similar consequences to those of normal use. And yet in

fiction it is claimed at one moment that the imitation is inferior to what it

imitates (parasitic) and at another that it transcends it (mysterious). (63)

Iser points this out as a prelude to his discussing the necessity that “[t]he parting of the

ways between literary and ordinary speech is to be observed in situational context” (63).

This is a very important feature of Iser’s work, and one which we have discussed above:

namely, the reliance upon a discrete relationship with context in establishing a dynamic

conceptualization of determinacy in respect of the “real” and the “literary” worlds. Iser

goes on:

The fictional utterance seems to be made without reference to any real

situation, whereas the speech act presupposes a situation whose precise

definition is essential to the success of that act. This lack of context does

not, of course, mean that the fictional utterance must therefore fail; it is

just a symptom of the fact that literature involves a different application

of language, and it is in this application that we can pinpoint the

uniqueness of literary speech. (63)

The situation of the literary speech is presented by Iser as residing within a “particular

application of language”. This does not involve a simple binary arrangement of literary

fictionality with reality, such that we can conveniently place literary speech in direct

opposition with everyday speech acts. However, this rejection of a dichotomy does not

extend to his regarding the distinction between literary and ordinary speech as spurious.

Instead, his understanding of this contrast is removed from a simple comparison of a

deterministic “real” and “fictive” transposition, and transported to a description of a

communicative activity. Here causality is challenged: determinant placement of fictive

against the real has been replaced with a systemic interaction of categories which may

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be described without being reduced. The “real” of ordinary speech is deterministic only

in response to an understanding of a communicative context, or process. The real in this

sense is, as discussed above, a given, but not a banal real, and literary speech is

uniqueness in its context. This differentiation is far removed from Hamilton and

Schneider’s notion of a straightforward “dichotomy” Iser initially finds to be false, and

later resurrects (644).

The comparison of everyday and literary language and its relationship to the

“real” has far reaching consequences in Iser’s theory, extending into his assessment of

the literary aesthetic. We see this if we return to the contradiction Hamilton and

Schneider argue for in relation to Iser’s definitive stance on aesthetic experience and the

significance of the aesthetic object. The authors state Iser’s arguments as follows:

On the one hand it is bad to bracket together the aesthetic and the

everyday. Only cultural artifacts, not the everyday, are aesthetic. On the

other hand, it is good to join the aesthetic in art to the aesthetic in real

life. To do otherwise is “highly puristic”. (644)

We have examined the reduction in the first part of this claim, where the author’s equate

Iser’s attention to the particular context of literature as a form of cultural elitism. The

latter part of this interpretation of Iser’s account of the aesthetic is based on a quote

taken from page 88 of The Act of Reading where he provides a critique of “deviationist”

theory. This “explanatory hypothesis” is problematic for Iser, since it posits that the

poetic quality of a literary moment manifests as it violates historically defined literary

norms, citing them and evoking them “so that it is not the violation as such, but the

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relation it establishes, which becomes a condition of ‘poetic quality’”19 (88). Iser points

out the shortcomings of the deviationist approach to poetics in a series of questions:

What is the norm of the standard language? What is the aesthetic canon?

These two linchpins of the deviationist model must be constant in order

to guarantee an invariable effect. If deviation from them is a condition of

‘poetic quality’ – a province reserved for literary texts – then what is the

status of conversational violations of the norm? The orthodox

deviationist theory is evidently highly puristic – what is aesthetic in art is

presumably nonaesthetic in real life. (88)

Iser is not critical of the separation of aesthetic spheres from a liberal, “anti-cultural

elitism” perspective. He is critical of a history of interpretation driven by an

understanding of aesthetics which relies upon a poorly defined set of key terms. Iser

makes this quite clear when he states that the above problems are highlighted in order to

challenge literary practice, in its detail: “The limitations of the deviationist model in

relation to text strategies can be gauged from the elementary problems it presents. What

is the norm?” (88). Iser is providing a carefully contextualised challenge to the aesthetic

treatment of literary works, a challenge not useful to Hamilton and Schneider’s rationale

for a “cognitive reception theory”. However this is a core feature of Iser’s theory:

charging literary theory and literary critical practice with offering a reduced account of

the aesthetic dimension of literature via a poorly located historical account. The

outcome in Iser’s theory is not a simplism wherein the aesthetic in art should be

conjoined with the aesthetic in real life. Instead, he is suggesting that the aesthetic

should be subject to a careful inspection that does not rely upon a spurious set of

assertions based on inherited literary categories. This critique of “deviationist theory” of

19 Iser focusses on the Mukarovsky essay of 1940, “Standard Language and Poetic Language” (Fictive

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literary aesthetics is consistent with Iser’s attempts to move past a simply binary

arrangement of literary worlds with “reality”.

Hamilton and Schneider argue that the contradiction caused by Iser’s flip-

flopping on the issue of delineating between ordinary and literary speech occurs on page

183 of The Act of Reading when Iser once again employs this dichotomy as he “finds

little similarity between the two” (qtd. in Hamilton and Schneider 644). However, if we

turn to page 183 of The Act of Reading, we find Iser addressing the intricate relationship

between literary and everyday language rather than deploying a simple dichotomy. He

does so by interrogating “blanks” that appear in the literary text as a result of its

indeterminacy. In a starkly similar portrayal to the account of the fictionalising act of

combination Iser offers in The Fictive and the Imaginary, he points out that these blanks

designate:

a vacancy in the overall system of the text, the filling of which brings

about an interaction of textual patterns. In other words, the need for

completion is replaced here by the need for combination. It is only when

the schemata of the text are related to one another that the imaginary

object can begin to be formed, and it is the blanks that get this

connecting operation underway. They indicate that the different

segments of the text are to be connected, even though the text itself does

not say so. (182-3)

Iser here maps a rich interaction of the structure of the text and how these “schemata”

relate to the reality of the text, and the reality of the extra-literary world. Blanks in the

literary text are opened by the language employed, since it does not refer to the world at

large, or other elements of the text itself, in any predictable fashion. In expository texts,

87).

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on the other hand, the purpose of the text is connected by virtue of its argument to “a

particular object”. The “individualization of purpose” of a speaker in an expository text:

is, to a large extent, guaranteed by the degree of observed connectability.

Blanks however, break up this connectability, thereby signalizing both

the absence of a connection and the expectations we have of everyday

language, where connectability is governed pragmatically. (183)

The pragmatism that governs everyday language has therefore a more direct role to play

in measuring the success of the expository text, which unfolds in respect of its particular

object-orientation governed by purpose. This pragmatism is not, however, limited to

everyday language, any more than it is to expository texts. In Iser’s theory it becomes in

turn an integral feature of literary language, just as the blank is a category that

permeates his conceptualization of the processing of speech in ordinary and literary

contexts. The literary text has, after all, some purpose traceable to intentionality, but the

open-ended nature of this intention means a less clearly identifiable purpose, and the

matter of pragmatism in the language is thereby marked by indeterminacy that impacts

upon both the reality of the literary text, and its relationship with the “given” world.

This study of connectibility and pragmatism forms a bridge which establishes the

similarity and difference between literary and everday language:

The break in connections gives rise to a number of functions which the

blanks can perform in a literary text. They point up the difference

between literary and everyday use of language, for what is always given

in everyday language must first be brought into existence in fiction.

(183)

What Hamilton and Schneider take to be inconsistent is in point of fact a cogent feature

of Iser’s work, namely, his ongoing rejection of binary portrayals of the literary real

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with the given real. As discussed above the “given” is a third category which allows the

contextual shift from the ordinary to the literary to be a dynamic one. This is a

conceptualization informed by the fluid relationship between the categories “ordinary”

and “literary”, and certainly not one limited by a dichotomous arrangement of the two.

5.2 Iser’s Psychology of Reading and Tom Jones

Hamilton and Schneider’s arguments illustrate the thesis put forward in chapter

four of this dissertation, as to how it is that Iser is popularly considered to have failed to

answer Fish. As Hamilton and Schneider describe it, Iser’s failure to “rebut all of Fish’s

points” meant Fish was able to “cut short the life of reception theory” (641). As we have

seen, a common explanation of this is that concepts which saw Iser gain favour with an

Anglo-American literary-critical community in need of a liberated reader in the early

seventies, had seen him lose popularity in the eightees. However, it is more accurate to

observe that a limited interpretation of Iser’s theory by an Anglo-American audience

had ensured his initial popularity. Eventually, the same limited interpretation had seen

him lose popularity. His “lost” debate with Fish both illustrates and is commonly

thought to be a catalyst for this pattern. Chapter three of Prospecting (“Interview”)

demonstrates a similar interaction, by including three questions asked of Iser by

Norman Holland. The relationship between reader, text and “reality” in reception theory

is integral to the discussion, which leads Hamilton and Schneider to conclude that:

Whereas Holland saw reception theory as possible only with an

empirical grounding, Iser preferred to turn it into something stratospheric.

Bluntly put, when Iser says, “Now we are in a position to qualify more

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precisely what is actually meant by reader participation in the text” (40),

he cannot be trusted. (644-5)

For Hamilton and Schneider, Iser’s consistency in “attacking reductionism and

interpretation” means “humans are never the answer for Iser” (644), because Iser asserts

in Prospecting that “‘an exclusive concentration on either the author’s techniques or the

reader’s psychology will tell us little about the reading process itself’” (qtd. in Hamilton

and Schneider 644). When questioned on the matter by Holland, Iser’s response is as

follows:

My distinction between Rezeptionstheorie and Wirkungstheorie strikes

him [Holland] as problematic, because “one can only arrive at a theory of

response by induction from actual responses,” but I maintain that a

framework must precede this induction if one is to draw any inferences

from the responses. Therefore, what I call reception is a product that is

initiated in the reader by the text, but is molded by the norms and values

that govern the reader’s outlook. Reception is therefore an indication of

preferences and predilections that reveal the reader’s disposition as well

as the social conditions that have shaped his attitudes. (Prospecting 50)

Iser sees particular accounts of interpretation to be capable of providing illustrations

(“inferences”) based on a more general “framework” being offered in the theory. A

reception theory must be examined beyond the level of a psychoanalytic account, since

it is required to encounter both the potentials in the reader (invited by the text to

manifest) and the manner in which the particular circumstances of the reader’s outlook

are then bought to bear during the process of interpretation. For Iser the literary world is

formed as a feature of a process of reception, and the detail of how the literary text

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“initiates” this process is of central importance for Iser. Holland’s critique of Iser, in

respect of this arrangement, is cited by Hamilton and Schneider who agree that:

his [Iser’s] method aims to shape a theory that is more about the world

and less about texts. Now this is very interesting. It might even have led

Iser into social semiotics, especially given Holland’s point that in

reception theory ‘it is awkward to suppose that we suddenly reverse our

entire cognitive system when we shift from fact to fiction’ (48). (645)

It is certainly clear that Iser maintains his literary theory at a more general level of

abstraction than Holland. However, this is a synthesis that disallows the primary focus

of Iser’s theory, namely, to examine the to-and-fro between the “given” world and the

world of the text. A cognitive account that holds to a particular explanation of how this

unfolds is not the concern of Iser’s “framework”, and for Iser’s purposes any such

reduction would be too particular as a description of an interpretive process. Not

included in Hamilton and Schneider’s paper is Iser’s response to this critique, which he

offers a few pages later in Prospecting. Again, it centres on the issue of determinism,

and he argues that,

[i]f Professor Holland and I agree that our models should be, and perhaps

are, conceived in terms of a text-reader dialogue, then the term

determinism seems to me inappropriate, for it transmutes the two-way

traffic between text and reader into a one-way system, either from text to

reader or reader to text. (53)

For Iser it was never a question of having to reverse a cognitive system, since the shift

from “fact to fiction” is not linear, in that fact does not govern fiction in a deterministic

fashion. When text and reader interact, they are mutually determining, therefore “fact to

fiction” always already includes a looping back we might call “fiction to fact”, though

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the distinction between the two is rather arbitrary given the nature of the pragmatic

boundaries of reader-text interaction. That is to say, the purpose of reading literature is

rather more ambiguous than the purpose of reading expository writing, as is the

relationship between fact and fiction. Similarly, “determinism” seems to require that the

reader align the text with fiction, and fact with “reality”; a convenient though reductive

arrangement.

Now we have come upon a point of departure that leads to cognitive criticism in

the most direct fashion. Hamilton and Schneider cite Iser’s observation in The Act of

Reading that “If aesthetic and everyday experiences are bracketed together, the literary

text must lose its aesthetic quality and be regarded merely as material to demonstrate the

functioning or nonfunctioning of our psychological dispositions (40)” (qtd. in Hamilton

and Schneider 644). This is in effect a critique of the “cognitive turn”. According to the

authors, cognitive criticism “see[s] literature as a demonstration of ‘our psychological

dispositions’. However, this does not make literature ‘merely’ into ‘material’ for

proving this disposition, nor does it imply that cognitive criticism merely ‘reduces’

literature to cognitive science” (644). It is not entirely clear how this is a defence against

Iser’s suggestion that such an empirical interpretive strategy strips the literary text of its

unique aesthetic quality. The authors accede that the cognitive arm of their “cognitive

reception theory” will need to rely upon literature, and particular interpretations of

literature, as evidence for a particular explanation of our general “psychological

dispositions”. They then deny that this is inconsequential or reductive, but do not go on

to substantiate this claim. They simply begin complaining that Iser “cannot be pinned

down on the aesthetic” (644), as though their difficulty in interpreting his account of the

aesthetic dimension of the text was an effective rebuttal of his argument that the literary

aesthetic requires a specific attention. Iser considers specific acts of interpretation to be

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reductions of the text that cannot evidence particular psychological explanations of the

human reader and distort the nature of the literary text into the deal.

Hamilton and Schneider want to conclude that this means Iser considers a

psychology of the reader to be inconsequential for a description of the act of reading, in

which “[h]umans are never the answer”. But Iser does offer a psychology of reading,

and below we examine how it is that his use of Gestalt psychology is consistent with his

description of the “inter-subjective” nature of the text-reader interaction. The Gestalt

theory he employs is not explanatory, since it observes the functioning of our

psychological apparatus in terms of procedures, rather than determining “dispositions”.

Here Iser is describing phenomena, rather than explaining it, just as his use of literary

examples is not employed as part of an inductive process. His interpretation of literature

does not yield the evidence of a psychological disposition, by which we come to explain

interpretation. Some comments on the nature of Gestalt psychology will assist in

clarifying this point. Ian Verstegen summarises “Gestalt thinking” as follows:

According to Gestalt thinking, the world and the human mind both share

principles of ordering. It is not a matter of imposing order on nature or

escaping in our minds an irrational outer world, rather, the ways our

minds work is precisely due to the principles that order nature. (1)

Based on this principle of ordering, he argues that Gestaltists take up the position “that

we perceive the world as ordered, clear-cut and meaningful” (2). In effect, this

assumption of a common ordering between mind and world allows for a definition of

perception as a “problem of perceptual organization. Depending on prevailing

conditions, the stimulus is organized into the simplest percept (according to known laws

of physics). This makes perception neither cognitive nor homuncular, nor ungrounded

in physical principles” (11). According to Verstegen this position entails “wide ranging

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ramifications for Gestaltists who have used ideas of perceptual organization well

beyond perception” (2), extending their research into such wide ranging affairs as social

scientific studies of group behaviour and the perception of art. Indeed, this

understanding of perception concludes that in terms of the aesthetic, “an image of

humanity attaches to ordered perception” by which we “perceive the bounty afforded by

some things and the lack missing in others” (2). Roy Behrens discusses Arnheim’s

observation that this relationship between the aesthetic and Gestalt psychology was a

central concern from the very beginnings of the approach, as is evident in the writings

of seminal authors of the field:

From the onset of Gestalt psychology, recalls Arnheim, its practitioners

looked “looked to art for the most convincing examples of sensitively

organised wholes” (Arnheim 1961, 197). People like Christian von

Ehrenfels, Wertheimer, and Köhler had interests in music and visual art,

less in literature. It is with the help of their writings, Arnheim continues,

that we are now able to realise a well-designed work of art – an esthetic

arrangement – is “a Gestalt of the highest degree” (Arnheim, ibid).20

(322)

Similarly with this description of a process of forming “wholes”, Iser summarises in

How To Do Theory how Gestalt theory argues that “an act of perception is organised as

a field, which basically consists of a center and a margin. A field requires structuring,

which is achieved by balancing out the tension between the data, thus grouping them

into a shape” (43). The field then “arises out of the relationship between the data” as the

perceiver engages in a “grouping activity” based on his or her own assumptions about

the reality perceived, leading to the projection of a “gestalt” (43). This gestalt is not to

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be aligned with the data or the imaginative activity of the subject, but is instead the

structure that “designates our relationship to the world” (44). For Iser, this places

Gestalt psychology in direct opposition with Lockean “stimulus-and-response theory”

since Locke had “data impinging on the mind”, whilst the gestalt is a projection of “the

mind itself onto the world outside” (43).

Iser employs Gestalt psychology in his accounts of the reader reading. In his

1972 essay “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”21 Iser begins to

develop his account of the “schematized views” offered through the text. He follows

Ingarden, describing the readerly act in terms of anticipation and retrospection, a

movement that does not “develop in a smooth flow” (284). Ingarden described the

potential for disjuncture between sentences, whereby the latter form basic units in a

linear flow of sense-making while “‘immersed in the flow of Satzdenken (sentence-

thought)’” the subject moves forward only after completing the thought of one sentence

and connects it to the next, therefore where “‘no tangible connection whatever with the

sentence we have just thought through’” presents itself, the subject becomes surprised

or indignant and the “‘blockage must be overcome if the reading is to flow once

more’”(qtd. in Iser 284). For Iser, this “hiatus” is characterized in Ingarden’s writing as

“a product of chance, and is to be regarded as a flaw; this is typical of his adherence to

the classical idea of art” (284). This adherence is anachronistic since:

it is only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its

dynamism. Thus whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in

unexpected directions, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play

our own faculty for establishing connections – for filling in the gaps left

by the text itself. These gaps have a different effect on the process of

20 Behrens refers to Arnheim’s “Gestalt Psychology and Artistic Form”.

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anticipation and retrospection, and thus on the ‘gestalt’ of the virtual

dimension, for they may be filled in different ways. (284-5)

The “potential for disjuncture” that was for Ingarden a disruptive force or flaw is for

Iser generative of the dynamism in language as it manifests in the literary medium. As a

means to explore this dynamism he introduces the terms of Gestalt psychology. These

terms allow a literal and figurative description of the dynamic interaction of reader and

text. Drawing upon the work of Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (1962),

Iser sees all the potential ways and means by which the reader “may link the phases of

the text together” as reliant upon dynamic processing of anticipation and retrospection

yielding “the formation of the virtual dimension which in turn transforms the text into

an experience for the reader” (286). He quotes from Phenomenology of Perception

where Merleau-Ponty observes that “‘[w]e have the experience of a world, not

understood as a system of relations which wholly determine each event, but as an open

totality the synthesis of which is inexhaustible’” (qtd. in “The Reading Process” 286).

For Iser, the dynamism or “continual modification” that characterizes the experience of

reading involves a verisimilitude drawn from close parallels it provides with the manner

in which we conduct the gathering of life experience. Iser concludes that this “‘reality’

of the reading experience can illuminate basic patterns of real experience” (286). The

outcomes for the reader will be individuated – to some degree for Iser this continues the

literary figure of the text as “a kind of mirror” – but the outcome will be a reality

formulated on the basis of a dynamic interaction with the text, “a reality which is

different from his own” (286-7). Without prescriptively delineating the nature of the

transformative outcome, Iser observes that this feature of literature provides the

potential for the reader to “leave behind the familiar world of his own experience” (287).

21 republished as the final chapter in The Implied Reader.

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This is significant to the broader picture of Iser’s work: it displays his parallel

exploration of the figurative and the literal; it characterizes his deployment of gestalt

psychology and dynamic, contingent reality formulation; and finally, but not least, it

demonstrates how the fictive can provide a fundamental human moment of

transformation. From this early phase in his theory Iser was preoccupied with the

telescoping of realities unfolding through the reader-text interaction, and undermining

the ancient roots of a conceptualisation of literature that would have it stand in

contradistinction with the given world, as a part of some readily described deterministic

relationship.

Later, in The Act of Reading, Iser discusses Gombrich’s (1966) work in Art and

Illusion, and Moles’ (1971) Informationstheorie und asthetische Wahrnehmung (Act

119f). He attempts to build his phenomenology of reading via “‘Consistency-Building

as a Basis for Involvement in the Text as an Event’” (118). Iser describes the

“wandering viewpoint” (as discussed in section 4.4 above) as a means by which to

portray the presence of the reader in the text “where memory and expectation converge”

(118). This follows the logic of his earlier work, and we see Iser describe again here a

process of “continual modification of memory and an increasing complexity of

expectation” which unfolds in the reading process where the text offers a “reciprocal

spotlighting of perspectives, which provide interrelated backgrounds for one another.

The interaction between these backgrounds provokes the reader into a synthesizing

activity” (118-9). For Iser, this involves a process of consistency building wherein the

reader understands the text in terms of “interacting structures”, an understanding

facilitated by the wandering viewpoint. Iser then draws out the strong parallels between

this dynamic interaction and the work of Gombrich, who argued that the subjective

interpretation of images occurs in a dynamic space between recognition of the known

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and mute awareness of the given. Iser quotes his conclusion that “‘it is the guess of the

beholder that tests the medley of forms and colours for coherent meaning, crystallizing

it into shape when a consistent interpretation has been found’” (119). Iser compares this

to the consistency building which occurs in the reading process, and concludes that the

“‘consistent interpretation’, or gestalt, is a product of the interaction between text and

reader, and so cannot be exclusively traced back either to the written text or the

disposition of the reader” (119). As such, the gestalt is for Iser both the figurative

portrayal of dynamism between text and reader, and a literal description of the process

of interaction between the two. Indeed the definition of “gestalt” in The Act of Reading

emerges through Iser’s discussion of the process of reading, rather than in any direct

fashion.

His most direct definition is offered as momentary construction that results from

the activity of the reader, and simultaneously as a manifestation of the potential in the

text. Iser points out that “apprehension of the text is dependent on gestalt groupings”.

Drawing upon Moles he defines these:

gestalten elementally as the ‘autocorrelation’ of textual signs. The term is

apposite, because it relates to the interconnection between the textual

signs prior to the stimulation of the individual reader’s disposition. A

gestalt would not be possible if there were not some potential correlation

between the signs. The reader’s task is then to make these signs

consistent. (Act 120)

The gestalt is not the potential, but instead the manifestation of the potential for a

relatively orderly assemblage which can be discovered not in the text, but during the

activity of reading. The reader acts to build consistency by bringing their disposition to

bear upon the potential in the text. This hermeneutic description is presented in The Act

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of Reading when we see Iser employ the example of Fielding’s Tom Jones to

demonstrate the potential in the literary text expressed in terms of gestalt psychology. In

a lengthy discussion Iser details the emergence of the characterisation of the

protagonists Allworthy and Dr Blifil through a complex interplay of narrative moments:

The realization that the one is hypocritical and the other naïve involves

building an equivalence, with a consistent gestalt, out of no less than

three different segments of perspectives – two segments of character and

one of narrator perspective. The forming of the gestalt resolves the

tensions that had resulted from the various complexes of the signs. But

this gestalt is not explicit in the text – it emerges from a projection of the

reader, which guided in so far as it arises out of the identification of the

connections between the signs. (121)

Since the reader is always necessary, and the reader must bring to bear their subjective

disposition, the indeterminacy Iser is at pains to maintain must always be accounted for

in a description of the act of reading. Iser thus portrays a dynamic, two-way relationship

between text and reader. He does not intend to rob the likes of Hamilton and Schneider

of the chance “to run Iser’s reading experiments” (643) for themselves, since he is not a

participant in the traditional interpretive game. He does not intend a method, and he

does not reduce Tom Jones by virtue of a definitive reading. He offers a contextualized

reader-text interaction to “illustrate this process and its consequences” (Act 120) rather

than simply describing the complex cognitive tasking that must undergird reading. Iser

introduces the interplay of perspective in the revelation of the character of Dr. Blifil,

with the following quote from Tom Jones:

Dr. Blifil enters the Allworthy family circle, and of him we learn: “the

doctor had one positive recommendation – this was a great appearance of

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religion. Whether his religion was real, or consisted only in appearance, I

shall not presume to say, as I am not possessed of any touchstone which

can distinguish the true from the false”. (120)

His use of gestalt psychology “fits” this reading, as he reflexively narrates how he can

“read” Tom Jones as paralleling his own thematic concerns, but it is tempting to

conclude that Iser is also taking advantage of this process to characterize – or “figure” –

the methods of his erstwhile critics in his observation that the naïve and graceful

Allworthy trusts the hypocritical Dr. Blifil “because perfection is simply incapable of

conceiving a mere pretence of ideality”, where the good Doctor’s piety “is put on in

order that he may impress Allworthy, with a view to worming his way into the family,

and perhaps gaining control of their estate” (121). During his illustrative reading he

argues that the completion of the task of the reader in establishing a “gestalt coherency”

yields a new category. The conception of which is described by Iser as the “perceptual

noema” (121). Here he draws upon Aron Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness

(1964). Iser describes Gurwitsch as having developed the notion of the “perceptual

noema” drawing on Husserl’s description of perception (n22). This concept presents the

reader as apprehending the linguistic sign in respect of a complex field of reference

points, and that the perceptual noema is formed in the mind of the reader linking “signs,

their implications, their reciprocal influences, and the reader’s acts of identification”

(121). The perceptual noema is a unit of meaning resulting from this complex

processing whereby the reader is compelled to concretize the sign in relation to a web of

points of referential contact. Since “each linguistic sign conveys more than just itself to

the mind of the reader, it must be joined together in a single unit with all its referential

contexts” (121). “[T]he text begins to exist as a gestalt” in the consciousness of the

reader as a result of the activity of formulating the perceptual noema. This process

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follows the progressive formulation of gestalten which begin as “open”, and progress

toward being “closed” through a process of “selection” from referential possibilities

based on subjective preferences (122). The movement toward a closed state will

necessitate consistency building which draws upon “the reader’s individual disposition

and experience” (123). As a result, Iser separates the initial textual or “plot-level”

gestalten from what he entitles “significance” gestalten, which calls upon the broader

subjective self (123). The interaction of the latter and the former will yield a movement

toward closure. As Iser places it, “the interdependence of the two types of gestalten…

remains an intersubjectively valid structure” (123). The intersubjective nature of the

reader-text interaction is described by Iser in terms of this process of mutual organising,

where the text provides part of the structure, and the reader the remainder. The

contentious issue of agency is emphasised at this point, since it is not clear where the

subject begins and ends, nor where the object begins and ends. Subject and object are

telescoped during reading, but the structure that organises the reality of the text remains

intersubjective. In clarifying his conceptualization of subjectivity as a dynamic one, Iser

quotes from Sartre’s (1947) What is Literature? where he explains the notion of

“impenetrable objectivity”:

“The reader is left with everything to do, and yet everything has already

been done; the work only exists precisely on the level of his abilities;

while he reads and creates, he knows that he could always go further in

his reading, and that he could always create more profoundly; and this is

why the work appears to him as inexhaustible and as impenetrable as an

object. This productiveness, whatever its quality may be, which before

our very eyes transforms itself into impenetrable objectivity in

accordance with the subject that produces it, is something I should like to

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compare to the ‘rational intuition’ Kant reserved for divine reason.” (qtd.

in Act 123-4).

The process of selection in gestalt formation then generates the subjective interaction

with the text as a dynamic one that reflects Sartre’s paradoxical description, which

presents a reader who has everything to do, despite the fact that everything has been

done. This “impenetrable objectivity” conceptualises the object of the text as

impenetrable, since in the act of reading the reader generates new depth in the object.

Similarly, the reader can “create more profoundly”, since during reading the

productiveness of further reading is ensured, as the “impenetrable object” is generative

of a new reader. The subject is altered during the act of reading, effectively ensuring an

interchangeable status for subject and object in the literary text and reader. Iser

describes this in terms of the organising gestalt which remains “intersubjectively

accessible even though its restrictive determinacy excludes other possibilities, thereby

revealing the impenetrability of the reader’s subjectivity” (124). It is precisely the

bringing to bear of a reader’s subjective agency that ensures the dynamic of an open and

closed “array” of gestalten, as new possibilities emerge and are tested upon each act of

reading.

Hamilton and Schneider observe the following of Iser’s work in The Act of

Reading:

His avoidance of real readers, unlike Holland’s (e.g. Five Readers

Reading), relegates to the stratosphere all of Iser’s discussions of

reading. This was the Achilles’ heel of 1970’s reception theory:

its true object of study eluded definition. (643)

The frustration of the Anglo-American reader – despite the co-authorship of this paper

with Schneider – is encouraged by the apparent absence of a set of methodological tools.

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Iser understands both the “real” and the “reader” in a fashion which assumes only the

necessity of a dynamic, communication oriented phenomenology of reading. If his

“stratospheric” aesthetic description of the literary work continues to elude readers, it is

because he does not cater to a context for theory and the interpretation of theory that

insists upon a “true object” which can be readily distilled as the evidence for

explanations of particular interpretations. A significant part of the motivation for

refraining from providing such a definition comes for Iser in his refusal of an inductive

approach to interpretation. The “meaning” discovered during the performance of

interpretation does not represent for Iser, the basis for an explanation of the human use

for literature. If Iser is determined to achieve anything in his “reception” theory, it is to

participate in a process of discovering how we read. This is so, since in its dynamic

intricacy, reading literature is a profoundly significant human phenomenon. That this

does not result in a suitably “clear” definition of the literary object makes it apparent,

that he considers the literary object worthy of investigation.

Perhaps Hamilton and Schneider’s conclusion that “[p]roblems like these no

doubt left readers in the 1970’s confused to say the very least” (644) is not so inaccurate.

As this chapter has demonstrated, the context for Iser’s literary anthropology is this

dissatisfaction with being trapped in the ontological complication of attempting to

articulate his description of the reader-text interaction. His attempts in the form of

reception theory continue to be subjected to the reductive role for interpretation it warns

against. Significantly, the role Iser suggests for the use of literature in literary theory

exhibits this concern. As we discuss in more detail in chapter six, Iser attempts to

position his use of literary examples as illustrations of his theoretical position. The goal

here is not to dismiss the interpretation of literature, but to clarify what happens when

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we interpret literature in order to allow his theory to deepen our understanding of the

human use for literature.

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6. The Reception of Iser: literary example

Iser’s phenomenological account of the processes involved in the reader-text

interaction calls upon the use of illustrative examples in the form of contextual

discussions of particular literary works. As noted in chapter one, his use of examples

changes across his major works. In The Implied Reader it is the reader’s process of

discovery through the text in the particular context of consumption that Iser illustrates

through the discussion of literary examples. Later in The Act of Reading he takes up a

more abstract examination of this process, focussing with great specificity upon the

reader. In The Implied Reader, Iser asserts that for his writing to “to carry any weight at

all” it “must have its foundations in actual texts” (xi). The title indicates an “implied

reader” whose “actualization” of the “potential” in the “prestructuring” of the text

makes up the subject matter of Iser’s illustrations. He explores this process by taking up

the novel in a variety of historical contexts which do not involve an overly narrow

“typology of possible readers” (xii). Later, in The Act of Reading, this “discovery”

becomes less clearly purposive, where Iser argues “literary criticism” should “take stock

of its own approaches to literary texts”:

If it is true that something happens to us by way of the literary text and

that we cannot do without fictions – regardless of what we consider them

to be – the question arises as to the actual function of literature in the

overall make-up of man. This anthropological side of literary criticism is

merely hinted at in the course of the thoughts developed here, but it is to

be hoped that these hints will suffice to draw attention to an important

and as yet very open field of study. (xi)

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In his literary anthropology this perspective on interpretation takes centre stage,

a project beginning in Prospecting where he suggests a move away from definitional

approaches to the study of literature, updating the traditional perspective on

interpretation that assumes a mimetic function for literature by focussing upon

representation as performance. He notes that the German word for “representation” is

“Darstellung”, a more complex term that suggests what emerges from the point of

mediation does not refer “to any object given prior to the act of representation” (236).

He uses literary fictionality to access what this context of representation can “tell us

about ourselves” (236), and introduces play, and how “the ludic nature of literature is

basically unlimited”, as against the more limiting approach to literature which

conceptualises it as a mode of “explanation” (245). Iser is interested here in the capacity

of literature to give us access to the inaccessible and in some way assist us with the

“impossibility of knowing what it is to be” human. He goes further however, by

asserting that literature does not foreclose on our “reality” since literary fiction stages

“the constant deferment of explanation” (245). As discussed in chapter five, Iser

maintains that any particular interpretation of literature is only useful after the

“framework” of the theory has been established. The role of this interpretation is

illustration of how the theory can be applied in a context to explore the phenomenon the

framework is concerned to describe. The later adjustments to his theory and the

changing role of literary example in his expository writing seem to have reflected the

criticism his attempts to employ this illustrative strategy have received. Rather than

being problematic for his anthropological strategies, the critical reception of his “reader-

oriented” phenomenology22 illustrates the value in his eventual emphasis on a literary

anthropology.

22Though as Winfried Fluck writes, “Iser’s theory is, above all, an aesthetic theory. Its goal is to clarify

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For example, Iser’s use of the works of Fielding has led to energetic debate.

Lothar Cerny argues that Iser uses Tom Jones not only:

to illustrate his theory but actually [to] provide the patterns or substrata

on which it is based. This inductive method, however sound in itself,

requires close attention to what the text says. In this paper, I am taking

issue with Iser because his reading of Fielding does not seem quite close

enough. (137)23

For Cerny there are two major flaws in Iser’s discussion of Fielding: Iser misreads the

ironic gesture manifest in Fielding’s “sagacious” reader; and, in relying upon a

problematic interpretation of Tom Jones, Iser’s theory employs a dangerously inductive

method. Where Iser takes Fielding’s description of his reader as “sagacious” in a more

literal fashion, Cerny takes it to be a parody of Locke for whom deductive reason is the

paradigm of wisdom. Cerny’s commentary inspired a lengthy debate unfolding over a

number of years, focussing on a range of themes, and generating vigorous interpretation

of both Fielding and Iser24. The current chapter will review select elements of this

debate, paying particular attention to the issues surrounding Iser’s use of literary

examples. The manner of his reading and employment of examples is the trigger to a

the character of aesthetic experience and not ‘responses’ of the reader” (n1 201). 23Cerny’s first note in his “Reader Participation” delineates that this is in reference to all Iser’s early discussions of Tom Jones: “1.I am referring to Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1972; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974), especially “The Role of the Reader in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones” 29-56. See also his earlier Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1970); The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989).” 24 The contributions appeared in Connotations, as follows: Cerny (1992), “Reader Participation and Rationalism in Fielding’s Tom Jones”; Hammond (1993), “‘Mind the Gap’: A Comment on Lothar Cerny”; Hudson (1993), “Fielding and the ‘Sagacious Reader’: A Response to Lothar Cerny”; Cerny (1993), “Fielding, Reception Theory and Rationalism: A Reply to Brean Hammond and Nicholas Hudson”; Harrison (1994), “Gaps and Stumbling-Blocks in Fielding: A Response to Cerny, Hammond and Hudson”; Cerny (1994), “‘But the Poet . . . Never Affirmeth’: A Reply to Bernard Harrison”; and finally Toker (1995), “If Everything Else Fails, Read the Instructions: Further Echoes of the Reception-

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series of disagreements that provide a useful insight into Iser’s stance in relation to the

historical context of literary theory and literary-critical interpretation. My focus is on

the theoretical concerns in question, rather than the effectiveness of the interpretation

itself. For the same reason I focus exclusively on the cardinal points: Cerny’s initial

objection to Iser’s use of literary example as a part of his theoretical approach, and

Leona Toker’s overall assessments of the debate. Hers is the final entry, in which she

takes a long view of this contest over Iser’s theory, in a discussion that offers useful

observations about literary studies in general, and for our attempt to examine his literary

anthropology in the context of literary discourse.

6.1 Cerny and Iser

In The Implied Reader Iser argues that Fielding presents to the “reader’s

sagacity” a model of human nature based on the negation of the hero’s possibilities

through the inhibiting presence of “norms and empirical circumstances” (54). He

argues that for Fielding, the sagacity of the reader is required to (with the hero) “release

the positive inherent in these negatives” by looking through “the outer appearances of

situations and perspectives” (54). It is in response to this negative presentation of a

prevailing normative perspective that Jones’ “good nature” unfolds. For Iser Fielding

presents a portrayal of human nature as “characterised by its independence of and

superiority to” the prevailing norms of any given situation. He invokes Barthes’

“pleasure of the text”, which unfolds at the intersection of the didactic and aesthetic

elements of the text:

Theory Debate”. Iser did eventually book-end the debate with a commentary of his own, “EUREKA: The Interpretation of Tom Jones. Some Remarks Concerning Interpretation. A Reply to Lothar Cerny”.

Matthews 218

What the hero has yet to learn – “prudence” and “circumspection” – is

what Fielding makes the subject of the exercise he is giving to the

reader’s sagacity. This exercise combines the esthetic with the didactic

intention of the novel: the esthetic pleasure lies in the opportunity for the

reader to discover things for himself; the didactic profit lies in his

availing himself of this opportunity, which is not intended by the author

as an end in itself, but is to serve as training for the reader’s sense of

discernment. (54)

The reader’s sagacity is for Iser the necessary counterpoint to the ironic tone of the

novel. The deficit in the hero is the focal point for training Fielding’s reader. Iser argues

that Fielding’s intention is therefore evident in his characterisation, as it is in the

experience of the reader, such that the aesthetic of the text is bound up with its purpose.

Iser presents the text as the basis for a process in which Fielding invites the reader to

“penetrate the outer appearances” of his own portrayal of the hero, as he frequently

encourages the reader to take the hero’s part, observing at one point in Tom Jones, “‘I

am convinced most of my readers will be much abler advocates for poor Jones’” (qtd. in

Iser 54-5).

In this way Iser’s explanation of the functioning of the text indicates how the

text can be thought of as thematizing his own perspective on literature. The prevailing

norms of interpretation are to be themselves assessed in order to reveal the history that

has inspired them:

The diversity which comes about through the negation of prevailing

norms can no longer be conveyed in terms of those norms. And so the

reader must form his judgment from one case to the next, for it is only

through a whole chain of such judgments that he can form a conception

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of this diversity. The presentation of the appearance of human nature by

means of different situations demands that the reader should think in

terms of situations, and this reflects an historical trend of the eighteenth

century – namely, the revaluation of the empirical reality as against the

universal claims of normative systems. (55)

In other words, the systems of thought portrayed in Tom Jones illustrate the relevance of

prevailing norms to mapping the interaction of reader and text. For Iser, Fielding is

promoting a sagacious reader, but this reading of Fielding is simultaneously a warning

against adopting a singular perspective upon intentionality. As we have seen, later in

Iser’s literary anthropology intentionality in the text sets down the pragmatic boundaries

of the text in terms of fictionalizing acts. While in an expository text, intentionality is

linked to pragmatism by virtue of a direct attempt at representation, in the literary text

intentionality is both limited and rendered uncertain by virtue of the self-disclosure of

the “as-if” world of the literary text. Here in his earlier work, this gap between the

intention of the author and the outcomes of this pragmatic purpose of the fictionalizing

acts involved in the literary text are clearly evident. When he observes that Fielding

promotes a sagacious reader, he does so in order to highlight a feature of the literary text

which sets it aside from other media. For the sagacious reader facilitates a playful

combination of “the esthetic with the didactic intention of the novel” in Iser’s

description. Here, the didactic intention is “not intended by the author as an end in

itself”, since it is an invitation to the reader to “discover things for himself”. The two-

fold outcome will be an ongoing challenge to the reality beyond the text, and a means

by which to conduct this challenge. The means available through literature for such a

challenge is enhanced when the reader is sagacious, reading through the surface of

portrayals and toward the uncovering of a diverse array of perspectives during a rich

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history of engagement. In the context of literature, and simultaneously the context of

Tom Jones itself, “it is only through a whole chain of such judgements” that the reader

can appreciate “human nature by means of different situations”. In the setting of the

eighteenth century, this manifests as a re-orientation toward empiricism over the

previously accepted “universal claims of normative systems”. In order to better

understand how Iser articulates this interaction of context and literary example we turn

our attention below to a closer reading of Iser’s assessment of Lockean empiricism, and

the role of systems theory in his phenomenological account of the reader-text

interaction. Firstly however, we introduce Cerny’s perspective in more detail.

Iser’s theory is concerned to examine the matter of how meaning is bound up in

language, and how the process of meaning making during reader-text interaction

intersects with a history of attempts to understand the relationship between “reality” and

literature. Cerny argues that while Iser sees his literary examples as illustrations of these

phenomena, they in fact provide the “patterns” on which it is based. Of course, this is

true insofar as literature in general must provide such a structure for an account of

reader-text interaction, but Cerny takes the particular conditions of Iser’s use of

Fielding’s Tom Jones (his use of Joseph Andrews receives less emphasis from Cerny) to

be evidence of an “inductive method” in Iser’s theory (“Reader Participation” 138).

Cerny argues that this method is “sound in itself”, but, as we have seen, Cerny says Iser

fails when his reading of Fielding is not “close enough” (138). For Cerny, Iser

misinterprets Fielding in two ways, firstly by presenting a primarily “intellectual and

epistemological” account that focuses on the “rational understanding” of his novels, and

secondly by taking Fielding’s “sagacious reader” literally and falling “into the trap of

Fielding’s irony” (138-9). Cerny has a very different approach to reading from Iser, and

he finds Fielding’s use of “rationalist” rhetoric as a method which manifests “a case in

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point of the classic strategy of forensic rhetoric, namely to outmanoeuvre the opponent

with his own weapons” (149). Cerny argues that Fielding lampoons the “dogmatic

rationalism” of Locke and “points to pragmatic absurdities of the subject-object

dichotomy, the principle of contrast and opposition” (148). He presents Fielding’s

purpose as “a composite one, ruled by feeling”, in which Locke’s “quality of judgment

which is achieved through a process of reasoning alone” (143) is demonstrated to be the

“absence of wisdom” (144). For Cerny, Iser’s method of interpretation is summarised in

the key terms “blanks” and “gaps”, which he sees as constitutive of his approach:

According to Iser the reader of Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews is

encouraged by the author-narrator to help constitute the meaning of the

novel. He sees Fielding’s offer of co-operation at certain places in the

novels which he calls “blanks” or “gaps.” The reader is meant to fill the

“Blanks” (Tom Jones II.i.76), “vacant Spaces” (III.i.116) or “vacant

Pages” (Joseph Andrews II.i.89)3 with the help of certain textual

signs . . . . (137)

He sees Iser bridging the gap between Iser’s own theory and the texts concerned by

discovering the reader’s participation in the intention of the author, a participation

directly invited by the author. Cerny disagrees with this reading, and presents his main

example from Iser in the form of a passage from Tom Jones where Fielding writes of

“the vacant Spaces of Time”:

In Chapter III.i Fielding addresses his reader, attributing to him, as so

often, “Sagacity” (116). As nothing of importance has happened in the

history of Tom Jones, so he tells the reader, he intends to pass over a

long stretch of time. The reader, therefore, has a chance of intelligent

participation,

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an Opportunity of employing that wonderful Sagacity, of which

he is Master, by filling up these vacant Spaces of Time with his

own Conjectures. (116)

Iser comments [on] this passage as follows:

The vacant spaces in the text, here as in Joseph Andrews, are

offered to the reader as pauses in which to reflect. They give him

the chance to enter into the proceedings in such a way that he can

construct their meaning. (138)25

Cerny disagrees, since Fielding’s “vacant Spaces” are “hardly identical” to the space for

interpretation that Iser suggests, especially given that in Cerny’s reading of Fielding, the

author “caricatures” this “unwanted participation” (138). For Cerny, Iser’s assessment

of a literal “sagacity” is involved with the mistaken terms in which Iser discovers an

equivalence of meaning between his theoretical approach and Fielding’s intention. This

is most pointedly stated by Cerny as follows:

In Iser’s description of the reading process the terms “gap,” “vacant

spaces,” and “missing links” are not ironical as they are in Fielding’s (or

in Sterne’s) dialogue with the reader and their literal meaning is taken to

be stronger than their function as metaphors. For Iser they seem to signal

a deficiency. The reader is supposed to fill in what the author left out –

on purpose and by necessity (the text cannot spell out its own meaning).

But an author like Fielding does not leave out anything essential. The

metaphors of space, if not used ironically, are rather unsuitable in a

theory of reading as they suggest the author left out parts, almost in the

way of a puzzle. (140)

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If Iser has employed a metaphorical portrayal of these “gaps” then he has moved

beyond theory, and into the unsuitable domain of having constructed a puzzle. Cerny

seems to imply that Iser’s theory takes the strength of the literary text into his theory,

where it becomes a weakness.

If the negative structure of the “blanks” and “gaps” are to be taken literally in

Iser’s theory, then they should have a structure to support them. Cerny appears to

mistake Iser’s metaphors for methodological tools. Nonetheless, whether these

metaphors remain illustrations in Iser’s discussion of a previously constituted structure

is a complex issue and one which demands we return to a close examination of Iser’s

argument. In The Act of Reading, he examines the reader-text relationship through an

application of General Systems Theory, and employs the example of Lockean

empiricism to elaborate upon the complex relationship between the categories “fiction”

and “reality”. Iser argues for the influence of Lockean empiricism upon the

contemporary tendency to conceptualise the fictive in binary opposition with reality

(71-9), and as we have seen, Iser makes the argument that fiction “is, in fact, not the

opposite, but the complement” to reality (73). The premise for Iser’s discussion is that

the literary interacts with dominant systems of thought in a complementary but

disruptive pattern, in that “it takes the prevalent thought system or social system as its

context, but does not reproduce the frame of reference which stabilizes these systems”

(71). As a result of the manner in which the literary text reproduces elements of the

systems it selects from, it cannot help but disturb expectations in the reader. This is so

since the reality of the systems borrowed from is not completely reproduced. Iser

explores this interaction by discussing the influence of Locke’s empiricism through a

study of 18th century literature. Locke’s assertion that “knowledge can only be acquired

25 The Fielding quotations in Cerny refer to the Wesleyan Edition of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews as

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subjectively” opened the issue of “questions of morality” (72). In solving “the problem

of how man is to acquire his knowledge (i.e., from experience)” Locke “throws up a

new problem of possible bases for human conduct and relations” (73). Iser finds that

literature in this context provided a balance to the shortcomings of a broader system of

logic. In order to demonstrate this role for literature Iser employs systems theory, and a

description of the aesthetic dimension of literature that focuses on the negative potential

in the text. Iser draws on Luhmann for his frame of reference, observing that

“According to General Systems Theory, each system has a definite structure of

regulators which marshal contingent reality into a definitive order” (71). This

description of systems as organising structures suits his concept of the aesthetic, in

which Iser follows Robert Kalivoda’s definition of the aesthetic as an “empty principle

which organises extraesthetic qualities” (qtd. in Iser 70). Iser finds a suitable set of

historical circumstances to demonstrate his theory in Tom Jones and its relationship to

Lockean empiricism. The negative qualification of the aesthetic allows him to link his

observations of the reader-text interaction to a systems-based description of an historical

context, and to facilitate a phenomenology which attempts to resolve the problem of

determinacy in interpretation. Where the fictive has traditionally been taken to stand in

opposition to the real, the aesthetic is “closed”, but where the “interaction between text

and reader has the character of an event”, the reality of the fictional text reflects the

nature of reality itself, which is transitory and conditioned by the temporary unity of

event in which it unfolds (67-8). Iser uses Tom Jones to illustrate the role of historical

context in his description of literature:

Literature need not always refer directly to the prevailing thought system

of the day. Fielding’s Tom Jones is an example of a much more indirect

edited by Martin C. Battestin.

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approach. Here the author’s avowed intention is to build up a picture of

human nature, and this picture incorporates a repertoire that is drawn

from many different thought systems. (76)

Iser suggests that each of the protagonists manifests a system of thought, and

promulgates a normative version of the world. After listing these changing perspectives

he concludes:

all the norms reduce human nature to a single principle, thus excluding

all those possibilities that do not concur with that principle. The reader

himself retains sight both of what the norms represent and of what the

representation leaves out. In this respect, the repertoire of the novel may

be said to have a horizontal organization, in the sense that it combines

and levels out norms of different systems which in real life were kept

quite separate from one another. By this selective combination of norms,

the repertoire offers information about the systems through which the

picture of human nature is to be compiled. (Act 76)

Here the norms are discovered in a context that illustrates a relationship between

reading literature and the conditions of consumption. Each analysis of a text is not

simply the product of a context, but of an event in which a particular frame of reference

is drawn from a context and employed to engage with a text. The text contains a world

drawn from the “empirical world”, but not equal to elements of that “given” world,

resulting in a complex interplay that has been further hidden beneath our assumptions

that fiction is the opposite of reality:

Whenever we analyze a text, we never deal with a text pure and simple,

but inevitably apply a frame of reference specifically chosen for our

analysis. Literature is generally regarded as fictitious writing, and,

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indeed, the very term fiction implies that the words on the printed page

are not meant to denote any given reality in the empirical world, but are

to represent something which is not given. For this reason “fiction” and

“reality” have always been classified as pure opposites, and so a good

deal of confusion arises when one seeks to define the “reality” of

literature. (Act 53)

The “given reality” of the empirical world is not equivalent to a determinate reality in

Iser’s theory, but is instead a challenge to this notion. Therefore, the illustrative

example of Tom Jones is understood by Iser to be subject to the conditions of his own

“frame of reference” during the analysis, in which the prevailing systems of thought

play a key role whilst simultaneously being the subject of his analysis.

In his response to Fish’s review of The Act of Reading, Iser wrote: “with the

literary text, it is the interpretation of the words that produces the literary world – i.e. its

real-ness, unlike that of the outside world, is not given” (“Talk Like Whales” 83). Iser

confuses Fish with his categorization of the given. Iser does not fill this “given”

category with the assumption of an extra-contextual constant. Iser characterizes this

human relationship with a given “reality” in the observation that “even though in

perceiving it we cannot avoid also imagining it” (85). He goes on in The Act of Reading

to relate systems to the literary work as follows: “no literary text relates to contingent

reality as such, but to models or concepts of reality, in which contingencies and

complexities are reduced to a meaningful structure. We can call these structures world-

pictures or systems” (70).

While Iser characterizes General Systems Theory in terms of “a definite

structure of regulators which marshal contingent reality into a definitive order” this is a

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heuristic approach, conscious of its own reduction. This reduction is seen as necessary

to an iterative process:

Every system therefore represents a model of reality based on a structure

inherent to all systems. Each 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

and thus offsetting and stabilizing the chosen possibilities of the system.

(71)

Here Iser shows how his understanding of the literary work is informed by a complex

modelling of potentials. This is a systemic portrayal of processes in connection to a

dynamic “reality”, where this “given” is reliant upon negation in a reflexive fashion.

Here Iser employs the example of Lockean empiricism in his interrogation of the

traditional opposition between reality and fiction. As we have seen, he argues that the

literary text holds the potential to intervene in the tendency for systems to “bring about

stabilization of expectations” in this human experience of the real by virtue of the fact

that “it does not reproduce the frame of reference which stabilizes these systems” (71).

Literary texts can manifest a system which parallels the broader systems in that it

reproduces this process of selection “against a background of neutralized and negated

possibilities” (71-2). However, the literary text is structured for Iser in distinction to this

relationship with a contingent reality, for it achieves a meaningful order in “relation to

the ordered pattern of systems with which the text interferes or is meant to interfere”

(72).

Conceptualised in these terms, the reader-text interaction reflects “reality”, but is

constituted by a complex of interacting processes of communication. Systems which

function on the basis of the subjective human presence are imagined and displaced in

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the maintenance of an understanding of the unique features of the literary medium. The

literary work is imagined as a communicative process and the resultant discussion in

The Act of Reading explores this potential in describing 18th century novels and drama

as manifesting a potential for compensating for an imbalance in human understanding

engendered by Lockean empiricism. In Iser’s explanation, Lockean empiricism is to be

characterized as “the dominant thought system in eighteenth century England” (72). For

Iser existing systems of thought attempted to adapt themselves to this empiricism, and

were subsequently positioned as subsystems. Most prominent among these was

theology, which having accepted the premise of empiricism “continually searched for

natural explanations of supernatural phenomena” (72). The effect of this was to ensure

the success of empiricism. Iser highlights the reductions of such a system of logic:

a system can only become stable by excluding other possibilities. In this

case the possibility of a priori knowledge was negated, and this meant

that knowledge could only be acquired subjectively. The advantage of

such a doctrine was that knowledge could be gained from man’s own

experience; the disadvantage was that all traditional postulates governing

human conduct and relations had to be called into question. (72)

For Iser, the nature of the relationship between reality and fiction is evident in the

response of the literary medium to this disadvantage. It is in the unique relationship with

other systems of meaning that we discover the dynamic interaction of the real and the

fictive in the literary work, where the system of the literary text “interferes” with the

overall systems with which it interacts. This is characterized in terms of a fulcrum of

interference: the literary text differs from the overall system with which it shares its

structure “in its intention” (72). This intention is discoverable in the tendency for the

literary text to:

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almost invariably… take as its dominant “meaning” those possibilities

that have been neutralized or negated by that system. If the basic

reference of the text is to the penumbra of excluded possibilities, one

might say that the borderlines of existing systems are the starting point

for the literary text. It begins to activate that which the system has left

inactive. Herein lies the unique relationship between the literary text and

“reality”, in the form of thought systems or models of reality. (72)

Here is the anchor for Iser’s observation that a broader reality is “given” and the real is

assigned a contingent value. The systems employed to conceptualise the “given” reality

may be in turn appropriated in the literary text, whereby the fictive incorporates features

of this reality in the context of a dynamic negotiation of the thought systems employed.

Indeed, for Iser it is the reductive feature of such systems of thought which manifest the

characteristic shortcomings that allow for the effective functioning of the literary text:

“This reaction is triggered by the system’s limited ability to cope with the multifarious-

ness of reality, thus drawing attention to its deficiencies” (72). In the example of

Lockean empiricism, this prevalent system of thought gave a milieu of cultural

production a momentum which saw English literature reply reflexively to the need to

deal with questions of morality. In Iser’s words: “Since the whole sphere of human

relations was absent from this system, literature now brought it into focus” (73).

Broadly, Iser sees reality as given, yet outside the possibility of complete

knowledge. He also sees literature as functioning in respect of human landscapes,

interacting with a complex of communicative processes which provide context for its

form and concern. Specifically, the literary text responds to reality in the presence of

contemporary ideational structures, and simultaneously can contain features of reality

negated in dominant thought systems. In Iser’s metaphor, literature can portray these by

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“shading in the areas all around that system” (73). Iser uses a structure of negation

which pays homage to Roland Barthes in his description of the paradoxical nature of the

literary work: the irreducible features of the literary medium are a response to and a

portrayal of their own history. As we have seen in Chapter 4, for Barthes the literary

work both resists and presents a history: “‘It forms a solid, irreducible nucleus in the

unresolved tangle of events, conditions, and collective mentality’” (qtd. in Iser 74).

Apropos the human significance of the literary medium, this powerful aesthetic

presence maintains the indomitable dynamism of the literary work. The aesthetic core of

the literary work is made up of “[t]he irreducible nucleus that Barthes spoke of”, which

“is the aesthetic value of the work or, in other words, its organizing force, and this lies

precisely in the recodification of the norms and conventions selected” (74).

In keeping with his communication-oriented description of the medium, he does

not foreclose on this process of negation. While Iser places the literary work in a

position to provide an aesthetic challenge to the normative function of contemporary

thought systems he sustains the process of negation in the stance the literary work must

take up:

What it does not do, however, is formulate alternate values, such as one

might expect after a process of negation; unlike philosophies and

ideologies, literature does not make its selections and its decisions

explicit. Instead it questions or recodes the signals of external reality in

such a way that the reader himself is to find the motives underlying the

questions, and in doing so he participates in producing the meaning. (74)

The reader-text interaction is challenging rather than normative, such that it does not

concretize an alternate structure of a moral kind, since its “selections and its decisions”

are not made “explicit”. The pragmatism of expository writing with its description of

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“philosophies and ideologies” is not present to limit literature; and the indeterminacy

that results from the lack of certainty in relation to the intention of the text will always

result in literature challenging rather than affirming “values”. Iser presents an open

category at the core of the literary repertoire in order that the human significance of the

literary might be better understood, in the form of his enabling “blanks”, “gaps” and

“vacancy”. All are features of literature Iser identifies as drawing out the subjectivity of

the reader whilst maintaining the indeterminacy of the text.

Iser goes on in The Act of Reading to offer a reading of Sterne’s Tristram

Shandy to support his view (74-7). While in Lockean empiricism, human access to

knowledge relies on an association of ideas, in Tristram Shandy this associative

mechanism remains in a virtual state, “thrusting into relief those possibilities of

knowledge that the Lockean system either rejected or ignored” (75). In Iser’s analysis of

Tristram Shandy, he suggests that the protagonists are presented so as to highlight the

“human dimension” which is left unaccounted for in Locke’s system (75). He suggests

that Sterne’s characters Walter Shandy and Uncle Toby portray the arbitrariness of the

human association of ideas which Locke calls upon to bring stability to his empiricism.

Iser concludes that this feature of Tristram Shandy highlights the lack of reflexivity in

Lockean empiricism:

This arbitrariness not only casts doubt on the dominant norm of the

Lockean system, but also reveals the unpredictability and impenetrability

of each subjective character. The result is not merely a negation of the

Lockean norm but also a disclosure of Locke’s hidden reference –

namely, subjectivity as the selecting and motivating power behind the

association of ideas. (75)

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Iser frustrates traditional expectations of the literary practitioner with his refusal to

model a methodology in this interpretation. Instead, he sustains a distance from the

object suitable to his observations of the human features of the medium. In the context

of Tristram Shandy, he offers broad observations of characters and places these in the

context of the significance of the literary work. This distance increases in Iser’s oeuvre

until it eventually becomes notable by its absence. As Toker points out, “in The Fictive

and the Imaginary Iser tends to dispense with examples altogether” (160). In the case of

Tristram Shandy, Iser has used the literary text to exhibit a phenomenon which radiates

out through context. The literary work takes up a meaningful form in Iser’s discussion

as a feature of a historical context, illustrating the human possibilities manifest in the

literary medium by attaching these to a fundamental human problem.

6.2 Toker and “second-degree” fictionalizing

Iser writes in his commentary on the debate that in reducing his “theory” to a

“method” Cerny overlooks the context of its writing, and regardless of the success of

any “theory”, “it is certainly not a method of interpretation” (“Eureka”). Rather than

offer further interpretation of Tom Jones, he investigates Cerny’s critique to uncover

what he has left out, namely “why interpretation is frequently a matter of dispute, and

what the difference is between methods of interpretation and theory”. Similarly, the

present examination is not directed toward determining which interpretation of Tom

Jones or what new direction in interpretation of Fielding will resolve the disparity that

manifests across the various interpretive narratives. We are interested in the

disagreements themselves, and what they reveal about the activity of formal

interpretation. While the goal of Cerny’s interpretation is a close reading of the text,

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Iser’s is to illustrate his theory of aesthetic experience in the context of a literary

example. As we have seen, for Iser this experience is always new, and always

contingent. Cerny’s approach seeks the evidence to substantiate his assertions about the

“meaning” of the text, and worth of his “method” of interpretation. Iser’s approach is to

present a description of the context of the work in order to illustrate his account of an

aesthetic experience that unfolds through the human function of literature. As we have

seen, his comments in the introduction to The Act of Reading and Prospecting reflect

this anthropological turn. The comparison reminds us that formal interpretation whether

presented as an empirical substantiation of a particular translation of the text, or as an

illustration of a theoretical position, reflects the richness of the literary text. In the

interpretations presented by both Cerny and Iser are the “meaning” of the literary text,

and exhibitions of the fashion in which we use the literary text to generate meaning, and

why we have this medium at all.

In the context of this debate, Iser objects to having his project aligned with

Cerny’s own. He objects to being interpreted by Cerny, as though he had an identical

purpose to that of Cerny. While Cerny is interested primarily in the meaning of the text

and the mechanics of how best to uncover this meaning, Iser is interested in describing

the manner in which the activity of interpretation generates meaning. For Iser

interpretation “transposes something into a different register that is not part of the

subject matter to be interpreted” (“Eureka”). In the case of a literary text, the register

into which the subject matter of literary discourse is transposed is made up of cognitive

terms that are “partial” and can come from an array of possibilities. Iser argues that

interpretation of “Tom Jones could be directed towards ascertaining what the novel is

about, what it means, what it intends, what it represents, what impact it exercises, what

responses it elicits, what its representation aims at, and so on” (“Eureka”). This range of

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viewpoints indicates that any interpretation must make a selection and adopt a particular

approach which is necessarily incomplete. An approach to interpretation which takes as

its aim the discovery of the essence of a literary work, rather than a negotiation of

meaning employing a particular approach, is contradictory with the structure and

purpose of interpretation:

In the final analysis, a claim to knowledge is alien to interpretation,

which would be redundant if one knew the true nature of the matter to be

explored. For interpretation is an attempt to understand what is beyond

knowing. Therefore negotiation is the guiding principle of interpretation,

not least because any claim to knowing colonizes the very space between

object and register that interpretation itself has opened up. (“Eureka”)

Iser’s response to Cerny suggests that competition over the meaning of the text contains

a paradox, since the interpretation it is built upon is defined by the negative state of not

knowing. For example, a claim to knowledge of the meaning of a literary text is the

same as a claim to knowing the mind of the author. For Iser, the presuppositions of any

would-be interpreter of a literary text are therefore to be considered heuristic

assumptions only; approximations designed to facilitate a process of exploration,

whereby “assumptions initiate and develop trial runs, and since they can never cover all

eventualities, some of their features must be exposed to change” (“Eureka”). Iser does

not, therefore, discard literary critical interpretation. Instead, interpretation is important

to Iser, and this is in no small part due to the manner in which interpretation generates

the potential for further interpretation.

In order to better appreciate Iser’s position, we will examine what Iser means by

his observation that “interpretation transposes something into a different register that is

not part of the subject matter to be interpreted”. To begin with, we must inspect the term

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“register” more carefully26. The “register” is a complex of interacting systems which

allow us to understand interpretation as an activity of translation:

The register into which the subject matter is to be transposed is dually

coded. It consists of viewpoints and assumptions that provide the angle

from which the subject matter is approached, but at the same time it

delineates the parameters into which the subject matter is to be translated

for the sake of grasping. This duality is doubled by another one. As the

register is bound to tailor what is to be translated, it simultaneously is

subjected to specifications if translation in its “root meaning of ‘carrying

across’” (p. 15) is meant to result in a “creative transposition”. (Range 6)

Iser is drawing on the work of Willis Barnstone27 in emphasising how it is that such a

transposition is to be accomplished. The “register” is made up of two interpretive

systems, each consisting of two primary characteristics. Firstly, the register both

dictates the approach to the material to be translated, and the boundaries of that which

will coalesce upon the completion of this activity. Secondly, since the register is the

basis for a re-fashioning of the subject matter at hand, the register itself is updated

according to certain “specifications”, meaning the register itself must be responsive to

the material translated. To clarify this last point: the goal of translation is to creatively

reproduce the initial meaning, and to mediate this meaning in a new setting; therefore

the approach of the interpreter must respond to the material translated dynamically in

order to execute this transposition. Iser describes this reflexivity as “a retooling of the

mechanics bought to bear, as evinced by the continual modification through which the

hermeneutic circle is reconceived” (Range 83). Imagining interpretation in terms of a

process of translation indicates the location of hermeneutic circularity in terms of the

26 We return to this discussion in some detail in Chapter 9.

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relationship between the procedures carried out during interpretation, and the ongoing

“monitoring and fine-tuning” of these procedures (Range 84). The adjustment of

interpretation, during this looping of discovery and exploration back into interpretation

forms the ground of his primary objection to Cerny’s critique. That is, he asserts that

Cerny works from the perspective of certainty in respect of Cerny’s own interpretation

of Tom Jones: “Cerny does not reflect on what is inherent in his premiss – and why

should he, in view of his certainty that he is right? Such an attitude is sadly reminiscent

of those outmoded brands of explanation which laid claim to a monopoly on

interpretation” (“Eureka”). Iser agrees with Toker that interpretation “can partially

illustrate but not bear out a theory” since “a literary text is a testing ground” rather than

a resource that can act in an evidentiary capacity (qtd. in “Eureka”). In other words, it

cannot announce the basis of the theory, or as Toker describes it, it cannot become a

“tribune for ideas”, since the literary example is “a field which only partly overlaps the

theory which one superimposes upon it” (160). Iser concludes his contribution to the

debate by quoting from Toker the idea that a literary example: “is richer than the theory

in some ways and poorer in others (less numerous); and it will necessarily indicate the

insufficiencies of this theory while failing to do justice to its extensions” (qtd. in

“Eureka”). Theory and literary example overlap, but the literary example serves largely

to enrich, and is not a substantive element of theory. The “testing” serves as illustration

of elements of the theory rather than as evidence of its substance, as a scientific

procedure might imply.

In How To Do Theory, Iser compares “hard-core theory” and “soft theory”, to

find that one makes predictions and the other offers “mapping” (5). Hard-core theory

advances hypotheses to predict, while soft theory “is almost the reverse” since rather

27 Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice.

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than attempting to establish laws to predict, it “‘pieces together’ observed data,

elements drawn from different frameworks, and even combines presuppositions” in

order to assess – rather than predict – art and literature (5). This “bricolage” is open-

ended and most often completed by the use of a metaphor, and though Iser finds that

both kinds of theory assume “plausibility through the closure of the framework”, soft

theories resist such closure. This is a difference Iser characterises as “[m]etaphor versus

law”, which summarises a “vital difference between the sciences and humanities” since

a law “has to be applied, whereas a metaphor triggers associations” (6). Beyond this

primary differentiation are two distinctions that emerge at the level of the application of

the theory in question. While hard-core theory requires that its capacity to predict is

verified during rigorous testing, the mapping and charting of soft theory can “be neither

falsified or verified” (6). Instead, soft theories with their various presuppositions

compete and “it is due to changing interests and fashions that certain theories at times

dominate their ‘rivals’”, and Iser concludes that it is this lack of a “test” that “may

account for the multiplicity of soft theories” (6). Since the “main concern of the

humanities” is “the interpretation of texts”, the very recent emergence of literary theory

after World War II has created an awareness of “the variety and changing validity of

interpretation” (1-3).

Literary theory emerged to meet the necessity to “find ways to access art and

literature that would objectify insights and separate comprehension from objective

taste” (3). The debate currently under inspection illustrates the effects of this

requirement for an empirical approach to interpretation, where Cerny begins by

asserting that Iser employs an inductive “method” to extract elements of his theory from

Fielding’s work. An accusation that prompted Iser to cite himself from “The Current

Situation of Literary Theory: Key Concepts and the Imaginary”, where he argues that

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“[t]heories generally provide the premises, which lay the foundation for the framework

of categories, whereas methods provide the tools for processes of interpretation” (4-5).

This discussion, republished in Prospecting, points out that literary theory in its purpose

of competing to provide a means of access to the text has confused key concepts like

“theory” and “method” and presents the “imaginary” as a category that will allow

theoretical discourse to explore literary texts without looking for “the meaning” of the

text. This perspective on theory is evident in his earlier paper, in which Iser was

concerned that literary theory, in its attempts to underpin a “science of literature”, had

become more concerned with approaches to literature, than literature itself (“Current” 2-

3). As discussed in chapter three, he continues: “[p]rospecting the regions of the

imaginary entails conveying the experience of an intangible pot of gold which is always

within our reach whenever we need it and which offers us such wealth that even the

coveted treasure of meaning is devalued to the level of a mere pragmatic concept” (19-

20). The imaginary manifests as a critique of method in this context, since it is a means

by which to describe processes that are involved with the reader’s interpreting the

literary text, rather than to provide a description of meaning – or the meaning – in the

text.

Toker concludes her discussion with a very interesting series of observations on

the literary studies practitioner that are based upon Iser’s “imaginary”:

For all that has been said about the inevitable asymmetry between

literary example and theory, it is well known that works of fiction or

poetry often anticipate psychological, sociological, ethical, literary, and

other theories developed in much later periods. There is, perhaps,

something profoundly genuine about texts which one trusts to have done

so. This may be equivalent to saying that what Iser calls the Imaginary –

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the non-verbal substratum that needs the fictive for its articulation – may

have informed the language and imagery of such texts with potentialities

to be approximated by second-degree fictionalization, that is, by critical

selection, recombination, and a theoretical processing of literary material,

in ways unavailable to culture-bound contemporary fictionalizing acts.

(161-2)

If this is true, Iser’s account of the “Imaginary” as a potential triggered off during the

reader-text interaction helps substantiate the importance of the literary critic. The

“second-degree fictionalization” Toker glosses as “critical selection” is thereby bound

up to the significance of literature, and appears to bear out this significance in its

generation of the achievements that Iser describes as the “protean manifestations in our

innumerable fictions” (“Current” 19). Similarly, the imaginary is a potential he intended

to chart in order to “enable interpretation to reflect upon itself” (19). Iser admires

Toker’s response, suggesting it provides “an impressive demonstration of why the

register of any interpretation should be examined first, as it forestalls a rush to judgment

in the conflict of interpretation” (“Eureka”). Iser’s evaluation of Toker’s evaluation of

Iser in response to the negotiation of his use of Tom Jones exhibits in a supremely ironic

fashion, Iser’s central argument about interpretation. For Iser, the literary studies

practitioner is engaged in a hermeneutic relationship with her own interpretive activity,

and interpretation involves negotiating the space that opens up between presupposition

and the text. He describes this in his response to the debate as: “thus developing a

hermeneutic circularity that acknowledges the space opened up by any interpretation,

and simultaneously brings under scrutiny one’s assumptions which, when focused upon,

will not stay the same” (“Eureka”).

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When this circularity and its effect is bought to bear upon the kind of polemical

interaction that precede his comments, useful insights emerge. Iser captures this with his

assertion that polemical exchanges often result in a problematic reductiveness, since the

attack must be based on both the assertion of an opposing premise, and a set of

assumptions:

The short cut to justifying one’s own premiss, therefore, is to single out

opponents and tear them to pieces, implying, of course, that this is

already sufficient evidence for the validity of one’s own assumptions.

The more vehement the attack, the more the assumptions depend on

constant reminders of the opponent’s failure. If the opponent has to be

caricatured to the verge of simple-mindedness, the effect can only be to

divert attention from the premiss on which the attack is based. It is, after

all, no proof of strength to say that the position attacked is weak.

(“Eureka”)

For Iser, an assault offered as a replacement for a careful articulation of a set of

assumptions can only serve to amplify confusion. Toker observes that The Act of

Reading continues to “stimulate literary-theoretical and critical studies” in which the

“interpretive clashes seem to be a surface expression of varying ideological positions”

(151). The question emerges, as to what Iser’s “premises” for the above description of

polemical competition over interpretation is. The conflict characterised by Iser, and

attributed to conflicting ideological stance-takings by Toker, reflects a structure in the

conduct of interpretation inside literary studies. This structure tells us something of

Iser’s premises. For instance, Iser’s “Imaginary” seems reflected in the debate. The

imaginary is a potential that relies for its description upon the fictionalizing acts of

selection, combination, and self-disclosure. The reader enacts this potential in a

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performance that takes on a tangible form in the various interpretations offered during

the debate. But this performance is always conditional, always a description of the

literary world that manifests “as-if” it were real. The energetic “second-degree

fictionalizing” that unfolds here, in the negotiation of meaning, points toward the

richness of the literary text in the first instance. Though this discourse is allied with the

literary, it is not literary, since its fictionalizing does not disclose itself. The “critical

selection” Toker describes above seems to indicate the mode of selection that leads to

canon formulation, and reflects the function of the “soft” theory Iser describes. These

theories are not tested in the scientific sense, but undergo a complex hermeneutic

negotiation that is generative of discourse which furthers the thesis of Iser’s own theory.

Namely, that the performance mediated by the literary text provides a unique

opportunity to grasp the mechanics of interpretation, as literature discloses the

procedures that are integral to this primary human activity. These mechanics are

amplified in literary discourse where interpretation of theory and literature is telescoped.

Interpretation in this illustrative mode provides a means by which to better understand

and articulate the human significance of the literary medium. In Iser’s illustrative

interpretation is an enactment of the procedures that he describes in his theory. Here, the

mode of insight into theoretical development described in Toker’s “second-order

fictionalizing” is displayed by Iser.

Literary critical interpretation takes the potential in self-disclosing fictionalizing

acts and turns them into expository fictions. Iser attempts to describe this transition,

rather than become another example of it, and this position matures in The Fictive and

the Imaginary. There his writing expands an existing tendency to blur the line between

literary and expository writing. In the example of Tom Jones, the interpretive discussion

leads to a collision of the major themes of his own work, in scientific empiricism versus

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cultural explanation. As an example of culture, literary fiction manifests such (perhaps

irresolvable) challenges to human knowledge, allowing us to explore the possibilities

the challenges themselves provide. For Iser, culture is dynamic just as the human is

dynamic, and as we expand upon in chapter seven, his growing emphasis upon

interpretation as an activity of translation reflects his definition of the human. Since

translation is described by Iser in terms of the attempt to give some form to the

unknowable, in its function of translating literature, critical interpretation has a key role

to play in expanding our understanding of the human.

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7. The Reception of Iser: Gans

Richard van Oort wrote in his “In Memoriam: Wolfgang Iser (1926-2007)” that

if forced Iser would describe the significance of literature in terms of the way we use the

medium to reflexively explore the “gap” between our direct experience and the forms of

representation through which we attempt to describe and understand reality:

humans are defined by their desire to know, to bridge the gap between

living and knowing, between sensory experience and the displacement of

experience in collective forms of representation. Iser regarded literature

as a self-conscious attempt to bridge this gap. In fact, this was how he

defined literature. In literature, humans invented temporary or

exploratory answers to the fundamental questions of human life. But the

exploratory nature of fiction was not something to be regretted, or

contrasted negatively with the ontological certainties of science or

metaphysics. On the contrary, it was a source of cultural renewal because

it reflected the peculiarity of the human situation. We live in the space of

a permanent deferral of reality. For Iser, this space or “gap,” as he

preferred to call it, defined humanity. (“Memoriam”)

Iser therefore confers on literature a great significance. The “gap” is more than an

attempt to represent the liminal space that continuously opens up between experience

and representation, it is instead definitively human. The desire to know, coupled with

the paradoxical requirement that we represent the real in order to know, opens up this

space or gap. The gap itself remains as the manifestation of the uncertain nature of

representation, which can never after all, be that which it represents. For Iser literature

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is by definition a human invention that triggers a potential he describes with his term the

“imaginary”. This potential can be partially understood through the indeterminacy of

the text which is generated by the lack of a clear authorial intention, and which allows

the reader to generate worlds “as-if” they were real. Literature then, is a testing ground,

a space in which humans invent “temporary or exploratory” answers to the challenging

“desire to know” that manifests as a primary feature of being human. Therefore,

literature stages the human condition not as a mirror but as modelling of the human, and

as a model for the human activity of exploring realities. Iser’s metaphor represents this

process of exploring in Prospecting, as the “continual patterning of human plasticity”

(xiii). In keeping with this simultaneously literal and figurative description of human

culture, The Fictive and the Imaginary is a primarily heuristic account of fiction in the

literary setting. Since this account is process oriented, or of the “permanent deferral of

reality” van Oort highlights, Iser’s heuristic description is focussed on the process of

fictionalizing. We examined in detail in chapter two the three fictionalizing acts he

identifies as most effectively conveying the manner in which we humans use the literary

medium to “invent” these temporary answers to the question of being human: selection,

combination and self-disclosure.

This thesis has attempted to demonstrate the central presuppositions of Iser’s

literary anthropology both by way of direct précis and through examination of examples

of his reception. These investigations of Iser’s reception have been focussed on

identifying the adoption of false presupposition by the interpreter. This has been

achieved through a direct examination of how the various interpretations in question

frame the context of Iser’s work. One of the outcomes has been an observation in

chapter two, of Iser’s reluctance to adopt a primarily explanatory approach to

understanding the human significance of literature. This approach is motivated by Iser’s

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“definition” of human culture as unfolding in respect of a “permanent deferral of

reality”. Now in the terms of Iser’s literary anthropology, this larger understanding of

the human experience finds its manifestation in the form of an account of fictionalizing

acts that are representative of an open-ended human condition. He argues that

representative fictions manifest outside the literary text, and that literary fictions are

separated from these everyday fictions because the purpose of this activity is not

entirely clear. The fictionalizing act of self-disclosure ensures the reader is aware the

reality of the text is to be understood “as-if” it were real. As we have seen, in “What Is

Literary Anthropology? The Difference between Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions”

Iser argues that the indeterminate intention behind this “bracketing” of the literary

reality means the literary medium has the unique capacity to generate a playful

interaction of fictions. These fictions are exploratory since they have no clear expository

purpose, and this exploratory function is capable of generating fundamentally new

cultural phenomena since what emerges during the event of the reader-text interaction is

not driven by a purely pragmatic structure: “[i]nstead of reducing the text play to an

underlying pattern which is supposed to power it, the play itself turns out to be a

generative matrix of emerging phenomena” (173).

The current chapter examines the implications of this generative perspective on

the literary medium. We do so by contrasting Iser’s literary anthropology with the

generative anthropology of Eric Gans. In an interview with Iser conducted in 1998, van

Oort observed that the authors seem to adopt a common presupposition about the

manner in which language structures representation. He stated that he was:

struck by a number of passages in The Fictive and the Imaginary that

seem to identify the same kind of paradoxical process at work that Gans

locates in what he calls in his latest book Signs of Paradox the “originary

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paradox” of the linguistic sign. For you, fiction is always a doubled

phenomenon. On the one hand, the fictional text denotes a reality that

stands outside it; on the other, it overleaps that reality and insists on its

“as if” or fictional separation from that reality. In the process it creates

something new, that is, it has the structure of an event. Gans seeks to

trace this paradoxical structure that you locate in fiction back to an

originary source. Hence what you call his “explanatory” impulse. (“Use

of Fiction” 8)

Iser shares with Gans a productive relationship with paradox. For Iser, the real is

arrayed in respect of the fictive and the imaginary as a determining, but not

“determined” category. Reality must remain knowable but open. Iser’s argues that he

adopts an exploratory approach, whilst simultaneously describing literary fictions as

themselves exploratory. As van Oort points out, what underpins Iser’s modelling of

literary fictionality is an event-based representation of the extra-textual real, which

simultaneously facilitates the exploration by humans of possible realities. The

“originary paradox” presupposed by the generative anthropology of Eric Gans is

indicated by his observation in the monograph Signs of Paradox that “[a]t the origin,

language coincides with the human reality to which it refers because it undecidably

generates this reality and is generated by it” (3). There does seem a strong similarity

between Iser’s more limited attention to literary fictionality and its human use as a

means of representation and Gans’s originary explanation of the paradoxical

relationship between language and human reality.

As the final sentence of the above citation signals, Iser identifies Gans’s

generative anthropology in terms of his reliance on an explanatory mode, and we must

therefore be concerned here to examine whether Iser’s identification of the explore-

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explain dialectic represents a satisfactory delineation between his and Gans’s projects.

Gans’s “explanatory” anthropological project employs an “originary hypothesis”, first

proposed in 1981 in The Origin of Language, and more recently described and refined

in The End of Culture: toward a generative anthropology (1985), Signs of Paradox

(1997) and The Scenic Imagination (2008)28. The originary hypothesis is a minimal

account of the origin of language. Since language refers to and is generative of human

reality, the origin of the human is the origin of language. The minimality of the

hypothesis is such that the scene is presented in an open-ended manner, assumed but not

foreclosed upon, and capable of providing the origin in an explanatory project for and of

the human. Gans wrote in Signs of Paradox that the:

crux of the origin of language is the emergence of the vertical sign-

relation from the horizontal one of animal interaction. The originary

hypothesis claims that this emergence is conceivable only as an event

because the communication of the new sign-relation to its users gives

them a conscious, directly manipulable access to the sign as a

transcendant form of representation. (15)

The “horizontal” is descriptive of the direct relation between subject and object in the

context of pre-human mimesis where imitation is enough to differentiate between

individuals inside an animal hierarchy. Gans posits a scene wherein the mimetic

behaviour of this “proto-human” group led to a build up of tension, since at some time

the subject and the model for imitation enter competition for the same object, and both

fail in their attempts at “obtaining appetitive satisfaction” (16). Where this “becoming-

obstacle of the model” during attempts at differentiating individuals in the group

28 Although the larger body of Gans’ work is more substantial, including a number of articles and as a part of the development and maintenance of his ideas he writes a journal entitled Chronicles of Love and Resentment which is published online at <http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/views/home.html>.

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“remains epiphenomenal with respect to the benefit conferred by imitation” (16-17)

such conflict may lead to the sacrifice of less fit members of a group, for example, in

animal hierarchies where this mimesis is still capable of benefiting the species. But in

higher species where individuals are more important to the group, the failure of this

hierarchy eventually leads to a “mimetic crisis”, when:

mimesis, having reached a certain level of intensity, becomes

incompatible with prehuman forms of differentiation…. Hence a new

system of control is necessary, one that can operate under the condition

of collective dedifferentiation. This system is language. The linguistic

sign as an aborted gesture of appropriation is detemporalized, cut off

from the practical domain in which imitative action slips unnoticeably

into violent rivalry. The sign points before it imitates, its horizontal,

metonymic relation to its referent turns back on itself as verticality,

metaphor. (15-6)

The sign then, is a product of a paradoxical situation where the differentiation produced

by mimesis in prehuman beings gives way to the systemic “collective dedifferentiation”

in language. In Signs of Paradox, Gans alters the collective scene earlier described in

The Origin of Language – which as he describes it, was accused of “naturalistic

naivete” – with a more minimal triangular model. Gans argues that “a collective scene

of origin goes against the grain of a postmodern intellectual climate suspicious of

centers of mimetic attraction” (Signs 15). He admits that the earlier description had left

“unclear the nature of the link between renunciation of appropriation on the one hand

and imaginary possession through representation on the other” (20). His later, more

minimal focus articulates the prehuman-human differentiation of mimetic structure, or

“doubling of mimetic models” (21). Dualistic prehuman imitation is characterised as

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only being capable of facilitating an elaboration of simple hierarchies, or pecking orders.

In triangular human mimesis “the sign begins as the same physical action as the aborted

gesture of appropriation, but the intended deferral of horizontal interaction with its

object allows it vertically to ‘intend’ this object in the phenomenological sense, to take

it as its theme” (21). This themed modelling of the originary scene is inspired by a

theatrical (Aristotlean) notion of mimetic representation. Here, Gans’s modelling of

mimesis is doubled: horizontal imitation that might yield conflict is a deferred activity,

becoming instead “the subject matter on stage… the conflict-free vertical representation

of reality” (21). In sum, the origin of language is described in terms of paradox, which

is “not the unthinkable; on the contrary, without paradox, thinking would be

impossible” (13). The originary scene is an open category, and at its core is deferral via

the linguistic sign which enables language and secures the human in communication,

whose early community now had conscious and “directly manipulable access to the sign

as a transcendant form of representation”.

Gans points out in the introduction to Signs of Paradox that paradox is

“unformalizable by definition. Readers will decide for themselves whether the analyses

of the first part of this volume represent qualitative advances over previous formulations

of such categories as irony, being, thought, signification, the unconscious” (9). Gans’s

work in Signs of Paradox is intended to “ground originary anthropology yet more

rigorously than before by constructing the originary scene of language from the mimetic

triangle alone” (9). This emphasis Gans calls a “return to Girard”29, in his articulation of

the triangular array of “the subject-mediator-object” in respect of mimesis and mediated

desire (8). Here the relationship between the human and the real is mediated by the

introduction of a “third”, and “verticality” is the substantial moment which cannot be

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removed from our understanding of human culture. The vertical feature of human

communication is that which separates and allows a description of the mimetic function

of pre-human communication. The horizontal relation between sign and referent is

rendered self-conscious by dint of its becoming “detemporalized”. This means for Gans,

that the larger system which controls human interaction, language, contains the means

by which to escape the immediacy of setting, the “practical domain”. The necessity for

such a leap occurred because “the indifferentiaton of mimesis overcomes at some point

the differentiating force of animal hierarchy” (15). “Indifferentiation” describes the

failure of imitative behaviour to defer conflict in a group of pre-human animals, where

the individuals of this “higher” species of “proto-humans” have become too valuable to

simply sacrifice. This assertion is built on certain assumptions. Firstly, that such a

hierarchy existed and that as a result, mimetic conflict existed and had to be

encountered and controlled in some systemic fashion. Since the further assumption is

made that the mimetic function generates similarity, the hierarchical mechanisms of

animal social orders must be overcome eventually by de-differentiation, leading to the

use of force. Such a moment of crisis led to the origin of human language, a system

which could control conflict “under the condition of collective dedifferentiation” as it

can perform this function in defiance of the temporal and spatial limitation of pre-

human interaction (16). As previously cited, Gans hypothesises a scene in which “the

mimetic relation to the other-mediator requires the impossible task of maintaining the

latter as a model while imitating his appropriative action toward a unique object” (20).

Girard’s modeling of “mimetic desire”, and the subsequent “mimetic rivalry” which

must emerge as a result of such inter-subjective interaction over a central appetitive

object leads to a “mimetic crisis” which is productive of human language when animal

29 More detail on the relationship between the projects of Girard and Gans is provided in the introduction

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means by which to negotiate such a crisis fails30. These are means by which to

differentiate between individuals and to define and maintain a hierarchical order that

mediates conflict. The paradoxical feature of such an understanding of language is that

the human subject cannot participate in a vertical escape from the horizontal sign

relation of mimesis without already knowing the sign, for how did the subject

manipulate the sign as a means of representation which transcends the immediacy of the

“reality” of their interaction with an object and an “other” in the originary scene? This

paradoxical feature of “the emergence of the vertical sign-relation from the horizontal

one of animal interaction” is precisely that which defines and separates human from

pre-human communication.

It seems an obvious point to make, that Gans is an example of Girard’s

“rivalrous” mimesis. Girard’s describes in Violence and the Sacred how it is that

“[m]imeticism is a source of continual conflict. By making one man’s desire into a

replica of another man’s desire, it invariably leads to rivalry; and rivalry in turn

transforms desire into violence” (169). We are left to pose an interesting question: has

this rivalry led to violence, or a deferral of violence? Both men desire to construct an

originary hypothesis, it is true to observe, and both adopt the triangular subject-model-

object structure. But Gans is hardly required to be other than that which Girard

describes, when the basis of his project is Girard’s own hypothesis, and Gans is himself,

human. Gans’s “violent” action is also an example of deferral, since his is an attempt to

fill the void he perceives in Girard’s project:

Like humanity and its language, generative anthropology has its own

genesis. René Girard’s originary scene, ambivalently monogenetic and

of this dissertation. 30 The compressions “mimetic crisis”, “mimetic rivalry”, “mimetic desire” are discussed in more detail in the introducution to this dissertation.

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polygenetic, universal and particular, situates the human community no

the periphery of a circle surrounding a sacred center. What this scene

lacks is the linguistic sign by means of which the peripheral humans

could avoid violence by deferring their mimetic-appetitive appropriation

of the center. (Signs 5)

As discussed above, Girard sees a rather nebulous, gradual emergence of the sign as a

satisfactory means by which to understand the structure of language. Gans sees this as a

vague account of what must be a minimally constructed scene of origin, but Gans’s

project aims to become a “common basis of both the humanities and the social

sciences” (Signs 3). Perhaps this might be viewed as a gesture of deferral, since for

Gans the humanities is preoccupied with interpreting a “text” which “reflects a universal

subjective reality”; and for the scientist “a particular objective reality” (3).

Contemporary literary critical endeavour is fascinated with this tension, as is evident in

the advance of an empirical approach to interpretation in “cognitive criticism”, and the

return to an object-oriented approach in “new formalism”. Cognitive criticism is at the

edge of a literary critical culture moving toward the objective safety of a scientific

methodology. The broader interpretive logic of literary criticism (which calls for the

“text” to evidence its conclusions) leads toward an objective (“social scientific”)

methodology. Gans typifies the nature of his “originary thinking” in answering the

question as to the function of his strategy, which is to be “deferred. The purpose of

originary thinking is not to supplant other modes of thought, but to provide a common

point of departure that persists as a link between them” (4). Gans writes of methodology

in Signs of Paradox:

It is tempting to offer one’s readers a “methodology” – a term whose

apparent seriousness masks its conflation of technique (method) with a

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theory that purportedly justifies that technique (-ology) Generative

anthropology neither is nor has a methodology. It provides no formula

for reading texts or gathering data. The rule of thumb of originary

thinking is as simple as the word “anthropology”: to remain always

attentive to the human, understood as the paradoxical generation of the

transcendant from the immanent, the vertical from the horizontal. (4)

The hermeneutic relationship between method and theory in literary critical

methodologies confounds the separation between the two and denies the possibility of

either a subjective or objective account of the “text”. This denial is the paradoxical

engine of a great deal of literary critical endeavor; a denial we have similarly observed

in Iser’s attempts to both comment on the confusion of theory with method, and his

resistance to the traditional use of interpretation of literary text as evidence for Iser’s

perspective on the text.

Iser addressed the comparison with Gans offered by van Oort as follows:

We cannot tolerate situations of which there is no experience or

knowledge, although we are sure that they will happen or have happened.

Similarly, we exist and yet we do not know what it is to exist. In other

words, we have an evidentiary experience, and simultaneously we want

to know what this evidentiary experience is. So we begin to fictionalize.

Fictions are modes that allow us to come close to what these situations

might be or how they might be tackled. Then there is what I would call

the “multiformity of human plasticity.” Representation as a deferral of

violence is certainly one way in which this human plasticity is patterned,

but it is not the only way. I should like to add that plasticity is just a

metaphor for the fact that we know very little about human nature.

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Nonetheless there is this plasticity, which is continually patterned and

shaped. If one uses fictionality as an exploratory instrument, there are

many ways to branch out into questions of this type. Basically, one might

say that an exploratory use of fictionality allows for the staging of

multifarious patternings of human plasticity. For this reason, literary

anthropology is not as consistent as generative anthropology. (“Use of

Fiction” 7)

In this lengthy quote, it seems that Iser brings together the disparate elements of our

brief comparison of the two theorists. Iser is at pains to emphasise that his exploratory

approach is predicated upon the notion that we know “very little about human nature”.

Therefore, to adopt a particular yet minimal fiction in the form of plasticity is the

appropriate means by which to convey (“stage”) the dynamic human animal, and

simultaneously open to exploration the human experience of reality. Literary

anthropology is differentiated from generative anthropology by Iser through the

rationale behind the fiction employed, which in the former project is a refraction of our

intolerance for the absence of “experience and knowledge”. As previously discussed,

Iser employs the cardinal points of existence as examples of such negative experiences

or knowledge “blanks”. But more broadly, Iser categorises our human condition in the

most general terms he is willing to adopt, when he asserts that “we exist, and yet we do

not know what it is to exist”. We have this evidence that is presented to the mind

through the senses, and since we require the means by which to generate knowledge

based on this evidence we represent it by employing the process of fictionalizing.

Therefore, fictions are modes of hypothesising ordered accounts of the reality evidenced

through experience. Iser wishes to represent this fictionalizing with a further and

reflexively open-ended “exploratory” fiction, in the form of plasticity. Meanwhile, he

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asserts that generative anthropology adopts a similar perspective on representation, but

that since it presents a single account of representation in reference to the deferral of

violence, it can be thought of as subsumed within his account of fiction. That is to say,

the originary hypothesis is in Iser’s description, subsumed within his account of

fictionalizing as just one example of the “staging of multifarious patternings of human

plasticity”. The consistency he attributes to generative anthropology is therefore an

intolerable reduction of the human to the conditions of a particular fiction in the form of

the originary hypothesis. In sum, the specific conditions of their various modelling of

representation generates the difference for Iser, which he summarised as follows:

“whereas Gans is interested in representation as the deferral of violence, I am interested

in the way in which fictionality generates possible worlds” (“Use of Fiction” 8).

7.1 Comparing literary and generative anthropology

Iser’s explanation of this differentiation does not provide a clear account of how

we might explore the “possible worlds” of fictionality in terms of the emergence of

language itself. The necessity for the originary hypothesis in Gans’s theory is to provide

an account of the emergence of “the vertical sign-relation from the horizontal one of

animal interaction” that generates “a conscious, directly manipulable access to the sign

as a transcendant form of representation” (Signs 15). Iser’s description of fictionality

must rely on this emergence since it presupposes the capacity for the human subject to

manipulate “a transcendant form of representation”. Whether this is attributable to the

deferral of violence or otherwise, the generative capacity of fictionalizing must

ultimately rely upon such an initiating transcendant gesture. In order for the complex

interaction that underpins the play of the text to manifest, language must have been

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possible. The antecedent conditions of language are left unattended to by Iser, since the

fundamental generative condition of the human is for Iser fictionalizing itself. This

process of fictionalizing may be mapped onto the “gap” between the evidence of

existing, and knowledge of “what it is to exist”, but there is no explanation in Iser’s

theory of when the human process of representation begins. This absence of an account

of the vertical emergence of the sign is a fundamental difference between Iser and Gans

that therefore indicates a “gap” in Iser’s literary anthropology.

The generative function of fictionalizing is modeled by Iser in the epilogue to

The Fictive and the Imaginary where he explores first “Mimesis and Performance,” and

lastly “Staging as an Anthropological Category”. Representation is here described in

performative terms, where staging is “the indefatigable attempt to confront ourselves

with ourselves, which can be done only by playing ourselves” (Fictive 303). Staging in

this sense embraces the scenic emphasis of generative anthropology, whereby the

mimetic structure of the stage inflects the human engagement with the “imaginary”.

Gans has described this “scene” in a paper employing the same title as Iser’s discussion

in The Fictive and the Imaginary – “Staging as an Anthropological Category” – as the

“classical locus of mimesis as it has been understood since Aristotle” (45). Gans argues

that the Aristotlean image of mimesis in this context:

takes place before the representatives of the community, who observe the

generation of a transcendent world of meanings out of human interaction.

To refer to the fictions that we enjoy in the privacy of our imagination as

‘staged’ is to remind us of the communal source of these as of all

representations. (“Staging” 45)

Here the fictive has the structure of an event, and fictionalizing is the process by which

the space of internal staging, or thinking, is facilitated. Iser’s closing remarks in

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Prospecting in the essay “Toward a Literary Anthropology” include the following

challenge: “staging itself must not lead to closure, but must remain open-ended if its

spell is not to be broken. This historical observation testifies to the fact that we

ourselves are the end and the beginning of these stagings, each of which is nothing but a

possibility” (Prospecting 284). Iser’s account of the historical context of any process of

staging is located in the human subject. We are the temporal boundaries of staging, and

our manifestation as human is bound up with this possibility, with this dynamic

potential. The question we ask of Iser’s literary anthropology is posed here, in the terms

of his account of staging, whereby staging is not synchronic and the diachronic

boundaries of staging co-incide with our own manifestation, for “we ourselves are the

end and the beginning of these stagings”. We must be, since anything less will limit the

dynamic function of staging, and while it is clear that “we ourselves” have not come to

an end (just yet) what is not clear is where we begin. Gans’s project turns on an answer

to this question, whilst Iser’s simply posits staging as a mode of “enacting what is not

there… to gain access to what we otherwise cannot have” (Prospecting 282). In the

closing lines of The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser wrote:

The need for staging is marked by a duality that defies cognitive

unraveling. On the one hand, staging allows us – at least in our fantasy –

to lead an ecstatic life by stepping out of what we are caught up in, in

order to open up for ourselves what we are otherwise barred from. On

the other hand, staging reflects us as the ever-fractured ‘holophrase,’ so

that we constantly speak to ourselves through the possibilities of our

otherness in a speaking that is a form of stabilization. Both apply, and

both can occur simultaneously. Precisely because cognitive discourse

cannot capture the duality adequately, we have literature. (303)

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The dual cognitive states which staging implies include the fantastic imaginary

experience of what we are not, and the stabilizing articulation to the self of the self and

the possible self as history unfolds behind us. The limiting approaches that describe

cognitive phenomena directly inspire the necessity for literature since they cannot

encompass this dimension of the human experience. Change and stability manifest in

cognition concurrently, and the mimetic functioning of the literary is possible as a result

of the unique positioning of fiction in respect of reality as it is generated and reflected

through triggering off the imaginary potential. For Iser, the “holophrase” (Sir Richard

Paget’s terminology) reflects the possibility of representation that literature manifests.

In Paget’s discussion this is directed to the origins of language, and the term has been

taken up in linguistics and psychology as a means by which to describe the transition a

child makes from pre-linguistic stages into language use. As John Dore describes it, the

child begins to utter single words to stand in for whole sentences, and the term

holophrase has often been understood as “meaning one-word sentence” (22). Though

“the theoretical status of one-word utterances has frequently been controversial” (21),

and the precise manner in which these early attempts at speech demonstrate the origin of

human language use is a matter of ongoing debate. As John Paul Riquelme points out,

the term is “not quite at home in cognitive discourse” (“Chameleon” 61) as deployed by

Iser above, where it becomes a “synecdoche” in combination with the term “fractured:

“for it means that one thing stands for a complex whole, even for a network that we

might ordinarily understand metonymically as the conjoining of many parts” (61). For

Riquelme, this strategy in Iser’s writings tends toward figuring what cannot be said, and

as noted in chapter one:

invite and enable us to recognize something that the argument cannot

itself articulate precisely. The discussion contains its own figurative

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supplement that turns out to be a primary way to evoke the character of

the study’s subject. The figures “say it,” but they do not “explain it.” (61)

This pattern in Iser’s attempt at a literary anthropology is for Riquelme, a necessary

element in an argument that sees the human animal as “groundless”. Iser’s human is

only describable through figures, since this subject cannot be located by a concrete

vertical dimension in language:

His subject is a groundless chameleon, a lion of the ground that has no

ground, that subsists on a kind of air, as chameleons traditionally were

thought to do. Rather than a debilitating contradiction, we have here a

duality that marks the need for staging and defies cognitive unraveling.

(70)

Here cognition is not in a position to decipher a puzzling creature, and it is the very

“groundless” possibility of the human that shows us the necessity for “staging”. In the

place of an (impossible) explanation of the human then, Iser presents us the human in a

very direct way, through his own enactment of “staging” as it unfolds through such

strategies as his choice of language.

Gans both objects to and affirms various elements of Iser’s employment of the

metaphor in “Staging as an Anthropological Category” where he, like van Oort,

identifies common ground with Iser’s project. In the concluding comments of his paper,

he quotes this final paragraph from The Fictive and the Imaginary and comments that

ironically enough, this “apparently irenic passage” indicates the deferred violence his

own account of the origin of language addresses in its suggestion of “interdiction,

transgressive ecstasy, fracture, otherness, duality, and the slightly sinister

‘stabilization’” (“Staging” 55). Indeed, for Gans this modelling of the necessity of

literature as a means by which to stage our own possibilities indicates that we are on the

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periphery, held from “the sacred center of the stage, the locus of sacrifice that we cannot

usurp without provoking collective violence” (55). He begins his discussion by quoting

from the opening pages of The Fictive and the Imaginary as follows: “the fictionalizing

act converts the reality reproduced into a sign, simultaneously casting the imaginary as

a form that allows us to conceive what it is toward which the sign points (FI 2)” (47).

He suggests that this modelling of fiction inflects an originary approach. For Gans the

sequence fictionalizing relies on, where the reality reproduced is converted into a sign,

is “tantamount to” the emergence of language in his own originary hypothesis (48).

Gans’s précis of this similarity is as follows:

fiction permits us to “conceive” the referent of the sign not as a direct

vision of the Idea but through a narrative understanding of human reality.

In order that we may “conceive what it is toward which the sign points,”

narrative explains why the timeless sign has pointed it out by telling us

the story of how in time it became significant. Implicit in Iser’s text is the

awareness of a difference between the mode of cognition by which we

apprehend the “reality” in the first half of the sentence, before its

conversion into a sign, and that by which we conceive it anew in the

second half through the mediation of “form.” Iser’s sentence reproduces

the originary hermeneutic circle: it is as though, by means of our

unreflective “prehuman” decision to designate this reality by the sign, we

became capable of reflecting on all reality as a potential designatum of

the sign. (50)

The “as though” is not resolved by Iser’s description of a “simultaneous” process of

conception and representation. Gans supplements this description with a scenic origin to

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language that leads us to conclude the human use of language is “staged”: human

language and our capacity to use it emerges from such staging. Gans writes that:

If we make the ‘postmetaphysical’ assumption that staging does not

emerge as a specific form of our general linguistic capacity but that it is

rather this capacity that emerges from staging, then the key challenge

posed to literary anthropology by Iser’s metaphor is to construct the

relation between fiction as mental staging and the stage as the locus of

cultural performance. We can use the linguistic sign as a means of

internal representation only subsequently to its invention/discovery as a

collective mode of communication – one whose radical discontinuity

from prehuman signal systems is increasingly recognized. (46)

This “postmetaphysical”31 assumption is central to Iser’s literary anthropology, since in

adopting staging as a metaphor to describe the process by which we “play” out our own

possibilities he invokes an originary perspective on the linguistic sign. The collective

notion of the stage as a space of public performance is also captured as the imaginary

function of mental staging, and in Gans’s challenge the relationship between the two is

only possible and itself representable after the emergence of language as “a collective”

phenomenon. Integral to this collective “vertical” differentiation of the sign from that

which it represents is the sacralisation of the space of the stage:

What then does it mean for the linguistic sign to be staged? The stage is a

sacred space inaccessible to us; what takes place on it stands in a

31Gans sees this “postmetaphysical” gesture as a seminal moment in establishing an originary account of human language. He argues that the “formal logic of signification justifies the founding gesture of metaphysics” (“Plato” 9), and concludes that Plato’s attempt to “find in language the basis of a conflict-free community… effaces the historical origin of language”. The implication for Gans, is an opposition between metaphysics and the generative perspective, since “[i]n order for the concept to be immortal, it must be without origin and therefore without history” (9). Gans captures this with the paradoxical observation that “the real immortality of the concept” evokes the “scenic sharing of the sign in the originary event as a transtemporal guarantee of communal peace” (9).

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“vertical” representational relationship to lived reality that contrasts with

our “horizontal” appetitive relations with objects on the plane of worldly

interaction. (46)

Gans’s “originary aesethics” is based on this originary event, and his heuristic account

of such an event indicates that Iser is literally missing a step:

human language begins not with categories but with the unique, a

historically eventful singularity that calls not for some particular action

but for the deferral of all action. Fiction returns to the originary use of

language in order to designate a particular element of reality not as

belonging to an interesting category but as of interest in itself, as sacred,

dangerous, a potential source of mimetic violence. The sacred is what is

desired too strongly by too many people to be safely appropriated by any

one of them. It can be shared only through the mediation of the sign,

which by designating this object implicitly institutes a category of all

such objects. The categorical signified does not precede but derives from

the unique sacred referent of the originary sign. (48)

Since the emergence of the sign is co-present with a deferral of all action, the staging

fiction relies on for its rendering sacred a “particular element of reality” is derived from

the originary sign. Fiction designates a part of reality – and of course the fictionalizing

acts – by employing language in the manner of a singular historical event that derives

from the emergence of the linguistic sign. So fiction follows the originary sign back to

the pre-categorical; returning to the originary sign in order to designate a particular

object as sacred, and this process renders fiction originary. As we have seen, Iser’s

articulation of fictionalizing, as converting “the reality reproduced into a sign,

simultaneously casting the imaginary as a form that allows us to conceive what it is

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toward which the sign points” (Fictive 2) evidences for Gans the sequence which

fictionalizing relies on, where the reality reproduced is converted into a sign, since this

is “tantamount to” the emergence of the language conveyed in his originary hypothesis

(“Staging” 48). Given that this is the case, it also follows that Iser’s description of

fiction places the cart-before-the-horse in respect of the linguistic sign:

If Iser makes no reference to a “signified” or “Idea” intermediary

between the worldly referent and the signifier, this is not because he is

unaware that the meaning of the word “cow” belongs to another category

of being than Bossy over there. On the contrary, in Iser’s analysis, the

aesthetic sign – on the model, I would add, of the originary sign – can

signify only a fictional Bossy; the category of cows-in-general is a

subsequent metaphysical construction that could not have provided the

stimulus for the sign’s emergence. (“Staging” 48)

Iser does not assume an originary hypothesis because such a gesture places

fictionalizing in a position which is subsequent to what he views to be a more fixed

account of the manner in which we access the real. Iser is wary of such a concretizing

explanation of the causal relationship suggested here by Gans, precisely because it

involves a fixing of language to which fictionalizing is subtended. Indeed Gans does, in

his reflexive gesture, do just this: concretize and explain how we come to access the real.

However, the larger category of “cows-in-general” is required to account for the

“fictional Bossy” in Iser’s exploratory account of the human use of fiction.

Gans sets out to begin “translating his (Iser’s) formulation of the relationship between

the fictive and the imaginary into the language of generative anthropology” (47). If we

are to follow Iser’s rationale, we view the imaginary as a feature of the internal stage

upon which the process of fictionalizing is played out during thought. Fictionalizing is

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an integral feature of the human as it generates something fundamentally new in our

understanding. Where this process is linked to an examination of the literary medium,

we are involved in an engagement with a textual environment which sees the generation

of such new understanding at the level of a reader-text interaction.

We are left with the question, as to whether Iser’s account of literature as

fundamentally open-ended is unacceptably limited during the incorporation of an

originary hypothesis? If we accept the originary argument, fictional Bossy is bound to

the historical sequence that returns us to an assumed knowledge of the sign, and the

resultant access to its use in designating the real. For Iser, this originary qualification of

the generation of the reality of the fictive Bossy during the act of reading leaves the

reader inhibited by a very particular arrangement of the linguistic sign. Iser argues that

we generate and are generated by the object even as we are engaged with it, but that this

dynamic interaction must remain undecidable. The particular strength of Iser’s aesthetic

account in respect of the literary medium is its capacity to maintain the generative “gap”

between text and reader. However, in order to maintain this distance, Iser assumes the

vertical possibility of the linguistic sign without a clear explanation of how this

emergent phenomenon is feasible. Paradoxically, the “reality” of representation is in

Iser’s account a means of staging “something that by nature is intangible” (Fictive 296).

Indeed, literature is significant since it stages “the extraordinary plasticity of human

beings” in a manner which “explores the space between” by ignoring the pragmatic

need in everyday life for “hard-and-fast definitions” (Fictive 296).

Alternately, in Signs of Paradox Gans uses the metaphor of an umbilical hole to

describe his departure from such a stance, and to contextualize the potency of paradox

in harnessing its originary anthropological utility:

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Paradox is the privileged road to understanding the human, because

paradox reveals the seam – the umbilical hole – in the hierarchy of sign

and referent that is the essence of human language. The foundational

modern definitions of the sign fail to grasp its double essence as a

relation both real and ideal, dualist and monist, “vertical” and

“horizontal”. (13)

At the beginning of language is a metonymic presentation of metonymy. The “seam”

which is understood by Gans to manifest in the ordering of sign and referent does not

ultimately find its definition in a spatial description, instead it becomes a further

metonymy in the paradoxical moment of birth. Here language is understood in terms of

an “umbilical hole”, a figure which indicates the necessary cross-over between life and

a paradoxically unknowable state before life. Gans’s gesture seems to ironise Lacan, as

it figures an unknowable epoch during which we are held in a liminal space and

nourished, awaiting the beginning of our human experience. The very definition of

language, and paradox, is in Gans’s writing a further paradox made of figures which

rise and fall dynamically as definition is deferred in favour of a minimal articulation.

For Gans, other definitions falter in their attempts to “define” this basic human

phenomenon. He raises the examples of Charles S. Peirce, Saussure, and Lacan. In

Peirce’s account, infinite regress invades to secure the lack of a clear account of the

horizontal relation between sign and referent:

the sign is defined as “determined by something else,” that is, it stands in

a horizontal relation to its referent. The inadequacy of this relation is

then supplemented by a hypothetical third term or “interpretant”, along

the lines of the “third man” of Greek philosophy who furnishes the

ground of resemblance between a real man and the idea of a man. The

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sign-relation is explained through a movement of infinite regress,

thereby deferring the horizontal encounter between sign and referent at

the cost of the definitional rigor of the system. (13-14)

For Saussure the sign manifests as “nothing but verticality”, and in Lacan the “bar”

which holds the sign in contradistinction to the signified is characterized by Gans as “in

his perspective primordial – (an) anthropological function of paternal interdiction”

(14)32. These three accounts are all less than satisfactory for Gans as they do not

instantiate the origin of language, and thereby the human, in a satisfactory manner.

Where Peirce allows infinite regress to intrude and disturb a definitional account of the

horizontal, Lacan leaves the “emergence of the formal-vertical from the horizontal” in a

mysterious location which requires explanation. Saussure on the other hand, defers the

horizontal by “bracketing the referent of the sign and substituting its signified or

concept”, rendering the sign and referent lucid only as two “worldly things”.

For Gans, the final analysis is that any anthropological account of human

language requires an account of the verticality of the sign. In “Staging as an

Anthropological Category”, he says this is to be achieved through an account of the sign

in originary terms. He argues that Iser’s use of the categories of mimesis, performance

and staging invoke “the transcendence of reality through representation” and that this

transcendence “is for Iser the raison d’être of the human as a literary being” that “can

most parsimoniously be explained by means of a generative hypothesis of origin” (45).

However, for Gans, Iser’s literary anthropology offers a description of the manner in

which we “stage” fictional language that overcomes the shortcomings of existing

“scientific” explanations of the relationship between language and the staging:

32 Not mentioned is Umberto Eco, who is perhaps closer to Gans’s own perspective on the symbolic in his semiotic argumentation for the mobility of the sign. As he writes in A Theory of Semiotics, “I propose to

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The originary interdependence between language and the ritual that

stages it has not yet been assimilated within positive scientific discourse.

In contrast, Iser’s humanistic conception of literature offers insight not

only into this interdependence but into its inaccessibility to positive

scientific method. The model of communication provided by our staging

of fictional language sheds light on our use of language in general. (46)

As Gans points out, a basic means by which to discriminate between human and animal

communication is the manner in which the enduring sign facilitates the staging in our

minds of ideas “independently of the real-world situation in which we find ourselves”

(46). However this fact alone is insufficient to reveal the full import of the metaphor of

staging, and that the social scientific explanation of language as simply the “individual

capacity for generating ‘symbolic’ signs that permit us to formulate ideas independently

of direct stimuli” will not suffice as an explanation of literary staging (46). Indeed, the

whole range of disciplines concerned to explain the “co-origin of ritual staging and

language” including “cognitive psychology, neurology, primatology, and

paleoanthropology,” have failed in this regard, since they provide only pragmatic

explanations based on the artefacts at hand, such as “seeking food, avoiding predators,

maintaining and developing tool kits, or, at best, creating solidarity within the group”

(p46). As we have seen for Gans language “emerges from staging”, since “[w]e can use

the linguistic sign as a means of internal representation only subsequently to its

invention/discovery as a collective mode of communication” (47). In Iser’s description

of fictionalizing, despite its lack of an adequate account of how this occurs, we discover

a modelling of the communicative function that emerges from a generative perspective

on language and language use.

define as a sign everything that, on the grounds of a previously established social convention, can be

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Given this common generative conception of language, Gans and Iser both

consider the literary medium to be of primary significance for cultural anthropology. In

his essay “Originary Narrative” (1997) Gans makes an argument for narrative as a

fundamental human phenomenon using his originary perspective. He argues that human

cultures are a direct result of the deferral of violence through representation and that

narrative is the primary mode of this representation. Gans makes the argument that the

structure of language initiated in the originary scene means that:

All culture is textual in that it is made up of representations that are

virtually if not actually copresent. The distinction between oral and

written culture is secondary. The “inscription” of the story in the mind is

not as accurate as that of the text on paper, but its relationship to the

linear time of telling is essentially the same: in either case, any element

of the whole can be accessed independently of the linear narrative

sequence. Yet this sequence cannot be dismissed as epiphenomenal. As

we frequently hear, we spend our lives telling stories; narrative is our

source of meaning. (“Originary”)

We can therefore access culture in simultaneously available representations that while

being sensible in terms of the individual scenes that make up history, is nevertheless

part of a meaning making process that is made up of a linear narrative sequence. That

which is “textual” is inevitably linked by Gans with his generative perpective on the

scene of representation in human culture. This “textual” culture is contained in a setting

which must be distinguished on the basis of the endeavour at hand, and it is not enough

to exchange text with origin without giving an account of setting. The condition of this

setting is underwritten by the temporality of the sign, and if the signifier continues in

taken as something standing for something else” (16).

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time beyond its instantiation and expression, the manifestation of this continuity in a

cultural setting is available to an originary anthropological inspection. To extend this

observation then to the context of a point of mediation such as literature, Gans observes

that:

We must distinguish between the minimal linguistic or “formal” use of

the sign as the “arbitrary” designation of the center and its cultural or

“institutional” use as a reproduction of the event. The temporality of the

sign is not that of worldly appetitive action, but that of a self-contained

act of mimesis and its closure. The sign’s very existence depends on the

deferral of the temporality of appetite and appropriation. But because the

sign nonetheless exists in time (as a “signifier”), it cannot escape this

temporality. The material sign is the basis of the arts: it is musical as

sound, danced and figurative as gesture, and so on. The institutional

inheres as a potential in any real use of the sign. But once we grant this,

we must conceive the originary – and every subsequent – use of the sign

as “narrative.” Narrativity requires nothing of the sign beyond its own

inherent temporality. (“Originary”)

Gans uses narrative as an explanatory tool to relate the originary hypothesis to the

materiality of the sign as a basis for such cultural manifestations as “the arts”, which are

precisely the paradox of the human. Since the narrative organization of the sign is

underwritten by the sign’s “inherent temporality”, which is “of a self-contained act of

mimesis and closure” rather than a “worldly appetitive” one, the materiality of the sign

“cannot escape this temporality”. That is, without access to the sign in the first instance,

the human expression and creation of cultural phenomenon in any material form is not

available. This is Gans’s argument when he points out that the “sign’s very existence

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depends on the deferral of the temporality of appetite and appropriation. But because the

sign nonetheless exists in time (as a ‘signifier’), it cannot escape this temporality”. This

tension between already having the sign and never finding it to be concrete, but instead

to be qualified in terms of its temporality as a “potential”, frames our understanding of

literary discourse. The history of this potential unfolds in the “explanatory” project of

Gans as a sequence which demands this temporality for its own instantiation. For Gans,

in order to study the use of the sign we must recognize this originary scene, or lose the

possibility of granting the sign its potential in any “real use” in an institutional setting.

This “real use” indicates a core feature of literary critical discourse which interprets and

pursues an account of the literary text through an institutionally underwritten “potential”.

In The Scenic Imagination Gans describes how this “scenic” or event-based

definition of human experience links representation to a collective experience in culture:

My thesis is that human experience, as opposed to that of other animals,

is uniquely characterised by scenic events recalled both collectively and

individually through representations, the most fundamental of which are

the signs of language. It is significant that the primary meaning of the

Greek word skene is not the stage itself but the hut or tent into which the

actor retired to change his costume; the term later came to designate the

stage building that provided a backdrop for the stage. That the ‘inside’ of

the scenic operation gave its name to its external surface and then

metonymically to the scene as a whole reflects the profound intuition that

skene and stage are internal and external versions of the same locus: the

empty space – Sartre’s néant – in which representations appear, the scene

of representation. (1-2)

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The “nothingness” of Sartre floats in a suspended space in opposition with “being”, and

this suspension would seem to inform an understanding of the human as being possible

in representation achieved through language. Here is a neat parallel with Iser’s

understanding of staging and its utility to our discussion of literary critical discourse as

“staging” the significance of literature as a human phenomenon: one which reflects this

liminal qualification of being human. The collective element of this staged event of

representation is figured in Gans’s history of the stage, as a narrative of the duality of

the negative space representation takes up. The copresent internal and external

manifestations of representation form human culture, and it is this (history) that

separates humans from animals, this “series of scenic events” (2). History is therefore

generated by a capacity to employ representation in the manner of the originary scene,

and on the basis of this structure for language Gans hypothesises the creation of “a

‘sacred’ difference between a significant object and the rest of the universe, insulating it

at the center of the scene from the potential violence of the rivalrous desires on the

scenic periphery” (2). Gans builds a vision of language as originating in a singularity

that comes to generate a centre-periphery model of desire, unfolding and ensuring the

“becoming sacred” of a difference between universe and object. This collective

manifestation of the ability to imagine our own origin is due to a deferral of violence,

and since “[t]he violence is deferred, not eliminated; the central object, through the

sacred interdiction conferred on it by the sign, becomes a focus of still greater desire”

(2).

Iser himself argued in “What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between

Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions” that for Gans this emphasis leads to the elevation

of literature to a position of primacy in his anthropology. While Gans applies his centre

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and periphery hypothesis to various spheres of cultural production and experience, the

“declarative” language of literature ensures that it sets itself aside as model of desire:

Although Gans demonstrates this continually interchanging relationship

between center and periphery in ritual, social, and economic terms, it

nevertheless finds its most tangible expression in literature which, for

him, becomes the signature of high culture. This is primarily because it

brings the originary impulse of the sign to full fruition. Literature, for

him, is declarative language. “The declarative describes the absence of

an object the significance of which was established by the imperative,

whose expression of this significance was supposed to make the object

appear” (121). As this is the basic structure of literature, it becomes the

epitome of high culture (171 ff.), since it is not a model of life in general,

but rather a model of desire through which human culture first comes to

life. (167)

As a model of desire, Iser suggests that Gans’s originary hypothesis leads to an

understanding of literature as a model for the absence of the object manifest in the

declaration complicit with the “originary impulse”. Gans agrees with this observation in

“Staging as an Anthropological Category”, to the extent that literature is a cultural

manifestation necessary to humans, since “we need, as Iser tells us, not merely language,

but literature” if we are to “reaffirm our solidarity with the emergent freedom of the

originary event”, a solidarity “that defines the unity of the human” (56). However, for

Iser in “What Is Literary Anthropology? The Difference between Explanatory and

Exploratory Fictions” the point of unity in language that would lead to this solidarity in

an account of fiction incorporates the originary hypothesis of Gans as an account of

how it is that “humankind sprang into existence by means of fiction, or, perhaps more

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aptly, the act of representation as a deferral of conflict proves to be an explanatory

fiction for the differentiation of humankind from the animal kingdom” (164). Here, the

more apt description reverses the generative potential of the fictive originary scene,

since in the first part of the sentence fiction is the means by which humankind sprang

into existence, and in the latter this is softened to a description of the originary

hypothesis as a fiction itself. This is not a literary fiction however, but an explanatory

fiction, and for Iser the solidarity Gans ascribes is problematic since one is not

continuous with the other. Iser raises the similar complaint, that in Gans’s generative

account of originary aesthetics:

The prominent status accorded to literature and the “esthetic” in Gans’s

generative anthropology makes them appear double-sided. Do literature

and the “esthetic” serve as explanatory fictions necessary for grasping

human culture, or are they already conceived as a literary anthropology,

exhibiting features of humans that are not brought out into the open

anywhere else? (168)

This question posits that Gans presents a model of fiction that does not clearly delineate,

as Iser does, between explanatory fictions, and literary fictions. And this objection to a

lack of the particular location Iser finds for his strictly “literary” anthropology has its

roots in a further doubt over representation as a deferral of conflict. Iser argues that the

emergence of the sign in the originary scene of Gans’s originary hypothesis indicates a

“fictionalizing capability inherent in the human makeup itself” (164). For Iser, this

possibility opens up a matter of concern over the role of explanatory fictions. Since for

Gans the inherent capability to fictionalize is:

taken to effect the initial deferral of appetitive satisfaction, which opens

up a difference between the individual and the appetitive object as well

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as a difference between the individuals themselves, the act of

representation appears to be a basic explanatory pattern of this generative

anthropology. Again the question poses itself: do fictions generate

differences, or are they just vehicles of explanation for what remains

cognitively inexplicable? (“What is” 164)

If fictions are generative of this definite indication of subject and object, and of inter-

subjectivity, then generative anthropology relies on the activity of representation to

explain these fundamental elements of the human. Here Iser poses his question as a

challenge to the function of the originary hypothesis in Gans’s anthropology, since the

fiction of his starting point to language must either participate in the process of

representation or simply map the human experience that an otherwise inexplicable

cognition generates. This question coincides with the challenge to generative

anthropology to delineate between explanatory fictions and literary fictionality, since

for Iser the latter provides both a model for and a means by which to stage the

“cognitively inexplicable” human reality. Alternatively, the former stands in danger of

generating the very reality it sets out to convey. For Iser the “originary esthetics” of

Gans functions to generate the declarative language and are “taken over by literature”,

where the centre and periphery manifest in an interplay which whilst being

unpredictable, becomes in retrospect the history of humanity (169). In his description,

generative anthropology has become a version of literary anthropology, which prompts

Iser to ask a further question of what he views as a limiting explanatory function for

Gans’s project, as to,

why there is a need for the self-monitoring that literature appears to

provide. Is the sublimation of resentment all that literature has to offer?

If so, this would make literary anthropology shrink to a rather one-

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dimensional revelation of human life, and not furnish a great deal more

than what psychoanalysis has come up with. At best, literary

anthropology would help to uncover a psychology of human history.

(169)

Iser presents the anthropological query as to why we appear to need literature as a

means of self-investigation or “auto-exegesis” and asserts that Gans’s project limits the

answer by virtue of his originary esthetics, to the particular psychological conditions of

the deferral of violence. If the mechanism of this deferral is the “sublimation of

resentment”, the scope of generative anthropology is limited to a mapping of the

psychological dimension of our history. As Gans argues, the originary event is

“nonconstructible”, in the sense that it cannot be articulated in a concrete fashion, and

the necessary fiction of his originary hypothesis is minimal to the extent that its details

are left blank. To Iser this suggests a recursive pattern in generative anthropology,

whereby “the originary event has generated the history of culture, [and] the latter, in

turn, lends plausibility to the positing of such an event” (“What is” 169). Literature

allows us to monitor this recursion, by playing out the unforeseeable element of this

process:

event and history are tied together by transactional loops. The

“nonconstructibility” is made to loop into the history of culture, and the

continual shifts of representation as avoidance of conflict are made to

loop into the originary event, whose nonconstructibility perpetuates itself

in the unforeseeable turns taken by the relationship between center and

periphery. (169)

Literature is the manifestation of this centre and periphery modelling of the human, a

modelling derived from a fictional representation of an originary event. Since the

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sequence of events that make up history are manifest in the fundamental structure of

this originary event, the interpretation of this sequence perpetuates the

“nonconstructibility” of the originary scene. The unforeseeable element of this looping,

best illustrated in the literary context, is experienced by humans in a process of

representation that we cannot escape since we cannot exceed language. As a result, Iser

can conclude that the conditions of generative anthropology indicate that the fictionality

of literature manifests as a paradoxical “innerworldly transcendence allowing us to

comprehend what otherwise exceeds any and all cognitive frameworks” (169).

Gans and Iser each envision a pathway forward by which their different projects

might incorporate the other. For Iser this emerges when Gans is at his most exploratory,

and this manifests when he “aims at finding out what may have been the roots of culture,

and how these roots have branched out into cultural patterns and institutions” (“What

is” 169). The problematic element of this generative anthropology for Iser is the

difficulty of constructing a division between the “nonconstructible” originary

explanatory fiction, and its position in literature as a manifestation of an unforeseeable

element of the human. To Iser, it is this very indeterminacy that renders us human, and

as such he cannot accept a particular structure for this indeterminacy. Such a structure is

by its basic constitution, explanatory, and thereby determinate. It is acceptable, it seems,

as a model of the manner in which literary anthropology manifests the unforeseeable

element of the human. But it muddies the waters by bringing an explanatory fiction into

the world of literary fictions. To Iser it is not enough to provide the caveat that this

explanatory fiction is in the mode of a heuristic account of the origin of language; it is

in the end a corruption of his own division between explanatory and exploratory fictions.

Literary fictions are not explanatory precisely because they are subject to the

indeterminate bounds of the “as-if” it were real world of the literary text. It is only in

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this open-ended medium that the human is ably conveyed. One outcome to the

particular conditions of the originary hypothesis is in Iser’s assessment, the limiting of

generative anthropology to a psychology of human history, and he sees the literary

medium as made up of a far more rich interaction of elements than that which can be

captured in the “sublimation of desire”. He sees the text as made up of a rich “plurality

of fictions” that underwrite a medium which is:

virtually teeming with gaps that can no longer be negotiated by the

procedures of explanatory fictions. Recursion, therefore, cannot be an

operational mode for the interrelationships that develop within such a

plurality. This is all the more obvious as literary fictions are not

concocted for the comprehension of something given. (“What is” 172)

As we have seen, the “gaps” might be imagined as the removal of those on the

periphery from the sacred centre, but this does not suffice to account for the multiplicity

of such gaps that manifest in the literary setting. For Iser this shortfall indicates the

differentiation of explanatory and exploratory fictions, since the latter takes as its

primary mode “play”, whilst the former is preoccupied with the “transactional loops”

that facilitate recursion. Iser describes this as follows: “Recursion versus play marks the

operational distinction between explanatory and exploratory fictions. Play is engendered

by what one might call ‘structural coupling,’ which forms the pattern underlying the

plurality of fictions in the literary text” (172). Fransisco Varela’s “structural coupling”

is employed by Iser in The Fictive and the Imaginary to describe a complex interaction

that underwrites the gaming that structures play. His examples of this process in “What

is Literary Anthropology: the difference between explanatory and exploratory fictions”

are presented in terms of the manner in which “the narrator is coupled with the

characters, the plotline, the addressee, and so forth. Such coupling is equally discernible

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with the truncated material imported into the text, derived from all kinds of referential

fields including existing literature” (172). This affirmative process of coupling results

from the development of play, but this interaction is not a singular activity. As

discussed in chapter three, in the earlier publication The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser

employs the description “dual countering” to explore the interaction of the various

elements in the text that generate gaming and play. “Dual countering” occurs between

contradictory but mutually reliant elements, in an action that invokes simultaneous and

mutally reliant processes Iser describes as “enabling by decomposing”, concluding that

“nullification and enabling go hand in hand” (Fictive 234). Here Iser reminds us in

“What is Literary Anthropology: the difference between explanatory and exploratory

fictions” that the gaming which emerges:

is structured by a countervailing movement. It is free play insofar as it

reaches beyond what is encountered, and it is instrumental play insofar

as there is something to be achieved. The actual play itself is permeated

by all the features of gaming: it is agonistic, unpredictable, deceptive,

and subversive, so that the multiple fictions find themselves in a state of

“dual countering.” (172)

Free play and a pragmatic or instrumental mode of play interact so as to generate this

plurality of gaming that affirms and negates in a simultaneous process. Representation

in the literary medium is experienced by a reader in a complex interaction that structures

the relatively stochastic human activity of play.

As we have seen, the final metaphor employed by Iser to describe literature is

the myth of Ariadne’s thread, whereby our interaction with the text is marked by the

possibility of becoming lost in the maze of our own possibilities, for if literature is the

necessary ground on which we confront ourselves:

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What might be the reason for such self-confrontation? Is it an unfulfilled

longing for what has been irrevocably lost, or is it a prefigurement of

what it might mean to be and simultaneously to have oneself? In the end,

neither of these alternatives may apply. Instead, it may be the duality into

which the human being is split, suspended between self-preservation and

self-transgression that makes us wander with undiminished fascination in

the maze of our own unpredictable possibilities. (177)

Play is this wandering, and is the emergent phenomenon underwritten by this

suspension. But is this wandering fascination enough? Must we choose between the

apparently self-authenticating but rather more firm “transactional looping” of generative

anthropology, and the somewhat confronting but liberating maze of own unpredictable

possibilities?

7.2 Does literary anthropology require an originary hypothesis?

Gans wrote in “Staging as an Anthropological Category” that generative

anthropology could “contribute an additional layer of modeling to Iser’s exposition”

since “[t]he metaphor of staging underlines the presence on the aesthetic scene not

merely of ‘phantasms’” (54). Iser’s use of “phantasm” figures the ancient subjects of

representation that have been somehow concretised in the modern form of literary

fictionality. Gans points out that in The Fictive and the Imaginary Iser employs Beckett

in the latter part of his chapter on the imaginary, writing33:

In Beckett’s “fantasy” Imagination Dead Imagine, which provides (FI

238–46) Iser’s ultimate example, the imagination’s imagining of its own

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death achieves a maximally inextricable ambiguity between the two

senses of “death”: as a state and as a moment of passage. (54)

Iser notes in The Fictive and the Imaginary that “[p]re-Aristotelian, archaic

representation” has been shown by Arnold Gehlen to have “aimed at stabilizing the

outside world” and as a result was made up of “phantasmic figurations” (302). For Iser,

staging is “an institution of human self-exegesis” in which is inherent this “archaic

structure of representation”, and these “phantasms” are no longer pragmatically

purposed to “stabilize the outside world” (302). For Gans however, this is a limiting

definition of staging, since the metaphor:

underlines the presence on the aesthetic scene not merely of “phantasms”

but of actors, real persons whose symmetrical and always potentially

agonistic confrontations on stage incarnate the fragile harmony and

conflictive potential of mimesis. In René Girard’s “triangular” model of

mimetic desire, the disciple’s pious repetition of the model’s gesture is at

the same time an act of rivalrous usurpation. All drama is mimesis of

conflict because conflict is inherent in mimesis itself. (“Staging” 54)

Here we see the central disagreement between the two theorists; Gans sees the human

possibility as underwritten by the potential for the conflict that is inherent in mimesis,

whilst Iser sees the human in less concrete terms. In Iser’s theory, the metaphor of the

stage stands for the space in which we might act out our possible selves, to “give

appearance to something that by nature is intangible”; namely the de-centred human

beings who do not have themselves, and are not “necessarily driven to ‘have’

themselves” (Fictive 296). It is a compelling feature of this comparison that both

authors centre their labours in an examination of the integrally “unforeseeable” and

33 Iser’s use of Beckett is discussed in this thesis in chapters one and three.

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“intangible” element of the human experience of reality in language, by focussing on

the “gaps” and the “nonconstructibility” that is responsible for such a condition in the

first place.

This shared employment of a paradoxical relationship between the human and

language to define the human as part of an exegetical confrontation with the self unfolds

through a series of metaphors. The endgame for Gans is an admission that his heuristic

explanation of the human tends toward the explanatory, but relies on the undefinable

potency of paradox to do so. He provides an explanation; but not the explanation since

it remains a hypothetical exercise. Despite these caveats Iser is not comfortable with

such finality and attempts a less determinate “definition” of the human by falling back

on play and gaming. In his essay “The Critic as Ethnographer” Richard van Oort made

the originary argument that culture is both “a representation and a performance, a

‘model of’ and a ‘model for’”34 (653). This perspective rings true with both Iser and

Gans, though they tend toward one end of the continuum or other, with Iser embracing

the “model for” more fully, and Gans the “model of”. Richard van Oort is attempting to

answer the question as to the necessity for an originary hypothesis while making this

observation about culture. For van Oort, what makes an originary approach greater than

a definition of the human as “the culture using animal” is “the fact that every definition

of humanity unavoidably assumes the paradoxical structure of the originary scene of

representation” (652). The human process of representation had to begin at some time,

and humans have uniquely “evolved the paradoxical ability to represent their own

origin”. As a result, it does not matter how our originary hypothesis is made up, instead

it is the very fact of having adopted a “self-consciously originary and hypothetical” one

in the first instance that matters. Indeed for van Oort the “very fact that we are self-

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conscious” of our origin “compels us to seek an explanation for it”, and it is this

impulse that makes us historical beings (653).

If we accept van Oort’s “originary” perspective on culture, we accept that it is

the inclusion of our own origin in both our consciousness and our language that make us

human. Into the bargain, we must also accept his conclusion that we are required to take

responsibility for our perspective on history. This involves deciding on a particular

hypothetical account of the originary event:

Once we have decided on a particular formulation, however, we must

take responsibility for it. The hypothesis defines not just our particular

interest in this or that cultural work, but also the anthropology by which

we are able to situate the historical significance of the work more

broadly. Originary thinking forces us to make a decision about what is

historically significant and, moreover, to do so in terms that are not

simply left to individual intuition but are rigorously traceable to the

terms of our anthropology, which is to say, to our definition of the

human implicit in the formulation of the hypothesis. (652-3)

In the final analysis, any interpretive anthropology (of which Iser’s literary

anthropology is inevitably, an example) must give an account of its definition of the

human, and the conditions of this definition are necessary to establishing the historical

significance of the phenomenon at hand. “Originary thinking” provides a means by

which to do so, and the terms by which to do so rigorously and anthropologically. For

van Oort, the structure of this anthropological strategy is to be found in Gans’s

generative anthropology, and is therefore completed by a definition that provides

equivalent hypothetical terms. This strategy allows the practitioner to minimize the

34 A description drawn from Clifford Geertz as noted in the introduction to this thesis.

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implications of “the central paradox that any theory of culture inevitably encounters…

the paradox of representation” (653) where this paradox is the initiating observation,

that culture is both a representation and a performance; a model of and a model for.

Iser’s definition of the human is not so tangible. His employment of the

metaphor of “plasticity”, which manifests in a process of “continual patterning”, is

difficult to interrogate as a “model of” human culture. Though Iser argues that originary

thinking based on Gans’s hypothesis of a scene of deferred conflict would limit the

scope of his literary anthropology, any anthropology is inevitably reliant on a definition

of the human for its rigor. As we have seen, Iser asserts that he is interested in more

than the deferral of conflict; he is “interested in the way in which fictionality generates

possible worlds”. But if Iser’s attempt to represent the manner in which humans employ

the literary medium to explore answers to fundamental human questions while

generating these “possible worlds” is to suceed, he would seem to require an account of

the paradox of representation that such exploration is inevitably predicated on. Rather

than foreclose on the potency of his metaphors, such an account of the “verticality” of

the linguistic sign that precedes human history would ensure the possibility of his

metaphoric account in the first instance. Indeed, it is simply not the case that Iser, as he

claims, is not interested in “representation as the deferral of violence”, since it is

representation that facilitates the possible worlds he is determined to explore. In van

Oort’s terms, the very answers Iser suggests we seek as a part of the human dilemma of

being (and therefore Iser himself sought) are always already attributable to an invention

that began with a crisis. That is to say, since Iser is interested in human representation

and performance at all, he is by default interested in the deferral of violence. As van

Oort argues, the answer to the originary crisis was representation since any initial

“failure to surmount it would lead to the extinction of the species”, and “deferral of this

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crisis via the originary sign is the first moment in the never-ending historical project of

representing” (“Ethnographer” 655). Despite Iser’s misgivings, it follows that his faith

in the capacity of the literary medium, is a faith in a phenomenon that emerges from this

history of representation. Van Oort writes that,

[t]o reject this minimal faith in representation is to reject, in nihilistic

fashion, humanity itself. But nihilism is not a realistic alternative to

anthropology, if only because the resentment of the nihilist depends upon

the same cultural resources that it also wishes to destroy.

(“Ethnographer” 655)

The representation and subsequent performance, or staging, of our human possibilities

through literature reflects this communal source of the representative potential in

literary fictionality. An originary hypothesis need not delimit the plurality of interacting

literary fictions, or the multiplicity of gaps that make up the potential for manifesting

human possibilities via the literary text, since it is a minimal explanation of the

emergence of the linguistic sign such phenomenon require for their manifestation.

Gans’s focus on the deferral of violence need not inhibit Iser’s focus on play and games,

or shift his focus from the manner in which fictions generate possible worlds. The focus

on a “psychology of history” in Gans’s project does not define the attention of a literary

anthropology by its minimal attention to the paradox of representation, and certainly

does not prevent staging from “being regarded as an institution of self-exegesis”

(Fictive 302). Indeed it is Gans’s suggestion that the “phantasms” that populate “the

aesethetic scene” might be thought of as richer through the metaphor of staging, and this

conclusion is built on the notion that representation is a belief in the collective human

capacity to generate worlds. In the aesthetic emerges the potential that issues into the

world, from the “as-if” world of the text. As van Oort argues, “[t]o reject this minimal

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faith in representation is to reject, in nihilistic fashion, humanity itself”. In order for Iser

to have his mutually altering reader and text, he must also have the human capacity for

representation in language, he must also have a history, and he must admit his faith in

this paradoxical creature.

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8. Decline of Literary Studies: a case for exploration

The following chapter relates literary anthropology and the theory of Wolfgang

Iser to some wider issues concerning the discipline of literary studies in Western

institutions. Literary studies faces an ongoing difficulty in evidencing its significance,

since the evidence such a defence must offer is most satisfying when it is at its most

empirical. However, the interpretation of literature conducted by literary studies

practitioners does not provide conclusive positions about objective phenomena in the

manner of the science based disciplines. The difficulty involved in defining, objectively,

the subject matter of literature both illustrates and evidences the cause and concern of

the discussion that follows. As Richard van Oort argues in “The Culture of Criticism”,

“culture is not an object like the stars or DNA. There is a self-referentiality to cultural

explanation that makes it impossible for the inquirer simply to propose a theory and

then submit it, like the scientist, to an arena where it is objectively tested” (462). Any

hypothetical explanation that becomes the basis for an interpretation of culture cannot

be in some simple and scientific fashion, tested during an empirical enquiry. The objects

studied as cultural artefacts are not simply objects, they involve a diffuse array of

phenomena we distinguish as worthy of study on the basis of the context they appear in.

The manner in which the interpretation of literature, for example, is conducted involves

a process of setting down a definition of literature which emerges as useful upon the

occasion of the interpretation itself. This self-referentiality has placed literary studies in

a tenuous position in a primarily scientific institution, a position that has come to

influence the practices of the discipline as its practitioners act to achieve the

preservation of the discipline. We begin our discussion in section 8.1 with Iser’s

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argument that interpretation is a primary human experience, best understood as an act of

translation, and note that Iser’s universal account of interpretation is well supported by

Eric Gans’s “originary” perspective. In 8.2 we follow Iser’s anthropological description

of interpretation as an act of translation through the “originary thinking” of Gans to the

arguments made by Richard van Oort. We focus primarily on the essay “The Critic as

Ethnographer” where he examines the broadening attention of literary studies

practitioners and the implication of what he considers to be a turn toward an

anthropological focus in the humanities in Western universities. Van Oort addresses the

humanities in general, but focusses upon the contemporary condition and direction of

the discipline of literary studies within the humanities. The position he extrapolates

from his originary perspective provides a defence of the role of the literary critic as

interpreter of literature, and the discipline of literary studies as a means by which to

conduct the important work of interpreting culture. This is a perspective we bring to

bear in section 8.3 by examining examples of the discourse that has dealt with the

“decline” of the discipline in order to substantiate the value of an anthropological

perspective on literature. In section 8.4 we conclude with some analytic perspectives on

what literary anthropology can tell us of the significance of literary studies, and

literature.

8.1 Iser, interpretation and translation

Wolfgang Iser provides a summary of contemporary trends in literary

interpretation in The Range of Interpretation. The book is based on lecture series

originally delivered in 1994 as the annual Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at

the University of California, Irvine. He makes the observation in his introduction that

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interpreting interpretation is problematic, since any stratagem adopted would carry with

it the bias implicit to the particular conditions of the approach employed. Interpreting

interpretation presupposes the possibility of a “transcendental stance” taken up outside

interpretation (2). He concludes that the only available pathway forward is to ask the

anthropological question, as to why we interpret:

Therefore we shall refrain from interpreting interpretation, and instead of

asking ‘What is interpretation?’, we shall ask: Why is interpretation? If

we can unfold an answer to this question it will serve as a pointer to

possible reasons for this unceasing human activity. But in order to do so

we must first lay bare the mechanics of interpretive procedures. (3)

One means by which to inspect interpretation is via the question as to how we interpret.

The functioning of “interpretive procedures” can improve our understanding of a history

of formal literary studies and assist us in demonstrating the connection between the

practices employed in literary studies and the larger anthropological question as to the

significance of literature. As we have seen, for Iser the function of interpretation is to

facilitate nothing less than our being:

We interpret, therefore we are. While such a basic human disposition

makes interpretation appear to come naturally, however, the forms it

takes do not. And [as] these forms to a large extent structure the acts of

interpretation, it is important to understand what happens during the

process itself, because the structures reveal what the interpretation is

meant to achieve. (1)

Since forms of interpretation structure acts of interpretation, the question as to how we

interpret can facilitate an exploration of the question as to why we interpret. Iser argues

on the basis of this rationale that the pathway toward an understanding of the

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significance of literary studies is one which involves an inspection of a process that

reveals the substance of particular acts of literary interpretation.

Iser is influenced by Nelson Goodman in suggesting of interpretation that “this

basic human impulse has been employed for a variety of tasks… the world we live in

appears to be a product of interpretation” (1). His goal is to compile an “anatomy” of

this interpretation, designed to assist in his “unfolding” interpretation for inspection. In

his introduction to this task in The Range of Interpretation, Iser “briefly glances” at that

which “is on offer” in “the marketplace of interpretation” (2-3). Iser argues that this

“marketplace” is the setting for a process of structuring interpretation, and it has

inspired three trends, all of which give evidence to the problem of interpreting

interpretation. The first trend involves a claim to universal validity on behalf of its

assumptions, and Marxism is the main example Iser uses in describing these “ideology

critiques” (2). These perspectives attempt to achieve a monopoly of interpretation and

assume their own presuppositions are substantial to the degree that they become the

determining mechanism in a universal account capable of incorporating all of reality.

Marxism, for example, shapes the reality it sets out to describe by elevating its

“presuppositions to the status of reality”. Interpretation based on such an “ideology

critique” is bound to generate the reality it prescriptively interprets (2). The functional

perspective inspired by Marxism and other examples of “ideology critique”, is therefore

falsely assumed to involve a stance outside of the reality described during interpretation.

The second trend he explores follows the phrase employed by Paul Ricœur when he

described the “conflict of interpretations” (3)35. Interpretation published on behalf of

institutionally underwritten theory movements like Marxism, psychoanalysis,

structuralism and post structuralism “manifests itself as a competition, with each type

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trying to assert itself at the expense of the others” (3). The outcomes of this competition

are such that each player begins to take on characteristics of the other in their attempts

to compensate for their own flaws and limits, creating the “magma of interpretive

discourses” Derrida described as a sequence that generates abominations, or the

“monsters these combinatory operations must give birth” to (qtd. in Range 3). Iser

observes that in this competition the players strive for a monopoly which cannot be

manifestly understood any more than it can manifest, and it is “the common need for

support from outside themselves” that prevents “each of these types from fulfilling its

inherent claim to be all-encompassing” (4). The third trend involves the oppositional

discourses, or those which attack a historically dominant set of presuppositions, setting

out to “subvert or dispute the standards of what they consider to be the hegemonic

discourse” (4). However for Iser each response to a history of dominance considered to

be logocentric must counter this history by taking on the characteristics of the

hegemonic discourse assailed. From minority centred perspectives to postcolonial

discourse, boundaries set by the reactive presuppositions adopted are such that the

foundations of the opposition are in no small measure shared by the position attacked.

Iser’s survey leads him to conclude that regardless of whether the

presuppositions adopted are taken to provide a direct, scientific description (“reified”)

or a minimal, reflexive approximation of the reality interpreted (“heuristic”) they

“cannot be equated with what happens in interpretation” (Range 5). The shift in

attention inspired by cultural studies away from more traditionally studied forms is of

central importance to this discussion, and will be examined throughout the current

chapter. This trend, along with the greater mobility of culture that characterises a

modern world (what Iser describes as the “interpenetration of cultures”) manifest as

35 Iser cites Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations.

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significant challenges to the notion that the various theoretical “presuppositions” that

compete in the “marketplace” allow us to grasp interpretation effectively. Iser suggests

interpretation is better understood in terms of a more foundational, process oriented

approach, and in terms of what it “has always been: an act of translation” (5). Indeed, he

considers this necessary to uncovering the motivation for interpretation, in that

“interpretation can only become an operative tool if conceived as an act of translation”.

He defines translation as an operation that “transposes something into something else”,

and this productive difference is “evinced by the division between the subject matter to

be interpreted and the register bought to bear” (5). This concept was raised in chapter

seven, where we noted that the “register” is a complex of interacting systems:

The register into which the subject matter is to be transposed is dually

coded. It consists of viewpoints and assumptions that provide the angle

from which the subject matter is approached, but at the same time it

delineates the parameters into which the subject matter is to be translated

for the sake of grasping. This duality is doubled by another one. As the

register is bound to tailor what is to be translated, it simultaneously is

subjected to specifications if translation in its “root meaning of ‘carrying

across’” (p15) is meant to result in a “creative transposition” (p11). (6)

Iser is drawing on the work of Willis Barnstone36 in emphasising how it is that such a

transposition is to be accomplished. The “register” is made up of two interpretive

systems, each consisting of two primary characteristics. Firstly, the register both

dictates the approach to the material to be translated, and the boundaries of that which

will coalesce upon the completion of this activity. Secondly, while the register is the

36 see The Poetics of Translation.

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basis for a re-fashioning of the subject matter at hand, the register itself is updated

according to certain “specifications”, meaning the register itself must be responsive to

the material translated. To clarify this last point: the goal of translation is to creatively

reproduce the initial meaning, and to mediate this meaning in a new setting; therefore

the approach of the interpreter must respond to the material translated dynamically in

order to execute this transposition.

As discussed in chapter 6, Iser describes this reflexivity as “a retooling of the

mechanics bought to bear, as evinced by the continual modification through which the

hermeneutic circle is reconceived” (Range 83). Imagining interpretation in terms of a

process of translation indicates the location of hermeneutic circularity in terms of the

relationship between the procedures carried out during interpretation, and the ongoing

“monitoring and fine-tuning” of these procedures (84). However, the “quality” of the

subject matter:

does not totally determine the interpretive procedure, and the register,

despite its partial fashioning of the subject matter, does not superimpose

itself on what is to be interpreted. Both participate in a circular

relationship through which the one conditions the other in a recursive

movement that brings about an elucidation of the subject matter and a

fine tuning of the interpretive strategies. Thus there seems to be a

recursive undercurrent in the very process of interpretation itself. (83-4)

The gap which is maintained between the subject matter and the register during

interpretation underwrites this access to a circular relationship through which the

strategies employed are subtly refined. Consequently the processes which allow for

interpretation demonstrate recursive features that seem similar to the practices involved

with literary critical interpretion. The description of interpretation as a communicative

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phenomenon allows Iser to map a direct relationship between the human process of

interpretation and contemporary disciplinary procedures in literary studies. His

argument is that the strength in understanding interpretation as translation lies in

understanding translation as an activity which creates difference. This difference is

described by Iser in terms of a “liminal space” generated by the activity of interpretation

in which the subject matter and the register are sustained in distinction to one another.

Paradoxically, the process of translation involves the maintenance of this difference in

an indeterminate space which provides resistance to the translation attempted. The

resistance experienced in the liminal space then creates the impetus, or dynamism,

promoting the attempted translation. As explained above, the result is such that the

register is in some way altered by the process of interpretation. The goal of

interpretation can only be achieved if the difference between approach and subject

matter is maintained, yet the intention of interpretation is to narrow this gap in order to

create and render accessible a translated text, thereby making smaller “the very space it

has produced” (Range 6). The paradoxical nature of this generative motif is reflective of

Iser’s account of literary fictionality, where as we have seen, he argues that the fusion of

literal and figurative discursive gestures creates a triadic extrapolation of a “doubled”

dual array. The real, the fictive and the imaginary interact to generate the “as-if” it were

real world of the literary text during the act of reading. The shifting boundaries of

language are exhibited by the “translation” that underpins interpretive activity, in which

the human subject achieves a complex and dynamic process of reality formulation via

the engagement of subject matter and register. The “liminal space” generated by

interpretation occurs as a result of the activity of translation. Literary fictionality

discloses its own fictionality, and brackets itself as such, but the purpose of this

bracketing off is not made clear. This structure resonates with Iser’s description of

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translation, in that the register involves a doubled structure, each tier of which is marked

by duality. The third element here is the activity of the human interlocutor, without

whose subjective possibility the remainder of the triad is without substance, no matter

how complex the doubling or redoubling becomes.

In chapter three of the lecture series reproduced in The Range of Interpretation

Iser expands upon this thesis under the heading “The Hermeneutic Circle” (41-81). In

chapter four (“The Recursive Loop”), in keeping with his late-career interest in

cybernetics, Iser elucidates a systemic description of this recursive “undercurrent… in

view of its basic operational mode, the cybernetic loop” (84). Iser summarises his

arguments in this lecture series as follows: interpretation is an act of translation that is

reliant on the “subject matter to be interpreted as well as on the context within which

the activity takes place” (145). Interpretation is subject to variables made up of

“iterations of translatability”, and is therefore not singular: “there can never be such a

thing as the interpretation” (145). Iser employs this thesis to make a series of arguments

related to the history of interpretation, focussing upon the issue of how authority is

established during interpretation. We are particularly interested in his attention to the

manner in which the authoritative position of particular interpretations contributes to the

formulation of the “canon” of literary works. He argues initially that authority come to

be important when authors included in the canon are “invoked as guidelines for both the

production and reception of literature” (145). The “singular authority” of the canon as a

guide to boundary setting is challenged by the emergence of a wide range of

interpretations. The “many readings” as acts of translation come to undermine the canon,

as the authority of individual texts that make up the canon are subjected “to situationally

conditioned manipulations”. The canon eventually became “a matter of dispute, or even

lost much of its erstwhile orientation” (145). For Iser, the hermeneutic circle is itself

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emergent from this challenge to the coherence of the canon, having “entered the stage”

as “a strategy of interpretation” to deal with this challenge. Eventually, the prominence

of the “recursive loop” responded to increasing entropy, when:

reality was to be conceived in terms of autonomous systems, or

composite systems emerged out of structural coupling of systems, or

encounters between cultures made it necessary to negotiate between the

familiar and the alien, not least as what is initially beyond reach will

respond to an intervention from a standpoint outside itself. (145-6)

Iser therefore maps the activity of interpretation in terms of “operators” that include

“circularity” and “recursion”. The shift over time in the procedures that underpin

interpretation reflected changing demands of context, as attempts “to cope with the

space between subject matter and register” (148).

How does such a universal modelling of interpretation deal with its own

tendency to reduce diverse human landscapes to the conditions of the model? One

answer can be discovered in Iser’s remarks on the “register”, which is a part of a fluid

framework that responds to context:

the register does not represent a transcendental consciousness from

which the subject matter is to be judged; if it did, translation would be

redundant, as the subject matter – instead of being transposed – would

just be determined for what it is. Therefore interpretation as

translatability has its repercussion on the register by diversifying the

framework into which the subject matter is transposed. For this reason

the registers not only change but are also fine-tuned in each act of

interpretation. Such reciprocity indicates that interpretation takes place

within historical situations that we cannot get out of. (Range 6)

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The structure of Iser’s account of interpretation is designed to assist in understanding

the diverse human experience, or human “plasticity”, under the particular conditions of

its manifestation. Adopting a description that places interpretation inside the historical

circumstances under which it is conducted is the paradoxical goal of Iser’s universal

approach. Since we are inside the language to be employed in the act of interpretation,

unfolding as translation, this activity is productive of something new. “History” is

therefore both productive of and generated by this ongoing process of translation.

8.2 Gans and van Oort: literary anthropology and the significance of interpretation

Universal approaches to culture are frequently criticised as holding the potential

to render a homogeneous description of a diverse range of phenomena. As already

discussed in this thesis, Iser is wary of such approaches in the context of interpreting

literature. For example in chapter five we noted his discussion in The Act of Reading of

a transition in the post-WWII era, when the attempt to attain a level of objectivity in

interpreting literature led critics to adopt the presuppositions of an increasing body of

literary theory in order to substantiate the worth of its methods. In so doing, literary

studies changed its perspective on “interpretation originally subservient to art” into a

discipline that used “its claims to universal validity to take up a superior position to art

itself” (13). Indeed, the project of literary anthropology takes a significant portion of its

energy from the requirement that our approaches to literature do not supersede our

attention to literature itself. Iser’s question as to “why” we appear to require literature

(what needs it fills through its function) is in part motivated by such a requirement, in

that Iser is attempting to step aside from a history of attempting to discover the

“meaning” of a literary text.

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Eric Gans offers a response to the critique of universal approaches to cultural

anthropology in his commentary “Universal Anthropology”. His proposition that human

culture began with a (minimally described) originary scene offers a single starting point

that is circumscribed as a definitional void in order to hypothesise the conditions of the

emergence of the linguistic sign. Human communication occurred as a symbolic gesture

that deferred an act of violence that might have occurred during intersubjective

competition (mutual desire) for an appetitive object. The symbolic violence then offered

in a symbolic order mutually recognized becomes an indicator of the beginning of

human culture. Where language is the possibility of human culture the two are

interchangeable: therefore a starting point which allows for an explanatory discourse to

trace the history of human cultures has been arrived at. There is no pretence toward a

complete account in generative anthropology, but instead an engagement that holds

forth the anthropological goal of creating a coherent interpretive hypothesis. In an

argument that reflects Iser’s assertions about the role of the register in his account of

translation, Gans argues that the very possibility of translation demands that cultural

anthropology offer a “heuristic theoretical construct” to account for this common

humanity:

a heuristic theoretical construct is necessary to mediate between the

necessary specificity of cultural experience, the mere multiplication of

which cannot suffice to found a universal notion of culture, and the claim

implicit in the very word anthropology that behind the variations of

individual cultures lies a single logos of the human that explains the

universality of all our moral intuitions, the intertranslatability of all our

languages, the mutual comprehensibility of all our customs.

(“Universal”)

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Morality, language and custom are the central building blocks of Gans’s assertion of the

necessity for such a universal cultural point of mediation. Gans argues that for

anthropologists these observations suggest we both require a definition of the human,

and that it meet the minimal requirement of moving beyond the immediacy of particular

account of the circumstances of human experience, of “cultural experience”. Without

expanding upon Gans’s assertions of a universally recognizable morality, we can

observe how translatability is the possibility of a universal anthropological

understanding that does overcome the specificity of this experience. Indeed, it is the

very specificity offered as a critique of universal modelling of the human that renders

the question of translatability immutable, since these specific conditions offer the

common element of being predicated on the emergence of the linguistic sign, as all

human language must be. Gans indicates the utility of such an approach as a generative

matrix:

The originary hypothesis is not a grid whose imposition on historical

reality reduces the variety of human culture to the repetition of the

“same” human scene and thereby forecloses empirical research…. From

the perspective of the originary hypothesis, history consists of a series of

experiments in social organization that begins with the originary event.

The two fundamental models of human exchange are the near-

instantaneous reciprocal exchange of signs and the deferred exchange of

things. If thus far the analysis of historical phenomena in the light of the

originary hypothesis has occurred most often in the Humanities, this is

because, in contrast with the entropy-ridden manifolds of real life, the

unified imaginary universes generated by religious representations and

works of art – works of “culture” in the narrow sense – are in the

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broadest sense homologous with the human universe as a whole, the

single “community of man.” This suggests that as our increasingly global

civilization – “culture” in the broad sense – attempts to construct such a

community in all its complexity, the hypothesis that all things human

derive from a single event should prove increasingly productive beyond

the humanistic sphere. (“Universal”)

Gans’s claim is that the originary hypothesis is not a “grid” that through its universal

quality becomes a reductive force in the interpretation and representation of the

historical reality of human culture. Human reality is portrayed not as a continuing

replacement of context with the originary scene, but as a “series of experiments in social

organisation” that might be traced back to the originary scene. To date, the primary

attention for discourse anchored by such a perspective has been located in the

humanities, and for Gans this is a tribute to how “religious representations” and “works

of art” manifest as the broadest paradigm of human cultures. But he also claims through

this paradigmatic perspective that the originary hypothesis can realise an attempt at a

universal account of the human. He concludes that this capacity to encompass a

complex human condition will see a broader application for the originary hypothesis,

one which will extend its influence beyond the Humanities.

Iser’s interpretation as translatability represents the basis for a similarly

universal approach, but what does this anthropological perspective offer us by way of

insight into the current situation of literary studies? In “The Critic as Ethnographer”

Richard van Oort makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that “[t]he discipline of

literature is no longer restricted to literature” (621). By this he means that those working

under the general banner of “English” and “Modern Languages” have begun to study

“texts” from a wide array of sources, and that these non-literary objects are “texts”

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simply because they “invite interpretation” in the first instance (621). For van Oort, like

Iser, interpretation is an action of translation, achieved through the “symbolic” process

of capturing the “significance of one thing by seeing it in terms of another” (621). Van

Oort identifies this activity as one of central importance to the manner in which we

delineate between animal and human uses of “referential processes” since animals

recognize signs in a limited indexing of cognitive processes, and only humans interpret

signs as “linguistic, aesthetic, or sacred” by virtue of “the collective act of symbolic

signification” (621). Van Oort asserts that the more general attentiveness of literary

studies to the symbolic interpretation of culture is driven by this definition of humans as

“culture-using” animals, where the definition of culture is understood to be self-

evidencing; manifesting in the form of the object that “invites symbolic interpretation”

(622). The shift in attention to a more general search for “symbolic significance” suits

the literary studies practitioner, for who is “better trained”, enquires van Oort, to read

“beyond the literal surface to see the deeper, more sacred meaning” than the literary

critic? However this convenient shift in attention has not been underpinned by a close

enough attention to a definition of culture and (as we have seen in chapter eight) van

Oort goes on to suggest that any rigorous definition of these categories must eventually

provide an originary account of the linguistic sign. Without a clear definition of culture

we cannot decide that culture in general should replace literature, and of course we

cannot decide how to delineate between culture in general and literature in the first

instance. For van Oort, the “extraordinary gravitation” toward culture beyond the

bounds of literature evidenced in the activity of contemporary literary critics is due in

no small part to the decline of high culture and the rise of popular culture, and the

“economic impetus” this change has generated in universities. The division between

high and popular culture is indicative of the nature of this shift, since the latter is less

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clearly defined in institutional terms. Van Oort suggests Durkheim’s hierarchical

understanding of the sacred and the profane, which underpinned the dominance of ritual

over economic exchange, has been reversed with the effect that “culture is now

everywhere because the market is everywhere, which is the same thing as saying that

culture is nowhere” (627). The outcome has been that the market has caused the decline

of “high” culture, and “decentred” or “desacralized” culture. The shifting fields of

attention inside universities parallel the larger changes in cultural production, since such

disciplines as cultural studies are concerned with studying contemporaneous popular

culture, and this contemporary culture bears the hallmarks of the marketplace with its

increasingly global focus and the accompanying difficulty it presents for those

attempting to formally define the object of study. According to van Oort, the study of

popular culture “is not motivated by the same desire to attain, by long and arduous

study, a place in ‘the great tradition’ of Western literature, but by the far more

pragmatic need to satisfy the desire of the individual consumer” (626).

To summarise, van Oort sees the trend in literary studies toward this broader

focus on culture as being reliant upon a definition of humans as “culture using animals”,

characterised by interpretation of culture as a symbolic process of translating “texts” as

against a centrally defined and “sacralized” literary object. He concludes that this

cultural turn has framed the attention of literary studies in terms of an anthropological

perspective on culture, since as mentioned above, animals interpret signs:

indexically, in terms of cognitive processes that remain unmediated by

the collective act of symbolic signification. This irreducible

anthropological fact explains the current preoccupation in literary studies

with culture as an object of general symbolic interpretation. For if

humanity is defined as the culture-using animal, and if culture is defined

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as that object which invites symbolic interpretation, then it follows that

literary studies stands at the center of an anthropology founded on these

assumptions. (621-2)

The rationale is driven by the foundational definitional strategy for the human, since our

definition of the human must instruct our definition of culture. If our definition of the

human is that we use culture, and culture is defined as that “which invites symbolic

interpretation”, the reflexive conditions of our attention to culture in general involves an

anthropological turn. This history of an anthropological turn for literary studies finds its

historical setting in no less than “the ‘long’ wave of theory in literary studies, from New

Criticism through structuralism and deconstruction, to new historicism, cultural studies,

and beyond”, which for van Oort “constitutes a single ongoing attempt to come to grips

with the problem of, in Eric Gans’s phrase, ‘the end of culture’” (627). Here “the end of

culture” involves the descent of literature as a central format of “high” culture, and the

rise of an anthropological focus appears to have paralleled the diffusion of a definition

of culture. This definition is to be discovered in terms of that which attracts

interpretation, and the activity of interpretation is generative of the cultural object (and

in some senses “commodity”) to which that attention is paid.

The modern North American context of literary studies certainly has a history of

attempting to provide for literature, a definition that allows the format to be maintained

under the conditions of the paradigm of “high” culture. In the example of the prominent

“Yale Critics” (Paul de Man, Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom), as

Ortwin de Graef summarises, “[n]otwithstanding their lasting differences... all articulate

more explicitly the problematic linguistic constitution of the literature they continue to

uphold as a distinctive discursive mode” (“Yale” 48). Paradoxically, or perhaps

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perversely, in the example of de Man’s initial remarks in Allegories of Reading, he

concludes:

[l]iterature as well as criticism – the difference between them being

delusive – is condemned (or priveleged) to be forever the most rigorous

and, consequently, the most unreliable language in terms of which man

names and transforms himself. (19)

John Guillory, one of de Man’s strongest critics, and heavily influenced by the theory of

Pierre Bourdieu, has written that such (rhetoric driven) defences of literary studies are

based on a definition of literature as a category that “names the cultural capital of the

old bourgeoisie, a form of capital increasingly marginal to the social function of the

present educational system” (x). In a somewhat prophetic statement (published in 1993),

Guillory concludes that,

[f]rom this perspective the issue of ‘canonicity’ will seem less important

than the historical crisis of literature, since it is this crisis – the long-term

decline in the cultural capital of literature – which gives rise to the canon

debate. The category of literature remains the impensé of the debate, in

spite of what passes on the left as a critique of that category’s

transcendent value, and on the right as a mythological ‘death of

literature’.(x)

In fastening the issue to the definition of literature employed by literary studies

practitioners, Guillory demonstrates the point at which literary anthropology would

intercede. For as Guillory goes on to argue, attempting to imagine that which would

succeed the canon of literature and theory as it stands, has tended to throw up the same

ontological concern it attempts to resolve. Guillory cites John Frow’s Marxism and

Literary Theory, where Frow writes that:

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“The whole weight of recent literary theory has been on the constitutive

status of language, on the impossibility of linguistic transparency, on the

agonistic rhetorical strategies of discourse, and on the shaping of

language by the forces of power and desire. The effect of this emphasis

should be in the first place to redefine the traditional objects of literary

knowledge, and in particular the forms of valorization of writing which

have prevailed in most forms of literary study”. Frow recommends a

“general poetics” or “general rhetoric” which would not be addressed

exclusively to the traditional canon of literary texts but would take as its

object noncanonical genres and forms, including popular romances,

journalism, film, television, scientific discourses, and even “everyday

language”. The recourse to “poetics” and “rhetoric” confirms once again

how nearly impossible it is to imagine what lies beyond the rhetoricism

of literary theory, and hence beyond the problematic of literariness.

(Guillory, 264-5)

Guillory is dissatisfied with Frow’s solution, because it is, inevitably, another response

to the history of literary studies that does not achieve a genuine reflexivity. Instead, the

answer is yet another example of the problem, whereby the existing problems of literary

studies are simply transposed to the larger scene of culture, and what might be

apprehended as texts upon this scene. Gans’s “end of culture” is in evidence here, where

literary theory cannot resolve its core ontological problem of attempting to define the

object of its study.

As we have seen, for Gans the answers to the questions that emerge from the

“end of culture” is a return to the beginning, rather than in attempts to predict the

“decline” of high culture by projecting the “death” of its central figures and the “end of

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history”. While the “end” is certainly a matter predicated on a maximal and hypothetical

set of circumstances that must be predicted from existing conditions, the former is

minimal and assumes that the human condition begins with the emergence of the

linguistic sign. As van Oort describes it, a literary anthropology based on an originary

hypothesis for its definition of the human “begins not with an empirically testable

hypothesis of origin, but with a minimally conceived heuristic fiction or ‘originary

hypothesis’ that is tested not by what precedes it empirically, but by what follows from

its minimal anthropological assumptions” (“Ethnographer” 628). Therefore originary

thinking tests its hypothesis (its minimal “heuristic fiction”) on the basis of reflexive

interpretation of the history that has unfolded from this origin, rather than on

empiricism imported from a scientific method. This is so since the conditions of the

hypothesis cannot be tested either from outside the conditions of the language which

allows for our perspective (cast from within language and within our humanity) or from

the detail of the minimal hypothesis, which must remain a fiction and an exercise in

uncertainty. This is a heuristic account that relies for its usefulness on the hypothetical

nature of the origin of language.

On the other hand, literary studies has taken as its model the necessity for an

empirical certification of the interpretive outcomes its practitioners generate, and theory

is bound to this pragmatism. The ontological complication that accompanies such an

empirical approach to interpretation has influenced theory in the humanities in general,

and if we refuse both originary thinking and the “end of history” as the cardinal points

to our understanding of human endeavour, where does this leave theory? The resultant

dilemma for theory in the humanities is described by van Oort as follows:

theory in the humanities remains in a state of permanent paralysis,

caught in a kind of interdisciplinary no-man’s-land: on the one hand,

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forbidding itself the luxury of the “grand narrative” out of a superstitious

fear of committing the teleological sin of nineteenth-century

evolutionary anthropology and, on the other, discontented with the ad

hoc synchronic empiricism of the social sciences. (“Ethnographer” 627)

For van Oort this “paralysis” is inspired from within a perspective that sees the grand

explanatory historical narrative as unsatisfactory, but so too is the contrasting and

momentary empiricism of social scientific approaches to interpretation which render an

“ad hoc” examination of culture independently of history. The superstition and

discontent van Oort describes as responsible for the stasis of theory may be radical, but

in either account, conceptualising theory is problematised by the boundaries to the

“epistemological status of interpretation” in the particular context of literary studies. As

we discussed in chapter six, the difficult matter of differentiating theory from the

methods of interpretation employed during interpretation within the discipline of

literary studies indicates a key theme in any assessment of the role of interpretation. But

as van Oort points out, a great deal of the effort expended on assessing the veracity of

interpretation in literary studies is devoted to uncovering the “unexpressed theoretical

presuppositions” behind the contested findings of the practitioner concerned. This mode

of inquiry indicates the fundamental epistemological bridge between the theory

expressed, and the findings of particular interpretations which are assumed to be

integral in substantiating the presuppositions of the theory in question. The manner in

which we should distinguish theory from interpretation in van Oort’s assessment

reflects Iser’s position on his illustrative use of literary example:

What distinguishes a theory from the broader category of interpretation

is an epistemological and methodological principle: the theory functions

as a more minimal – and therefore more easily sharable – interpretation

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of its object. It functions not merely to reproduce a preexisting

historically specific interpretation of the cultural object, but to identify

the minimal cultural categories necessary for the interpretation of the

object to exist in the first place. It is, in short, the basis of a minimal

anthropology. The first moment of any interpretive anthropology begins

with the analysis of the originary categories that constitute its definition

of the human. (632)

This is a very functional perspective on cultural interpretation, in that it liberates our

theory formulation from any particular act of interpretation. Now the interpretation may

come to perform a variety of roles in the theory, but it will never be interchangeable

with the theory itself, since it is located on a continuum made up of a range of

interpretation. The cardinal points of this continuum are firstly the minimal and

theoretical and secondly the maximal and interpretive. Any interpretation is a function

of the definitive categories that precede it and allow for it, similarly the definition of

these categories involve in the most minimal sense, a presupposition that allows for a

definition of the human. This definition begins “with the analysis of the originary

categories” that allow for such a definition and are therefore, even in this most minimal

of approaches, interpretive, and the means of interpretation are ultimately the language

from which the culture in question is derived. Van Oort employs the example of a

Martian come to earth, attempting to describe a soccer game to account for this

important separation of the scientific method from cultural anthropology, with its

interpretive and theoretical boundaries. The Martian scholar cannot ultimately hope to

interpret and represent the game in and of its human significance without first having

command of the language from whence it emerges, since as he concludes this would

involve entering into a dialogue with the human, a process impossible for the Martian

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until it becomes “a language user like us” (633). The translation interpretation implies is

therefore both indispensible to human understanding, and ultimately reliant on an

account of the human in terms of the linguistic sign.

The implications of this minimal anthropological perspective on interpretation,

and the shifting focus of literary studies can be discovered in both how we construct our

definitions of the human and subsequently, that which is indicative of human history.

For van Oort it is not sufficient for the humanities to be cynical of universal scientific

definitions for culture:

The true potential of theory in aesthetic and cultural criticism lies in the

elaboration of an independent research strategy that eschews the narrow

empiricism of the social sciences, yet without also throwing out the

theoretical baby with the empirical bathwater by then proceeding to deny

the very possibility of anthropology itself. (“Ethnographer” 654)

A minimal, originary approach reflexively presents an alternative to a scientific process

of evidencing an account of the human, by offering and admitting the fictional status of

its minimal hypothesis of the emergence of the originary sign. Van Oort makes the

important point that such a perspective lends enormous weight to the argument on

behalf of both the important role of the literary critic, and the study of literature, to

understanding the human. For if we have successfully made the argument in the

humanities that the only acceptable definition of the human is to be discovered in our

use of symbolic culture, then it is the:

ever-marginal literary critics – namely, those whose work remains

relatively untouched by the empiricism of scientific method and by the

lucrative funding and prestige attached to the notion of genuine scientific

research – who are also therefore better positioned to grasp the full

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anthropological significance of the idea that humanity is defined by its

use of symbolic culture. (“Ethnographer” 655)

This is a very exciting conclusion for literary studies, which as we shall see in this

chapter, has over the past two decades demonstrated its difficulties in a significant

strand of its own discourse, directed toward the “decline” of its own fortunes. A primary

feature of this has been the assertion that the study of a carefully defined “canon” of

works that have been determined to be worthy of study has been achieved in a culturally

exclusive (elitist) fashion that is unacceptably definitive of just what should be studied.

As highlighted by van Oort, this has contributed to a shift in attention beyond the

literary text and toward culture in general, but discarding the history of such endeavours

would seem pre-emptory from the perspective suggested by an anthropology of

literature:

That the specifically Western tradition of a literary high culture has an

important role to play in formulating such an anthropology is not to be

dismissed, in knee-jerk fashion, as a narrow ethnocentric prejudice. On

the contrary, to discern the anthropology implicit in the works of this

tradition is to recognize that, like high culture itself, a literary

anthropology is concerned not merely with the ephemeral consumer

products of the present, but with the enduring works of the past.

(“Ethnographer” 655)

In other words, regardless of existing conditions of cultural production, the history of

literary endeavour manifests as a rich domain for symbolic interpretation, and a

generative perspective on this textuality is central to both understanding the human in

general, and the cultural objects of the current epoch.

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8.3 Discourse of the decline of literary studies

When, in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye argued “that criticism

cannot be a systematic study unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be

so”, he was (perhaps unwittingly) articulating, in part, the position of literary

anthropology. In his famous argument that points toward the apparent “patterns of

significance” that draw “us” back to the “masterpiece” over the “peripheral” work, he

did not simply exclude those who were not fortunate enough to reside within the

institution of formal literary studies. Though he was participating in this exclusion, he

was also participating in a literary studies disciplinarity that prompted him to ponder the

nature of the scene of origin of literature:

We begin to wonder if we cannot see literature, not only as complicating

itself in time, but as spread out in conceptual space from some kind of

center that criticism could locate. (17)

Ironically enough, just as literary studies was realising a post-war significance it would

perhaps never return to, Frye was argueing that “[c]riticism seems to be badly in need

of a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in

biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole” (16). Frye here

anticipates the central themes of the eventual decline of literary studies. These themes

are inspired by the competition for resources in an institution that sets disciplinary

boundaries about the coherence of its object of study in scientific terms. Here, the

reference to Darwinian thinking could not be more topical, and combined with the lack

of a clear definition for literature-as-artefact (inevitably a feature of literary studies), the

“parts of a whole” are left tumbling through history, and into decline.

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A literary anthropology that incorporates van Oort’s perspective on the

requirement for a definition of the human can bring to bear the insights that emerge

from the project of Iser, as exemplified in his use of translation, to describe literary

critical interpretation. This is illustrated when we begin to discuss examples of the

discourse that addresses the “decline” of literary studies. Late in his career René Wellek

(1983) expressed a fear in his paper “Destroying Literary Studies” that growing

criticism of literary studies from within the university “may spell the breakdown or even

the abolition of all traditional literary scholarship and teaching” (42). He argued that the

formal practices of the discipline can be divided into three main branches. These are

theory, the study of literary works or “concrete criticism”, and literary history. For

Wellek, these three “implicate each other” and are mutually reliant for their basic

function. In his tripartite division of literary studies, interpretation makes up “only one

step” in the “process of criticism” but is integral to all of the efforts conducted under the

banner of literary studies (41). Wellek argued that at the core of the critique of literary

studies was the accusation that the fashion in which the “literary” objects it studies are

defined relies upon the subjectivism of aesthetic experience. Wellek raises the famous

argument of I.A. Richards that aesthetic approaches to literary studies are fraught with

indefensible subjectivity. Richards wrote in his Principles of Literary Criticism that

“[t]his view of the arts as providing a private heaven for aesthetes” is nothing short of

“a great impediment to the investigation of their value” since it appeals to “a mystery”

to substantiate its methods and perspective (17-18). In Wellek’s summary, if the

aesthetic is considered mute, delineation between the literary and non-literary is

problematic and in any case, a growing opinion held that the processes of interpretation

further oppressive elitism. The sum of the resistance to the worth of literary studies led

Wellek to express his resentment as follows:

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It is now unfashionable to speak of a love of literature, of enjoyment of

and admiration for a poem, a play, or a novel. But such feeling surely

must have been the original stimulus to anyone engaged in the study of

literature. Otherwise he might as well have studied accounting or

engineering. Love, admiration is, I agree, only the first step. Then we ask

why we love and admire or detest. We reflect, analyse, and interpret; and

out of understanding grows evaluation and judgement, which need not be

articulated expressly. Evaluation leads to the definition of the canon, of

the classics, of tradition. In the realm of literature the question of quality

is inescapable. If this is ‘elitism,’ so be it. (49)

Wellek’s fatalism, his reflexive naivety, illuminates a consciousness of the larger

challenge literary studies faced at this time. The originary stimulus for engagement with

literature must spring from a very deep human need, since it continually inspired a

return to the medium. The question as to “why we love and admire or detest” is played

out during our interaction with the text, regardless of whether this is formally expressed

or not. It is the history of this engagement that defines literature, with its institutionally

underwritten process of sacralising the texts that make up the canon. Wellek argues that

regardless of the sociocultural implications, the exclusory process by which the canon

has come into being is itself revealing of the fact that literature mediates an important

human phenomenon. When he argues that “quality” is a comparative measure that

reveals a great deal about the question as to “why” we were drawn to the study of

literature in the first instance, he presents a discursive illustration of the observation two

decades later by van Oort that the literary critic is well “positioned to grasp the full

anthropological significance of the idea that humanity is defined by its use of symbolic

culture”. The centrally important process of interpretation manifests as the locus of this

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relationship between the anthropological question as to why we have continued return

to the study (and creation) of literature, and the answers as they are bound up in history

itself. Wellek also pointed out that:

If literature has nothing to say about our minds and the cosmos, about

love and death, about humanity in other times and countries, literature

loses its meaning. It is possible to account for the flight from literary

studies in our universities. I am of course aware of the other reasons,

mainly economic, but the emptying of human significance, the implied

nihilism, must be contributing to the decline of the appeal of subjects like

English and foreign languages and encouraging the preference for more

palpable and palatable subject matter. (49)

If his earlier affirmation of elitism was playfully naïve, his recognition of the need to

substantiate the human significance of literature is anything but. Wellek is very direct in

addressing the reasons why literature is waning in its socio-historical importance. He

sees it as more than simply bound to the marketplace of university studies and

interpretation, for Wellek this is a loss of an appreciation for the “human significance”

of the study of literature, in favour of “more palpable and palatable” material. The

“palpable” subject matter of less interpretive disciplines, where the object of study is

more clearly defined and carefully contained, itself implies the “nihilism” Wellek

asserts a contemporary world has come to advertise on behalf of literature. There is a

certain wistful glance backward to a time when “the cosmos”, “love and death” and

“humanity” were considered palatable in Wellek’s comments. His assertion that it was

the association of these very difficult to describe, but nonetheless very real, phenomena

with literary studies that made it attractive, carries the implication that contemporary

popular cultural formats demonstrate the nihilism Wellek describes. In other words, the

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decline in fortunes for literary studies may reflect more than simply a failure to

appreciate the significance of literature, and a growing nihilism in the university. It may

reflect a global nihilism that can both unfold from, and be complicit with this changing

emphasis, away from the careful construction and consumption of culture, toward a

disposable, (market driven) rapidly shifting cycle of cultural production. Such a

perspective reminds, also, of the views of van Oort, for whom high culture and literary

anthropology are similarly “concerned not merely with the ephemeral consumer

products of the present, but with the enduring works of the past”. While Wellek

employs a different rationale, his appeal is similar to van Oort’s suggestion that we not

toss “the theoretical baby out with the empirical bathwater”, in that both consider the

tradition of literary studies to be the product of a complex of interacting cultural

histories. While formal literary studies and its accompanying edifice, “the canon”, may

evidence “oppression” and ambiguity of purpose, they also manifest as significant

anthropological phenomena. The appraisal of these phenomena will certainly benefit

from the articulation of anthropological categories capable of exploring the “human

significance” which commentators like Wellek seem to fall back upon during their

attempts to arrest the decline they examine.

Harold Bloom dealt with this topic and reached a large audience with his The

Western Canon (1994). Bloom offers a defence of the canon by arguing that the

reification of a set of texts is a rigorous means by which to remember the worthiest

history of our “individual thinking”. He mourns the decline of university based study of

Western Literature, concluding in an unmistakable tone that the “English Department”

is on a slippery slope which leads back to the:

more modest scale of our current Classics departments. What are now

called “Departments of English” will be renamed departments of

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“Cultural Studies” where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks,

television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton,

Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. (519)

For Bloom, shifting our attention from the canon to a larger domain of cultural artefacts

on the basis of a critique of the problematic nature of subjective aesthetic assessment

would only serve to weaken our understanding of ourselves. Bloom’s controversial

refusal of the logic of the “cultural turn” indicates a similar determination to that of

Wellek and van Oort, to preserve the interpretation of literature. However for Bloom,

the notion that we should study literature in a manner governed by the social purpose of

the activity is somewhat absurd, as he argues altering the basis of our rationale for

inclusion in the canon and reading the work of those who had been the victims of such

“elitism” could hardly “benefit the insulted and injured” parties concerned. The desire

to interpret culture using the best means available is therefore complicated by our

inability to determine and select the most appropriate cultural phenomenon in the first

instance. How do we determine the human significance of culture at hand, when the

politics of the institution intervene in such a fashion? An important part of the process

of selecting that which will be studied involves setting down criteria to deal with this

somewhat paradoxical tension in the scholarly culture of the humanities.

Alvin Kernan in The Death of Literature(1990) argued that the changes in the

university manifest as “the complex transformations of a social institution in a time of

radical political, technological, and social change” (10). For Kernan, history can inform

us that “criticism” has and continues to perform a key social function of interrogating

such processes of change in order to determine that which can be preserved of history:

Deconstructive criticism, for example, which looms so large in the

literary scene alone, figuring either as heroic revolutionary or treasonous

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clerk, when seen in the social context of the literary crisis, or of the battle

to control language, begins to look far less melodramatic and more like

criticism at its traditional social function of preserving whatever can be

saved in a time of radical questioning of basic institutional values and

beliefs. (10)

“Criticism” in Kernan’s use is a function made up of interpretation of not just literature,

but of complex institutional structures, in which theoretical constructs play a key role.

In the example offered above, the “looming” figure which for Kernan is the variously

evil or good practice of deconstructive criticism – depending on your perspective –

manifests as an illustration of his argument that criticism’s function involves a

stabilizing procedure. The complex interaction of the institution criticism functions

from within, and the societal setting the institution occupies, unfolds as the ongoing

interrogation of our institutional values. This “radical questioning” is inspired by such

shifts as the decreasing socio-historical importance of literature, and as van Oort has

argued, becomes complicit with questions of central importance like just how we come

to define fundamental boundaries. The division between human and animal, or between

literature and culture in general, are examples of what Kernan characterises above. As

van Oort later argued in “The Culture of Criticism”, the necessity for criticism is

identical to the need for its institutional setting and function, as a counterbalance to

human understanding dictated by an empirical, over an interpretive perspective:

We need criticism because we need the humanities in which criticism

flourishes. In an era in which the biological sciences of the human, the

protohuman, and the parahuman (for example, evolutionary and

cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics, biological anthropology,

neuroscience, and primatology) are increasingly refining our sense of the

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continuity between human and animal life, we need the humanities

because only the humanities are founded on the anthropological truth

that the human is differentiated not ultimately by its biology but by its

capacity to use and interpret symbolic signs. (474)

However, Kernan’s perspective differs from van Oort’s, since for the former author the

critical gesture is fundamentally conservative, whereas van Oort is prescribing a

differentiation between humans and animals based an anthropological perspective on

interpretation. For van Oort, simply acting to preserve the institution is doomed to

failure, because without a hypothesis to substantiate a position on the human

significance of that which criticism sets out to interpret “we cannot expect criticism to

last much beyond its own narrow self-justifications of institutional membership” (475).

This is so since:

criticism begins not with the maximal historical assumption that the

aesthetic is an institution to be derived “empirically” from an ad hoc

examination of various arbitrarily chosen cultural works or periods.

Rather, it begins with a minimal hypothesis that seeks to explain the

originary basis for those institutions deemed indispensable for cultural

and aesthetic analysis (for example, language, art, ritual, and economic

exchange). (474)

It is not enough to consider criticism the basis for such a claim on behalf of literature,

since the significance of literature cannot be proven using a scientific approach to the

outcomes of interpretation conducted by “critics”. Kernan illustrates this point as he

telescopes deconstruction as a theoretical moment and movement, with the character of

an institutionally underwritten interpretive function performed by the literary

practitioner. In his description, the function of “[p]reserving whatever can be saved”

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assumes the human significance of the literary medium can be evidenced by the

processes involved with criticism. In the context of literary studies, this involves

interpreting and creating theory, and the simultaneous interpretation of literary works.

The latter evidences the perspective gained through (and assists during) the construction

of theory. However the point of this discussion is not to attack the perspective of

Kernan, among others, but instead to argue that there is a great deal to be recovered

from his mode of perspectival bias, in moments both literal and figurative. Literally, the

shift prescribed by Kernan above is one toward an observation of continuity. This

continuity is anthropological in its boundaries. It is on the one hand explanatory of a

history of cultural cause and effect, and on the other exploratory of the domain features

within which this explanation and any associated phenomenon occur. The discursive

engagement allowed for in formal institutional terms (and the attention prescribed) is

toward a history and phenomenal mapping of the human. Kernan’s above quoted

observation serves as conclusion to a series of lists he supplies in his introduction, of

shifts manifesting across the modern history of literary studies. His list illustrates and

describes a circular feature of literary discourse, as in the following lengthy quote where

Kernan efficiently summarises his observation that the institution of literature has been

reoriented both in terms of an external assessment and in terms of its contextual social

positioning:

Externally, political radicals, old and young, from Herbert Marcuse to

Terry Eagleton, have attacked literature as elitist and repressive.

Television and other forms of electronic communication have

increasingly replaced the printed book, especially its idealized form,

literature, as a more attractive and authoritative source of knowledge.

Literacy, on which literary texts are dependent, has diminished to the

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point that we commonplacely speak of a ‘literary crisis’. Courses in

composition have increasingly replaced courses in literature in the

colleges and universities, where enrolments and majors in literature

continue to decrease nationally. The art novel has grown increasingly

involute and cryptic, poetry more opaque, gloomy, and inward, and

theatre more hysterical, crude, and vulgar in counterproductive attempts

to assert their continued importance. What was once called ‘serious

literature’ has by now only a coterie audience, and almost no presence in

the world outside university literature departments. Within the university,

literary criticism, already by the 1960’s Byzantine in its complexity,

mountainous in its bulk, and incredible in its totality, has turned on

literature and deconstructed its basic principles, declaring literature an

illusory category, the poet dead, the work of art only a floating ‘text,’

language indeterminate and incapable of meaning, interpretation a matter

of personal choice. Many of our best authors – Nabakov, Mailer,

Malamud, and Bellow were the cases I explored in an earlier book, The

Imaginary Library – have experienced and not recovered from a crisis of

confidence in the traditional values of literature and a sense of its

importance to humanity. (3)

Kernan’s lament at the “crisis of confidence” embodied by the list of canonised literary

figures, is anchored by testimony that these authors have lost their sense of the socio-

historical significance of the medium. In his list are interpretations of the landscape of

literary endeavour, and a suite of symptoms which indicate a deeper set of assertions

about the literary medium that have fuelled its demise. Kernan describes literature as

having become corrupted by broader social influences and politically motivated

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commentary, and paints a picture of a corpus of critical endeavour that became

unwieldy and began to undermine the “basic principles” of literature itself. He writes of

the “crisis” in terms of the circular relationship between production and consumption,

concluding that criticism’s role in this has been to deconstruct “its basic principles”, like

the “poet”, and the object of art as containing meaning derived from a context that

would allow interpretation to provide a relative measure of insight into that context.

Kernan’s history of literature and literary criticism is made up of clearly identifiable

boundaries (“principles”) that have now been degraded, but once allowed the

delineation of the medium and the processes by which it is interpreted. The loss Kernan

describes is not unlike Iser’s “unfolding” of interpretation as translation. The history of

interpretive endeavour was marked by the emergence of hermeneutic circularity, a

strategy that coincided with a challenge to the authority of the canon, and which

advanced with increasing interpretation of the canon. Since the activity of translation

that makes up interpretation is dictated by the nature of the works at hand, and the

context of interpretation, it was bound to change over time and bring the “authority” of

the canon into question. Kernan’s rather pessimistic description involves the process

whereby the literature itself changed, since for Kernan the approaches to interpretation

adopted by literary critics have undermined the confidence of some of its key authors.

The list above is a lament at a loss of a tradition that had ensured we could understand

the importance of literature “to humanity”. The authors are inspired by a literary context

influenced by the lack of a capacity to evidence this importance, a shortfall which is for

Kernan directly linked to the critic’s activity.

Kernan describes a failure to maintain the distinctions that would sustain

literature against a decline in socio-historical significance. This “failure” is in part due

to a lack of what we might describe as an anthropological perspective on the processes

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of interpretation that underpin criticism. This shortfall is compounded by the confusion

created when key categories like “method”, “theory”, “interpretation” and “literature”

are not clearly separated. Mark Bauerlein observed in his introduction to Literary

Criticism: an Autopsy that “In the case of literary criticism, the definition of literature

constitutes not an ontic description, but a methodological opening, the first step by

which literary criticism differentiates itself from other forms of criticism” (4-5). Why is

this delineation important? The answers are to be found in how we position the basic

function of interpretation. Regardless of whether we understand literary criticism to be

charged with connecting the literary work with a “reality”, or with maintaining its own

pragmatic boundaries in respect of the “literary”, the function of the practitioner is to

interpret. This interpretation most frequently adopts a methodological approach. For

Bauerlein the definition of literature is a functional manifestation of a “methodological

opening”, and unfolds the means by which to distinguish literary criticism from the

symbolic interpretation of cultural “texts” in general. If methodology is the defining

feature of the discipline of literary studies, then its circularity is its definition.

Methodology relies upon the action of interpreting theory as a way to construct and

authenticate both the means and the substance of the interpretation of literature on

behalf of a larger community of readers. This larger community is primarily

underwritten by the institution of the university, which is concerned with teaching its

methods to students, and establishing the professional standing of its practitioners in a

formal context. Therefore, literary criticism is conducted as a definitional, theoretical

and interpretive fusion which generates a human engagement with the medium both

literally and figuratively. Bauerlein’s introduction describes a trend in literary studies

through the 90s which was preoccupied with the limits placed upon criticism by an

approach toward the “object in itself”, and rejection of the classical influence which

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created the process of aesthetic objectification. Aesthetic accounts were accused of

removing the literary work from context, from the reality in which it was produced and

eventually consumed. To de-contextualise in such a fashion, it was said, is to do

violence to the work, and remove the possibility of an accurate representation through

close reading. The resulting wisdom’s “call is simple, but pervasive: put literature back

into its cultural context and convert textual analysis into cultural criticism” (1). If there

is a problem with this “representative” turn, it is to be discovered in the logic behind an

emphasis of context. Bauerlein writes that the leaders of the turn,including Raymond

Williams, Edward Said, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton, had taken up a logically

absurd position: “The problem: they use literary criticism’s own subject matter,

literature, to assert that the discipline fails rightly to understand and appreciate it” (2).

The logical tension manifests for Bauerlein between the possibility of representing the

literary object through interpretation which is responsive to a work of literature as a

“real cultural artefact”, and where and how the work itself finds the possibility of

definition as “literary”. Bauerlein frames his objection with a question: “how can

literary criticism misconceive the reality of literature, when literary criticism has

defined literature?” (2). In sum, the accusation of circularity Bauerlein attempts to

defend the discipline against, is the very circularity he employs as a defence, and in the

form of a rhetorical question. Bauerlein presents in his introduction in a rigorous

fashion a description of the institutionally underwritten boundaries of literary studies,

and examines the implications for literary critical practitioners of the push toward a

stronger contextual account of the literary work. He notes that the need for a move

toward a “representational” mode of literary criticism undermines the pragmatic

possibility of uniformity in disciplinary practice, since the very prospect of a

homogeneous set of disciplinary practices re-presents the original question as to how a

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discipline which pre-constructs its “methods” can escape doing violence to the very

medium it purports to represent through interpretation. The goal of representational

discourse is an escape from the shortcomings of methodology construction, where the

method in its stricture predicts the boundaries of the artefact. Bauerlein both figures

(and in literal terms) describes this circularity, pointing out that inevitably, any attempt

at disciplinary coherence involves the practical limitations of methodology formulation:

“For the establishment of representation as a viable critical practice carries with it a set

of practical exigencies that are themselves not representational, but methodological”

(10). A coherent discipline must rely on a set of practices for its definition, otherwise

what do its practitioners practise? The hermeneutic circularity involved with monitoring,

maintaining and employing these practices unfolds as methodology formulation. Once

we try to define literary studies by its methodology, we find that this definition becomes

entirely circular. Interpretation then is not simply concerned with representation in

literary critical practice, and as Bauerlein argues the “practical exigencies” of this self-

certification leave the literary critic simultaneously open to the accusation of reduction

of context, and the subjectivism which aesthetic categories imply. The lack of coherence

which might result from the breakdown of clear disciplinary boundaries had already

manifested for Bauerlein, who committed his entire monograph to an attempt to redeem

the discipline from the confusing consequences of definitional ambiguity. The content

of his book moves through a list of terminology and its usage from the growing territory

of representational criticism, his introduction anticipating pithily that his “intent is

clarification. If the result should be a critique, I leave its consequences for my readers to

draw” (15). In the end the reader is empowered to take what they will from his irony,

and Bauerlein offers no resolution to the conflict he identifies.

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Instead we are reminded by Bauerlein only of the importance of rigor. In

defining literary criticism, for example, he highlights the necessity for making the

distinction between literary and non-literary. Without this distinction the discipline

cannot exist, and this distinction is certainly an entirely institionally bound and therefore

synthetic prospect: “a disciplinary invention whose only justification is its institutional

effect: the organisation of a discipline of literary criticism” (91). He concludes that the

term:

now connotes an exemplary strategy of institutional construction

antithetical to the demands of political awareness and cultural

engagement. The methodological orderliness that makes literary

criticism into a self-contained enquiry is the very thing that condemns it

in contemporary debate. The boundaries and distinctions of literary

criticism that seem useful and advisory are seen as repressive and

bureaucratic. Pragmatic definitions of literature that open a discrete

region of analysis become exercises in territorialism. Under this

transvaluation of disciplinary values, the term “literary criticism” has

become a rebuke of institutional sins. (91-2)

He describes the treatment of literary criticism from within the Western university to

this point in the late nineties, as cynically reflexive of a wrong-headed reduction of the

methods and boundaries to literary studies. A pyrrhic victory is won by the institution

over one of its own, and rather than celebrate the “orderliness” of literary criticism with

it unique capacity for functioning in a “self-contained” fashion, it is denigrated as

“repressive”, “bureaucratic” and indulging in “territorialism”. Bauerlein’s analysis

highlights how it is that literary studies is disadvantaged by its rigour, for while a

disciplinary perspective beginning its interpretation with history or philosophy, for

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example, will be oriented toward the historical or philosophical offerings of the text

interpreted through context, a literary reading is bound to literariness. It is not primarily

concerned with a history, though this may become a feature of the interpretive gesture

and increasingly is under a representational motif. Instead it is concerned with what

makes the work literary. The literary critic is accused of responding to the need for

disciplinary stability by demoting historical context in favour of a method for textual

analysis, which must in some pragmatic way identify the “literary” features of the

artefact at stake. This is a description of a reified discipline, where practices that “seem

useful and advisory are seen as repressive and bureaucratic”. His diffident question,

“does a pragmatic justification for literary criticism carry any weight in today’s critical

climate? None whatsoever” (6) is a not so thinly veiled criticism of a reactive and

unstable contemporary institution. However, when Bauerlein observes in his

introduction, that during the practice of literary criticism “the definition of literature

constitutes not an ontic description, but a methodological opening” (4-5), he indicates

the relevance of a non-methodological assessment of the human significance of the

medium. Bauerlein’s attempt to define terms is an extension upon the literary theory

that would feed back into the hermeneutic circles inscribed during methodology

formulation. His effort involves a suggestion that the old methods be revisited with yet

more vigour. But such a resolution is no resolution; it is instead an extension of existing

methods. Bauerlein accepts the institutional self-definition of literary critical boundaries

as a pragmatic necessity, and asserts that methodology follows on the heels of this

purpose. The question remains however at the end of his discussion as to why literature

should be subject matter for this methodological approach.

In “The Culture of Criticism”, van Oort discusses Bauerlein’s arguments and

concludes that he fails to answer the question as to “why literary method should remain

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tied to literature other than for purely methodological reasons” (465). For van Oort,

Bauerlein shares an assumption concerning “the use of literature as the privileged

vehicle for theoretical reflection” (465). For van Oort, even those – like the “New

Historicists” – who would discover how “power is being secretly manipulated” add to

this privileging of literature by returning to the text for the evidence, for the “discovery”

of this manipulation. The “New Formalism” that has emerged over the past two decades

has been described by Marjorie Levinson as bifurcating into “the discipline’s neglect of

form as an ideological mystification”, and a “by-product of the institutional authority

enjoyed by the historical turn”. This return to “form” is born of a general concern that

avoiding the ontological complication of formalism has “bred facility, stripping method

of both the complexity and the textual engagement evident in its early instances” (559).

Whether inspired by the obfuscation created by “ideological mystification” or the

influence of the “historical turn”, the locus of this concern is the method involved in the

methodology employed, rather than the larger questions as to what separates literature

as a privileged point of focus in the study of culture, or the related question as to how

we differentiate between the theoretical underpinning to our approach, and the object

under inspection during interpretation. As van Oort argues, it is interesting to note that

“celebrity criticism” is tantamount to literature, and this closer resemblance between

“art” and criticism, than between criticism and theory reflects that the “central function

of criticism is neither to sacralize the object nor to explain it. Rather, it is to engage the

reader in an experience that is best described as aesthetic in structure” (465). Van Oort

argues that for a:

critical analysis to attain the status of theory implies a reversal of the

traditional hierarchy between criticism and literature. A work of (mere)

criticism becomes a work of (prestigious) theory when it successfully

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manages to overshadow the literary and sacred texts it interprets…. First

it destroys the assumption that there is such a thing as high culture and

good taste. Then it resurrects it, this time in favor of the critic by

implying that if there is any remaining significance to be found in the

works of high culture, the critic alone is able to demonstrate this. (466)

“Theory” begins when criticism paradoxically overleaps the object of its study.

Interpretation underpins the success the theorist enjoys, when the critical endeavour that

supports the interpretation becomes valorised to the extent that the prestige it

accumulates allows it to “overshadow” the text it interprets. The history of the

production of theory has involved the destruction of “high culture and good taste”, an

event the critic capitalises upon by appointing themselves the task of redeeming any

“remaining significance” in high culture. For van Oort, this means that theory itself has

become “the last remaining holdout of what used to be called high culture” (466). The

theory that would furnish the literary critic with the method to conduct interpretation is

itself:

presented as an objective representation of its object (culture); but if the

object is available only while one is doing the theory, then the theory can

be “tested” only by reproducing the theory. Theory and object collapse

into each other. Theory is both subject and object. It is the product of the

theorist, but it is also an object of study. (462)

The continuum of theory and culture is presented as always already interpretive by van

Oort. In Iser’s terms, conducting literary critical interpretation involves an ongoing

attempt to translate an example of “culture” according to a register that sets the

contextual boundaries to the interpretation. As we have seen however, the register is

responsive to the material to be interpreted, and the register is updated even as it is

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employed during translation. Van Oort asserts that “[t]he science of anthropology is

inseparable from the art of cultural criticism”, since any hypothesis offered to describe

the human through culture remains unavoidably interpretive (462). Certainly it seems to

be the case that in the terms of the discourse produced by those attempting to examine

the decline of literary studies, the irreconcilable elements of the discussion evidence the

difficulty involved with distinguishing boundaries to the primary categories upon which

literary studies is built. Any attempt to understand the context of and the necessity for

changes in the disciplinary practices that make up literary studies, must contend first

with the necessity for clarifying a position on the nature of these categories.

Methodology, theory and interpretation, culture and the human itself are all subject to

this discussion, and, as Iser, Gans and van Oort have argued, there is a common set of

anthropological concerns that join each of these categories.

8.4 Literary critic as “hero”?

In his “Presidential Address 1999: Humanism and Heroism” on behalf of the

MLA, Edward Said asked a lengthy question:

Is it too much to opine that the disarray in which we find ourselves as

scholars and teachers of literature – with vast disagreements separating

us from one another; with hyphenated and ill-formed new fields of

activity many of which are neither linguistics nor psychoanalysis nor

anthropology nor history nor sociology nor philosophy but bits of all of

them, flooding and overcoming the (perhaps false) serenity of former

times; with numerous new jargons eliciting from traditional minded

critics excoriation and misperception – that all this may in fact be

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traceable to the loss of an enabling image of an individual human being

pressing on with her or his work, pen in hand, manuscript or book on the

table, rescuing some sense for the page from out of the confusion and

disorganization that surround us in ordinary life? (289)

Said presents a self-consciously romantic image of the heroic endeavour of attempting

to mediate the past by challenging the contemporary toward imagining the advancement

of human understanding into the future. Said fears that globalization and the imposition

of a singular deregulated market economy inspires “new disparities in wealth,

entitlement, and the distribution of goods that bedevil the very idea of human

development” (291). Is the decline of literary studies an example of this shift? As Said

describes it, “the practice of humanistic service in the fields of human history, culture,

art, and psychology always entails a heroic unwillingness to rest in the consolidation of

previously existing attitudes” (290). Of course, Said embodies a popular vision of this

heroism with his own achievement, but those self-same achievements are also a feature

of the violent tectonic shifts in the humanities of the modern era. If Said romantically

imagines the heroism of the “enabling image of an individual human being pressing on

with her or his work, pen in hand, manuscript or book on the table”, it is not without a

sense of irony that he does so. The very “disarray” that he describes is in no small part

attributable to his own heroic efforts, yet his faith is in the potency of the individual

writing as a means by which to amplify the human and rescue us from “the confusion

and disorganization that surround us in ordinary life”. His desperate thesis turns on the

critical question asked of scholars and teachers of literature, as to whether the troubling

complexities that make up the context of the modern scholarly institutions can be traced

to a crisis of confidence for the individual scholar. The loss of the “enabling image” of

the heroic toiler he describes is similar to the crisis of confidence for important literary

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authors Kernan describes. He traces this crisis to a lack of a sense that their endeavours

are “important to humanity”. It seems that critic and author are bound together, in the

task of “rescuing” some “sense for the page”, and that this task relies in the end upon

what can only be understood in terms of faith in the importance of the project to

humanity. The nihilism Wellek has undermining literary studies, seems very similar to

the loss that inspires Said’s question. The question suggests that to empower the

humanities scholar in their endeavours involves challenging existing understandings

from a position of belief, and that it is a growing nihilism which is responsible for and

discoverable in the confusing mass of theoretical approaches to humanistic fields of

study. The world is “confusion and disorganisation”, and the humanities intend to

assemble some sense from it all, rather than add to it. This addition to our humanity

must be generated not simply by the literary author, but by the would-be interpreter, and

of course, the theorist. This visionary, this hero, is in the end the only figure capable of

manifesting all of these subjective possibilities simultaneously: the critic.

Discussions in Western institutions during the past two decades of the decline in

significance of literary studies have very frequently ended in vague cul-de-sacs of

hopefulness or dismissal not dissimilar in tone to Said’s appeal on behalf of the heroic

and individual “literary” figure. For example, at the end of the 1990s, in his review of

books directed toward the topic, Professor Andrew Delbanco provides a thorough

account of the terrain and concludes that the “English Department” will survive on a

smaller scale, but that:

full-scale revival will come only when English professors recommit

themselves to slaking the human craving for contact with works of art

that somehow register one’s own longings and yet exceed what one has

been able to articulate by and for oneself. This is among the

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indispensable experiences of the fulfilled life, and the English

department will survive—if on a smaller scale than before—only if it

continues to coax and prod students toward it. (“Decline and Fall”)

Delbanco describes the necessity for literary studies scholars to be the progenitors of a

“revival” by ensuring their efforts “exceed” the individual. Its practitioners as experts

are charged with facilitating access to the genius of a more complete human experience

and its subsequent expression. Rather than explore “how” this articulate function of

literary discourse will continue – with increased vigour – Delbanco concerns himself

with the articulate function itself. For those who would support Delbanco, however, the

downsizing of literary studies raises important questions as to how this heroic function

can be executed. The broadening of the study of popular culture in the humanities has

accompanied the waning attention paid toward literature by not only students, but the

scholars that students become. This shift signals a fundamental alteration in how we

understand the significance of literature and as such has and will impact the literary

paradigm under which literature will continue to be studied and created. These changes

are in themselves worthy of study, and if the goal of literary studies is perceived to be

the advancement of “humanity”, then there seems to be a legitimate rationale for

measuring the failure of literary studies in terms of its capacity to mediate a broader set

of human concerns. However, there is a danger in assuming the ongoing decline in

attention directed toward literature from both without and within western universities is

directly proportional with the significance of the literary medium as a cultural paradigm

now, and throughout our history. This danger has been noted and published upon

extensively, and the most frequent scapegoat for this “mistaken” assumption is the

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much discussed “failure” of literary criticism37. Sabre rattling polemics and personality

politics driven by competition for institutional success and or survival are often listed

among these shortcomings, and these are certainly significant factors that affect how

literary theory is created and how criticism is engaged. The problem with such an

internal analysis is that any criterion adopted during the analysis is itself a part of the

institutional history it describes. It is precisely this history that has placed literary

studies in its currently marginalised position.

The accusation of a lack of relevance must be explored on its own terms:

questions arise as to the human significance of the study of literature irrespective of the

cause of its decline, which may be a by-product of institutional trends, or a direct result

of the reduced significance of literature as a cultural paradigm. For example, if it is to be

or is being replaced, then why and how is this occurring, and why has literature

performed an indispensable human function for so long? These important questions

demand a perspective that lies beyond the limiting pragmatism of methodology, and

beyond the presuppositions that would privilege the literary medium without providing

the necessary rigour to substantiate such presumed significance. The goal of a literary

anthropology is to provide just such a point of departure, one which will allow the

exploration of the interplay between the complex narratives that make up the “circles”

and “loops” of literary discourse. Or more romantically, one which can describe the role

of that heroic individual Said is almost frightened to imagine. They hide beyond the

well funded rooms populated by scientists, behind the plush lounges of the behavioural

37 A great deal has been written on the topics of the decline of high theory and literary studies, and possible means by which to reassess the significance of literature. See the following abbreviated list of texts for useful examinations, essays and interviews: Baumlin; Bérubé; Bloom; Crawford; Delbanco; Eagleton, Literary theory: an introduction; Eagleton, After Theory; Ellis; Kernan, The Imaginary Library; Kernan, The death of literature; Kernan, ed, What’s happened to the humanities?; Kernan, In Plato’s cave; Olsen; Patai and Corral, eds; Rapaport; Schad and Payne; Scholes; van Oort, “Crisis and Collegiality”; and Woodring.

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sciences, and are tucked away between the social scientists and the students of

communication and the law, these heroic interpreters of all that precede them: the

literary critics.

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9. Emergence

This thesis has been concerned with the development and reception of Iser’s

literary anthropology, arguing that his writings can help us understand and articulate the

human significance of literature and literary studies. Chapters seven and eight of this

thesis have attempted to demonstrate a strong continuity between his perspective on

literature and the project of generative anthropology, with its debt to the originary

hypothesis of Eric Gans and René Girard. Iser is preoccupied with the means by which

we separate and understand the literary text, and the manner in which the reader

interacts with this text. The key to such interaction is interpretation, and Iser suggests

that we consider interpretation to be an activity of translation: “we interpret, therefore

we are” (Range 1). Interpretation itself is the central organising narrative in Iser’s work:

his early work centred on the reader-text interaction and expanded into the literary

anthropology of his late career. We should remember, however, that this preoccupation

with the reader-text interaction is a deliberate over-stepping of the tradition of literary

critical interpretation. This is not interpretation as a search for the “meaning” of the text.

Instead Iser is attempting to examine how the aesthetic dimension of the literary

medium meets basic human needs, and what this reveals of our make-up. After The

Fictive and the Imaginary, this anthropological focus meant an account of interpretation

as an activity of translation, and (we have not examined this section of his writing

closely) employing cybernetics to understand interpretation. Iser was working on a book

length account of the phenomenon of “emergence” in his final years, a project that

seems to reflect his ongoing assertion that the literary work is generative of new

phenomena. He says that “[w]henever interpretation occurs, something emerges, and

this something is identical neither with the subject matter nor with the register into

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which the subject matter is to be transposed” (Range 151). This generative characteristic

of interpretation, manifesting as emergence, is always already the marker of

interpretation for Iser: “Interpretation… always makes something emerge, so that we

might be justified in saying that emergence is its hallmark” (Range 154).

With this focus upon emergence, Iser has shifted his attention from the particular

context of the reader-text interaction, to the manner in which “culture emerges out of a

continual recursion between humans and their environment” (“Emergence of Culture

and Emergence in Art”). This change leads to a compelling context for our discussion of

the human significance of literature, in the origins of culture. One of the few resources

available on the topic is a description provided by Iser for a seminar he conducted in

2005 at the University of California, Irvine, “Emergence of Culture and Emergence in

Art”. Here Iser sets out to “spotlight basic ideas in the currently prominent

pronouncement regarding the formation of culture”, and explains that during the

seminar “speculations about origins will be confronted with the changes to be observed

in the formation of culture”. The basis for this assessment is a larger argument that

culture,

continually generates its own constantly shifting organization. This

makes culture - as the artificially produced human habitat - into an

emergent phenomenon. Conceiving of culture as an emergent

phenomenon is apt insofar as it is not an appearance of something other

than itself to which it can give presence. As a self-transforming

phenomenon, it reveals its infrastructure as a recursively operating

movement of input and output, which makes recursion into the

mainspring of emergence.

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For Iser, there is significant potential in “recursive looping” for the study of the human

animal. Indeed he transposes this basic insight at what he considers the most

fundamental level of being, by arguing that “there seems to be a recursive undercurrent

in the very process of interpretation itself” (Range 84). As we have seen, Iser describes

the process of translation as being dependent upon the material to be translated, and that

the act of translation updates the register into which the material is to be translated. This

recursion, observable in the operations that function toward interpretation, is described

by Iser as constituting the focus of his paradigmatic description the “cybernetic loop”

(Range 84).

“Cybernetics” is a term defined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in a book

published in 1948 entitled Cybernetics, or the study of control and communication in

the animal and the machine. Here Wiener takes up the Greek term for “steersman” as a

description for his attempt at a general theory of control and communication in systems.

Iser’s interest is in how Wiener was inspired by the mechanical control systems that had

been developed, to provide a means by which to automatically adjust the functioning of

technology based on a measurement of the variables at hand38. In Iser’s description,

Wiener formulates a basic principle in his later book, The Human Use of Human Beings

(1954) to describe this function as a means by which to “control entropy through

feedback” (qtd. in Range 84). Here feedback is a function of control, and Iser cites

Wiener as follows in order to suggest that such initial patterns of control are updated on

the basis of:

past performance. Feedback may be as simple as that of a common reflex,

or it may be a higher order feedback, in which past experience is used

38 See The Range of Interpretation (83-112) for Iser’s discussion of “Recursion in Ethnographic Discourse”. Here Iser traces the recursive pattern Wiener identifies through the central concerns of the

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not only to regulate specific movements, but also whole policies of

behaviour. The nervous system and the automatic machine are

fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on the

basis of decisions they have made in the past. (qtd. in Range 84-5)

Wiener clearly argues here that the biological and the technological are equal in their

relationship to the history of decisions made. Iser argues that this is a recursive mode of

interaction, best described in terms of “recursive looping” (Range 85). He sees

“Wiener’s basic formula” of past decisions informing future ones as a recursive looping

that “develops as an interchange between input and output, in the course of which a

prediction, anticipation, or even projection is corrected insofar as it has failed” (Range

85).

In The Range of Interpretation Iser argues that the description of a reciprocal

relationship between “the evolution of Homo sapiens and the rise of culture” in

ethnographic discourse is an important instance of the potential in recursive looping to

become a means by which to describe culture. Iser compares this approach to the study

of culture with hermeneutics and its attempt to study “texts”:

Controlling entropy and coming to grips with contingencies are not

comparable to what a text-oriented hermeneutics had to face, even when

the text was taken as a metaphor, as in psychoanalysis. Between entropy

as a measure of disorder and the attempt to control it, there is a yawning

gulf, which can hardly be regarded as parallel to the various gaps bridged

by the different versions of the hermeneutic circle. Furthermore, entropy

and contingency elude knowledge, so that coping with them requires a

continual looping from the known to the unknown. (Range 86)

anthropology of Geertz and Leroi-Gourhan, and examines how the study of culture is taken up in systems

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The removal of hermeneutics from cybernetics then is significant, in that hermeneutics

is not suited to:

the type of interpretation ethnographers apply when trying to elucidate

the interconnection between the evolution of Homo sapiens and rise of

culture. For such an enterprise, the hermeneutic circle, for all its

sophisticated variations, no longer works. There is no text to be

deciphered. Instead, we have as a starting point something that lies

beyond what hermeneutics is able to cope with – even if some

hermeneuticists claim otherwise. That starting point is the human

confrontation with entropy. (Range 87)

Iser is at pains in his discussion of ethnography, to distance the project of hermeneutics

from that of the ethnographer attempting to explain the rise of culture in relation to the

evolution of the particular species, homo sapiens. This is a very interesting distinction,

in that Iser traces the origin of culture to the “human confrontation with entropy”. This

effectively becomes Iser’s definition of the human, and one which distances

interpretation of the history of human culture from interpretation of particular “texts” in

literary discourse. This dissertation has highlighted that for Iser, the hermeneutic

tradition that makes up literary critical discourse manifests a circularity where:

[t]he subject matter is tailored to a degree by the interpretive register into

which it is translated, and it simultaneously calls for a retooling of the

mechanics bought to bear, as evinced by the continual modification

through which the hermeneutic circle is reconceived…. Both participate

in a circular relationship through which the one conditions the other in a

and cybernetics-oriented ethnographic discourse.

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recursive movement that bring about the elucidation of the subject matter

and a fine-tuning of the interpretive strategies. (83)

Both the subject matter and the register are integral to this circularity. In the context of

hermeneutics, then, it is the dynamic movement back-and-forth between subject matter

and register that demonstrates the “recursive undercurrent” in interpretation. This Iser

finds to be a paradigmatic presentation of the basic operation of the cybernetic loop.

However, Iser argues that when interpretation addresses the subject matter of recursive

loops themselves, rather than particular texts, the hermeneutic approach is no longer

“able to cope”. The example at hand is the origin of the “rise of culture”. For Iser, this is

not an ordinary attempt to interpret “texts”, but instead an examination of entropy itself,

in terms of,

(a) how entropy is translated into control; (b) how randomness is

translated into what is central; (c) how the largely intangible reciprocity

of hominization and the rise of culture is translated into conceptual

language; and (d) how cultures or cultural levels are translated into terms

that allow an interchange between what is foreign and what is familiar.

(84)

For Iser, articulating concepts to allow for an interpretation of the evolution of homo

sapiens and the interaction of this process with the rise of culture does not concern itself

with the interpretation of texts. Furthermore, Iser is arguing that interpreting the means

by which cultural exchange occurs, or the dynamics of a movement from the foreign to

the familiar during translation, is a matter of interpreting the systemic interaction that

such an interchange involves. In other words, Iser is not addressing particular scenes of

culture in this discussion; he is addressing instead, fundamental questions as to how we

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can best explain patterns in culture by creating descriptions of the systems that continue

to generate these patterns.

This distinction leaves us with the problem that continues to present itself in

Iser’s anthropology, as to how the origin of language is to be accounted for in his

definition of the human. For Iser, the human is the continuously interpreting animal,

who attempts through a continuous process of translation to control entropy. The

recursive loops that reflect the human for Iser, are always already in his definition of

human culture, marked by the emergence of new phenomena. However, the culture that

emerges from this continuous interpretation is not to be thought of as somehow separate

to the recursion that inspires its ongoing production. Instead, it is these emergent

phenomena that form the basic constituents or the shifting ground upon which humans

perform the activities that lead to the ongoing emergence of culture. If the human

animal is to be understood in these terms, in the terms of interacting systems and the

processes these involve, how are we to understand the basic constituents of these

processes? The most prominent example is the language that allows for the interpretive

procedures in the first instance. We seem to be left with the question, as to where and

how the language that is so central to emergence, itself emerged? Emergence is the

marker of interpretation for Iser, in two dimensions: “(a) it indicates the ever-widening

ramification of attempts to bring things about; and (b) whatever comes about is a

charting of the reality we live in. As we cannot encompass this reality, we map it out

into plurality of worlds” (Range 154). These insights lead Iser to assert that the central

role of interpretation and emergence in the human attempts to come to terms with reality

are indicative of the nature of interpretation: “The nature of interpretation is to make

functional whatever is given” (Range 155).

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So why are humans compelled to continuously interpret? Why do we generate

the ever widening complex of cultural phenomena, as we simultaneously chart and

come to terms with the reality we cannot wholly “encompass”? For Iser the answer lies

in the negative presentation of consciousness, which is haunted by two “basic blanks”

(Range 156). The first, he suggests is that “the ground from which human beings have

sprung is unfathomable and appears to be withheld from them” (Range 155). The

second is that “we are but do not know what it is to be” (156). As a result of these

blanks, human consciousness is “permeated by the awareness that the fundamentals are

unplumbable” (156). For Iser, the unceasing interpretation that defines human being is a

response to these blanks, and our attempts to “achieve understanding, self-

understanding, control, system building, and differentiation of difference” are all futile

attempts to fill these blanks. The results are “only maps, which chart territories”. For

Iser there is no territory to map and so the groundless human is not engaged in an

attempt to “gain territory” (156). Instead they are performing the possibility of a

territory, where,

[i]nstead of denoting a territory, the map enables the contours of a

territory to emerge, which coincide with the map because it has no

existence outside this designation. Therefore the map adumbrates the

conditions under which the not-yet-existing may be conceived. (156)

The process of generating these maps sets down the more limited conditions, the less

entropic conditions, under which the subsequent process of generating “territory”

humans playfully entertain as reality. In this fashion, humans perform their own

possibilities; they “live by what they produce” in this continual activity of interpretation.

The goal of the following discussion is to establish that here we have arrived at a

crucial point of departure between Iser’s articulation of emergence and the originary

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perspective on culture, and that we have also uncovered some striking similarities. A

comparison of the two will yield useful insights into these recent developments in

cultural anthropology, but more than this, will allow us to demonstrate how Iser’s

explanation of culture stands as significant groundwork that can assist us in articulating

the human significance of literature.

9.1 Emergence and defining the human

Iser’s definition of the human appears in terms of a kind of vertical free-fall that

reflects our knowledge of a lack, or of a blank in our potential to interpret our own

consciousness. Since we cannot transcend consciousness, and since we are aware of this

impossibility, we perform ourselves. This performance Iser describes in terms of the

manifestation of our “plasticity” in culture, which allows him to explain and explore

Clifford Geertz’s challenge to the “wrongly assumed constancy of human nature”

(Range 88). Iser argues that with the decline of “eighteenth-century concepts of

humanity, as manifested in philosophy and literature” there comes a “greater focus on

culture” (88). Geertz defines the human in terms of the “unfinished animal”, marked by

a gap which is intended to link the rise of culture with the evolution of Homo sapiens.

Culture fills the vacuum, or what Geertz refers to in his collection of essays, The

Interpretation of Cultures (1973) as the “information gap” left between “what our body

tells us and what we have to know in order to function” (qtd. in Range 92). For Iser, this

definition of culture points toward the role of recursive looping, since the “information

gap” is a trigger to the recursion that is itself indicated as the most appropriate response

to the “dual reference” of the gap:

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The information gap has a dual reference: it applies to both humans and

their environment. There is a vacuum in the unfinished animal itself,

highlighted by its plasticity, that needs to be patterned for the sake of

self-preservation; and there is the vacuum of an entropic universe to

which humans are exposed. The inception of culture presents itself as an

effort to split entropy into order and contingency…. If dwelling in the

information gap originally means that the unfinished animal is exposed

to entropy, the filling of the gap is achieved by human culture, which still

reflects the dual reference of the vacuum. Entropy is transformed into

order, and order in turn shapes human plasticity, through which all

human beings are transformed into “cultural artefacts”. (Range 93)

In this quotation Iser is mapping the recursive loops that make up the reciprocal

relationship between culture and the human in Geertz’s anthropology. Iser’s summary

of Geertz’s position in Interpretation of Cultures, is that “‘culture’ and ‘man’ are two

mutually interdependent systems that appear to feed into one another” (Range 87). Here

culture is “an artificially built habitat”, and the interdependent relationship between

culture and the evolution of homo sapiens can be grasped through an examination of the

recursive loops that seem to unfold between species and culture. Iser reasons, that

ultimately the information gap is “a challenge to interpretation itself” (Range 93). In

ethnographic discourse this challenge must be “met by the concept of recursive looping,

whose explanatory power makes it possible to grasp the process of hominization as well

as the interchange between the rise of Homo sapiens and human culture” (Range 93).

Iser concludes that while we consider the human and culture to be mutually

defining there can be no universal description of the basis of human nature, since

culture is constituted by “changeable and hence nonuniversal responses of humans to

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their environment” (Range 89). The alternative is to examine patterns in the systemic

recursion between human and environment through culture, and Iser finds the examples

of this in André Leroi-Gourhan’s arguments about the exterior manifestation of culture

in tools, and Geertz’s description of a “symbol system”. In the case of the former, Iser

finds a recursive pattern in Leroi-Gourhan’s interpretation of the relationship between

the “function, form, and figuration” of toolmaking, which “continually feed into one

another for the purpose of optimizing the adequacy of the tool” (Range 94). In the case

of Geertz, Iser argues “culture, as the artificial habitat built into a vacuum, is a symbol

system” (Range 95). In his discussion of Geertz, Iser highlights the duality previously

analysed in this thesis, where Geertz describes the symbol as “a model of ‘reality,’” and

“a model for ‘reality’”. For Iser this is a duality which “makes it possible to grasp the

operational intent of the symbol, which is an abstraction from something for the purpose

of shaping something” (Range 95). He goes on to suggest that Geertz’s “dual aspect of

the symbol reflects the chasm that separates humans from the environment to which

they are exposed, and it is simultaneously an attempt to come to grips with this chasm”

(96). In the first instance, the symbol is a model of “something given”, and in the latter,

it is a model for “something new”. The model of is, therefore, “fed forward” into the

model for. The goal here, is always to limit entropy, to “bring order out of disorder”,

and when the goal of order is not attained a feedback loop is established and the initial

abstraction from the given reality is updated.

There appears to be an event missing from this description of emergence that

perhaps will become clearer with time. This event would explain the bridge between the

dual function of the symbolic as the model of, and the model for culture. It would

describe the conditions under which humans attained the capacity for filling the gap

between what our bodies tell us, and what we need to know to in order to function in the

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universe we inhabit, but cannot encompass. This event, we might describe as the first

instance of emergence. This first event would make it apparent how the symbolic is

capable of providing the structure for culture as an emergent phenomenon. For Iser, the

continuous activity of interpretation actualises the dynamic movement between the

model of, and the model for culture. He describes the impetus for this ongoing

movement as being evident in the negative, or in the blanks that qualify the symbolic.

Humans are conscious of their consciousness, and yet cannot transcend consciousness

in order to know what it is. This manifests for Iser in the very dynamism that marks

human culture, which is driven along by interpretation. In sum, Iser finds that the

“hallmark” of this recursive patterning in culture is emergence. This emphasis upon

interpretation allows Iser to maintain an open-ended description of the human, where

culture itself becomes the possibility of grasping our nature. He argues that what:

emerges from interpretation is an insight into the unforeseeable

multifariousness of human being’s responses to their constitutive blanks.

Viewed from this angle, interpretation indicates what it might mean to

lead a conscious life that is permeated by awareness of the

unfathomableness out of which it arises. Such a view tends to prevent us

from lapsing into another master narrative of the human condition,

because unending interpretation unfolds in fleeting figurations, during

the course of which each is either modified or cancelled by what is to

follow. This sequence highlights figuration as a mapping activity, which

equally assembles and dismantles territories, thus invalidating any notion

that claims to represent human life… for it is basically unrepresentable.

(Range 158)

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This has always been Iser’s fight, manifesting as a thoroughgoing resistance to a

mathesis for the human. No complete description will do, since we cannot ultimately

provide the resolution to this, the most basic of drives in the human condition. We seek

to explain the inexplicable, and for Iser this is the definition of our humanity. The

figures by which we would represent our humanity are always conditional, always

temporary and ever shifting. Indeed, it does not appear to be lost on Iser that his

argument enacts itself; that it embraces the circular by pointing toward itself. But no

matter how fleeting, Iser’s explanation of these figures as futile attempts at

representation cannot remain in this detached state, because while we do not know the

precise circumstances of the event, we know that there was a beginning to these

attempts. Furthermore, we know that this origin provides the impetus to which Iser’s

theory addresses itself, and that the basic structure of this impetus Iser describes in the

above quotation as follows: “This sequence highlights figuration”. The sequence to

which Iser is attentive is, in sum, the sequence that begins with language. Language is

the only possibility for these futile attempts at representation Iser describes. Indeed,

they are the only possibility for the failure of these attempts, and finally, the only

possibility for our recognition of this failure. Emergence, it seems, reveals its structure

in Iser’s description as being tantamount to the emergence of the linguistic sign during

the originary event of human culture.

This refusal to give an explanation for language manifests in Iser’s concept of

emergence as a confusing appraisal of the symbolic and of the central position of

“texts”. If during the activity of ethnographic discourse, the anthropologist is not

addressing “texts”, then it must be possible to supersede the human as a text in favour of

the systems identified in the discourse. The “mapping” Iser describes must therefore be

sometimes addressing the mapping itself, as part of a procedure that moves beyond texts

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and into the domain of basic functions of culture. What does this mean for Iser’s literary

anthropology? As we have seen, in describing the activity of interpreting literature Iser

continually employs the negative by emphasising “gaps” and “blanks” that manifest

through the literary fictionality of the text, and later the “vacancies” of the “liminal

space” that interpretation opens up, and the “difference” that is necessary to the process

of translation that is involved in interpretation. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan in her

“Wolfgang Iser – In Memoriam” highlights Iser’s preoccupation with the literary text’s

capacity to mediate “virtual realities”. For Rimmon-Kenan, Iser’s oeuvre was made up

of two distinct phases, and emergence would have manifested as a third phase focussed

primarily upon this capacity to issue forth something that had previously not been in our

world:

Iser’s early work explores literature through the interaction between text

and reader, his later work uses literature as an instrument for exploring

the human imagination…. It is my fantasy that “the problem of how such

emerging virtual realities, which have no equivalent in our empirical

world, can be processed and indeed understood” (58) is the core of Iser’s

new, monumental, and – sadly – unfinished book on emergence.

Whether my fantasy does or does not correspond to reality, it is clear

from glimpses we were fortunate enough to receive of his work on

emergence that it would have become a third stage in Iser’s trajectory – a

trailblazing and provocative contribution to the ways we think about

literature and culture…. Indeed, this would add another dimension to the

concept of interaction between reader and text. (143)

These observations indicate that Iser’s articulation of anthropological categories, such

as fictionalizing, relate to the generation of culture described by emergence. Rimmon-

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Kenan emphasises how it is that emergence addresses the capacity for literature to

mediate a process that is productive of fundamentally new phenomena during

interpretation. But more than this, she suggests emergence is reflective of the larger

body of Iser’s work, and reliant upon the development of ideas that unfold through this

corpus of writing. What is unclear however, is the manner in which the “text” of the

reader-text interaction is to be appraised in this extension of a literary anthropological

approach to literature and culture.

The available resources on the topics of how Iser’s concept of emergence

positions the text, and how emergence may contribute to our understanding of

“literature and culture,” are limited. Sanford Budick bases his description of emergence

upon his interpretation of the lectures and seminars Iser had already presented on the

topic. He writes that despite the fact that Iser’s book remains incomplete, he “had

already described at least some of the lines of his project in a number of public venues”

(83). Budick is careful to note that this is his “understanding and exemplification of the

relations among recursion, negativity, and emergence”, and an “extrapolation from what

we know of Iser’s terms” (64). Indeed, Budick’s only direct citation is drawn from

Iser’s description of the seminar “Emergence in Culture and Emergence in Art”

delivered at the University of California, Irvine, in the winter semester of 2005. It

should be noted however, that Budick had a close relationship with Iser with whom he

had co-edited two book length collections, the first in 1989 was Languages of the

unsayable : the play of negativity in literature and literary theory and second in 1996

entitled The Translatability of cultures : figurations of the space between. The latter

contains a discussion by Iser entitled “The Emergence of a Cross-Cultural Discourse:

Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus”, in which Iser employs the concept of emergence.

Curiously, he does not articulate it directly or even use the terminology in a direct

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fashion outside the title itself. The essay was later included as an appendix to The Range

of Interpretation, appearing directly after the most direct account of emergence

available, entitled “Configurations of Interpretation: An epilogue”. As noted above,

despite being published in book form in 2000, the content of The Range of

Interpretation was originally delivered as a lecture series at the University of California,

Irvine in 1994. It is possible, it seems, that a more detailed picture of Iser’s final

writings on the top will eventually emerge from the Iser archive (Budick 63). Another

primary resource does exist however, in the form of a paper by Iser from 2006 that

employs emergence to investigate Beckett, entitled “Erasing Narration: Samuel

Beckett’s Malone Dies and Texts for Nothing”39 .

9.2 The negative and literary interpretation

Iser’s preoccupation with poioumena, i.e. fictions with plots centred on the

writing of the fiction itself, is certainly due in part to his fascination with recursion. He

has used seminal poioumenon novels as illustrative examples frequently in his writings,

such as Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies and the Unnamable), Thomas

Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. It is not surprising

that his discussions of emergence are no exception. As we have seen throughout this

thesis, Iser sees the reader-text interaction as being conceivable only as a potential. The

result of this focus is an ongoing return to the suggestion, that “It may well be the

hallmark of literature that it is performative by nature, as it brings hitherto non-existent

39 Also the title of a lecture Iser delivered on the 9th of March in 2006 at the University College Dublin. It would seem that this paper gives some indication of the contents of Iser’s University of California at Irvine seminar on emergence of the same year (that Budick mentions in his paper and referred to above), “Emergence in Culture and Emergence in Art”. Iser lists Beckett among the required readings in the seminar description.

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phenomena into being” (“Erasing Narration” 1). Poioumena perform their construction

by including the fictional exposition of the activity of writing and in so doing, point

toward their own status as a literary work. In this way the poioumenon is a performance

of the recursion that is so fundamental to Iser’s cybernetic description of interpretation,

and emergence. Furthermore, by presenting a “virtual” construction of the text within

the text, they present the distance between the reader and the text as itself a feature of

the text. To place the argument in Iser’s terms: the distance that allows for the

indeterminate element of the text is performed in these works. Iser cares about the

uncertainty of the outcome of reader-text interaction as much as the certainty of the

emergence of this outcome, since it is this uncertainty that provides the impetus for

interpretation and the production of culture. In the case of cybernetics, this manifests as

our attempt to reduce entropy. Our manifestation as human beings is only possible

while we produce culture and consume culture simultaneously, recursively and

continuously. Iser uses the example of literature that thematizes recursion in order to

illustrate this point, and to suggest that literature gives us very direct access to this key

feature of human culture.

In Sartor Resartus, commonly translated to the recursive “The Tailor Re-

Tailored”, Carlyle presents the Philosophy of Clothes of the fictional German Professor,

Herr Teufelsdrockh. Carlyle does so through the filter of a British Editor who relates the

Clothes Philosophy to an English audience. Iser interprets this duality of narration in the

text as a paradigm of cross-cultural discourse, arguing that “German transcendentalism

is staged in terms of British empiricism and vice versa”, with the effect of exhibiting

how it is that “[t]he interlinking of cultures brought about by a cross-cultural discourse

enacts one culture in terms of the other” (“Cross-Cultural” 263). For Iser, the outcome

is such that the tension between British empiricism and German idealism are maintained,

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to the extent that the dynamic portrayal of the tension between the two is itself made up

of the transactional loops it represents. This unfolds in the maintenance of a distance

that is ensured, paradoxically, by the manifestation of the two cultures:

If empirical criteria guide the takeover of German transcendentalism, an

alien set of references is applied that both dwarfs and enlarges features of

transcendentalism. Something similar happens to empiricism when

transcendentalism provides the criteria. (“Cross-Cultural” 263)

This difference, as a generative description of culture is concluded in Iser’s suggestion

that “no culture is founded on itself, which is evinced not least by the array of

mythologies invoked when the assumed foundation of culture has to be substantiated”

(263). He writes in his introduction to the discussion that this text provides a

paradigmatic example of cross-cultural discourse since such a possibility

cannot be set up as a transcendental stance under which the relationships

between different cultures are subsumed. Instead of an overarching third

dimension, the discourse concerned can only function as an interlinking

network and will assume a shape whose generic features cannot be

equated with any of the existing genres. (“Cross-Cultural” 245)

And Iser’s argument is as follows: “Sartor Resartus is primarily a paradigm of

translatability rather than an actual translation” (“Cross-Cultural” 254). Iser backs this

argument by suggesting that the Philosophy of Clothes is “to be conceived as an

anatomy of representation” since clothing something is “neither a mode of imitation or

nor one of depiction. Although it seems that what is to be clothed must somehow

preexist, this preexistence is never to be ascertained independently of its being clothed”

(255). Since representation assumes there is a given something to represent, by taking

up a position between imitation and depiction, the Philosophy of Clothes “anatomizes

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the process of translatability itself” (255); manifesting the intangible nature of

translatability through the metaphor of clothing. In effect, Iser interprets Sartor Resartus

as a manifestation of emergence. The context of cross-cultural discourse facilitates this

explanation, since cross-cultural discourse functions on the basis of recursive loops that

in their dynamism, generate culture. This process cannot be represented, instead, they

operate as “transactional loops” that

work chiastically, thus converting the ‘black box’ between cultures into a

dynamism, exposing each one to its otherness, the mastery of which

results in change. In this respect the cross-cultural discourse is a means

of mutually supportive self-regeneration of cultures. (“Cross-Cultural”

262)

As noted earlier, Iser has argued that to map the relation of the rise of culture to

the evolution of homo sapiens one must explore “how cultures or cultural levels are

translated into terms that allow an interchange between what is foreign and what is

familiar” (Range 84). He also suggested that the tracing of recursive loops in translation

offered a better way to map this process than hermeneutics. His discussion of Sartor

Resartus is certainly an example of this. But what is not clear in this discussion, is how

Iser maintains his own explanatory distance from the literary work in question.

Regardless of his approach to interpreting Sartor Resartus, Iser’s account is in the end a

translation of the text into a context, or in Iser’s terms, the subject matter into a register.

Iser’s arguments continue to return to the basic presupposition that culture has as its

origin negation itself. In the case of a cross-cultural discourse, this manifests as the

difference generated when one culture faces what it is not. In his coda to the book in

which this essay appears he points out that the discussion did not venture into the

originary works of Gans and Blumenberg, because this would involve accounts of

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anthropology and ethnography and such contextual discussions will have been beyond

the scope of the project at hand. He does however recognize that these “minimally

conceived assumptions” have advantages over myth in accounting for “the self-

generating ramifications of culture” as they “do not reify the rise of culture” (301). He

also argues that in the context of cultural tradition, “[v]ertically conceived, tradition is

transmitted into a present in order to provide continuity and stability; horizontally

conceived, its translation into a present serves to chart open-endedness” (301). These

observations illuminate the extent to which Iser is aware that an account of the vertical

dimension of culture is required, prompting the question as to why this account is not

required in for the language that seems to continue to manifest as the underpinning to

culture and cultural interpretation. He is fascinated with the difference in culture as an

engine for emergence, but his fascination with recursion leaves little room for an

account of the continuity in history: the sequence, which makes up history, in language.

He writes for example that in reading Carlyle he finds that the Philosophy of Clothes is

built upon a historical continuity which is generative of culture. He describes how

mutual translatability might be conceived as the hallmark of culture, not

least because the latter, since the advent of the modern age, can no longer

be grounded in etiological myth. If an impenetrable groundlessness

replaces etiological myth as the mainspring of culture, the necessary

stability can only be provided by a network of translatabilities, as

exemplified by the Philosophy of Clothes. The life of culture realizes

itself in such recursive loops, and it begins to dry up whenever the loop

is discontinued by elevating one of the achievements of its interchange

into an all-encompassing form of representation. Representation runs

counter to translatability, whose ongoing transformations are brought to

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a standstill by equating culture with one of its conspicuous features. The

recursive loop, however, is able to process groundlessness, and as there

is no stance beyond this loop for ascertaining what happens in its

operations, the Philosophy of Clothes presents itself as a paradigm for

spelling out the blue-print of culture. This paradigm has a dual coding: it

makes tangible what analytically remains ungraspable, and as a mode of

translatability it provides access to what is beyond the terms of

empiricism. (“Cross-Cultural” 258-9)

What Iser suggests here is that the vertical dimension of culture is made up of the rich

interplay of past and present. This is a description of emergence, where the looping

itself forms a patterning that orients culture, and generates culture. In this account

history is not concrete, and cannot really be explained as culture, but instead is a

manifestation of culture as it is produced. As he wrote earlier, the Philosophy of Clothes

is,

a kind of shorthand for the patterning and repatterning of human

plasticity. It is initially conceived as a metaphor, because human

plasticity is not accessible in itself. Yet the metaphor turns into a

patterning and thus functions metonymically, as otherwise human beings

elude grasping. (“Cross-Cultural” 256)

To employ a term Gore Vidal created, this is a crypto-generative perspective, since the

metaphor (“initially conceived as”) that underwrites the patterning of culture and

becomes (“turns into a patterning”) metonymic in its function, is a description of the

emergence of language and its carrying forward over time to become history, that

unfolds as human culture. The claim that humans are ungraspable is a restatement of the

fact that we cannot escape language. In sum: Iser’s position can be thought of as

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originary. His categories are elaborations upon this central theme, of the singularity

(unknowable) that recurs in culture, leads to a changing culture based on a singular

structure, and which can only be grasped (explained) by presenting this structure in

terms of language (plasticity). This dynamism is generative. Iser argues that

interpretation is a matter of translation, but is only able to illustrate this point in an

interpretation of the literary work as a paradigmatic manifestation of his own theoretical

description for the origin to culture. In effect, Iser’s emergence is posterior to a

particular account of the origin of culture, rather than being itself a particular

interpretation of the origin of culture. In arguing that the Philosophy of Clothes is “the

blue print of culture”, Iser interprets the text to be an instance of the original attempt

that provides the impetus to cultural emergence, which is effectively an attempt to

control entropy. This is an extension of Geertz’s explanation for culture, as the attempt

of an incomplete human animal to fill the “information gap” between what the body

tells us, and what we need to know to complete the artificial habitat made up of culture.

If, however, this interpretation of the “mainspring” to culture were to be replaced with

an interpretation that does not purport to have a scientific basis, the human “text” and

all subsequent texts legitimately offer themselves as the subject matter of Iser’s cultural

explanation. Iser’s presentation of the “groundlessness” that recursive loops can process,

returns us to the notion that “[r]epresentation runs counter to translatability”, though

ultimately it is the metaphor of plasticity and how the metaphor becomes metonymic in

the sequence of history that enables Iser to interpret the origin of human culture. In

other words, it is the “dual-coding” in language itself, that the originary hypothesis

interprets to manifest the structure of language, and which allows Iser to conclude the

Philosophy of Clothes as a cultural “paradigm has a dual coding: it makes tangible what

analytically remains ungraspable, and as a mode of translatability it provides access to

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what is beyond the terms of empiricism”. Language then, manifests as a model of and a

model for culture. A representation and a performance, an attempt to appreciate the past

in order to construct decision making to deal with that which has not yet been

discovered, in what is to come. If the minimal fiction of the originary hypothesis is an

etiological myth, as Iser himself notes, it is at least self-conscious and designed to

account for the structure Iser finds in culture. Violence is not directly interchangeable

with entropy, but as Iser himself has explained, the deferral of violence is not the limit

to cultural explanation. And furthermore, if emergence can be demonstrated to indeed

be attributable to language, it might also account for a leap inside culture, from the

initial deferral to the management of entropy. But the gap Iser invokes does not require

a biological foundation. It can instead, be the originary singularity, when the sign

emerged to become the previously absent vertical sign-relation to the object. If

representation has come to represent something not yet given, then this is the definitive

movement of the originary sign forward in time to become culture.

What Iser maintains as the necessary difference that drives the self-regeneration

of culture, is tantamount to the différance of language. The application of emergence to

an analysis of cross-cultural discourse in Iser’s interpretation of Sartor Resartus

illustrates this point. What is different is the cultural context to underpin the différance

that establishes the possibility of emergence. As Eric Gans argues,

Derrida characterizes any sign system that generates meanings by means

of a paradigm of differentiated signs, thereby “erasing” the “proper” sign

of its (mythical) originary referent…. The originary generation of

meaning through deferral is the source of all subsequent systems of

differences; of the two components of Derrida’s différance, difference is

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dependent on deferral rather than the other way around. (“Ecriture from

Barthes to GA”)

Gans’s appropriation of Derrida is bound to be surprising. In 1981 in The Origin of

Language, Gans begins his “generative” project by criticizing the uncritical manner in

which the American “scene” of social scientific and anthropological research has

absorbed Derrida’s critique of an account of the origin of language. Gans notes that his

work is reflexive of the philosophical context that gives rise to this scene:

De la grammatologie… makes this skepticism a sine qua non of

philosophical lucidity; past philosophy (“metaphysics”) has done nothing

but seek to fix a point of origin, in an endeavour condemned to endless

repetition because the “origin” is “always already” inhabited by the

search for itself…. In this view (linguistic) consciousness emerges from

(prelinguistic) unconsciousness at so microscopic a rate that it emerges…

(sic) unconsciously. The paradox that underlies Derrida’s agnosticism is

blissfully ignored in the precritical context of American (and not only

American) social science. The present work takes this paradox itself as

its anthropological foundation; it affirms that violence and origin are one,

and indeed that the fear of intellectual violence so characteristic of

contemporary social science is one and the same with the motivating

force behind the creation of language and of culture in general. (ix-x)

At the origin of his own project is the rather violent rejection of Derrida’s assertion of

the “always already” mutually generative nexus of language and consciousness. Yet by

the time of the publication of Signs of Paradox in 1997, Gans writes:

[T]o take the deconstructive position to its extreme turns it into its

opposite. If indeed language from the very first is a trace supplementary

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to a lost presence, so that the event it pretends to commemorate does not

precede it but is in effect coeval with it, as the Son is coeval with the

Father in Trinitary theology – I think this is a fair summary of Derrida’s

position in De la grammatologie – then all theory of writing, of the

supplement, of deferral, is in effect a theory of the originary event. (7)

With this, Derrida’s différance is appropriated by Gans. He is able to employ the

concept to describe the aborted gesture of appropriate that underpins his originary

hypothesis, by pointing out how it is that this abortion is (paradoxically) made into an

“action of a new kind, devoid its direct worldly aim” (27). Here the aim is deferred, thus

pointing toward this deferral a:

[W]orldly realization… by which I refer to the fundamental equivalence,

pointed at by Derrida’s seminal term difference, between differentiation

as marked by the sign and deferral of the mimetic conflict that the loss of

difference risks bringing about. The sign re-presents the object as what

may truly be called an object of desire, now that its potential appetitive

attractiveness is cut off from practical action. (27)

In relation to Iser’s emergence, the difference he holds as necessary to the

recursive loops that continue to unfold through interpretation, must be based on a sign

system. If this sign system that comes to make up the (necessary) symbolic dimension

of culture is to have a vertical relation to that which it signifies, even should it

necessarily erase the possibility of such an act of representation representing anything

given, then it must have been preceded by deferral. An originary deferral precedes

difference, and together these phenomena drive the recursion in culture. The “black

box” between cultures is a difference engine, but it demands a sign system. This is

exhibited in Iser’s observation, that “the cross-cultural discourse is a means of mutually

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supportive self-generation of cultures”. To use Iser’s terms, the difference between

cultural centres can only be converted into “a dynamism, exposing each one to its

otherness” as the patternings in language facilitate the “the mastery” of this otherness.

Difference emerges as the possibility offered in deferral, or as Gans describes it, the

“originary generation of meaning through deferral is the source of all subsequent

systems of differences” (“Ecriture from Barthes to GA”).

This pattern in Iser’s use of emergence is repeated in his discussion of Beckett.

Iser selects Beckett because the recursive features of his writing allow him to present a

direct case for the utility of emergence. Iser argues that “in contradistinction to

representation and reception”, emergence has a particular applicability to an analysis of

how it is that “[n]egation becomes an agent that makes things happen” (1). Iser points

out that Beckett draws the attention of the reader to the negation that provides the basic

impetus in a literary work:

The more intensely this agent operates, the more nuanced the emergent

becomes. But owing to the incessant cancellation of what has come into

being, none of these phenomena can congeal into a product. This turns

cancellation itself into an emergent phenomenon, because by discrediting

what has emerged, it makes virtual realities happen. Beckettian negation

turns emergence into a “thought-provoking reality,” which, of course, is

differently processed by individual readers. However, it is the

performative nature of the text and not the reader that makes such

phenomena happen. (“Erasing Narration” 2)

In this argument we find some further clues as to how Iser applied the concept in the

context of a literary theory. In essence, the applicability is consonant with the structure

and content of the work itself. This seems to be a text-oriented argument, a theme we

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return to below. Iser notes that that which is emergent is provoking at the level of

particular subjective interaction with the text, but makes it clear that he distinguishes

between an implicit performance that resides with the text. The text is a performance,

and the reader processes this performance but this act of reading does not alter this

indelible feature of the text. Iser argues that Beckett’s genius is in his capacity to

perform the negative, by “discrediting” that which emerges through the performance in

the text. Beckett allows Iser to illustrate how it is that the dynamic quality of the text is

indigenous to the text, where for example in Malone Dies:

What is to be erased is the mimetic nature of narration, and this

invalidation is effected by the many “holes” that Beckett “bores” into the

first-person deliberations of Malone, and into the string of stories that

Malone tells himself – a procedure that we shall inspect in due course.

Erasure wipes out the stances that are inscribed into every narrative and

are necessary for the depiction of what it is “about.” Narration that has

been nullified, however, does not actually eliminate what has been

cancelled, so that the discredited narrative makes Malone’s anticipation

of death emerge as an unmediated reality. It is the waiting itself, and not

a conception of what it may mean, that now moves into focus. (“Erasing

Narration” 2-3)

Here Iser makes reference to a letter Beckett wrote in which he expressed the hope that:

the time will come, thank God in certain circles it has already come,

when language is most efficiently used where it is most efficiently

misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least

leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute.

To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it – be it

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something or nothing – begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher

goal for a writer today. (qtd. in “Erasing Narration” 2)

What lurks behind language? This is what Iser attempts to demonstrate in Beckett. But

of course, this is a paradoxical effort. Beckett is playfully suggesting that there is a

“behind” language. In setting up the possibility of some layer to reality that is beyond

language, Beckett points toward the manner in which language itself is the only means

available by which to assemble our humanity. Here, the instrument that bores holes in

language is itself language. If this recursive statement denotes anything, it denotes

nothing. The outcome to such a deferral of meaning is a difference. When Iser argues

that “it is the waiting itself, and not a conception of what it may mean” that becomes

central to the text, he also argues that in the morbidity of the wait for death is experience

through and of language. It follows that if life is defined as the time before our death,

then it is life itself that is focussed upon in this recursion. Again, Iser has selected and

approached the text with the goal of highlighting the recursive loops that culture

consists in. In so doing, his own writing becomes recursive, as highlighted in his

discussion of Beckett’s use of particular narrative devices to highlight negation itself.

The paradoxical quality of Iser’s theory is that by his own description it cannot occur.

When Iser writes:

Malone’s stories make nothingness operative, and as growing

indeterminacy, this seeps back into the narratives. Thus nothingness

presents itself as indeterminacy. However, nothing ‘as’ anything

amounts to a determination of nothingness (10).

Is he wholly serious? His work, if followed literally, maps these loops into nothing:

nothing, save for the loops themselves. It seems Iser is modelling the recursion in his

description. The term “seeps” indicates a playful quality to the description, for the

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reader cannot manage this seeping, without first imagining the looping of the narrative

into itself. The seeping is in effect, a figurative description of the poetics of the recorso

as a spiralling manifestation. In The Range of Interpretation, Iser invokes the poetic

philosophy of Giambattista Vico in his New Science, in order to describe this patterning

in culture as a source of emergence:

History, Vico maintains, is a process of ever-new beginnings, as it

appears to be both linear and cyclical, and such a countervailing

movement is intertwined by what he calls the ricorso…. the ricorso is a

close-up allowing us to perceive the engendering of poetic qualities that

give rise to emergent phenomena in the act of interpretation (150-1).

Here the ricorso is the complex manifestation of the “vortex of the liminal space” Iser

considers the source of the dynamism that unfolds during interpretation of the literary

text. As discussed earlier in relation to translation, Iser defines this “liminal space” as

opening “between the subject matter to be interpreted and what the subject matter is

transposed into…. it marks off the subject matter from the register and therefore does

not belong to either” (Range 146). Iser cites Giuseppe Mazotta who argues “the spiral,

the ricorso… is the simultaneous figuration of closure and openness of a circle that

repeats itself with a difference” (qtd. in Range 150). Budick characterises emergence as

a spiral, not just in terms of the poetic engine that inspires emergence, but the

continuous recursive generation of culture:

This endless movement of recursion is, I think, best thought of as spiral

because, as Iser says, it not only emerges endlessly into the future, but, in

the history of culture, also entails recourse to earlier emergences or

outputs. (“Oedipus’s Blessing” 63-4)

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Iser finds this repetition with difference to be a pattern in culture, and manifesting in

Malone Dies as a means by which to force the process itself out into the open. The

emergent phenomenon is itself indeterminate, and for Iser this is Beckett demonstrating

that behind language is nothing. But this nothing is of course, a generative absence.

Later in his discussion, Iser turns his attention to Beckett’s Texts for Nothing. The

emphasis upon indeterminacy in Malone Dies “reveals the extent to which emergence is

dependent on the interplay of the components that make it happen” because “Malone

did not focus on what the growing nothingness was doing to his stories, whereas the

personal pronoun in Texts for Nothing appears to be striving to make nothing happen”

(“Erasing Narration” 10). Iser argues that Beckett’s “self-annihilating” agent in the story

undoes even the possibility of words denoting or signifying anything, turns them into

“digits that run against one another….This digitalization is a far cry from Malone’s

activity of canceling his own self-inventions. The agent, seemingly anterior to

‘nothing,’ now becomes instrumental in spelling out the presence of ‘nothing’” (11-12).

This leads to the “digitalization [which] allows the emergence of what can never be

encompassed, namely ‘nothing’” (13). There is “nothing behind the emergent to which

it might point” (16). In effect, the tendency for the indeterminacy in the text to “seep”

back into the text that unfolds in Malone Dies, has become “somewhat radicalized” by

the more determined attempts to “make nothing happen” in Texts for Nothing. We are

allowed an insight into the role of language in Iser’s theory, through the metaphor of

“seeping”. This is a phenomenon that manifests inside language, as is reflected when

Iser observes of Malone Dies, that “the signifier refers to nothing that, in turn, ‘seeps’

into the stories, manifesting itself in an endlessly expanding indeterminacy” (16). In

Texts for Nothing, this radical indeterminacy means that “[w]hat remains is the

puncturing of textuality by increasing gaps and pauses. This is a drastic constraint on

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what the words of the text are meant to say, so that the texts peter out into murmurs and

silences” (17). But in the end, this “nothing” is virtualised as something, since the

imaginary potential is momentarily completed as it is negated. It is “erased” even as it is

generated, just as the history of human culture is. As Iser concludes, these texts are:

neither about ‘nothing’ nor a concept of it; instead, it makes ‘nothing’

happen…. agency, narration, and language are anterior to endlessness

and ‘nothing,’ but this anteriority creates a paradoxical situation.

‘Nothing’ is always on the verge of being transformed into something,

which of course it is not. However, without agent or language,

endlessness and ‘nothing’ could never become tangible. Hence the

former are endowed with a duality that typifies the sophistication of

Beckett’s art. The agent has to dismantle itself, narration has to erase

itself, and language has to puncture itself with gaps in order for them all

to undo their respective anteriority. (“Erasing Narration” 17)

This negative, recursive structure Beckett functions in must be the structure of language.

If, as Iser’s analysis indicates, Beckett’s art strips the spiral that both figures emergence

and manifests as the engine for its endlessness, then this is only feasible due to the

deferral that precedes difference. While Iser seems to anticipate this, it is in the

recursion itself that Iser finds the origin of culture, since it is to nothing that all returns.

But beyond this difference, between the tangible emergence of something, as against

nothing, is the origin of language. For even in Beckett, Iser discovers the absence to be

a presence through difference. But this difference does not come before the deferral in

language itself, as the vertical dimension of the sign to that which it signifies (even if

this is nothing) indicates a structure that generates the history of human culture. In other

words, it is language we are attempting to transcend even as we establish that we cannot.

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That literature is virtual – it is hovering between the material and the transcendent – is

precisely its significance. Without language this is not feasible. As Iser describes it, the

“nothing” behind the emergent in Beckett is filled even as it is mentioned in language

itself, and this is the function of the originary hypothesis: to virtualise the negative

(unknowable) which is the “before” culture, into the “third” dimension of language, in

the symbolic.

When Iser writes that Beckett reminds us “emergence is dependent on the

interplay of the components that make it happen” (“Erasing Narration” 10), he is

referring to the components that make emergence happen in the literary text. As

discussed in chapter seven, in his essay “What Is Literary Anthropology? The

Difference between Explanatory and Exploratory Fictions” Iser expresses a key

difference between generative anthropology and literary anthropology based on the

comparison of recursion and play: “Recursion versus play marks the operational

distinction between explanatory and exploratory fictions. Play is engendered by what

one might call ‘structural coupling,’ which forms the pattern underlying the plurality of

fictions in the literary text” (172). Recursion appears to be explanatory and generative,

whilst play is exploratory and literary. This distinction seems to be contradictory with

the role of recursion in emergence. In The Range of Interpretation, Iser writes that:

recursion realizes itself through a play movement by shuttling back and

forth between the familiar and the foreign. The play movement is marked

by a duality, which manifests itself in an ongoing interplay between what

might be termed free and instrumental play. Instrumental play sets out to

achieve its aim in terms of the familiar, whereas free play invalidates the

familiar to a certain degree, thus correcting it and highlighting what still

appears beyond control. The reciprocal inscription of free and

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instrumental play maps out the trajectory along which recursive looping

develops. (114)

Is there an inconsistency here, since recursion realizes itself through play? Perhaps this

is the evidence that emergence cannot be a model of literary fictions, so much as a

model of where literary fictions end during our interpretation of literature. In other

words: we interpret literary fictions in order to explore possible explanations of

responses to fundamental human questions. Therefore, literature enables and allows us

to grasp emergence. When Iser describes emergence through Beckett, he describes the

text as a performance. Explanation is therefore thematized by Beckett in an exploratory

mode. The interplay of the components that make emergence happen constitutes a

performance. The exploratory possibilities that literary fictions allow for the reader, are

intertwined with the explanatory function they ultimately perform; they exhibit the

paralleling intermeshing of literary and generative anthropology.

In Prospecting, Iser writes: “Literature is not self-sufficient, so it could hardly

bear its own origin within itself. What it is, is the result of its function” (264). In

suggesting this originary perspective, he anticipates a turn to the function of literature as

a part of what would become an increasingly elaborated anthropological approach.

Simultaneously warning against discovering anthropological constants in human nature,

Iser describes history in the terms of an early indication of his later focus upon

emergence:

[i]f there were really anthropological constants – and many people

believe that there are – then history would be nothing but an illustration

of them. Instead, historical situations continually activate human

potentials, which issue forth into a history of their own variegated

patternings. These cannot be exclusively attributed either to

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anthropological dispositions or to given circumstances, but they are the

products of an interaction, have a touch of singularity, and always exceed

the conditions from which they emerge. (265)

Iser describes the purpose and function of his anthropology in these lines. The

patternings are only possible because of the conditions from which they emerge, and yet

they exceed them. This is emergence: the “touch of singularity”. The singularity he

discovers to be evident in each scene of human culture is the fundamentally original

possibility underwritten by language itself. If history is an illustration of anything, it is

an illustration of the language with which it emerges, and with which it begins. Iser

makes the point that Beckett “refrains from equating ‘nothing’ with a particular quality.

There can be no ‘nothing as,’ because any such correlation is bound to reify ‘nothing’”

(“Cross-Cultural” 13). In this Iser places the “nothing” as the potential of the literary

fictional, and equally, the capacity of the literary text to demonstrate emergence.

Similarly, for Iser, to draw out a universal description of the human that has as its

definitional boundary a concrete quantum or a specific set of characteristics, is to reify

the reality of being human in a manner that would replace the human potential. This

potential, with its open-endedness, is Iser’s definition of the human. This “plasticity”

manifests through a kaleidoscopically shifting set of possibilities interacting to generate

emergent realities of human culture and experience. To reify is to foreclose on this

potential, and an originary hypothesis can become such a reifying force. But without

actualizing such a potential, under Iser’s own description, there remains only the

potential. Therefore, without actualizing an explanation of language to underwrite this

plasticity, there can be no human, and therefore no plasticity. The potential is in

language. Just as language is both virtual (transcendent) and the potential itself, so is

literature.

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9.3 The text in language

This argument returns us to the challenge to establish why “literature” should be

considered as somehow separable from the remainder of “culture”. If literature is to be

bracketed off from the remainder of culture in terms of a definition of culture in which

the human and culture are interchangeable, and the human begins with language, how is

this bracketing to be achieved? The “cultural turn” has made it necessary for literary

studies to offer a definition of literature that can underpin its bracketing off from

cultural studies in general. The central features about which the discipline is organised

are reliant upon this definition, with the role of canon formulation and the practice of

studying canonised works being the most prominent examples. This central corpus of

texts manifests the problem at hand, in that it attracts the most energetic accusations of

elitism, and the most impassioned defences of a tradition of human knowledge. If

literary studies is to meet this challenge, it must present the history of its endeavours as

capable of being a party to the “progressive” research conducted in the humanities of

the modern university, where progress is measured in the terms of the competition over

which cultural phenomena should be held as worthy of study in the first instance. As

Richard van Oort argues in the introduction to his The End of Literature, the “very idea

of intellectual progress, upon which the modern university is based, depends on the

antagonism between present and past, between scientific or scholarly progress and a

‘conservative’ tradition” (ix). He argues that this conflictual culture, this “familiar

spectacle of rivalry between young and old” is made up of one “essential” conflict:

“over texts and how they are to be interpreted” (ix). In terms of the boundaries to

interpretation, there is a clear difference between the humanities and the social sciences,

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a difference that reflects a more divisive process for deciding which texts should be

interpreted, and how. Van Oort writes that in social scientific research the “text” is a

means of access to the world, to gathering data on existing reality either internal to the

human subject as in psychology, or external as in the structured human experience

engaged in sociology. In the humanities on the other hand, the determination of the

worthy “text” is primarily based around whether the phenomenon at hand possesses

sufficient “intrinsic cultural or aesthetic” value. This value means the text is held up as

“sacred”, or “inviolable” and subsequently “[c]onflicts over which texts deserve most

attention depend upon this notion of inviolability” (ix). In recent years, the conflict over

which “texts” sustain this “inviolable” quality has expanded the range of culture

regarded as “texts”. As we have seen, van Oort argues that this problematic engagement

with “texts” can be more readily negotiated if we recognize that the humanities has an

“originary core”, and that the rejection of this unifying perspective on culture by those

who view such an approach as an “intolerable constraint” on the “self-evident reality of

a plurality of human cultures” is deeply problematic (xii). In so doing, we are

relinquishing the only grounds from which to defend the highly interpretive practice of

the humanities critic, “within a university dominated by the empirical sciences” (xiii).

For van Oort, in order to argue that the interpretive activity of the humanities maintains

a unique ability to distinguish cultural difference, we require a “dialogue on human

origin” (xii), since this is precisely what the scientist cannot provide. Indeed, “[t]he very

possibility of dialogue on this issue depends on the assumption that culture is sharable”,

and this possibility can be supplied by the foundational claim, that the humanities has an

“originary core” (xiii).

Can Iser’s writings participate in such a dialogue? As we have seen, while Iser

applauded the project of generative anthropology, and certainly employed elements of

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originary thinking in his own writing, he was reluctant to embrace the finality of such

an “originary core”. As discussed in chapter two, he argued that there is a danger in

such an approach to cultural anthropology of “reifying” the premise. For Iser, such a

danger demands the caveat that the “methodological guidelines of anthropological

research” be regarded “as fictions by nature” (“What is Literary Anthropology” 160).

As discussed in chapters seven and eight, Eric Gans employs his hypothesis on the basis

that it is to remain hypothetical, and that this minimal originary project is “heuristic”.

Richard van Oort characterised this element of “originary thinking” as “self-consciously

originary and hypothetical” (“Ethnographer” 653). The whole project of literary

anthropology is for van Oort necessarily grounded in an “originary” approach because it

demonstrates that an interpretive account of human culture must employ a non-scientific

definition of the human in order to answer the challenge as to why we should preserve

literature through our scholarly endeavours:

There is a self-referentiality to cultural explanation that makes it

impossible for the inquirer simply to propose a theory and then submit it,

like the scientist, to an arena where it is objectively tested… if culture is

only knowable while one is doing it, then what is to distinguish a theory

of culture from the testing of that theory? The theory is presented as an

objective representation of its object (culture); but if the object is

available only while one is doing the theory, then the theory can be

“tested” only by reproducing the theory. Theory and object collapse into

each other. Theory is both subject and object. It is the product of the

theorist, but it is also an object of study. The science of anthropology is

inseparable from the art of cultural criticism. (“The Culture of Criticism”

462)

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In other words, the humanities require both a means by which to communicate with

itself, and with the scientific institution in which it resides. “Originary” thinking

provides a way to establish a point of departure that meets this requirement, and

illustrates the importance of an interpretive approach to culture that is by definition,

interpretive, since we only know it “by doing it”. Emergence presents a description of

culture that sees the human condition as both constrained by the context in which they

participate, and as contributing to that context via the culture that emerges from this

participation that unfolds as interpretation. In its current articulation, the origin to this

recursive pattern which Iser describes as the “mainspring” to emergence is the need to

manage entropy. This unpredictable patterning leads to all humans being “cultural

artefacts”, but this process is not itself an artefact. Iser’s theoretical position seems to

incorporate, at least tacitly, the futility of his own task, since in attempting to trace the

origin of culture in relation to the evolution of homo sapiens, Iser takes as the origin for

his origin, a particular interpretation of the “reciprocal” relation between the rise of

human culture and the human species. The “information gap” is this particular

interpretation, and like the originary hypothesis, this interpretation of an origin to

culture manifests as an explanation that cannot be tested in the fashion a scientific

explanation can be tested. This is an explanation of culture, and as van Oort points out,

it is itself an object of study, even as it unfolds. This is evident in Iser’s preoccupation

with recursion, and unfolds through his articulation of the position he takes up, which

emphasises the inconclusive and the “basically unrepresentable” human being which

can “only be conceived in terms of the transient figurations of interpretation” (Range

158). Therefore, while Iser may be correct in asserting that hermeneutics and the

hermeneutic circle are not equipped to interpret the rise of culture, it is difficult to see

how the recursive loops that Iser employs to characterise emergence are not also a

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means by which to interpret elements of the human “cultural artefact”. And if we are

interpreting the human cultural artefact in any of its elements, are we not rendering

them “texts”?

Richard van Oort argues that the purpose of adopting an originary approach to

literary anthropology is to meet the demand that the purpose of literary studies be

explained, since “it is no longer possible simply to assume that literature is worth

preserving without also explaining why it must be preserved” (End xiii). This

dissertation has argued that the basic presupposition adopted by Iser in The Fictive and

the Imaginary suggests that his literary anthropology provides a basis for such an

explanation. Iser sets out in The Fictive and the Imaginary to answer his own challenge,

offered in the essay “Towards a Literary Anthropology”, to demonstrate what literature

reveals “to us about our own anthropological makeup” since “literature as a medium has

been with us more or less since the beginning of recorded time” and “its presence must

presumably meet certain anthropological needs” (Prospecting 264). As we have seen,

there are further similarities with the “originary” projects of Gans and van Oort to be

discovered in the literary anthropology of Iser. For example, Iser considers his literary

anthropology to be a “heuristic” account, and on the basis of this caveat sets out to

“chart” a universal description of the manner in which the reader-text interaction

unfolds in order to explore (rather than explain) why we humans need literature. Iser

does, however, set down that the scope of his project is limited to literature, arguing that

“we must dispense with all axiomatic definitions of humanity” in order to provide a

“heuristics for human self-interpretation through literature” since any constructed

elements of this heuristic account should “be linked to those human dispositions that are

also constituents of literature” (Fictive xiii). Stepping beyond this to the larger scope of

a project like generative anthropology is for Iser to step outside a literary anthropology,

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and this requirement for containing his anthropological account inside the context of

literature is central to his avoiding of the adoption of an “originary hypothesis”. He is

concerned over the “reifying” potential of employing an explanation of the human by

elevating it to the position of being equated with reality through repetitious

presupposition of a particular hypothesis during interpretation. Despite this caveat, Iser

seems to provide a universal insight into the human creature through his “charting” of a

literary anthropology. For example, Iser offers a definition of the human in a

deliberately open-ended metaphor, “plasticity”, in order to both figure the human as

“multiform” and denote the “protean” human potential. The three “fictionalizing acts”

that unfold in the literary context and define the literary medium are designed to allow

for an exploration of human possibilities, and characterised as a means by which we

explore our possibilities. This closely parallels the description of language in

“originary” terms, as a “model of” and a “model for”; or as Gans described it, “a

bootstrapping operation” (Signs 1). The latter insight reflects a perspective on language

that Iser shares with Gans, namely, that we are inside language and cannot escape it.

Language is the attempt to transcend; and yet it is futile since language is the possibility

of the human in the first instance. Thus, Iser’s adoption of the mantra from Beckett that

we humans must “Live: or invent”.

As we have seen in chapter eight, Gans makes this argument of Iser’s work by

focussing on his use of “Staging as an Anthropological Category”. For Gans, Iser’s

description of how “the fictionalizing act converts the reality reproduced into a sign,

simultaneously casting the imaginary as a form that allows us to conceive what it is

toward which the sign points” (Fictive 2) is “tantamount to” the emergence of language

in his own originary hypothesis (“Staging” 48). Gans argues that Iser’s use of the

metaphor “staging” to portray interpretation provokes “the key challenge… to construct

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the relation between fiction as mental staging and the stage as the locus of cultural

performance” since it is structured according to the emergence of the linguistic sign

which “stands in a ‘vertical’ representational relationship to lived reality that contrasts

with our ‘horizontal’ appetitive relations with objects on the plane of worldly

interaction” (46). These similarities are in each case pragmatic by their nature, and have

as their common purpose, the achievement of a shared ground upon which scholars can

conduct an inquiry into fundamental human activity of interpretation. This common

purpose does not limit the plurality of human cultures, and van Oort is correct in

asserting that we must presuppose “culture is sharable” in order to defend literary

studies and its primary function: the interpretation of literature. The way forward

involves an examination of the human use for literature by demonstrating its “originary”

basis, and Iser’s work is certainly very useful territory in which to prospect for the

means by which to do so.

The conclusion to Iser’s articulation of “emergence” is a return to the moment

that frees literature from determinacy: the absence of a clear pragmatism in the text.

When Iser asks why we are “incessantly engaged in translating something into

something else” (Range 154), he finds the most common answer, that interpretation has

a pragmatic purpose, to be less than satisfactory. If pragmatic outcomes suffice to

explain interpretation, then the pragmatic outcomes would put an end to “this activity,

whereas in fact it never ends” (154). Iser finds that since interpretation always produces

emergent phenomena, this is a more satisfactory description of interpretation, since

pragmatic intent is one objective of interpretation, but not “the matrix of emergence”

that interpretation allows us to participate in (154). As cited above, Iser articulates this

as a dual structure, where “(a) it indicates the ever-widening ramification of attempts to

bring things about; and (b) whatever comes about is a charting of the reality we live in”

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(154). In the case of literary fictionality, the fictionalizing acts that unfold are a result of

an intention on the part of the literary author, but the precise nature of this intention is

undecidable. Therefore the literary text lacks a clear set of pragmatic boundaries, and

indeed this absence of a clear and pragmatic purpose extends to the reader through the

text. In Iser’s literary theory, we see a continuing return to the argument that literature

allows humans to stage their own possibilities through the process of fictionalizing. In

the terms of emergence, the performance of our possible selves in the confines of

literature is an unusually direct manifestation of Iser’s claim that “humans appear to be

an unending performance of themselves”. Iser’s fascination with Beckett as an

illustrative vehicle for this argument, is evident in Iser’s argument that “the

performative character of the Beckettian text… tends to be ignored when viewed in

terms of both representation and reception, since the latter only gives the reader

something to ‘perform’” (“Erasing Narration” 1). With this statement Iser is asking the

reader to accept the argument that Iser’s own act of reading is not necessary to Beckett’s

performance. As we have seen, in order to make this argument Iser lays bare the

workings of Beckett’s texts, in an activity which is clearly interpretive. This argument

could be mistaken for an unselfconsciously circular one, if it weren’t a part of Iser’s

own performance of the recursive loops he describes. Iser’s interpretive work is for its

own part, at least partially literary. It has a dual structure, just as Iser argues the

“Beckettian text” does. This allows Iser to both expose and figure the patterns in culture

he presents through his theory. While this strategy provides Iser’s own theory-as-text

with a capacity to perform that which it describes, it also leaves open the question as to

the boundary between literary and non-literary writing. If Iser’s work is playfully

crossing these boundaries in order to demonstrate the dynamism of the Beckettian text,

how are we to interpret this purpose? And such a challenge to the pragmatic boundaries

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of Iser’s interpretation leaves us wondering: if the interpretation that generates

emergence in the literary setting is not specifically pragmatic, is this the source of the

difference between interpretation leading to emergence in general, and interpretation

leading to emergence in the literary setting? In the case of Iser’s theory, the answer may

be mapped through formality like genre, but in critical interpretation this differentiation

is eventually anchored by the label itself. That which claims to be theory is read as a

primarily expository work, and that which claims to be literary is read as open-ended.

Perhaps this is the definition of literature emergence allows for, where the literary can

lead to cultural explanation through interpretation, but in itself is a very direct

manifestation of the “unending performance” humans deliver. Or to put it in terms of

intention and emergence, “interpretation as an activity to make phenomena emerge

remains inconclusive… because we are in the midst of life and always seeking to lift

ourselves out of our entanglement” (Range 157).

This “entanglement” is certainly figuratively portrayed in Iser’s cybernetic

modelling of interpretation. In his description of emergence in The Range of

Interpretation, Iser argues that the relationship of the register40 to the subject matter

transposed can be thought of as taking up a position on a continuum marked off on one

side by a rendering of the subject matter as “subservient” to the register, and on the

other by “differentiating the register when the subject matter is meant to be perceived in

all its complexity” (151). No matter where on this scale the act manifests, there is the

potential for “disturbances” that unfold as a result of the pragmatic “structural coupling”

of the subject matter with the register. These are “an inevitable consequence of any

structural coupling” given that the register makes “inroads” into the subject matter in

order to open access to the material and “through its very intervention occasions

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disturbance” (151). These Iser compares with the “noise” that “theorists of self-

organizing systems employ as a metaphoric portrayal of “something uncontrollable”

that emerges during this pragmatic process of intervention (152). This “noise” must be

processed somehow, and for Iser this processing “makes something emerge that is

different from what has been coupled” (152). As discussed above, interpretation opens

up a “liminal space” during the transposition it entails, and for Iser this means

interpretation is a “performative act, rather than an explanatory one” (Range 7). This is

so since explanation presupposes a “frame of reference” against which to validate the

result of the explanation, while performance “brings about its own criteria” that allows

us to “participate in whatever is highlighted” during interpretation (7). Interpretation

unfolds as a “liminal space” during translation, and this space is a product of the

difference such a translation relies upon, between the “subject matter to be interpreted

and the register brought to bear” (5). Indeed, the performance of translation drives itself

in a recursive fashion, since the paradoxical condition of the “liminal space” of

translation “energizes the drive to overcome” the very difference that allows it to

manifest (6). Iser also expresses this in terms of a capacity to generate “its own power”

since “the ineliminable residual untranslatability” involved in translation “drives the

performance” to continue (Range 153).

Iser’s writings highlight the performative quality of interpretation and allow for

a shift in emphasis in assessing the interpretation of literature as “criticism”. He argues

that the scope of interpretation is not limiting or limited, but open-ended and the manner

in which this performative activity is generative of “its own criteria” – his basic defence

of a performative instead of explanatory perspective on interpretation – seems to be a

position adopted against an originary perspective, which Iser sees as functioning in a

40 The “register” is discussed in chapter six, and chapter eight.

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basically explanatory mode. However, in Iser’s model of interpretation as translation the

“presupposed” criteria for explanation also demands an end to interpretation, since a

particular context of translation cannot for pragmatic reasons proceed ad infinitum. This

is not Iser’s argument when he suggests that interpretation is not entirely pragmatic. He

argues that interpretation continues, as it is a basic necessity of the consciousness that

human experience consists of, and the purpose of consciousness is the open-ended

question we pursue through language. If language were to cease, our humanity would

cease, but this does not mean interpretation is pragmatic. That is, of course, unless we

conclude there is some purpose to being human in the first instance, a proposition that

returns us to the paradoxical possibility of transcending language in order to establish an

answer to this question.

Iser’s thinking does not seem very different to originary thinking. As discussed

in chapters eight and nine, the parallels between Iser’s basically generative approach,

and the “originary thinking” of generative anthropology are compelling. Iser’s ongoing

adherence to an emphasis of the negative provides a clear illustration of this, and his

assertion of a non-pragmatic function for interpretation that never ends is also an

example of this, since interpretation must continue in its attempt to fill a void it cannot

fill. However, where Iser insists that the void which defines the possibility of the human

and literature be maintained in order to avoid “reifying” such a proposition, Gans argues

that it must as result of this basic interpretive human function be itself interpreted. The

emergence of the originary sign in Gan’s description of a hypothetical originary scene is

just such an attempt. By interpreting our own origin, we take responsibility for an

account of the structure in language and culture. The linguistic sign which emerged as a

gesture of deferral manifests the singularity that provides the potential, or negative, or

infinite category to allow for the first act of interpretation. This interpretation comes in

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the form of an appreciation of difference. With this first gesture comes the

intersubjective recognition that means that instead of subject and model we have the

mutually understood deferral and difference that will be the basic constituents of culture.

Interpretation carries the recognition that we cannot define the human except in

language, and describing language using language is ultimately a paradoxical exercise.

The pragmatic paradox that gives rise to the emergence of the sign is the simultaneous

desire for the object and imperative to resist this desire to avoid violent conflict.

Therefore language as a definition of the human is itself recursive, built on

interpretation and continuously demonstrated as the catalyst for the emergence of

culture. The originary hypothesis is itself a fiction: an interpretation of our origin.

Therefore, Gans’s parsimonious articulation of his hypothesis is a performance or a

staging of our origin that allows interpretation to unfold as a self-conscious attempt,

recognised as flawed, to explain the human in language and as language. This is the

definition of emergence: the model of and model for culture. Humans generate these

representations and are a product of a particular set of cultural circumstances. Therefore,

any movement toward transcendence is paradoxical, whilst language itself is a

transcendent possibility. It is only feasible through a vertical movement of the sign

beyond that which it signifies, such that the sign can be carried forward, meaning it is

no longer attached to the materiality of the culture it allows for in the first instance. Yet

without it, there is no possibility for human culture, no symbolic texts would be

available. The sign is the first culture, the first example of the emergent phenomenon

which must have continued to emerge to this moment, and with this gesture emerges in

the next.

It seems reasonable to conclude that Iser’s own activities of interpretation cannot

be mapped at some point on a continuum defined by the difference between explanation

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and exploration. Instead, they are a point of departure which highlights the

shortcomings of this continuum. If exploration and explanation allow for a difference to

be maintained, then dynamism of this difference is what Iser’s interpretation allows us

grasp. While Iser claims to be on an exploratory mission in his literary anthropology,

his many acts of translation (even translating translation itself) are inevitably

explanations. Paradoxically, if Iser is correct and reification is a potential outcome of

explanation, the danger remains (since his performance of the process may itself

become so convincing) that it is taken to be the reality. Reality formulation is

nevertheless, a process that demands translation, and demands a perpetual process of

interpretation. To reify is to valorise a particular account, but what if that particular

account is focussed upon the prevention of reification? Arguably, this is the intention of

an originary perspective: to impose the kind of self-consciousness that constantly

(recursively) indicates the origin of the explanation in the origin of culture. If an

originary perspective has a particular bent, it is a turn back upon itself, as it points

toward the minimal fiction it tolerates, and if Gans is parsimonious, it is at the expense

of histrionics rather than at the expense of recognising that this explanation (this

interpretation) is itself a performance, and is itself a scene of human culture.

In attempting to “rescue” emergence from Iser’s adoption of Geertz’s biological

definition of the human we are doing what van Oort insists we must do in “The Critic as

Ethnographer”. His argument is that defining the human in terms of culture cannot

simply be empirical, expressed in terms of biological or evolutionary origins. Culture is

also symbolic, and the origin of the symbolic. If the symbolic is simply a bridge to the

biological, as the external manifestation of an “information gap”, then as van Oort

argues, the dual nature of culture is dissolved. It is simultaneously a representation and

a performance, or a model of and a model for, and “in reducing the categories of

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cultural interpretation to those of biological explanation, Geertz eliminates, in one

stroke, the fundamental interpretive crux of all culture, namely, the paradox between

representation and performance, ‘model of’ and ‘model for’” (End 98). Iser anticipates

this problematic conflation by emphasising the recursive loops that make up culture,

and the interpretation of culture, but he does so in order to escape the limitations of

hermeneutics. His introduction of cybernetics is designed to account for the emergent

nature of culture, as always already new and generative of the new. But this is not a

resolution to the initial problem of circularity, which is created by the lack of a point of

origin for representation. Iser attempts to replace this origin for representation, and

thereby the symbolic, by pointing toward the originary mechanism of the attempt to

control entropy. But the means by which this control is established (the symbolic) must

have itself emerged at some point. It is not surprising that this is tantamount to Gans’s

articulation of the originary mimetic crisis. The entropy that governs the future

decisions in Iser’s concept of emergence is the anticipation of violence that inspired the

emergence of language in Gans’s originary scene. The build up of mimetic tension is

building entropy. The animal hierarchy that maintains order and prevents violence is

threatening to break down. The individuals of the group are too valuable to be sacrificed.

These are the conditions that pave the way for human language, the language that is the

representation which defers the potential violence and generates the community. Here is

the origin of culture, and of history, as each subsequent scene of human culture

manifests the structure of the first. In other words, the emergence of the linguistic sign

is the first instance of emergence. To take this one step further: the emergence Iser

charts is an application of cybernetics to solve the problem of the circularity that is

inevitable when one interprets the human using a symbolic means, by adopting a wholly

scientific explanation of the origin to the symbolic. Representation and performance are

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conflated to become the singular extension of a biological explanation for the symbolic,

using the symbolic. This comes to a head for Iser, when he attempts to distance himself

from the interpretation of “texts”. Iser points out, quite rightly, that there “is no text to

be deciphered” when one attempts to find the bridge between the evolution of homo

sapiens and the rise of culture. There is only the point of origin which is equal to the

attempt to control entropy. For Iser, the escape from hermeneutic circularity can be

mapped to this point of origin. But as van Oort points out, there is no escape from the

interpretation of texts, all interpretation is the interpretation of texts, and the origin of

interpretation is the origin of the human, since the object of all interpretation is

“humanity itself”, where the definition of the human is in culture, and culture is made

up of “texts” (End 91). As van Oort makes this argument, he returns to the simple and

unavoidable anthropological observation that “the human is most succinctly defined as

the creature which represents itself by its culture, which is to say, but its texts” (End 91).

9.4 Conclusion

Emergence emphasises the processes of interpretation over the texts these

continually produce as culture. This approach signals a significant change in Iser’s

work; a change that seems to involve a shift toward a more communal perspective on

the process of cultural production rather than a direct extension of his earlier emphasis

upon the individuated subjective interaction between reader and text. There appear to be

two motivating theoretical reasons for Iser’s move to emergence. The first, we might

suggest, is that Iser presents emergence as a resolution to the immateriality of the

imaginary. In the triad that underpins Iser’s literary anthropology, the real-fictive-

imaginary, the imaginary is a potential and has no particular form. The “protean”

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manifestation of the various forms of culture, including the materiality of culture, has a

role to play in how this triad manifests. But what is not entirely clear is the manner in

which the potential of the imaginary generates the tangible forms and formats of culture

that constitute a given context. Instead, the real-fictive-imaginary attempts to

demonstrate why humans need literature, and what literature reveals of our makeup.

Involved in this account is a description of how we interact with literature, but not how

particular practices or artefacts are generated. Emergence, for example, allows Iser to

discuss the “Beckettian text” as implicitly performative, while the real-fictive-imaginary

can only anticipate this possibility. The second, which relies upon the first, is a

changing attention from the individuated experience of reality to the larger history of

the human experience of and participation in a cultural context. The latter requires some

cultural output, and these emergent phenomena are in part made up of the materiality of

culture. But in its current form, Iser’s resolution to this issue is not complete. Sanford

Budick notes that up until the development of this conceptualisation of cultural

processing in the form of a recursive looping, or “spiralling” Iser:

continued to locate the plurality of the anthropological dimension largely

in the range of possibilities that are open to the individual interpreter. In

his project of emergence the idea of an endless recursion within the

cultural entity bought with it the possibility of a new kind of plurality of

interpretation. A literary anthropology of this sort could show how

culture was continually recreated by a recursive unfolding beyond the

individual interpreter. In its fully specified form Iser’s anthropology has

profound implications for how we participate in the being that, via

negativity and the imaginary, we are presently helping to bring about.

Iser, I believe, had begun to explain how the greatest works of art and

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culture enact an interactive, transformative, and emergent way of being

in recursion. (“The Emergence of Oedipus’s Blessing” 64)

It would be interesting to discover how Iser would respond to this claim that he had

begun to “explain” a way of “being” that reflected the broader human footprint of such

phenomena as works of art. It is tempting to suggest that he would have been concerned

about this level of anticipation of a book on “emergence”, and would have claimed that

he was not seeking to explain anything and that instead he was contributing to an

exploration of “being” and the manner in which literature mediates human possibilities.

Budick himself notes Iser’s “habitual self-effacement and profound suspicion of

inspirational claims” (83).

It seems Iser’s resistance to an interpretation of the human, such as the one

offered in the originary hypothesis, is built on the concern that such an explanation

ceases to recognise its own role in being. In Iser’s apprehension of “explanation”, it

forecloses upon dynamic nature of “being”. Or put another way, explanation stops being.

An exploration is of being, and contributes to while participating in being. This

continuous process is what emergence is constitutive of and attempting to portray in

Iser’s own “performance”; and it is this dynamic human potential he presents through

his use of metaphors like “plasticity”. Iser’s cybernetic account of the ongoing process

of emergence is itself transformative, contributing to “emergence” by itself “emerging”,

as it describes the phenomenon and is the phenomenon simultaneously. The possibilities

in an emphasis on interpretation are in and of this self-conscious presentation as a

“model of” and a “model for” culture. For Iser the boundaries of this possibility are

presented through the various contexts in which the human phenomena manifest, and

his literary anthropology is necessarily limited to the exploratory context of the subject

matter itself, literature. This boundary setting lends it a strong relevance to the role of

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substantiating the significance of literary interpretation, but problematic in that Iser’s

understanding of literature is not simply representative, but preoccupied with how the

literary medium enables the production of the new. Once we experience something

directly, we need not produce it in the imaginary, but if we read of it then we must

produce a new version of it on the stage of the imagination. Representation, then, in a

literary setting, where the reader experiences the new, is productive of the real in the

imaginary, and is thereby no longer representative, but participates in a recursive

looping made up of cycles of activity which have as a necessary feature of their function,

further cycles of activity. Budick defines recursion in the following terms:

a procedure is called recursive if one of its steps calls for a new running

of the procedure. It is clear that what Iser means by recursion in literature

and culture is more complex: namely, it is a process of transformation in

which each emerging form or output, with its framed negativity,

becomes a new input. (63)

As discussed above, Iser characterises the role of recursion in “emergence” in terms of a

“spiral”, such that subsequent procedures are informed by earlier outputs. Budick argues

that the spiral is an appropriate representation of the nature of this “endlessly self-

transforming” process in the context of literature since it is made up of an “endless

movement” which “not only emerges endlessly into the future, but, in the history of

culture, also entails recourse to earlier emergences or outputs. These earlier emergences

become inputs into succeeding moments of transformation and emergence” (63-4). The

contrast in this model of interpretation as “emergence” to his earlier work is to be

discovered in the collective description of the processes presented. Budick suggests that

this is an exciting development, since Iser had previously focussed upon the individual’s

immediate experience of reading, “[q]uite differently, in Iser’s theory of emergence, the

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negativity within recursion enables an emergence that is multifocal, not focused in the

reader” (75). In other words, this final phase of Iser’s writings seemed to adopt a

collective description of culture. If emergence is an attempt at a resolution to the

immateriality of the imaginary, the mechanism of this attempt is a movement from the

individual to the dynamics of individual subject and cultural context. The reader is not

isolated with the text, but a participant in a community, constituted by the recursion that

manifests at the complex manifestation of the symbolic in the particular formats that

constitute a continually emerging culture.

This comment reminds us that a primarily figural description of culture, of

representation, and of the subjective participation in cultural production has its limits.

Ironically, when we overstep these limits, we move beyond the exploratory mode of

discovery and into the explanatory mode Iser ascribes to generative anthropology. If we

adopt fictionalizing as an anthropological category in order to establish a clear

distinction between literature and the remainder of culture, we do so in the knowledge

that it points toward the unknowable as a definition of the human. A key issue in literary

anthropology is whether we adopt a particular interpretation of this unknowable

boundary to the human. This thesis has suggested that in order for a hypothesis of an

interpreting human to function as a successful and self-conscious defence of the

significance of literature, the interpreter must interpret not just culture, but the origin of

culture. Therefore, an originary hypothesis must be presented in some form, and the

reader must adopt just such a definition for the human. This minimal fiction points

toward the indefinite quality of being, which for Iser is best described in terms of the

indefinite and dynamic boundaries to play. Even in his articulation of “emergence”,

with its “multifocal” movement beyond the reader, it is at the chaotic edges that his

systemic description of interpretation attains its closest presentation of the human, for

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play “is engendered by what one might call ‘structural coupling,’ which forms the

pattern underlying the plurality of fictions in the literary text” (“What is” 172).

Recursion is explanatory, and play exploratory, yet the dynamics of instrumental and

free “play maps out the trajectory along which recursive looping develops” (Range 114).

What emerges from this play is following such a trajectory, such that culture appears to

emerge in the pattern underlying fiction. In our attempts to demarcate the value of

literary “texts” as units of symbolic culture worthy of our attention during formal

activities of interpretation, fiction remains as a potent category for discovering the

human significance of literature, and literary studies. The fictionalizing acts are just so:

a map for the grounds upon which a sturdy defence of literary studies can proceed.

In sum, Iser himself does not seek to escape recursion, only to perform it. This

makes his work into a particular type of text, and leaves open the question as whether

this is by his own definition, a literary or expository text? Playing with this boundary is

part of what gives Iser’s writings their capacity to challenge existing theory. However,

if Iser’s theory is to remain sans an account of the origin of language that moves beyond

the basic structure of negation, it must remain literary. However, once supplied with one,

it is expository. Under latter conditions, Iser’s theory can take responsibility for the

ground it takes up a position upon, without this ground being the ephemeral negative of

a biological foundation for human culture. Furthermore, the complexly articulated

account Iser provides for such important human phenomena as the process of

fictionalizing can take on their full weight as expositions of the human machinery. In

the context of the significance of literature and literary studies, the categorical

descriptions Iser has developed to extend on these foundational anthropological insights

offer a rich pathway forward for research.

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Conclusion

This thesis has presented a particular interpretation of the literary anthropology

of Wolfgang Iser. The purpose has been to demonstrate the relevance of Iser’s writings

to contemporary literary studies. The chapters move through three phases, with the first

made up of chapters one, two and three, which provide an expository discussion of the

categories that make up Iser’s literary anthropology, drawing primarily on his major

work on the topic, The Fictive and the Imaginary. The second phase, made up of

chapters four, five and six, presents a review of the reception of Iser’s literary theory by

Anglo-American literary studies practitioners in order to demonstrate the context that

led Iser to pursue a literary anthropology. The third phase, consisting of the final three

chapters, interprets Iser’s literary anthropology as a potential component of

contemporary literary studies by attempting to ground it using the originary hypothesis

embraced by generative anthropology.

A central argument of this dissertation has been that a through-going theme in

Iser’s oeuvre is the function and structure of interpretation. In his “reception” aesthetics,

this is focused in the reader-text interaction. In his literary anthropology, Iser shifts to a

focus upon the fictionalizing acts that manifest in the text. These are a result of the

activity of the author, but are always a manifestation of a potential reader. Indeed

fictions are attempts to represent interpretation of a given world, and are fictions

precisely because they are not that which they represent. In expository fictions, these

representations point toward the given world, even though they are representations of a

particular interpretation of the given world. In the literary setting these fictions disclose

themselves as fictional or manifest “as-if” they were representations of a given world.

Matthews 390

Literature therefore manifests this primary human procedure of fictionalizing in a

unique fashion, allowing us to grasp how language provides an interface between the

human subject and reality. The function of interpretation is fundamental to the human,

indeed definitive of the human for Iser, who argues that “[w]e interpret, therefore we

are” (Range 1). This position leads Iser, eventually, to suggest that humans are a

product of their cultural context, and generative of the culture that emerges and makes

up this context in a dynamic, interactive and ongoing fashion. The engine of this

dynamic human condition that appears to function on the basis of recursive loops is the

continuous interpretation that is necessary to the human experience. If interpretation

ceases, then so does the human.

What are the origins of this interpretation? Iser considers all interpretation to be

based on acts of translation. Translation is itself a recursive phenomenon, where the

human subject transposes the subject matter according to a register that is made up of

the new context. The subject matter and the register are each modified during the

procedures of translation, which involve a movement back and forth between the

subject matter and the register as each is updated in order to generate a graspable

modification of the material to be translated. In order that such procedures can unfold,

we must assume the human subject executing the translation is in command of symbolic

signs capable of mediating these virtual transactions. With this observation, we arrive at

the key issue: how does Iser account for the origin of this vertical relation between the

sign and that which it symbolizes? For without this explanation, we have no answer for

the subsequent but not lesser issue, as to how the sign becomes the symbolic dimension

that underpins the coterminous human language and culture.

This absence is not lost on Iser, who continues to resist the necessity for such an

explanation. Indeed, it is arguable that the key marker of his work is the recursion this

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blank creates. It has been argued the blank means Iser’s work is finally of a generically

difficult type. By his own description, he has actively discouraged proselytes and

perhaps his refusal to take responsibility for a particular explanation of the vertical

dimension of the sign is designed to maintain a dynamic in his work that will always

already hold the reader at a distance. Taking up his descriptions of particular categories

is very difficult, and the current thesis has concluded that without the addition of an

originary hypothesis to account for the emergence of the linguistic sign, his literary

anthropology must be considered incomplete as a “theory”.

These observations present challenges to the reader of Iser, who by all accounts

was a very collegial scholar, and perhaps it is in the interest of collegiality that Iser

eventually traces his theory of the origin of culture, no matter how indirectly, to a

biological source. As van Oort characterized it in his essay “Crisis and Collegiality”,

[t]he idea of collegiality – of one’s interaction with others in the

professional workplace – is a profane concept modeled on the idea of

free linguistic exchange. A good colleague participates in a process of

reciprocal exchange – a conversation – that produces a whole greater

than the sum of its parts. (158)

Profane, since this is a reciprocal exchange, as against a sacred arrangement in which

the individual is “a speck in the face of the infinite” (158). These observations form part

of an originary analysis of the conduct of scholarly endeavour in the humanities. In an

application of the originary hypothesis that demonstrates its sweeping implication, van

Oort argues that the sociological categorization, and definition, of literature in terms of

“high” and “low” culture reflects the originary scene of language:

The origin of the high/low distinction depends upon an opposition that is

not between individuals or groups of individuals, but between the entire

Matthews 392

human community and its sacred other. It is the scandal of our mutual

exclusion from the sacred that motivates us to imagine substitutes for it –

and to resent those who appear to have usurped it. (164)

In effect, the critical interpreter in all parts of the humanities is a participant in this

scene. For van Oort, just as in the origin of language, the sacred is a central, if “muted”,

element of the exchange between “professors of literature” (159). In the discourse of the

decline of literary studies a central concern is clinging to a definition of literature that is

an example of such a substitution for the originary sacred. Rather than resent the

disturbance of this centrality, collegiality must take on the self-reflexivity of an

anthropological perspective, by building recognition of common ground. Indeed, for

van Oort these trends signal an opportunity rather than a crisis. Since the “demise of the

old high culture opens the way not just to popular culture and the market-driven

entertainment industry, but to the theory of culture” and indicate that theory “in the

humanities must learn to become originary, which is to say, minimally anthropological

rather than maximally political and institutional” (166).

This is a rationale for a literary anthropology, in which collegiality demands that

we take responsibility for the definitions of key categories that can open up this

common ground; therefore collegiality must demand a definition for the human. Iser

presents this in the form of his cybernetic account of culture, but simultaneously

maintains his emphasis upon the negative, or the blanks that define human culture.

While culture emerges as a result of the incomplete human animal attempting to

generate its own artificial habitat, the history of culture has no hard narrative to hold it

together, no concrete “mainspring”. Instead, it has only groundlessness itself. For Iser

this groundlessness gives rise to complex networks of interacting cultural phenomenon

that make up our history, and in effect it is groundlessness itself that generates a

Matthews 393

nebulous but dynamic interaction of past and present. At this juncture Iser presents

another of his commonly adopted strategies: his emphasis upon process over text. In his

systems-oriented description of culture there is an implied claim that he is moving

beyond the interpretation of texts, yet the interpretation of texts seems to take up a great

deal of his attention. The gravity of this issue appears to have had a long running role to

play in his literary theory: his use of literary examples has confounded and irritated

readers in an ongoing fashion. This is in no small part due to his challenges both to

existing definitions, and to the notion that definition can take on a concrete form.

Definition for Iser is best achieved by deferral. Rather than give a particular account of

the material conditions of a category, he prefers to emphasise the various agents

interacting in a context. Human subjects and the processes they are engaged with to

underpin these interacting systems are therefore to be understood in terms of dynamics,

rather than particular outcomes. These outcomes are typically material culture, the

coherent units that represent culture and that are commonly described as texts. For Iser,

the text is a participant in a dynamic interaction, rather than a particular unit of meaning

that represents a concrete element of the human. Instead, the possible texts that are

generated manifest the manifold plasticity of the protean human possibilities. The result

of this resistance in Iser’s work is a resistance to Iser’s work. When Iser’s readers see

him illustrating his points with particular interpretations of literary works, they object in

what we might describe as a refusal to allow Iser to “have his cake and eat it too”.

Iser entangles himself in metaphor, by pointing out that this duality is precisely

the point. In his literary anthropology, plasticity is his metaphor of choice. He uses

plasticity to describe the potential for humans to manifest, just as he presents his

interpretations of literature as illustrations of his arguments. When Iser interprets, it is

an example of a performance of reading. This is how he has his cake and eats it; by

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suggesting that this interpretation is an interpretation, rather than the interpretation. This

thesis has attempted to establish that he has earned his cake, in his very detailed

accounts of the categories he sets out to articulate. In the course of completing this task,

we have not attempted to use his interpretations as a model, since they do not model a

technique, but instead demonstrate a purpose. Ironically enough, Iser argues that reading

literature is not based on any particular focus and pragmatic goal, since the literary text

does not have a clear authorial intention. Consequently, intentionality is a source of

indeterminacy in the text. Indeterminacy is the source of the dynamism in the text, but

also the underpinning to his argument that the reader does not read literature as one

reads an expository text, namely, to discover something in particular. If we were to

evidence a particular perspective on literature by interpreting literature, we would not be

interpreting Iser any longer, but providing another instance of that which he has already

illustrated. Instead we have examined literary discourse as a context for the

interpretation of the theory of Iser, with the intention of resituating literary criticism in

the terms of his literary anthropology.

In identifying Iser’s literary anthropology as a theoretical text we are forced to

reflect upon the nature of theory as itself a text available for interpretation. The role of

literary criticism is primarily determined by the practices involved with interpreting

literary texts, and there has been a growing anxiety associated with this task. This

anxiety is in part caused by the difficulty a critic faces in defining what the literary text

is made up of, and why we should be studying it all. The undecideability of the text, in

terms of its materiality, points toward a definition that is based upon use. However, if

Iser’s work leads us toward a conclusion in this competition between process (use) and

form (materiality), the conclusion is that the undecideability of the text is itself a key

feature of literature. The literary text is defined as that which is interpreted by the

Matthews 395

literary critic, and while theory provides the means of access to the text, text and theory

are simultaneously interpreted, and indeed, telescoped through the practice of literary

criticism. Iser’s writings provide a series of categories that can equip literary criticism

with an expanded toolkit, and can facilitate a response to the challenges associated with

attempting to demonstrate the worth of literary studies. The imaginary is presented by

Iser, as a solution to the problematic opposition of reality and fiction in defining the

literary medium. We are now, in our institutions and in our positioning within these

institutions, challenged to articulate the unique context of the literary, and why we

appear to need it. The triadic account that Iser offers, in the real-fictive-imaginary,

allows him to open the medium to inspection in terms of the processes it facilitates, that

appear to meet basic human needs. However, in articulating these categories Iser has

generated a series of ambiguities that compel the critical reader to conclude that his

work is itself performative, as he claims the literary text is performative. He falls back

on the figures and processes he discovers in literature itself, and in so doing casts his

own writing as at least in some part literary. While this is not a new observation, it leads

to new places in the current discussion, where we have attempted to suggest this

reliance upon the figurative and performative elements of language in an expository

setting leaves us trapped in deferral. Iser seeks to defer with no point of origin for this

deferral. Most significantly, it is the absence of an explanation of how the human begins

in the language that we have attempted to address.

In employing the originary perspective of generative anthropology, the current

thesis has presented a strictly delimited account of the categories so far articulated by its

practitioners. In particular, the aesthetic and moral implications of the originary

perspective have been almost completely elided in favour of an emphasis on the basic

structure offered by Gans’s articulation of the originary hypothesis. The aim has been to

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offer a means by which to ground Iser’s literary anthropology in a clearer account of the

vertical dimension of language. The vertical dimension allows the sign to transcend the

world of objects, and point toward the history of its own use, thus becoming the

possibility of human culture. Moving beyond this focus, we might discover a deeper

significance in Iser’s categories in the terms of generative anthropology. For example, a

phenomenon that goes undiscussed is Adam Katz’s description of “firstness”. Katz

borrows the term from Charles Peirce, and in the setting of the originary scene, argues

that there must have been a first instance of an individual who aborted their gesture of

appropriation. Gans describes the implications of this discovery:

firstness attaches to the one who by first renouncing his desire

inaugurates the becoming-meaningful of its object. In the originary scene,

the first begins the process of conversion whereby the aborted gesture of

appropriation becomes the first sign. (“On Firstness” 42-3)

The implications of firstness are far-reaching. This is a very particular statement about

culture in terms of morality and the structure of language, for without firstness there can

be no intiation of the deferral of resentment. And yet, this deferral is the evidence of the

originary resentment, in that firstness always inspires the resentment it defers. Gans

captures this in the mordant observation, “if I am first, you can at best be second” (41).

The implication is that the resentment language defers, language also ensures is

generated. Gans maps this deferral onto the “rhetoric of resentment” that he finds can be

anticipated in generative anthropology: “[t]he originary hypothesis offers the sole

‘neutral’ ground, prior to any historical division, on which the analysis of this rhetoric

may be carried out” (52). A key argument against the study of high culture in the

context of the texts that make up the canonized works of literature is the violence it

begets by virtue of its “exclusory” influence. Addressing this exclusion can be achieved

Matthews 397

via an originary analysis of the “rhetoric of resentment” that constitutes this division.

The goal of such a task is to understand the human significance of the phenomena by

adopting a perspective that can come before the language of resentment itself. Literary

anthropology can map the emergence of resentment in terms of the rhetoric itself, and

the manifestations in the texts we take to represent culture as history.

Instead of this approach to a history, we have focused upon grounding Iser’s

claims that literature provides a unique opportunity to grasp representation as

performance. Iser suggests humans cannot step outside themselves to describe their own

condition (we are, but do not “have” ourselves), and so must perform their possible

selves and representation, he suggests, is an example of this performance. Iser argues

that since literary fictions disclose their fictional status, they represent a world “as-if” it

were real. This literary reality allows the reader a unique opportunity to explore the

challenges of being human, since here the reader can stage their own possible selves.

Iser argues that the literary fictionalizing acts of selection, combination and self-

disclosure create a dynamic relation between the literary and extra-literary real. Here

elements of the extra-literary reality are reproduced in a new context, generating a

necessary movement to and fro between real and possible worlds. These fictionalizing

acts are performed by the author, and may eventually be enacted by the reader. Reader

and author are participants in the staging of human possibilities, and this performance

can only be grasped as a potential Iser attempts to encompass in his description of the

imaginary. Since this performance is not designed to represent a given world, but a

possible world, it is not entirely pragmatic. Here the intention of the author cannot be

completely determined, only hypothesized. By extension, the act of reading is not

constrained by an expository purpose. In other words, the performance is bracketed off

Matthews 398

as a performance, thus pointing towards itself as a manifestation of this primary human

procedure.

Iser makes these arguments as a part of attempting to determine why literary

fiction exists, and what it reveals of our makeup. In his description of fiction, Iser

attempts to move beyond the ontological complication of dealing with the literary object

by focusing on literary discourse, but he cannot move beyond the material text entirely.

For example, he insists that the literary medium can be identified by its adherence to

generic forms. His discussion of pastoralism as a paradigm of literary fictionality, for

example, provides a specific description of the connection between traditional themes

and forms, and the function of literature as a medium in which human possibilities can

be staged. There appear to be two incommensurable elements in this argument, however,

and these are the function and form of the text. These elements manifest an unresolved

tension between what we might describe as our reliance on the materiality of the text,

and Iser’s insistence on maintaining the undecidability of the text. For example, in Iser’s

argument that the Renaissance pastoralism he examines thematizes a particular

articulation of the function of literary fictionality, Iser also offers an interpretation of

elements of the text that make it generic in the first instance. Iser’s desire is to “avoid

giving precedence either to the status or to the use of fiction” (Fictive 24). He selects

Renaissance pastoralism because in his appraisal of the historical context in which it

emerged, it “became a literary system of its own…. no longer bounded by genres”

(Fictive 24). In order to make such a claim, he identifies pastoralism in the text

according to an interpretation of history which represents the “reality” of the

“traditional” circumstances. Indeed, the passage of cultural practices from the less

clearly defined avant-garde, into the commonly acknowledged status of orthodoxy, or

“tradition”, is a key feature of the discourse of genre. Identifying a particular epoch in

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which the text appears, and the characteristics of the text during this era, whether

“bounded” by genre of not, is marked by a bracketing procedure. This is not an

argument against Iser’s descriptions, but a reminder that there is a conflict between the

material forms that make up the texts that come to represent the history of the literary

medium, and Iser’s emphasis upon the anthropological function of literature. Iser’s

emphasis upon the context of literary discourse in The Fictive and the Imaginary

emerges from his dissatisfaction with existing definitions for literary fictionality, which

focus upon either the status of the text or its “communicative function”. Literary

discourse, Iser argues, allows him to focus upon “historical shifts of fictionality’s

manifestations”, and to conclude that “[p]erhaps the most far-reaching problem posed

by fiction… is the question of why it exists at all” (Fictive 23). Iser’s examination of

discourse is an attempt to transcend the ontological complications of focusing upon the

form or function of literary texts. His solution is to examine history in terms of literary

systems, to uncover why the human interacts with and continues to generate the literary

medium, and perhaps “change the manner in which these manifestations are to be

viewed” (Fictive 23). Again, we witness Iser sitting astride text and reader, astride

function and form, and astride diachronic and synchronic accounts of literary discourse.

Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that he doesn’t intend to transcend them, but to alter

existing understandings, and to “change the manner” in which they are assessed. His

literary anthropology, in keeping with his earlier efforts in dealing with the reader-text

interaction, is characterized by this gesture of deferral. For Iser, the phenomena that

consist in the immediacy of the materiality, or formality, of the text through to the

abstracted processes that might make up the transcendant symbolic dimension of the

activity of writing, reading and interpretation are all part of the domain of literary

anthropology. None of these, however, can be accounted for in theory in a satisfactory

Matthews 400

manner. They are all real; and all are “virtual”. In effect, all are part of the performance

of the human that Iser can harness to his exploratory examination of literature. At his

most lucid Iser suggests that since literature provides us a context for fictionalizing in

which the fictionalizing processes are always already disclosed and lacking a specific

pragmatic function, literature allows us a privileged access to the human makeup.

Iser does not want to excuse his shifting between the elements of the text and the

manner in which these mediate communication at the “inter” and “intra” subjective

levels. His exploration deliberately “has its cake and eats it”, in order to highlight the

irresolvable blanks that mark such a shifting attention. This thesis has concluded that

the tension between these competing elements of Iser’s theoretical disposition have their

roots in the longer narrative of his competition with Stanley Fish. Iser had sought to

maintain a distance between text and reader that would allow a theoretical approach that

described the relationship between the two as intersubjective. Granting agency to the

text in this fashion holds a strong consonance with his later description of the “register”

and its role in translation, where the register is updated even as the process of

interpretation is executed. Between the interpreter and that which is to be interpreted is

a shifting potential that both cannot be finalized and provides an impetus for

interpretation, the origin of which is the requirement that the translation interpretation

relies upon moves toward completion. Fish, on the other hand, opted for a radical

monism and argued Iser was indeed attempting to have his cake and eat it too. For Fish,

agency lies with the reader. For Iser, an intricate interaction unfolds and one cannot

place the primacy of this agency with reader or text. The question resounds even now,

as to how this difference can be resolved. In the current thesis, the answer has been to

adopt a minimal fiction, in the form of the originary hypothesis. Clearly, we cannot side

with text, or with reader, as either is a denial. Iser’s solution is sensible, but in order to

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maintain the indeterminacy that lends the text its agency, he requires an account of the

symbolic that can sustain the blanks he insists upon. The originary hypothesis is such an

account.

Paradoxically, this origin is the original emergence of a transcendent sign that

points toward its referent, without which the performance in language of the human is

not explicable. Without this transcendant possibility, the human cannot pretend toward a

portrayal of itself. The human, when indicated by the sign, becomes the possibility or

the potential, that Iser insists it is. Gans argues that the “pragmatic reality of the

originary sign” can be understood in terms of the “fundamental paradox of

signification”, which he presents as follows,

(1) the sign refers to an object (S -> O)

(2) by this very fact, this object is no longer a part of the object world,

but the object-referred-to-by-the-sign (S -> (S -> O)) (“The Fundamental

Paradox of Signification”)

Gans reminds us that this is not “an exercise in symbolic logic; it derives from the

successful negotiation of the pragmatic reality of the originary scene” (“The

Fundamental Paradox of Signification”). The emergence of the sign, and the sign’s

subsequent capacity to represent an object as an object for analysis, reflects the

pragmatic paradox which structures the originary event. Here the aborted gesture of

appropriation indicates the object and becomes the sign, but in indicating that the

subject does not intend to attempt to appropriate the object, the sign simultaneously

indicates that the object is desirable. Therefore, in avoiding mimetic conflict, the sign

also renders the object sacred, as it is not the centre of the group’s attention, but

paradoxically, the desirable object is no longer available to the individuals for

appropriation. This is the definition of sacred: that the object is beyond appropriation.

Matthews 402

Hence Gans is able to point toward the example of the paradoxical statement, “Don’t

think of an elephant”, and suggest that it is “certainly possible not to think of an

elephant (O), but not in the context in which this behavior is explicitly thematized

(S -> O)” (“The Fundamental Paradox of Signification”). This structure is reflected in

Iser’s account of the human. That the object is no longer simply an object, but is the

object indicated by the sign, is a necessary feature of language. Similarly, as we

apprehend the cultural context in which we exist, we act to alter it. In context of the

literary text, since it does not designate reality directly, but instead a possible reality, it

thematizes the fundamental paradox of signification. It presents the bracketed-off

literary world, to use Iser’s terms, “as-if” it were real. In so doing, the literary text

performs the “pragmatic reality of the originary scene”. It represents, without a clear

pragmatism, resulting in a playful questioning of that which lies beyond the as-if it were

real world of the text. The reader has a role to play in this game, and this possibility

relies upon the originary sign. In other words, the tension between the transcendant sign

and that which it indicates is mapped in the anthropological account of literature Iser

presents. The object indicated by the sign and the signed-object are contained by a

paradoxical structure which reflects Iser’s “literature”: to the human subject, the “real”

literary text continually emerges even as it has emerged.

Finally, the emergence Iser synthesizes as a cybernetic account of the human

subject producing culture and being entangled in the culture of a particular context

appears to have been reflexive of the immaterial “imaginary”. If the imaginary and

emergence demonstrate a reciprocity in their articulation, it is at the point of

differentiation between a cultural history, and the production of culture in all its forms

that this reciprocity manifests. In terms of literature, there must always be the literary

text. The literary text is a material form of culture. The immaterial imaginary cannot

Matthews 403

cope with the production of this text. It can only subsume its potential as a nebulous

mapping of the the various processes involved with the construction of the text. While

Iser indicates that the text stages human possibilities through the processes of

fictionalizing, the readerly end of this transaction moves in and out of focus in his

writings. This must be in part because Iser cannot afford to have his text materialize: the

literary object, with the imaginary, can never become a concrete phenomenon. When it

does, the reader has enacted a particular instance of this potential, and his synchronic

description of the human use of literature is no longer anthropological, it is instead

literary-critical. Emergence it seems is reflexive of this resistance to the hermeneutic

circle. There can be no particular process of interpretation, made up of an adjustment of

the approach and subsequent alterations of the outcomes in an anthropological

orientation, where the theorist is attempting to interpret the interpretation itself. Instead,

Iser finds a pathway from the human animal into culture through cybernetics and of the

biological originary hypothesis offered by Geertz, of culture as the manifestation of the

incomplete human animal. This dissertation has argued that this is problematic. Since

the interpretation of the origin to culture is finally pretending toward the scientific, as

cybernetics pretends toward a complete description of cultural production, it also

pretends not to be an interpretation. Instead, it is the interpretation. It is the final and

concrete; it is the reification Iser had for so long fought against. Iser’s emergence holds

the potential to become a formidable tool for cultural explanation, once supplied with a

self-conscious hypothesis for the origin of culture. This hypothesis must account for the

human in language. The minimal fiction of the originary hypothesis taken up by

generative anthropology is just such an account.

Matthews 404

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