Wolfgang Iser and Literary Anthropology

WOLFGANG ISER AND LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY

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 i

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. Matthews ii

For Clieve and Joy McCosker Matthews iii

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 willingness 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 recognise 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 struggle. 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. Table of Contents Matthews iv

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE

Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Abstract vi

Introduction 1

1. Literary Fictionality: an exploration 37 1.1 Strategy in The Fictive and the Imaginary 39 1.2 Three Fictionalizing Acts: selection, combination, self-disclosure 45 1.3 How literary fictionality can assist us to explore discourse 69

2. The Imaginary 79 2.1 Iser’s dual approach in The Fictive and the Imaginary 79 2.2 Introducing the imaginary 85 2.3 The imaginary and play 97

3. The Interplay of the Fictive and the Imaginary 113 3.1 The reader, play, and games 114 3.2 The imaginary as a critique of methodology 125 3.3 Figuring convergence and deforming 137

4. The Reception of Iser: Fish 150 4.1 Fish’s reception of Iser 151 4.2 The “reality” of fiction 162 4.3 The reality of literary anthropology 169 4.4 Alternate “realities” of Iser 174

5. The Reception of Iser: outcomes 179 5.1 The reception of Iser and new directions in literary theory: “cognitive reception theory” 184 5.2 Iser’s psychology of reading and Tom Jones 198

6. The Reception of Iser: literary example 214 6.1 Cerny and Iser 217 6.2 Toker and “second-degree” fictionalizing 232

Matthews v

CHAPTER TITLE PAGE

7. The Reception of Iser: Gans 243 7.1 Comparing literary and generative anthropology 255 7.2 Does literary anthropology require an originary hypothesis? 279

8. Decline of Literary Studies: a case for exploration 286 8.1 Iser, interpretation and translation 287 8.2 Gans and van Oort, literary anthropology and the significance of interpretation 296 8.3 Discourse of the decline of literary studies 310 8.4 Literary critic as “hero”? 328

9. Emergence 334 9.1 Emergence and defining the human 342 9.2 The negative and literary interpretation 349 9.3 The text in language 368 9.4 Conclusion 382

Conclusion 389

Works Cited 404 Matthews vi 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 literature 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 definition 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 generative 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 subsequent scene of human culture. The final phase of this dissertation examines the proposition 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. Matthews 1

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: Matthews 2

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 Matthews 3

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 Matthews 4

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 Matthews 5

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 Matthews 6

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) Matthews 7

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 Matthews 8

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 – Matthews 9

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 Matthews 10

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”) Matthews 11

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 Matthews 12

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. Matthews 13

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 Matthews 14

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 Matthews 15

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) Matthews 19

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,

(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 Matthews 30

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 Matthews 33

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: Matthews 34

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) Matthews 35

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 Matthews 36

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. Matthews 37

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, Matthews 38

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 Matthews 39

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. Matthews 40

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, Matthews 41

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 Matthews 42

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. Matthews 43

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. Matthews 44

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, Matthews 45

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: Matthews 46

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’ Matthews 47

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 Matthews 48

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 Matthews 49

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 Matthews 50

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). Matthews 51

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 Matthews 52

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”). Matthews 53

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 Matthews 54

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 Matthews 55

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). Matthews 56

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 Matthews 57

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 Matthews 58

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 Matthews 59

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 Matthews 60

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). Matthews 61

“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 Matthews 62

“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 Matthews 63

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 Matthews 64

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 Matthews 65

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 Matthews 66

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 Matthews 67

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. Matthews 68

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. Matthews 69

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 Matthews 70

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) Matthews 71

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 Matthews 72

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: Matthews 73

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 Matthews 74

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. Matthews 75

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. Matthews 76

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”. Matthews 77

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 Matthews 78

that follows we discuss Iser’s attempt present this potential in his articulation of the imaginary. Matthews 79

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 Matthews 80

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 Matthews 81

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 Matthews 82

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 Matthews 83

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 Matthews 84

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 Matthews 85

“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: Matthews 86

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 Matthews 87

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 Matthews 88

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 Matthews 89

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). Matthews 90

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 Matthews 91

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 Matthews 92

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 Matthews 93

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 Matthews 94

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). Matthews 95

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: Matthews 96

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 Matthews 97

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 Matthews 98

(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 Matthews 99

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 Matthews 100

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 Matthews 101

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 Matthews 102

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 Matthews 103

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: Matthews 104

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 Matthews 105

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 Matthews 106

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 Matthews 107

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) Matthews 108

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 Matthews 109

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 Matthews 110

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 Matthews 111

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 Matthews 112

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. Matthews 113

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 Matthews 114

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 Matthews 115

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 Matthews 116

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 Matthews 117

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 Matthews 118

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. Matthews 119

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, Matthews 120

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 Matthews 121

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 Matthews 122

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). Matthews 123

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. Matthews 124

“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 Matthews 125

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 Matthews 126

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 Matthews 127

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 Matthews 128

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 Matthews 129

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”. Matthews 130

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: Matthews 131

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 Matthews 132

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 Matthews 133

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 Matthews 134

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 Matthews 135

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 Matthews 136

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. Matthews 137

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 Matthews 138

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 Matthews 139

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: Matthews 140

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 Matthews 141

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. Matthews 142

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. Matthews 143

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. Matthews 144

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). Matthews 145

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 Matthews 146

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, Matthews 147

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; Matthews 148

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 Matthews 149

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. Matthews 150

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 Matthews 151

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 Matthews 152

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 Matthews 153

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: Matthews 154

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: Matthews 155

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: Matthews 156

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 Matthews 157

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 Matthews 158

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: Matthews 159

“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 Matthews 160

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: Matthews 161

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 Matthews 162

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 Matthews 163

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: Matthews 164

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 Matthews 165

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 Matthews 166

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 Matthews 167

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 Matthews 168

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 Matthews 169

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 Matthews 170

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 Matthews 171

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 Matthews 172

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 Matthews 173

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 Matthews 174

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: Matthews 175

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 Matthews 176

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 Matthews 177

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 Matthews 178

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. Matthews 179

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 Matthews 180

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 Matthews 181

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). Matthews 182

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 Matthews 183

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 Matthews 184

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 Matthews 185

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 Matthews 186

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 Matthews 187

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 Matthews 188

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 Matthews 189

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 Matthews 190

“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 Matthews 191

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. Matthews 192

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: Matthews 193

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 Matthews 194

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 Matthews 195

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 Matthews 196

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). Matthews 197

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 Matthews 198

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 Matthews 199

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 Matthews 200

“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 Matthews 201

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 Matthews 202

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 Matthews 203

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 Matthews 204

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”. Matthews 205

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. Matthews 206

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 Matthews 207

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 Matthews 208

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 Matthews 209

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 Matthews 210

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 Matthews 211

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. Matthews 212

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 Matthews 213

we interpret literature in order to allow his theory to deepen our understanding of the human use for literature.

Matthews 214

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) Matthews 215

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 Matthews 216

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- Matthews 217

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 Matthews 219

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 twofold 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 Matthews 220

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 Matthews 221

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, Matthews 222

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) Matthews 223

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 Matthews 224

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. Matthews 225

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, Matthews 226

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 Matthews 227

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 Matthews 228

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: Matthews 229

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 multifariousness 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 Matthews 230

“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 Matthews 231

“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) Matthews 232

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, Matthews 233

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 Matthews 234

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 Matthews 235

“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

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. Matthews 236

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. Matthews 237

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 Matthews 238

“[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 – Matthews 239

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”). Matthews 240

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 Matthews 241

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 Matthews 242

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.

Matthews 243

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 Matthews 244

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 Matthews 245

“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 Matthews 246

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- Matthews 247

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 . Matthews 248

“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 Matthews 249

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 Matthews 250

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 prehuman 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 Matthews 251

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. Matthews 252

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 Matthews 253

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. Matthews 254

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 Matthews 255

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 Matthews 256

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 Matthews 257

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) Matthews 258

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 Matthews 259

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 Matthews 260

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 Matthews 261

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). Matthews 262

“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 Matthews 263

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 Matthews 264

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: Matthews 265

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 Matthews 266

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 Matthews 267

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 Matthews 268

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). Matthews 269

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 Matthews 270

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) Matthews 271

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 Matthews 272

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 Matthews 273

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 Matthews 274

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- Matthews 275

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 Matthews 276

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 Matthews 277

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 Matthews 278

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: Matthews 279

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 Matthews 280

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. Matthews 281

“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- Matthews 282

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. Matthews 283

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 Matthews 284

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 Matthews 285

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.

Matthews 286

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 Matthews 287

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 Matthews 288

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 Matthews 289

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 Matthews 290

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. Matthews 291

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

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.

Matthews 292

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 Matthews 293

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 Matthews 294

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 Matthews 295

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) Matthews 296

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. Matthews 297

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”) Matthews 298

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 Matthews 299

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” Matthews 300

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 Matthews 301

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 Matthews 302

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 Matthews 303

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: Matthews 304

“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 Matthews 305

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, Matthews 306

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 Matthews 307

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 Matthews 308

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 Matthews 309

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.

Matthews 310

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. Matthews 311

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: Matthews 312

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 Matthews 313

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 Matthews 314

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 Matthews 315

“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 Matthews 316

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 Matthews 317

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” Matthews 318

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 Matthews 319

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 Matthews 320

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 Matthews 321

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 Matthews 322

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 Matthews 323

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. Matthews 324

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 Matthews 325

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 Matthews 326

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 Matthews 327

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 Matthews 328

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 Matthews 329

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 Matthews 330

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 Matthews 331

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 Matthews 332

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. Matthews 333

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. Matthews 334

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 Matthews 335

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. Matthews 336

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 Matthews 337

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 Matthews 338

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. Matthews 339

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 Matthews 340

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). Matthews 341

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 Matthews 342

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: Matthews 343

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 Matthews 344

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 Matthews 345

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) Matthews 346

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 Matthews 347

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- Matthews 348

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 Matthews 349

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. Matthews 350

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, Matthews 351

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 Matthews 352

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 Matthews 353

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 Matthews 354

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 Matthews 355

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 Matthews 356

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 Matthews 357

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 Matthews 358

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 Matthews 359

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 Matthews 360

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 Matthews 361

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 Matthews 362

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) Matthews 363

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 Matthews 364

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. Matthews 365

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 Matthews 366

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 Matthews 367

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. Matthews 368

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, Matthews 369

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 Matthews 370

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) Matthews 371

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 Matthews 372

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, Matthews 373

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 Matthews 374

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” Matthews 375

(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 Matthews 376

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 Matthews 377

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. Matthews 378

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 Matthews 379

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 Matthews 380

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 Matthews 381

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 Matthews 382

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” Matthews 383

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 Matthews 384

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 Matthews 385

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 Matthews 386

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 Matthews 387

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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Matthews 389

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 Matthews 391

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 Matthews 394

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 Matthews 396

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 Matthews 399

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 Matthews 401

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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