Why No Ones Afraid of Wolfgang Iser

Stanley Fish

As Iser sees it, the advantage of his theory is that it avoids identifying the aesthetic object either with the text, in its formal and objective self-sufficiency, or with the idiosyncratic experience of individual readers. The literary work cannot be identical with the text or with the concretization, but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or to the subjectivity of the reader (p.21). To the question informing much of contemporary literary theory--what is the source of interpretive authority, the text or the reader--Iser answers both. He does not, however, conceive of the relationship between them as a partnership in which each brings a portion of the meaning which is then added to the portion brought by the other; for in his theory meaning is something neither of them has (it is not an embodied object); rather it is something that is produced or built up or assembled by a process of interaction in which the two parties play quite different, but interdependent, roles. The role of the text is to designate instructions for the production of the signified, which in the case of literature is the aesthetic object; the role of the reader is to follow these directions and so to produce it. It in this last sentence does not stand for a thing but for an event, a happening; the emphasis of the model is finally temporal rather than spatial (although, as we shall see, it contains spatial elements), and the literary work is not to be identified with any one point in the dyadic interaction but with the entire process. The text can never be grasped as a whole--only as a series of changing viewpoints, each one restricted in itself and so necessitating further perspectives. This is the process by which the reader realizes an overall situation. 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. The distinction is crucial because it provides both the stability and flexibility of Isers formulations. Without it he would not be able to say that the readers activities are constrained by something they do not produce; he would not be able at once to honor and to bypass history by stabilizing the set of directions the text contains; he would not be able to

define the aesthetic object in opposition to the world of fact, but tie its production securely to that world; he would have no basis (independent of interpretation) for the thesis that since the end of the eighteenth century literature has been characterized by more and more gaps; he would not be able to free the text from the constraints of referential meaning and yet say that the meanings produced by innumerable readers are part of its potential. It is important to realize how firm the determinacy/ indeterminacy distinction is for Iser. 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 readers activities; but in his more characteristic moments Iser insists on the brute-fact status of the text, at least insofar as it provides directions for the assembling of the virtual object. Thus he declares in one place, the stars in a literary text are fixed; the lines that join them are variable; and in another, the structure of the text sets off a sequence of mental images which lead to the text translating itself into the readers consciousness; and in still another, the text itself offers schematized aspects through which the actual subject matter of the work can be produced. Each of these statements (and there are countless others) is a version of the basic distinction, reaffirmed unequivocally by Iser in the Diacritics interview (June 1980), between a significance which is to be supplied, and a significance which has been supplied or, in other words, between what is already given and what must be brought into being by interpretive activity. Iser is able to maintain this position because he regards the text as a part of the world (even though the process it sets in motion is not), and because he regards the world, or external reality, as itself determinate, something that is given rather than supplied. It is the objective status of the world that accounts for the difference between literary and nonliterary mental activity. In ordinary experience the given empirical object acts as a constraint on any characterization of it; whereas in literary experiences objects are produced by the mental images we form, images that endow the nongiven with presence. Sentences uttered in everyday life are assessed in terms of their fidelity to empirical facts, but for the literary text there can be no such facts; instead we have a sequence of schemata which have the function of stimulating the reader himself into establishing the facts. The point is that these

schemata are themselves facts of a determinate kind and are therefore ontologically (rather than merely temporally) prior to the (literary) facts whose production they guide. Isers most developed example of this process concerns the presentation of Allworthy in Fieldings Tom Jones:

Allworthy is introduced to us as a perfect man, but he is at once brought face to face with a hypocrite, Captain Blifil, and is completely taken in by the latters feigned piety. Clearly, then, the signifiers are not meant solely to designate perfection. On the contrary, they denote instructions to the reader to build up the signified which presents not a quality of perfection, but in fact a vital defect, Allworthys lack of judgement.

This is an instance, in Isers vocabulary, of the changing perspectives that are juxtaposed in such a way as to stimulate the readers search for consistency. Thus two character perspectives, that of Allworthy as homo perfectus and Blifil as apparent saint, confront one another, and the reader is led to reject the simple designation of perfection and to formulate for himself a revised conception of Allworthys character. It is a perfect illustration of what distinguishes a literary from a nonliterary text. In a nonliterary text the connections are all supplied (by the structure of empirical reality), and as a result the reader is left with nothing to do; but in the literary text textual segments are presented without explicit indications of the relationships between them, and as a result gaps open up which it is the responsibility of the reader to close and fill. It is all very neat until one begins to examine the textual segments that constitute the category of the given. Consider the characterization of Allworthy as a perfect or all -worthy man. In order for Isers account to be persuasive, perfection in humankind must be understood (at least at first) to be incompatible with being taken in by a hypocrite; for only then will the Allworthy perspective and the Blifil perspective be perceived as discontinuous. But one can easily imagine a reader for whom perfection is inseparable from the vulnerability displayed by Allworthy, and for such a reader there would be no disparity between the original description of Allworthy and his subsequent behavior. That is, the text

would display good continuation (a characteristic, according to Iser, of nonliterary texts) and would not, at least at this point, present a gap or blank for the reader to fill up. I am not urging this reading against Isers, but merely pointing out that it is a possible one, and that its possibility irreparably blurs the supposedly hard lines of his theory: for if the textual signs do not announce their shape but appear in a variety of shapes according to the differing expectations and assumptions of different readers, and if gaps are not built into the text, but appear (or do not appear) as a consequence of particular interpretive strategies, then 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. Let me make clear what I am not saying. I am not saying that it is impossible to give an account of Tom Jones which depends on a distinction between what is in the text and what the reader is moved, by gaps in the text, to supply; it is just that the distinction itself is an assumption which, when it informs an act of literary description, will produce the phenomena it purports to describe. That is to say, every component in such an account--the determinacies or textual segments, the indeterminacies or gaps, and the adventures of the readers wandering viewpoint--will be the products of an interpretive strategy that demands them, and therefore no one of those components can constitute the independent given which serves to ground the interpretive process.