The Wandering Viewpoint

Leslie Hill
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: a theory of aesthetic response,
( L o n d o n and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978; hardback
£8.95. ISBN 0 7100 0 0 3 3 2).

— As you sing it it's a study. That

letter selfpenned to one's other, that
neverperfect everplanned?
Finnegans Wake

Within that array of concepts which go to make up the common rote of

literary critical discourse, the idea of the reader occupies a strange and yet
strategic place. In its most ordinary manifestation, the part of the reader
may be described quite simply as the part of him or her who does not write.
Indeed, while the critic draws his authority from having once been a reader,
readers themselves would seem to derive no special prestige from their silence
— or discretion. Defined as he is for many by the simplicity and immediacy of
his relation to the literary text, and at best invoked as a kind of fictional
(and even fictitious) persona, it is tempting to view the individual reader as
no more than a haphazard though indispensable adjunct to the literary
institution, as a kind of aphasic supernumerary condemned to ghost his
way in silence through the world of books. And yet, it may be argued, it is
because of readers and for readers that literature exists at all; whether it be as
critics or as authors, it is because we read (and are read) that we write.
In this way, a view perhaps contrary to that of the norm may be asserted
here. It is one that has been argued on many occasions by some of the most
decisive literary figures of our modernity. It is to say that the place of reading,
94
Leslie Hill 95

though doubly excluded from discourse (for it is the reader's fate to be

confined to an uncertain yet often highly charged intimacy with the literary
work), constitutes in the last resort the displaced and dissimulated locus of
writing itself, the site itself of that transformation which turns citizen into
artist.
There is no doubt that it is from the indeterminacy of its standing and
from the mutism with which the position of reading is affected that comes
the difficulty (but also the danger and the rarity) of any discourse which
takes as its object the actual process of ordinary reading. For like the dummy
hand in the card-game, or the dead man at the wake, the place of reading is
that silent and unoccupied place which must remain unassigned so as to allow
the system of literature to function. Desired by the writer of fiction as an
insistent yet endlessly deferred presence, the reader's place may only be
located on the frontiers of the literary artifact as a vacant interstice of sense,
shaping nonetheless the margins and contours of the text by its ever silent
intervention. The relation which binds the reader to the text, and the text to
the reader, is, as Iser rightly underlines, an asymmetrical one. It may only be
inscribed in the literary work as a sign of absence and as a lack. Simultaneously
included and excluded by the literary text, the existence of the reader desig­
nates the text's lack of identity with itself as a closed totality; but also it
demonstrates the lack of the reader's own presence to a world (that of
fiction) which he alone is able to reformulate as a world, by transforming
through the imprint of his desire a series of discrete and formal verbal signs
into an experience of sense.
It is this complex relationship of reader to fiction, and fiction to reader,
that Wolfgang Iser sets out to examine in his recent study. The Act of Reading.
It is a scrupulous and detailed work, which, despite some deficiencies, provides
us with one of the best modern accounts of the way in which ordinary readers
process literary texts. It is also an undogmatic book, which arguably raises as
many issues as it undertakes to answer. An ambitious work, it stands as an
invitation to its own reader to elaborate in turn the theory of his own reading
practice and to engage with its author in a dialogue of perspectives which is
itself the best proof of the endless mutability of the reading act. At the same
time. The Act of Reading provides a useful companion-piece to Iser's earlier
volume, The Implied Reader (published in English in 1974), covering much
of the same textual ground as the preceding book, while founding more
consistently the theoretical rationale of The Implied Reader, which suffers
at times from its over-descriptive approach. The author's range of references
run from the novels of eighteenth-century England (notably Fielding and
Sterne) to the modern texts of such as Joyce and Beckett, betraying nonethe­
less a paradigmatic bias towards the dialogic realism of the former, while
entrusting to the latter the somewhat uncomfortable role merely of sub­
stantiating the historical relativity of many of those aesthetic norms which
form the ground against which traditional narratives are apprehended. This
unevenness of penetration, by no means unusual in a work of this kind,
constitutes, as I shall suggest in due course, the greatest single limitation of
Iser's approach.
96 Oxford Literary Review

For the author, just as the literary text is a linguistic artifact directed
towards the grasping of an imaginary object, so the reader fulfills the role of
an imaginary Other, to whom the writer addresses his text, and who is present
in the literary work as a virtuality and as a support, yet absent from it as a
biographic singularity or an individualized body. To this degree Iser is con­
cerned (unlike those engaged in the constitution of a theory of audience
response, or Rezeptionskritik) less with actual historical or contemporary
readers themselves, and more with the implicit or implied reader, who
functions as the addressee of the literary text, and whose existence is invoked
and called into being by the intersubjective relation on which the act of
writing is founded. The definition given here of the literary text is that of an
act of communication, shuttling back and forth between author and reader as
a mode of intersubjective collaboration, though one which at the same time
(and crucially) eludes the referentially oriented channels of ordinary language.
This description of the literary text as an act of communication constantly
being displaced and refashioned by the negativities of fictional perspective
(and the relation of reading which acts as the support of such perspective)
forms the dual postulate of Iser's inquiry.
These negativities, which are in this way inherent to the practice of literary
fiction, are several in kind. The first is to be found in the way in which
fictional language works on ordinary language as a parasite (the term, bor­
rowed from the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle, may be maintained
1
here, though Iser rightly questions its moral overtones). Fictional language,
we are able to say, works here as an extension of ordinary language; rather
than a simple rule-breaking deviation from it, it operates more as an anaclitic
reworking and remodelling of ordinary language. There is therefore a close
degree of overlap between fictional meaning and ordinary discourse, and it is
this proximity which accounts for the way the literary text is able to incor­
porate into itself so much of that extra-literary material, which in the shape
of those many differentiated discursive norms (from historically contingent
value and idea systems of social and cultural origin to those existing literary
traditions which found the intelligibility of an author's text) make up what
Iser terms the repertoire of the fictional text.
But between ordinary language and fictional language an important
recasting of function has taken place. This is to say that literature may be
defined not in terms of a specific essence, but as an effect; its particularities
are functional rather than ontological. As one moves from ordinary language
to that of fiction a complex displacement comes to affect the pragmatic
situation within which any linguistic act is necessarily formulated. The
displacement involved is one of context. For if ordinary language acts are
exhausted within the closure of a single given (though potentially repeatable)
pragmatic situation, bounded both in time and in space, fictional language
may be typified by the strange propensity it possesses to 'depragmatize' its
original referential contexts. In this way, from the functional point of view,
literature may be characterized by the new type of relation it forges between
language and the subject of language. For it is in the position of enunciation
adopted in fiction by the speaking, or writing, self of its author that such a
 Leslie Hill 97

depragmatization of a linguistic act manifests itself. Put in another way, from

the standpoint of Iser's psychology of intersubjectivity, this is to say that, in
terms of the effect that is literature, it is in its relation to its reader(s) that
the literary text constitutes itself as such.
This depragmatization of language by fiction does not imply a relegating
of the fictional world of a text to a purely formal and self-referring twilight,
for, as Iser reminds us, even a depragmatized language act possesses a real and
effective potential for disturbing the universe. Even depragmatized, literature,
as an act of language, preserves its own particular pragmatic function. Indeed,
fiction does not stand in binary opposition to reality and to the actuality of
ordinary language acts, but presents a new and unique synthesis of functions:
those which are of the order of the imaginary, the invented and the simulated.
Fiction transforms actual situations into imaginary ones, and while it virtual-
izes the given, it accords to the imaginary a specific functional reality of its
own. It is to this reality of fiction that Iser devotes much of his analysis. For,
showing here a welcome interest more in the specificities of literary meaning
than in the psychology of art, Iser argues that the shift in pragmatic context
and in the enunciative position of a literary text decisively transforms the
perspectives held over meaning by the reader of the text and over those
elements borrowed by the text from its own historical exterior. This shift
into the fictional gives to the literary text a new critical turn, allowing it to
display the reciprocal deficiencies and lacks in the many codes of meaning it
integrates into its own fictional space. The main axis of the literary text is
not denotation, but connotation, and with this confrontation with the
density of connotation of meaning the reader begins to enter that complex
and multiple space of secondary and ironic meanings that constitutes the
specific preserve of literary fiction. The pragmatic context within which
fiction unfolds is dialogic rather than denotational, and it is this sense of the
interweaving of meanings as so many different positions of meaning that
allows the reader not simply to recognize but rather to scrutinize critically
each different position of meaning against the background of its own dis­
simulated exclusions. The statements which are to be found in novels are
confronted with their own negativity in the shape of those gaps and margins
which constitute them as positions of utterance and which embody their own
particular blind spots (and repressed truths). And it is here, in such intervals
and lacks, in such blanks and fissures, that the reader of a text becomes
implied and implicated in that text, impelled to judge and compare the
relative adequacies (or deficiencies) of each position of meaning, given to
combine and to tress the differentiated codes of the text in terms of a new
and totally original synthesis.
For Iser, the reader participates in the text as a combining and trans­
forming consciousness. His freedom and specific work begin where the
various coded perspectives of the text interweave to produce a plural and
mobile spectacle of sense. Implicated in the text as a subject of desire and of
meaning by the many specific absences of the text (which are the reverse
corollary of its nature as an act of enunciation), the reader pursues, in his
own mind's eye, the various metonymic trajectories of sense profiled in the
 98 Oxford Literary Review

mobile horizons of the text. Confronting one against the other the various
positions of narrator, plot, situation and characters the reader is able to essay
a provisional synthesis, nowhere stated by the text but realized by the reader
in an act of original participation along lines prompted (but not necessarily
pre-empted) by the text. This process of dialogic combination provides for a
second type of negativity active in the reading process. Iser argues the case
convincingly from the standpoint of Gestalt psychology. For what the reader
does as he reads is to construct from the differentiated codes of the text
certain forms of working consistency based on a selective combination of
certain areas or perspectives of the text. Such selective forms of consistency
remain provisional, and the dynamic motion of the act of reading is provided
for in the way the reader is forced, as his reading proceeds, to revise and
rearticulate his views according to the unfolding of the text.
The crucial element in this process of construction, revision and readjust­
ment is the material space through which this act of reading is deployed. For
though inevitably contained in the linear dimension of its own progressive
motion (miming the unfolding of the book as it runs its course from first page
to last), the space of reading is itself multi-dimensional. Although bounded
by memory (of the text already perused) and by expectation (of the text as
yet unread), the reading perspective constitutes a wandering viewpoint,
transforming and displacing its own temporal horizons by its own dynamic
of reinterpretation. To read is in this way to collaborate in the enunciative
plurality and volume of the literary text, not to decode step by step a finite
message. For while the text is woven together as a tressing of those codes it
integrates from the extra-literary world, the literary work itself is constituted
as a message without a code. There exists for the fictional text no one code
which might possess the dubious virtue of reducing the text to one deter­
minate message, authorizing in this way a finalist interpretation which would
simply dispense with the text itself. The literary text is articulated according
to a mode of semantic indeterminacy, and it is in the blanks and negations of
the text (where the intersecting and jostling codes of the text annul each
other in a fading or swooning of sense equivalent to a dialogic discontinuity
of meaning, or where the text shifts onto a different plane to problematize
its own codes of significance) that the reader becomes entangled within the
work as a participating and desiring subject.
In this mobile unfolding of the text Iser sees the genesis of the effect of
realism and of that suspension of disbelief with which narrative fiction is
customarily received. The source of such effects is that the literary text
performs not as a univocal message, but as an event, not as a denotational
statement, but as an experience, and for Iser it is because they participate
in the unravelling of an event th<rt readers accord fiction a special kind of
credence and come to live out its effects in fantasmatic fashion. His energies
already invested affectively in the gaps and margins of the text, the reader is
propelled from that position of subjective foreclosure characterizing the
subject of knowledge and statement and given to test out the mobility of
enunciation enacted by the text, which, refashioning and displacing the place
of its reader as it goes, elicits from the reader the free play of his imagination.
Leslie Hill 99

In this way, for Iser, implicated in fiction as mobile subjects, we come to

project onto the literary text our own mental images and significations.
It is here that we begin to touch upon the margins and deficiencies of
Iser's approach. It has to do centrally with his conception of the reading
subject. For if it is true that 'every discernible structure in fiction . . . is
[both] verbal and affective' (p.21), it is difficult to see how any theory of
reading can dispense with a concept of the reading subject as a subject of
unconscious affects. Yet (though the elements of such a theory are present
in Iser's book, albeit at a deeply embedded level, as I have sought to suggest
by recasting some of the author's arguments) Iser seems not to see the need
for such a theoretical definition of the reading subject. He formulates the
reader's role as that of a participating consciousness, not as a subject of
desire or of affects. In a strict sense his approach is a phenomenological one,
conceiving of the subject of reading as a fluid and shifting consciousness
able to integrate as objects of perception and awareness the complex seduc­
tions of the reading act. Yet he offers no real theory of such seductions and is
content merely to register the way readers may respond to a literary text with
a series of mental images or projections. The reader described in Iser's book
runs the risk of becoming a merely formal entity, for while Iser recognizes
the role of the reader as an intersubjective support of the text, he denies
himself the possibility of thinking of the reading self as occupying a plurality
of possible subjective positions. The reading subject becomes incapable of
real and effective differentiation, and the place of the reader becomes implicitly
downgraded to that of a fantasmatic spectator to an ultimately unified (if
endlessly deferred) totality of sense. It is indeed as the realiser of such a
totality that the reader is defined in Iser's book.
This failing becomes clear in the book's treatment of the modern texts of
Joyce and Beckett. For the (divergent) forms of negativity practised by each
of these authors are seen only as a means of questioning the values of the past
and the coherence of narrative form itself, not as a way of submitting the
actual subject of reading to an untenable dispersion of sense, in which the
reader is undone as a fantasmatic self and confronted with the impossibility
of subjective closure or unity. Modernity tends to be theorized by Iser as a
merely negative enterprise presenting the reader with an experiencing of the
world as fragmented, and not as a critical scattering of the subject of sense
and reading. From Iser's point of view, the plurality of subjective position
which such texts render possible (and presuppose) is grasped merely sche­
matically, foreclosed to the complexity of those bodily affects which animate
the reading of so many modern writers. For it is certain that the writing of
both Joyce and Beckett can only be read with reference to a dynamic conflict
between sense, body and the fragility of the potential positions of subject­
ivity. The impact of such texts is to disqualify and to disperse the desire for
totality and unity which possesses the reader as portrayed in The Act of
Reading.
The reading subject of Iser's study remains bound within an idea of
consciousness gradually integrating its own negativities within a totalizing
project of awareness. Such a project (even though its finality may be end-
100 Oxford Literary Review

lessly deferred, perpetually displaced by its own unmasterable negativities) is,

in a strict sense, of the order of fantasy (in the Freudian definition of the
term). For Iser the role of the reader is the role of a distanced voyeur of
sense, held in a specular relation to the text as a vision of the world, detached
from the stage of meaning but massively implicated in it as a subject of his
own unconscious affects. His study, however, fails to question the genesis of
this idea of sense as a particular kind of fantasmatic seeing, and the role it
plays as a support of the classic realism of the eighteenth or nineteenth
century. For there are important issues to be raised in respect of the way the
novel, throughout all this period, was conceived and articulated as a derivative
of the theatre. For this is not a precondition of fictional writing, but a
particular type of historical norm, rooted crucially not merely in certain
literary or cultural traditions but in the positions of subjectivity exploited by
the classic realist text as a way of underpinning the coherence of its organi­
sation. Moreover, it is arguable that it is precisely this notion of the literary
text as a kind of specular seeing that is able to function here as the dis­
simulated basis of Iser's definition of the literary work primordially as a form
of communication, setting reader and writer in a situation of vis-a-vis, as in a
theatre or a situation of intersubjective dialogue. For it is by defining the
literary text from the outset as a form of communication that Iser's whole
project begs the question of the reader's (and writer's) affective investment
in the aesthetic work according to the logic of that 'other stage' of un­
conscious figuration.
In this way, Iser offers no real account of the way novels such as Ulysses
refuse to present the world as an organized specular seeing and deny the
reader any simple fantasmatic participation in an imaginary world. He gives
no concept of how, in such texts, the idea of communication is not just
problematized, but disrupted and diffracted, distended to a point of excess
where the text as a mode of communication (all but) founders on the mobile
asperities of sense itself. For Ulysses works as a fracturing, not a seeing, of
sense, dispersing the position of the specular subject not in order to hold up a
vision of fragmentation but to displace and scatter the affects of the reading
self through a plurality of different positions of sense, confronting him with
the excessiveness of those margins, edges and interstices of sense which
(already in the classic realist text) constitute the reader as a subject and
implicate him affectively in the process of sense. Similarly, it must be said
that in the novels of Beckett negativity (appearing diversely as repetition,
rejection and comedy) works not as a way of 'showing how language functions'
(p.223) or of reducing fictional language to a language of 'pure statement'
(ibid.), but as a sign of the confrontation of the language of the subject with
the fragility of his own ever-nascent body. Rather than eliciting the mental
projections of the reader in order to cancel them out in an act of purely
linguistic aporia (having only a didactic value), the negativity of Beckett's
texts seeks rather to displace the subject of sense towards those margins and
points of origin which insistently repeat the incommensurability of body,
language and sense and which render impossible any attempt at totalizing
synthesis or any chance of subjective unity.
Leslie Hill 101

Whatever the value of Iser's insights into the voyeuristic reader of classical
realism, his failure to formulate a concept of the positionality of the reading
subject (and of the plurality of possible relations to the text which such a
concept implies) proves an unfortunate liability. Iser loses hold of the reader
of the modern text (as, too, of the reader of poetry); his reader remains
enclosed within the confines of an imaginary relation. The reader he describes
runs the risk of being no more than a fictional and fantasmatic construct, a
reader whom the institution of literary criticism presupposes, and who is
demanded by the realist text but relieved of the possibility of becoming
himself in turn a subject of meaning and a writer of texts. But it would be
unjust to lay the blame for these shortcomings simply at the door of Iser's
phenomenological approach. For, in a more probing way, what Iser's study
demonstrates, albeit almost in spite of itself, is that the subject of reading is a
subject who is lacking in his own place. He is a singularity who, beyond the
fantasy he supports, will always be of the order of the absent, the fictitious,
the failing.
Yet if the reader escapes determination except as the support of our own
fantasies, and as himself the support of the fantasmatics of the reading
relation, this should not become a cause for despondency. It testifies more
than all else to the unpredictability of the literary text. For if the real and
effective reader escapes theoretical determination, it is because the literary
text has always transformed him into something other than he was. The
reading subject is in this sense always the subject of a writing. To this extent,
for a theory of reading, we must turn to a theory of writing; we need to
return to that writing of a reading, which is the literary text itself. For, as
Proust tirelessly reminds us, it is only in writing that we may find the locus of
reading itself. The problem comes full circle. Reading and writing are inter­
dependent; they are the two sides of the same act. For while it is true that we
write because we already read, it is nonetheless also true that we read because
we (do not) write. To have shown this, in its gaps and deficiencies as well as
through many of its arguments, is, paradoxical though it may be, not the least
part of the achievement of Iser's study.

Note
1. For a m o r e critical discussion o f t h e parasite, see J . D e r r i d a , ' S i g n a t u r e , e v e n e m e n t ,
c o n t e x t e ' , in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: M i n u i t , 1 9 7 2 ) , p p . . 3 6 5 - 3 9 3 . T r a n s l a t e d
as 'Signature, E v e n t , C o n t e x t ' , Glyph 1 . A l s o Derrida's ' L i m i t e d Inc.' in Glyph 2 .
102

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critique
an interdisciplinary journal of german studies
editors: David Bathrick, Helen Fehervary, AndreasHuyssen,
Anson G. Rabinbach and Jack Zipes

N E W G E R M A N C R I T I Q U E is the first American journal to develop a

comprehensive discussion of German politics, social theory, art, and literature
on an international level.

Our current issue ( # 17) is a special Walter Benjamin issue and includes:
Anson Rabinbach Critique and Commentary/Alchemy and Chemistry
Some Remarks on Walter Benjamin and this Issue
Philip Brewster and Language and Critique: Jiirgen Habermas on
Carl Howard Buchner Walter Benjamin
Jiirgen Habermas Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism
The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin
Anson Rabinbach Introduction to Benjamins "Doctrine of the Similar
Walter Benjamin Doctrine of the Similar
Irving Wohlfarth Walter Benjamin's Image of Interpretation
Ansgar Hillach The Aesthetics of Politics: Walter Benjamin's
"Theories of German Fascism"
Walter Benjamin Theories of German Fascism
Elzbieta Ettinger Comrade & Lover: Rosa Luxemberg's Letters to Leo Jogiehes
R. G . Davis Benjamin, Storytelling and Brecht in the USA

A L S O A V A I L A B L E : Special N G C supplementary volume of Hemer Mullcr's revolutionary

play C E M E N T , with introduction and production notes. S3.(M) per copv

New German Critique Name

published three times a
year. Annual subscrip­ Address
tion: $8 individuals, $16
institutions. Foreign $1
extra. Single copies $3. Amount Enclosed

New German Critique

Make checks payable to: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
New German Critique Department of German
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee. W I 53201
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