The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response by Wolfgang Iser

Review by: Daniel T. O'Hara

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn, 1979), pp. 88-91
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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 88 REVIEWS

smallness is unfortunate, given the importance Judgment." That this last part of the anthol-
of the topic. However, the editor can by no ogy follows but is distinct from the part on
means be faulted; it is just that there is, aesthetic judgment does well in suggesting to
relative to other areas in aesthetics, little of the student that descriptions of works of art
significance that has been written on this sub- do not necessarily imply judgments of value.
ject. All in all, Professor Kennick has very care-
The title of the large third section, "Under- fully and vastly improved what had been a
standing Works of Art," is a misnomer, for the very good anthology to begin with. The new
editor offers us a potpourri of articles on the selections are among the very best that he
concepts of interpretation (Stuart Hampshire, could have picked; and his arrangement of
Annette Barnes), expression (Alan Tormey, them displays continuity, a highly desirable
Guy Sircello), depiction (Max Black, Kendall but elusive property in philosophical antholo-
Walton), metaphor (Max Black, Stanley Ca- gies, especially those in aesthetics.
vell), and the language of fiction (Margaret
Macdonald, Marcia Eaton). Although Kennick JAY E. BACHRACH
makes a fairly good attempt in his summary Central Washington University
essay to tie all this together, it would seem
more useful to the student being introduced to
aesthetics to illuminate central issues first in
each of these traditional areas. The heading ISER, WOLFGANG.The Act of Reading: A
"Understanding Art" does not really bring Theory of Aesthetic Response. The Johns
them all together. The naive student, further- Hopkins University Press, 1978, xii + 239
more, might be misled by the title into think- pp., $15.00.
ing such philosophical writings would func- At the beginning of his autobiography, Dich-
tion as art criticism, increasing one's under- tung und Warheit, Goethe juxtaposes a prefa-
standing of individual works. tory letter from a friend that requests him to
The section, "Aesthetic Experience," is pri- explain the connections that certainly must
marily concerned with the question of aesthetic exist among his many great works, with the
attitude and vision. Monroe Beardsley's paper, account of an incident from early childhood
"Aesthetic Experience Regained," is the only that tells of the time the budding genius broke
one that deals with the nature of experience every piece of his mother's finest crockery
rather than how we deal with works. To be before an appreciative audience of older
sure, discussions of aesthetic attitude and ex- neighborhood boys who cried out insistently
perience are related; but, when we think of after each scene of destruction for the
Dewey's or Beardsley's theories of aesthetic ex- future creator of Faust to produce "more,
perience, the subject matter is considerably more more!" How a reader makes something
than how we perceive or otherwise engage works significant out of essentially ironic juxta-
of art. positions of this kind, especially as they in-
The selections for "Aesthetic Judgment" form the structure of extended narrative
bring together, perhaps inevitably, questions works, is the complex subject of Wolfgang
about the logic of aesthetic judgment and the Iser's latest book. For Iser, who, strangely
sort of properties that one talks about when enough, does not discuss Goethe's marvelous
employing such judgments. Guy Sircello's new prose, such juxtapositions form the basis of
theory of beauty very fittingly finds a place all narrative, whether the work is Tom Jones
beside standard selections from Hume and or Ulysses. And Iser thinks that the difference
Kant. Frank Sibley's "Aesthetic Concepts," between such representative eighteenth- and
followed by Ted Cohen's critique of Sibley's twentieth-century texts resides primarily in the
position, will show the student that the dis- degree of complexity with which the juxta-
tinction between aesthetic and nonaesthetic positions are deployed, repeated, and varied.
predicates is by no means clear and distinct. The reader's act of "realizing" or interpreting
Kendall Walton's "Categories of Art" and Alan a text, of making it consciously one's own,
Tormey's "Critical Judgments" complete this whatever the period of its creation, is the focal
collection. point of Iser's phenomenological study.
Papers by Stuart Hampshire, Arnold Isen- Iser divides his book into four major sec-
berg, Paul Ziff, William G. Lycan and Peter tions, each of which contains two counter
K. Machamer and, finally, Bruce Vermazen pointing chapters of analysis, and all of which
comprise a well-organized section on "Critical bear on the dialectical interaction between text

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Reviews 89

and reader that provides the basis for his so allowing him to formulate that which has
been unleashed by the text .... the literary text
theory of aesthetic response. The first section,
entitled "The Situation," criticizes all tradi- releases the reader from the pressure of his
tional forms of objective interpretation that normal experience, thus allowing the resurfacing
of that which has hitherto been repressed . . .
look upon a literary work as a static thing to
[and that] he had previously been unable to
be penetrated and analyzed or a complex formulate in his conscious mind (pp. 49-50).
puzzle to be solved, and it argues for a reader- If the basic referenceof the text is the penumbra
response approach to literary texts based upon of excluded possibilities, one might say that the
his notion of the implied reader. (In his book borderlines of existing systems are the starting
of that name, Iser establishes that works of point for the literary text. It begins to activate
literature are structured in such a way as to that which the system [of thought dominant
prefigure and evoke the kind of reading and at the time] has left inactive (pp. 71-72).
so the kind of intended reader necessary for Each sentence correlate [in the text] contains
understanding the work. The Act of Reading what one might call a hollow sphere, which
is a theoretical sequel to The Implied Reader looks forward to the next correlate,and a retro-
(English trans. 1975), which is an exercise in spective section, which answers the expecta-
tions of the preceding sentence (p. 112).
practical criticism largely). In the next two
sections, "The Reality of Fiction" and
"Phenomenology of Reading," Iser concen- Iser's view is that by virtue of their schematic
trates first on the structure and codes (the overdetermination, their symbolic suggestive-
"repertoire" and "strategies") present in a ness, which extends from the sentence level to
text that serve as guides to the reader's inter- that of the world of the work, literary texts
pretation. This is what Iser calls his "Func- provoke the reader into a more creative frame
tionalist Model of the Literary Text." He then of mind which allows him to realize imagina-
focuses on the kind of cognition involved in tively many of the possibilities repressed by
the act of reading such highly encoded texts the structures and norms of conventional so-
as Austen's Emma or (once again) Joyce's ciety-structures and norms which the literary
Ulysses, although these, like all of Iser's text defamiliarizes and liberates the reader
analyses in this book, are brief refinements from by making them mere possibilities among
upon those developed at much greater length other possibilities. This liberation is essentially
in The Implied Reader. Finally, in the last one of free association, despite Iser's qualifica-
section, "Interaction Between Text and tons to the contrary. Consider this: Iser quotes
Reader," Iser attempts to describe "the com- the following passage from Walter Pater in
municatory structure of the literary text," i.e., both The Act of Reading (p. 126) and The
that structure of signs which by its very in- Implied Reader (p. 285) as one of his touch-
tended indeterminacy provokes the reader's stones of critical wisdom:
imaginative realization of the text by stimu-
For to the grave reader words too are grave;
lating his constitutive consciousness to perform and the ornamental word, the figure, the ac-
at its best.
A cento of quotations from the book should cessory form or colour or reference, is rarely
content to die to thought precisely at the right
give a sense of its intricate argument: moment, but will inevitably linger awhile, stir-
ring a long "brainwave"behind it of perhaps
As we have seen, the overdeterminationof a quite alien associations (Appreciations, 1920,
text produces indeterminacy, and this sets in p. 18).
motion a whole process of comprehension
whereby the reader tries to assemble the world So as Pater's great essay on "Style" and as Iser
of the text-a world that has been removed from argue, literary texts stimulate the reader's
the everyday world by this very overdetermina- imagination by their structure of indeterminacy.
tion. The process of assembling the meaning of Texts led readers on to fill in the many blanks
the text is not a private one, for although it in description and logic they include, to make
does mobilize the subjective disposition of the the connections, to supply the missing links
reader, it does not lead to day-dreaming,but to
the fulfillment of conditions that have already of narrative and commentary, as does my open-
been structured in the text. Herein lies the ing example from Goethe, which asks the
significance of the overdetermination of the reader to do both by imagining the cruel
text: it is not merely a given textual quality, smiles of the youths and the more refined smile
but a structure that enables the reader to break of the master who recalls it all and puts the
out of his accustomedframeworkof conventions, letter and the incident into play once again-

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 90 REVIEWS

but this time according to his designs and his and of reading we are left with is still much
ironic logic. closer to that associated with Pater and Wilde
Essentially, Iser continues the phenomeno- than with Ingarden's phenomenology of
logical tradition of literary speculation, taking aesthetic cognition and his celebration of
as his inspiration the work of Edmund Husserl classical representation. For Iser, reading a
on the phenomenon of internal time con- text is a process essentially like that of filling
sciousness, and especially the work of Roman in a blank or darkening an empty if luminous
Ingarden (Husserl's Polish disciple) on the form, whose virtue or power resides in its
cognition of the literary work of art. Iser seductive privations, its enticing lacunae that
derives from Husserl the notion that the text promise a freedom to play at will with the
is an intentional process of signification to be rudiments of knowledge that can lead to pur-
imaginatively described and not a real object ple passages and haunting chants in honor of
(like a rock) to be analytically comprehended indifferent portraits:
or an ideal object (like a triangle) to be syn-
The text mobilizes the subjective knowledge
thetically posited. Iser takes from Ingarden
the idea that the text, when is a present in all kinds of readers and directs it to
interpreted, one particular end. However varied this knowl-
multi-layered schematic assemblage, the prod- edge may be, the reader'ssubjective contribution
uct of the reader's constitutive consciousness. is controlled by the given framework. It is as
But Iser goes farther than either of his chosen if the schema were a hollow form into which
guides by denying (unlike Husserl) any de- the reader is invited to pour his own store of
finable objective status to the literary text that knowledge (p. 143).
would adjudicate between different interpreta-
tions of it and by claiming (unlike Ingarden) What Iser's attempt at dialectic here is really
that it is fundamentally the "spots of in- saying is that the content of a literary text is
determinacy" in a text that set the reader's actually free-floating and dependent on the
imagination to work at that complete remaking reader, while the form remains essentially
of the text he calls "realization." (Ingarden stable, in "control." The problem with such
calls interpretation "concretizing" the text to a view is that once the reader is granted the
distinguish the reader's version of the text power to revise the text in this way, the
from the thing itself.) Iser, then, accepts the "control" of form also becomes open to dis-
central insights of Husserl and Ingarden on pute, challenge, and disbelief.
matters that relate directly to the act of read- The fundamental problem with Iser's work,
ing only to push on beyond them by arguing however, lies not in its faint-hearted flirtations
for a more subjectivist phenomenological with both solipsism and objectivity, nor in its
standpoint than either of his critical fathers abstract and often imprecise language, nor in
would countenance. its stubborn refusal to confront the great mas-
However, Iser side-steps the threatened ters of suspicion, Nietzsche, Freud, and Der-
abyss of solipsism in several ways, but pri- rida, whose work calls all Iser's phenomeno-
marily with his notion of the schema of in- logical assumptions into question. Rather the
structions, the structure of codes ("the reper- book's failing is in not presenting the actual
toire," "the strategies"), inscribed in the text subject Iser is constantly referring to, if often
that serve as a guide to the reader's act of unwittingly, viz., the relationship between the
"realizing" the text. How this would work ironic, the sublime, and the daemonic.
with my example from Goethe goes as follows. I would argue that Iser's insistence on the
Since the literary text is essentially subversive role played in structuring a text by gaps,
of conventional expectations, so as to liberate blanks, lacunae, negations, open-ended juxta-
the reader from habitual modes of thinking, positions, by literary approximations of logical
the juxtaposition of letter and incident at the aporias in short, testifies to his real subject-
opening of Goethe's autobiography provides a matter-the ironic experience of the reader as
structure of ironic expectation that leads the he faces the sublime and attempts to transform
reader to believe that the text he is reading himself into that daemonic image of the crea-
the misty
proceeds by creating striking gaps in meaning tor he projects smiling through
which the reader is tempted to fill with an fissures of the text. Iser unwittingly grants as
idealized image of the serene creator, the self- much when he quotes with emphatic approval
born mocker, who stands behind his masterful (but then does little original with) the follow-
schematic creation. Yet the view of the text ing passage from Ingarden:

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 Reviews 91

For the original emotion [of aesthetic response] sublimely influential text. Or, to put the
is full of inner dynamism, of a kind of unsatis- matter in the words of Merleau-Ponty (writing
fied hunger which appears when and only when as if he were thinking of Socrates, that wisest
we have already been excited by a quality but
of teachers who, on principle, refused to
have not yet succeeded in beholding it in direct
intuition so that we can be intoxicated with it. write), "the lack of a sign can itself be a sign
In this condition of being unsatisfied (of (p. 63).
"hunger")we can see, if we will, an element of DANIELT. O'HARA
discomfort, of unpleasantness, but the charac- Princeton University
teristic quality of the original emotion as the
first phase of the aesthetic experience does not
consist in this unpleasantnessbut in inner un-
rest, in being unsatisfied. It is an original emo- ROSENBLATT, LOUISEM., The Reader, The Text,
tion precisely because the elements present in it
are developed both as the further course of the The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the
aesthetic experience and the formation of its Literary Work. Southern Illinois University
intentional correlate,the aestheticobject (p. 174). Press, 1978, xv + 196 pp., $10.95.
There are many questions one can ask about
The primary advantage of this line of criti- a literary work, and many questions about other
cism is that it helps to explain the many matters for which a literary work may provide
passages, in the last half of the book especially, answers. At the end of a decade notorious for
that generally read as follows: the variety of sophisticated, if not sophistic,
questions critics ask, it is refreshing to read a
The blank in the fictional text appears to be a book that celebrates the experience of the
paradigmatic structure; its function consists in common reader. Not that these years have
initiating structured operations in the reader, wanted in attention to the process of reading.
the execution of which transmits the reciprocal (One thinks, for example, of books and articles
interaction of textual positions into conscious- by Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, Stephen Booth,
ness. The shifting blank is responsible for a Jonathan Culler, and Walter Slatoff.) But Pro-
sequenceof colliding imageswhich condition each fessor Rosenblatt got there first (Literature as
other in the time-flow of readings. The dis-
carded image imprints itself on its successor, Exploration, 1938), and she has addressed, most
even though the latter is meant to resolve the persistently, the education of young readers in
deficiencies of the former. In this respect, the the classroom and the virtues of a less rarified
images hang together in a sequence, and it is by criticism that would foster independent, crea-
this sequence that the meaning of the text tive reading.
comes alive in the reader'simagination (p. 203; The Reader, The Text, The Poem is a book
my emphasis). for teachers and students. Its premises, which
strike me as unassailable, are: that reading is
So it seems that by virtue of a romance of an active process in which the reader "evokes"
interpretation, a marriage of true images if a world of people and events from a text; that
you will, an idea is born in the reader's mind, what the reader brings to the text, in the form
an idea that transforms the crucifixion of of personal and cultural memories and asso-
temporal sequence into the resurrection of ciations, will affect what he makes of it
semantic unity. ("mnemonic relevances," she calls them, play-
Rather than taking Henry James's story ing nicely on Richards's phrase); and that every
"The Figure in the Carpet" as his initial experience of a text is therefore unique. The
parable of the act of reading, Iser perhaps ultimately personal nature of the reading ex-
would have done better to open with an in- perience is to be cherished, not overcome, and
cident from Plato's Symposium. For when it contains the key, insofar as the reader can
Alcibiades, the drunken intruder, starts to also become self-critical, to the value of literary
speak in praise of his beloved but ever dis- experience.
tant Socrates, admitting as he does so that he The last chapter of this book is one of the
can only speak of his master in erotic contexts finest descriptions of the function of a literary
figuratively, for otherwise his mind draws a education-particularly in a world where few
blank, this incident appears to be a perfect students will remain literary professionals
allegorical representation of the ironic situation after college-that I know. The Reader, The
faced by the literary critic today as he is re- Text, The Poem has already been hailed as a
peatedly caught in the act of (mis-) reading a book all teachers of literature should read, and

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