The Four Sides of Reading: Paradox, Play, and Autobiographical Fiction in Iser and Rilke Author(s): Bianca Theisen Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter, 2000), pp. 105-128 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057590 . Accessed: 09/03/2014 11:06 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.177.218.24 on Sun, 9 Mar 2014 11:06:30 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
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The Four Sides of Reading: Paradox, Play, and Autobiographical Fiction in Iser and RilkeAuthor(s): Bianca TheisenSource: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,2000), pp. 105-128Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057590 .
Accessed: 09/03/2014 11:06
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.
http://www.jstor.org
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and backgrounds selection, mollifying the paradoxical unity of their
distinction in an emphasis on pure difference.
The models charted in both books, then, need to be read in
conjunction, if we want to conceptualize the relation between paradigma and syntagma
as a systemic relation, and, more
specifically, as a four
sided "form" that can account for the otherwise incompatible unity of
the distinction between a paradigmatization of the syntagma and a
syntagmatization of the paradigma. Reconfiguring the relation between
paradigma and syntagma as a systemic one will allow us to highlight the
influence of systems theory (Niklas Luhmann) and communication
theory (Gregory Bateson) on Iser's work?an influence that is most
obvious when Iser describes the reading process as a self-regulating
system that "is cybernetic in nature as it involves a feedback of effects
and information throughout a
sequence of changing situational frames"
or when he conceives of the text's reference to "world" as a system
environment relationship.2 A systemic relation between paradigma and
syntagma will also allow us to trace the departure from the limitations of
the "linguistic turn," which Iser targets when he shifts the emphasis from a
cognitive to a functional interest in literature.3 The relation between
syntagma and paradigma in the literary text, then, does not merely
replicate the linguistic axes, with its follow-up problem of how to
differentiate literariness from the linguistic norm. Seen as a systemic relation or a four-sided form, syntagmatic indication does not
merely mean what it says and thereby suspends paradigmatic equivalence,
splitting it into both itself and something different. Saying that it does
not mean what it says, syntagmatic indication reveals what Iser calls its
duplicity: it indicates that it does not indicate, but such an indication of
course in turn indicates. It is this paradox of indication that The Act of
Reading and even more so The Fictive and the Imaginary explore. I trace
the relation between syntagmatization and paradigmatization through other theories of reading from Georges Poulet to Michael Riffaterre and
Paul de Man in order to set it off from Iser's configuration of this
relation as a four-sided form. That form is figured in the four game structures and reader responses Iser discusses in The Fictive and the
Imaginary and the four perspectival arrangements he outlines in The Act
of Reading. I close with an interpretation of Rilke 's fictive autobiography The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) as a modernist text that
exemplifies the recursive observation central to Iser's theory. The inter
relation of extraliterary and intraliterary reference emerges as a process that calls attention to the paradox of its form, which involves masking and unmasking itself as an autobiography.
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The art and artifice of reading, Friedrich Schlegel once suggested, consist in reading with an other, that is, attempting to read the reading of others.4 Such a notion of reading envisions a pragmatics of reading:
reading with an other and reading the reading of others embed the
technique of reading in intersubjective communication. Theories that
semanticize the reading process tend to conceive of intersubjective communication as an interaction between subject and subject,
trans
formed and enclosed in a textual object that organizes inside and
outside as if it were a container. Poulet's reader heuristic, for instance,
conceptualizes the process of reading as a transformation of the
external, material reality of signs on a page into an inner experience. In
this process of interrelation, the reading subject, breaking down the
distinction between self and other, through the mediation of the book, is posited as the site of a doubling or ghosting in which "the I who
'thinks in me' when I read a book is the I of the one who reads the
book."5 Since Poulet's heuristic is modeled on a historically specific attitude toward reading?namely extensive, identificatory reading as it
evolved in the late eighteenth century and replaced intensive, repetitive
reading, due to a general increase in literacy6?it remains indebted to
this particular historical semantics of reading. Such a semantics advo
cates a process of intersubjective identification between author and
reader and privileges the paradigmatic principle of similarity and
equivalence. A model of reading in which the text enshrines the author as the
intersubjective other of the reader's self who can then identify himself
with his other, determines the direction of reading as a one-way process from text to reader. Norman Holland has attempted
to overcome such a
"bi-active model" with a "transactive model" that starts with the response
of the reader instead of focusing on the effect of the text on the reader; Holland conceives such a response in psychoanalytical terms as a
defense mechanism against and fantasy transformation of the text. With
his four-sided formula, unity/text/identity/self, Holland hopes to ex
ceed the unidirectionality of text-reader interaction, but since he only draws out the four sides of his formula in two directions, reading it
vertically and horizontally, as it were?unity is to identity as text is to self, and unity is to text as identity is to self?he merely redoubles uni
directionality when he takes his four-sided formula t? indicate that
"identity is the unity I find in a self if I look at it as though it were a text."
What Holland does not make explicit in his formula, the premise that
we can see the self as unity only if we turn to the text as identity
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of those blanks, D?llenbach suggests, tends to overlook that the cathexis of each blank only opens up another blank, and that the process of
reading, drawn into the chain of interconnectability it has established, is
therefore no longer in control of its own operations. The semantic seam
bursts when the reader realizes that the text frustrates and neutralizes
attempts to create probable isotopes, because it in turn already offers
interconnectivity, if on the level of the signifier and not on that of
semantics, and withholds the code that could direct the reader's
suturing activity.10
The focus on the syntagmatic level of textual perception invited a
delineation of literary competence, which, historically variable and
context-dependent, would describe the codes that guide reader re
sponses. Reader heuristics, like Riffaterre's "archilecteur" or Stanley Fish's "informed reader," address this problem of what orients the reader's attempts to supplement a code while the text withholds it from him and disorients his semantic efforts. Riffaterre reformulates Roman
Jakobson's poetic function?defined as the syntagmatization of paradig matic equivalencies?as "stylistic function"; a stylistic stimulus perceived
in the text triggers certain responses that then retroactively allow for the
description of the stylistic information in the text.11 Riffaterre not only relies on a behavioral stimulus-response model that Holland had dubbed
"bi-active," he also presupposes the subjective consciousness of the
perceiving reader who responds to the text's stylistic stimuli. Riffaterre's
"archilecteur," being the sum of the responses that then allow for the
structural description of the text, is therefore based on a notion of
reception as an underlying, if historically changing, reality context. While Riffaterre presupposes such a reality context in the perceiving
subjectivity of real readers, Fish tries to model the literary competence or code-orientation of the reader on transformational grammar; his
"informed reader" evolves as a linguistic function that presupposes
ordinary language as a reality context (from which literary language can then deviate, and encode its deviation in turn in a deep structure).12
Jonathan Culler as well extrapolates from the idea of an internalized
grammar and argues for a "grammar of literature" that could account
for the transformation of linguistic into literary competence. Meaning is not immanent in the text, Culler emphasizes, but evolves from a set of
conventions and codes shared by author, reader and the institution of
literature at a certain time; meaning is no longer localized in the object but emerges from an internalized competence within a given literary system.13
Such a shift to code-orientation or literary competence foregrounds the syntagmatic axis over paradigmatic equivalence, combination over selection. When one maps reading onto the stringing of signs into a
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syntagmatic chain in which each sign is what it is by being different from
its immediate context, an operation that Fish and Riffaterre in particular have in mind, one runs into a deadlock of intrasystemic reference.
Problems of codification, however, Niklas Luhmann has argued, have to
be differentiated from problems of reference. Reference relies on a
distinction between self- and heteroreference. With regard to the
literary system, the problem of reference would be one between
literature and non-literature ("world" or "reality"). Problems of codifica
tion revolve around the value difference with which any system marks its
operations as its own. The code thus refers only
to the system itself. The
reference to non-literature, to "world" or to the extraliterary context
(the linguistic norm of ordinary language, for instance, or the subjective consciousness of the reader), cannot simply function as the negative value with which the literary system organizes its internal reference to its
own operations
as acceptable
or unacceptable; it cannot function as the
literary code. Reference, or the distinction of a literary work from
something else (non-literature, "world"), only delimits a specific space of
observations; and it is this very delimitation, or "form" (as the unity of
the distinction between self- and heteroreference), that then serves as
the ideation of "world" for the literary work and renders invisible the
distinction it operates on. The problem of how to account for the
specific observations with which the literary system observes itself, on
the other hand, is a question of codification: the code, Luhmann says,
"both symbolizes and interrupts the fundamental circularity of the
system's self-implication."14 In their attempt to reformulate selection as
combination, by advertising extraliterary reference as intraliterary codi
fication, the advocates of "literary" competence encounter an aporia of
inverted inside-outside relationships. De Man therefore argues that "deconstructive" models of reading,
trying to read metonymy within metaphor, or, in the terms we have been
using, combination within selection, have poised themselves between
two logically incompatible readings?the paradigmatization of the
syntagma and the syntagmatization of the paradigma. Instead of playing out the distinction between those incompatible readings, or instead of
allegorizing "Reading itself," in de Man's terms, deconstruction wishes
to stabilize this distinction by allegorizing the "crossing" of the two
readings. "Crossing," which de Man elucidates as a chiastic operation of
metaphor employed on the level of metonymy, aims at establishing a
conjunction between the paradigmatization of the syntagma and the
syntagmatization of the paradigma, but as syntagmatization. It thus runs
into the aporia of employing one side of the distinction between the two
modes of reading to account for the overall distinction, and could only mask its own observations as already implicit in what is being observed,
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namely, the two modes of "reading" played out by the text itself. De Man describes this move as one of pure self-reference: "If one of the readings is declared true, it will always be possible to undo it by means of the
other; if it is decreed false, it will always be possible to demonstrate that it states the truth of its aberration." Such a self-referential allegory of
reading passes extraliterary reference for intraliterary codification; or as de Man says: it aims at "including the contradictions of reading in a narrative that would be able to contain them."15 The deconstructive
allegorization of reading includes an outside in an inside that still functions as a container, and is in turn based on an inclusive relation
ship between inside and outside. The potential four-sidedness of inside outside distinctions would then, if de Man's characterization of the deconstructive move holds, again be collapsed by amplifying the inside. De Man calls up Walter Benjamin's figure of the rolled-up sock, whose outside is also its own inside when it is unrolled like a M?bius strip, to
map out an alternative to the emphasis on
syntagmatization.
Among the few clues with which de Man points in an alternative direction that could unfold deconstructive allegories of reading with an
allegory of Reading is the term "re-entry" (DAR 76). Deconstructive
readings, de Man believes, can spotlight the net of substitutions govern ing the text, but they invariably fail to prevent the recurrence of such substitutions in their own discourse because they cannot "uncross" these
exchanges (DAR242). De Man may here be suggesting that deconstructive
readings treat distinction as
operation but not as a re-entered distinction.
In order to reformulate de Man's notion of "re-entry" and "uncross
ing" in those terms we have to draw on distinction theory as George Spencer-Brown has outlined it. Spencer-Brown distinguishes between
distinction or "cross" and re-entered distinction or "marker." While a
distinction distinguishes between its two sides, a marked and an un marked side, an inside and an outside, a re-entered distinction distin
guishes the distinction itself from what it distinguishes. While a distinc tion is a first-order operation,
a re-entered distinction is a second-order
observation of its own operation, since it distinguishes itself as distinc tion from what it distinguishes. As a "marker" or a re-entered distinction, the distinction is the distinction it is and yet no longer is what it is. It is
paradoxical and can be observed as the unity of its two sides or its "form." A distinction can thus be observed as a cross or as a marker.16 We
can then take de Man's claim that deconstructive readings can observe
distinctions only as cross and cannot "uncross" them on the level of their own observations to intimate that deconstruction, because it cannot
distinguish between cross and marker, remains blind to its own level of observation: it has to posit it as being implicit in the set of distinctions
already operative in the text. De Man's "allegorization of Reading," on
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the reader is led to discover the rule that governs the text, the text's moves constantly shift the rules it plays out. The reader may thus be
prompted to substitute the code of his own system of beliefs, attitudes or norms for the indeterminacy and codelessness of the textual code, to
project his own disposition onto the textual game; but coding the
codelessness of the textual code, the reader centralizes its paradoxical structure and ends the movement of its play. Or, as Iser formulates it, the
reader cathects the differential play of the text in his attempt to
semanticize it; supplementing it with his own code, he superimposes on
the play of the text what is not play. The game then is his, but the textual
game is up. A reader response that proliferates from a need for
understanding the text, that tries to appropriate the experiences that
the text seems to offer, or that sets itself up as a defense against the
unknown and the unfamiliar is prone to produce such a semantic
reading with which the reader "wins" out over the textual game by
substituting a meaning. The first of the four typified reader responses, then, is semantization.
If, on the other hand, the reader does not play it safe by semanticizing, but plays the game of the text, he will have to suspend his own attitudes and codes and will himself be played by the text. Iser here outlines the
other three possible responses: (2) the reader lets himself be drawn into a game in which he hopes to gain experience by "tilting" his own code
for the codeless code of the text, which he nevertheless appropriates by
making it part of his own experience; (3) the reader discovers that his
discovery of the rules of the game is in turn a game in which he activates
his cognitive and emotive faculties, and thus comes into play himself; (4) the reader does not only come into play himself, he gambles with his
own Self, his own attitudes and beliefs are put at stake when he reinscribes the distinction between his own moves and those of the text
into the game; that is, the reader's observer position is drawn into and
operationalized in what Iser calls the ineradicable difference of play. Iser refers to this last response with a term borrowed from Barthes as the
"pleasure of the text": the reader erases himself as his own reference
frame. The reader's position, similar to the subject's position in the split utterance as Lacan has analysed it, "fades" into the split
or the ineradi
cable difference that is itself "subject" of the text?and that is not
subject, and even less so cognizant subject, but an operationalization of
difference (?T279). In the terms of Luhmann's distinction theory I have
introduced above, the very distinction between play (the codeless code
of the text) and what is not play (the reader's code), is being re-entered
into the play so as to become play itself. The "pleasure of the text" thus
indicates a response to a game in which the reader plays on and is being
played by the very paradox of play.
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These four attitudes of reading?semantization, gaining experience, the activation of faculties, and the pleasure of the text?correspond to
four game structures that Iser, following Caillois' terms but reformulat
ing them as textual strategies or constituents, calls ag?n, alea, mimicry and ilinx. Agon is staged as an antagonistic contest, in which colliding
positions are played out so as to overcome the difference of play
("Spieldifferenz"). The reader-response of semantization, of controlling the play of textual difference by superimposing a code and overcoming ludic difference by bringing it to a halt, can be seen as the flip-side of the
aleatory rule that governs this game structure, namely the ultimate
uncontrollability of a contest that revolves around gain or loss. Alea as a
generator of chance explodes the determinateness of positions in the
text, as they are poised against each other in agon, into what Iser calls
"an unpredictable structuring of its semantics" (FT 261). Alea plays on
the fact that the nodal points that organize the combination and the
selection of extratextual and intertextual references within the text are
contingent and unforeseeable. It intensifies the difference of play, which
Iser conceptualizes as a difference between the axes of selection and
combination. The aleatory rule of this game structure?an extension of
alternative and contingent decisions that defamiliarizes and implodes a
semantics of determinate positions?corresponds to an attitude of
reading that is prepared to suspend its familiar codes in order to let itself
be drawn into the play of the text; and it functions as the flip-side of this
rule, if it ultimately suspends such a suspension of codes by appropriat
ing it as experience. Mimicry as a play of transformation and masking blurs the determinate delineation of positions in the text so as to create an illusion that tries to dissimulate the difference between play and non
play altogether. The axes of selection and combination are here framed
by an "as if that pretends that what is said is what is meant, thereby
concealing while also revealing the very structure of play itself, which
does not mean what it says. According to the aleatory rule of mimicry, the illusion of play aims at pretending that it is not play, but at the same
time makes itself transparent as illusion in order still to be play.
Differentiating between this disappearing and reappearing distinction
play/non-play, the reader will activate his own faculties and discover that
he is implied in his observation; and his response would turn into the
flip-side of this aleatory rule as soon as he identified with or cathected
the very illusion that the textual play is not a play on itself as play but a
reference to world, or to non-play. Ilinx, by subverting, undercutting, or
carnivalizing textual positions to a degree of vertigo, makes them
indeterminate; it almost exceeds itself as play, not like mimicry by
dissimulating its ludic structure for the simulation of "reality" or non
play, but by drawing every outside of play (Iser refers to it as the
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a shifting between actualization and visualization, or foregrounding and backgrounding, which
pinpoints selection as contingency. "Mean
ing is selection" for Iser, as it is for Luhmann.22
Even though Iser draws on Luhmann's notion of selection as systemic reference in The Act of Reading, he further specifies it for the literary text:
while social systems refer to and distinguish themselves from the pure
contingency of world or world as a "meaning correlate,"23 and, through
selection, reduce the complexity of world, the literary text does not refer to world; it refers to the reference of other social systems to world. What
is environment for the literary text is not "reality"
or "world," or even,
qua intertextuality, the literary system, but the complexity reduction of the predominant social or
literary systems at a particular time. The
literary text does not reinforce the dominant set of beliefs, expectations, and perceptions these social systems generate, but references their very
delimitation from something else (the contingency of the world). It
references the blind spot of the distinctions they draw and the selections
they make: "In this respect, the literary text is also a system, which shares
the basic structure of overall systems as it brings out dominant meanings
against a background of neutralized and negated possibilities. However, this structure becomes operative
not in relation to a contingent world,
but in relation to the ordered pattern of systems with which the text
interferes or is meant to interfere" (AR 72). Textual reference thus takes the very distinctions and delimitations of social systems as its starting
point. It makes selections and highlights the contingency of those
selections, by actualizing what they had left virtual. Literary reference, then, does not
"represent" a
given reality?be it the world, or the
dominant ideologies of a social environment?it does not denote, but
reconstructs and constructs liminality.24 Literary reference, that is to say,
is a second order observation; the fictional text can then no longer be understood as a correlative to
"reality" but has to be seen as interaction
and communication.
Such a selection of selection, or the external reference of the text, is
furthermore organized in an "internal network of references" through combination. Following Jakobson 's idea of the poetic function, Iser understands combination as
syntagmatization of the paradigma, and
specifies it as a theme-horizon relationship that constitutes the system of
intratextual perspectives (AR 96). The shifting and tilting of four
perspectives?narrator, characters, plot, and reader position?arrange
the extraliterary references (as selection of selection, or observation on
observation) by thematizing one perspective, while backgrounding other perspectives on the horizon. This shifting of perspectives yields the meaning of the text or what Iser calls the "aesthetic object." Iser
differentiates among four modalizations of the perspectival arrangement
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according to the theme-horizon structure: (1) A counterbalancing
("kontrafaktisch") arrangement hierarchizes perspectives, privileges one
and restricts others, and excludes uncertainties that might emerge from
the shifting of perspectives, so as to foreground a specific ideology associated with and sustained by one of the perspectives. For Iser,
didactic, devotional, or propagandistic literature takes to such an
arrangement of perspectives, not because it simply imitates the domi
nant belief systems of its time, but because it wants to compensate for
their shortcomings or blind spots. It combines the selection of selection in such a way, however, that it obscures its own viewpoint by foregrounding one dominating perspective and thereby becomes "ideological" in turn;
(2) An oppositional arrangement posits norms or belief systems against each other, so that each one with its limits and limitations is observed
from the position of the other. The norms thus opposed cancel each
other out; their mutual foregrounding and backgrounding show them
for what they are: functional in a specific system, but contingent; (3) An
echelon arrangement of perspectives levels out all hierarchization of
one perspective
over the other; instead it offers a multitude of refer
enced systems and viewpoints that disorients the reader's attempt to find a dominant one; yet at the same time it sets him up to project his own
attitudes onto the leveling of the text's perspectives between theme and
horizon, as a stronghold against his disorientation; (4) A serial arrange ment of perspectives heightens the leveling of the echelon structure to
a point where the perspective shifts from sentence to sentence or even
within one sentence; serialization of perspectives alternates between
theme and horizon so quickly that it becomes almost impossible to
recognize the referenced subtexts. A "continual process of transforma
tion that leads back into itself replaces the identification of referenced
systems (AR 102). Disoriented by such a structure of serialized perspec tives, the reader realizes the text's very process of selection. Combina
tion here proceeds as a feedback of the text's external reference, its
selection of selection, back into itself.
If we map those four perspectival arrangements onto the four game
structures and their respective reader responses, counterbalancing or
the hierarchization of perspectives that posits one over the others in
order to consolidate specific norms or
positions corresponds to an
agonistic game structure that arranges intratextual positions antitheti
cally and arrives at a similar determination and stabilization. The
oppositional arrangement, in which perspectives cancel each other to a
point where the contingency of the referenced norms becomes evident, conforms to alea, as a game structure that dissipates
the semantic
relations building up from the referenced worlds and texts and opens them up to a combinatory multiplicity. Prompting the reader to project
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his own belief system onto a textual structure that simultaneously undercuts such an identification, the echelon arrangement agrees with
mimicry, as a game structure that plays on deception, role playing and the transfiguration of identity. Serialization of perspectives?that draws the reader into an oscillation where his attempt to produce meaning is
constantly exceeded by an ever changing trajectory of actualized possi bilities?tallies up with ilinx, as a game structure that disrupts the
stability of perceptions and subverts any determinate textual positions so
that the reader is made aware of his own eccentricity. And as perspectival serialization presents a feedback of the text's external reference back into itself, ilinx re-enters the intratextual distinction between play and
non-play back into itself and observes, as well as transgresses it, as
distinction.
While Iser models both the perspectival arrangement and the game structures and their respective reader responses on four-sided forms,
geared to observing selection as selection and play as play, both need to be read in conjunction in order to account for the unity of the distinction between reference and codification in the literary text.
Reading The Act of Reading in conjunction with The Fictive and the
Imaginary involves us in distinguishing a four-sided distinction from a
four-sided distinction, reference from codification. Whereas reference entails a distinction between self- and heteroreference, literature and
"everything else" (in other words, non-literature or "world"), we had
argued with Luhmann, codification revolves around the self-reference
with which a system marks its own
operations as its own, and therefore
relies on a distinction between what is acceptable and what is unaccept able for its self-reproduction. Drawing on Luhmann and general systems theory (AR 70ff.), Iser reformulates the problem of reference in The Act
of Reading as one of perspective and specifies such perspective as a
shifting and tilting of observations on observations: with its selections, the text does not reference world, it references other selections (of social systems, other texts or art works) that have already cut into the
pure contingency of "world."25 With its selection of selection, literature
delineates itself as a second-order observation: it observes the blind spot entailed in the selections of social systems or other art works, and points to what they left as virtual and potential. But while it organizes the text's
distinction between self- and heteroreference, such an observation is but an operation which in turn involves a blind spot, it functions as a cross, and not as a marker.
When, on the other hand, Iser models the problem of literary codification on the paradoxical structure of play in The Fictive and the
Imaginary and suggests that play indicates something else than it
indicates, he delineates an intratextual reference with which the text
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that the literary text here frames its frame within itself: it frames its
extratextual reference?as that which delineates it as literature and
differentiates it from non-literature. The rule of the game, or its
metacommunicative frame, reiterates the external reference to non-play
on the inside of the play and traces out the internal moves with which
the game reproduces itself as game. The re-entry of the metacommu
nicative frame into what it frames can then be played through by the
game structures Iser describes. As a framed metacommunicative frame,
extratextual reference is at the same time processed as intratextual
reference and reproduces the text's own moves: it can function as
marker. And as marker or re-entered distinction, extratextual reference
becomes paradoxical: it is the distinction it is (between literature and
non-literature or play and non-play) and yet no longer is what it is.
Extratextual reference delimits a space of operations and observations
specific for literature and fiction as play; this very delimitation is re
entered into the self-reproduction of these operations and observations.
We can also say that selection as a second-order observation of the
literary text within the literary text here zooms in on its own blind spot as that which it cannot observe.
The conjunction between Iser's concern with problems of reference
in The Act of Reading and his emphasis on the problem of codification in
The Fictive and the Imaginary can be conceived of as an observation of the
unobservable. As a second-order observation, literature observes the
blind spot of what are first-order observations for it?sociopolitical and
historical contexts, other texts, other art works?but also feeds its own
observations back into its own operations, and observes itself observing.
Especially with the rise of modernism, Luhmann has suggested, art no
longer only shows what it observes, but wants to show how it observes. For
Iser, modernist literature therefore tends towards such structures as the
serialization of perspectives or the game strategy of ilinx. Unfolding
paradoxes of observation, modern art intends to be observed as ob
server itself (KG 74, 96).
III. Staging Autobiography: Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge
If literature stages itself as an observation of observers in a world that
is constructed on recursive observations, it is no longer referential: it
does not imitate nature or world, it does not represent something
phenomenologically or historically given, but in turn creates and calls
forth what it refers to when it relies on recursive observation. As fiction, Iser says, literature outlines possibilities, it does not model itself on what
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seems to be given, but invokes horizons of potentiality (TL 22). I would
like to consider a key modernist narrative, Rilke 's The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge, to exemplify such a shift from representation to recursive
observation in modernist literature in the fictional concern with what we
have called an observation of the unobservable.
Staged as a fictive autobiography or memoir of the impoverished young Danish aristocrat and poet Malte Laurids Brigge, the Notebooks
comprise scenes, observations, and memories that are apparently
un
connected. Portrayals of the homeless, the poor, the dying, or a blind
newsvendor in Paris, descriptions of decaying houses turned inside out, or of overcrowded hallways and rooms in the Salpeti?re alternate with
the narration of childhood memories, the narration of art works and of
the literature Malte has read, and with the portraits of historical
personae. To connect what seems unconnected, readers have mostly
looked for the loose thematic threads that run through the narrative, such as remembrance, intransitive love (a love that exceeds its object), or Malte's programmatically formulated agenda of "seeing": "I am
learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more
deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to."?"Have I said it before?
I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly" (N5, 6). Kate Hamburger compares Rilke 's notion of seeing to Husserl's, and
argues that seeing here aims at a phenomenological world whose
objects, as it were, invade subjective consciousness.26 Judith Ryan,
on the
other hand, suggests that Malte's narration indeed departs from any
phenomenologically given reality and instead constitutes his own reality very selectively, in turn permeating the outside world with a completely subjective imagination, so that seeing would be less receptive than
constitutive.27 For Ryan, Malte aims at a "hypothetical narration": he
does not narrate what is, but what could have been, when he opens up alternatives to the historical accounts he gives, or when he "plays on
possibilities" in retelling the biblical story of the prodigal son.
Although I agree with Ryan's insight about the hypothetical, highly conjunctive mode of narration that constantly revokes the perspective it
has just offered and presents the reader with yet another alternative, I would not ground such a narrative suspension of fixed perspectives and reference frames in an
all-determining and overbearing subjective consciousness. The narrative rather sets up its
highly confusing alterna
tion of perspectives, its very dense network of allusions to historical,
social, literary, legendary, and autobiographical facts and personae, and its montage of apparently unconnected scenes and vignettes, in order to
break down any external reference frames, such as subjective conscious
ness, be it of narrator, character or reader. Through this breakdown of external reference frames, the reader is in turn drawn into the narrative
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concealed space, or on a realm of the ineffable. What is inaccessible is its
own mode of access, what is unobservable is its own form of observation.
Iser captures this operation with the metaphors of "staging" and of the
text as a "mirror world." Staging implies a "crossing of boundaries," and
the play of the text, Iser suggests, "stages transformation and at the same
time reveals how the staging is done," exhibiting "its own procedural
workings" so as to provide an "access road to the inaccessible," which
"allows us to have things both ways, by making what is inaccessible both
present and absent" (P 260). Such a simultaneity of presence and
absence, or, in Luhmann's terms, the paradoxical unity or "form" of
their distinction, characterizes the fictional for Iser; he also describes it
as "a place of manifold mirrorings, in which everything is reflected,
refracted, fragmented, telescoped, perspectivized, exposed, or revealed"
(FI 79). With his notion of fiction as a paradoxical doubling or as ek
stasis, Iser draws on Helmuth Plessner's anthropology of eccentricity,
according to which man both is and has body, an ambivalent position that differentiates him from animals, who only are body and therefore
do not have to distinguish themselves in themselves from themselves.28 If
fiction as ek-stasis can stage for us the simultaneous inclusion in ourselves
and exclusion from ourselves, it is a paradoxical
enactment that allows
us to see ourselves at the same time from within and from without.
Fiction allows us to see our own blind spot, to observe our own
observations, but invariably entails its own blind spot in turn, setting itself up as the "form" or the unity of the distinction between first and
second-order observations.
The actor and the mask are paradigms of such fictional enactment for
Iser: they suggest the simultaneity of a presence with an absence, the
determination of a role with its indeterminability: "In order to produce the determinate form of an unreal character, the actor must allow his
own reality to fade out. At the same time, however, he does not know
precisely who, say, Hamlet is, for one cannot properly identify a
character who has never existed. Thus role-playing endows a figment with a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies total
determination" (P244). Acting, theatricality, disguise, masks, and face lessness as the flip-side of the face (that is, as something that cannot be
seen) are, in conjunction with the making visible of the invisible, another "dominant" of Rilke 's Notebooks. While the concern with face and facelessness is certainly an intertextual reference to what Baudelaire
had called "tyrannie de la face humaine" in his Petits Po?mes en Prose,
explicitly mentioned in the Notebooks, it also pinpoints Rilke 's poetic
attempt to capture the "hollow form" as the negative or virtual back
ground of foregrounded, actualized figuration. Malte perceives the
faces of passers-by in Paris as something they wear and wear out until the
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discourse in which the "I" splits itself between discourse and story level, and functions as both subject and object of its own narrative, a split that can also be underscored by shifts between first- and third-person narration. Autobiographical discourse, Jean Starobinski has suggested, is therefore always double.29 It counterfeits a simultaneity of the non
simultaneous: of the present with the past, of a former sinful self with a
current repentant self, of a remembered "I" with a remembering "I."
The characteristic use of the narrative present and the linguistic variable
"I" establish the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, or the paradox of
autobiographical form. As Emile Benveniste has shown, the first-person pronoun functions as a
linguistic variable, as a non-referential instance
of discourse that refers but to itself as discourse: it represents a "reality of
discourse." With such pronouns, Benveniste believes, language ad
dresses the problem of intersubjective communication and solves it with an "ensemble of 'empty' signs that are nonreferential with respect to
'reality.'"30 We could also say that the linguistic instance "I" can mark
what is unmarked as marked only when it refers to itself as the present instance of its own discourse: it operates on the inside of this distinction.
The third person, on the other hand, does not function as a mere
referent of discourse. According to Benveniste, it assumes its differential value by being opposed to the "I" of the enunciation; from the
perspective of discourse, the third person can only be situated as a "non
person." Only with such a non-person, or "the unmarked member of the
correlation of person," as Benveniste also calls it, can discourse refer to
something outside itself. The apparent symmetry between first- and
third-person pronouns should thus be seen as an asymmetry that figures forth the distinction between language as an act in discourse, and
language as combination and substitution (222). With reference to the form of autobiography, this linguistic asymme
try can be unfolded as a four-sided distinction. With first-person narrative, autobiography marks what is unmarked as marked and refers
but to itself as autobiographical discourse, or to the "now" of writing and
remembering, while third-person narrative, as the unmarked correlative
or the other side of autobiography,
crosses over into what is non
autobiographical discourse?fiction, as well as "reality"?and re-enters it
as the included excluded third. The shift between first- and third-person narrative in Rilke 's Notebooks?between Malte's present and his past, and even more so the past of the historical and literary personae whose
biographies feed into and alternate with the memoirs of the autobio
graphical "I"?would thus play on the very code of autobiography as a
genre, that is, on its "form" as the unity of the distinction between
autobiography and non-autobiography. What the seemingly unconnected scenes and vignettes have in common
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of roses in front of her face like a mask that would hide the disappear ance of her reality in a fiction so dense that her audience would mistake
it for her reality. Seen by all, the actress became invisible?but then her
(autobiographical) performance, like the novel in which it is men
tioned, shows precisely this.
Johns Hopkins University
NOTES
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, tr. Stephen Mitchell (New
York, 1982); hereafter cited in text as N.
2 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 67, 70ff.; hereafter cited in text
as AR.
3 Wolfgang Iser, Theorie der Literatur (Constance, 1992); hereafter cited in text as TL.
4 Friedrich Schlegel, "Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur," Kritische-Friedrich-Schlegel
Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler (Paderborn, 1981), p. 309, No. 669: "Das k?nstliche Lesen besteht
darin, da? man mit einem anderen liest, n?mlich auch das Lesen anderer zu lesen sucht."
5 George Poulet, "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore, 1980), p. 45.
6 See G?nther Erning, Das Lesen und die Lesewut (Bad Heilbrunn, 1974), p. 69, and
Siegfried J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18.Jahrhundert
(Frankfurt, 1989), pp. 335-59.
7 Norman Holland, "Unity Identity Text Self," in Reader-Response Criticism, p. 123.
8 See the Holland-Iser "Interview" in Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting (Baltimore, 1989), pp.
42-69; hereafter cited in Text as P.
9 See for instance Gary Lee Stonum ("For a Cybernetics of Reading," MLN, 92 [1977],
945-68), who draws on cybernetics to account for the "constitutive uncanniness" of the
reading process and to reinterpret indeterminacies in light of open systems. See also
William Paulson ("Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity," Chaos and Order: Complex
Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles [Chicago, 19911, pp. 37-53), who suggests that the production of meaning through the reader should be seen as self
organization from noise; since the reader will not be able to actualize all the codes
necessary to understand the literary text, it will always remain partially uncoded, that is, noise.
10 Lucien D?llenbach, "Reading as Suture (Problems of Reception of the Fragmentary Text: Balzac and Claude Simon)," in Mirrors and After: Five Essays on Literary Theory and
Criticism (New York, 1986), pp. 25-37.
11 Michael Riffaterre, "Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's
'Les Chats,'" in Reader Response Criticism, pp. 26-40. See also Michael Riffaterre, Strukturale
Stilistik (Munich, 1973). 12 Stanley E. Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," in Reader-Response
Criticism, pp. 70-100.
13 Jonathan Culler, "Literary Competence," in Reader-Response Criticism, pp. 101-17.
14 Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1995), p. 304; hereafter cited in
text as KG.
15 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and
Proust (New Haven, 1979), pp. 77, 72; hereafter cited in text as DAR
16 George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (New York, 1972).
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17 Dirk Baecker, "Die Unterscheidung zwischen Kommunikation und Bewu?tsein," in
Emergenz, ed. Wolfgang Krohn and G?nter K?ppers (Frankfurt, 1992), pp. 217-68.
18 Wolfgang Iser, "Mimesis?Emergenz," in Mimesis und Simulation, ed. Gerhard Neumann
and Andreas Kablitz (Freiburg, 1998), pp. 669-84.
19 See also Dirk Baecker, "Das Spiel mit der Form," in Probleme der Form, ed. D. Baecker
(Frankfurt, 1993), pp. 148-58.
20 See Gregory Bateson, "Eine Theorie des Spiels und der Phantasie," in ?kologie des
Geistes (Frankfurt, 1990), pp. 241-61, and Bateson, "The Message 'This is a Play,'" in Group Processes: Transactions of the Second Conference (October 1955), ed. B. Schaffner (Princeton,
1956), pp. 145-242.
21 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,
1993), p. 275; hereafter cited in text as FI.
22 Niklas Luhmann, "Anfang und Ende: Probleme einer Unterscheidung," in Zwischen
Anfang und Ende. Fragen an die P?dagogik, ed. Niklas Luhmann and Karl Eberhard Schorr
(Frankfurt, 1990), p. 16.
23 Niklas Luhmann, "Die Form des Zeichens," in Probleme der Form, pp. 45-69.
24 Iser expands on this notion of liminality in Der Akt des Lesens: "Fiktional sind diese
Texte deshalb, weil sie weder das entsprechende Sinnsystem noch dessen Geltung
denotieren, sondern viel eher dessen Abschattungshorizont bzw. dessen Grenze als
Zielpunkt haben. Sie beziehen sich auf etwas, das in der Struktur des Systems nicht
enthalten, zugleich aber als dessen Grenze aktualisierbar ist." See Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt
des Lesens (Munich, 1976), p. 120.
25 See also Prospecting, p. 69, where Iser lists general systems theory as one of the "four
reference frames" for this theory design. 26 Kate Hamburger, "Die ph?nomenologische Struktur der Dichtung Rilkes," in Rilke in
neuer Sicht, ed. Kate Hamburger (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 83-158.
27 Judith Ryan, "'Hypothetisches Erz?hlen': Zur Funktion von Phantasie und Einbildung in Rilkes 'Malte Laurids Brigge,'" in Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. R?diger G?rner (Darmstadt,
1987), pp. 245-84.
28 Helmuth Plessner, "Lachen und Weinen," in Philosophische Anthropologie, ed. G. Dux,
(Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 43, 46.
29 Jean Starobinski, "The Style of Autobiography," in Autobiography, ed. James Olney
(Princeton, 1980), p. 78.
30 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Miami, 1971), p. 219; hereafter cited
in text.
31 The Notebooks draw on the Reventlow archive as one of the main sources for Malte's
family background. 32 See August Stahl, Rilke-Kommentar (Munich, 1979), p. 201.
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