|
|
[Iser taught at the University of Constance and at many universities in the U.S. and the U.K. A leading theorist of the role of the reader, Iser promulgated the concept of the implied reader and worked toward an integrated notion of aesthetic response. These excerpts are from Chapter Two of his book, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978).]
Interpretatio today is beginning to discover its own history - not only the limitations of its respective norms but also those factors that could not come to light as long as traditional norms held sway. The most important of these factors is without doubt the reader himself, the addressee of the text. So long as the focal point of interest was the author's intention, or the contemporary, psychological, social, or historical meaning of the text, or the way in which it was constructed, it scarcely seemed to occur to critics that the text could only have a meaning when it was read. Of course, this was something everyone took for granted, and yet we know surprisingly little of what we are taking for granted. One thing that is clear is that reading is the essential precondition for all processes of literary interpretation. As Walter Slatoff has observed in his book With Respect to Readers [1970]:
One feels a little foolish having to begin by insisting that works of literature exist, in part, at least, in order to be read, that we do in fact read them, and that it is worth thinking about what happens when we do. Put so blatantly, such statements seem too obvious to be worth making, for after all, no one directly denies that readers and reading do actually exist; even those who have most insisted on the autonomy of literary works and the irrelevance of the readers' responses, themselves do read books and respond to them. . . . Equally obvious, perhaps, is the observation that works of literature are important and worthy of study essentially because they can be read and can engender responses in human beings.
Central to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between its structure and its recipient. This is why the phenomenological theory of art has emphatically drawn attention to the fact that the study of a literary work should concern not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text. The text itself simply offers "schematized aspects" [the phrase is Roman Ingarden's] through which the subject matter of the work can be produced, while the actual production takes place through an act of concretization.
From this we may conclude that the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author's text and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with the concretization, but must be situated somewhere between the two. It must inevitably be virtual in character, as it cannot be reduced to the reality of the text or in the subjectivity of the reader, and it is from this virtuality that it derives its dynamism. As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text and relates the different views and patterns to one another he sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion, too.
If the virtual position of the work is between text and reader, its actualization is clearly the result of an interaction between the two, and so exclusive concentration on either the author's techniques or the reader's psychology will tell us little about the reading process itself. This is not to deny the vital importance of each of the two poles - it is simply that if one loses sight of the relationship, one loses sight of the virtual work. Despite its uses, separate analysis would only be conclusive if the relationship were that of transmitter and receiver, for this would presuppose a common code, ensuring accurate communication, since the message would only be traveling one way.
In literary works, however, the message is transmitted in two ways, in that the reader 'receives' it by composing it. There is no common code - at best one could say that a common code may arise in the course of the process. Starting with this assumption, we must search for structures that will enable us to describe basic conditions of interaction, for only then shall we be able to gain some insight into the potential effects inherent in the work. These structures must be of a complex nature, for although they are contained in the text, they do not fulfill their function until they have affected the reader. Practically every discernible structure in fiction has this two-sidedness: it is verbal and affective. The verbal aspect guides the reaction and prevents it from being arbitrary; the affective aspect is the fulfillment of that which has been prestructured by the language of the text. Any description of the interaction between the two and therefore must incorporate both the structure of effects (the text) and that of response (the reader).
It is characteristic of aesthetic effect that it cannot be pinned to something existing, and indeed the very word 'aesthetic' is an embarrassment to referential language, for it designates a gap in the defining qualities of language rather than a definition. Josef König summed up the situation as follows [1957]: "Certainly . . . the expressions 'to be beautiful' and 'this is beautiful' are not meaningless. However . . . what they mean is nothing but what is meant through them . . . and this is only something to the extent that it is nothing but what is meant through these expressions." [!!!!!] The aesthetic effect is robbed of this unique quality the moment one tries to define what is meant in terms of other meanings that one knows. For if it means nothing but what comes through it into the world, it cannot possibly be identical to anything already existing in the world. At the same time, of course, it is easy to see why specific definitions are attributed to this indefinable reality, for one automatically seeks to relate it to contexts that are familiar. The moment one does so, however, the effect is extinguished, because the effect is in the nature of an experience and not an exercise in explanation. Thus, the meaning of a literary text is not a definable entity but, if anything, a dynamic happening.
As has already been suggested, the interpreter's task should be to elucidate the potential meanings of a text, and not to restrict himself to just one. Obviously, the total potential can never be fulfilled in the reading process, but it is this very fact that makes it so essential that one should conceive of meaning as something that happens, for only then can one become aware of those factors that precondition the composition of the meaning. However individual may be the meaning realized in each case, the act of compositing it will always have intersubjectively verifiable characteristics. Now the traditional form of interpretation, based on the search for a single meaning, set out to instruct the reader; consequently, it tended to ignore both the character of the text as a happening and the experience of the reader that is activated by this happening. As we have seen, such a referential meaning could not be of an aesthetic nature. However, initially it is aesthetic, because it brings into the world something that did not exist before; but the moment one tries to come to grips with this new experience one is constrained to reach out for nonaesthetic reassurance. Consequently, the aesthetic nature of meaning constantly threatens to transmute itself into discursive determinacy - to use a Kantian term, it is amphibolic: at one moment aesthetic and at the next discursive. This transmutation is conditioned by the structure of fictional 'meaning,' for it is impossible for such a meaning to remain indefinitely as an aesthetic effect. The very experience which it activates and develops in the reader shows that it brings about something that can no longer be regarded as aesthetic, since it extends its meaningfulness by relating to something outside itself. [. . .]
Northrop Frye once wrote [1967]: "It has been said of [the German mystic Jacob] Boehme that his books are like a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning. The remark may have been intended as a sneer at Boehme, but it is an exact description of all works of literary art without exception." Any attempt to understand the true nature of this cooperative enterprise will run into difficulties over the question of which reader is being referred to. Many different types of readers are invoked when the literary critic makes pronouncements on the effects of literature or responses to it. Generally, two categories emerge, in accordance with whether the critic is concerned with the history of responses or the potential effect of the literary text. In the first instance, we have the 'real' reader, known to us by his documented reactions; in the second, we have the 'hypothetical' reader, upon whom all possible actualizations of the text may be projected. The latter category is frequently subdivided into the so-called ideal reader and the contemporary reader. The first of these cannot be said to exist objectively, while the second, though undoubtedly there, is difficult to mould to the form of a generalization.
Nevertheless, no one would deny that there is such a being as a contemporary reader, and perhaps an ideal reader too, and it is the very plausibility of their existence that seems to substantiate the claims made on their behalf. The importance of this plausible basis as a means of verification can be gauged from the fact that in recent years another type of reader has sometimes been endowed with more than merely heuristic qualities: namely, the reader whose psychology has been opened up by the findings of psychoanalysis. Examples of such studies are those by Simon Lesser and Norman Holland, to which we shall be referring again later. Recourse to psychology, as a basis for a particular category of reader, in whom the responses to literature may be observed, has come about not least because of the desire to escape from the limitations of the other categories. The assumption of a psychologically describable reader has increased the extent to which literary responses may be ascertained, and a psychoanalytically based theory seems eminently plausible, because the reader it refers to appears to have a real existence of his own.
Let us now take a closer look at the two main categories of readers and their place in literary criticism. The real reader is invoked mainly in studies of the history of responses, i.e. when attention is focused on the way in which a literary work has been received by a specific reading public. Now whatever judgments may have been passed on the work will also reflect various attitudes and norms of that public, so that literature can be said to mirror the cultural code which conditions these judgements. This is also true when the readers quoted belong to different historical ages, for, whatever period they may have belonged to, their judgment of the work in question will still reveal their own norms, thereby offering a substantial clue as to the norms and tastes of their respective societies. Reconstruction of the real reader naturally depends on the survival of contemporary documents, but the further back in time we go, beyond the eighteenth century, the more sparse the documentation becomes. As a result, the reconstruction often depends entirely on what can be gleaned from the literary works themselves. The problem here is whether such a reconstruction corresponds to the real reader of the time, or simply represents the role which the author intended the reader to assume. In this respect, there are three types of 'contemporary' reader - the one real and historical, drawn from existing documents, and the other two hypothetical: the first constructed from social and historical knowledge of the time, and the second extrapolated from the reader's role laid down in the text.
Almost diametrically opposite the contemporary reader stands the oft quoted ideal reader. It is difficult to pinpoint precisely where he is draw from, though there is a good deal to be said for the claim that he tends to emerge from the brain of the philologist or critic himself. Although the critic's judgment may well have been honed and refined by the many texts he has dealt with, he remains nothing more than a cultured reader - if only because an ideal reader is a structural impossibility as far as literary communication is concerned. An ideal reader would have a identical code to that of the author; authors, however, generally recodify prevailing codes in their texts, and so the ideal reader would also have to share the intentions underlying this process. And if this were possible, communication would then be quite superfluous, for one only communicates that which is not already shared by sender and receiver.
The idea that the author himself might be his own ideal reader is frequently undermined by the statements writers have made about their own works. Generally, as readers they hardly ever make any remarks on the impact their own texts have exercised upon them, but prefer to talk in referential language about their intentions, strategies, and constructions, conforming to conditions that will also be valid for the public they are trying to guide. Whenever this happens, i.e., whenever the author turns into a reader of his own work, he must therefore revert to the code, which he had already recoded in his work. In other words, the author, although theoretically the only possible ideal reader, as he has experienced what he has written, does not in fact need to duplicate himself into author and ideal reader, so that the postulate of an ideal reader is, in his case, superfluous.
A further question mark against the concept of the ideal reader lies in the fact that such a being would have to be able to realize in full the meaning potential of the fictional text. The history of literary responses, however, shows quite clearly that this potential has been fulfilled in many different ways, and if so, how can one person at one go encompass all the possible meanings? Different meanings of the same text have emerged at different times, and indeed, the same text read a second time will have a different effect from that of its first reading. The ideal reader, then, must not only fulfill the potential meaning of the text independently of his own historical situation, but he must also do this exhaustively. The result would be total consumption of the text - which would itself be ruinous for literature. But there are texts which can be 'consumed' in this way, as is obvious from the mounds of light literature that flow regularly into the pulping machines. The question then arises as to whether the reader of such works is really the one meant by the term 'ideal reader,' for the latter is usually called upon when the text is hard to grasp - it is hoped that he will help to unravel its mysteries and if there are no mysteries, his presence is not required anyway. Indeed, herein lies the true essence of this particularly concept. The ideal reader, unlike the contemporary reader, is a purely fictional being; he has no basis in reality, and it is this very face that makes him so useful: as a fictional being, he can close the gaps that constantly appear in any analysis of literary effects and responses. He can be endowed with a variety of qualities in accordance with whatever problem he is called upon to help solve.
[. . .] The desire to break free from these traditional and basically restrictive categories of readers can already be seen in the various attempts that have been made to develop new categories of readers as heuristic concepts. Present-day literary criticism offers specific categories for specific areas of discussion: there is the superreader (Michael Riffaterre), the informed reader (Stanley Fish), and the intended reader (Erwin Wolff), to name but a few, each type bringing with it a special terminology of its own. [Iser discusses these: the "superreader stands for a 'group of informants,' who always come together at 'nodal points in the text,' thus establishing through their common reactions the existence of a 'stylistic fact.'" Iser allows Fish to define "the informed reader":]
The informed reader is someone who 1) is a competent speaker of the language out of which the text is built up. 2) is in full possession of 'semantic knowledge that a mature . . . listener brings to the task of comprehension.' This includes knowledge (that is, the experience, both as a producer and comprehender) of lexical sets, collocation probabilities, idioms, professional and other dialects, etc. 3) has literary competence. . . . The reader, of whose responses I speak, then, is this informed reader, neither an abstraction, nor an actual living reader, but a hybrid - a real reader (me) who does everything within his power to make himself informed.
[Iser explains Wolff's project as trying to reconstruct the reader the author had in mind.]
It is evident that no theory concerned with literary texts can make much headway without bringing in the reader, who now appears to have been promoted to the new frame of reference whenever the semantic and pragmatic potential of the text comes under scrutiny. The question is, what kind of reader? As we have seen, the different concepts, of real and of hypothetical readers, all entail restrictions that inevitably undermine the general applicability of the theories to which they are linked. If, then, we are to try and understand the effects caused and the responses elicited by literary works, we must allow for the reader's presence without in any way predetermining his character or his historical situation. We may call him, for want of a better term, the implied reader. He embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect - predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader.
It is generally recognized that literary texts take on their reality by being read, and this in turn means that texts must already contain certain conditions of actualization that will allow their meaning to be assembled in the responsive mind of the recipient. The concept of the implied reader is therefore a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him: this concept prestructures the role to be assumed by each recipient, and this holds true even when texts deliberately appear to ignore their possible recipient or actively exclude him. Thus the concept of the implied reader designates a network of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader to grasp the text.
No matter who or what he may be, the real reader is always offered a particular role to play, and it is this role that constitutes the concept of the implied reader. There are two basic, interrelated aspects to this concept: the reader's role as a textual structure, and the reader's role as a structured act. Let us begin with the textual structure. We may assume that every literary text in one way or another represents a perspective view of the world put together by (though not necessarily typical of) the author. As such, the work is in no way a mere copy of the given world - it constructs a world of its own out of the material available to it. It is the way in which this world is constructed that brings about the perspective intended by the author. Since the world of the text is bound to have variable degrees of unfamiliarity for its possible readers (if the work is to have any 'novelty' for them), they must be placed in a position which enables them to actualize the new view. This position, however, cannot be present in the text itself, as it is the vantage point for visualizing the world represented and so cannot be part of that world. The text must therefore bring about a standpoint from which the reader will be able to view things that would never have come into focus as long as his own habitual dispositions were determining his orientation, and what is more, this standpoint must be able to accommodate all kinds of different readers. How, then, can it evolve from the structure of the text?
It has been pointed out that the literary text offers a perspective view of the world (namely, the author's). It is also, in itself, composed of a variety of perspectives that outline the author's view and also provide access to what the reader is meant to visualize. This is best exemplified by the novel, which is a system of perspectives designed to transmit the individuality of the author's vision. As a rule there are four main perspectives: those of the narrator, the characters, the plot, and the fictitious reader [the narratee]. Although these may differ in order of importance, none of them on its own is identical to the meaning of the text. What they do is provide guidelines originating from different starting points (narrator, characters, etc.), continually shading into each other and devised in such a way that they all converge on a general meeting place. We call this meeting place the meaning of the text, which can only be brought into focus if it is visualized from a standpoint. Thus, standpoint and convergence of textual perspectives are closely interrelated, although neither of them is actually represented in the text, let alone set out in words. Rather they emerge during the reading process, in the course of which the reader's role is to occupy shifting vantage points that are geared to a prestructured activity and to fit the diverse perspectives into a gradually evolving pattern. This allows him to grasp both the different starting points of the textual perspectives and their ultimate coalescence, which is guided by the interplay between the changing perspective and the gradually unfolding coalescence itself.
Thus, the reader's role is prestructured by three basic components: the different perspectives represented in the text, the vantage point from which he joins them together, and the meeting place where they converge.
This pattern simultaneously reveals that the reader's role is not identical to the fictitious reader portrayed in the text. The latter is merely one component part of the reader's role, by which the author exposes the disposition of an assumed reader to interaction with the other perspectives, in order to bring about modifications.
So far we have outlined the reader's role as a textual structure, which, however, will be fully implemented only when it induces structured acts in the reader. The reason for this is that although the textual perspectives themselves are given, their gradual convergence and final meeting place are not linguistically formulated and so have to be imagined. This is the point where the textual structure of his role begins to affect the reader. The instructions provided stimulate mental images, which animate what is linguistically implied, though not said. A sequence of mental images is bound to arise during the reading process, as new instructions have continually to be accommodated, resulting not only in the replacement of images formed but also in a shifting position of the vantage point, which differentiates the attitudes to be adopted in the process of image-building. Thus the vantage point of the reader and the meeting place of perspectives become interrelated during the ideational activity and so draw the reader inescapably into the world of the text.
Textual structure and structured act are related in much the same way as intentional and fulfillment, though in the concept of the implied reader they are joined together in the dynamic process we have described. In this respect, the concept departs from the latest postulate that the programmed reception of the text be designated as "Rezeptionsvorgabe" (structured prefigurement). This term relates only to discernible textual structures and completely ignores the dynamic act which elicits the response to those structures.
The concept of the implied reader as an expression of the role offered by the text is in no way an abstraction derived from a real reader, but it rather the conditioning force behind a particular kind of tension produced by the real reader when he accepts the role. This tension results, in the first place, from the difference
between myself as reader and the often very different self who goes about paying bills, repairing leaky faucets, and failing in generosity and wisdom. It is only as I read that I become the self whose beliefs must coincide with the author's. Regardless of my real beliefs and practices, I must subordinate any mind and heart to the book if I am to enjoy it to the full. The author creates, in short, an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement. [Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1963]
One wonders whether such an agreement can really work; even Coleridge's ever popular demand for a "willing suspension of disbelief" on the part of the audience remins an ideal whose desirability is questionable. Would the role offered by the text function properly if it were totally accepted? The sacrifice of the real reader's own beliefs would mean the loss of the whole repertoire of historical norms and values, and this in turn would entail the loss of the tension which is a precondition for the processing and for the comprehension that follows it. As M. H. Abrams has rightly stressed: "Given a truly impassive reader, all his beliefs suspended or anaesthetized, (a poet) would be as helpless, in his attempt to endow his work with interest and power, as though he had to write for an audience from Mars" [Literature and Belief 1957]. However, the suggestion that there are two selves is certainly tenable, for these are the role offered by the text and the real reader's own disposition, and as the one can never be fully taken over by the other, there arises between the two the tension we have described. Generally, the role prescribed by the text will be the stronger, but the reader's own disposition will never disappear totally; it will tend instead to form the background to and a frame of reference for the act of grasping and comprehending. If it were to disappear totally, we should simply forget all the experiences that we are constantly bringing into play as we read - experiences which are responsible for the many different ways in which people fulfill the reader's role set out by the text. And even though we may lose awareness of these experiences while we read, we are still guided by them unconsciously, and by the end of our reading we are liable consciously to want to incorporate the new experience into our own store of knowledge.
The fact that the reader's role can be fulfilled in different ways, according to historical or individual circumstances, is an indication that the structure of the text allows for different ways of fulfillment. Clearly, then, the process of fulfillment is always a selective one, and any one actualization can be judged against the background of the others potentially present in the textual structure of the reader's role. Each actualization therefore represents a selective realization of the implied reader, whose own structure provides a frame of reference within which individual responses to a text can be communicated to others. This is a vital function of the whole concept of the implied reader: it provides a link between all the historical and individual actualizations of the text and makes them accessible to analysis.
To sum up, then, the concept of the implied reader is a transcendental model which makes it possible for the structured effects of literary texts to be described. It denotes the role of the reader, which is definable in terms of textual structure and structured acts. By bringing about a standpoint for the reader, the textual structure follows a basic rule of human perception, as our views of the world are always of a perspective nature. "The observing subject and the represented object have a particular relationship one to the other; the 'subject-object relationship' merges into the perspective way of representation. It also merges into the observer's way of seeing; for just as the artist organizes his representation according to the standpoint of an observer, the observer - because of this very technique of representation - finds himself directed toward a particular view which more or less obliges him to search for the one and only standpoint that will correspond to that view." [Carl Friedrich Graumann, 1960]
By virtue of this standpoint, the reader is situated in such a position that he can assemble the meaning toward which the perspectives of the text have guided him. But since this meaning is neither a given external reality nor a copy of an intended reader's own world, it is something that has to be ideated by the mind of the reader. A reality that has no existence of its own can only come into being by way of ideation, and so the structure of the text sets off a sequence of mental images which lead to the text translating itself into the reader's consciousness. The actual content of these mental images will be colored by the reader's existing stock of experience, which acts as a referential background against which the unfamiliar can be conceived and processed. The concept of the implied reader offers a means of describing the process whereby textual structures are transmuted through ideational activities into personal experiences.
From: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/DEBCLASS/iser.htm
[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-7-12 22:50 编辑 ] |
|
狗仔卡
发表于 2006-7-12 22:43
收藏
分享
提升卡
置顶卡
沉默卡
变色卡
楼主