Prof: So before we go on
to talk a little bit about the
American historicist
hermeneutical scholar
E.D. Hirsch,
and then Wolfgang Iser--for
whom you have your reading
assignment--
I want to go back to Gadamer a
little bit and say something
more about his taste,
that is to say,
the kind of literary and
intellectual canon that his
approach to hermeneutics
establishes.
You remember Gadamer is very
much concerned with the norm of
classicism,
which later in his essay he is
inclined to call
"tradition"
instead,
and the reason that's so
important to him is that he
actually has a very conservative
view of what the reader can
accomplish in understanding
another horizon.
 
Gadamer, in other words,
doesn't think that the reader
can perform any great miracles
in intuitively feeling his or
her way into the mind of another
time and place,
so that the value of classicism
and of tradition for Gadamer is
that there is evident common
ground in certain texts.
Sometimes we refer to them as
"great books"--
in other words,
the sort of text that speaks,
or we feel as though it's
speaking,
to all places and times.
 
Of course, it's contested
whether or not there is really
any merit in talking about texts
that way.
But Gadamer's view is very
strongly that this conservatism
about the canon,
which is intimately related to
his conservative doubt about the
actual capability of a reader to
span enormous gaps--
and I use that word advisedly
because it is the word that Iser
uses to talk about the distance
between the reader and the text,
and the way in which that
distance should be negotiated--
so in any case this
conservatism,
it seems to me,
however, can be questioned.
 
I thought that we'd begin then
by turning to page 731,
the left-hand column,
the footnote.
You're beginning to realize,
I'm sure, that I like
footnotes.
 
Gibbon of course was said to
have lived his life in his
footnotes.
 
Perhaps I live my life in the
footnotes of other people.
In any case,
in this footnote Gadamer says
something--
I think it's very rare that we
can actually just sort of
outright disagree with Gadamer,
but he says something in this
footnote that I believe we can
actually disagree with.
 
Toward the bottom of the
footnote,
731, left-hand column,
he says, "…
[J]ust as in conversation,
we understand irony to the
extent to which we are in
agreement on the subject with
the other person."
 
We understand irony only,
he means, to the extent to
which we are in agreement with
the other person.
If you are expressing an
opinion, in other words,
which differs radically from my
own,
I can't understand,
according to Gadamer,
whether or not you're being
ironic.
This seems to me to be just
patently false.
Think about politics.
 
Think about political talk
shows.
Think about political campaigns.
 
When our political opponent is
being ironic about our views we
understand the irony perfectly
well.
We're used to it,
we have accommodated ourselves
to it, and of course it's the
same in reverse.
Our opponent understands our
ironies,
and there is,
it seems to me,
a perfect kind of symbiosis,
ironically enough,
between political opponents
precisely maybe in the measure
to which their ironies are
mutually intelligible.
It probably teaches each of
them a good deal to be able to
accommodate,
to encounter,
to get used to the ironies of
the other,
and I think this applies to
conversation in general.
It's very easy to pick up most
forms of irony.
We don't have an enormous
difficulty grasping them,
and it doesn't seem to me that
our capability of grasping irony
is founded on a necessary,
underlying agreement.
That's what he's saying.
 
Now if this is the case,
it seems to me that one has
found a loophole in Gadamer's
conservatism about what the
reader can do.
 
His premise is that in order to
understand, there has to be a
basis of agreement;
but if what we've just said
about understanding each other's
ironies,
even where there is pretty
wholesale disagreement,
is true, that ought to apply
also to our capacity to read
work with which we distinctly
disagree,
with which we feel we can never
come to terms in terms of
affirming its value,
but which we nevertheless can
understand.
 
If understanding is not
predicated on agreement,
the possibility of opening up
the canon,
as we say, insisting that it
doesn't have to be an absolutely
continuous traditional canon,
is available to us once again
and Gadamer's conservatism on
this issue can be questioned.
Now it's not that Gadamer is
insisting on absolute
continuity.
 
On the contrary.
 
You'll probably remember that
he says early in the essay that
in order to recognize that we
are in the presence of something
that isn't merely within our own
historical horizon,
we need to be "pulled up
short."
In other words,
to go back to that example once
more,
we need to recognize that
there's something weird about
that word "plastic,"
and in being pulled up short we
recognize the need also for the
fundamental act of reading in
Gadamer which is the merger of
horizons: in other words,
that we are dealing knowingly
with a horizon not altogether
our own that has to be
negotiated,
that has to be merged with our
own for understanding to be
possible.
In fact, Gadamer even insists
that if we don't have this
phenomenon of being pulled up
short, our reading is basically
just solipsistic.
 
We just take it for granted
that what we're reading is
completely within our own
horizon and we don't make any
effort at all to understand that
which is fundamentally or at
least in some ways different.
 
Gadamer acknowledges this,
even insists on it as I say,
but he doesn't lay stress on it
because the gap that is implied
in the need to be pulled up
short is not a big one.
That is to say,
it's one that we can easily
traverse.
 
Take the example of
"plastic"
again: "Oh,
gee, that's a strange
word," we say,
so we go to the OED [Oxford
English Dictionary],
we see it meant something
different then,
our problem is solved,
and we continue.
 
No big deal, right?
 
But there may be ways of being
pulled up short,
occasions for being pulled up
short, that Gadamer thinks
exceed the imaginative grasp of
a reader.
As you'll see when we return to
Iser after I've said a few
things about Hirsch,
this, as you'll see,
is the fundamental difference
between Gadamer and Iser.
Where for Gadamer,
the gap between reader and
text,
between my horizon and the
horizon of the text,
is perforce a small one,
for Iser it needs to be a much
larger one in order for what he
calls the "act of the
reader,"
the reading act,
really to swing into high gear,
and we'll see that this has
implications for the obvious
difference between their two
canons.
All right, but now I want to
say something about the passage
from which I quoted over against
the passage from Gadamer at the
end of the Gadamer lecture.
 
You remember Gadamer said we
have to be open to the otherness
of the past in order that for us
it may "speak true,"
but if we simply bracket out
our own feelings,
that can't possibly happen so
that we have to recognize that
in this mutuality of the reading
experience we really are in a
conversation.
 
We're open to being told
something true by someone else.
Hirsch on the other hand says,
"Oh, well,
no.
 
The important thing is to know
the exact meaning of that other
person because that's the only
way to honor the otherness of
the person.
 
Kant says people ought to be an
end and not a means for us;
we ought to understand them on
their terms."
Gadamer's claim,
however, was that if we do
that, we are in fact suspending
the way in which it might be
that they speak true.
 
We are honoring instead the
integrity of what they're saying
without thinking about whether
or not it might be true.
So I introduced Hirsch in that
context,
and now I want to go back to
him a little bit and I want to
work with two passages which I
have sent you all in e-mail-form
and which I have neglected to
put on the board,
but they're so short I don't
think that will be necessary.
The first of the two passages I
want to talk about is Hirsch's
argument that "meaning is
an affair of consciousness and
not of words"--
meaning is an affair of
consciousness and not of words.
 
In other words,
the text is what makes the
ascertainment of meaning
possible and available to us,
but meaning is not in
the text.
Meaning is in the intention of
the author, and that is what we
need to arrive at as we work
through the text.
Meaning is an affair of
consciousness and not of words.
Now think about this.
 
What it means is that in
understanding a text,
we are attempting to grasp it
in paraphrase.
We are, in other words,
attempting to grasp it in a
sentence that might read
something like,
"What the author means to
say is-- "
Right?
 
So that it's not what the text
means--which might be anything,
according to Hirsch,
if you just appeal to the text;
it's what the author means to
say.
Okay.
 
So what's implied here?
 
On the one hand,
you could say this is just
absolute total nonsense.
 
We use a text to find meaning
in something that we don't have
available to us.
 
Why don't we just find meaning
in the text, which is available
to us?
 
That would make more sense.
 
It's up to us to construe the
text.
We can't possibly know what the
author meant except on the basis
of our determination of the
meaning of the text,
so why not just focus our
attention to meaning on the
text?
 
Hirsch was a student of Wimsatt.
 
Hirsch was engaged in lifelong
disagreement with Gadamer but he
was a student of Wimsatt,
the author of "The
Intentional Fallacy."
 
Obviously, Hirsch was a
rebellious student
>
 
and insisted that,
far from wanting to take
Wimsatt's position,
appealing to intention was the
most important thing you can do,
the only thing you can do which
establishes--
according to the title of his
first important book on
hermeneutics--
"validity in
interpretation."
All right.
 
It's very difficult intuitively
to assent to Hirsch's position,
and I'll just tell you by the
way that I don't,
I can't, but I will say in
passing in defense of Hirsch
that if we reflect on the
matter,
we realize that in common sense
terms,
appealing to an author's
intention is precisely what we
do for practical reasons.
 
Let me give you an example.
 
You're all students.
 
You are sitting in classrooms
that in many cases oblige you to
take exams.
 
Your instructor tells you when
you write your exam,
"Don't just parrot the
words of the authors you're
studying.
 
I want to know that you
understand those authors."
Think about it.
 
You prove to your teacher that
you understand the authors by
being able to put their meaning
in other words--
in other words,
to say the author is intending
to say something,
not just that the text says
something and this is what it
says,
with your exam then being one
long screed of quotation.
Ironically, the instructor
doesn't really want just
quotation on an exam.
 
He wants explanation,
and the form of explanation is
paraphrase.
 
You can't have paraphrase
unless you can identify a
meaning which is interpersonal,
a meaning which can be shared
among a group that understands
it and can be expressed in other
words.
 
That's the key.
 
If you can put it in other
words, those other words take
the form of an appeal to
intention.
All right.
 
That's an important argument in
Hirsch's favor.
We realize that practically
speaking,
the necessity of appealing to
paraphrase in order to guarantee
mutual understanding certainly
does seem to be something like
agreeing or admitting that
meaning is an affair of
consciousness,
not of words--my consciousness,
the author's consciousness,
the consciousness that we can
all share.
 
That's where we find meaning,
and meaning takes the form of
that kind of paraphrase that
everyone can agree on.
So much then to the advantage
or benefit of Hirsch.
There are lots of things to be
said against it,
on the other hand,
which I don't want to pause
over now because I think a
course of lectures on literary
theory will inevitably show the
ways in which paraphrase is
inadequate to the task of
rigorous interpretation.
Cleanth Brooks,
a New Critic,
writes a famous essay called
"The Heresy of
Paraphrase,"
insisting that proper literary
interpretation is a wooden,
mechanical, inflexible exercise
if it reduces the incredible
complexity of a textual surface
to paraphrase.
 
So it's a complex issue,
and I should leave it having
said this much,
at least for the moment.
Now one other thing that Hirsch
says, the other thing that I
quoted, is in effect--I'll
paraphrase
now-->
 
that what Gadamer omits to
realize is that there is a
difference between the
meaning of a text and the
significance of a text.
 
That is Hirsch's other key
position,
and we can understand it by
saying something like this:
the meaning of a text is what
the author intended it to mean--
that is to say,
what we can establish with a
reliable paraphrase.
 
The significance of the text,
which Hirsch does not deny
interest to,
is the meaning for
us--that is to say,
what we take to be important
about this meaning:
the way in which,
for example,
we can translate it into our
own terms historically,
we can adapt it to a cause or
an intellectual position--
the ways, in other words,
in which we can take the
meaning of a text and make it
significant for us.
 
The difference between meaning
and significance then is
something that Hirsch takes very
seriously and he insists--
and here is,
of course, where it becomes
controversial--
he insists that it's possible
to tell the difference between
meaning and significance if,
good historicists that you are,
you can pin down accurately and
incontestably the author's
meaning,
appealing to all the
philological tricks that you
have,
throwing out irrelevancies and
insisting that you finally have
the meaning right--
of course, how many times has
that happened?
which is obviously one point of
disagreement with Hirsch.
Then, once you've done that,
once you have secured the
integrity and accuracy of the
meaning, Hirsch says,
"Okay, fine.
 
Now you can do anything you
like with the text.
You can adapt it for any sort
of possible purpose,
but the crucial thing is to
keep the distinction between
meaning and significance
clear."
Obviously, Gadamer refuses to
argue that we can distinguish in
that way reliably.
 
We don't know--because it's a
question of merging horizons,
my horizon and the horizon of
the text--
we don't know with any
guarantee where meaning leaves
off and significance begins,
so that the splitting apart of
the two terms is something that
simply can't be accomplished by
the way in which we enter the
hermeneutic circle.
That's Gadamer's position,
and it is the position of
anyone who opposes that of
Hirsch, although what he means
by the distinction is clear
enough.
"Yes, yes,"
you say, "I see exactly
what he means."
 
Nevertheless,
to secure the distinction in
actual practice,
to say, "Okay.
This is the meaning and now
this is how I'm going to make it
significant"--
well, it seems unlikely indeed
that this is something anyone
could ever accomplish.
All right.
 
Finally, to turn to Wolfgang
Iser: Iser is concerned with
what he calls the act of the
reader--
Akt des Lesers is the
title of one of his books--
and in so doing he establishes
himself as a person very much in
the tradition of phenomenology
deriving from Husserl and more
directly,
in Iser's case,
from an analyst of the way in
which the reader moves from
sentence to sentence in
negotiating a text,
a Polish intellectual named
Roman Ingarden who is quoted
frequently in the essay that you
have.
Those are the primary
influences on Iser,
but he himself has been
tremendously influential in
turn.
 
Iser's interest in the reader's
experience is part of a school
of thought that he helped to
found that grew up around the
University of Konstanz in the
sixties and seventies,
and which resulted in a series
of seminars on what was called
"reception history"
or alternatively "the
aesthetics of reception."
 
Iser's colleague was Hans
Robert Jauss,
whom we will be reading later
in the course.
The influence of the so-called
Konstanz School spread to the
United States and had many
ramifications here,
particularly and crucially in
the early work of another critic
we'll be turning to later in the
semester, Stanley Fish.
So reception history has been a
kind of partly theoretical,
partly scholarly field,
one that's really still
flourishing and has been ever
since the early work in the
great Konstanz seminars of Iser,
Jauss and others.
Iser, later in his career--he
died just a couple of years
ago--
taught annually at the
University of California,
Irvine, and by that time he was
very much engaged in a new
aspect of his project,
which he called the
anthropology of fiction--
that is to say,
"Why do we have fiction?
Why do we tell stories to each
other?"
All of Iser's work is grounded
in the notion of literature as
fiction.
 
He's almost exclusively a
scholar of the novel--
and by the way,
one of the first obvious
differences you can notice
between Iser and Gadamer is that
whereas Gadamer is an
intellectual historian whose
canonical texts are works of
philosophy,
works of social thought as well
as great works of literature,
for Iser it's a completely
different canon.
He is exclusively concerned
with fiction and how we read
fiction,
how we come to understand
fiction, and how we determine
the meaning of a work of
fiction.
 
As I say, in the last phase of
his career when he started
thinking about the anthropology
of fiction,
he raised the even more
fundamental question--
I think a very important one,
though not necessarily to be
aimed exclusively at fiction--
the anthropological question of
why we have fiction at all,
why it has been a persisting
trans-historical phenomenon of
human culture that we tell
stories to each other,
that we make things up when
after all we could be spending
all of our time,
well, just talking about things
that actually are around us.
In other words,
how is it that we feel the need
to make things up?
 
All right.
 
Now as you read Iser you'll see
immediately that in tone,
in his sense of what's
important, and in his
understanding of the way in
which we negotiate the world of
texts he much more closely
resembles Gadamer than Hirsch.
We can say this in two
different ways.
We can say that Iser's position
is a reconstruction of what
Gadamer has, essentially,
to say about the merger of
horizons.
 
For example,
on page 1002,
the bottom of the left-hand
column over to the right-hand
column,
he says, "The convergence
of text and reader"--
Gadamer's way of putting that
would be the merger of the
reader's horizon,
my horizon, with the horizon
within which the text appears--
"brings the literary work
into existence."
This is implied in Gadamer as
well.
It's not your horizon;
it's not my horizon;
it's that effective history
which takes place when our
horizons merge.
 
That is the locus of meaning
for Gadamer.
By the same token,
what Iser is saying is that the
space of meaning is
"virtual"--this is the
word he uses.
 
It's neither in the text nor in
the reader but the result of the
negotiation back and forth
between the text and the reader,
he says, that sort of brings
the literary work into existence
in a virtual space.
 
"…
[A]nd this convergence can
never be precisely pinpointed,
but must always remain virtual,
as is not to be identified
either with the reality of the
text or with the individual
disposition of the reader."
So you see this is Gadamerian.
 
This is the result,
this is the fruit,
of the hermeneutic engagement
between horizons that results in
meaning.
 
It's put in a different way by
Iser, but it is in a large
degree the same idea.
 
He also plainly shares with
Gadamer the assumption,
the supposition,
that the construal of meaning
cannot be altogether objective.
 
In other words,
Iser is no more an historicist
than Gadamer is but insists
rather on the mutual exchange of
prejudice between the two
horizons in question.
So he argues on page 1005,
the right-hand column:
One text [this halfway down the
column]
is potentially capable of
several different realizations,
and no reading can ever exhaust
the full potentia,
for each individual reader will
fill in the gaps in his own way.
This of course brings us to the
issue of "gaps"
and the role that they play in
the act of reading as Iser
understands it.
 
It's an interesting term.
 
I don't actually know whether
Iser, to be Hirschian,
means
>
what I'm about to say about
gaps, but plainly a
"gap"
is an abyss,
it's a distance between two
points;
but what's really interesting
is that we think of spark
plugs--we think of gapping a
spark plug.
I don't know if you know how a
spark plug works,
but for the electrical current
to fly into operation in a spark
plug,
the two points of contact have
to be gapped.
 
They have to be forced apart to
a certain degree.
Too much, there's no spark.
 
Too little, you short out.
 
Right?
 
There's no spark.
 
So you have to gap a spark
plug, and it seems to me that
the "ah-ha"
effect of reading,
the movement back and forth
across the gap between the
reader and the text,
can be understood in terms of a
spark,
right, as though the
relationship between the reader
and the text were the
relationship between the two
points of a spark plug.
Whether Gadamer means that when
he speaks of gap or whether he
simply means an abyss or a
distance to be crossed
>
 
I couldn't say.
 
Much like the opportunities in
the word "plastic,"
I think it's useful to suggest
that this sense of gapping a
spark plug may have some
relevance to our understanding
of what goes on in this reading
process.
Now how then does he differ
from Gadamer?
One way that is I think not
terribly important but I think
is interesting in view of what
we've just been saying about
Hirsch and another way that's
absolutely crucial that we've
implied already and to which we
need to return.
The way that's perhaps not
terribly important at least for
present purposes--
although this is a distinction
that's going to be coming up
again and again later in the
semester--
is the way in which he actually
seems to distinguish--
this is page 1006 in the upper
left-hand column--
between "reading"
and "interpretation."
 
This is at the very top of the
left-hand column.
He says: "…
[T]he text refers back directly
to our own preconceptions--
"--Gadamer would call
those "prejudices"--
"which are revealed by the
act of interpretation that is a
basic element of the reading
process."
 
So there's a wedge there
between the concept of reading
and the concept of
interpretation.
I would suggest that it's not
unlike the wedge that Hirsch
drives between the concept of
meaning and the concept of
significance.
 
In other words,
meaning is construal.
Significance is the application
of that construal to something.
I think that the distinction
Iser is making between reading
and interpretation can be
understood in much the same way.
Iser doesn't make much of the
distinction.
In other words,
it's not an important part of
his argument,
which is why I say that the
difference with Gadamer--
who never makes the distinction
between reading and
interpretation--
in this matter is slight,
but the other difference is
very important,
and that is--to return to this
point--
that Iser stresses innovation
as the principle of value
governing the choice and the
interpretive strategies of
reading.
Innovation is what Iser's canon
is looking for.
That's what makes it so
different from Gadamer's
conservative continuous
traditional canon.
Iser's understanding of gapping
the spark plug is a much more
bold affirmative of the
imaginative powers of the
reader,
a much more bold process than
the hesitant conservative
process suggested by Gadamer.
Now in order to illustrate the
way in which what Iser calls
virtual work gets done in this
regard, let me just run through
a few passages quickly.
 
If Gadamer says,
in a way, that he doesn't
really stress in the long run
that in order to know that there
is actually a difference between
the reader's horizon and the
horizon of the text you need to
be "pulled up short,"
something needs to surprise
you--
well, Iser throws his whole
emphasis on this element of
surprise.
 
If it doesn't surprise,
it isn't worth it;
it doesn't have value.
 
And we'll talk in more detail
about the ways in which it
doesn't have value in a minute.
 
If the element of surprise is
to become absolutely central and
paramount in the reading
process, the gap has to get
bigger.
 
>
 
It has to be a bigger distance,
a broader abyss,
and that's what Iser is working
with in the passages I'm about
to quote.
 
As I say, I'm going to quote
three, more or less rapid-fire.
The first is on page 1003,
the upper left-hand column:
"In this process of
creativity"--
that is to say,
the way in which a text induces
the feeling of surprise in the
reader--
"the text may either not
go far enough,
or may go too far…"
Now I admit in this particular
passage you get a hint of
Gadamer's element of
conservatism.
 
The text may go too far.
 
In other words,
it may make demands on us that
are too great.
 
For example,
we're reading Finnegan's
Wake.
 
We haven't got a clue.
 
The text has gone too far.
 
We can't get from sentence to
sentence,
and even within the sentence we
have no idea what the words
mean,
so we're lost at sea unless,
of course,
we really rise to meet the
challenge;
but typically or
characteristically in Iser's
terms the text has gone too far:
"…
[S]o we may say"--
he elaborates here'--"that
boredom and overstrain form the
boundaries beyond which the
reader will leave the field of
play."
 
In other words,
if there are no surprises,
it's just a yawn.
 
Why bother to read at all?
 
If the surprises are too great,
then they induce overstrain and
we throw away the book in
frustration and despair.
So the distance of the gap
needs to be between the outer
limits of boredom and overstrain
according to Iser.
Continuing to page 1004,
the upper right-hand column:
"…
[E]xpectations"--
this word is what Iser thinks
governs the sort of dialectic
that the reading process is
playing with.
Reading consists,
according to Iser,
in the violation of
expectations.
For the violation to work the
expectations have to be there.So
that's the dialectic;
that's what's negotiated.
There has to be a sense,
moving from sentence to
sentence, that something is
likely to happen next.
If that underlying sense isn't
there,
then whatever happens is simply
met with frustration,
but if we have the expectation
that something's going to happen
next,
and then something different
happens,
or if the suspense of wondering
what will happen next is in play
so that anything can happen--
but the experience of suspense
has been gone through,
then in those cases that's all
to the good;
that's a good part of the
reading process.
"…
[E]xpectations,"
says Iser,
"are scarcely ever
fulfilled in a truly literary
text."
You see, that's where the
evaluative principle that
completely revolutionizes
Gadamer's canon comes in.
In other words,
innovation, the principle of
change,
the principle of violated
expectation,
is what imposes or establishes
value in the literary text--
not continuity,
not a sense that across the
abyss truth is being spoken to
us,
but rather the sense that
across the abyss we are being
constructively surprised.
Right?
 
That's what has changed between
these two positions.
"We implicitly demand of
expository texts,"
he goes on to say--
and he may be alluding to
Gadamer here because after all
Gadamer is talking primarily
about expository texst,
works of philosophy,
works of social thought,
which of course aren't trying
to surprise
>
or trick us.
 
They're trying to lay out an
argument which is consistent and
continuous and keep surprise to
a minimum.
It's difficult,
philosophy and social thought,
but it's not difficult because
of the element of surprise.
It's the vocabulary,
it's the complexity of the
thought, and so on that makes it
difficult.
Iser acknowledges this.
 
He says, "…
[W]e implicitly demand of
expository texts…
[that there be no surprise]
as we refer to the objects they
are meant to present--
[but it's]
a defect in a literary
text."
 
That's the difference for Iser
between nonfiction and fiction.
With nonfiction,
we don't want to be surprised.
It poses other kinds of
difficulty, let's say;
but in the case of fiction,
in order to be engaged,
in order to enter the
hermeneutic circle properly,
we need the element of
surprise, as I say,
as a way of distinguishing
between fiction and nonfiction.
Let's turn to page 1010,
the lower right-hand column.
The word
"defamiliarization"
we will encounter soon when we
take up the Russian Formalists.
"Defamiliarization"
means precisely pulling you up
short or taking you by surprise,
making you feel that what you
thought was going to be the case
or what you thought was the
state of affairs is not the
state of affairs.
The poet Wallace Stevens puts
it beautifully when he says that
poetry should make the visible a
little hard to see;
in other words it should be a
defamiliarizing of that which
has become too familiar.
 
That's an aspect of the reading
process,
and so Iser says:
"This defamiliarization of
what the reader thought he
recognized is bound to create a
tension that will intensify his
expectations as well as his
distrust of those
expectations."
In other words,
the tension itself of
simultaneously having
expectations and feeling that
they should be violated,
that probably they will be
violated,
being on the alert for how
they're going to be violated--
this is a kind of tension,
a constructive tension which
constitutes for Iser the
psychological excitement of
reading.
All right.
 
Having said all of this,
obviously what Iser means to
say is that the reader should
work hard,
that the virtual work done by
the reader to constitute,
to bring into existence,
a virtual meaning should be
hard work,
and there's not much work to do
if two things are the case:
first of all,
if the text just seems real.
 
In other words,
if there's no spin on reality,
if there's no sense of this
being a fictive world,
if it just seems to be about
the everyday,
about life as we live it,
the life that we find ourselves
in--
then according to Iser,
at least, there's no violation
of expectations.
The gap isn't big enough.
 
This is, of course, disputable.
 
There is a kind of a vogue
recurrently in the history of
fiction for a kind of miraculous
sense that this is just exactly
the way things are.
 
People enjoy that in ways that
Iser may not be fully
acknowledging in this argument,
but there's no question that it
doesn't involve the violation of
expectations.
There's not much gap at all.
 
It's another kind of pleasure
that Iser is perhaps not taking
into account that we take in
that which seems to be simply
incontestably real as we read
it,
and Iser leaves that out of
account.
On the other hand,
he says that there is no use
either,
no value either,
in that form of engagement with
a text in which an illusion is
perpetually sustained.
 
In other words,
an illusion is created;
a never-never land is created.
 
We know it's an illusion,
but we get to live in it so
comfortably with so little
alteration of the nature of the
illusion or of the way in which
we negotiate the illusory world,
that it becomes kind of
womb-like and cozy.
Here of course,
Iser is referring to what he
calls "culinary
fiction,"
the sub-genres of literature
like,
well, nurse novels,
bodice-rippers,
certain kinds of detective
fiction--
although a lot of detective
fiction is much better than that
description would imply:
in other words,
novels in which undoubtedly
it's an illusory world.
Things just don't happen the
way they happen in nurse novels
and bodice-rippers--in which
somehow or another the pauper
marries the prince.
 
This doesn't happen,
but at the same time it's a
world of illusion in which the
reader lives all too
comfortably.
 
Right?
 
So these are forms of the
experience of reading fiction of
which Iser disapproves because
there's no work being done.
The virtual work of the reader
does not involve surprise,
does not involve the violation
of expectations.
The relationship between text
and reader must be a
collaboration,
Iser argues.
The poly-semantic nature of the
text--
that is to say,
the fact that the text sort of
throws up all sorts of
possibilities of meaning if it's
a good text--
>
and the illusion making of the
reader are opposed factors.
In other words,
there is something in the
reader that wants to settle
comfortably into the world of
the nurse novel,
the bodice-ripper,
the formulaic detective novel--
that wants just to sort of
exist comfortably in those
worlds;
but a good text is perpetually
bringing the reader up short and
preventing that comfort zone
from establishing itself,
so that the tension between the
tendency on our part to sustain
an illusion and the way in which
the text keeps undermining the
illusion is again that aspect of
the psychological excitement of
reading that Iser wants to
concentrate on.
Now a word about Tony the
Tow Truck in this regard.
I brought the text with me.
 
You can look at it now or at
your leisure.
I wanted to call attention to a
few places in the text in which
it is a question of expectation
and of the way in which this
expectation can be violated.
 
Now it's only fair to say that
if we're going to read Tony
seriously in this way we
have to put ourselves in the
shoes of a toddler;
that is to say,
as readers or auditors we have
to think of ourselves and of the
psychological excitement of
experiencing the text as that of
a toddler.
 
It's not so very difficult to
do.
For example:
I am Tony the Tow Truck.
I live in a little yellow
garage.
I help cars that are stuck.
 
I tow them to my garage.
 
I like my job.
 
One day I am stuck.
 
Who will help Tony the tow
truck?
All right.
 
Now this is a wonderful example
of the tension between having
expectations,
the expectation that someone
will help Tony,
and being in a state of
suspense, not knowing who it
will be.
Now from the adult point of
view, this is culinary because
we know that we're in the world
of folklore and that in folklore
everything happens three times.
 
We know that two vehicles are
going to come along and not help
Tony and that the third vehicle
will,
because everything,
as I say, happens in threes in
folklore.
 
Notice Tony the Tow
Truck <<emphasizes
consonants>>
 
--next week when we read the
Russian formalists,
we will learn the research
finding of one of the early
formalists to the effect that
"repetition in verse is
analogous to tautology in
folklore."
We have exactly that
>
going on in Tony the Tow
Truck,
"t- t- t,"
and then the three events,
Neato the Car,
Speedy the Car,
and Bumpy the Car coming along
in sequence,
with Bumpy finally resolving
the problem.
So in any case we have an
expectation.
We have the dialectic of
suspense on the one hand,
how will this be resolved,
and inevitability on the other,
"Oh, it's a folk tale,
it'll be resolved,
don't worry about it."
 
We have this suspense,
as I say, between expectation,
the possibility of violation,
and simply not knowing.
Okay.
 
Now we continue:
"I cannot help you,"
says Neato the Car.
 
"I don't want to get
dirty"…
"I cannot help you,"
says Speedy the Car.
"I am too
busy"…
I am very sad.
 
Then a little car pulls up.
 
I think it's wonderful because
it "pulls up"
just like Gadamer being
"pulled up short,"
and there is,
it seems to me,
there's another crisis of
expectation in this line in that
especially as a toddler I need
to negotiate that expression
idiomatically.
 
I'm three years old.
 
Maybe I don't know what
"pulls up"
means.
 
It's probably not very good
writing for a toddler precisely
for that reason,
but at the same time it lends
itself to us because we
recognize that there's a reading
problem or a piece of virtual
work that needs to be overcome
before you can get on with it.
 
You have to find out what
"pulls up"
means in the same way that the
adult reader of Pleasures of
the Imagination has to find
out what "plastic"
means.
 
As I say, it's a wonderful
irony that this particular
difficulty in reading is
precisely what Gadamer calls
being pulled up short.
 
All right.
 
So you solve the problem and
then, lo and behold,
it turns out that:
It is my friend Bumpy.
Bumpy gives me a push.
 
He pushes and pushes and-- I'm
on my way.
"Thank you,
Bumpy,"
I call back.
 
"You're welcome,"
says Bumpy.
Now I think we get another
expectation.
This is the kind of story that
has a moral.
It's a feel-good story.
 
Something good has happened.
 
A sense of reciprocity is
established between the tow
truck and the person who helps
the tow truck out of being
stuck--
a fine sense of reciprocity,
so the expectation is that
there will be a moral.
The tension or suspense is:
what will the moral be?
There are a variety of ways,
in other words,
in which this story,
just like The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,
could end.
It's by no means clear that
The Rhyme of the Ancient
Mariner will end with
"Love all things,
great and small things."
 
It could have ended any number
>
of other ways,
and just so this story could
end a number of ways.
 
It happens to end "Now
that's what I call a
friend."
 
Well, fine.
 
The moral is that reciprocity
is friendship and so good,
all to the good,
but as I say there's a moment
of suspense in the expectation
at the point in the text when we
expect a moral but we don't know
what the moral is going to be.
Once again, there is that
moment of suspense that the
reader is able to get through
with a kind of pleasurable
excitement and then overcome as
the moral is actually revealed.
So even Tony the Tow
Truck, in other
words,
is not absolutely culinary and
can be treated in ways that I
hope shed some light on the
reading process.
 
All right.
 
The time is up,
so let me conclude by saying
that if there is this
remarkable distinction between
Gadamer and Iser,
between canons,
where the methodology of
Gadamer seems to impose on us a
traditional canon and the
methodology of Iser seems to
impose on us an innovative
canon,
isn't there some relief in
historicism after all--
because the whole point of
historicism,
as Gadamer himself puts it,
is that it lets the canon be?
We're not interested in
establishing a principle of
value that shapes a canon.
 
We're interested in hearing
everybody on his or her own
terms and letting those texts
be.
In other words,
doesn't historicism open the
canon and indeed make the
process of reading,
the experience of reading,
archival and omnivorous rather
than canonical?
 
If every text just is what it
is and we can't bring,
methodologically speaking,
any kind of preconception to
bear on what's a good text or
what's a bad text,
haven't we solved the problem
of the limitation imposed on the
reader by any kind of canon
formation?
Well, that's the case only,
I say in conclusion,
if we can distinguish between
meaning and significance.
In other words,
only if we really are sure that
the historicist act of reading
is effective and works,
if I know the meaning of a
text.
Well, fine.
 
Then later on,
if I wish, I can establish a
canon by saying certain texts
have certain significance and
those are the texts that I care
about and want to read,
but I can only do that if I can
distinguish between meaning and
significance.
 
But if meaning and significance
bleed into each other,
what I'm going to be doing is
establishing a canon,
as it were, unconsciously or
semiconsciously.
I'm going to say, "Ah,
this is just what the text
means," but at the same
time,
I'll be finding ways,
without realizing it,
of affirming certain kinds of
meaning and discrediting certain
other kinds of meaning--
all the while saying,
"Oh, it's just meaning.
 
I'm not doing that."
 
But if in fact my reading
practice can be shown not
clearly to distinguish between
meaning and significance,
well, then that's what would
happen.
So it's still up in the air and
it's still perhaps inescapable
that we read,
as it were, canonically,
but by thinking of various
approaches to hermeneutics in
these terms,
I think what's shown is that
there is a relationship between
methodology and canon formation,
that certain things follow from
our assumptions about how to
read.
 
Evaluation would seem rather at
a distance removed from simple
considerations of how to read,
but in fact I think we've shown
that evaluation is in one way or
another implicit in certain
methodological premises as they
establish themselves in the work
of these various writers.
 
Okay.
 
Thank you very much.
 
