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The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett by Wolfgang Iser
English, German (translation)
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December 19, 2010Pilgrim's Progress: Coexistence of prose and poetry, the former allowing individual expression and the latter framing meaning by aphoristic summary.
Joseph Andrews: Abraham Adams by nature of his name is in conflict. A further tension arises between his denigration of the world and the world's denigration of him. The reader begins from a superior standpoint, is led to sympathize from his perspective, and when he is shaken down we by emulation are also shaken down. It is not rhetoric that gets us into the character's absolute POV, but the authentic recreation of experience by our own imaginations.
Humphy Clinker: Generic expectations of style and language become a discursive vocabulary for the reader; combining styles in new ways calls attention to a mode of seeing the world in new ways. (or am I confusing this w/ a chapter from Mimesis?)
... Vanity Fair: Criticism from the narrator trains the reader to be critical as well, first when the narrator is silent and ultimately even of the narrator himself when he comments. Characters are thus composed by the tension and convergence of multiple external perspectives, the consideration of alternate possibilities.
Henry Esmond: Autobiography as construct, multiplicity of objective selves existing in time.
The Sound and the Fury vs. A Heritage and Its History: Construction of self/identity through the non-order or false ordering of a narrative consciousness vs. the unspoken and in-formulation of external dialogue.
The Oxen of the Sun (Joyce's): The anachronistic mimicries of style show especially their inability to express realities existing beyond their historical presumptions. The more styles are employed, the more we see the insufficiency of style to be wholly accurate.
Molloy trilogy: The anxieties and indignation we feel when fiction is negated reveal to us how much we depend upon the ordering mode of fiction, and how fiction cannot save us from this need. Molloy ultimately aspires toward writing only about writing as he writes; but one must have something about which to write before beginning to write, and such an inception initiates any given discourse. Experiencing contingency is only possible when we abandon our usual conditioned habits of perception and expectation.
The inevitable incompleteness of any illusion is what makes illusion productive. Looking at a mountain, we see the mountain; but the moment we imagine or conceptualize it we cease to see it before our sensory eyes. Thus we are led toward infinite discoveries. Reading is a process of internalization, and as we participate in ordering/interpreting relations we experience the fictional world as virtual selves such that the object before us is recreated upon each reread. As life experiences are foreshortened into memory, then elongated and revised upon recall, so does real art resist our organization; from the gaps of discrepancy arise more possibility.
Joseph Andrews: Abraham Adams by nature of his name is in conflict. A further tension arises between his denigration of the world and the world's denigration of him. The reader begins from a superior standpoint, is led to sympathize from his perspective, and when he is shaken down we by emulation are also shaken down. It is not rhetoric that gets us into the character's absolute POV, but the authentic recreation of experience by our own imaginations.
Humphy Clinker: Generic expectations of style and language become a discursive vocabulary for the reader; combining styles in new ways calls attention to a mode of seeing the world in new ways. (or am I confusing this w/ a chapter from Mimesis?)
... Vanity Fair: Criticism from the narrator trains the reader to be critical as well, first when the narrator is silent and ultimately even of the narrator himself when he comments. Characters are thus composed by the tension and convergence of multiple external perspectives, the consideration of alternate possibilities.
Henry Esmond: Autobiography as construct, multiplicity of objective selves existing in time.
The Sound and the Fury vs. A Heritage and Its History: Construction of self/identity through the non-order or false ordering of a narrative consciousness vs. the unspoken and in-formulation of external dialogue.
The Oxen of the Sun (Joyce's): The anachronistic mimicries of style show especially their inability to express realities existing beyond their historical presumptions. The more styles are employed, the more we see the insufficiency of style to be wholly accurate.
Molloy trilogy: The anxieties and indignation we feel when fiction is negated reveal to us how much we depend upon the ordering mode of fiction, and how fiction cannot save us from this need. Molloy ultimately aspires toward writing only about writing as he writes; but one must have something about which to write before beginning to write, and such an inception initiates any given discourse. Experiencing contingency is only possible when we abandon our usual conditioned habits of perception and expectation.
The inevitable incompleteness of any illusion is what makes illusion productive. Looking at a mountain, we see the mountain; but the moment we imagine or conceptualize it we cease to see it before our sensory eyes. Thus we are led toward infinite discoveries. Reading is a process of internalization, and as we participate in ordering/interpreting relations we experience the fictional world as virtual selves such that the object before us is recreated upon each reread. As life experiences are foreshortened into memory, then elongated and revised upon recall, so does real art resist our organization; from the gaps of discrepancy arise more possibility.
January 4, 2010
I'm going against my usual strategy of waiting till I finish a book before commenting because I fear I've got more energy for this now than I'll have when I'm finished reading this.
I have wanted to read this book for a long time, so of course it disappoints. I think a lot of it is Iser's prose, which is kind of dull, as if everything is a fait accompli, but also the fact that this book is, as he explains in the intro, a collection of essays that he pulled together for this work, so that there's not a clearly articulated central project... so there's no clear build expressed in the prose itself, though obviously there is a development happening here. But because it is seen through the collection and its ordering rather than the sentences, this lacks any clear ah-hah! monent.
So, what is the project? Iser calls it a taxonomy of the novel, and means something at least slightly different than what I would mean if I were to say that. What he really intends is to trace the way the designs novels and novelists have on readers change. So he starts with Pilgrims Progress to show how that book is different than the kinds of straight allegories that preceded it by the way it asks readers to see themselves as doing something different in the act of reading. And from there, Iser finds other novels that break from the genre that seeks to define them, all in terms of the way they make unusual designs on readers, designs usually involve a kind of discrimination-- so Pilgrim's Progress is less about allegory with its one-to-one connection of its figures than showing how such correlations really don't hold up outside of books, to how Faulkner in _Sound and the Fury_ forces us to create a subjectivity for the fragmented speakers of the monologues that make up the first three chapters of that book. That's the idea, how these particular novels are waystations in terms of what novels ask readers to do.
It's not a bad idea, in an of itself, though it makes it about as interesting as Auerbach's _Mimesis_, with which it shares a lot, including a progressivist tilting toward present perfection, and a lack of critique or explanation of why things developed in this way. But no thesis-treatise can do everything, and that's not a totally fair way to criticize Iser's book.
Really, it's the methodology that I find more troubling than the structure, the way that Iser identifies the goals of the novel largely in terms of what the novelist said they were trying to do-- in introductions and letters, mostly-- and then sets out to find what the writers said they included. I think that's a dodgy prospect, especially for a book as late in the game as Iser's. Writers not only don't always know what they are doing, more often I think they just don't accomplish it (the minor revelation here for me is that I can finally articulate what being a creative writer brings to by critical reading: the sense that writing is fucking hard, and rarely works out the way you planned). Iser doesn't seem to doubt the fact that because a writer said this is what he was trying to do that he could have accomplished anything else, or nothing. And I suppose that's a nice approach, and it saves Iser from forming his sense of what the novel's accomplish by reading them closely and with an equally critical and sympathetic eye. And yes, that was meant as a slam. Instead, he finds what the writer wants him to find, which is really weird, given how attentive he wants to be to readers and what they find-- it's very much at a level of abstraction, the experience of reading, and it's weird, given that this as a book is so ostensibly about that.
Weirder still that someone who I think is kind of nuts and off on his own like Holland is actually closer to presenting the work a reader does in processing a story. But whatever.
Iser finds what he is told to look for, and I think there are limits to that; I haven't read all the novels he talks about, but with _Vanity Fair_, for example, I think his reading is just plain wrong-- Amelia, to this reader, does emerge as the moral center of the novel, even if that frustrates Thackeray's sense of what the novel was meant to do. But Iser's theory, and here his method, doesn't allow for that.
Anyhow, it's interesting, and it might come together by the end, but for now, I'm seeing why no one before ever suggested I actually read this book.
Additional notes that I hope will someday help me with this: Iser does give some surprisingly useful definitions of genre and what they require to succeed. So he is very good on allegory when he talks about Bunyan, and almost as good with the historical novel when (if I recall) he is talking about Scott.
His chapter on Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun" is pretty good on the relationship between style and meaning, but the first section of the chapter is also a really lucid take on what's at stake in intertextuality, bringing up aspects I'd never considered.
I have wanted to read this book for a long time, so of course it disappoints. I think a lot of it is Iser's prose, which is kind of dull, as if everything is a fait accompli, but also the fact that this book is, as he explains in the intro, a collection of essays that he pulled together for this work, so that there's not a clearly articulated central project... so there's no clear build expressed in the prose itself, though obviously there is a development happening here. But because it is seen through the collection and its ordering rather than the sentences, this lacks any clear ah-hah! monent.
So, what is the project? Iser calls it a taxonomy of the novel, and means something at least slightly different than what I would mean if I were to say that. What he really intends is to trace the way the designs novels and novelists have on readers change. So he starts with Pilgrims Progress to show how that book is different than the kinds of straight allegories that preceded it by the way it asks readers to see themselves as doing something different in the act of reading. And from there, Iser finds other novels that break from the genre that seeks to define them, all in terms of the way they make unusual designs on readers, designs usually involve a kind of discrimination-- so Pilgrim's Progress is less about allegory with its one-to-one connection of its figures than showing how such correlations really don't hold up outside of books, to how Faulkner in _Sound and the Fury_ forces us to create a subjectivity for the fragmented speakers of the monologues that make up the first three chapters of that book. That's the idea, how these particular novels are waystations in terms of what novels ask readers to do.
It's not a bad idea, in an of itself, though it makes it about as interesting as Auerbach's _Mimesis_, with which it shares a lot, including a progressivist tilting toward present perfection, and a lack of critique or explanation of why things developed in this way. But no thesis-treatise can do everything, and that's not a totally fair way to criticize Iser's book.
Really, it's the methodology that I find more troubling than the structure, the way that Iser identifies the goals of the novel largely in terms of what the novelist said they were trying to do-- in introductions and letters, mostly-- and then sets out to find what the writers said they included. I think that's a dodgy prospect, especially for a book as late in the game as Iser's. Writers not only don't always know what they are doing, more often I think they just don't accomplish it (the minor revelation here for me is that I can finally articulate what being a creative writer brings to by critical reading: the sense that writing is fucking hard, and rarely works out the way you planned). Iser doesn't seem to doubt the fact that because a writer said this is what he was trying to do that he could have accomplished anything else, or nothing. And I suppose that's a nice approach, and it saves Iser from forming his sense of what the novel's accomplish by reading them closely and with an equally critical and sympathetic eye. And yes, that was meant as a slam. Instead, he finds what the writer wants him to find, which is really weird, given how attentive he wants to be to readers and what they find-- it's very much at a level of abstraction, the experience of reading, and it's weird, given that this as a book is so ostensibly about that.
Weirder still that someone who I think is kind of nuts and off on his own like Holland is actually closer to presenting the work a reader does in processing a story. But whatever.
Iser finds what he is told to look for, and I think there are limits to that; I haven't read all the novels he talks about, but with _Vanity Fair_, for example, I think his reading is just plain wrong-- Amelia, to this reader, does emerge as the moral center of the novel, even if that frustrates Thackeray's sense of what the novel was meant to do. But Iser's theory, and here his method, doesn't allow for that.
Anyhow, it's interesting, and it might come together by the end, but for now, I'm seeing why no one before ever suggested I actually read this book.
Additional notes that I hope will someday help me with this: Iser does give some surprisingly useful definitions of genre and what they require to succeed. So he is very good on allegory when he talks about Bunyan, and almost as good with the historical novel when (if I recall) he is talking about Scott.
His chapter on Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun" is pretty good on the relationship between style and meaning, but the first section of the chapter is also a really lucid take on what's at stake in intertextuality, bringing up aspects I'd never considered.
February 18, 2024
Didn’t think I’d enjoy reading Iser’s theory as much as I did, very useful!!
November 14, 2012
Iser's gestures toward the history of the novel now seem pretty cartoonish, bluntand ocassionally downright wrong (especially his assertion of male dominance in everything), but the last chapter on the reading process is still useful, still opening up questions about how to explain the process of reading comprehension. Books come to life in readers, but readers strive to follow the author's directions for world creation.
August 30, 2016
I think I am one of the few on here who preferred Iser's reader response theory chapters. One may push back against the methodology - it's not like we didn't have, like, a decade of that after all - but it's at least a development. Oddly enough, despite all the pushback reader response theories have received, it is fascinating to see how much its considerations and forms of reading have impacted other subspecies of criticism since.
September 27, 2012
The essay on Joyce is worth the effort, and the book is especially worth reading if you've been forced to sit through one too many summaries of "Reader response theory". What Iser does with Joyce is far more subtle than the reduction of his ideas to a couple of "concepts" might suggest.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews