text arises out of a gestalt-forming process in which the individual gestalt is both a unit and a transition. A basic element of this process is the fact that each gestalt bears with it those possibilities which it has excluded but which may eventually invalidate it. This is the way in which the literary text exploits the consistency-building habit which underlies all comprehension. But as the excluded possibilities become more and more obtrusive, so they may come more and more to take on the status of alternatives rather than fringe influences. In everyday language we call these alternatives
ambiguities, by which we mean not just the disturbance but also the hindrance of the consistency- building process. This hindrance is particularly noticeable when the ambiguity is brought about by our own gestalt-forming, for then it is not merely the product of the printed text but that of our own activity. Obvious textual ambiguities are like a puzzle which we have to solve ourselves; ambiguities arising from our own gestalt-forming, however, stimulate us into trying to balance all the more
intensively the contradictions that we have produced. Just as the reciprocal disturbance of the gestalten brings about the dimension of the event, in which illusion-building and illusion-breaking are
integrated, here too we have a need for integration. What, though, is the effect of this intensified struggle for balance?
This question might best be answered by taking a relatively straightforward example from Joyce's
Ulysses. There is a passage which induces the reader to compare Bloom's cigar to Ulysses's spear. The
spear is evoked as a specific part of the Homeric repertoire, but is equated with the cigar as if they were two things of a kind. The very fact that we equate them causes us to be aware of their
differences, and so to wonder why they should have been linked together. Our answer may be that the equation is ironic—at least that is how many reputable Joyce critics have interpreted the passage.'14
Irony would then be the gestalt through which the reader would identify the connection between the signs. But what exactly is the recipient of this ironic treatment—Ulysses's spear, or Bloom's cigar? The lack of clarity already poses a threat to the gestalt of irony. But even if irony does appear to endow the equation with the necessary consistency, this irony is of a peculiar nature. After all, irony ''Richard Ellmann, "Ulysses. The Divine Nobody," in Twelve Original Essays on C.-ortl English Novels, Charles Shapiro, c<l. (Detroit, 1900), p. 247, calls this allusion
130 Phenomenology of Reading
normally leads us to the conclusion that the meaning is precisely the opposite of what is formulated in the text, but such an intention is not evident here. At best we might say that here the formulated text means something that has not been formulated, but perhaps it may even mean something that lies beyond a 'formulated' irony, though this irony may be, as it were, a stepping-stone to such an interpretation. Whatever may be the significance of the equation, it is clear that the consistency vital for comprehension will bear with it a discrepancy. This will be more than just an excluded or nonselected possibility, because in this case the discrepancy has the effect, not just of disturbing a formulated gestalt but of showing up its inadequacy. Instead of being modified or replaced, it becomes itself an object of scrutiny, because it seems to lack the motivation necessary for an equivalence of signs to be found.
This, of course, does not mean that it is pointless to formulate such inadequate gestalten. On the contrary, their veiy inadequacy will stimulate the reader into searching for another gestalt to represent the connection between the signs—and, indeed, he may do so precisely because he has been unable to stick to the original, most obvious gestalt. Again we may illustrate this with reference to the Joyce example. Many readers have tried to smooth out the discrepancy of the irony gestalt by taking the phallus as the connection between the signs. As far as the spear is concerned the equation seems to work, both in terms of tradition and mythological dignity; but we must also incorporate the cigar into our gestalt. The cigar, however, jerks the imagination onto so many different planes that it not only shatters the mythological paradigm but also explodes the gestalt. The apparent consistency now fragments itself into the various associations of the individual reader's imagination. But as he indulges in these associations he will become more and more subjected to the influence of the discarded irony gestalt, which now returns to belittle every product of the gestalt-forming imagination. In such cases, the vital process of consistency-building is used to make the reader himself produce discrepancies, and as he becomes aware of both the discrepancies and the processes that have produced them, so he becomes more and more entangled in the text.
Such processes certainly occur more frequently in modern than in older literature. However,
throughout the history of narrative prose, certain literary devices have been built into the structure of the work in order to stimulate the production of discrepancies. From Cervantes to Fielding, we find the interpolated story that functions as a reversal of the main action, so that gestalten are formed by way of an undermining interaction between plot and subplot. This brings to the fore hitherto concealed possibilities, which in turn produce a configurative meaning. In the nine-
" v rflrt'T
Grasping a Text 131
of an unreliable narrator who either openly or indirectly disputes the judgments of the implied
author.-* Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) introduced divergent textual perspectives which resist integration
and so devalue their own individual authenticity. Joyce then split up the textual perspectives and intermingled them in such a way as to prevent the reader from ever gaining a single reliable vantage
point. And, finally, Beckett has devised a sentence structure in which each statement is followed by a negation, which itself is a statement eliciting further negations in an unending process that leads the reader to search for the key, which becomes more and more elusive.
What all these techniques of inversion have in common is the fact that the discrepancies produced by the reader make him dispute his own gestalten. He tries to balance out these discrepancies, but the questionable gestalt which was the starting-point for this operation remains as a challenge in the face of which the newly attempted integration has to prove itself. This whole process takes place within the reader's imagination, so that he cannot escape from it. This involvement, or entanglement, is what places us in the 'presentness' of the text and what makes the text into a presence for us. "In so far as there is entanglement, there is also presence."30
This entanglement entails several effects at the same time. While we are caught up in a text, we do not at first know what is happening to us. This is why we often feel the need to talk about books we have read-not in order to gain some distance from them so much as to find out just what it is that we were entangled in. Even literary critics frequently do no more than seek to translate their entanglement into referential language. As our presence in the text depends upon this involvement, it represents a correlative of the text in the mind, which is a necessary complement to the event-correlative. But when we are present in an event, something must happen to us. The more 'present' the text is to us, the more our habitual selves—at least for the duration of the reading—recede into the 'past'. The literary text relegates our own prevailing views into the past by itself becoming a present experience, for what is now happening or may happen was not possible so long as our characteristic news formed our present.
Now experiences do not come about merely through the recognition of the familiar. "It is true that we should never talk about anything if we were limited to talking about those experiences with which we coincide."37 Experiences arise only when the familiar is transcended or under-
s:'Sce Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, •'1963), pp. 21 Iff., 3391F. '"Wilhelm Schapp, In
Geschicliten vcrstrickt ( Hamburg, 1953), p. 143. 37M;uirico Mcrlcau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, transl. by
Coliu Smith 1V\v York, 1962), p. 337.
132 Phenomenology of Reading