Since each text involves only certain dispositional facets and never invokes the total
system of our orientation, the very make-up of this system will be differently weighted
according to the text we read. As the new, foregrounded theme can only he understood
through its relation to our old, backgrounded experience (from whichever facet of our
disposition this may derive), it follows that our assimilation of the alien experience must
have retroactive effects on that store of experience. The division, then, is not between
subject and object, but between subject and himself.
olf
I/I
156 Phenomenology of Reading
the text, and so leave behind that which has hitherto made him what he is. The nature of this 'presence' has been described by Stanley Cavell, in his discussion of King Lear:
The perception or attitude demanded in following this drama is one which demands a continuous attention to what is happening at each here and now, as if everything of significance is happening at this moment, while each thing that happens turns a leaf of time. I think of it as an experience of continuous prc-sentness. Its demands are as rigorous as those of any spiritual exercise—to let the past go and to let the future take its time; so that we not allow the past to
determine the meaning of what is now happening (something else may have come of it) and that we not anticipate what will come of what has come. Not that anything is possible (though it is) but that we do not know what is, and is not, next.38
'Presentness' means being lifted out of time—the past is without influ-, ence, and the future is
unimaginable. A present that has slipped out of its temporal context takes on the character of an event for the person caught up in it. But to be truly caught up in such a present involves forgetting oneself. And from this condition derives the impression readers sometimes have of experiencing a
transformation in reading. Such an impression is long established and well documented. In the early days of the novel, during the seventeenth century, such reading was regarded as a form of madness, because it meant becoming someone else.30 Two hundred years later, Henry James described this same
transformation as the wonderful experience of having lived another life for a short while.40
The split between subject and himself, which results in a contrapunt-ally structured personality in reading, not only enables the subject to make himself present to the text, it also brings about a tension, which
•'^Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York, 1969), p. 322; Duf-renne, Aesthetic Experience, p. 555, observes in a similar context:
The spectator also alienates himself in the aesthetic object, as if to sacrifice himself for the sake of its advent and as if this were a duty which he must fulfill. Still, losing himself in this way, the spectator finds himself. He must contribute something to the aesthetic object. This does not mean that he should add to the object a commentary consisting of images or
representations which will eventually lead him away from aesthetic experience. Rather, he must be himself fully by gathering himself together as a whole, without forcing the silent plenitude of the work to become explicit or extracting any
representations from this treasure trove. Thus the spectator's alienation is simply the culmination of the process of attention by which he discovers that the world of the aesthetic object into which he is plunged is also his world. lie is at home in this world. He understands the affective quality revealed by the work because he ii that quality, just as the artist is his work.
30See Michel Foucault, Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft, transl. by Ulrich Koppcn (Frankfort, 1969), pp. 378ff. 40See Henry James, Theory of Fiction, James E. Miller, Jr., ed. (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1972), p. 93. Passive Syntheses in Reading 157
indicates to what extent the subject has been affected by the text. "Affection," writes Husserl, "is animation 'as' the condition of unity,"41 by which he means that affection stimulates the desire to regain
coherence which the subject had lost through being separated from himself. This reunion, however, cannot come about simply by restoring the habitual orientation to the self which had been temporarily relegated to the past, for now a new experience has to be incorporated. 'Affection', then, does not reinvoke past orientations, but it mobilizes the spontaneity of the subject. The type of mobilized spontaneity will depend, though, on the nature of the text to which we have made ourselves present. It will cast the released spontaneity into a certain shape and thus begin to mould what it has called forth. For there are "spontaneities of feeling and will, the spontaneous evaluating and the spontaneous practical conduct of the ego, evaluating and wilful decision-taking—each one in various modes of spontaneity."42 These different modes of spontaneity are the reading subject's attitudes, through which
he tries to reconcile the as yet unknown experience of the present text with his own store of past experience.
As the nature and the extent of released spontaneity are governed by the individuality of the text, a layer of the reader's personality is brought to light which had hitherto remained hidden in the shadows. The psychoanalytical theory of art lays great stress on this problem. Hanns Sachs, in discussing the effect of art on the conscious mind, maintains: "By this process an inner world is laid open to him which is ... his own, but into which he cannot enter without the help and stimulation coming from this particular work of art."'13 The significance of the work, then, does not lie in the meaning sealed within
the text, but in the fact that that meaning brings out what had previously been sealed within us. When the subject is separated from himself, the resultant spontaneity is guided and shaped by the text in such a way that it is transformed into a new and real consciousness. Thus each text constitutes its own reader. "We might say that the ego as ego continually develops itself through its original decisions, and at any given time is a pole of multifarious and actual determinations, and a pole of an habitual, radiating system of realizable potentials for positive and negative attitudes."44 This structure pinpoints
the reciprocity between the constituting of meaning and the heightening of self-awareness which develops in the reading process along precisely the same lines and between precisely the same poles. It is not a one-
4'Edmund Husserl, Analijsen zur passiven Synthesis, Gcsammclte Werke XI (The Hague, 1966), p. 388. "Ibid., p. 361. In this context, Husserl also emphasizes the close connection between spontaneity and receptivity. 43Hanns Sachs, The Creative Unconscious: Studies in the Psychoanalysis of Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 197. "Husserl, Analysen, p. 360.
158 Phenomenology of Reading
dimensional process of projections from the reader's past conventions, but a dialectical movement in the course of which his past experiences become marginal and he is able to react spontaneously; consequently, his spontaneity—evoked and formulated by the text—penetrates into consciousness. Relevant to this process is an observation made by W. D. Harding on the nature of reading: "What is sometimes called wish-fulfilment in novels and plays can . . . more plausibly be described as wish- formulation or the definition of desires. The cultural levels at which it works may vary widely; the process is the same. ... It seems nearer the truth ... to say that fictions contribute to defining the reader's or spectator's values, and perhaps stimulating his desires, rather than to suppose that they gratify desire by some mechanism of vicarious experience."45
This implies that in thinking alien thoughts it is not enough for us just to comprehend them; such acts of comprehension can only be successful to the extent that they help to formulate something in us. Alien thoughts can only formulate themselves in our consciousness when the spontaneity mobilized in us by the text gains a gestalt of its own. This gestalt cannot be formed by our own past and conscious orientations, for these could not have awakened our spontaneity, and so it follows that the condition- ing influence must be the alien thoughts which we are now thinking. Hence, the constitution of meaning not only implies the creation of a totality emerging from interacting textual perspectives—as we have already seen—but also, through formulating this totality, it enables us to formulate ourselves and thus discover an inner world of which we had hitherto not been conscious.
At this point, the phenomenology of reading merges into the modern preoccupation with subjectivity. Husserl had already considerably modified the Cartesian cogito—the self-affirmation of the ego in the consciousness of its thought—by pointing out the discrepancies between the degrees of certainty of the cogito and the degrees of uncertainty of the conscious mind.40 Psychoanalysis has taught us that
there is a large area in the subject which manifests itself in a variety of symbols and is completely closed to the conscious mind. These limitations in the subject give credence to the implications of Freud's maxim: "Where It was, the T is to become." In Ricoeur's words, Freud here replaces
"consciousness with becoming conscious. What was origin now becomes task or goal."47
Now reading is not a therapy designed to restore to communication
*DD. W. Harding, "Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction," in Aesthetics in the Modern World, Harold Osborne, ed. (London, 1968), pp. 313f.; see also Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York, 1953), p. 397. 40See Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, Gesammclte Werke I (The Hague, 21973), pp. 57f,, 61ff.
47Rirorur. Ucmn'nciilik untl Strtikturalismtis, p. 142.
Passive Syntheses in Reading 159
the symbols that have separated themselves from the conscious mind. Nevertheless, it does enable us to see how little of the subject is a given reality, even to its own consciousness. However, if the certainty of the subject can no longer be based exclusively on its own consciousness— not even through the minimal Cartesian condition of its being it because it can be perceived in the mirror of its consciousness—reading, as the activation of spontaneity, plays a not unimportant part in the process of "becoming conscious." For this spontaneity is activated against the background of existing consciousness, the marginal situation of which during the reading process serves only to bring to consciousness this same spontaneity, which has been aroused and given form on different terms from those shaping the original consciousness. This latter consciousness will clearly not remain unaffected by the process, as the incorporation of the new requires a re-formation of the old.
IV. INTERACTION BE:
Tlie Communicatory S
WEEN TEXT AND READER
ructure of tlw Literary Text
SEVEN
ASYMMETRY BETWEEN TEXT AND READER CONDITIONS OF INTERACTION
>>SK IN OUR DISCUSSION so far, we have concentrated mainly on y$j& the two partners in the communication process, namely, the text and the reader. It is time now to take a closer look at the conditions that give rise to and govern this communication. Reading is an activity that is guided by the text; this must be processed by the reader, who is then, in turn, affected by what he has processed. It is difficult to describe this interaction, not least because the literary critic has very little to go on in the way of guidelines, and, of course, the two partners are far easier to analyze than is the event that takes place between them. However, there are discernible conditions that govern interaction generally, and some of these will certainly apply to the special reader-text relationship. The differences and
similarities may become clear if we examine the types of interaction that have emerged from social psychology and psychoanalytical research into structures of communication.
The theory of interaction, as advanced by Edward E. Jones and Harold B. Gerard in Foundations of
Social Psychology, begins by categorizing the different types of contingency that are to be found in, or
arise out of, all human interactions. We need not concern ourselves too closely with these types (i.e., pseudocontingency, asymmetrical, reactive, and mutual contingency); what is important for us is the
fact that unpredictability is both a constitutive and differentiating element in this process of inter-
action.
1. We have pseudocontingency when both partners know each other's 'behavioral plan' so well that the replies and their consequences can be accurately predicted; in this case, the conduct of the partners resembles a well-rehearsed scene, and through such ritualization the contingency disappears.
164 Interaction between Text and Reader