Jauss’s colleague Wolfgang Iser drew heavily on Jauss’s work for his own scholarship, but Iser takes a slightly different tack, by making a distinction between two different approaches to literary texts that are commonly joined together under the rubric of “reception theory.” At the start of his main work on literary theory, Der Akt
des Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung, translated into English as The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response58, Iser makes clear that he is presenting not a theory of
57 Suleiman, 37.
58 The word “Wirkung” is generally translated as “effect” in English, although a footnote on the first page of the Preface for The Act of Reading justifies translating it as “response” because “effect” is too “weak.” There is no translator listed on the cover or copyright page of the English edition, but since Iser was closely involved in the translations of his German books into English, it seems likely that he chose the terms “response” and “reader-response theory” himself. John Paul Riquelme, “Wolfgang Iser’s Aesthetic Politics: Reading as Fieldwork,” New Literary History 31, no. 1 (2000), 12, n2.
aesthetic reception (Rezeptionstheorie), but a theory of aesthetic response
(Wirkungstheorie). In Iser’s distinction, a theory of aesthetic reception (Rezeptionstheorie) is concerned with how works are received by a reading public, and involves historically and culturally conditioned responses to literature. It focuses on “real readers,” whose collective reactions to a work can be documented in the form of book reviews, awards, or other judgments on a text reflecting the values and attitudes of a reading public.59
Aesthetic response (Wirkungstheorie), on the other hand, considers a hypothetical reader, while placing more emphasis on that hypothetical reader’s imaginative and perceptive faculties.60 This study encompasses both Wirkungstheorie (in examining how
many of Khuḍayyir’s stories require the “imaginative and perceptive faculties” of readers in order to make sense of them) and Rezeptionstheorie (in addressing the
reception of the text by interpretive communities, as well as the way that texts such as
Baṣrayāthā have in turn created and nurtured interpretive communities.)
Iser proposes that the effects that a text has on a reader (or rather, the aesthetic responses that a text generates) do not inhere entirely in either text or reader, but rather exist virtually between them. The text is not the ultimate source of the response,
59 Ibid., 28.
60 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), x. When referring to this text, I will cite the English translation.
but simply “represents a potential effect that is realized [konkretisiert] in the reading process.”61 The text is not fixed to only one correct reading, but can be realized in
multiple ways by different readers.
In his 1978 study, The Act of Reading, Iser expands on the idea that a text contains multiple realizable meanings by rejecting the 19th-century notion that literary meaning
is pre-existent in a work of art, and that a critic’s job is simply to extract it. In this new understanding of aesthetic meaning, the images in a painting or the plot of a story were not to be deciphered to uncover the “true” object. A text’s meaning is not something to be discovered, but an effect that is to be experienced.62 Following this line of
argument—that the meaning of the work is not an embedded object, but rather an effect—Iser draws the conclusion that the reader must be a central participant in order for that effect to be realized. Since the reading of a literary work involves the
interaction of text and reader, and an analysis of that work should concern both the text and the response to it, Iser’s reader response work posits the notion of the “virtuality” of the literary text. That virtuality, operating in a dialectical relationship between the text and reader, is the source of the literary work’s dynamism.63
61 Ibid., ix. 62 Ibid., 10. 63 Ibid., 275.
For Iser, the reader’s input is required because literary texts are necessarily partial and incomplete. The text’s “unwritten aspects” draw us into a narrative, working together to form expectations of what is to come. However, as readers, we want literary texts to defy or modify the expectations we build up as we read it, “for the more a text individualizes or confirms an expectation it has initially aroused, the more aware we become of its didactic purpose.”64 That is, like Eco and Jauss, Iser sees
texts as existing along a continuum ranging from “expectation-confirming” to
“expectation-defying,” which determines to what extent we classify them as “literary” or “genre” fiction. Reading is thus a dynamic process, a “kaleidoscope of perspectives, pre-intentions, recollections” that is continually negotiated with the unfolding text.65
1.7.1: The Text’s Controlling Structure and the Reader’s Performance
Iser’s definition of “the reader” as an “implied reader” opens up the question of readerly competence and status—a question that every variety of reader response theory has had to address. Specifically, if meaning is somehow embedded in or produced by a reader, then what qualifies a reader to make that meaning? Must all readings be accepted as equally valid, or can any be ruled out as unacceptable or
64 Ibid., 278. 65 Ibid., 279.
incompetent? Iser aims to answer this question not by seeking to establish the cultural literacy and competence of a presumed reader, but by insisting on what he terms “intersubjectively verifiable” meanings derived from the text.66 By this, he means that
no interpreter can elucidate all the potential meanings of a text, but those meanings she does create from it must have at least some basis in the text itself.
In Iser’s formulation, a fictional text is a set of arranged symbols which instruct the reader on how to perceive:
“The iconic signs of literature constitute an organization of signifiers which do not serve to designate a signified object, but instead designate
instructions for the production of the signified.”67
Guided by those signs, the reader is led to construct a meaning, thus fulfilling the potential of the text.
At the same time, the textual structures composed of signs are never fully determinate. Instead, fiction is marked by indeterminacy, which is what allows the text to communicate with the reader.68 The text can accommodate multiple readings, which
will in turn be influenced by readers’ particular historical or cultural circumstances. Thus, Iser characterizes literary meaning as an “event” or “performance” of the text. In
66 Ibid., 22. 67 Ibid., 65. 68 Ibid., 24.
sum, the literary text initiates performances of meaning without actually formulating meanings itself: that is, the text is not identical to its meaning, which is realized by a reader.69
Overall, Iser believes that literary texts operate somewhat askew from the linguistic and cultural conventions out of which they grow. They do not adhere fully to existing norms, but necessarily take an oppositional stance toward dominant systems of language and culture. A text inhabits “the borderlines of existing systems,” and represents a reaction to them. It thus rearranges and reorganizes hierarchies and patterns of meaning.70
Texts can critique dominant cultures and language systems because they are “depragmatized”: that is, as nonreferential works, they take objects out of their
“pragmatic context,” and can thus reveal social norms or other realities that otherwise would have been unexamined or unexposed.71
69 Ibid., 27. 70 Ibid., 72. 71 Ibid., 109.
1.7.2: Repertoires and Strategies
Although in Iser’s formulation, the text is not fully determinative of meaning, it controls the reader’s response via two means: firstly, through what Iser calls the “repertoire,” and secondly, through “strategies.”72 For Iser, the text’s repertoire refers
to the range of literary conventions that are necessary to establish communication between text and reader. The repertoire includes genre norms, literary allusions, and the entire cultural milieu out of which the text emerged.73
If the repertoire represents Iser’s “raw material” for communication, then strategies (which Iser also calls “techniques”) represent ways that a text organizes this repertoire.74 Strategies and techniques are the text’s means of defamiliarizing the
repertoire for the reader, disrupting the illusions that form as we read, and indicating to the reader that the assumptions she is making along the way must be rethought. (An example might be the technique of the unreliable narrator, which aims to unsettle the
72 Iser draws on J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory for his concept of textual repertoire and strategies. In Austin’s formulation, the three conditions for a successful performative utterance include: 1)
conventions common to speaker and recipient; 2) accepted procedures; and 3) the willingness of both to participate. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Second Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 14-15.
73 Iser, Act of Reading 69. The repertoire corresponds to Austin’s first condition (“conventions common to speaker and recipient”) mentioned in note 72 above. Austin, 14.
74 In terms of Austin’s speech-act theory, strategies correspond to Austin’s second condition, “accepted procedures.” Austin, 15.
reader’s conventional assurance of the narrator’s authority.75) These strategies toy with
the reader’s assumptions with the aim of re-directing her focus and moral point of view:
The efficacy of a literary text is brought about by the apparent evocation and subsequent negation of the familiar. What at first seemed to be an affirmation of our assumptions leads to our own rejection of them, thus tending to prepare us for a re-orientation.76
As nonreferential works, texts take objects out of their “pragmatic context,” and can thus reveal or critique dominant social norms or other realities that a reader would otherwise leave unexamined.77
Overall, then, Iser believes that literary texts operate somewhat askew from the linguistic and cultural conventions out of which they grow. They do not adhere fully to existing norms, which gives the text its dynamic aesthetic value.78 For Iser, literary
texts necessarily take an oppositional stance toward dominant systems of language and culture. A text inhabits “the borderlines of existing systems,” and represents a reaction to them. It thus rearranges and reorganizes hierarchies and patterns of meaning.79
75 Iser, Implied Reader, 289. 76 Ibid., 290.
77 Ibid., 109.
78 Iser, Act of Reading, 70. 79 Ibid., 72.
1.7.3: Coherent Deformations
One of the primary techniques of defamiliarization that Iser sees in literary texts is the use of what he terms “coherent deformations.” Coherent deformations represent a deliberate distortion of what is familiar to the reader. Through them, the text alters the “apparent immutability” of everyday life in the reader, and thus begins the process through which the reader assembles the text’s meaning.80 These deviations
from accepted norms are not ends in themselves, he argues, but must have the aim of producing a response in the recipient (i.e., the reader.)81
The coherent deformations and defamiliarizing strategies the text employs do not act in isolation from each other, but cause a “wandering viewpoint”82 in the reader,
which permits him to travel through the text and connect and reconcile multiple interconnecting perspectives. These perspectives can include different characters through whom a text can be alternately focalized, or differing interpretations of an event in a novel. The reader’s role is to choose from a network of possible connections
80 Ibid., 82. 81 Ibid., 90. 82 Ibid., 135.
in the text, and no two readers will make the same set of interconnecting perspectives.83
Drawing on Jauss’s ideas, Iser sees reading as a process of a shifting horizon of expectations. Every moment of reading looks forward and backward—confirming or frustrating the memory of what we have read, and looking ahead to the next sentence to see if it confirms or frustrates our current viewpoint. Individual sentences “always imply an expectation of some kind,” and each one in turn either narrows or confounds the horizon of expectations the reader has before her.84 Through the interplay of
changing expectations and retroactively modified memories, the reader participates in forming a gestalt—that is, an encompassing structure of meaning drawn from what she has read and the expectations she is forming. The responses the reader has to the text— surprises, expectations, disappointments, etc.—are simply reactions to the gestalt being disturbed or displaced.85
83 Ibid., 118. 84 Ibid., 111. 85 Ibid., 128.