1. The public image of literature was shattered at the time when literature, through theory, prompted the entire field of the humanities to recognize its own language, rhetorics, fictionality, narration, etc., as epistemic instruments rather than as irrelevant auxiliaries. The period of enthusiasm was replaced by a concern for the authority of the humanities, many of which hastily cut out this dangerous liaison. Yet the harm seems to be already done or cunningly used, so the case of literature appeared to be symptomatic for the gloomy future of the humanities. (back)
2. It would be farfetched to blame theory for having infected the reading public, but the better part of the new literature has been reset in order to live up to the expectations. The well told story, in the cases it was not altogether forsaken, became so intricately learned, allegoric, intertextual, ironic, and self-subverting, that any identification or empathy seemed dated. The gap between the public and literature was getting deeper and literary studies occurred to be among the culprits. Suspiciously enough, such accusations were broadcast persistently by the competing media. (back)
3. The transformation of the literary into cultural studies has been taking place in a hardly casual parallel with the proliferation of surveys focused on the narrative and/or fictional aspects of literature. (See for example: Walter Benjamin, Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows, Gesammelte Schriften, II. 2, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980); in English, “The Storyteller” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Peter Brooks, Freud’s Masterplot: Questions of narrative; Reading for the Plot (New York: Knopf, 1984); La condition Postmodern (Paris: Minuit, 1979), in English, The Postmodern Condition, (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984); Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of fiction ((Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984); Frederick Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, Social Text 1 (1979); Mieke Bal, Narratologie (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977); Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction (London: Methuen, 1983). Narrative and fiction occurred to be quite reliable for the regressive (in a Freudian sense) purposes of the new studies. By placing man in their central or strategic positions, narrative-and-fiction approaches confess an insurmountable humanistic faith. They may question the totality or identity of their anthropomorphic figure, yet by its presence as a character in a story, as a subject in a proposition, as an actant, proper name or psycho-physical determinacy, the fiction-and-narrative trends remain into or rather return to the enlightened but still immature modernity. Moreover, the new narratology very much abandoned the objectives and strategies of its structuralist predecessor, constraining its efforts to the seductive and persuasive power of narrative. Thus, the media-and-culture approaches have been provided with a reliable explanatory instrumentaria that legitimize their rather simple vision of man: a communal creature susceptible to various ideological manipulations, whose predilections are “essentially” or “politically” predetermined by (their) sex/gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. Such a political picture presents the human being of the liberal societies as a would-be active chooser of identity images and symbols and thus as a dazzled consumer of goods, products and lifestyles. No doubt, such anthropology suggests those studies as another simulacrum, another market product, whose calculated critical pathos proves to be pathetic in comparison with their collaborative readiness, reinforcing the status quo power structure. Therefore, the co-operation between the new studies and the literary concern of fiction and narrative is far from being an innocent one: man’s identity is a (self-)imposed construct, a mixture of communal culture and politics, almost entirely deprived of existential or epistemological options. (back)
4. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Originally published as Das Fiktive und das Imaginre. Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1991. (All quotations are made from the English authorized translation). (back)
5. The Fictive and the Imaginary (XI). (back)
6. “Literature fans out human plasticity into a panoply of shapes, each of which is an enactment of self-confrontation. As a medium, it can only show all determinacy to be illusory. It even incorporates into itself the inauthenticity of all the human patternings it features, since this is the only way it can give presence to the protean character of what it is mediating. Perhaps this is the truth through which literature counters the awareness that it is an illusion, thereby resisting dismissal as mere deception” (XI). (back)
7. The further one goes the more luring the decoys of essence, substance and nature get. The latter explains why art appears to be indispensable for the new anthropological studies: on the level of its form, construction, and material density, art resists or at least is reluctant to yield to the temptations of the ideal constructs or ideological speculations. Its operational mechanisms, formal procedures, and functioning reflect the non-ideological other of the human way to think and act. It does not imply, however, that the speculation on art and human plasticity is immunized against ideology. (Not sure what you mean here). (back)
8. “Gegenwndligkeit (SP!) is a term, introduced by Heidegger in his discussion of the origin of the artwork.” (234) (back)
9. Undoubtedly, it does not mean more than asking ourselves about the intention of the text, leaving Iser’s personality and biography in peace. (back)
10. “Difference is therefore no longer a matter merely of distinction; as an empty space it operates both as a divider and as a stimulus for the linking of what has been divided. These simultaneous countermovements take place as a continual referring of the separated elements to one another; thus difference never disappears through link-ups, and the iteration never ceases. Since the contermovements are initiated by the overstepping acts of fictionalizing, the intratextual difference ensuing from such overstepping does not indicate deferral of origins but constitutes a structure that enables the text to play itself out beyond the boundaries of its own individual world” (p. 229). (back)
11. The process even gets further when in the chapter dedicated to The Imaginary the interplay between the imaginary and the fictive has evolved, or when Text Play is put under consideration. (back)
12. It is particularly clear with regard to the act of self-disclosure: reader’s split attitude into one that is simultaneously natural and artificial is in turn bracketed by the usual suspect, the imaginary: the represented world is not a world, but the reader imagines as if it were one, triggering an imaginative reaction to the world represented in brackets, thereby indicating the presence of a purpose that proves to be the observability of the world represented (16). The tension between the attitudes obviously demands resolution, obtained in the meaningful visual accomplishment of a world disclosing its fictionality but never losing its dependence on the principle of phenomenality. (back)
13. The fictive in the text sets and then transgresses boundaries in order to endow the imaginary with that degree of concreteness necessary for it to be effective; the effect is to trigger the reader’s need to close the event and thus to master the experience of the imaginary (17). This form of doubling shapes the mobilized imaginary in such a way that the derealized textual world turns into a guide for the perceptive fantasy which will permit something nonexistent to be visualized as a reality (232). (back)
14. The question becomes more pressing given that in a lecture (“The Significance of Fictionalizing”) six years after the first publication of the book, the imaginary is erased without apparent losses. Undoubtedly, technical reasons might account for the omission. The discarding of the old fiction/reality oppositon altogether, as well as the eloquent defense of the imaginary throughout a book entitled not less than The Fictive and the Imaginary notwithstending, the lecture surprises as it does not seem to need any imaginary for fulfilling the same anthropological program. Could we assume that in the meanwhile Iser has withdrawn his confidence in the imaginary? Barely so. For, as we see, the imaginary proves to be the basic device for overstepping the boundary of theory. (back)
15. The imaginary is recruited to a literary analytic where it has not been a central concept for at least a century. The resurrection of a notion as classic as that of imagination is a strategically calculated risk whose justification lies in the intention for tying together the all too deviant points of Modernity. It reminds us that the other two elements in the interplay are not in their innocent youth as well. If they have their both traditional and contemporary justification, however, the status of the imaginary is overtly provocative and intentionally irritating 'to whom it may concern'. (back)
16. Reluctantly, we are given rather evasive definitions of each of the elements in endnotes, the reason for which should be already clear: "our concern is with its modes of manifestation and operation, so that the word is indicative of a program rather than a definition. We must find out how the imaginary functions, approaching it by way of describable effects, and this we shall attempt to do by examining the connection between the fictive and the imaginary" (305). What is said about the imaginary implies the condition of the others as well. It is of crucial importance for Iser to avoid the trap of speaking from a position outside, be it of a discipline, a system or a principle. Therefore, throughout the book he elaborates and carefully enriches a self-enclosed system whose ground, justification and mode of existence are self-sustainable. By avoiding any kind of preconditioning (except maybe of that stipulated 'human plasticity'), Iser adheres to a position philosophically both bold and sound. (back)
17. The imaginary is made to be the most mysterious element among the others. The book is precociously reluctant to offer a closer look into the nature of the imaginary, simply because such is not available (as we are often reminded.) It needs an agent outside itself in order to take place and the fictive should be its general generator in literature. The imaginary is said to be intangible and hardly intelligible. Its realization automatically terminates it since by this it obtains determinacy, which is also pragmatically implicated. Thus, only literature provides comparatively more favorable conditions for its appearance. Yet we are warned to abandon the naive hopes for Apocalypse or Revelation, when the reveries are expected to enter. Very much like Gaudault, they are meant not to appear, which makes their presence somewhat haunting. (back)
18. The imaginary thus preserves the most striking effect of rhetorics: that it is a problem of reading that cannot be closed into the language, yet could not get rid of it. (back)
19. Any unintended effect should be either mitigated (as when Goodmans' expression/ representation couple is sent for to cover the flank of the figurative language) or implicitly relegated to the unintentional nature of the imaginary, which does not harm the general picture. Thus, the alleged discursive character of the real remains undiscussed, yet its extratextual character is encouraged to reoccur. The fictive is announced as inexplicable through linguistic instrumentaria, although it would be only if the fictive implies throughout an intentional proceeding which is hard to be warranted. (back)
20. Contrary to the first impression, suggesting that the project is a shift from the field of reception to one of production, the book is rather a pussyfooting prolongation of the previous project, known as a theory of reading, now doubled by the act of creation. The suggestion is that the actual act of reading proceeds through stages that are mirroring the crucial points of the production of the literary text. Each of these processes is supposed to take place before and after the language, or at least the extra-linguistic aspects are incomparably more important. Blurring the linguistic elements would help for clearing out the picture of literature, both as a creative act, or production and as an actual act of beholding or of speculation over the beheld. Iser implies that both the reader and the author are playing the game of literature with much bigger wagers than the language-oriented theory imagines, for at stake is the only life of the human which literature spawns to many imaginary possibilities. Thus, the real, the fictive, and the imaginary as well as the whole range of doubling, mirroring, outstripping, overstepping, as-ifness, staging, enactment, and the others are chosen for being not only far away from language but also intimately close to the actual act of reading literature to the occurring in the reader's mind, rather than in the writing of a literary scholar. This aspect of Iser's metaphoricity may be omitted, eclipsed by the horizon of expected sober and sombre German terminology. Yet those words still keep their energetic, dynamic, metaphorical flavour that refreshes the against-language, i.e. against theory theatrical atmosphere of the project. (This needs to be finished) (back)