A figure in Iser´s Carpet

A "Figure" in Iser's "Carpet"Author(s): Shlomith Rimmon-KenanReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,2000), pp. 91-104Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057589 .

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A "Figure" in Iser's "Carpet"

Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

In 1978, Wolfgang Iser published a brilliant analysis of Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet."1 Around the same time, I also pub lished a study of that enigmatic story, from a completely different

point of view.2 Twenty years later, in an essay concerning his work, it

seems appropriate to play Iser's own game and try to trace a "figure" in

his "carpet." However, interpreting Iser in the spirit of his reading of

James is a tricky business, since?according to him?"The Figure in the

Carpet" is a warning against interpretation (at least when interpretation is conceived of as a statement about a concealed referential meaning).

Furthermore, the reasons for Iser's objection to

interpretation are part

and parcel of the "figure" in his own "carpet." While tracing this

"figure," therefore, I wish to emphasize both the existence, in principle, of many other "figures" and the non-finalizing character of my interpre tation of its significance.

A figure in a Persian carpet is a complex pattern of repetitive yet

expanding shapes. My paper will show a similar phenomenon in Iser's

work: a patterning of recurrent

expressions and concepts, creating

continuity between his contributions to different areas, and an expan

sion of their implications and functions as he moves from reader

response to literary anthropology to cultural translatability. In order to

render the "figure" concrete and bring it into sharp focus, I shall then

"perform" it by reading Beckett's Company side by side with Iser's theory as well as his analyses of the trilogy and plays.

The main features of the "figure" I detect in Iser's work are: the space

between (+ virtuality), dynamism (+ process), interaction, blanks and

gaps, activation of the reader's imagination, a to-and-fro movement,

plurality, kaleidoscopic switches, mutual mobilization. All these stress

the dynamics of interactional experience, rather than the stasis of

reified meaning, and their permutations in Iser's work suggest that seeds of the later studies were already implicit in the earlier. Take, for

example, the kaleidoscope image, which I have always associated with the later Iser and have now found in a work as early as The Implied Reader: "As we have seen, the activity of

reading can be characterized as a sort of

kaleidoscope of perspectives, reintentions, recollections."3 More surpris

ing, the concern with literary anthropology, which becomes the center

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 91-104



92 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

of Iser's theorizing in The Fictive and the Imaginary, is anticipated, though partly through negation, in one of his earliest publications in English, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction." In this

essay, Iser asks: "What is it that makes the reader want to share in the

adventures of literature?" and then relegates the exploration of the

question to another discipline: "This question is perhaps more for the

anthropologist than for the literary critic."4 In 1993 (and its anticipation in 1989), this question

no longer

seems extra-literary. On the contrary,

as opposed to many current tendencies which explore literature through the prism of other disciplines (for example, philosophy, psychoanalysis), Iser is interested in using literature as exploratory. Accordingly, the

subtitle of The Fictive and the Imaginary stresses a literary anthropology, and the book attempts to chart the human imagination by way of its

responses to literature.

What are we to make of these (and other) recurrent concepts and

expressions? Is Iser merely repeating himself? Has he developed a

conceptual framework and then simply applied it to different objects of

study? To my mind, even if this were the case, "simply" would be far from a felicitous description; rather, the "applications" could be taken to

indicate that the key discovered is so powerful that it opens many locks.

However, I wish to make a stronger claim. I argue?and examples will

follow?that the basic features of the "figure" in Iser's "carpet" undergo intensification, self-reflexivity, and expansion as his work develops. The

development, of course, is a continuum, not a binary opposition

between "early" and "late," as my formulations may sometimes make it

sound.

Intensification consists in raising phenomena to a higher power (in the mathematical sense). While the early work deals with interaction

between elements (for example, "the reader" and "the text"), the later

work describes interaction between elements already turned into pro cesses (for example, "the fictive" and "the imaginary"). Processes, in

turn, are put into motion by a relational operation that simultaneously activates them and is activated by them, thus raising the kinetic to the

third power.

By "self-reflexivity" I am referring to the way in which early statements

about literature are mirrored in the later work by the very fabric of Iser's

style. Thus, for example, early discussions of the reader's to-and-fro

oscillation tend to take the shape of approach-avoidance formulations in

the later work. True, this increases the difficulty of reading Iser, but?

more importantly?it endows theoretical discourse with the performative nature characteristic of literature (according to Iser), at once depriving it of a claim to truth and perpetuating the quest for the inaccessible.

Expansion occurs on various levels. First, there is the obvious move



a "figure" in iser's "carpet" 93

ment from literature proper to a broader range of phenomena, or?

more specifically?from reader-response to literary anthropology to

cultural translatability. Moreover, objects of study become instruments

for further study. Thus, in the early work, literature is the object of

exploration; in the later work, on the other hand, it becomes an

instrument for exploring the operation of the human mind. Similarly, the early work is concerned mainly with the question "How litera

ture?"?that is, how does literature affect the reader while simulta

neously being "realized" by him?5 The later work, on the other hand, moves from "How literature?" to

"Why literature?"?that is, what func

tions does literature perform in relation to the human makeup? This

change of question explains why early-phase answers become triggers for further questions in the later phase. For example, blanks and gaps are important in the early phase because they make reading an active

process, an experience, rather than a

passive consumption, and "pro

cess" is valorized in Iser against "entities," "givens," "essences," "reifica

tions," "closure," "stasis." But why is process valorized? This is a question

that the second phase illuminates beyond literature in terms of van

quishing human limitations.

Instead of jumping ahead, however, I propose to fill in my argument in two stages, following the expansion I have outlined. The first is

descriptive in character, exemplifying?mostly in Iser's own voice?the

various components of the "figure" and showing how they unfold with time. The second stage is a discussion of the significance (or functions) of the pattern in the light of the later work.

In an oft-quoted position statement, Iser defines the literary work not as an

entity but as a space between two

poles:6 "From this we may conclude

that the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author's text and the aesthetic is the

realization accomplished by the reader . . . the work cannot be identical

with the text or with the concretization, but must be situated somewhere between the two" (IR 274).7 In a still earlier text, literature's "halfway position" is said to be "between the external world of objects and the reader's own world of experience" (RR 8). The subtitle of a collection

containing a sample of Iser's ongoing work on cultural translatability is

"Figurations of the Space Between."8 Here the space is not only

a result,

or manifestation, of the experience of cultural difference, but also a

value. A "colonization of the space between" would involve either a

domination of one culture by another or a self-effacement of a culture

upon confronting another, not the desirable relationship of respect and mutual transformation.

I have said earlier that the space-between is not an actual junction. Nor is it a stable location. It is a process rather than a product (AR 48), "a




complex interaction between text and reader" (RR 5). Throughout his

work, Iser emphasizes both the play between textual structures and their

recipient9 and the "continually interacting elements" within the ever

changing text (RR 17). It is precisely in the name of an experiential process rather than a finalized meaning that Iser criticizes the critic narrator in James's "The Figure in the Carpet." According to Iser, the

critic-narrator in James's story fails because he treats

meaning as a

detachable message (AR 7), whereas the story suggests that "meaning is no longer an object to be defined, but is an effect to be experienced" (A? 9-10). The "figure" in the "carpet" emerges from "an interaction

between the textual signals and the reader's acts of comprehension"

(AR 9). Dynamism is intensified in The Fictive and the Imaginary where the

interaction occurs between elements already turned into processes.

Here, age-old faculties become modes of operation, and definitions are

transformed into programs. Two quotations concerning the title's key

concepts illustrate the dynamization quite clearly: (1) "By fictive here is meant an act, which has all the qualities pertaining

to an event and thus

relieves the definition of fiction from the burden of making the

customary ontological statements

regarding what fiction is."10 Because

of the objection to ontological definitions, chapter 1 of the book deals

with "fictionalizing acts" rather than with "fiction" or "fictionality." (2) "As far as the literary text is concerned, the imaginary is not to be viewed as a human faculty;

our concern is with its modes of manifestation and

operation, so that the word is indicative of a program rather than a

definition" (FI 305n4, my emphasis). The relationship between the

fictive and the imaginary, obviously a central issue in the book bearing that title, is a process, a continual motion, at once

activating and being activated by its two constitutive motions. A similar kinetic quality

animates Iser's conception of culture as "not a static and definable entity

but a galaxy of mobile features that dwarf every attempt at reducing culture to a conceptual point of view" (TC 299). Dynamism reigns supreme in all aspects of Iser's theory.

"How shall we then describe the dynamic character of a text?" is a

question that concerns Iser from the beginning of his theoretical

enterprise (RR 3). Two interdependent factors recur in his various

descriptions: "blanks" "gaps" and "indeterminacies" in the text and the

correlative activity of the reader's imagination: "If one sees the mountain, then of course one can no longer imagine it, and so the act of picturing the mountain presupposes its absence . . . indeed without the elements

of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our

imagination" (IR 283). The activity set in motion by these absences is, at

least partly, a

to-and-fro movement of

constructing, discarding, and recon




structing hypotheses. Readers always seek consistency, but their efforts

are continually frustrated, so as to stimulate further efforts: "However, if

the reader were to achieve a balance, obviously he would then no longer be engaged in the process of establishing and disrupting consistency. And since it is this very process that gives rise to the balancing operation, we may say that the nonachievement of balance is a prerequisite for the

very dynamism of the operation" (IR 286-87). Discussions of the to-and-fro movement on the reader's part become

an approach-avoidance "game"

on Iser's part when he describes, for

example, textplay, staging, and simulacrum as attempts to

glimpse the

inaccessible without tampering with its inaccessibility. The process he is

concerned with is one of gesturing toward a possibility without ever

coinciding with what it is a possibility of: "every appearance is a faked

mode of access to what cannot become present" (FT 300), and "the

simulacrum always bears the inscription that what it is forming is

unformable" (?7302). The "figure" traced so far has linked the space-between to interaction

and then to the dynamism created by blanks and indeterminacies as well as by incessant but necessarily unsuccessful attempts to fill them in. Both

the virtual space and the gaps, however, also give rise to plurality, for

different readers fill them in differently. Plurality, in turn, provokes further dynamic interplay: "one text is potentially capable of several

different realizations, and no reading

can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way. ... In this

very act the dynamics of reading are revealed" (IR 280). The Fictive and

the Imaginary similarly relates plurality to the space-between: "Literature

makes itself into a setting in which that very space launches itself into

multifarious patternings" (?7296). Both the forward-backward movement of hypotheses-construction

and the "variety," "diversity," "proliferation" of possibilities are often

described as " kaleidoscopic switches" (?Txviii, 299). In The Implied Reader, as

we have already seen, the kaleidoscope image relates to changes in the reader's interaction with the text. The Fictive and the Imaginary enlarges the scope of the image far beyond the activity of reading to the way we

give meaning to our lives. Thus, it detects kaleidoscopic shifts in the

rendering of reality (FI 284), the subject's staging of him/herself (FI xix), the boundary-crossings characteristic of fictionalizing acts (FIxv), and even the inaccessibilities to which we seek to gain access (?T299). In

The Translatability of Cultures the image is extended beyond the life of the

individual to the cultural process, or more specifically the relationship between temporal dimensions in it: "This kind of mutuality allows for all

kinds of kaleidoscopic shifts and gradations which tie tradition inextrica

bly to a present and vice versa" (TC301).




Are the kaleidoscopic shifts causes or results of the interplay between

text and reader? This turns out to be a non-question in Iser's theory, for

the "figure" in his "carpet" includes a mutual mobilization of cause and

effect, of actor and acted-upon. In a similar way, the space-between both

generates the reader-text interaction and is generated by it. The

participants in the interaction are themselves mutually activating: The

reader "sets the work in motion, and so sets himself in motion too" (AR

21). Moreover, neither the text nor the reader has a fixed identity prior to the process of mutual "definition" and mutual change: "it seems to

me that this process, always active as the reader travels inside the text

and executes the instructions given to him, actually gives shape to his

identity" (IT 52). A mutuality of shape-giving is discerned between the

explicit and the implicit: "What is concealed spurs the reader into

action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light"

(IT 52). And the interaction between the fictive and the imaginary is

also characterized by interchangeability: "the fictive compels the imagi

nary to take on a form at the same time that it acts as a medium for its

manifestation" (?Txvii). This double activity is accomplished under the

aegis of play, which itself undergoes a similar process. Play, according to

Iser, "is both a product of activation and the condition for the productiv

ity brought about by the interaction it stimulates" (?<7xvii), and "Play becomes a mode of discovery but is itself changed by what it has set in

motion" (FI 294). Like play, culture also "constitutes what it has

connected. As cultures are not clear-cut givens, let alone entities, their

encounters inevitably result in mutual molding" ( TC 300). The various features of the "figure" prevent stasis, maintain gaps and

indeterminacies and consequently the desire to fill them in, gesture toward the inaccessible without either making

it accessible or giving it a

definable identity; in short, they keep alive the dynamics of reading.

Why is dynamism so valorized in Iser's theory? At least partly because it

turns limitations into advantages. Indeed, the transformation of short

comings into opportunities is another common denominator among

various features of the "figure." Thus, as we have seen earlier, the

absence of the (metaphoric) mountain sets the imagination in motion

(IR 283); the reader's inability to achieve a balance of consistent clues

has the advantage of provoking further engagement with the work (IR

286-87); and the incapacity of any realization to exhaust the full

potential of a text gives rise to both plurality and productivity in reading

(?#280). At stake is a view of literature as

experience rather than as a corpus of

autonomous objects, and a conception

of reading as an active interac




tion with texts rather than as their passive consumption. The underlying

phenomenological assumptions have been sufficiently pointed out by Iser himself as well as by various commentators on his work.11 What has

only recently come to light are the implications of the "figure" beyond literature, although in retrospect foreshadowings of these later insights can be traced in earlier texts as well. In the later work, it seems to me, the interaction between reader and text becomes a mise en abyme of the

ways people relate to themselves, to others, and to the world. This may be the reason why Iser retrospectively describes literary anthropology as

"both an underpinning and an offshoot of reader response criticism."12

Our non-coincidence with ourselves, the opacity of others, and

temporal finitude are the main human limitations dwelt on in The Fictive

and the Imaginary. They are also the main triggers for recurrent attempts at self-extension. Non-coincidence is both ontological and epistemologi cal. The incapacity

to be self-present results in an insurmountable

distance between "being" and "having" ourselves (FI 296). Moreover, while we do have "evidential experiences," characterized by "instanta neous

certainty," like falling

in love, we cannot know what we experience,

we cannot "look at" what happens to us (FI 299-300). This double split stimulates an incessant process of

testing out

illusory presences and

alternative understandings, thereby turning disadvantages into opportu nities. In Iser's words, "The impossibility of being present to ourselves

becomes our possibility to play ourselves out to the fullness that knows no bounds, because no matter how vast the range, none of the

possibilities will 'make us tick'" (FI 297). If we are, in this sense, our own otherness, our

attempts to understand

other "others" is at least equally problematic. The opacity of the other

intrigued Iser long before The Fictive and the Imaginary. In "Interaction between Text and Reader," he approached the problem from the

perspective of Laing's The Politics of Experience. According to Laing, 'Your

experience of me is invisible to me and my experience of you is invisible to you. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot

experience my

experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one

another. Experience is man's invisibility to man."13

Seen through Iser's lenses, this "invisibility" spurs the desire for

interpersonal relations, our inability

to know how we experience

one

another becoming a propellant to interaction. The gap in our knowl

edge causes us to construct our own

conception of the way the other

experiences us, our reactions to the other being based upon these

projections. With time, however, we discover that these are projections, that is, "images" of a reality that exists but remains unknowable. Such a

discovery is itself potentially productive, initiating further construction




and further interactions. On the other hand, the reification practiced by those who take such constructs as

reality stops the quest for understand

ing and often distorts human relations.

By dramatizing and provoking inexhaustible attempts to understand

the other and fashion the self, literature also seems to offer an

expansion beyond temporal finiteness. It "makes the interminable

staging of ourselves appear as the postponement of the end" (?Txix). Of

course, such staging does not literally postpone death, but "appear ance," "fiction," may be the only "pragmatic

extension" possible.14 The

shadow of death thus adds another, life-affirming dimension to the

interminable search, process, dynamism, informing all aspects of the

"figure" in Iser's "carpet."

* * *

"I shall not say I again, ever again, it's too farcical. I shall put in its

place, whenever I hear it, the third person, if I think of it," says Beckett's

Unnamable.15 At once denying self-identity and admitting the inevitabil

ity of "I" by way of performance, this paradoxical statement could not

fail to attract Iser's attention. Indeed, Beckett has a place of honor in

Iser's repertoire. His relatively early essays, "The Pattern of Negativity in

Beckett's Prose" and "The Art of Failure: The Stifled Laugh in Beckett's

Theater"16 contain most (if not all) the elements I detected in Iser's

theoretical writings. In Beckett's work, Iser finds blanks and indetermi

nacies exploding into a plurality of possibilities, a to-and-fro movement

of statements that are made and then instantly rejected as well as of

fiction-building and destroying, an endless groping toward the inacces

sible, an unresolved process in the represented world, causing an

unfinalizable, zigzagging dynamism in the experience of reading and/ or

watching.

Moreover, the anthropological functions of these characteristics are

also anticipated by Iser's early studies of Beckett. Through the concept of negativity, he analyzes the non-coincidence of the self with himself in

the trilogy. In Beckett he also explores both the condition of identity as

evidential experience without knowledge and the opacity of the other.

These limitations, together with human finiteness, lead Beckett's charac

ters to a never-ending process of fictionalizing and narrating. "The game with fictions," Iser concludes, "can never stop, and it is this fact that

endows man's finiteness with infinitude" (PN 151). Does not this

conclusion sound like a quotation from The Fictive and the Imaginary} And yet it comes from a study of Beckett!

Iser's essays on Beckett foreshadow and render concrete the "figure"




in his own "carpet." Has Iser's theory emerged from his interaction with

Beckett's texts, or does he project his own emergent theory on Beckett?

In terms of the "figure" I have outlined, this question is unanswerable.

Rather than posit causality in one direction or another, I see the

relations between the two as a case of mutual mobilization. In other

words, Beckett is both a basis and a confirmation of Iser's thinking, and

theory?I would add?is both an underpinning and a result of reading. To continue the interactional chain, I would now like to discuss

Beckett's Company in conjunction with Iser's theory as well as his analyses of the trilogy and the plays.17 My aim is not to "apply" Iser's theory or

textual insights, but to "stage" an interplay in which my reading of

Beckett will simultaneously offer a reading of Iser. This move, I believe,

"performs" Iser's view of a "figure" in a

"carpet" (James's, Beckett's, his

own) not as a reified meaning or

pattern but as a response-provoking

constellation.

Company, as I see it, is a fictional autobiography of a "fabling" subject who carefully avoids the first person and "speak [s] of himself as of

another." Paradoxically, the "I" is present through absence and nega

tion. At one point, the subject on his back in the dark muses: "In

another dark or in the same another devising it all for company. .. . Why

in another dark or in the same? And whose voice asking this? Who asks, Whose voice asking this? And answers, His soever who devises it all. . . .

Who asks in the end, Who asks? The unthinkable last of all. Unnamable.

Last person. I. Quick leave him" (C22, 24). The technique used here is

precisely the one Iser describes in his analysis of the trilogy, that is,

posing a hypothesis and instantly dismantling it, making a statement

only to dismiss it. With "I" explicitly eschewed, Company dramatizes the

non-coincidence of the subject with himself through an interplay of

personal pronouns, a discontinuity between present and past, a dismem

berment of the body, and a fragmentation of the text.

The text alternates between sections in the third person and sections

in the second. The second-person sections are spoken by

a voice and

concern partly the present situation of the solitary subject ('You are on

your back in the dark") and partly memories, which the voice wishes to

convince the one are his (annoying his mother by a comment about the distance of the sky, being encouraged by his father to jump into the

water, unwittingly causing the death of the hedgehog, having an

ambivalent relationship with a woman). The third-person sections are

partly about the one on his back in the dark and partly about an

amazingly cerebral creative process?with its hypotheses, hesitations, and reservations?of someone who "devise [s] it all for company" (C8). These shifts, as well as the omission they signal, dramatize, "perform," a

de-reification, destabilization, and dispersal of the concept of "self:




"Use of the second person marks the voice. That of the third that

cankerous other. Could he speak to and of whom the voice speaks there

would be a first. But he cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You shall not"

(C8). The interplay between pronouns not only dismantles any essentialist

view of self, but also problematizes its unity. Are "he" and "you" the same

person from different perspectives (being spoken about in the third

person and spoken to in the second)? Or "May there not be another

with him in the dark to and of whom the voice is speaking"? (C8-9) Are

there different subjects in Company, or are the others figments of the

imagination of the one on his back in the dark? Indeterminacy concern

ing identity continually transforms the one into many and the many into

one.

Unity of self is also undermined by severing the subject's present from

his past. The deviser, it seems to me, aims at the subject's personal

integration: "To have the hearer have a past and acknowledge it. You

were born on an Easter Friday after long labor. Yes I remember" (C34).

By owning one's memories and establishing continuity with the past, one

can gain

access to a voice and an I: "Another trait its repetitiousness.

Repeatedly with only minor variants the same bygone. As if willing him

by this dint to make it his. To confess, Yes I remember. Perhaps even to

have a voice. To murmur, Yes I remember" (C 16). But the subject is

incapable, or unwilling, to own his memories, hence disclaiming the

right to an I as well as to a voice that would speak, instead of passively

being spoken to and about by other voices.

The discontinuity between past and present is paralleled by a frag mentation of the body. The body is reduced to a back, a hand, an eye, a

knee, feet?all disconnected from each other. Analogously, the body of

the text is fragmented by the alternating pronominal sections and the

temporal dislocations. Non-coincidence is no less (perhaps more) dominant in Company than it was in the trilogy.

Non-coincidence, however, is not only a

disadvantaged human pre

dicament. It also offers an opportunity for self-extension, interaction,

and creative imagination. The brighter side of the subject's fragmenta tion is his plurality. Free from the confines of a unified entity, the subject

becomes a multiplicity of roles, and the changing pronouns can be seen

as different positions of the mind in relation to itself: the mind talking to

itself about itself, occasionally perceiving itself as if from the outside, often imagining?even inventing its own activity. Similarly, the disconti

nuity between past and present can be seen as a liberation from pseudo sameness. Far from shirking responsibility, the subject's disowning of

past memories can be perceived, from this point of view, as emphasizing




the dynamics of change: "One day! In the end. In the end you will utter

again. Yes I remember. That was I. That was I then" (C 21; my emphasis). In a mutual mobilization that Iser would no doubt appreciate, the

absence of unity turns out to be both a trigger and an effect of company. As long as there is unity, there is no company. Otherness is a necessary condition for company, and when "one" is alone, otherness takes the form of otherness-to-self, namely split, fragmentation, transforming

aspects or parts of the subject into others. In his solitude, the subject invokes the voice and the hearer as potential friends: "Little by little as

he lies the craving for company revives. . . . The need to hear that voice

again" (C 55); "Might not the hearer be improved? Made more

companionable if not downright human" (C 34). Parts of the body (for

example, the ear [C34]) and physical postures (being prone or supine [C 26-27, 56]) also become an addition to company, as do the

hypothetical fly (C 28) and dead rat (C 27) who would have been welcome in the empty room.

Self-extension and sociability depend in Company on "fabling," "devis

ing," and "narrating," that is, what Iser calls

"fictionalizing acts." The

subject on his back in the dark is a "devised deviser devising it all for

company" (C 46), straining beyond his limits by imagining a world,

narrating his story to himself, and inventing doubles who both are and are not himself. In what Iser (both when analyzing Beckett and when

developing his own theory) describes as a to-and-fro movement, doubles

are no sooner conjured up than rejected as mere figments. This type of

zigzagging sequence is particularly pronounced in relation to the initials invented to "represent" or "name" the doubles. Evoking the divine fiat, the creator muses: "Let the hearer be named H. Aspirate. Haitch. You

Haitch are on your back in the dark. And let him know his name"

(C31). An initial, of course, is not exactly a name, but?in addition to

evoking the sound of breathing, often referred to in the text?"H" is the first letter in both "hearer" and "he," thus gaining a certain degree of

substantiality, only to be immediately dispelled: "Is it desirable? No. Would he gain thereby in companionability? No. Then let him not be

named H. Let him be again as he was. The hearer. Unnamable. You"

(C32). But the game with letters does not stop here. A few pages later,

"feeling the need for company again he tells himself to call the hearer M at least. For readier reference. Himself some other character. W" (C42

43). This time, the initial confers an even greater substantiality (M =

AM?), but it also hints at the interchangeability of doubles both by calling the other AM and by using two letters which visually mirror each other in reverse (M and W). Moreover, W = "double you," and the hearer was constantly addressed as "you." In typical fashion, however, all




this is soon undone: "Is there anything to add to this esquisse? His

unnamability. Even M must go. So W reminds himself of his creature as

so far created. W? But W too is creature. Figment" (C 45).

Fictionalizing not only creates insubstantial figments who are never

theless a good enough society, but also?as in Iser?appears to postpone the end. Fabling, devising, narrating are equated with both company and life. At the end, the subject is lonely and expiring. Death cannot be

postponed once 'You hear how words are

coming to an end. With every

inane word a little nearer to the last. And how the fable too. The fable of

one with you in the dark. The fable of one fabling with you in the dark.

And how better in the end labor lost and silence. And you as you always were. / Alone" (C 62-63). "Alone" thus terminates life, the game with

fictions, the subject's process of narration, and Beckett's text.

* * *

In this essay I trace a patterning

of concepts and expressions in Iser's

work. By analogy with James's story and Iser's reading of it, I call this

kinetic cluster a "figure"

in the latter's "carpet," and argue that it

undergoes intensification, self-reflexivity, and expansion as Iser's work

develops. I then "perform" the "figure" by reading Company side by side

with Iser's theory as well as his analyses of Beckett.

Quite a few analogies emerge in the course of my argument. In

retrospect, they strike me as a further confirmation of the "figure" and

therefore an appropriate

conclusion to my discussion. First, there are

analogies between what Iser says about different areas: reader-response,

literary anthropology, culture. These, I believe, are a manifestation of

the continuity and expansion I see in his work. Further analogies

can be

detected between Iser's theoretical thinking and his analyses of Beckett.

These can be explained as a result of mutual mobilization, Beckett's

work seen as both a basis and a confirmation of Iser's theory. This is why it is hard to say whether the theory emerges from Iser's interaction with

Beckett's texts or, conversely, his reading of Beckett is a projection of his

theory. A similar mutual mobilization can be perceived between what

Iser says about Beckett's trilogy and what I say about Company, since I

read the latter in conjunction with the former.

Of a different kind is the analogy between what Iser says and the way

he says it, for example when, in an approach-avoidance style, he talks

about a to-and-fro movement. The analogy between Iser's theorizing and my analysis of it belongs to the same category, both because my

analysis is a retracing of his "figure" and because my style begins to

sound more and more like his. Beyond continuity, expansion, and




mutual mobilization, these analogies dramatize the performative aspect of both literature and literary theory. Thus Iser does not only say what he

thinks but does it in his own writing. And texts?James's, Beckett's, and

Iser's?are not objects for the reader's act of deciphering but invitations

to a response that "performs" them. This, perhaps, is why Iser "repeats"

James and Beckett, and I "repeat" both Iser and Beckett.

A caveat is in order, however. If the reader's interaction with the text is, in some sense, its "performance," and if there is a "figure" in the textual

carpet, a certain determinism seems to hover over the interplay. It is

important to

emphasize, in defense, that there is always

more than one

"figure" in a textual "carpet," and the one I discerned in Iser is in no way exclusive.18 Different readers find and "perform" different "figures,"

plurality keeping the reading-game alive. As Iser explicitly and self

reflexively says in an interview, "the path would be blocked if any model

achieved sufficient success to become reified."19

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

NOTES

1 Wolfgang Iser, "Partial Art?Total Interpretation: Henry James, 'The Figure in the

Carpet,' In Place of an Introduction," in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response

(London, 1978), pp. 3-10.

2 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, "The Figure in the Carpet," in The Concept of Ambiguity?The

Example of fames (Chicago, 1977), pp. 95-115.

3 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore, 1974), p. 279; hereafter cited in text as IR

4 Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction" (1971),

rpt. in Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1989), p. 29; hereafter cited in text as RR.

5 Sartre's famous question, "What is literature?" is obviously one that Iser would reject as

a call for reifying, essentialist answers.

6 In the descriptive section that follows, I underline constitutive concepts of the "figure," for the sake of clarity and conspicuity. 7 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (London, 1978), p. 21; hereafter cited in text as AR

8 The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and

Wolfgang Iser (Stanford, 1996); hereafter cited in text as TC.

9 For example, Wolfgang Iser, "Interaction between Text and Reader" (1980), rpt. in

Prospecting, p. 31; hereafter cited in text as IT.

10 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,

1993), p. 305n3 (his emphasis); hereafter cited in text as FI.

11 For example, Robert C Holub, Reception Theory (London, 1984). 12 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting, p. vii.

13 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (Harmondsworth, 1968), quoted in Iser, "Interaction between Text and Reader," p. 32.

14 In a discussion of the unknowability of others, Iser similarly says about pragmatically




oriented fictions: "this mode of comprehension is the only one possible, even though real

comprehension is not possible" ("The Pattern of Negativity in Beckett's Prose" [19751, rpt. in Prospecting, p. 149; hereafter cited in text as PN).

15 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable (New York, 1965),

p. 355.

16 Wolfgang Iser, "The Art of Failure: The Stifled Laugh in Beckett's Theater" (1981),

rpt. in Prospecting, pp. 152-93.

17 Iser discusses Cowman); briefly (one page) in subordination to questions of modernism

and postmodernism in Implied Reader, pp. 55-71.1 myself previously analyzed this text with

an emphasis on the reversibility of narrative levels (Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, A Glance

Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity [Columbus, 1996], pp. 93-103). There is

some overlap between my two studies. References to Company are taken from Samuel

Beckett, Company (London, 1980); hereafter cited in text as C.

18 Indeed, Iser's one page on Company suggests that his reading of this text may well be

different from mine.

19 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting, p. 56.



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A figure in Iser´s Carpet