An Overview of Wolfgang Iser’s The Reading Process

Wolfgang Iser’s The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach

Reading is a process that envisages an act of comprehension. Whenever we read meaning in a text, we read meaning into a text and out of the text. Therefore, while reading meaning we have to consider two things – the actual text & the actions involved in responding to the text. This is what Roman Ingarden terms as ‘Konkretisation’ meaning realization. The act of konkretisation is bipolar; the aesthetic and the artistic. The aesthetic side of the spectrum is the realization accomplished by the reader. The artistic side of the spectrum holds(entombs) the text created by the author. A work of art is greater or lesser depending on its ability to bring together(convergence’) the text and its reader, and if it comes to life only when read and realized respectively. That is, a work is always greater than the text because in the words of the new critics a text simply is (divorced from its creator and comes alive only when read). On the contrary a work is greater because it is the meeting point of both the text and the reader. This convergent reading is always virtual (this apparentness gives all meanings to a text). But the process of reading unravels the inherent dynamic character of the text and it is because of this virtuality that the text becomes dynamic.

According to Lawrence Sterne as quoted by Wolfgang Iser, “a literary text is an arena where reader and author participate in the game of imagination, i.e. when everything is ‘told’ the reader has no role to play in the act of reading. Therefore, a literary text should ‘engage’ the reader into imaginative participation. Reading becomes a pleasure only when it is active and creative.”

It is vey important to note that in this process of creating meaning, the text may engage too much (creating over strain on the reader) or disengage (bring about misrepresentation). Therefore, care should be taken not to distort the meaning of a text on subjective discrimination. Iser goes on to say that the right balance of convergence and konkretisation take place when the reader focuses on the “unwritten part of the text”. Iser calls them blanks or gaps in the text. These blanks or gaps can be typographical, syntactical, semantical or semiotic. Iser believes that the unwritten stimulates the reader imagination. The unwritten makes the reader become the author (implied author). By creating the fillers, now this process of reader imagination is liable to go out of control either due to too much of engaging or ill-informed disengagement. Hence the text ‘imposes’ certain limits to reader fancifulness. Such imposition will prevent either over signification (hyperbolic) or under signification (retort) the nature and the role of gaps and blanks allows even the trivial, the unnoticed, the less noticed and the deliberately ignored and make it serious and enduring how this is formed is seldom noticed or explained, but this is the ultimate interaction between the reader of the text.

This apparently describable and inexplicable engagement between reader and the text in the act of realization can be explained by a phenomenological analysis. This reading as a dynamic virtuality is mainly psychoanalytical. Hence such an abstract concept needs or requires a phenomenological analysis.

Reading is an act of pleasure only when it is active and creative. Phenomenology is a way of examining the act of reading in relation to he way in which sentences act upon one another, how consciousness between two entities elate with each other in ringing about meaning. The basic premise for such an analysis is to examine the way ‘sequent sentences’ act upon one another.

According to Roman Ingarden, the world presented by literary texts is connected and constructed through what he calls ‘intentionale satz korrelate’ which means intentional sentence correlatives. These ‘intentionale satz korrelate’ fornm subtle connections. That is, sentences either link themselves or linked by the reader to form complex units of meaning, giving rise to different genres of varied structures. It is important not that these sentences are only componential parts and do not make the sum total of the text itself.

Conceiving the connection between correlatives:

• Connections are points or places or hints or gaps in a text which allow the reader to “climb aboard” the text, i.e., “go into the text or explore”
• Climbing aboard or entering to explore involves participation of the reader and acceptance by the text. This participation and acceptance are based on a plan or “pre-intention” (in Husserl’s terms)
• According to Husserl, the expectation formed in the act of realization / reading is called pre-intention. In the act of reading “expectations are continually modified by the intentional correlatives”. Expectations are scarcely fulfilled in literary texts – if expectations are fulfilled, it offers no room for imagination and therefore result in a defective text – intentional correlatives are rigid and unyielding in didactic text. The more the text is “clear” (without raising expectations) the more it is distanced from the reader. They arouse interest in what is to come. When they are modified in succeeding sentences it makes one rethink on what has already been read and reconstruct that which is to be said.

Memory plays a vital role in reading even as perception does. But memory (recollection) and perception (observation) are not identical. For a reader, new situations and new backgrounds bring to light new aspects of what he had committed to memory. This retrospectively arouses more complex anticipations.

A literary text triggers our expectations to recreate the world it represents. This is called the “virtual dimension of the text”. Now, the virtual dimension is neither the text itself nor the imagination of its reader but “the coming together” (meeting point) of text and imagination (reader’s imagination).

The twentieth century School of German Philosophy called Gestalt believes that the perception of the total of anything whole is different from the perception of the sum of its parts. This Gestalt theory is otherwise called anti-atomistic theory. This Gestalt psychology of the virtual dimension therefore believes that a text has the potential for “seven different realizations” – it is inexhaustible. Each reader, in each reading, fills in the gaps in his own way even while he is engaged in the act of reading. This is because “the potential text” is infinitely richer than any of its individual realizations. Therefore, the second, third and multiple readings produce different impressions each time, proportional to the change in the reader’s own circumstances or situations. It is not that the second reading is truer than the first but just that each is “quite simply, different”. Therefore, the reader’s experience of a text reflects his own disposition. The process of reading also involves “anticipation and retrospection; a second reading elicits an advanced retrospection”.

The stars in the sky, like the literary text, are fixed in their positions. The lines that we draw to create patterns and images out of it depend on our imagination and the situation we are in at that time of drawing connecting lines between each star. Similarly, in a literary text we can only picture things that are not there by drawing connecting lines to fill in the gaps and arrive at that meaning at that time.

The written part of the text provides us knowledge. But the unwritten part of the text provides us the opportunity to picture things according to our imagination and frame of mind. The picturing of text through our imagination provides us with the Gestalt of a literary text. Even as we are involved in the process of anticipation and expectation and encounter the changes inevitable in both the reader we continue to strive, even unconsciously to fit in everything together in a consistent pattern. The Gestalt is colored and conditioned by the reader’s own characteristic selection process.