The Range of Interpretation (review)

Wolfgang Iser's The Range of Interpretation defies my attempt to write a standard review, highlighting the main arguments and suggesting a substantiated evaluation. Indeed, trying to write this way forces me to repeat Iser's own words, so that I find myself in a position uncannily similar to Borges' Pierre Menard, whose creation of Don Quijote is a verbatim reproduction of Cervantes' text. This predicament, I believe, results from at least two features of Iser's book. One is its condensed manner of presentation: a point is made and immediately followed by the next point in the rigorous logic of Iser's thinking, without much in the way of elaboration, explanation, or exemplification; the whole book thus reads like a distillation of a vast range of ideas, rendering a summary of a summary problematic in the extreme. The other consists in that, to the extent that an abstraction of the skeleton of the argument from the numerous "main points" is at all possible, it is already integrated into Iser's own book: the preface and then, with a different emphasis, the epilogue magisterially offer the wrap-up that an ordinary reviewer would have to labour hard to produce.

Pierre Menard, Borges suggests, succeeds in creating a new masterpiece partly because of the temporal distance between Cervantes' text and his own, a gap filled by new connotations, perspectives, contexts. Since I cannot claim the same benefit for a review written shortly after the book's publication, I confine myself to the foregoing description of an awkward scene of writing and shall try to take it as a challenge rather than a deterrent.

Wolfgang Iser, one of the major thinkers of our time, is best known among literary theorists for what some call Reader-Response and others Reception Theory (see The Implied Reader, 1974; and The Act of Reading, 1978). His interest in the interaction between text and reader has led him, in the last decade, to develop a literary anthropology (Prospecting, 1989; The Fictive and the Imaginary, 1993; and the present book). As is well known, the early work is concerned mainly with the question "How literature?" —namely how literature affects the reader while simultaneously being realized by him. The later work, on the other hand, moves from "How literature?" to "Why literature?" —that is, what functions literature (or, more precisely, fiction) performs in relation to the human makeup. The present book reflexively turns the question "Why" to the act of interpretation itself, Iser's answer having many affinities with his earlier explanation of the motivation for fiction. But before discussing the answer (or even the question), some presentation of the book's main concepts is necessary.

Interpretation, according to Iser, is an act of translation, transposing something into something else (ix). There is always a gap between what is interpreted and the terms (or "register") into which it is translated for the sake of accessibility. The gap both calls for an interpretation and is created by the act of translation. Iser labels this gap a "liminal space," and the book analyses the history of interpretation as the development of different modes of coping with this space. Changes in the modes of negotiation are caused both by the variety of subject matter to be translated and by differences in the parameters informing interpretation. Indeed, the range of historical phenomena covered by The Range of Interpretation is awe-inspiring: the Torah and its exegesis, the literary canon as conceived by Dr. Johnson, the hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the historiography of Johann Gustav Droysen, Paul Ricoeur's understanding of psychoanalysis, ethnographic discourse (mainly that of Clifford Geertz), systems theory (mainly according to Francisco Varela), and Franz Rosenzweig's theological-existential quest. The appendices add Walter Pater and Thomas Carlyle to the already amazing range —and all this in less than 200 pages.

The rabbinical tradition sought to translate the holy text of the Torah into the life of the community, the authority of the canon being a central concern in this endeavour. Commentary on the...