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New Literary History 31.1 (2000) 57-71



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The Way of the Chameleon in Iser, Beckett, and Yeats:
Figuring Death and the Imaginary in The Fictive and the Imaginary

John Paul Riquelme

Figures *


When I try to put it all into a phrase, I say, Man can embody truth but he cannot know it. I must embody it in the completion of my life. The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not . . . the Song of Sixpence.

W. B. Yeats, Letter of 4 January 1939 1

Chameleon in spite of himself, there you have Molloy, viewed from a certain angle.

Samuel Beckett, Molloy 2

I. Hodos Chameleontis: Plenitude and Death

In their quite different texts and styles, Samuel Beckett and Wolfgang Iser follow what Yeats in his autobiography, alluding to alchemical traditions, calls hodos chameleontis, the way of the chameleon. Iser takes Beckett up into his own travelling of this path most obviously when he writes about Beckett's work. The merging of their paths is particularly arresting in the discussion of Beckett that Iser inserts at a crucial moment in The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, which is a work of theoretical speculation, not literary interpretation. His remarks on Beckett there are a part of his theoretical discourse rather than a digression from it.

The dual standing of Beckett's works in Iser's writings, as texts for interpretation and as, in effect, a component in the theorizing, invites looking through both ends of the telescope: at Beckett through Iser and at Iser through Beckett. Doing so necessarily raises the issue of the fit between theory and interpretive method, an issue that Iser has been concerned with frequently, most explicitly in his essay "Key Concepts in Current Literary Theory and the Imaginary." 3 One hermeneutical fit between theory and literature can come into being when the reader or [End Page 57] the writer of a theoretical text brings to the text attitudes generated by literary works that have themselves contributed to producing the theoretical text. That fit is possible again when we turn eventually from a theory to the interpretation of literary texts that have contributed to the theoretical formulations. A dynamic crossover between literary text and theoretical discourse is likely to be a matter of rhetorical figures and their implications, not primarily a matter of logical argumentation, whether speculative or interpretative. Looking through both ends of the telescope can become a kind of binocular vision of a sort that is potentially self-testing, self-adjusting, and self-correcting. The testing, adjusting, and correcting are neither a technical matter nor an abstract one.

The path of the chameleon discernible in both Iser and Beckett is, as in Heraclitus's fragment about the hodos that is both catahodos and anahodos, a way up that is also a way down, a way forward that is a way back, and a response to living, even the end or goal of living, that is also a response to dying, another kind of end to and of living. Traversing the path enables looking in two directions. Yeats concludes the section called Hodos Chameleontis in his autobiographical writings by introducing his theory of masks. 4 He takes Oscar Wilde's ideas about masks and elaborates them into the notion that self and anti-self in the artist are linked. Wilde expressed the double, antithetical vision that Yeats took over in his essay "The Truth of Masks," from Intentions, when he says in the closing sentences that "A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true." 5 It is this kind of insight about the simultaneous coexistence of opposites, with its challenge to Aristotelian logic, that links Beckett and Iser in ways that make Wilde and Yeats also relevant. Although I do not pursue such a description here, a coherent sketch of modernism from Wilde to Beckett could be elaborated from the connections among these writers. Any persuasive description of modernism...

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