"If only I were not obliged to manifest": Iser's Aesthetics of Negativity

I. Fictionality and Negativity: Connective Tissues in Iser's Work

In relation to the empirical world, the imaginary as otherness is a sort of holy madness that does not turn away from the world but intervenes in it. ¹

[N]egativity provides the structure underlying the interaction between text and reader. ²

The two epigraphs chosen for this essay contain in a nutshell the most pressing concerns in Iser's work. Literature as an instrument of "holy madness" figures as a kind of cultural broker whose main role consists in intervening in the empirical world. Defying ontology, fiction, Iser asserts, is most tangible in its impact on the reader: "The more fiction eludes an ontological definition, the more unmistakably it presents itself in terms of its use. If it is no longer confined to an explanatory function, its impact becomes its most prominent feature" (P 267). Yet how are we to determine this impact? "It has always been assumed that fiction can produce realities," writes Iser almost laconically (P 267). Yet, in light of his claim that negativity structures the interaction between text and reader, his insistent question "Why do human beings need fictions?" leads to a quasiparadoxical answer: fictions become our uncanny doubles, reflecting to us something we otherwise cannot perceive. This "holy madness," this haunting attraction to our self-produced doubles, eternally recreates our world, albeit to produce difference rather than similarity. Mirroring something in us we can never see or fully grasp, literature suspends us forever in a productive negativity, a "space between" the knowable and the unknown. This "space between" needs to remain free of empirical manifestations yet paradoxically manifests itself in our empirical world.

Already motivating Iser's reader-response theory, the question of why we need fictions links the different phases and decades of Iser's work and continues to inform his recent turn to literary anthropology. Any answer to the question holds a promise to legitimize literary studies--a deeply felt concern when reader-response criticism emerged in the sixties and flourished in the seventies. This very concern takes on a new urgency at the turn of our century when "fictions" seem to have been hijacked by media culture, and the discipline of aesthetics is often considered a mere remnant of an obsolete humanist heritage. Yet, the very question of why we need fiction obstinately stays with us. It also lies at the heart of the recent anthropological turn in literary studies--a turn brought about when the new paradigm of culture emerged, challenging the hegemony of the textualist paradigm by asserting its prominence across disciplines. It is in addressing the human need for fiction at its most fundamental level that Wolfgang Iser's work anticipated this "anthropological turn" and retains its relevance and vitality in current debates in literary and cultural studies.

For Iser, the need for fiction is intimately tied to its generation of a productive negativity that must be retained at all costs, both in writing and in reading literature. Such commitment to negativity, however, creates a certain predicament--one Samuel Beckett voiced most succinctly in The Unnamable: "If only I were not obliged to manifest." ³ This "resistance to manifestion" marks a distinct cultural sensibility typical of the historical moment in which Iser develops his theories. Derived from a profound philosophical and epistemological skepticism, the pervasive suspicion against manifestation requires Iser to search for a radically new form of thinking and writing--a search in which Beckett becomes the most inspiring source. Beckett serves as a model for Iser's new aesthetics of negativity, which is designed to forgo the pitfalls of concrete manifestation, and ultimately to undermine any form of determinacy. Iser's own "resistance to manifestation" emerges in recursive loops that consistently qualify his statements, marking the epistemological premises and basic political stance of his work, as well as its emotional energy or underlying mood. This mood...