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A "Figure" in Iser's "Carpet"
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 31, Number 1, Winter 2000
- pp. 91-104
- 10.1353/nlh.2000.0008
- Article
- Additional Information
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New Literary History 31.1 (2000) 91-104
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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 published 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 interpretation 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 expansion 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 surprising, the concern with literary anthropology, which becomes the center [End Page 91] 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...