Bianca Theisen, The Four Sides of Reading. Paradox, Play, And Autobiographical Fiction in Iser and Rilke

The Four Sides of Reading: Paradox, Play, and Autobiographical Fiction in Iser and RilkeAuthor(s): Bianca TheisenSource: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,2000), pp. 105-128Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057590 .

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The Four Sides of Reading: Paradox, Play, and Autobiographical Fiction

in Iser and Rilke

Bianca Theisen

over and over again you lifted up a poem to see

whether you could hide behind it . . . and only an angel should have been allowed to search for

you.1

BY foregrounding either a semantic approach to the literary

text or one emphasizing signification, theories of reading have

tended to privilege either a paradigmatic condensation of

syntagmatic differentiality or a syntagmatization of paradigmatic equiva lencies. While the work of Wolfgang Iser has taken the relation between

selection and combination as one of its guiding principles, it has charted a more

complex model of a four-sided form, in which the very

distinction between combination and selection is reinscribed into both

combination and selection, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axes.

By reinscribing the distinction, Iser provides a distinctive alternative to

other theories of reading. In The Act of Reading Iser targets such a four-sided form with the

foreground-background-relation on the paradigmatic axis and the theme

horizon-relation on the syntagmatic axis, but ultimately subjects combi

nation to selection. In The Fictive and the Imaginary, on the other hand, Iser has combination dominate selection; he anthropologizes their

distinction as a play

structure that unfolds within the four sides of map

and territory and imitation and symbolization. The Act of Reading

pinpoints the distinction as a determination of the indeterminate, when,

through a shifting of perspectives, the reading process aims at cathecting indeterminate voids. By contrast, The Fictive and the Imaginary stages the

distinction as an ind?termination of the determinate, since the reader will in

the last instance always fail to cathect the purely differential nature of

play. The Act of Reading foregrounds selection and backgrounds combi

nation, stabilizing their distinction as a foregroundable "figure" in turn.

The Fictive and the Imaginary, on the other hand, foregrounds combination

New Literary H?tory, 2000, 31: 105-128



106 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

and backgrounds selection, mollifying the paradoxical unity of their

distinction in an emphasis on pure difference.

The models charted in both books, then, need to be read in

conjunction, if we want to conceptualize the relation between paradigma and syntagma

as a systemic relation, and, more

specifically, as a four

sided "form" that can account for the otherwise incompatible unity of

the distinction between a paradigmatization of the syntagma and a

syntagmatization of the paradigma. Reconfiguring the relation between

paradigma and syntagma as a systemic one will allow us to highlight the

influence of systems theory (Niklas Luhmann) and communication

theory (Gregory Bateson) on Iser's work?an influence that is most

obvious when Iser describes the reading process as a self-regulating

system that "is cybernetic in nature as it involves a feedback of effects

and information throughout a

sequence of changing situational frames"

or when he conceives of the text's reference to "world" as a system

environment relationship.2 A systemic relation between paradigma and

syntagma will also allow us to trace the departure from the limitations of

the "linguistic turn," which Iser targets when he shifts the emphasis from a

cognitive to a functional interest in literature.3 The relation between

syntagma and paradigma in the literary text, then, does not merely

replicate the linguistic axes, with its follow-up problem of how to

differentiate literariness from the linguistic norm. Seen as a systemic relation or a four-sided form, syntagmatic indication does not

merely mean what it says and thereby suspends paradigmatic equivalence,

splitting it into both itself and something different. Saying that it does

not mean what it says, syntagmatic indication reveals what Iser calls its

duplicity: it indicates that it does not indicate, but such an indication of

course in turn indicates. It is this paradox of indication that The Act of

Reading and even more so The Fictive and the Imaginary explore. I trace

the relation between syntagmatization and paradigmatization through other theories of reading from Georges Poulet to Michael Riffaterre and

Paul de Man in order to set it off from Iser's configuration of this

relation as a four-sided form. That form is figured in the four game structures and reader responses Iser discusses in The Fictive and the

Imaginary and the four perspectival arrangements he outlines in The Act

of Reading. I close with an interpretation of Rilke 's fictive autobiography The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) as a modernist text that

exemplifies the recursive observation central to Iser's theory. The inter

relation of extraliterary and intraliterary reference emerges as a process that calls attention to the paradox of its form, which involves masking and unmasking itself as an autobiography.



THE FOUR SIDES OF READING 107

I. Reading Theory: Poulet to de Man and Beyond

The art and artifice of reading, Friedrich Schlegel once suggested, consist in reading with an other, that is, attempting to read the reading of others.4 Such a notion of reading envisions a pragmatics of reading:

reading with an other and reading the reading of others embed the

technique of reading in intersubjective communication. Theories that

semanticize the reading process tend to conceive of intersubjective communication as an interaction between subject and subject,

trans

formed and enclosed in a textual object that organizes inside and

outside as if it were a container. Poulet's reader heuristic, for instance,

conceptualizes the process of reading as a transformation of the

external, material reality of signs on a page into an inner experience. In

this process of interrelation, the reading subject, breaking down the

distinction between self and other, through the mediation of the book, is posited as the site of a doubling or ghosting in which "the I who

'thinks in me' when I read a book is the I of the one who reads the

book."5 Since Poulet's heuristic is modeled on a historically specific attitude toward reading?namely extensive, identificatory reading as it

evolved in the late eighteenth century and replaced intensive, repetitive

reading, due to a general increase in literacy6?it remains indebted to

this particular historical semantics of reading. Such a semantics advo

cates a process of intersubjective identification between author and

reader and privileges the paradigmatic principle of similarity and

equivalence. A model of reading in which the text enshrines the author as the

intersubjective other of the reader's self who can then identify himself

with his other, determines the direction of reading as a one-way process from text to reader. Norman Holland has attempted

to overcome such a

"bi-active model" with a "transactive model" that starts with the response

of the reader instead of focusing on the effect of the text on the reader; Holland conceives such a response in psychoanalytical terms as a

defense mechanism against and fantasy transformation of the text. With

his four-sided formula, unity/text/identity/self, Holland hopes to ex

ceed the unidirectionality of text-reader interaction, but since he only draws out the four sides of his formula in two directions, reading it

vertically and horizontally, as it were?unity is to identity as text is to self, and unity is to text as identity is to self?he merely redoubles uni

directionality when he takes his four-sided formula t? indicate that

"identity is the unity I find in a self if I look at it as though it were a text."

What Holland does not make explicit in his formula, the premise that

we can see the self as unity only if we turn to the text as identity




constitution, becomes obvious if one reads his four terms chiasmatically: unity is to self as text is to identity. This implicit premise, however,

collapses the four sides onto yet another, here psychoanalytically in

formed, model of intersubjective identification. Reaffirming subject

object positions by insisting that reading and interpretation are a

"function of identity,"7 Holland's model cannot operationalize the

reader's response as a feedback loop, as he claims it does in his critique of Iser.8 By interpreting the implication of the reader's viewpoint in the

text in Iser as a bi-active trajectory in which the text determines the

response of the reader, Holland has misunderstood it as a stimulus

response model that would indeed preclude feedback. While Holland's

model of intersubjective identification between text and reader may, as

he phrases it, put the "reader in the driver's seat (cybernos)," it cannot

account for the recursive feedback of communication into communica

tion that a "cybernetics of reading" would have to explicate.9 Bound to a

semantics of consciousness or identity constitution, communication

between text and reader can only be conceived as an

intersubjective

relay or a mediation between one

subjective consciousness and another.

In such a view, any "feedback" or bi-directionality

can only be another

version of the hermeneutic circle, in which the reader "brings to bear

questions on the text as he understands them through his unique

identity" (P46). While for Holland identity still operates as a given pretext that then

allows us to "read literature as we perceive reality," Iser already maintains

in The Act of Reading that the reader's ideational process, his combina

tion or cathexis of textual segmentation, is as constructed by and

constructive of reality contexts as the text's extraliterary and intertextual

reference, its selections from sociohistorical environments and literary

traditions. Reinterpreting Ingarden's category of indeterminacy, which

he no longer sees as the passage to the hidden truths of a subjective consciousness trying to grasp itself in an other, but as a communicative

relay between text and reader, Iser argues for a systemic relationship

between text-environment (selection) and text-reader (combination).

That relationship does not represent

a pre-given "reality" but constructs

it in the acts of selection and combination.

A discontent with the semantization of indeterminacy in the process of reading and its projection of communication onto subjective con

sciousness has, on the other hand, triggered the concern with a

primarily syntagmatic level of text-reader interaction. Lucien D?llenbach

has argued that reading unfolds as a "suture" of the textual blanks,

connecting and combining what is unconnected and thus creating a

chain of interConnectivity that reading then tries to invest with meaning in order to grasp or recreate the "unity" of the text. Yet a

semanticizing




of those blanks, D?llenbach suggests, tends to overlook that the cathexis of each blank only opens up another blank, and that the process of

reading, drawn into the chain of interconnectability it has established, is

therefore no longer in control of its own operations. The semantic seam

bursts when the reader realizes that the text frustrates and neutralizes

attempts to create probable isotopes, because it in turn already offers

interconnectivity, if on the level of the signifier and not on that of

semantics, and withholds the code that could direct the reader's

suturing activity.10

The focus on the syntagmatic level of textual perception invited a

delineation of literary competence, which, historically variable and

context-dependent, would describe the codes that guide reader re

sponses. Reader heuristics, like Riffaterre's "archilecteur" or Stanley Fish's "informed reader," address this problem of what orients the reader's attempts to supplement a code while the text withholds it from him and disorients his semantic efforts. Riffaterre reformulates Roman

Jakobson's poetic function?defined as the syntagmatization of paradig matic equivalencies?as "stylistic function"; a stylistic stimulus perceived

in the text triggers certain responses that then retroactively allow for the

description of the stylistic information in the text.11 Riffaterre not only relies on a behavioral stimulus-response model that Holland had dubbed

"bi-active," he also presupposes the subjective consciousness of the

perceiving reader who responds to the text's stylistic stimuli. Riffaterre's

"archilecteur," being the sum of the responses that then allow for the

structural description of the text, is therefore based on a notion of

reception as an underlying, if historically changing, reality context. While Riffaterre presupposes such a reality context in the perceiving

subjectivity of real readers, Fish tries to model the literary competence or code-orientation of the reader on transformational grammar; his

"informed reader" evolves as a linguistic function that presupposes

ordinary language as a reality context (from which literary language can then deviate, and encode its deviation in turn in a deep structure).12

Jonathan Culler as well extrapolates from the idea of an internalized

grammar and argues for a "grammar of literature" that could account

for the transformation of linguistic into literary competence. Meaning is not immanent in the text, Culler emphasizes, but evolves from a set of

conventions and codes shared by author, reader and the institution of

literature at a certain time; meaning is no longer localized in the object but emerges from an internalized competence within a given literary system.13

Such a shift to code-orientation or literary competence foregrounds the syntagmatic axis over paradigmatic equivalence, combination over selection. When one maps reading onto the stringing of signs into a




syntagmatic chain in which each sign is what it is by being different from

its immediate context, an operation that Fish and Riffaterre in particular have in mind, one runs into a deadlock of intrasystemic reference.

Problems of codification, however, Niklas Luhmann has argued, have to

be differentiated from problems of reference. Reference relies on a

distinction between self- and heteroreference. With regard to the

literary system, the problem of reference would be one between

literature and non-literature ("world" or "reality"). Problems of codifica

tion revolve around the value difference with which any system marks its

operations as its own. The code thus refers only

to the system itself. The

reference to non-literature, to "world" or to the extraliterary context

(the linguistic norm of ordinary language, for instance, or the subjective consciousness of the reader), cannot simply function as the negative value with which the literary system organizes its internal reference to its

own operations

as acceptable

or unacceptable; it cannot function as the

literary code. Reference, or the distinction of a literary work from

something else (non-literature, "world"), only delimits a specific space of

observations; and it is this very delimitation, or "form" (as the unity of

the distinction between self- and heteroreference), that then serves as

the ideation of "world" for the literary work and renders invisible the

distinction it operates on. The problem of how to account for the

specific observations with which the literary system observes itself, on

the other hand, is a question of codification: the code, Luhmann says,

"both symbolizes and interrupts the fundamental circularity of the

system's self-implication."14 In their attempt to reformulate selection as

combination, by advertising extraliterary reference as intraliterary codi

fication, the advocates of "literary" competence encounter an aporia of

inverted inside-outside relationships. De Man therefore argues that "deconstructive" models of reading,

trying to read metonymy within metaphor, or, in the terms we have been

using, combination within selection, have poised themselves between

two logically incompatible readings?the paradigmatization of the

syntagma and the syntagmatization of the paradigma. Instead of playing out the distinction between those incompatible readings, or instead of

allegorizing "Reading itself," in de Man's terms, deconstruction wishes

to stabilize this distinction by allegorizing the "crossing" of the two

readings. "Crossing," which de Man elucidates as a chiastic operation of

metaphor employed on the level of metonymy, aims at establishing a

conjunction between the paradigmatization of the syntagma and the

syntagmatization of the paradigma, but as syntagmatization. It thus runs

into the aporia of employing one side of the distinction between the two

modes of reading to account for the overall distinction, and could only mask its own observations as already implicit in what is being observed,




namely, the two modes of "reading" played out by the text itself. De Man describes this move as one of pure self-reference: "If one of the readings is declared true, it will always be possible to undo it by means of the

other; if it is decreed false, it will always be possible to demonstrate that it states the truth of its aberration." Such a self-referential allegory of

reading passes extraliterary reference for intraliterary codification; or as de Man says: it aims at "including the contradictions of reading in a narrative that would be able to contain them."15 The deconstructive

allegorization of reading includes an outside in an inside that still functions as a container, and is in turn based on an inclusive relation

ship between inside and outside. The potential four-sidedness of inside outside distinctions would then, if de Man's characterization of the deconstructive move holds, again be collapsed by amplifying the inside. De Man calls up Walter Benjamin's figure of the rolled-up sock, whose outside is also its own inside when it is unrolled like a M?bius strip, to

map out an alternative to the emphasis on

syntagmatization.

Among the few clues with which de Man points in an alternative direction that could unfold deconstructive allegories of reading with an

allegory of Reading is the term "re-entry" (DAR 76). Deconstructive

readings, de Man believes, can spotlight the net of substitutions govern ing the text, but they invariably fail to prevent the recurrence of such substitutions in their own discourse because they cannot "uncross" these

exchanges (DAR242). De Man may here be suggesting that deconstructive

readings treat distinction as

operation but not as a re-entered distinction.

In order to reformulate de Man's notion of "re-entry" and "uncross

ing" in those terms we have to draw on distinction theory as George Spencer-Brown has outlined it. Spencer-Brown distinguishes between

distinction or "cross" and re-entered distinction or "marker." While a

distinction distinguishes between its two sides, a marked and an un marked side, an inside and an outside, a re-entered distinction distin

guishes the distinction itself from what it distinguishes. While a distinc tion is a first-order operation,

a re-entered distinction is a second-order

observation of its own operation, since it distinguishes itself as distinc tion from what it distinguishes. As a "marker" or a re-entered distinction, the distinction is the distinction it is and yet no longer is what it is. It is

paradoxical and can be observed as the unity of its two sides or its "form." A distinction can thus be observed as a cross or as a marker.16 We

can then take de Man's claim that deconstructive readings can observe

distinctions only as cross and cannot "uncross" them on the level of their own observations to intimate that deconstruction, because it cannot

distinguish between cross and marker, remains blind to its own level of observation: it has to posit it as being implicit in the set of distinctions

already operative in the text. De Man's "allegorization of Reading," on




the other hand, seems to target the paradoxes of indication implied in

re-entry: it is impossible to read "Reading," as he suggests in his analysis of Proust, because whatever Proust's text indicates is

something else

than what it represents. Indication is processed on a double plane where

the text indicates both itself and "something else"?and that is "Read

ing" for de Man.

On the basis of re-entry we can then look at the two "logically

incompatible readings"?the paradigmatization of the syntagma and the

syntagmatization of the paradigma?both in terms of their difference

and in terms of their unity, and can formalize this distinction as a four

sided form. While a distinction posits the two sides between which it

distinguishes?in this case the paradigmatization of the syntagma and

the syntagmatization of the paradigma?the form or unity of a distinc

tion moreover constructs that from which this distinction is in turn

distinguished, as from another unmarked space. We then distinguish the fact that we distinguish between the paradigmatization of the

syntagma and the syntagmatization of the paradigma: we distinguish this

distinction from itself within itself. Re-entering the distinction into itself, we distinguish the paradigmatization of the syntagma and the syntagma

tization of the paradigma as a marked space from the paradigmatization

of the syntagma and the syntagmatization of the paradigma as an

unmarked space. Such an operationalization of paradigmatization and

syntagmatization as an unmarked space seems to be what de Man had in

mind with "Reading" as the "something else" processed by a paradoxical indication. Distinguishing paradigmatization and syntagmatization from

paradigmatization and syntagmatization in this way, we attain a four

sided form: we can observe the unity of the distinction between its

marked spaces or the unity of the distinction between its unmarked

spaces.17 Observing such a form in terms of its marked spaces allows for

a re-entry of the distinction back into the distinction; observing it in

terms of its unmarked spaces prompts a re-entry of the excluded

included third back into the distinction. While the re-entry of the

distinction into the distinction calls attention to its form, while it

foregrounds distinction, the re-entry of the included excluded third,

crossing over into an unmarked space, collapses

or cancels distinction.

II. Iser's Four-Fold Play of Reading

Iser develops his alternative to other theories of reading into a more

general theory of play that takes up certain deconstructive views, in

particular those of Roland Barthes, but transforms them in a constructivist

model of reading.18 He does so because reading as a systemic relation




and as an act of construction is not adequately described by the recourse

to linguistic codes and literary competence advocated by Fish, Riffaterre, and Culler. Describing reading as a form of play, Iser instead focuses on

re-entry or reinscription,

as outlined above, in order to account for such

acts of construction.

Play involves a paradox similar to the paradox of re-entering a

distinction into distinction: it does not mean what it says and, playing out this duplicity between meaning and saying, explores the paradoxical

simultaneity of both their difference and their unity.19 In the way that a

re-entered distinction both is and is not the distinction it is, play both

indicates and at the same time does not indicate what it indicates. Play thus suspends the code that would govern indication in a context of

non-play, and, transforming this code, reinscribes it as its own rule. In

The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser draws on Gregory Bateson's analysis of

play to account for this paradox. In play, Bateson believes, a bite is not a

bite, as it would be in a communicative context that signaled fight. In

order to indicate that the bite is not a bite, and yet is a bite, in order to

differentiate within the play between play and non-play, it is necessary for

play to establish the metacommunicative frame "this is a play."20 This

explicit rule, which, by differentiating play from non-play, organizes its

"reference" (as the distinction between self- and heteroreference),

however, is simultaneously processed as an implicit rule that allows for

certain moves and excludes others, or determines what is acceptable and

what is unacceptable for this play to be the play it is. If play processes an

explicit rule implicitly, or re-enters it into its operations, it dovetails with

what we had earlier differentiated as reference and code. Iser formulates

this problem with Bateson's distinction between map and territory, and

speaks of a pure differentiality of play that he also defines with Anthony Wilden as a "digitalization of the analog." While the digital marks

differences, operates on distinctions, and crosses boundaries, the analog

figures forth a condensation of coherence.21 Iser unfolds such a digitali zation of the analog?which responds to the aporia of reference and

code in the deconstructive version of the syntagmatization of the

paradigm?as a

relationship between four sides: map and territory, and

imitation and symbolization. This four-sided distinction then yields four different game structures or textual strategies and their

respective reader responses.

The textual play on an implicit explicit code prompts the reader to react to the ind?termination of its code. Since the rules that guide the

reading of the text are "unmarked," since they coincide neither with the

regulative, nor with the constitutive rules with which Searle had circum scribed the language game, Iser refers to them as aleatory: they guide

reading only by misguiding it through a maze of textual moves. While




the reader is led to discover the rule that governs the text, the text's moves constantly shift the rules it plays out. The reader may thus be

prompted to substitute the code of his own system of beliefs, attitudes or norms for the indeterminacy and codelessness of the textual code, to

project his own disposition onto the textual game; but coding the

codelessness of the textual code, the reader centralizes its paradoxical structure and ends the movement of its play. Or, as Iser formulates it, the

reader cathects the differential play of the text in his attempt to

semanticize it; supplementing it with his own code, he superimposes on

the play of the text what is not play. The game then is his, but the textual

game is up. A reader response that proliferates from a need for

understanding the text, that tries to appropriate the experiences that

the text seems to offer, or that sets itself up as a defense against the

unknown and the unfamiliar is prone to produce such a semantic

reading with which the reader "wins" out over the textual game by

substituting a meaning. The first of the four typified reader responses, then, is semantization.

If, on the other hand, the reader does not play it safe by semanticizing, but plays the game of the text, he will have to suspend his own attitudes and codes and will himself be played by the text. Iser here outlines the

other three possible responses: (2) the reader lets himself be drawn into a game in which he hopes to gain experience by "tilting" his own code

for the codeless code of the text, which he nevertheless appropriates by

making it part of his own experience; (3) the reader discovers that his

discovery of the rules of the game is in turn a game in which he activates

his cognitive and emotive faculties, and thus comes into play himself; (4) the reader does not only come into play himself, he gambles with his

own Self, his own attitudes and beliefs are put at stake when he reinscribes the distinction between his own moves and those of the text

into the game; that is, the reader's observer position is drawn into and

operationalized in what Iser calls the ineradicable difference of play. Iser refers to this last response with a term borrowed from Barthes as the

"pleasure of the text": the reader erases himself as his own reference

frame. The reader's position, similar to the subject's position in the split utterance as Lacan has analysed it, "fades" into the split

or the ineradi

cable difference that is itself "subject" of the text?and that is not

subject, and even less so cognizant subject, but an operationalization of

difference (?T279). In the terms of Luhmann's distinction theory I have

introduced above, the very distinction between play (the codeless code

of the text) and what is not play (the reader's code), is being re-entered

into the play so as to become play itself. The "pleasure of the text" thus

indicates a response to a game in which the reader plays on and is being

played by the very paradox of play.




These four attitudes of reading?semantization, gaining experience, the activation of faculties, and the pleasure of the text?correspond to

four game structures that Iser, following Caillois' terms but reformulat

ing them as textual strategies or constituents, calls ag?n, alea, mimicry and ilinx. Agon is staged as an antagonistic contest, in which colliding

positions are played out so as to overcome the difference of play

("Spieldifferenz"). The reader-response of semantization, of controlling the play of textual difference by superimposing a code and overcoming ludic difference by bringing it to a halt, can be seen as the flip-side of the

aleatory rule that governs this game structure, namely the ultimate

uncontrollability of a contest that revolves around gain or loss. Alea as a

generator of chance explodes the determinateness of positions in the

text, as they are poised against each other in agon, into what Iser calls

"an unpredictable structuring of its semantics" (FT 261). Alea plays on

the fact that the nodal points that organize the combination and the

selection of extratextual and intertextual references within the text are

contingent and unforeseeable. It intensifies the difference of play, which

Iser conceptualizes as a difference between the axes of selection and

combination. The aleatory rule of this game structure?an extension of

alternative and contingent decisions that defamiliarizes and implodes a

semantics of determinate positions?corresponds to an attitude of

reading that is prepared to suspend its familiar codes in order to let itself

be drawn into the play of the text; and it functions as the flip-side of this

rule, if it ultimately suspends such a suspension of codes by appropriat

ing it as experience. Mimicry as a play of transformation and masking blurs the determinate delineation of positions in the text so as to create an illusion that tries to dissimulate the difference between play and non

play altogether. The axes of selection and combination are here framed

by an "as if that pretends that what is said is what is meant, thereby

concealing while also revealing the very structure of play itself, which

does not mean what it says. According to the aleatory rule of mimicry, the illusion of play aims at pretending that it is not play, but at the same

time makes itself transparent as illusion in order still to be play.

Differentiating between this disappearing and reappearing distinction

play/non-play, the reader will activate his own faculties and discover that

he is implied in his observation; and his response would turn into the

flip-side of this aleatory rule as soon as he identified with or cathected

the very illusion that the textual play is not a play on itself as play but a

reference to world, or to non-play. Ilinx, by subverting, undercutting, or

carnivalizing textual positions to a degree of vertigo, makes them

indeterminate; it almost exceeds itself as play, not like mimicry by

dissimulating its ludic structure for the simulation of "reality" or non

play, but by drawing every outside of play (Iser refers to it as the




"repressed") into play. Ilinx then reintroduces the distinction between

play and non-play, or in other words, that which makes play play, back

into the play. Play difference itself, as the included excluded third

between play and non-play, is in turn played out within the play. Iser

describes the aleatory rule of this game structure as a return of the

excluded or the repressed, as a reapplication of the outside to the

inside; it "allows the absent to play against the present, and in everything that is present it opens a difference that makes whatever has been

excluded fight back against the representative claims of what excluded

it. Whatever is present is as if mirrored from its reverse side" (i<7 262). Ilinx then corresponds

to a reader response where the reader's own

expectations are played on, where his "outside" position is drawn into

and erased in the play of the text; eliminating the difference between

the play of the text and the code of the reader, and halting the textual

game in this way, would account for the flip-side of the aleatory rule of

ilinx.

These four game structures and their corresponding reader responses

can be seen as a four-sided form. In agon and mimicry denotation

dominates over figuration, and imitation over

symbolization. They are

both play structures in which the bite is taken to be a fight, in which play is confused with non-play, but in and as play. Since those two ludic

strategies try to overcome or erase the distinction between play and non

play within play, and thereby highlight the very paradox of play all the

more, we could also speak of a re-entry of this distinction into the

distinction. Alea and ilinx, on the other hand, foreground figuration over denotation, and symbolization over imitation; the bite is not taken

to be a fight, it is taken as play, and it functions simultaneously as fight and as

non-fight. Play can here be experienced

as a play

on and a re

entry of this very distinction as its included excluded third.

In The Act of Reading, Iser charts four textual strategies (counterbal

ancing, opposition, echelon, and serial) that organize perspective or the

reference of text to world within the text. On the level of reference, they are correlative to the four game structures that organize the "codedness"

of the text, or its organization of its own moves and operations.

Perspective establishes external as well as internal reference, selection,

and combination: the external reference of the text occasions a fore

ground-background relationship in which the selected element is

foregrounded and depragmatized from its original context, which is at

the same time still referenced as background. Mapping selection onto a

foreground-background relationship, Iser disengages it from a primarily

linguistic semantics in which meaning is produced through the associa

tion of the latent, repressed presence of an absent sign, an effect that

presupposes paradigmatic equivalence. Rather, meaning emerges from




a shifting between actualization and visualization, or foregrounding and backgrounding, which

pinpoints selection as contingency. "Mean

ing is selection" for Iser, as it is for Luhmann.22

Even though Iser draws on Luhmann's notion of selection as systemic reference in The Act of Reading, he further specifies it for the literary text:

while social systems refer to and distinguish themselves from the pure

contingency of world or world as a "meaning correlate,"23 and, through

selection, reduce the complexity of world, the literary text does not refer to world; it refers to the reference of other social systems to world. What

is environment for the literary text is not "reality"

or "world," or even,

qua intertextuality, the literary system, but the complexity reduction of the predominant social or

literary systems at a particular time. The

literary text does not reinforce the dominant set of beliefs, expectations, and perceptions these social systems generate, but references their very

delimitation from something else (the contingency of the world). It

references the blind spot of the distinctions they draw and the selections

they make: "In this respect, the literary text is also a system, which shares

the basic structure of overall systems as it brings out dominant meanings

against a background of neutralized and negated possibilities. However, this structure becomes operative

not in relation to a contingent world,

but in relation to the ordered pattern of systems with which the text

interferes or is meant to interfere" (AR 72). Textual reference thus takes the very distinctions and delimitations of social systems as its starting

point. It makes selections and highlights the contingency of those

selections, by actualizing what they had left virtual. Literary reference, then, does not

"represent" a

given reality?be it the world, or the

dominant ideologies of a social environment?it does not denote, but

reconstructs and constructs liminality.24 Literary reference, that is to say,

is a second order observation; the fictional text can then no longer be understood as a correlative to

"reality" but has to be seen as interaction

and communication.

Such a selection of selection, or the external reference of the text, is

furthermore organized in an "internal network of references" through combination. Following Jakobson 's idea of the poetic function, Iser understands combination as

syntagmatization of the paradigma, and

specifies it as a theme-horizon relationship that constitutes the system of

intratextual perspectives (AR 96). The shifting and tilting of four

perspectives?narrator, characters, plot, and reader position?arrange

the extraliterary references (as selection of selection, or observation on

observation) by thematizing one perspective, while backgrounding other perspectives on the horizon. This shifting of perspectives yields the meaning of the text or what Iser calls the "aesthetic object." Iser

differentiates among four modalizations of the perspectival arrangement




according to the theme-horizon structure: (1) A counterbalancing

("kontrafaktisch") arrangement hierarchizes perspectives, privileges one

and restricts others, and excludes uncertainties that might emerge from

the shifting of perspectives, so as to foreground a specific ideology associated with and sustained by one of the perspectives. For Iser,

didactic, devotional, or propagandistic literature takes to such an

arrangement of perspectives, not because it simply imitates the domi

nant belief systems of its time, but because it wants to compensate for

their shortcomings or blind spots. It combines the selection of selection in such a way, however, that it obscures its own viewpoint by foregrounding one dominating perspective and thereby becomes "ideological" in turn;

(2) An oppositional arrangement posits norms or belief systems against each other, so that each one with its limits and limitations is observed

from the position of the other. The norms thus opposed cancel each

other out; their mutual foregrounding and backgrounding show them

for what they are: functional in a specific system, but contingent; (3) An

echelon arrangement of perspectives levels out all hierarchization of

one perspective

over the other; instead it offers a multitude of refer

enced systems and viewpoints that disorients the reader's attempt to find a dominant one; yet at the same time it sets him up to project his own

attitudes onto the leveling of the text's perspectives between theme and

horizon, as a stronghold against his disorientation; (4) A serial arrange ment of perspectives heightens the leveling of the echelon structure to

a point where the perspective shifts from sentence to sentence or even

within one sentence; serialization of perspectives alternates between

theme and horizon so quickly that it becomes almost impossible to

recognize the referenced subtexts. A "continual process of transforma

tion that leads back into itself replaces the identification of referenced

systems (AR 102). Disoriented by such a structure of serialized perspec tives, the reader realizes the text's very process of selection. Combina

tion here proceeds as a feedback of the text's external reference, its

selection of selection, back into itself.

If we map those four perspectival arrangements onto the four game

structures and their respective reader responses, counterbalancing or

the hierarchization of perspectives that posits one over the others in

order to consolidate specific norms or

positions corresponds to an

agonistic game structure that arranges intratextual positions antitheti

cally and arrives at a similar determination and stabilization. The

oppositional arrangement, in which perspectives cancel each other to a

point where the contingency of the referenced norms becomes evident, conforms to alea, as a game structure that dissipates

the semantic

relations building up from the referenced worlds and texts and opens them up to a combinatory multiplicity. Prompting the reader to project




his own belief system onto a textual structure that simultaneously undercuts such an identification, the echelon arrangement agrees with

mimicry, as a game structure that plays on deception, role playing and the transfiguration of identity. Serialization of perspectives?that draws the reader into an oscillation where his attempt to produce meaning is

constantly exceeded by an ever changing trajectory of actualized possi bilities?tallies up with ilinx, as a game structure that disrupts the

stability of perceptions and subverts any determinate textual positions so

that the reader is made aware of his own eccentricity. And as perspectival serialization presents a feedback of the text's external reference back into itself, ilinx re-enters the intratextual distinction between play and

non-play back into itself and observes, as well as transgresses it, as

distinction.

While Iser models both the perspectival arrangement and the game structures and their respective reader responses on four-sided forms,

geared to observing selection as selection and play as play, both need to be read in conjunction in order to account for the unity of the distinction between reference and codification in the literary text.

Reading The Act of Reading in conjunction with The Fictive and the

Imaginary involves us in distinguishing a four-sided distinction from a

four-sided distinction, reference from codification. Whereas reference entails a distinction between self- and heteroreference, literature and

"everything else" (in other words, non-literature or "world"), we had

argued with Luhmann, codification revolves around the self-reference

with which a system marks its own

operations as its own, and therefore

relies on a distinction between what is acceptable and what is unaccept able for its self-reproduction. Drawing on Luhmann and general systems theory (AR 70ff.), Iser reformulates the problem of reference in The Act

of Reading as one of perspective and specifies such perspective as a

shifting and tilting of observations on observations: with its selections, the text does not reference world, it references other selections (of social systems, other texts or art works) that have already cut into the

pure contingency of "world."25 With its selection of selection, literature

delineates itself as a second-order observation: it observes the blind spot entailed in the selections of social systems or other art works, and points to what they left as virtual and potential. But while it organizes the text's

distinction between self- and heteroreference, such an observation is but an operation which in turn involves a blind spot, it functions as a cross, and not as a marker.

When, on the other hand, Iser models the problem of literary codification on the paradoxical structure of play in The Fictive and the

Imaginary and suggests that play indicates something else than it

indicates, he delineates an intratextual reference with which the text




points to and reproduces its own

operations and moves. We can also say

that the literary text here frames its frame within itself: it frames its

extratextual reference?as that which delineates it as literature and

differentiates it from non-literature. The rule of the game, or its

metacommunicative frame, reiterates the external reference to non-play

on the inside of the play and traces out the internal moves with which

the game reproduces itself as game. The re-entry of the metacommu

nicative frame into what it frames can then be played through by the

game structures Iser describes. As a framed metacommunicative frame,

extratextual reference is at the same time processed as intratextual

reference and reproduces the text's own moves: it can function as

marker. And as marker or re-entered distinction, extratextual reference

becomes paradoxical: it is the distinction it is (between literature and

non-literature or play and non-play) and yet no longer is what it is.

Extratextual reference delimits a space of operations and observations

specific for literature and fiction as play; this very delimitation is re

entered into the self-reproduction of these operations and observations.

We can also say that selection as a second-order observation of the

literary text within the literary text here zooms in on its own blind spot as that which it cannot observe.

The conjunction between Iser's concern with problems of reference

in The Act of Reading and his emphasis on the problem of codification in

The Fictive and the Imaginary can be conceived of as an observation of the

unobservable. As a second-order observation, literature observes the

blind spot of what are first-order observations for it?sociopolitical and

historical contexts, other texts, other art works?but also feeds its own

observations back into its own operations, and observes itself observing.

Especially with the rise of modernism, Luhmann has suggested, art no

longer only shows what it observes, but wants to show how it observes. For

Iser, modernist literature therefore tends towards such structures as the

serialization of perspectives or the game strategy of ilinx. Unfolding

paradoxes of observation, modern art intends to be observed as ob

server itself (KG 74, 96).

III. Staging Autobiography: Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge

If literature stages itself as an observation of observers in a world that

is constructed on recursive observations, it is no longer referential: it

does not imitate nature or world, it does not represent something

phenomenologically or historically given, but in turn creates and calls

forth what it refers to when it relies on recursive observation. As fiction, Iser says, literature outlines possibilities, it does not model itself on what




seems to be given, but invokes horizons of potentiality (TL 22). I would

like to consider a key modernist narrative, Rilke 's The Notebooks of Malte

Laurids Brigge, to exemplify such a shift from representation to recursive

observation in modernist literature in the fictional concern with what we

have called an observation of the unobservable.

Staged as a fictive autobiography or memoir of the impoverished young Danish aristocrat and poet Malte Laurids Brigge, the Notebooks

comprise scenes, observations, and memories that are apparently

un

connected. Portrayals of the homeless, the poor, the dying, or a blind

newsvendor in Paris, descriptions of decaying houses turned inside out, or of overcrowded hallways and rooms in the Salpeti?re alternate with

the narration of childhood memories, the narration of art works and of

the literature Malte has read, and with the portraits of historical

personae. To connect what seems unconnected, readers have mostly

looked for the loose thematic threads that run through the narrative, such as remembrance, intransitive love (a love that exceeds its object), or Malte's programmatically formulated agenda of "seeing": "I am

learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more

deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to."?"Have I said it before?

I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly" (N5, 6). Kate Hamburger compares Rilke 's notion of seeing to Husserl's, and

argues that seeing here aims at a phenomenological world whose

objects, as it were, invade subjective consciousness.26 Judith Ryan,

on the

other hand, suggests that Malte's narration indeed departs from any

phenomenologically given reality and instead constitutes his own reality very selectively, in turn permeating the outside world with a completely subjective imagination, so that seeing would be less receptive than

constitutive.27 For Ryan, Malte aims at a "hypothetical narration": he

does not narrate what is, but what could have been, when he opens up alternatives to the historical accounts he gives, or when he "plays on

possibilities" in retelling the biblical story of the prodigal son.

Although I agree with Ryan's insight about the hypothetical, highly conjunctive mode of narration that constantly revokes the perspective it

has just offered and presents the reader with yet another alternative, I would not ground such a narrative suspension of fixed perspectives and reference frames in an

all-determining and overbearing subjective consciousness. The narrative rather sets up its

highly confusing alterna

tion of perspectives, its very dense network of allusions to historical,

social, literary, legendary, and autobiographical facts and personae, and its montage of apparently unconnected scenes and vignettes, in order to

break down any external reference frames, such as subjective conscious

ness, be it of narrator, character or reader. Through this breakdown of external reference frames, the reader is in turn drawn into the narrative




and is made to act out one of the many roles with which it theatricalizes

autobiography. Autobiographical coding here points the reader to his

own criteria of observation and selection, so that to a certain degree he

will always read his own reading in Malte's autobiographical reading of

his present surroundings and past childhood, or in his reinterpretation of the historical past. The reader will read his own autobiography.

Throughout, the Notebooks are concerned with making visible what is

invisible: Malte and his mother believe that they can see a house that

had burnt down but which is in fact still "there" for them; they believe

they can see Christine Brahe's or

Ingeborg's ghosts. Malte's maternal

grandfather, Count Brahe, who still knows how to tell stories, narrates

his memoirs in such a way as to make a protean figure from his

childhood, the impostor Count Saint-Germain, visible and present to his

daughter Abelone while he dictates his memoirs to her: "'Do you see

him?' he bellowed at her. And suddenly he seized one of the silver

candlesticks and held the light blindingly into her face. Abelone

remembered that she had seen him" (TV 153). Malte's own narration, on

the other hand, is to a second degree removed from an immediate and

forceful visualization of the invisible that, as in his grandfather's narrative style, still relies on the blinding of its recipient. Looking at the

tapestries "La dame ? la Licorne" in the Muse? de Cluny, Malte imagines that the absent Abelone is present for him, and that he shows her what

is represented in the tapestries. Inverting the order in which they are

exhibited, he transforms the medieval pictorial representations into a

narrative that closes in on itself when the last tapestry is said to mirror

the presence of an absence. It makes visible what is invisible when it

shows the mirrored image of the unicorn: "What she is holding is a

mirror. Do you see: she is showing the unicorn its image?. Abelone, I

am imagining that you are here. Do you understand, Abelone?" (A/T30).

If Abelone's absence is made present, as, according to

legend, the

unicorn's invisibility is made visible in a mirror held by a virgin, what

Abelone, also a virgin, is made to see in this mirroring narrative is

herself, simultaneously mirrored and mirroring. Instead of blinding Abelone to make her see what cannot be seen, Malte's narration makes

her see herself seeing.

Making visible the invisible, the Notebooks part with mimesis and

representation. Whatever is being represented, we could say with Iser, is

bracketed with the fictional marker "as if; whatever seems to be sig nified only indicates that it does not indicate what it indicates?yet such

non-indication in turn functions as a (bracketed) indication that can

then call into existence what is not given (TL 15). If literature thus

accesses the inaccessible, makes present what is absent, actualizes what is

virtual, or observes the unobservable, it does not dwell on an ontologically




concealed space, or on a realm of the ineffable. What is inaccessible is its

own mode of access, what is unobservable is its own form of observation.

Iser captures this operation with the metaphors of "staging" and of the

text as a "mirror world." Staging implies a "crossing of boundaries," and

the play of the text, Iser suggests, "stages transformation and at the same

time reveals how the staging is done," exhibiting "its own procedural

workings" so as to provide an "access road to the inaccessible," which

"allows us to have things both ways, by making what is inaccessible both

present and absent" (P 260). Such a simultaneity of presence and

absence, or, in Luhmann's terms, the paradoxical unity or "form" of

their distinction, characterizes the fictional for Iser; he also describes it

as "a place of manifold mirrorings, in which everything is reflected,

refracted, fragmented, telescoped, perspectivized, exposed, or revealed"

(FI 79). With his notion of fiction as a paradoxical doubling or as ek

stasis, Iser draws on Helmuth Plessner's anthropology of eccentricity,

according to which man both is and has body, an ambivalent position that differentiates him from animals, who only are body and therefore

do not have to distinguish themselves in themselves from themselves.28 If

fiction as ek-stasis can stage for us the simultaneous inclusion in ourselves

and exclusion from ourselves, it is a paradoxical

enactment that allows

us to see ourselves at the same time from within and from without.

Fiction allows us to see our own blind spot, to observe our own

observations, but invariably entails its own blind spot in turn, setting itself up as the "form" or the unity of the distinction between first and

second-order observations.

The actor and the mask are paradigms of such fictional enactment for

Iser: they suggest the simultaneity of a presence with an absence, the

determination of a role with its indeterminability: "In order to produce the determinate form of an unreal character, the actor must allow his

own reality to fade out. At the same time, however, he does not know

precisely who, say, Hamlet is, for one cannot properly identify a

character who has never existed. Thus role-playing endows a figment with a sense of reality in spite of its impenetrability which defies total

determination" (P244). Acting, theatricality, disguise, masks, and face lessness as the flip-side of the face (that is, as something that cannot be

seen) are, in conjunction with the making visible of the invisible, another "dominant" of Rilke 's Notebooks. While the concern with face and facelessness is certainly an intertextual reference to what Baudelaire

had called "tyrannie de la face humaine" in his Petits Po?mes en Prose,

explicitly mentioned in the Notebooks, it also pinpoints Rilke 's poetic

attempt to capture the "hollow form" as the negative or virtual back

ground of foregrounded, actualized figuration. Malte perceives the

faces of passers-by in Paris as something they wear and wear out until the




non-face shows through; he describes an old woman whose face is

suddenly left in her two hands: "I could see it lying there: its hollow

form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not

to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face

from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head

waiting there, faceless" (N7). As a child, Malte on occasion plays the

role of Sophie, the imaginary daughter his mother has never had, to

commiserate about the villainous Malte; he holds one role present as he

is playing the other. Or he disguises himself in an elaborate costume

with scarves and mask as a sorcerer. The mirror at first reflects the

grandiose image Malte has created of himself, but then, as he struggles to unwrap scarves and cloak in front of the mirror, it turns on him, as it

were, to refract a monstrous reality that exceeds Malte's role and inverts

the positions of mirrored and mirror:

It forced me, I don't know how, to look up, and dictated to me an image, no a

reality, a strange, incomprehensible, monstrous reality that permeated me

against my will: for now it was the stronger one, and I was the mirror. I stared at

this large, terrifying stranger in front of me, and felt appalled to be alone with

him. But at the very moment I thought this, the worst thing happened: I lost all

sense of myself, I simply ceased to exist. For one second, I felt an indescribable,

piercing, futile longing for myself, then only he remained: there was nothing

except him. (TV 107)

Different from Abelone, who is supposed to see herself simultaneously

mirroring and mirrored in the tapestries, Malte here finds himself

transfigured into a mirror that no longer refracts an

image, a role, a

face, or even a mask, but merely the mirror as the "incomprehensible

reality" of a third person or a non-person. In Iser's terms we could then

say that this passage plays out a double game on the unity of the

distinction between identity and role, and between face and facelessness

by shifting from the structure of mimicry into that of ilinx. As in ilinx, "whatever is present is as if mirrored from its reverse side" (FI 262),

namely the mirror itself as mirrored by Malte as a mirror, and the non

person emerges as the excluded included third between seeing and

seen, to a point where the autobiographical "I" fades into the third

person ("I began to run, but now it was he that was running").

Enacting such shifts from mimicry to ilinx, from an erasure of the

distinction between role and identity to the re-entry of such a distinc

tion, the Notebooks stage themselves as a fictive autobiography that

subverts the textual positions of autobiography and calls attention to the

very distinction or "form" that guides them. Written mostly as a first

person narrative, the Notebooks seem to comply with autobiographical




discourse in which the "I" splits itself between discourse and story level, and functions as both subject and object of its own narrative, a split that can also be underscored by shifts between first- and third-person narration. Autobiographical discourse, Jean Starobinski has suggested, is therefore always double.29 It counterfeits a simultaneity of the non

simultaneous: of the present with the past, of a former sinful self with a

current repentant self, of a remembered "I" with a remembering "I."

The characteristic use of the narrative present and the linguistic variable

"I" establish the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, or the paradox of

autobiographical form. As Emile Benveniste has shown, the first-person pronoun functions as a

linguistic variable, as a non-referential instance

of discourse that refers but to itself as discourse: it represents a "reality of

discourse." With such pronouns, Benveniste believes, language ad

dresses the problem of intersubjective communication and solves it with an "ensemble of 'empty' signs that are nonreferential with respect to

'reality.'"30 We could also say that the linguistic instance "I" can mark

what is unmarked as marked only when it refers to itself as the present instance of its own discourse: it operates on the inside of this distinction.

The third person, on the other hand, does not function as a mere

referent of discourse. According to Benveniste, it assumes its differential value by being opposed to the "I" of the enunciation; from the

perspective of discourse, the third person can only be situated as a "non

person." Only with such a non-person, or "the unmarked member of the

correlation of person," as Benveniste also calls it, can discourse refer to

something outside itself. The apparent symmetry between first- and

third-person pronouns should thus be seen as an asymmetry that figures forth the distinction between language as an act in discourse, and

language as combination and substitution (222). With reference to the form of autobiography, this linguistic asymme

try can be unfolded as a four-sided distinction. With first-person narrative, autobiography marks what is unmarked as marked and refers

but to itself as autobiographical discourse, or to the "now" of writing and

remembering, while third-person narrative, as the unmarked correlative

or the other side of autobiography,

crosses over into what is non

autobiographical discourse?fiction, as well as "reality"?and re-enters it

as the included excluded third. The shift between first- and third-person narrative in Rilke 's Notebooks?between Malte's present and his past, and even more so the past of the historical and literary personae whose

biographies feed into and alternate with the memoirs of the autobio

graphical "I"?would thus play on the very code of autobiography as a

genre, that is, on its "form" as the unity of the distinction between

autobiography and non-autobiography. What the seemingly unconnected scenes and vignettes have in common




is the code of their genre: autobiography and biography. The narratives of historical personae such as Jacob de Cahors (pope at Avignon from

1316-1334) or the French king Charles Le Fou (Charles VI, 1368-1422), the stories of the death of the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold

(1433-1477) and of Grischa Otrepjow, the false czar, the reference to

socially notable personae, as Julie Reventlow (1763-1816),31 or the

characterization of the adventurer and impostor Count St. Germain, the

portraits of such writers and artists as Sappho, Ibsen, Beethoven, or

Bettine von Arnim, hagiographies or confessions reduced to their core, the reinterpreted biblical legend of the prodigal son and the portraits of

the "faceless"?the homeless, the dying, or Malte's neighbors?are all

biographical miniatures that are set off against or tied into Malte's

autobiographical narration. With those third-person biographies, as well as with a

mise-en-abyme of memoir within memoir?Count Brahe's

memoirs within Malte's diarist notebooks are an intertextual reference

to Lavater's journal from his travel to Copenhagen in 1793 (to observe

the spiritist sessions at the court)32?Rilke serializes the autobiographi cal perspective and destabilizes its intent to bridge a split identity. When

Malte's fictional autobiography does not simply

reconstruct an indi

vidual biography, but "remembers" biography, memoir, letters, legend,

hagiography, and confession as its generic precursors and reinscribes

them into its form, it subverts the code-orientation of autobiography (as it had been newly defined in the late eighteenth century). It subverts its

regulative rule, in Iser's terms, with an aleatory rule that, by re-entering

the earlier, excluded literary forms into the form of autobiography,

multiplies or even "carnivalizes" the autobiographical

concern with

individuality and identity-constitution. The subverted "code" of autobi

ography then organizes extratextual reference?in the Notebooks prima

rily a very dense intertextuality?as intratextual self-reproduction. This

autobiography challenges its reader to see it as it sees itself: as an

autobiography in disguise. But to read it as Rilke 's own autobiography in

disguise would merely supplement a code of identification and bring this complex game of mirrorings and biographical or autobiographical

masks to an end. Even though Malte may be roughly the same age as

Rilke when he began working on the Notebooks (1902-1903) and lives at

the same address in Paris, even though Rilke constantly references his

poetry, his own biography and more or less quotes from his letters,

narrator, character and author are certainly

not identical in the Note

books. This autobiography in disguise rather masks that the autobio

graphical roles it acts out are as much "entirely without the pretext of a

role" as those of the actress it describes in one of its scenes without

naming her. Eleonora Duse foresaw the reality of her own future fate in

her first great tragic role when, according to Rilke, she held a bouquet




of roses in front of her face like a mask that would hide the disappear ance of her reality in a fiction so dense that her audience would mistake

it for her reality. Seen by all, the actress became invisible?but then her

(autobiographical) performance, like the novel in which it is men

tioned, shows precisely this.

Johns Hopkins University

NOTES

1 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, tr. Stephen Mitchell (New

York, 1982); hereafter cited in text as N.

2 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 67, 70ff.; hereafter cited in text

as AR.

3 Wolfgang Iser, Theorie der Literatur (Constance, 1992); hereafter cited in text as TL.

4 Friedrich Schlegel, "Fragmente zur Poesie und Literatur," Kritische-Friedrich-Schlegel

Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler (Paderborn, 1981), p. 309, No. 669: "Das k?nstliche Lesen besteht

darin, da? man mit einem anderen liest, n?mlich auch das Lesen anderer zu lesen sucht."

5 George Poulet, "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," in Reader-Response Criticism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore, 1980), p. 45.

6 See G?nther Erning, Das Lesen und die Lesewut (Bad Heilbrunn, 1974), p. 69, and

Siegfried J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18.Jahrhundert

(Frankfurt, 1989), pp. 335-59.

7 Norman Holland, "Unity Identity Text Self," in Reader-Response Criticism, p. 123.

8 See the Holland-Iser "Interview" in Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting (Baltimore, 1989), pp.

42-69; hereafter cited in Text as P.

9 See for instance Gary Lee Stonum ("For a Cybernetics of Reading," MLN, 92 [1977],

945-68), who draws on cybernetics to account for the "constitutive uncanniness" of the

reading process and to reinterpret indeterminacies in light of open systems. See also

William Paulson ("Literature, Complexity, Interdisciplinarity," Chaos and Order: Complex

Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles [Chicago, 19911, pp. 37-53), who suggests that the production of meaning through the reader should be seen as self

organization from noise; since the reader will not be able to actualize all the codes

necessary to understand the literary text, it will always remain partially uncoded, that is, noise.

10 Lucien D?llenbach, "Reading as Suture (Problems of Reception of the Fragmentary Text: Balzac and Claude Simon)," in Mirrors and After: Five Essays on Literary Theory and

Criticism (New York, 1986), pp. 25-37.

11 Michael Riffaterre, "Describing Poetic Structures: Two Approaches to Baudelaire's

'Les Chats,'" in Reader Response Criticism, pp. 26-40. See also Michael Riffaterre, Strukturale

Stilistik (Munich, 1973). 12 Stanley E. Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," in Reader-Response

Criticism, pp. 70-100.

13 Jonathan Culler, "Literary Competence," in Reader-Response Criticism, pp. 101-17.

14 Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1995), p. 304; hereafter cited in

text as KG.

15 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and

Proust (New Haven, 1979), pp. 77, 72; hereafter cited in text as DAR

16 George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form (New York, 1972).




17 Dirk Baecker, "Die Unterscheidung zwischen Kommunikation und Bewu?tsein," in

Emergenz, ed. Wolfgang Krohn and G?nter K?ppers (Frankfurt, 1992), pp. 217-68.

18 Wolfgang Iser, "Mimesis?Emergenz," in Mimesis und Simulation, ed. Gerhard Neumann

and Andreas Kablitz (Freiburg, 1998), pp. 669-84.

19 See also Dirk Baecker, "Das Spiel mit der Form," in Probleme der Form, ed. D. Baecker

(Frankfurt, 1993), pp. 148-58.

20 See Gregory Bateson, "Eine Theorie des Spiels und der Phantasie," in ?kologie des

Geistes (Frankfurt, 1990), pp. 241-61, and Bateson, "The Message 'This is a Play,'" in Group Processes: Transactions of the Second Conference (October 1955), ed. B. Schaffner (Princeton,

1956), pp. 145-242.

21 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,

1993), p. 275; hereafter cited in text as FI.

22 Niklas Luhmann, "Anfang und Ende: Probleme einer Unterscheidung," in Zwischen

Anfang und Ende. Fragen an die P?dagogik, ed. Niklas Luhmann and Karl Eberhard Schorr

(Frankfurt, 1990), p. 16.

23 Niklas Luhmann, "Die Form des Zeichens," in Probleme der Form, pp. 45-69.

24 Iser expands on this notion of liminality in Der Akt des Lesens: "Fiktional sind diese

Texte deshalb, weil sie weder das entsprechende Sinnsystem noch dessen Geltung

denotieren, sondern viel eher dessen Abschattungshorizont bzw. dessen Grenze als

Zielpunkt haben. Sie beziehen sich auf etwas, das in der Struktur des Systems nicht

enthalten, zugleich aber als dessen Grenze aktualisierbar ist." See Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt

des Lesens (Munich, 1976), p. 120.

25 See also Prospecting, p. 69, where Iser lists general systems theory as one of the "four

reference frames" for this theory design. 26 Kate Hamburger, "Die ph?nomenologische Struktur der Dichtung Rilkes," in Rilke in

neuer Sicht, ed. Kate Hamburger (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 83-158.

27 Judith Ryan, "'Hypothetisches Erz?hlen': Zur Funktion von Phantasie und Einbildung in Rilkes 'Malte Laurids Brigge,'" in Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. R?diger G?rner (Darmstadt,

1987), pp. 245-84.

28 Helmuth Plessner, "Lachen und Weinen," in Philosophische Anthropologie, ed. G. Dux,

(Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 43, 46.

29 Jean Starobinski, "The Style of Autobiography," in Autobiography, ed. James Olney

(Princeton, 1980), p. 78.

30 Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Miami, 1971), p. 219; hereafter cited

in text.

31 The Notebooks draw on the Reventlow archive as one of the main sources for Malte's

family background. 32 See August Stahl, Rilke-Kommentar (Munich, 1979), p. 201.



Documents

Bianca Theisen, The Four Sides of Reading. Paradox, Play, And Autobiographical Fiction in Iser and Rilke