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eine bestimmte Eigenschaft besitzt oder nicht 65
This may be the colour of Konsul Buddenbrook's eyes, it may be the brand of tobacco
Sherlock Holmes smokes or any other imaginable detail. For Ingarden the existence of
indeterminacies is neither coincidence nor a composition error; they are necessary and
basic for every work ofliterature, since it is impossible to describe the unlimited number
of characteristics of a person/situation/scenery with the limited number ofwords a text
can provide. A lotof information is given implicitly;Julius Caesar is a man, so he has two
arms, two legs, a head, breathes and eats, but even more is not implicit, e.g. how long his
arms are and what he eats. In consequence the text cannot be seen as a closed or fixed
building, it is rather like a skeleton that consists ofindeterminacies and that the reader
concretises (konkretisiert) in herlhis way.
The question why it is nevertheless possible to describe situations and create characters
in a text would be answered by reader-response critics in reference back to Husserl's
phenomenology. Husserl works with two central terms: on the one hand there is
"phenomenological reduction": we cannot know if objects exist independently from
ourselves, all we know is how they appear to us and how we perceive and experience
them; reality must therefore be treated as a set of phenomena and not as objective. On
the other hand there is the "eidetic abstraction'l". Our minds are not a "random fluxus of
phenomena", we are not simply overwhelmed by impressions without being able to
structure and organise them. Every phenomenon is abstracted to a set ofgeneral features
or types, this set for cat maybe "four legs, funy, whiskers" and this set makes it possible
to identify the "phenomenon cat" if we see it - and also to remember it. Literary works
are based on the same principle. When a house is mentioned, it is not one specific
house but the principle of house or house in general. A text presents "schematized
views" (schematisierte Ansicbten) as Wolfgang Iser calls them. It is the job of the reader to
take these schematized views a text offers and to concretise them.
There is a general agreement on the notion ofa text as a "series ofindeterminacies" but
65 Roman Ingarden, "Konkretisation und Rekonstruktion", in: Warning, Rainer (ed.), Rezeptionsdstbetik:
Theone undPraxis (Miinchen: Fink, 1975), p. 44.
66Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), P·55·
Chapter 3 -page 118