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There is still the question how objective or subjective the results of the reading process can be and if there is any right or wrong in concretising a text. Roman Ingarden presumes in VomErkennendesLiterarischenKunstwerks that the literary work is an "organic whole", that the text has indeterminacies and that a reader has to concretise them correctly: "Die Funktion des Lesers besteht darin, sich den vom Werk ausgehenden Direktiven und Suggestionen zu fiigen {...J."73 That, of course, limits the activity of the reader enormously and puts him back into the passive role of somebody who can only react to given orders. ] auss and Iser are more open-minded, according to them different readers are allowed to fill the gaps in different ways. A reading is neither purely subjective or arbitrary, nor is there only one pre-given correct interpretation, the text "gewahrt einen Spielraum von Akrualisierungsmoglichkeiten, denn er ist zu verschiedenen Zeiten von unterschiedlichen Lesern immer ein wenig anders verstanden worden. "74 and an "Auslegungsspielraum" exists to fill the gaps between the different "schematized views". It is a process of balance between certain means and signals an author gives and shared literary conventionvs. readers' private inputs. The text encodes within itself an "implied reader" (implizierten Leser) who shares the code and the cultural background of the author to a certain extent. While writing the text the author has one potential audience more than another in mind and as long as there is a certain correspondence of the code implied by the author and the one ofthe actual reader and as long as the reading ofa text is more or less coherent, it is acceptable for Iser. The problem with this notion is that it is based on the assumption that a literary work can or should be something "coherent" or "an organic whole", which especially does not work with (postlmodern (hyperrtexts that often enough do not want to have ONE graspable meaning. They tantalise the reader with double-meanings or tty to have no 73 Roman Ingarden, "Konkretisation und Rekonstruktion", in: Warning, Rezeptionsiisthetik, p. 5I. 74 Iser, "Appellstruktur", p. 230. Chapter 3 -page 121
meaning at all (to be "texte sur rien") and are often more a "free play ofwords" than a close, coherent, meaningful text. Another question combined with the question of subjectivity/objectivity is that if we consider a text as a kind of skeleton that gets "its flesh" only through realisation ofthe reader, how can I (as a critic and reader) ever get hold of the text itself and of the "pure meaning" of the text? The only access to a text I have is via reading it, and then it is no longer the "text itself' but my own interpretation ofit. Stanley Fish refers to this question in his collection of essays Is There a Text in this Class? where he comes to the (of course quite polemical) conclusion that there are only the twenty-five different readings/interpretations of a text in the class and nothing like the "text itself'. Of course there is the book, hundreds of pages full of black print, but one should not give way to the temptation to mistake the "material" for the "content". Fish denies any objectivity: The objectivity ofthe text is an illusion, and moreover a dangerous illusion, because it is so physically convincing.{...}A line of print or a page or a book is so obviously THERE {...}, that it seems to be the sole repository ofwhatever value and meaning we associate with it,75 The number of possible readings of a text is not limited but infinite, as the number of potential readers ofa text is infinite. As a consequence the question: "What does a text MEAN ?" is a question which cannot be answered; there is nothing like a pre-existing meaning in the text, it is entirely in the hands ofthe reader to decide what s/he wants it to mean. The question to ask is:"What does the text do to us?", with the help of "an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relations to the words as they succeed one after another in time">', The subject ofcritical attention must be the reader and hislher reaction and not any "objective structure" that can be found in the text. Fish also widens the definition of "interpretation". We do not read a poem (=Poem as a given fact), we interpret it as a poem; the line endings are not important points, we interpret them as such; and even the author ofa text is no "fact" but our interpretation of 75 Fish, "Affective Stylistics", p. 140. 76 Fish, "Affective Stylistics", P.140. Chapter 3 -page 122
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