读者反映理论

Real Reader⏹The “real readers”, or members of a particular reading public, are historicallyreal people. To reconstruct these readers, one needs to know, among other things, the norms (both literary and social) of their time, their emotions and attitudes aroused by the work, and the critical judgments they passed on it.⏹Here Iser must have in mind the work of his colleague H.R. Jauss, whose“aesthetics of reception” deals chiefly with the “history of responses”. Hypothetical Reader⏹Unlike the real historical reader, the hypothetical reader owes its existence tothe critic when the latter creates it as the receiver of the potential effect of a particular work.⏹There are two types of the hypothetical reader (as shown in the diagram), butwhat concerns Iser more is the first type, the ideal reader, because the second type, the contemporary reader, though often casually mentioned by critics, is difficult to specify.⏹Unlike the real reader and the contemporary reader, the ideal reader is a“fictional being” tha t crops up now and then in discussions of contemporary theory, often with different references and implications. P.J. Rabinowitz, for instance, defines it as theoretical models (such as G. Prince‟s “narratee”, W.Gibson‟s “mock reader”, and even Iser‟s “implied reader”) that help to show the ideal operation or processing of the text.The Psychologically Describable Reader⏹The reader in this category refers to one “whose psychology has been openedup by the findings of psychoanalysis” (Iser, 1987, pp.27-28). The typical psychoanalytical reader is found in the work of N. Holland, who defines his psychoanalytical reading of texts as “transactive criticism”, and his reader as the “transactive reader”, namely, one who “works explicitly from his transaction of th e text”The Reader as Heuristic Models⏹This category is important for the present discussion because Iser‟s “impliedreader” is, to a great extent, one such model along with many others.⏹We will begin our discussion of Iser‟s reading theory by first reca lling some ofthe “limitations” of the concepts of the reader discussed just now, in order to see how Iser tries to avoid, or rather, to overcome them in his model of the reader.The problem with the “real reader”, as we have seen, is that the reconstruc tion of the horizon of expectations depends heavily on the availability of historical data. The “ideal reader”, on the other hand, is believed to presuppose the total consumption of the work and therefore demolishes the very basis of its potential effects on the reader. As for Holland and Fish who try to locate meaning in the reader‟s mind (the unconscious for Holland and the internalized competences for Fish), the link seems loose between the literary experience they are talking about and the process ofcommunication that takes place to shape this very experience.Against these “limitations” Iser‟s concept of the reader stands as a good contrast. He says:⏹If, then, we are to try and understand the effects caused and the responseselicited by literary works, we must allow for the reader‟s presence without in any way predetermining his character or his historical situation. We may call him, for want of a better term, the implied reader. He embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect -- predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and is in no way to be identified with any real reader. (179)The passage quoted above is a concentrated expression of Iser‟s basic ideas concerning the construction of his model and his reactions to the other models. It shows⏹i) the implied reader, as a theoretical construct, could avoid the practicaldifficulties faced by the concept of the “real reader”,⏹ii) though it does not stand for any actual reader, the concept itself implies hispresence and his operation in the process of literary communication,⏹iii) the implied reader carries within itself the “predispositions” that ensure theliterary work both to produce the desired effects on the reader and to elicit relevant responses from him, and⏹iv) what constitutes a major difference between Iser and Holland or Fish isthat the predispositions necessary for the production of effects and responses are determined not by personal desires or competences, but by the very structure of the text itself.Iser‟s concept of the implied reader may be better apprehended through an examination of its structure. From the above brief account it is clear that this structure should be able to account for both the “predispositions” prestructured by the text and the actualizations performed by the reader. For the former, Iser proposes the concept of “the reader‟s role as textual structure”, and for the latter, “the reader‟s role as structured acts”.Each author, in his composition of a fictional work, selects useful materials to create a world of his own inventions, which in on e way or another represents the author‟s view of the real world. But few authors would present their views too explicitly or directly if they want their works to achieve any effect on the reader. Generally, the author‟s view is expressed through the variou s perspectives in the text, which perform two functions, namely, to “outline the author‟s view and also provide access to what the reader is meant to visualize” (180)Thus the textual structure of the implied reader, as we have seen, is composed of or prestructured by three basic components: the textual perspectives, their convergentplace, and the vantage point of the reader. The last two components, i.e., the convergent place of the textual perspectives and the vantage point of the reader, however, only remain potential in the textual structure and have to be actualized by the reader. This actualization is made possible by the other component of the implied reader, i.e., the structured acts.We may take A Dream of Red Mansions for an illustration of the concept of the implied reader. At the beginning of Chapter One, the viewpoints from the narrator‟s perspective tell that the whole story is but the dreams and illusions of the author, therefore the reader‟s vantage point decides that the story is purely f ictional.But this is immediately followed by the statement (another textual viewpoint) that the story is a record of the girls the author has known well, and that the dreams and illusions actually represent the real intention of the novel. So the reader changes his vantage point and believes that the story is real.Then the origin of the story (another textual viewpoint) from the perspective of the Reverend V oid once again puts the reader in an uncertain position as to the credulity of the story, but th is uncertainty is soon cleared up, this time from the stone‟s perspective, when the reader is told that the story is based on true facts without any modification.But this is not all, the reader‟s vantage point may undergo another shift to the contrary when he comes to the Illusory Land of Great V oid (太虚幻境) revealed through the perspective of the plot, especially when he reads the couplet “假作真时真亦假；无为有处有还无” “When false is taken for true, true becomes false; If non-being turns into being, being becomes non-being. ”The perspectives and viewpoints prescribed by the text provide instructions for the reader to build up mental images. The continuous replacement of these images results in shifts of the reader‟s vantage point, reflecting his changing attitudes in the process of reading. Finally, the textual viewpoints and the reader‟s vantage point meet at the convergent place, where the meaning potential of the work is actualized by the reader‟s structured acts.After these shifts of vantage point, most readers would finally agree, as indicated by the author‟s viewpoints, that the pages of the novel are not full of fantastic talks (“满纸荒唐言”), nor would they call the author mad (“都云作者痴”), but that they should read the story carefully and try to understand the au thor‟s message (“解其中味”)This is what we might call the final convergent place of the textual viewpoints and the reader‟s vantage points, or the meaning reached by the reader about the credulity of the story, after his interaction with the text under the guidance of the textual perspectives.From the above description of the implied reader, we may make several general observations about the concept:⏹1) Iser‟s theoretical construct of the implied reader is not an actual reader, noris it an abstraction of it. For any concept of the reader which centers chiefly on the reader to the neglect of other elements in the process of reading is unlikely to give an account of literary communication.⏹2) The implied reader is thus best understood as a phenomenological constructof the actual reader with two roles both as textual structure and as structured acts. These two roles are interrelated and interdependent in that the textual structure provides framework of perspectives for the structured acts to work within, while the latter implements the former to determine a vantage point and to arrive at the convergent place.Y et, the two roles are also in a sense separate, because only a separation allows of the possibility of a relationship between them and makes possible their mutual interaction and final combination in the concept of the implied reader. Just as the idea of the literary work is the result of the interaction between the text and the reader, the two are “separate” though by no means “autonomous” objects.T. Eagleton, believes that “Iser is aware of the social dimension of reading, but chooses to concentrate largely on its …aesthetic‟ aspects”, therefore his reader does not have a foothold in history (Eagleton, 1985, p.83).S.R. Suleiman has made a similar observation when she says that Iser‟s reader “is not a specific, historically situated individual but a transhistorical mind whose activities are ... everywhere the same”. She gives credit to Iser‟s effort at introducing a historical dimension to the description of the reading process by the use of the repertoire, but complains that his readers are still “implied”, not actual (Suleiman in Suleiman & Crosman, 1980, pp.25-26).Iser tries to keep in his phenomenological reader both its virtual presence in terms of “textual repertoire” or “structured acts” and brackets its historical presence. This treatment of the historicity of the reader in a way resembles the textualization of history and the idea of “praxis” (i.e., theoretical but not social practice) fa vored by the post-structuralists (cf. Zhu Gang. 2001, pp.173-175).Other Heuristic Models of the Reader: H.R. Jauss: The Historical ReaderJauss has devised a particular reader, labeled by Jauss himself as “the historical reader”:⏹The role of this historical reader should presuppose that one is experienced inone‟s associations with lyrics, but that one can initially suspend one‟s literary historical or linguistic competence, and put in its place the capacity occasionally to wonder during the course of the reading, and to express this wonder in the form of questions. (Jauss, 1989, p.144)⏹First, this historical reader is one who deals with the effect of a literary workand the reader‟s response to it, and helps to reveal the nature of literary reading as an eventful and process-like experience in more or less the same way as Iser‟s implied reader shows. But the historical reader only wonders during the course of reading. Though this is a clear indication of the reader playing a role and responding to the effects of the text, it does not, in fact, say much about the intricate relationship between the reader and the text.Secondly, contrary to the ideal reader who is free to use his perfect historical knowledge and literary competence, the historical reader suspends both of these in order to have “the capacity occasionally to wonder”. This is understandable, for a reader with perfect knowledge and competence would only provide answers, rather than pose questions to bring about an aesthetic experience.Stanley Fish is perhaps the best known and most polemic American reader-response critic of all . Many of his early ideas (the dramatic nature of reading, the temporal unfolding of meaning, the active role played by the reader in the reading process, etc.) come closest to those of Iser‟s, yet one great difference between them, among others, is reflected in the concept of the role of the reader in their respective heuristic models.For Fish, this reader is someone who projects, expects and corrects his responses all the way as he moves from one word to the next in his linear processing of a text. In formulating his theory of reading, Fish draws on the theory of Chomskian transformational-generative grammar.Fish builds up his model of the reader, which he calls the “informed reader”, characterized by three notable competences: i) competence in the language of the text; ii) semantic competence; and iii) literary competence. The combination of these three competences, as Fish assures us, would unfailingly make any actual reader an “informed” one, and enable him to realize the potential and probable responses a text might elicit. The “informed reader”, therefore, is an abstraction of the idealized actual reader.Iser has observed in his critique of Fish‟s theory t hat the informed reader must “observe his own reactions during the process of actualization, in order to control them” (Iser, 1987, p.32). What Iser is saying here is that Fish‟s reader himself functions as a controlling element in the reading process, as the responses are regulated and organized by the three competences internalized in the informed reader and thus preexist the actual processing of the text.This difference about the controlling element in reading is ultimately again an epistemological question. Here it is enough to point out that such a difference already anticipates the Iser-Fish debate that took place a few years later, and that with the controlling power invested entirely in the reader, the Iserian process of dyadic二元的interaction between the reader and the text necessarily becomes non-existent. Holland maintains that a person reveals his unique personality in the various things hedoes and the various ideas he expresses. Behind these “behavioral transformations”, however, lies an “invariant”, the “unchanging core of personality”, which he calls the “primary identity”, or “identity theme”, a term he borrowed from the modern psychologist Heinz Lichtenstein, and upon which he builds his theory of transactive criticism.For Holland, literary interpretation is inseparable from the question of identity. It is in fact a function of identity, for differences in interpretation can be accounted for in terms of the differences in personality, both being “variations upon an identity theme” (Holland in Tompkins, 1984, p.123). But what is more important is Holland‟s discovery that the “overarching principle” of the function of identity is that “identity re-creates itself.”That is to say, the reader, while reading, makes use of the text to replicate his own characteristic patterns of desires, anxieties, expectations, etc.. This, as Holland seems to argue, is the purpose of reading a literary work, and it is also what his “transactive reader” actually does in the act of reading.In the reading process in which identity recreation is carried out, what the transactive reader does is to find in the text the match for his expectations (e.g., similar wishes and fears), and then to respond by defending against them with his characteristic strategies, either to gratify the wishes, or to defeat the fears.Once the deep wishes and fears are defensively adapted, the reader will be able to derive from the text “fantasies of the particular kind that yield him pleasure” and, therefore, begin to enjoy the text by transforming the guilt and anxiety aroused by the fantasies into “a total experience of aesthetic, moral, intellectual or social coherence and significance.”The brief description given above concerning the recreation of identity through what Holland calls the DEFT (defence-expectation-fantasy-transformation) mechanism serves to show that the “transactive reader” is neither the real reader nor the ideal reader, but an abstraction of any actual reader who reads psychoanalytically, or rather, who is read psychoanalytically by the text he is reading.The concept of the transactive reader has undoubtedly extended our investigation of the reader into the deeper realms of his unconscious, but as a key element in a theory of reading, it is inadequate for a satisfactory explanation of the complex process of literary reading. To use Culler‟s words, Holland “fails to study reading as a process with its own operations and goals” (Culler in Suleiman & Crosman, 1980, p.55).J. Culler: The Ideal ReaderM. Riffaterre: The SuperreaderG. Prince: The Zero-Degree Narratee, and C. Brooke-Rose: The Encoded Reader W. Gibson: The Mock ReaderW.C. Booth: The Reader Created by the Author, or the Implied Reader。