publications of the modern language association of america 1981 wilson

8/7/2019 Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 1981 Wilson

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Modern Language Association

Readers in TextsAuthor(s): W. Daniel WilsonSource: PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 5 (Oct., 1981), pp. 848-863Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462128

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W. DANIEL WILSON

Readersin TextsA N INTRIGUING outgrowth of the pastdecade's awakening fascination with the

reception of literary works is the newfocus on various types of readers within works.As is often true with such new growths, how-ever, the study of these fictional beings is be-ginning to look like a tangled mass because ofits unruly profuseness. Confronted with studiesof readers' roles, ideal readers, fictive readers,intended readers, implied readers, abstractreaders, virtual readers, and myriad other termsthat often seem to duplicate one another, thenovice cannot be blamed for turning with im-patience to tried and true approaches to litera-ture. I intend to clear up some of this confusion,present a workable synthetic taxonomy, and, inthe process, attempt to bridge a regrettable gapof awareness between English- and German-language criticism. Along the way I examine thework of several outstanding theorists, mostnotably Erwin Wolff, Wolfgang Iser, WalterOng, Hannelore Link, and Gerald Prince.

German-language criticism reserves the term"fictive reader" (fiktiver Leser) for a very re-stricted phenomenon: an extreme example isone of the hapless victims that Tristram Shandyberates after interruptingthe narrative:- How could you, Madam, be so inattentiveinreadingthe last chapter?I told you in it, That mymotherwas not a papist.--Papist! You told meno such thing, Sir. Madam, I beg leave to re-peat it over again,That I told you as plain, at least,as words,by direct inference,could tell you such athing. Then, Sir, I must have misseda page.(Vol. i, Ch. xx)And so on, until the narrator forces Madam toreread the entire chapter. Even when readers donot speak up, they belong to the same basic typeas long as they are characterized in some way inthe text. Even such a comparatively innocentaddress as to "the gentle reader" serves to char-acterize a reader, to fix a sociological status forhim or her. We shall also see that the reader

need not be referred to directly in order to becharacterized. That this figure is a fictional cre-ation of the author (much as the characters are)rather than a real reader is obvious enough thatwe can hardly take issue with the general term"fictive reader"; for reasons that become clear,however, the type should be specified further,and I have chosen the name "characterizedreader" for this particular subtype of fictivereader. This type occurs most frequently-althoughby no means exclusively-in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century works. Its function canbe much more complex and important than onemight suspect at firstglance.Far more crucial is a less visible abstractreader, that referred to when critics speak of a"reader's role." Following Wolfgang Iser, I callthis structure the "implied reader," and I defineit as the behavior, attitudes, and background-presupposed or defined, usually indirectly, in thetext itself-necessary for a proper understandingof the text. This idealized reader may be con-sciously or unconsciously conceived by the au-thor, but he or she exists in every work, sincealmost every "message" presupposes a certainkind of recipient and implicitly defines him orher to some extent. Anglo-American critics willrecognize Iser's indebtedness to Wayne Booth'sRhetoric of Fiction and particularly to the con-cept of the "implied author," which Booth out-lined as follows:Just as one's personal letters imply differentver-sions of oneself, depending on the differingrela-tionshipswith each correspondentand the purposeof each letter, so the writer sets himself out witha differentair dependingon the needs of particularworks.'The "implied" author whom we sense in a text,above or behind the narrator, is never identicalwith the real author in all stages of life as weexperience him or her in other documents; theauthor fictionalizes himself or herself in order tomeet the demands of a particular fictive world848


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W. Daniel Wilsonand the accompanying communication. Thus thewriter creates a "second self" anew in everywork (Booth, p. 71). In an often-quoted pas-sage, Booth relates this concept of the impliedauthorto the corresponding reader:The author creates . . . an image of himself andanotherimage of his reader;he makes the reader,as he makeshis secondself, andthe most successfulreadingis one in which the created selves, authorandreader,can findcompleteagreement. (p. 138)In practice, the term "implied author" is fre-quently superfluous. Booth was concerned withcountering attacks on an author's "sincerity"that proceeded from a misguided comparison ofthe implied authors in various works created bythe same writer. But in our theoretical context-and in most interpretations-we are of necessityalready speaking of individual works. As long aswe do not make improper generalizations from"Goethe in Elective Affinities" to "Goethe," forexample, we can simply refer to the "author"oruse his name when discussing the communica-tive situation in a particular text. HanneloreLink, who constructs much more clearly thanIser a model in which the "implied author"stands opposite the "implied reader" on onelevel of communication, herself interchanges thetwo concepts "author" and "abstract [i.e., im-plied] author,"2thus showing the superfluity ofthe latter. It is essential, however, that we notconfuse the "implied reader" with the (real)"reader," a mistake that is much more easilycommitted.

Erwin Wolff introduced the term "intendedreader" (intendierter Leser) for this figure,3which he describes as "the idea of the readerthat forms in the author's mind" or "the 'ideal'representation which the poet conceives of hisaudience and which then 'conditions' his work toa much greater extent than the real reader . . .ever could" (pp. 166, 143). That the intendedreader "conditions" the work shows that Wolff'sand Iser's concepts have the same foundation inthe text. We must be wary, however, of Wolff'sthree methods for determiningthe author's "ideaof the reader": first, describing any reader whomay be directly portrayed in the work (i.e., thecharacterized reader); second, ascertaining thetype of reader that complements a particulargeneric form; and third, evaluating the author's

relevant theoretical remarks.4 The third methodhas the same limitations that it has in any otherliterary interpretation: the author's extratextualcomments on the work may be valuable, butthey must take second place to an analysis of thework itself and must not be taken as more au-thoritative than the work's structures if a con-tradiction arises. The second method comescloser to my concerns, since the generic form ofa work does, indeed, tend to limit the intendedreadership. Certain faculties are required to ap-preciate fully the innovation in a great work of aparticular genre, as Wolff shows in his analysis.To understand a new sort of epistolary novel,for instance, one must be familiar with earlierrepresentatives of the genre but remain open tochange; therefore, a novelist who achieves suchinnovation automatically defines his or her in-tended audience more narrowly.Wolff's first method, while apparently mostrelevant to my topic, actually manifests the mostserious and most widespread confusion in dis-cussions of intratextualreaders, that between thecharacterized fictive reader and the intended orimplied reader. This criterion makes us wonderwhether Wolff has been writing about anythingother than the characterizedreader all along; in-deed, the confusion recurs throughout his essay.Quoting the passage from TristramShandy citedearlier, Wolff remarks that the narrator mocksthe intended reader; further, since "Madam" isbut one of a large group of such figures, Wolffsays that we can infer an individualization of theintended reading public (pp. 152-53). ForWolff, then, "Madam"is the reader type Sternewished for this work, and, inversely, her pres-ence in the work attests to Sterne's wish. Ofcourse, authors may sometimes straightfor-wardly characterize a reader by whom theywant to be read. Such characterizations of theintended audience often appear in lyric po-etry and in narratives where the reader is char-acterized only indirectly. It is not true in Tris-tram Shandy, where we are presented caricaturesof readers, satirized readers whose behavior theauthor does not wish his intended reader to emu-late. The conduct of characterized readers is inprinciple as little a model for our own responseas the characters'conduct. In fact, Elizabeth W.Harries has shown that in leading eighteenth-century fiction these characterized readers are

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Readers in Texts"negative models" or foils for the intended read-er's response.5 Wolff is not alone in this mis-conception; many German-language criticsadopt it, and one of the few English-languagecontributors to the discussion, Lowry Nelson,Jr., writes that "of the many ways in which thereader is granted his fictive role, perhaps themost elementary is the direct address to him"and that another is "direct mention of himwithin the fictional body of the work."6Wolff's misunderstanding provides a basis fora look at the work of Wolfgang Iser, one of theforemost critics in the field of reader-orientedtheory. In his book The Act of Reading (1976;trans. 1978), and not in his earlier The ImpliedReader (1972; trans. 1974), Iser most clearlydefines what he means by the "implied reader,"partly by discussing related concepts likeWolff's.7Referring to Wolff's first method of de-termining the intended reader, Iser concludesthat what Wolff really means by the "intendedreader" is the reader characterized in the text(Leserfiktion).8 But Iser accepts this faultyidentification of the two concepts, not realizingthat the characterized reader cannot categori-cally be identified with the reader who is "in-tended" by the author and who "conditions" thework. Iser's confusion can be seen in the follow-ing passage, where he contradictshimself:The intendedreader, then, markscertain positionsand attitudesin the text, but these are not yet iden-tical to the reader'srole, for manyof thesepositionsare conceived ironically, ... so that the readerisnot expectedto acceptthe attitudeofferedhim, butratherto reactto it. (Act, p. 33; Akt, p. 59)How can these attitudes be "intended" for thereader who is "not expected to" identify withthem? By failing to scrutinize Wolff's applicationof the term "intended" to the characterizedreader, Iser skirts the question of whether hisown implied reader or reader's role is equivalentto the properly understood intended reader. In-deed, if we take only Wolff's initial definition ofthe intended reader as "the idea of the readerthat forms in the author's mind" and that "con-ditions" the work and reject his and Iser's falseidentification of this reader with the character-ized reader, the difference between intended andimplied readers virtually disappears. Iser at-

tempts to distinguish between them, between,respectively, "the image of the reader in the au-thor's mind" ("das Bild des Lesers, das demAutor vorschwebte") and "the activity of con-stituting [meaning] which is prescribed to therecipients of texts" ("die den Empfangern derTexte vorgezeichnete Konstitutionsaktivitat").If the author's "image of the reader" "condi-tions" his or her work, then it necessarily formsa role in the text that shows readers how tounderstand that text (or to "constitute its mean-ing"). Or, to approachthis issue differently,whobut the author can prescribe anything to thereader? Iser would probably argue that the textitself does so, and in this sense Hannelore Linknotes that the intended reader is identical to theimplied reader only when authors succeed informulating their "messages" according to theirintentions, that is, in writing for the reader theyintended to write for. But Link also points outthat in most works that we consider "literary,"the authorrealizes this intention (p. 28).The deeper problem underlying this issue hasits roots in Iser's theoretical basis for his conceptof the implied reader. For Iser, the author as thedeterminerof the work's meaning shrinks almostto the point of extinction. Instead, the readercreates the work's meaning. Iser believes thatthe implied reader consists of both an objec-tively determinable structure in the text(Textstruktur) and the varying subjective actu-alizations of the structure by real readers(Aktstruktur); indeterminacies in the text and inits implied reader structure make varying actu-alizations possible. Critics such as Link arebaffledby Iser's statements like "the intention ofa text" lies "in the reader's imagination."'0Such statements are less mystifying (and moredifficult to counter) when one considers Iser'sphenomenological roots, which reach backthrough the Polish philosopher Roman Ingardento Edmund Husserl, Ingarden's teacher. "Inten-tion" should apparently be understood in thephenomenological sense of "intentionality."Thereader-the noetic pole-"intends" or consti-tutes the meaning of the work, the noematicpole. Whether one views the experience of a lit-erary work communicatively (as Link) orphenomenologically or whether one tries to syn-thesize these outlooks (as Iser attempts to do-unsuccessfully, to my mind) is a matter of

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W. Daniel Wilsonchoice that lies outside the bounds of my topic.It should be pointed out that E. D. Hirsch hasshown that according to Husserl, "different in-tentional acts (on different occasions) 'intend'an identical intentional object" and that "verbalmeaning, being an intentional object, is unchang-ing."11No matter which approach one chooses,the implied reader is a part of the overall textualmeaning and is not to be confused with the realreader, the noetic pole who actualizes the mean-ing and who correspondingly relates to the im-plied reader'srole.Iser's use of "intention," however, is far frombeing consistently phenomenological. On a singlepage of The Act of Reading Iser speaks of "theperspective intended by the author" and "whatthe reader is meant to visualize" (p. 35). In hispractical analyses in The Implied Reader, too,Iser is forced more than once to fall back on"the role intended for the reader," as other crit-ics have noted.12 Surely Iser can only be refer-ring (or avoiding referring) to the author's in-tentions; this position is a far cry from his orig-inal theoretical assertion that the text's meaningis created by the reader. Of course, we mustavoid the narrow concept of intention as the au-thor's statements of purpose outside the work;the intention as expressed in the work itselfshould be our guide to establishing the communi-cative structure of the work. Wimsatt andBeardsley clearly formulated this distinctionmany years ago: "If the poet succeeded in doingit, then the poem itself shows what he was tryingto do."13 It is intention in this wider sense-asevidenced in the work itself-that Iser falls backon, as he should. So only if Wolff uses "in-tended" in the narrow sense (his third criterionwould seem to indicate that he does, althoughthe emphasis on the intended reader "condition-ing" the work weakens this impression) can avalid distinction between intended and impliedreaders be sustained. The distinction would thenboil down to the individual critic's response tothe age-old theoretical problem: does an authorconsciously intend to create those more subtlestructures that critics uncover in his or herworks? This question remains unresolved for ourdiscipline generally, and the whole issue is notvery fruitful for an analysis of the communica-tive structure actually found in the work, since,as Stanley Fish points out, "one can analyze an

effect without worrying about whether it wasproduced accidentally or on purpose."14If we understand "intended" in the broaderand more proper sense, we find no essentialdifference between Wolff's and Iser's concepts.Iser asks with respect to Wolff's model "why,generations later, a reader can still grasp themeaning ... of the text, even though he cannotbe the intended reader" (Act, p. 33; Akt, p.59). We may ask the same question about Iser'simplied reader. If a work speaks to a future age,the real reader who corresponds to the reader"intended" or "implied" or presupposed by thetext and by the author can exist in the future-the author writes for a reader who does not yetexist (i.e., who exists only in the author's mindand text and who is fully actualized only by afuture real reader). Whether "intended" by theauthor (in the wider sense) or "implied," thisreader is, after all, an abstraction, not a reallyexisting reader. He or she will almost certainlypossess various characteristics of actual readersand reflect the author'shistorical setting in manyways (the "implied readers" in the analyses inIser's Implied Reader reflect the historical situa-tion of the works, and Iser never asks how wecan today, "generations later," fill these roles).But precisely because he or she is a constructionin the author's mind and/or a structure of thetext, he or she exists as long as the book existsand his or her role may be filled in future ages ifthe work truly outlasts its time. So it will not dofor Iser to play off the intended reader as "aconcept of reconstruction, uncovering the his-torical dispositions of the reading public atwhich the author was aiming" against the im-plied reader, who "as a concept has his rootsfirmly planted in the structure of the text"-implying that the latter, whose role "can befulfilled in differentways, according to historicalor individual circumstances," is somehow moreahistorical.15Intended and implied readers areboth "firmly planted in the structureof the text,"and their roles may be realized by future readersin favorable circumstances. An interpretationofthe implied or intended reader's role in a workmust aim at what the author intended (in thewider sense) to communicate, and historical cir-cumstances will condition this intention. Iser'sreliance on authorial intention shows that theimplied reader, like the intended reader, is "a

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Readers in Textsconcept of reconstruction, uncovering the his-torical dispositions of the reading public atwhich the author was aiming," whether the au-thor aimed at these (real) dispositions nega-tively or positively; the dispositions are, ofcourse, transformed into a fictional, implied re-cipient. If we understand intention in the propersense and avoid confusing the characterizedreader with the intended reader, the impliedreader differs from the intended reader only inname and to the degree that one attempts topush the author out of the picture. I use the term"implied reader"without Iser's bias and theoret-ical presuppositions.When I say that the implied reader is fictional,I am departing from Iser's-and most Germancritics'-understanding of the term. Walter Ongcategorically affirms my position, as the title ofhis relevant article shows: "The Writer's Audi-ence Is Always a Fiction."16Can we really callthe reader's role-that is, the implied reader-afiction? Ong means two things when he makesthis claim.First,that the writermust construct in his imagina-tion, clearly or vaguely, an audiencecast in somesort of role-entertainment seekers, reflectivesharers of experience (as those who listen to Con-rad's Marlow), inhabitantsof a lost and remem-bered world of prepubertal latency (readers ofTolkien's hobbit stories), and so on. Second, wemean that the audience must correspondinglyfictionalize itself. A readerhas to play the role inwhich the author has cast him, which seldomcoincides with his role in the rest of actuallife.

(p. 12)Iser would probably disagree both with Ong'semphasis on the author and (as we shall see)with the insistence that the reader must play theprecise role the author outlines, and yet the twomodels show remarkablesimilarities. One differ-ence is that Iser follows the standard Germanterminology, calling only the characterizedreader-the one who is addressed or portrayeddirectly in the text-fictitious (fiktiv, or Leser-fiktion). Surely Ong is correct: if this role existsin the work itself and consists of a reader whonever corresponds to real readers "in an un-transmuted state" (p. 10), then this reader orreader's role is a part of the fictive world, orfictive. Of course, one may argue that thesereaders are fictive in different ways from, say,

the characters and, again, that the impliedreader is a differentsort of fiction from the char-acterized reader. I would agree, but using theterm fictive readers (not characters) and distin-guishing between "characterized"and "implied"(or "intended") precisely express these differ-ences.

What are the relations of these fictive readersto reality? Obviously, this relationship cannot beany less complex than that between fictionalworlds and reality generally, so our responsemust be differentiated.First, characterizedread-ers may be based on real persons (often in theircapacity as readers), just as any fictional charac-ter may be. For example, when Sterne had Tris-tram Shandy speak to the "Madam" character-ized in his text, he may have been thinking of aparticularcontemporary reading habit or even aparticular individual who incorporated thishabit. But the same transmutations occur herethat occur when any real person forms the basisfor a fictional figure. I have shown elsewherethat although C. M. Wieland partly addresses hisComic Tales (1765) to a "Herrn Doctor Z,"which stands for his friend Johann GeorgZimmermann, the fictionalized "Z" can beclearly distinguished from his model in re-ality.17The implied reader, too, may be based ona real reader; following Pushkin's death, Gogolwrote: "I have not written one line withoutimagining him before me."18 And yet the realperson is transformed into a fictional role thatother real readers may play, so that the impliedreader may seem even more divorced from re-ality than the characterizedreader does. Becausethe implied reader's role is fictional, KarlMaurer rightly dismisses as deceptive any hopeof writing a historical study of reading behaviorbased only on the texts and their implied read-ers,19 since the degree to which an impliedreader reflects real reading behavior is not evi-dent from the text alone. True Rezeptions-geschichte is concerned with real, historicalreaders, not primarily with fictive readers.20The fictive reader is a tool for interpreting awork, not-except very indirectly and unreliably-for sketching historical readinghabits.In another sense the implied reader's relationto reality is unique and central: the impliedreader incorporates the reading behavior thatreal readers are supposed to adopt, even if they

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W. Daniel Wilsonfail to do so. In other words, our relation to theimplied reader is crucial to our understandingofthe text. Within this context, we can distinguishtwo basic models concerning the flexibility withwhich this relation is realized. Ong sees his fic-tionalized reader-perhaps unwittingly-as aless flexible role. He generally speaks in terms ofthe roles readers are "called on" or "asked" toplay (pp. 9, 12), and, more restrictively,he saysthat these roles are "enforced" on the reader (p.10) and that "a reader has to play the role inwhich the author has cast him" (p. 12). Iser'smodel would seem more flexible. He asserts thatno real reader can completely correspond to therole cut out for him or her, contrary to WayneBooth's suggestions that "the most successfulreading is one in which the created selves, au-thor and reader, can find complete agreement"and "regardlessof my real beliefs and practices,I must subordinate my mind and heart to thebook," that is, to "the self whose beliefs mustcoincide with the author's."21In Iser's concep-tion, the reader's role contains a range of possi-bilities for realization (a Realisierungsfiicher),allowing for varying historical and individualactualizations.In much of Iser's concrete textual analysis,however, the flexibility granted to the reader-when, indeed, it is at all as significant as Iserintimates-can be postulated only by commit-ting the familiar error of identifying impliedreader with characterized reader. Consider thefollowing narrative commentary in Joseph An-drews, after the hero resists Lady Booby's se-ductions and professes his "virtue":You have heard,reader,poets talk of the statue ofSurprise;you have heardlikewise,or else you haveheard very little, how Surprisemade one of thesons of Croesusspeak, though he was dumb. Youhave seen the faces, in the eighteen-pennygallery,when, throughthe trap-door,to soft or no music,Mr Bridgewater,Mr William Mills, or some otherof ghostly appearance,hath ascended,with a faceall pale with powder, and a shirt all bloody withribbons;-but from none of these,nor from Phidiasor Praxiteles,if they should returnto life-no, notfrom the inimitablepencil of my friend Hogarth,could you receivesuch an idea of surpriseas wouldhave entered in at your eyes had they beheld theLady Booby when those last words issued out fromthe lips of Joseph. (Bk. i, Ch. viii)

In his essay "The Role of the Reader in Field-ing's Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones," Isercomments on this passage: "As the narrativedoes not offer a description of Lady Booby'sreaction, the reader is left to provide the descrip-tion, using the directions offered him."22It is,however, only the characterized reader-one,indeed, whose knowledge of contemporary andancient culture is depicted in some detail-whois offered any flexibility here, and consequently,the flexibility granted the real reader is insignifi-cant if not actually nonexistent. What does itmatter exactly how Lady Booby's surpriselooked? The narrator's comic hyperbole com-municates the central fact and importance of thissurprise very well, and for the narratorto implythat the reader must imagine it for himself orherself is simply to poke fun at him or her-andto create a characterized reader, a superficialsnob who would enjoy parading the accoutre-ments of his or her experience of the Londontheater for so trivial a matter and who hypocriti-cally disdains the "rabble's" surprise while en-joying (and paying a great deal more than theyfor) the vulgar sort of theater that invoked thissurprise. The implied or intended reader is notidentical to this characterized reader; he or shereacts to the characterized reader just as he orshe does to the rest of the passage, but he or shedoes not follow the narrator's "instructions"tohim or her.23 Fielding's narrator calls his the-oretical chapters "vacant pages," but thisdescription is deceptive: the "vacancies" and"gaps" that Fielding and Iser mention are oftenin fact the most "filled" passages. We must be-ware of always taking narrators at their word;Elizabeth Harries has shown that in Fielding,Sterne, Diderot, and Wieland "most of the invi-tations to the reader to supply part of the story,to use his imagination to fill in gaps, are lessthan genuine" (p. 145).So the flexibility of Iser's implied reader toplay different roles seems to be based on a falseidentification of characterized and implied read-ers (not in theory, but in practice). And KarlMaurer and others before him have pointed outthat even in Iser's own estimation "indeter-minacy" and the reader's filling of "gaps" in atext are historically limited phenomena ratherthan general conditions for the effects of litera-ture.24It seems likely that the wider phenom-

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Readers in Textsenon of flexibility, as Iser refers to it, is itself aparticular reader's role. When we speak ab-stractly of the implied reader as a general con-cept, we cannot equip him or her with individualcharacteristics, such as flexibility. We must in-vestigate each work without preconceived no-tions; generalities about the reader's role in anybody of works (even those of one author) willusually stumble on the insistent uniqueness ofthe individual fictive world. Finally, Iser's prac-tical reliance on authorial intention (which isinconsistent with his basic theory) also destroysflexibility; the reader who must uncover the au-thor's intention or meaning is not really allowedmuch leeway.The example of Walter Ong's article showsthat English-language critics, by implication,have something to teach German critics: allreaders within the text can be called fictive. Ofcourse, Ong's article can only be fit into the de-veloping discussion ex post facto, since he andmost other English-language critics were notovertly concerned with the characterizedreader;so they, in turn, can learn from the German tra-dition. Walker Gibson, in an early article,writes: "A bad book . . . is a book in whosemock reader we discover a person we refuse tobecome, a mask we refuse to put on, a role wewill not play."25 Leaving aside the dubiousequation of literary quality with our willingnessto play the implied reader's role, we can see thatGibson overlooks the category of the character-ized reader entirely (and that his "mock reader"therefore corresponds to the implied reader).The author may create a reader's role withwhich we are not expected to identify, as we sawin Joseph Andrews. Ong, too, misses this dis-tinction. A close look at some of his exampleswill enable us to define more clearly the finepoints of distinction between characterized andimplied fictive readers.One of Ong's central examples is the openingpassage of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms:"In the late summer of that year we lived in ahouse in a village that looked across the riverand the plain to the mountains." Ong percep-tively points out that the use of the definite ar-ticle and demonstratives("thatyear,""the river,"etc.) in the first sentence of this work estab-lishes a fictionalized reader who apparentlyknows which year, which river the narrator is

talking about, and this reader is therefore "castin the role of a close companion of the writer"(p. 13). But must "the audience ... correspond-ingly fictionalize itself" to conform to readerswithin texts, as Ong asserts? We can certainlyimagine a parody of Hemingway that beginswith a sentence very similar to Hemingway'sown, perhaps with a few signals of irony to indi-cate that the buddy relation is being ridiculed. Inthis hypothetical case, a reader would still befictionalized, but the real reader would not beexpected to take on this (characterized reader's)fictional role. Rather, an opposite role, still fic-tional, would be present, one distinguishedby anironic aloofness toward the camaraderiebetweennarrator and reader that Hemingway intendsseriously. The word "narrator"must be stressedhere. Aleksandra Okopieni-Slawiniskawouldseem to describe Ong's example from Heming-way when she writes: "The narratorcan draw avery distinct picture of his conversational part-ner without mentioning him at all."26 ButOkopieni-Stawifiskaemphasizes that the narra-tor, ratherthan the author, is the communicativepartner of this characterized reader. Only whenthe narrator approximates the (implied) authordoes the implied reader (the implied author'scommunicative partner) correspond to the char-acterizedreader.So the examples Ong gives are in the firstplace characterized readers who are only coin-cidentally implied readers. The distinction mayseem sophistic or insignificantin the Hemingwaytext, where the two roles coincide, but we shouldcertainly not be led to believe that all readerscharacterizedin the text are intended to regulateour response. In Ong's own analysis, other ex-amples show more clearly the pitfalls of thisconfusion. Ong speaks of the frame technique(e.g., in The Canterbury Tales or The De-cameron) as one in which readers can be shownquite clearly how to fictionalize themselves: theymust simply emulate the reading (listening)behavior depicted in the fictional listeners. Thiscorrespondence is certainly probable for theearly historical development of the genre towhich Ong refers, but his claim that the frame"is really a rather clumsy gambit" for showingreaders their roles (p. 16) ignores those charac-terized readers who are straw men (and women)whose faulty responses we are not meant to

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W. Daniel Wilsonemulate-as may be true in Goethe's Conversa-tions of German Emigrants and Conrad Ferdi-nand Meyer's The Monk's Wedding. Similarly,Ong suggests that the audience is intended tofictionalize itself in the role of Marlow's listenersin Conrad's narratives (see above, p. 852).Consider the following passage from Lord Jim,where Marlow interrupts his soul-baring story:He paused againto wait for an encouragingremarkperhaps,but nobody spoke;only the host, as if re-luctantlyperforminga duty,murmured-"You are so subtle,Marlow." (Ch. viii)Is it altogether clear that we are meant to castourselves in the listener's role characterizedhere? I think not, and Ong's principle that wemust always do so for such roles does not holdwater. The considerable difference betweenreaders characterized as subtly as Hemingway'sand those in a frame narrative or in TristramShandy may be summed up in the provisionalempirical supposition that readers who are char-acterized without direct reference usually cor-respond to the implied reader, whereas readersto whom the narrator draws attention usuallyturn out to be negative foils, which help estab-lish the implied reader's role but which differfrom it. But the hypothetical example of aHemingway parody-paralleled by many realparodies throughout literaryhistory-shows thatthe difference is in degree and not in kind.Gerald Prince's studies support this conclu-sion, since he has established a continuum ofcharacterized readers "according to their degreeof involvement in the events recounted."27 Hisfive major categories extend from, at one end ofthe scale, the narrator as his or her own charac-terized reader (most involvement) through cate-gories of characterized readers who are more orless involved with and familiar with events orcharacters in the narrative and who are referredto more or less directly by the narrator to, at theother end of the continuum, characterized read-ers who are not referred to directly in the textbut who may be inferred from it. Although thislast category may seem to mark the intendedreader, it does not do so in principle. For ex-ample, Prince includes in this category a charac-terized reader in a novel by Camara Laye inwhich the narratormentions Guinean pots called

"les gris-gris" and then proceeds to explain tothe reader what these mysterious objects are (p.101). From this passage and others Prince con-cludes that the narrator is speaking to a non-Guinean, who does not know what "les gris-gris"are. As in Ong's example from Hemingway, acharacterized reader happens to coincide withthe implied reader. Prince's categorization showsthat any reader who is presupposed, howeversubtly, by specific passages in a text must fallinto the category of the characterizedreader. Wemust rely on our interpretationof the whole textto decide whether the characterized reader ismeant to circumscribeour own response, that is,whether he or she is also an implied reader.Unfortunately, Prince explicitly rejects the no-tion that the implied reader is as fictive as thecharacterizedreader. He asserts that the relationbetween "narratee" (characterized reader) and"virtual" or "ideal" reader (implied reader) isnot developed within the text itself.28 One ofPrince's own examples belies this notion. Fromthe famous chapter "Of Love" (Bk. vi, Ch. i) inTom Jones, he quotes the following remark ofthe narrator: "To treat of the effects of love toyou, must be as absurd as to discourse on col-ours to a man born blind; . . . love probablymay, in your opinion, very greatly resemble adish of soup, or a sir-loin of roast-beef." Princenotes quite rightly that this passage can only becomic to the reader who does not think this wayabout love (p. 192), that is, to the impliedreader. But our very ability to deduce this cir-cumstance from the text itself must mean thatthe reader who does not think in this manner isincluded within the text, as a fiction, implied bythe very inappropriateness of the characterizedreader who does think of love as of roast beef.Whetherwe as real readers actually perceive andplay the role of implied reader is, of course,largely a matter of circumstances outside thetext, but the interaction between the character-ized and implied readers takes place within thework.

For these reasons, I have chosen the terms"characterizedfictive reader" and "implied" or"intended fictive reader." By the former term Iunderstand any reader characterized within thetext who exists only there. The characterizationmay be achieved directly, when the narrator ad-dresses or refers to this reader or when the

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Readers in Textsreader is heard to speak. But the characterizedreader can also be determined indirectly, byuncovering implicit assumptions about a readerin the text. Most often, the indirectly portrayedcharacterized reader will correspond to the im-plied reader. The implied reader, in turn, can bedefined as the attitudes and judgments de-manded of the real reader by the text. The im-plied reader cannot be deduced from specifictextual references, whether direct or indirect, toa reader, unless the implied reader is identical toa characterized reader. The characterized readercan be a negative foil for the expected readerresponses, whereas the implied reader is by defi-nition always a positively intended model. Theimplied reader, to whom we refer when we speakof "the reader's role,"29 corresponds to ouroverall interpretation of the text, as we shall seebelow. In principle, both these fictive readersmust be distinguished from real readers (bywhich I mean simply persons outside the text,reading it), since the former are creations of theauthor, even if real readers actualize the impliedreader's role after the work is created or arereflected in that role as the work is being created.Various other terms have been used for whatI have chosen to call the characterized reader.As we have seen, the most common Germanterm, simply "the fictive reader" (der fiktiveLeser), incorrectly assumes that the impliedreader is not fictive, as do the terms "immanentreader" (immanenter Leser), used by Wolff andothers, and "inside reader," a term introducedby Arthur Sherbo. Sherbo speaks of the charac-terized reader as being "inside" the work andanother reader as being "outside." Most of theexamples Sherbo gives of the "outside" readerare not the real reader but the author's fiction-alization of his or her intended reader, that is,the implied or intended reader. Referring to theTom Jones passage about love as soup or roastbeef, Sherbo claims that the narrator "asks us,the 'outside' readers, to share his joke at the['inside' reader's] expense."30As we have seen,the narrator'svery "asking" us also fictionalizesus. Were this fictionalization not "inside" thetext, Sherbo would not speak of it as such a self-evident truth. Elizabeth Harries, who uses Sher-bo's terminology, suggests (following HenryJames) that the author "makes" or "constructs"the "outside" reader (p. 147); but surely a

reader created by the author cannot be "outside"the work. Thus the term "inside reader" estab-lishes a false opposition.Following Gerard Genette, Gerald Prince

adopts the term "narratee" (French narrataire)for the object of the narrator'smessage, a termthat is intended to include both characterizedreaders and listeners. I feel, however, that weshould avoid jargonistic neologisms where rela-tively self-explanatory terms would serve thesame purpose; surely it is clear that a character-ized reader becomes a characterized listener in afictively or actually oral communicative situationand that the characterized reader is the narra-tor's communicative partner even though he orshe does not share the narrator'slinguistic form.Another of Prince's terms will prove useful. Hecalls "secondary" a characterized reader (i.e.,narratee) who reads only part of the work and"principal" one who reads all of it ("Introduc-tion," p. 190). Thus, Marlow's listeners in Con-rad's works would be secondary, as would lis-teners in other framework texts and thecorrespondents in a normal epistolary novel.Even in works with no such obvious frame, acharacterized reader may be secondary sincesections such as the preface to the reader ornotes that are part of the fiction may not beaddressed to him or her. Hannelore Link makesthe mistake of using the term "explicit" reader(expliziter Leser) for the characterized reader:the characterized reader may not be explicitlycharacterized, as my examples have shown.31Finally, Peter Michelsen's term "imaginedreader" (vorgestellter Leser) inappropriatelyre-fers to the real readers that the author "imag-ines" as his or her audience.32Terms for the implied reader have propagatedthemselves even more profusely than those forthe characterized reader. One of the most com-mon terms is the "ideal reader." Iser's criticismof this concept defines his own position moreexactly:The ideal reader... is a purelyfictionalbeing;hehas no basis in reality,and it is this very fact thatmakes him so useful: as a fictionalbeing, he canclose the gapsthatconstantlyappearin any analysisof literaryeffectsandresponses.He can be endowedwith a varietyof qualitiesin accordancewith what-ever problemhe is calledupon to help solve.(Act, p. 29; Akt, p. 54)

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W. Daniel WilsonIser's is undoubtedly the most serious argumentagainst the ideal reader, but his own model hasdrawn similar criticism, a response that is notsurprisingwhen we recall that Iser's own impliedreader is in fact "a fictional being"; the criticismaffects only misuses of the concept, as we shallsee. The more pressing reason for avoiding theterm (although not the concept) is that, para-doxically, the "ideal reader" can be misunder-stood to refer to a real reader. If an interpretersays that the ideal reader of a certain workwould understand such and such, it is not im-mediately clear whether the interpreter means areal reader or an abstract structure of the text;thus the term is too ambiguous to figure as asynonym for the implied reader.33Part (thoughnot all) of Iser's criticism of the ideal readerstems from his own confusing it with the realreader. He claims that the ideal reader is "astructural impossibility as far as literary com-munication is concerned. An ideal reader wouldhave to have an identical code to that of theauthor," and "if this were possible, communica-tion would then be quite superfluous, for oneonly communicates that which is not alreadyshared by sender and receiver" (Act, pp.28-29; Akt, p. 53). The ideal reader, under-stood in Iser's and my own sense as "a fictionalbeing," is not the real "receiver,"however, but atextual structure through which communicationoccurs; the "communication" between authorand ideal/implied reader is precisely a fiction, apotential communication. Real readers do(sometimes) assimilate new attitudes in their re-lation to the ideal reader; from their points ofview, the ideal reader is part of the assimilatedcode.

Using Link's term "abstract reader" for theimplied reader also tends to mislead: our abilityto abstract the "abstract"-or often not soabstract-reader from the text also means thatthis reader has been fictionalized in the firstplace; thus, the more precise antonym for "real"is here "fictive" and, specifically, "implied,"rather than "abstract."The term essentially sayslittle; it is too abstract. Manfred Naumann, whoexamines the problem from a Marxist perspec-tive, calls the implied reader the "addressee"(Adressat),34 which, although technically cor-rect from a communication-oriented point ofview, introduces more jargon (in the form of a

term that sounds rather like a reference to thereader of an envelope).A few other terms might be considered ac-ceptable alternativesto implied/intended reader.Der addquate Leser has become somewhat es-tablished in German criticism, although in En-glish "the adequate reader" sounds odd (and is,moreover, not an exact equivalent). Nelson'sterm "optimum reader," like "ideal" and "adi-quat," stresses normatively the implied reader'squalitative appropriateness for a particular text(a judgmental basis avoided by Iser), althoughit, like "ideal," may perhaps be taken to refer toa real reader. The "virtual" or "potentialreader," as used by some structuralists,35givesus an acceptable synonym for the implied readerand stresses the latency of this structure beforeits actualization. The term "implied reader" it-self has the advantages of having gained cur-rency and, as we have seen, of corresponding tothe "implied author"proposed by Wayne Boothat an earlier stage of the critical discussion.Robert Crosman has pointed to an importantmisuse of the implied reader, although he per-ceives the problem as inherent in the conceptitself. Crosman argues that certain analyses of"the reader of Paradise Lost" have led to at-tempts to prescribe our responses in what I be-lieve are two ways: one concerns the pinpointingof implied readers in works historically divorcedfrom the critic; the other concerns the critic'sattempt to make this interpretative act abso-lute.36 First, the critic postulates "the seven-teenth-century reader." It is certainly valid toattribute to the implied reader of a work fromany age familiaritywith the basic knowledge andcultural presuppositions of that age. But the in-dividual work must determine how we evaluatesuch presuppositions. If there is no textual basis,say, for believing that the implied reader ofParadise Lost unquestioningly embraces all thereligious tenets of seventeenth-century Puritan-ism, then we must not postulate such a conform-ist reader. To do so would betray "an effort toimpose on modern readers responses [the critic]is not certain of being able to persuade them toadopt on the evidence of their own reading ofthe text" (Crosman, p. 380). Such an attempttrivializes the implied reader into a conformistwho would probably be incapable of properlyreading demanding literature. In fact, if Hans

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Readers in TextsRobert Jauss is correct, the extent to which awork surpasses the "horizon of expectations" ofreal readers of its time (i.e., the incongruity be-tween the real and implied readers) determinesthe quality of the work.37 Thus many of thebest authors would seem to write "for" readersin the future or attempt to "create" a new typeof implied reader. The abuse of the impliedreader is most widespread here, and it is prob-ably this abuse that Iser refers to in his criticismof the "ideal reader." Another example: LowryNelson argues that "it is a duty of the reader tolearn and fictively embrace the code of feeling inany work of any age by the contractual exerciseof his historical imagination" (pp. 182-83); Nel-son uses thisprincipleto arguethat we areto comedown on the side of Werther, the sincere senti-mental sufferer. At the beginning of Goethe'snovel, the "editor" (not Goethe) does indeedcall for the "reader" to admire and love Wer-ther's spirit and character and to shed tears overhis fate; the "reader"who suffers like Werther isto be consoled by the hero's sufferings and thebook is to replace the friends that this "reader"does not have. The real sentimental personalitiesof some Germans in the 1770s serve as a modelfor a characterized reader, but whether thecharacterized reader corresponds in toto to theimplied reader of the novel-that is, whether weare supposed to adopt the implied reader's atti-tudes-is a matter of interpretation (and is, Ibelieve, doubtful). So in this example, the mat-ter can be resolved by distinguishingbetween thecharacterizedreader and the implied reader and,even more important, by avoiding an otherwiseunjustifiedidentification of implied and real con-temporaryreaders (just as we avoid unjustifiablyidentifying the fictive "editor" with the impliedauthor or Goethe). An examination of the au-thor's relation to contemporary readers may bevaluable in determining how this relation af-fected the creation of the implied reader (as weshall see), but this relation must not be confusedwith the relation between the author and thatsame implied reader; the only "communicativepartner"present during the genesis of a work isthe implied reader, who (as Ong points out) isnever identical to the unmodifiedreal reader.The second way in which our responses carbe inappropriately prescribed in criticism of theimplied reader is described by Crosman as "the

illusion of objectivity" (p. 380). The "impliedreader" is a structure of the text. But a criticcannot determine the aspects or meaning of thatstructure with any more absolute validity thanhe or she can the meaning of other structures.We must not claim that our interpretationof theimplied reader is anything more than our inter-pretation. Whether one believes that absolute"validity in interpretation" is possible, as doesE. D. Hirsch, or that objective structuresexist inthe text but can never be totally elucidated by agiven interpretation,38one can still use the con-cept of the implied reader. Properly understood,an interpretation of the implied reader is nomore authoritative and restrictive on our ownright to establish a new interpretationthan otheraspects of a work are. Each critic will believethat he or she has uncovered the implied reader,and recourse to textual evidence may or may notresolve the differences.39Critical criteria such asmy distinction between characterized and im-plied readers should partially resolve-for ex-ample-the wide divergences among the (atleast) three interpretationsof the reader'srole inFielding's novels.40But all differences will neverbe resolved, and a reader's role is an implicitcorrelate to each interpretation rather than aneasy shortcut to an objectively valid interpre-tation.

The implied reader thus ideally contributes tocriticism that is no more, but also no less, objec-tive or valid than interpretation generally. Fur-ther, the implied reader is a function of no moreand no less than the overall meaning (that is, theoverall interpretation) of the text. I say "nomore" because the implied reader is in principlenot identical to real readers outside the text andmust not be interpretedwith undue emphasis onreal readers and other extratextual criteria. An-other example of such criteria is an author'sopinions about his or her work expressed else-where than in the work; I mentioned above the"intentional fallacy" of taking such statementsas authoritative (Wimsatt and Beardsley). Afurther example, reference to other works of thesame author, shows where studies of "the readerin the works of so-and-so" often fall short: theygeneralize about the implied reader in severalworks, ignoring the unique communicative pat-tern, and thus the unique implied reader, in eachwork. That pattern is part and parcel of the

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W. Daniel Wilsonoverall meaning of the work. The implied readeris thus also "no less" than this overall meaning.For example, a passage that implies a readerwho knows, say, the works of Jane Austen mightbe modified by the wider sense that the expectedresponse to Jane Austen's world is ironic in thistext. This example points up the necessity ofdistinguishing between characterized and im-plied fictive readers. A reader is characterized(perhaps by an unexplained reference to a JaneAusten character) as an Austen aficionado, butthe interpreter must determine whether thischaracterization constitutes the intended (im-plied) response. To say that the implied readeris a correlate of no more and no less than ourinterpretation of the text's meaning means thatthe implied reader, as the author's perfect com-municative partner, is necessarily similar to the(implied) author. Thus the implied reader isoften described as a "brother" of the author-for example, by Valery:Tout poete se fie necessairementdans son travailaquelque lecteur ideal qui lui serve le mieux dumonde, et qui, d'ailleurs,lui ressembleun peu plusqu'unfrere.

Everypoet necessarilyrelieson some ideal readerinhis work, who serveshim as the best readerin theworld, and who, moreover, resembles him a bitmore closely than a brother.41

How, then, does the analysis of the impliedreader relate to new trends in criticism? At leasttwo new "paradigms" (using Thomas Kuhn'sconcept from The Structureof Scientific Revolu-tions) of critical method have been posited inrecent years. According to Hans Robert Jauss,the "aesthetic-formalistic" paradigm still domi-nant a decade ago concentrates on describingworks of art and their objective meanings iso-lated from their historical settings and includesformalism and New Criticism. The new para-digm that Jauss sees arising emphasizes the en-tire communicative pattern of literature in ahistorical context, concentrating especially onthe reception of the literary "message."42Theconcept of the implied reader would appear tostand with a foot in each of these two paradigms.

It must be interpreted as a property of the text,without allowing extratextual aspects to domi-nate. At the same time, the implied reader is anessential link in the line of communication be-tween the author and every (real) reader, onethat determines to a large extent the success andquality of the communication. Jauss, who iscounted with Iser as a member of the "Con-stance School" of literary theory, has given hisimprimaturto the concept of the implied readeras a primarytool of the study of reception. Jaussargues that the implied reader, who can be de-termined more "objectively"from the text itself,deserves "methodological precedence" over thestudy of the real reader.43In other words, onecan evaluate a real reader's response to the textonly after determining the implied reader's roleand examining the contrast between the two po-sitions. Gunter Grimm has criticized Jauss'sstatement, with some justification; can the im-plied reader's role in a text, asks Grimm, beconstructed without prior knowledge of the realcommunicative relation between the author andthe audience? (Rezeptionsgeschichte, p. 48).With respect to the work's genesis, of course,Grimm is correct. An analysis of the author'sperception of his or her real public at the timethe work was written will often aid interpreta-tion of the author's relation to the implied readerof a text. If, for example, the text appears toshow (perhaps by its innovative structures) thatthe implied reader represents a reader type notpresent in the author's day and therefore that theauthor was writing for a reader of the futureand/or to educate his or her real readership, theinterpretation would be supported by pinpoint-ing both the nature of and the author's (nega-tive) attitude toward the real readership-without, of course, subsuming the actual textualevidence under any of this external evidence(including externally expressed authorial inten-tion, toward which Grimm's attitude is am-biguous).44Indeed, it is difficult to imagine an authorwhose creation (including the implied reader) isnot affected in some way by his or her percep-tions of real readers.45 I believe that Jauss re-fers to the evaluation of responses of real read-ers historically removed from the genesis of thework; if so, he would seem to claim that themeaning of the implied reader is independent of

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Readers in Textsvarious "readings."In either case, the concept ofthe implied reader is central both to the text'smeaning and to an evaluation of how real read-ers relate to that meaning. In the light of thedual nature of the concept, it is understandablethat Link has labeled Iser's model a sort of "in-terference" between the two paradigms.46Moreoptimistically, we can hope that the model rep-resents a mediation between them and a contri-bution to each, a step toward unifying, andrecognizing the interdependence of, what Grimmcalls the produktionsdsthetisch and rezeptions-iisthetisch points of view. From the vantage ofthe Warsaw structuralists, Michaf Gtowiiiskinotes that the issues of "how the constructionof the literary work sketches the role of the re-cipient" and of "how certain claims of the re-cipients . . . influence the form of the poeticwork and determine its structure" are really"complementary questions"; in this respect, thepossible "concretizations of a work" are"equally a matter of poetics and literary sociol-ogy" (pp. 97, 103).The relation of the implied reader to the otherdefinition of a new paradigm, David Bleich'smore radical "subjective criticism,"47 is moreelusive. Bleich feels that literarycritics, like theircolleagues in other disciplines, must relinquishthe illusion of objectivity and admit that textualmeaning is a matter of "negotiation" of individ-ual reading experiences. If one believes, as Iser

and Jauss apparently do, that the implied readercan be determined objectively from the text,48the concept would not fit into Bleich's newparadigm. In fact, belief in the impossibility oftotally objective elucidation of textual meaning(and thus the implied reader) will lead somecritics with a delusive desire for such method-ological objectivity in literary "science" (basedon an obsolete model of natural science) to shunthe concept of the implied reader in favor ofthe supposedly more objective study of realreaders.49

Common to both these new "paradigms,"however-and to most other new trends of criti-cism-is the insistence that literature is com-munication. As an intermediate textual factor inthe line of communication between author andreal reader, the concept of the implied readercan potentially mediate between the two ex-tremes of criticism that deify these respectivepoles. As we saw, the study of fictive readers isalso a logical outgrowth of investigations intothe "rhetoricof fiction." These critical tools thusenjoy a certain ideological neutrality-save thepostulate of communication-oriented analysis-that should render them useful to scholars onmore than just one continent.50

McGill UniversityMontreal, Quebec

Notes1 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. ofChicago Press, 1961), p. 71.2 Link, Rezeptionsforschung: Eine Einfiihrung inMethoden und Probleme (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,

1976); on p. 2, Link speaks both of the "Auswahl,dieder abstrakteAutor [her alternate term for "impliziterAutor"] getroffen hat" and of the "Auswahl, die derAutor . . . getroffen hat"; see also p. 28. Link's ties toBooth are Rolf Fieguth (see n. 26) and Wolf Schmid,Der Textaufbau in den Erzihlungen Dostoevskijs(Munich: Fink, 1973).3 Wolff, "Der intendierte Leser: Oberlegungen undBeispiele zur Einfuhrung eines literaturwissenschaft-lichen Begriffs," Poetica, 4 (1971), 141-66; transla-tions in the text are mine.4 Wolff, p. 160. Wolff's criteria are adopted uncriti-cally by Gunter Grimm, "Einfiihrung in die Rezep-tionsforschung," in Literatur und Leser: Theorien und

Modelle zur Rezeption literarischer Werke, ed. Grimm(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975), pp. 11-84, esp. p. 75, andby Horst Flaschka, "Rezeptionsasthetik im Litera-turunterricht: Eine Einfiihrung in Schwerpunkte derTheorie (1. Teil)," Mitteilungen des Deutschen Ger-manisten-Verbandes, 24 (1977), 35-44, esp. p. 43.5Harries, "Fiction and Artifice: Studies in Fielding,Wieland, Sterne, Diderot," Diss. Yale 1973 (DAI, 34[1973], 7191A), esp. pp. 136-46. Except for the ter-minology (see p. 856 of my essay), this study containsone of the clearest and most insightful analyses offictivereaders.6 Nelson, "The Fictive Reader and Literary Self-Re-flectiveness," in The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. PeterDemetz et al. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968),pp. 173-91, esp. p. 175. At times it even seems thatNelson's fictive readeris the real reader: "The problemof the fictive reader [of Wordsworth's 'The Thorn'],

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W. Daniel Wilsonthen, is to gauge his responsibility in reading or, better,performing such poetry as 'The Thorn'" (p. 178). SeeHarries' criticism, p. 136.

7 Iser, Der Akt des Lesens: Theorie dsthetischerWirkung (Munich: Fink, 1976); The Act of Reading:A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 1978). Der implizite Leser:Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bisBeckett (Munich: Fink, 1972); The Implied Reader:Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction fromBunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.Press, 1974).8 Akt, p. 59: ". . im intendierten Leser als der demText eingezeichneten Leserfiktion . . ."; this is oddlytranslated as "a sort of fictional inhabitant of thetext" (Act, p. 33), showing the need for an Englishterm like "characterized reader."9 Akt, p. 62; my translation, since Iser omitted thepassage in the English edition-perhaps because he sawthe inconsistency.10Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Responsein Prose Fiction," in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. HillisMiller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), pp.1-45, esp. p. 43; originally Die Appellstruktur derTexte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung litera-rischer Prosa (Constance: Universitatsverlag, 1970), p.33.11 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven:Yale Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 218-19; see also p. 38.

12 The Implied Reader, p. 48 (italics mine); Derimplizite Leser, p. 82 ("die dem Leser des Tom Joneszugedachte Rolle"). Link has argued at some lengththat Iser's analyses of particular texts in this studyultimately aim at the author's intention (" 'Die Appell-struktur der Texte' und ein 'Paradigmawechsel in derLiteraturwissenschaft'?" Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schil-ler-Gesellschaft, 17 [1973], 532-83, esp. pp. 548, 564);Gerhard Kaiser had made the same point ("Nachruf aufdie Interpretation? Zu Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruk-tur der Texte," Poetica, 4 [1971], 267-80; rpt. in Kaiser,Antithesen [Frankfurt: Athenium, 1973], pp. 51-70,esp. pp. 54-55), and Ferdinand van Ingen lists fourmore examples ("Die Revolte des Lesers oder Rezep-tion versus Interpretation," Amsterdamer Beitrdge zurneueren Germanistik, 3 [1974], 83-147, esp. p. 137).Iser responds to Kaiser's and Link's criticism in "ImLichte der Kritik," in Rezeptionsdsthetik, ed. RainerWarning (Munich: Fink, 1975), pp. 325-42. He arguesthat Kaiser is still bound by "Darstellungsasthetik" andthat Link distorts and overemphasizes his concept ofindeterminacy. Nowhere, however, does he address thecharge that he himself relies on authorial intention.

13 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "TheIntentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon(Lexington: Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 3-18,esp. p. 4. See also van Ingen, p. 89, and Grimm,Rezeptionsgeschichte (Munich: Fink, 1977), pp. 50-54, 280-81, but neither of these critics refers toWimsatt and Beardsley's original formulation of thisdistinction.

14 "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,"New Literary History, 2 (1970), 123-62; rpt. in Fish,Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: Univ. of Cali-fornia Press, 1972), pp. 383-427; the quotation appearson p. 409.

15 Act, pp. 34, 37; Akt, pp. 60, 65.16 Ong, PMLA, 90 (1975), 9-21, shows a regrettable

ignorance of the whole German critical tradition in thisarea, including Wolff, Iser, and Naumann (see p. 854of my essay).17 " 'Die Facher vors Gesicht!' Leser und Erotik inWielands Comischen Erziihlungen," Lessing Yearbook,11 (1979), 199-226.18 16-28 March 1837; quoted by J. Kamerbeek, Jr.,"Drei Hypostasen des Lesers: Eine Montage," in Dichterund Leser, ed. Ferdinand van Ingen (Groningen: Wal-ters-Noordhoff, 1972), p. 196.19 "Formen des Lesens," Poetica, 9 (1977), 472-98,esp. p. 478. It appears from the context that Maurerintends this statement as a criticism of Iser; I do notbelieve, however, that Iser intends his work as a historyof real readers' responses (but see n. 23 below).20 See Gunter Grimm, "Einfuhrung," p. 77. Grimm'sclassification of readers (p. 75) is confused and vagueand is barely improved (indeed, it is contradicted inpart) in his Rezeptionsgeschichte (1977), pp. 40-41,where he distinguishes between readers on three levelswithin the text: (a) characters in the narrated events(presumably only when they are also readers or lis-teners; these would correspond to my secondary char-acterized readers); (b) on the level of narration: "theimplied reader" of Iser; this includes an "intentional"reader (intentionaler Leser-an odd formulation ineither language), which is more or less the same as theimplied reader, but the "intentional" reader is forGrimm a larger concept and also encompasses thecharacterized reader (Leserfigur) (p. 275, n. 109).Thus Grimm seems to commit the common error ofassuming that the characterized reader represents amodel for the real reader's response ("Identifikationsan-gebot an den realen Leser" [p. 41]). The third level (c)is the "addressee of the work," who is not on the levelof narration but on the level of "the work." This con-cept would seem to be identical to Iser's implied reader,and even to Grimm's own "intentional" reader: Grimmwrites that the intention of the author, embodied in the"intentional" reader, expresses "alle im Text enthaltenenLesersignale"; the addressee, likewise, is "erschlie1baraus der Summe der intentionalen Leser-Signale" (pp.40-41). Grimm's new terms relating to the author'sconception of his reader when not embodied in a text("imaginierter," "intendierter," "konzeptioneller Leser,"pp. 38-39) will prove useless for interpretation (hisalteration of Wolff's concept "intendierter Leser" isespecially misleading; Wolff meant his concept in rela-tion to a text).21 Booth, p. 138; quoted by Iser, Act, pp. 36-37,Akt, pp. 64-65. In The Implied Reader (p. 30; Derimplizite Leser, p. 58), Iser quoted most of the samepassage from Booth but failed to take exception to it,

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Readers in Textsthus giving the impression that he believed that thereader does perfectly fill this role.

22 The Implied Reader, p. 38; Der implizite Leser, p.68. In The Act of Reading, Iser submits the same pas-sage to a more extended analysis (pp. 142-46), but atthe basis of this variation lies the same confusion ofcharacterizedand implied readers.23 Iser further confuses matters by drawing a con-clusion directly from the sociologically differentiatedcharacterizationsof readersin this passage to Fielding'sconcern "with catering for a varied public" (ImpliedReader, p. 38); in other words, he identifies the fictivecharacterizationswith real readers-the "variedpublic"-and these, in turn, with the reader implied in or in-tended for the work-the audience Fielding is "cateringto." This added confusion is not surprising,since Iserexplicitly argues that the "imaginary" (fingiert)"author-readerdialogue"gives the reader"guidelinesasto how he is to view the proceedings," and is thus"explicit guidance of the reader" (Implied Reader, pp.46-47; Der implizite Leser, p. 81).24 Maurer, p. 480; he refers to previous articles byKarlheinz Stierle and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.25 Gibson, "Authors, Speakers, Readers, and MockReaders," College English, 11 (1949-50), 265-69,esp. p. 268. See also Harries,pp. 137-38.26 "Die personalen Relationen in der literarischenKommunikation" (1969); rpt. in Literarische Kom-munikation, ed. Rolf Fieguth (Kronberg: Scriptor,1975), pp. 127-47, esp. p. 142. Rolf Fieguth wouldprobablyagree;in his analysisof a passagethat does notmention a reader at all, he posits an implied "dialogue"between a characterizedreader and a narrator, a dia-logue that is remarkablysimilar to that constructedbyOng on the basis of the Hemingway text (p. 13), butfrom which the implied reader must distance himselfor herself ("Zur Rezeptionslenkungbei narrativenunddramatischen Werken," Sprache im technischen Zeital-ter, 47 [1973], 186-201, esp. pp. 188-89).27 Prince,"Notes toward a Categorizationof Fictional'Narratees,'"Genre, 4 (1971), 100-06, esp. p. 100. On"narratees"(characterized readers) see p. 856 of myessay.28 Prince, "Introduction a l'etude du narrataire,"Poetique, 14 (1973), 178-96, esp. p. 191.

29 In his review of Der Akt des Lesens, H. U. Gum-brecht criticizes, unreasonably to my mind, Iser'ssynonymous use of the terms "impliziter Leser" 'im-plied reader' and "Leserrolle"'reader's role' (Poetica,9 [1977], 522-34, esp. p. 524).30 Sherbo, "'Inside' and 'Outside' Readers in Field-ing's Novels," in his Studies in the Eighteenth CenturyNovel (n.p.: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1969), pp.35-57, esp. p. 39.31 Hans Robert Jauss has more recently furthercom-plicated "die gegenwartig ausufernde Typologie vonLeserrollen"by calling the real reader "der expliziteLeser" ("Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Geschichteder Literatur,"Poetica, 7 [1975], 325-44, esp. p. 339).It goes almost without saying that this sort of "explicit"

reader (outside the text) is not explicit in the same waythe "implicit"reader (inside the text) is implicit. Theactualization of the reader's role does not make the"implicit"reader "explicit."

32 Michelsen, Laurence Sterne und der deutscheRoman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Gottingen: Van-denhoeck und Ruprecht, 1962), pp. 15-16 and n. 9.When Michelsen says that the "vorgestellter Leser"can be determined "direkt aus den Apostrophen desErzahlers,"he clearly refers to a characterized reader.33 Kamerbeekpoints out the various connotations ofthe term: "dans le mot 'ideal' le seme de 'perfectionconcrete' ou bien celui d' 'idealiteabstraite'est actualise"

("Le Concept du 'Lecteur Ideal,'" Neophilologus, 61[1977], 2-7, esp. p. 5; Kamerbeektraces the use of thisterm back to A. W. Schlegel). Aleksandra Okopiein-Stawinska uses the term "ideal"to refer to a real re-cipient (pp. 143, 145).

34 "Autor-Adressat-Leser," Weimarer Beitrdge, 17,No. 11 (1971), 163-69. The term is also used bystructuralistslike Okopieni-Stawiniska.35 E.g., Gerard Genette, Figures, iII (Paris: Seuil,1972), 265-66.36Crosman, "Some Doubts about 'The Reader ofParadise Lost,'" College English, 37 (1975), 372-82.37 Jauss, "Literaturgeschichteals Provokation derLiteraturwissenschaft," in Jauss, Literaturgeschichte alsProvokation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), translatedin part as "LiteraryHistory as a Challenge to LiteraryTheory," New Literary History, 2 (1970), 7-37.38 Cf. H. P. H. Teesing: "Das Absolute wird zwarnicht erkannt, aber anerkannt";"Die adaquate Inter-pretation gibt es . . . idealiter, nicht realiter" ("DerStandortdes Interpreten,"Orbis Litterarum,19 [1964],31-46, esp. pp. 42, 45; quoted by van Ingen, p. 93).39 Crosmanseems at times to rejectthe idea of inten-tion altogether and at other times to embrace it. Buthe is mistaken to identify the concept of the "idealreader" with "an attempt, ... in the wake of its demoli-tion at the hands of Wimsattand Beardsley,to smuggle'authorial intention' back into critical discussion" (p.373), at least where the ideal readeris based on textualevidence. Wimsatt and Beardsley did not argue thatintention cannot be determined by reference to thetext; they argued only that authorial intentions ex-pressed outside the text do not necessarily describe thestructuresof the work. They accepted internal but notexternal manifestationsof intention.40 See Sherbo; Iser (The Implied Reader, Ch. ii);and John Preston, The Created Self: The Reader's Rolein Eighteenth-Century Fiction (London: Heinemann,1970).41"De la diction des verses," (Euvres, ed. Jean Hy-tier, in (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 1255-56; quoted byKamerbeek,"Drei Hypostasen," p. 204.42 Jauss, "Paradigmawechselin der Literaturwissen-schaft," Linguistische Berichte, No. 3 (1969), pp. 44-56; rpt. in Methoden der deutschen Literaturwissen-schaft, ed. Viktor Zmega6 (Frankfurt: Athenaum,1972), pp. 274-90.

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W. Daniel Wilson43 Jauss, "Der Leser als Instanz einer neuen Ge-schichte der Literatur,"Poetica, 7 (1975), 325-44, esp.pp. 339-40. Jauss takes the same position in his prefaceto Asthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik,I (Munich: Fink, 1977), 13.44 For example, on page 48 of Rezeptionsgeschichte

Grimm gives special status to such intentions ("DieObjektivationder fiktionalen Leserrolle laBt sich . . .nur mit Kenntnis der entstehungsgeschichtlichenSachverhalte, einschlieBlich der extratextuellen Autorin-tention . .. approximativ erreichen" 'The objectivizationof the fictional role of the reader can be approximatelyattained . . . only with knowledge of the facts sur-roundingthe genesis of the work, including extratextualauthorial intention'-italics mine), and on page 51 he(correctly) withdraws this status ("Diese textexternexplizit gemachten Intentionen sollten . . . mit ebender Vorsicht behandelt werden, die der Interpretationjedes Nichtautors entgegengebracht wird" 'These in-tentions made explicit outside the text should be . . .treated with the same caution as an interpretationbyany other person').45Michat Gtowiniskiwrites, "ein gewisser Teil derpoetischen Werke entsteht entweder gegen die For-derungen der Empfanger oder aber beriicksichtigt siegar nicht und lai3tsich deshalb nur mittelbar als Aus-druck jener Forderungen analysieren"'a certain num-ber of poetic works originates either in opposition tothe demands of the recipientsor pays no heed to themand can therefore be analyzed only indirectly as anexpression of those demands' ("Der virtuelle Empfan-ger in der Struktur des poetischen Werks" [originally1967], in Literarische Kommunikation, pp. 97-126, esp.p. 98; rpt. in Weimarer Beitrige, 21, No. 6 [1975],118-43). This may be true for concrete "Forderungen"'demands'of the public but not for less obvious aspectsof the writer's relation to society. But van Ingen iswrong to assume, at the opposite extreme, that there isalways a direct, positive relation between contemporaryaudience and the writer: "Der Autor orientiert sichan den Regelkonventionen,die er beim Leser als bekanntvoraussetzt" 'The author is guided by the regulativeconventions he presumes to be known to the reader'(p. 131). The implied reader may represent the au-thor's rejection of the contemporary public (whichmeans, of course, that they do influence the author).

46Link, "'Appellstruktur'und 'Paradigmawechsel'?"p. 539 and elsewhere ("Interferenz"). She is followedby Elrud Kunne-Ibsch, "Rezeptionsforschung: Kon-stanten und Varianten eines literaturwissenschaftlichen

Konzeptsin Theorie und Praxis,"AmsterdamerBeitragezur neueren Germanistik, 3 (1974), 1-36.47 See Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 1978), and "The SubjectiveParadigm in Science, Psychology and Criticism,"NewLiterary History, 7 (1976), 313-34.

48 Jauss: "die implizite Leserrolle [ist] an objektivenStrukturendes Textes ablesbar"'the implicit role of thereader can be determinedfrom objective structuresofthe text' ("Der Leser als Instanz,"p. 339). It seems asif Jauss is here inadvertently reintroducing "objectivemeaning"of texts after having rejected it (e.g., in "AnInterview with Hans Robert Jauss," New LiteraryHistory, 11 [1979], 83-95, esp. p. 84).49 In spite of his expressed skepticism regardingob-jectivity (Rezeptionsgeschichte, p. 54), Grimm's entiresystem is based on a deep-seatedfaith in the determin-ability of a correct understanding of the text ("dietjberpriifbarkeiteines adaquatenVerstehens" [p. 57]).To turn to "history" as a philosopher's stone thatwould render criticism objective ignores the ambiguityof historical evidence (one critic'sEntstehungsgeschichteis not necessarilyanother's!) and the subjectivityof thehistorian'spoint of view (to which Grimm gives tokenrecognition-e.g., p. 59). Van Ingen, too, calls histori-cal data "objektivierbar"(p. 134). I mean to degradenot historical criticism-my approach is eminentlyhistorical-but rather a naive model of historiographicobjectivity.50In the year after I submitted this article, largelynew essays appeared in a book whose title indicateshow close the authors' concerns are to mine: TheReader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpre-tation, ed. Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Prince-ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980). In her discerning"Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criti-cism" (pp. 3-45), Suleimantouches on several issues Itreat. She speaks of an "inscribed reader" (p. 14),which would correspondto the characterizedreader,andperceptively criticizes Iser (pp. 23-25), although sheignores much German criticismthat preceded her own.Essays that I have cited by Gibson, Prince, Iser, andFish are now collected (in English), with others, inReader-Response Criticism:. From Formalism to Post-Structuralism,ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins Univ. Press, 1980). Both Crosmanand Tomp-kins have assembled annotated bibliographiesthat areespecially comprehensive for Anglo-American andFrench criticism.

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