RANGKUMAN THE ACT OF READING

RANGKUMAN
THE ACT OF READING

GRASPING A TEXT

INTERPLAY BETWEEN TEXT AND READER
Textual structures and structure acts of comprehension are therefore the two poles in the act of communication, whose success will depend on the degree in which the text establishes itself as a correlative in the reader’s consciousness. This “transfer” of text to reader is often regarded as being brought about solely by the text. Any successful transfer however—though initiated by the text—depends on the extent to which this text can activate the individual reader’s faculties of perceiving and processing. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987;107).

This fact is worth emphasizing, because there are many current theories which give the impression that texts automatically imprint themselves on the reader’s mind of their own accord. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 107).

Reading is not a direct ‘internalization’, because it is not a one-away process, and our concern will be to find means of describing the reading process, and our concern will be to find means of describing the reading process as a dynamic interaction between text and reader (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 107).

Tristram Shandy said “… thus author and reader are to share the game of the imagination, and, indeed, the game will not work if the text sets out to be anything more than a set of governing rules. The reader’s enjoyment begins when he himself becomes productive, i.e., when the text allows him to bring his own faculties into play (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 108).

The process of wring, however, includes as a dialectic correlative the process of reading, and these two interdependent acts require two differently active people. The combined efforts of author and reader bring into being the concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. Art exists only for and through other people (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 108).

THE WANDERING VIEWPOINT
The ’object’ of the text can only be imagined by way of different consecutive phases of reading. We always stand outside the given object, whereas we are situated inside the literary text. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 109).

The reader’s view point is, at one and the same time, caught up in and transcended by the object it is to apprehend. Apperception can only take place in phases, each of which contains aspects of the object to be constituted, but none of which can claim to be representative of it. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 109).

As this is true of all the sentences in a literary text, the correlates constantly intersect, giving rise ultimately to the semantic fulfillment at which they had aimed. The fulfillment, however, takes place not in the text, but in the reader, who must ‘activate’ the interplay of the correlates prestructured by the sequence of sentences. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 110).

It is clear, then, that throughout the reading process there is a continual interplay between modified expectations and transformed memories. However, the text itself does not formulate expectations or their modification; nor does it specify how the connectability of memories is to be implemented. This is the province of the reader himself, and so here we have a first insight into how the synthesizing activity of the reader enables the text to be translated and transferred to his own mind. The process of translation also shows up the basic hermeneutic structure of reading. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 112).

Each sentence correlate contains what one might call a hollow section, which looks forward to the next correlate, and a retrospective section, which answers the expectations of the preceding sentence (now part of the remembered background). Thus every moment of reading is dialectic of pretension and retention, conveying a future horizon yet to be occupied, along with a past (and continually fading horizon already filled; the wandering viewpoint carves its passage through both at the same time and leaves them to emerge together in its wake. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 112).

As there is no definite frame of reference to regulate this process, successful communication must ultimately depend on the reader’s creative activity (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 112).

CORRELATIVE PRODUCED BY THE WANDERING VIEWPOINT
Consistency-Building as a basis for involvement in the text as an event. The wandering viewpoint is a means of describing the way in which the reader is present in the text. This presence is at a point where memory and expectation converge, and the resultant dialectic movement brings about a continual modification of memory and an increasing complexity of expectation. These processes depend on the reciprocal spotlighting of the perspectives, which provide interrelated backgrounds for another. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 118-119).

For if the reader were really to scan letters and words like a computer, the reading process would simply entail registering these units which, however, are not yet units of meaning. “meaning is at a level of language where words do not belong… meaning is part of the deep structure, the semantic, cognitive level. An you may recall that between the surface level and the deep level o language there is no one-to-one correspondence. Meaning may always resist mere words. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 120).

As meaning is not manifested in words, and the reading process therefore cannot be mere identification of individual linguistic signs, it follows that apprehension of the text is dependent on gestalt groupings. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 120).

The realization that the one is hypocritical and the other naïve involves building an equivalence, with a consistent gestalt, out of no less than three different segments of perspectives- two segments of character and one of narrator perspective. The forming of gestalt resolves the tensions that had resulted from the various complexes of signs. But this gestalt is not explicit in the text- it emerges from a projection of the reader, which is guided in so far as it arises out of the identification of the connections between the signs. In this particular example, it actually brings out something which is not stated by the linguistic signs, and, indeed, it shows that what is meant is the opposite of what is said (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 121).

The consistent gestalt endows the linguistic signs with their significance, and this grows out of the reciprocal modifications to which the individual positions are subjected, as result of the need for establishing equivalences. The gestalt coherency might be described in terms used by Gurwithsch, as the perceptual noema of the text. This means that as each linguistic sign conveys more than just itself to the mind of the reader, it must be joined together in a single unit with all its referential contexts. The unit of the perceptual noema comes about by way of the reader’s acts of apprehension: he identifies the connections between the linguistic signs and thus concretizes the references not explicitly manifested in those signs. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 121).

Sartre said; The reader is left with everything to do, and yet everything has already been done; the work only exists precisely on the level of his abilities; while he reads and creates, he knows that he could always go further in his reading, and that he could always create more profoundly, and this is why the work appears to him as inexhaustible and as impenetrable as an object. This productiveness, whatever its quality may be, which before our very eyes transforms itself into impenetrable objectivity in accordance with the subject that produces it, is something I should like to compare to the “rational intuition” KANT reserved for divine reason. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 123-124).

Expectation, however, may lead to the production of illusion, in the sense that our attention is confined to details which we imbue with an overall representative validity (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 124).

The illusion element in gestalt-forming is one vital condition for grasping the literary text. “the reader is interested in gaining the necessary information with the least trouble to himself… and so if the author sets out to increase the number of code systems and the complexity of their structure, the reader will tend to reduce them to what he regards as an acceptable minimum. The tendency to complicate the characters is the author’s; the contrastive black-white structure is the reader’s. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 125).

In everyday language we call these alternatives ambiguities, by which we mean not just the disturbance but also the hindrance of the consistency-building process. This hindrance is particularly noticeable when the ambiguity is brought about by our own gestalt-forming, for it is not merely the product of the printed txt but that of our own activity. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 129).

Shaw said : “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. Reading has the same structure as experience, to the extent that our entanglement has the effect of pushing our various criteria of orientation back into the past, thus suspending their validity for the new present. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 132).

PASSIVE SYNTHESES IN THE READING PROCESS

MENTAL IMAGES AS A BASIC FEATURE OF IDEATION
Clearly, then, we must distinguish between perception and ideation as two different means of access to the world; perception requires the actual presence of the object, whereas ideation depends upon its absence or nonexistence. In reading literary text we always have to form mental images, because the schematized aspects’ of the text only offer us knowledge of the conditions under which the imaginary object is to be produced. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 137).

The image, then, is basic o ideation. It relates to the nongiven or to the absent, endowing it with presence. It also makes conceivable innovations arising from a rejection of given knowledge or from unusual combinations of signs. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 137).

Physical presence or absence is not the only difference between the perceived and the imagined. As Gilbert Ryle pointed out, we ‘see’ something in our image of an object which we cannot see when the object is actually there. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 138).

MENTAL IMAGE
The significance of this process lies in the fact that image-building eliminates the subject –object division essential for all perception, so that when we ‘awaken’ to the real world, this division seems all the more accentuated. Suddently we find ourselves detached from our world, to which we are inextricably tied, and able to perceive it as an object. And even if this detachment is only momentary, it may enable us to apply the knowledge we have gained by figuring out the multiple references of the linguistic signs, so that we can view our own world as a thing “freshly understood”. (Wolfgang Iser, 1987; 140).