Page 72 - Critical and Cultural Theory

READING
configurations. This point can be illustrated with reference to the
phenomenological approach to reading proposed by Wolfgang
Iser. Iser works on the assumption that all texts leave gaps and
that these gaps invite readers to produce their own connections: to
organize various textual components into patterns and interac-
tions. Thus, beside the text's artistic pole (the author's creation),
there is always an aesthetic pole (the reader's concretization of the
text). The reader, Iser maintains, tends to unify the text by filling
in its gaps. Paradoxically, this does not lead to a comforting
feeling that the text can be contained but rather to an awareness
of its limitlessness. Unifying readings alert us to the text's infinite
richness and multiplicity, for 'one text is potentially capable of
several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the
full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his
own way'. The potential text', in other words, 'is infinitely richer
than any of its individual realizations' (Iser 1988: 216). Readers
constantly 'oscillate' between 'the building and the breaking of
illusions' (Iser 1988: 222): the creation of patterns and the recogni-
tion of their fragility.
Obviously, certain textual forms are more likely than others to
stimulate a reader's imagination and flair for devising patterns. It
is on this basis that Umberto Eco proposes a distinction between
closed and open texts. The closed text is the one in which the struc-
ture and the style of a narrative attempt to control readers' inter-
pretations by telling them (more or less explicitly) how to read
their characters, themes and situations. The open text, by contrast,
articulates its narrative so as to unleash multiple associations and
interpretations: it does not presume to convey a single message
and does not seek to determine what different readers will make of
it (Eco 1979). Eco's views bear affinities to Roland Barthes's
distinction between the readerly text and the writerly text (Barthes
1975). The readerly text assumes the existence of a fixed reality
and posits itself as a means of portraying that reality: readers are
passive recipients of its messages. The writerly text, conversely,
encourages readers to participate in the process of its construction:
it does not offer a static reality but rather invites us to produce
myriad realities. 4

4 I^~ Barthes's theories are discussed in detail in Part I, Chapter 6, Textuality'

55