d ustin b reitenWischer Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience (and the Case of Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist”) I. The In-Between One of the most essential and intriguing questions in the field of literary studies is what happens in the act of reading? A prominent angle from which to tackle this question treats the respective text first and foremost as a source of aesthetic experience, meaning that the text’s basic function is to afford the reader aesthetic pleasure. Over the course of the past fifty years, reception aesthetics and literary hermeneutics (from Peter Szondi and Paul Ricoeur to the thinkers of the so-called Constance School) have taught us that the act of reading, may it be academically or leisurely motivated, is characterized by a complex and dynamic dialogue between text and reader. 1 The reader is not understood as merely being exposed to a text, but text and reader are thought of as always already being with each other. As attempts to overthrow the rigorous regime of what is most commonly known as Werkästhetik (aesthetics of the work of art) and to free the aesthetic object and its recipient from the misguided pressure of uncovering and revealing an inherent Truth, both 1 As Winfried Fluck argues: “The cultural history of literary texts is the history of their varying uses in the act of reception. Literary history and the history of reception thus cannot be separated” (“Why We Need Fiction: Reception Aesthetics, Literary Anthropology, Funktionsgeschichte.” Romance with America? Essays on Culture, Literature, and American Studies. Eds. Laura Bieger and Johannes Voelz [Heidelberg: Winter, 2009] 365-84; 383). For further introduction, see Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989); Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984); Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretation. Ed. Don Ihde. Transl. Willis Domingo et al. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988); Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics. Transl. Martha Woodmannsee (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995). With regards to the phenomenon of aesthetic and readerly pleasure, and in addition to the traditions of reception aesthetics and literary hermeneutics, see also Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Transl. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). For a concise comparison between the reception-theoretical models of Barthes and Iser (in German), see Doris Pany, Wirkungsästhetische Modelle: Wolfgang Iser und Roland Barthes im Vergleich (Erlangen and Jena: Palm & Enke, 2000). 220 d ustin b reitenWischer theoretical rationales have understood work and recipient to be in a spontaneous and inherently open relationship with each other (and thereby with themselves and their quest for self-understanding). What is more, in these assumptions about the text-reader relationship neither work nor recipient could any longer be understood as holding fast to the idea of having a stable background in front of which they could act upon the respective other, meaning that work and recipient are not simply opposing each other. To the contrary, they are luring and are curiously intertwined with each other. Work and recipient were henceforth understood to activate a state of aesthetic experience in which worlds are not represented and apprehended, but in which worlds conflate. Understood as such, the recipient is not tied to an observing outside position in front of the respective work. She rather unconsciously renounces parts of her immediate environment to performatively engage in the playful world, which opens up between her and the work. In “Representation: A Performative Act,” Wolfgang Iser therefore argues that “the required activity of the recipient resembles that of an actor, who in order to perform [her] role must use [her] thoughts, [her] feelings, and even [her] body as an analogue for representing something [she] is not.” 2 As readers (i.e. performers of our act of reading) we are always “both ourselves and someone else.” 3 In the final part of this essay I will turn to the act of reading poetry, for it is in the latter where the “analogous” is most often turned into an immediate ‘acting out,’ or, as Heinz Schlaffer convincingly argues, appropriation of a poem’s subjective agency. 4 Poetry therefore provides an extraordinary understanding of what it means to be reading in-between. Reading, as I understand it here, is more than just a text-based practice of reception, but the raison d’ être of perception as such, i.e. a general mode of sensemaking that treats the aesthetic as a paradigmatic play-space. 5 At this point, allow me to adjust and specify the opening question: What is taking place between the text and the reader? In his essay “Fictionalizing,” Iser basically condenses his aforementioned argument by claiming that the reader is caught in an “in-between state,” 6 which Winfried Fluck qualifies as a venue for “an interplay between its constituents.” 7 Yet, I argue that Iser’s concurrent ‘both … and’ structure of aesthetic experience is not only declaring a particular state, but that it eventually opens up a space which can be conceived of as the dematerialized appearance of the physical space between the place of reception and the appearance of the work (the “gap between text 2 Wolfgang Iser, “Representation: A Performative Act.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 244. 3 Wolfgang Iser, “Representation” 244. 4 Heinz Schlaffer, “Die Aneignung von Gedichten: Grammatisches, rhetorisches und pragmatisches Ich in der Lyrik.” Poetica 27, 1-2 (1996): 38-57. 5 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst.” Was ist ein Bild? Ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: Fink, 2001) 90-104; 95ff. 6 Wolfgang Iser, “Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fiction.” New Literary History 21.4 (Fall 1990): 939-55; 953 [emph. D.B.]. 7 Winfried Fluck, “The Search for Distance: Negation and Negativity in Wolfgang Iser’s Literary Theory.” New Literary History 31.1 (Winter 2000): 175-210; 181. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 221 and reader,” as Rita Felski calls it) 8 into an imaginary and nondescript third space. Hence, what is taking place between text and reader is the occurrence of a space in-between, in and through which the material, or, corporeal textreader binary dissolves into a unified imaginary and ultimately performative universe, thereby drawing on but moving beyond Iser’s metaphorical definition of the in-between. 9 The alteration from imaginative state to imaginary space thus allows us to understand the in-between not only as an internal(ized) matrix of the eventfulness of our aesthetic experience (to feel as if we were part of the fictional universe), but as the result of a conjoint effort of us and the text that revokes the dynamics of a Cartesian subject-object dichotomy and that, accordingly, turns the act of reading into an intersubjective event. As I said, even though the in-between is effectively an imaginary space, it fundamentally exceeds the level of the metaphorical. Albeit the fact the in-between might be invisible and in certain ways ungraspable, by using not only our imagination but also our body as an “analogue,” our very bodily reactions to a particular text (shivering, sweating, screaming, etc.) are not simply real world responses to a fictive occurrence. Instead they are original, ‘act-specific’ occurrences that do not react to but activate the text within the spatial confines of the in-between. By definition, the in-between marks a space between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ between the diegetic world we turn to and the background world we rely on. 10 Quite literally, aesthetic experience thus opens up a space between the aesthetic object and the recipient, a space, which is, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, without boundaries of its own, which takes on and receives itself, its form, from the outside, which is not its outside (this would imply that it has a form) but whose form is the outside of the identity, not just of an other (for that would reduce the in-between to the role of object, not of space) but of others, whose relations of positivity define, by default, the space that is constituted as in-between. 11 In the in-between, as I understand it, hierarchies are dissolved: everything is equally near and far, attached and removed, physical and mental, captured and lost. In hermeneutical terms, the in-between serves as the self-representation of the metaphorical horizon as an unreachable site. This is indeed the anthropological dimension of the in-between. The in-between is based on, what Laura Bieger has argued with regards to narrativity, a certain anthropological need for “place-making” as a result of human’s “space-boundedness,” 8 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 28. 9 I develop this theory in greater scope in my forthcoming book Das Dazwischen ästhetischer Erfahrung (Paderborn: Fink) [forthcoming]. 10 In many ways, the simultaneous ‘here and there’ of in-between of aesthetic experience characterizes a space with significant heterotopic qualities. For the conflation of Foucault’s seminal theory of space in his short essay “Of Other Spaces” (Diacritics 16 [Spring 1986]: 22-27) and a Constance School-based theory of aesthetic reception, see Laura Bieger, Ästhetik der Immersion: Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007). 11 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT P, 2001) 91 [emph. E.G.]. 222 d ustin b reitenWischer which is ultimately tied to “the impossibility of understanding the meaning of one’s death.” 12 Along these lines, the in-between is thus an extraordinary space, as it allows the reader to understand her existential “impossibility of understanding.” Pragmatically speaking, the in-between is the space where “the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing,” where “a being [is] wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive” (Dewey, Art as Experience 18). Thereby, the in-between allows the one who is in it to turn to herself. Or, again in Dewey’s words: “We are, as it were, introduced into a world beyond this world which is nevertheless the deeper reality of the world in which we live in our ordinary experiences. We are carried out beyond ourselves to find ourselves” (Art as Experience 195). 13 In line with this idea of productive self-extension, the thought of an imaginary in-between space of aesthetic experience could also be understood as the possibility of a contesting sphere of opposing visions, sentiments, and interpretations. For it is within a variety of sociocultural and socio-institutional dialogues where other, non-artistic forms of ‘in-betweenness’ are at stake. Hence, my impulse to move beyond an understanding of the in-between as a state one is caught in to it being a space one co-produces (in alliance with the aesthetic object) is not merely based on an effort to foreground the limitations of the metaphorical but to interlink the moment of aesthetic experience with (often non-aesthetic) questions of subjectivity and cultural (dis-) positions. Here, we might want to think of such lucid elaborations as Homi Bhabha’s theory of transand intercultural ‘in-between’ spaces. With regards to matters of sociocultural subject categories, Bhabha argues that it is crucial to “focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences,” that is, “’in-between’ spaces [that] provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood.” 14 In Bhabha’s case, the in-between 12 Laura Bieger, “No Place Like Home; or, Dwelling in Narrative.” New Literary History 46.1 (Winter 2015): 17-39; 19. 13 At a later point, I will return to a similar thought in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2006). 14 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) In a similar vein, ‘in-betweenness’ may also be understood as a space of cultural and linguistic translation, and thus as an enabling sphere for a variety of artistic, historical, and sociopolitical practices of intersubjective communication. See for example Silviano Santiago, The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Ed. Ana Lúcia Gazzola (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) esp. 25-38. Furthermore and with regards to both religious and aesthetic experiences, the in-between is at times taken to be a “threshold” or “liminal space,” i.e. a quasi-metaphorical site of imaginary, performative, and miraculous self-expansion. See for example Thomas Moore, “Neither Here Nor There.” Parabola 25.1 (2000): 34; Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Transl. Saskya Iris Jain (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). Even though aesthetic and religious experiences may not always produce radical changes in the multitude of one’s own life-worlds, I argue that the appearance of an imaginary in-betweenness can provide us with a testing ground for the intersubjective performance of difference, otherness, and (sociocultural) hybridity. It offers the subject of that experience the opportunity - be it inside or outside the academic discourse - to stage and engage in the intricate relationship between her aesthetic and non-aesthetic life-worlds. In other words, the experience’s ‘in-between’ can very well be understood Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 223 is thus a (often imaginary) site for “the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4). Unmistakably, Bhabha’s ‘in-between of cultural difference’ - as many other representations of (non-)aesthetic in-betweenness - is far removed from the interests of a Constance-based reception theory. That being said, those theories may nonetheless be curiously interrelated with such reception-centered theories of aesthetic pleasure. If we consider the in-between of aesthetic experience to be a space, in which certain subject positions can be tested, accepted or disregarded, we may want to understand even the most intimate moment of aesthetic pleasure (like the act of reading) as an act that informs and, at times, even transforms the sociocultural environment attached it. 15 Therefore, I briefly wanted to stress the intricate relation between the aesthetics of the in-between (f.e. in Bhabha’s “articulation of cultural difference”) and the inbetween of aesthetic experience (as an imaginary stage area of such difference), for it not only allows for a curious trans-academic dialogue, but it also underscores the necessity to take Iser’s word quite literally and treat the in-between as an imaginary space. By doing so, we might not only see that spaces of cultural hybridity take on aesthetic form but that they are in many ways in accordance with the desire for imaginary self-extension and self-difference (“being both ourselves and someone else”) produced in the in-between of aesthetic experience. And if we consider the satisfaction of these desires to be one of the significant sociocultural and sociopolitical functions of reading - both academically and leisurely motivated - we may even argue that the function of reading correlates with the consequences and the architecture of its experience, i.e. with the event and performance of being in-between. As to the various socio-institutional theories, meanings and implications of reading, I want to suggest that the in-between space of aesthetic experience functions as a leveling sphere, in which the aesthetic is not merely exposed to formalistic value judgments. Instead, we may want to consider the idea that an intimate intersubjective act can most promisingly be expanded as a communicative space of transmission or translation, as it caters to the associative assemblage of a text’s functional multitude. Thereby, the aesthetic is not disabling a text’s non-aesthetic functions, but it is enabling the latter to gain a (potentially heterogeneous) gestalt in the safe realm of its imaginary space. 15 Along the lines of a reception-based understanding of reading, Gabriele Schwab’s studies The Mirror and the Killer-Queen and Subjects Without Selves respectively help to bridge some of the gaps between an individual (aesthetic) response and its culturally hybrid ramifications, as she explores a psychoanalytical expansion of Iser’s (and, for that matter, Hans Robert Jauss’) reception aesthetics by way of arguing that the reader is caught in a “transitional space” of (sociocultural) transference. Schwab thereby claims that the readerly subject is enabled to repeatedly encounter herself through extending herself imaginarily into the ‘Other’ of the fictional universe. But even though Schwab considers a spatial dimension in Iser’s reception theory, her own studies do not either move beyond the metaphorical. Gabriele Schwab, The Mirror and the Killer- Queen: Otherness in Literary Language (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996) esp. 1-46. With regards to the “transitional space” of literature, see Gabriele Schwab, Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994). 224 d ustin b reitenWischer into a social practice within the shielded sphere of such an in-between space, that is, a sphere of cultural and critical interest and inquiry. What is more, the in-between can even serve as a domain, in which fundamental questions of how and what we read are raised, and in which possible answers can be safely explored. If we take the concern of this present volume we thus may want to think of each individual reading experience as the premise of and the point of departure for various public and academic debates. Yet at this point, it is crucial to reiterate that I understand the in-between as an imaginary space that produces and contains a self-associative matrix, i.e. a dynamic and meandering structure that is ultimately and necessarily able to reflect and act upon itself as its own rendering. The in-between produces a dialogical setting, which allows the reader to extraordinarily engage with herself and her world at the same time. 16 II. Self-Representation Even though the in-between cannot be completely deduced from the material presence of the aesthetic object (i.e. its appearance), it seems to be always already present in the aesthetic object. 17 To be more precise, I argue that the 16 Here, I concur with Hans-Georg Gadamer who compares the structure of experience with the intersubjective disposition of an I and a you noting that in the best case this intersubjective model works by way of constantly drawing on an inherent openness whereby the I-you-interaction enables the respective other to formulate and thereby understand the yet unknown (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 238ff.). Understood this way, experience as openness enables a space for future experiencing, turning intersubjectivity into a mode of understanding human experience. In “Von der zerstörerischen Kraft des Dritten,” Axel Honneth criticizes Gadamer’s understanding of experience by claiming that the latter’s model is too private and intimate to stand in for most societal modes of intersubjectivity and their respective production of recognition. In contrast, Honneth argues in favor of a third position that he sees apparently missing in Gadamer’s model. For Honneth, this third position is significantly non-biased and as such the adequate enabler for moral and ethical reflection of one’s own position and experience. And where could we locate such a third figure? Honneth writes: “Such a perspective does not intrude into the I-you-relationship from the outside but it always already constitutes one of two standpoints whose respective comparison allows a reflection of the joined behavior” (Axel Honneth, “Von der zerstörerischen Kraft des Dritten: Gadamer und die Intersubjektivitätslehre Heideggers.” Unsichtbarkeit: Stationen einer Theorie der Intersubjektivität [Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 2003] 49-70; 69 [transl. D.B.]). The third position thus appears from within as an in-between actor that most literally takes place. Yet, I argue that Gadamer essentially knows of this third position, but instead of having I and you relate to it as a non-identical other, he lets this third party happen, as he turns intersubjectivity into a process of reciprocal intention. 17 My understanding of the term “appearance” (or “appearing”) stems from Martin Seel’s Aesthetics of Appearing, in which the author argues that “appearing” is the basic mode of being for aesthetic objects. It is not primarily through semblance or representation that aesthetic objects become meaningful for us but through their spontaneous, extraordinary and genuine ways of appearing. Cf. Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing. Transl. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) esp. 19-103. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 225 aesthetic object is by definition also the representation of (its own) in-betweenness. That is to say that in the act of reading the in-between persistently receives formal offers from the text as a performer of its inherent in-betweenness. Yet these offers can only materialize in the act of reading itself, which, in turn, leads Iser to the assumption that the reader is confronted with “the task of visualizing the many possible shapes of the identifiable world, so that inevitably the world repeated in the text begins to undergo changes.” 18 As I understand it, we are presented with the ungraspable and ever-changing appearance of an in-between space, an appearance that is, of course, also fundamentally tied to the fact that in the acts of reading a novel, watching a film, or looking at a painting we constantly move in and out of our imaginary in-between (for example when the phone rings, a theater door is thrown open, or a grade school class runs by). Since we are always surrounded by our environment and thereby exposed to a vast amount of unforeseen (and essentially non-artistic) acts and impressions, we need to repeatedly produce the in-between anew to then being ever-newly equipped with non-identical images and the memory of our past experiences. 19 What is more, the temporal progress of the act of reading - reading word after word, line after line, page after page - thus translates into the non-linear dynamic of the production of the in-between space. 20 Understood as such, this in-between space is not a succession of different spaces opening onto each other. It rather seems to be an amorphic space marked by radical elusiveness and sudden alterations, and which is analogous to the prereflective space between the written word and the materializing image. At this point, the literary text must not merely be understood as a given aesthetic object or a bleak source of aesthetic pleasure but as a proactive agent with whom the reader comradely spatializes and stages the modes in which the text will be experienced. Hence, I argue that (1) the aesthetic object is constituted in and through experience, (2) experience (as the intersubjective 18 Wolfgang Iser, “The Play of the Text.” Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 249-61; 250. 19 This argument is very much in line with Karl Heinz Bohrer’s theory of aesthetic suddenness (Plötzlichkeit) as the appearance of aesthetic sensations in and through their autonomous realities. Bohrer ultimately argues in favor of an overwhelming aesthetic presence in which the aesthetic cannot be stored but which needs to constantly be actualized. Bohrer thereby develops a concept, which will then be broadened by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and his study The Production of Presence. Cf. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance. Transl. Ruth Crowley (New York: Columbia UP, 1994); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004). 20 I use the term “production” in close connection to Henri Lefebvre’s seminal study The Production of Space. Lefebvre argues that space is always already the complex product of cultural and social interactions, thereby developing a triad in which space unfolds as being conceived (f.e. in architectural blueprints), perceived (in streets, houses, trains, etc.), and lived (in symbols, rituals, actions). According to Lefebvre, space is produced in the interplay of the three modes to eventually materialize in (social) practices. Cf. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. Transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) esp. 31-67. 226 d ustin b reitenWischer occurrence of the text-reader interaction) produces its own space, and (3) the aesthetic object constantly makes formal offers to that space, thereby actively shaping the appearance of experience as such. This means that the in-between does not only mark a specific entry point for the interpretation of a particular object. It also demarcates a sphere of aesthetic self-awareness in and through the relationship of experience and object. In short, the inbetween space of aesthetic experience is not only the space for the dynamics of that experience, but also the appearance of the experience’s own rendering. III. Interpretation The act of reading affords the reader aesthetic pleasure, thereby opening an imaginary space in-between in whose dynamic of intersubjective self-positioning reader and text engage in their interpretative dialogue. Understood as such, interpretation is not merely the act of figuring out what a specific work of literature says; it allows for the self-referential production of a text’s own enabling aesthetic play-space: Interpretation is fundamentally a matter of mediation, translation, even transduction; it is what allows texts to move across temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries, as they are slotted into new and ever changing frames. Interpretation is also indirect, reflective, and double-voiced, binding the words of the critic to those of a text. It involves both critique and imagination, faithfulness to the past and a bold reconfiguration of old schemes. 21 Interpretation is the practice of affording a text with an interest. And to be inter-ested is to literally be in-between. Based on a reception theory of aesthetic ‘in-betweenness,’ I furthermore argue that any interpretation ipso facto needs to scour a text for its in-between spaces to have the recipient sink into them as if there was no outside to them, and to venture in unknown modes and practices of individual and cultural difference. As an admittedly formalist argument, this means that literary texts (as all other aesthetic objects) do not only afford their recipients an experience of in-betweeness, but that literary texts are able to articulate, stage, perform, and most playfully represent inbetween spaces as sites of hermeneutic and interpretative openness. What might sound like a theory of aesthetic mirroring in fact radically testifies to the core potentiality of the literary work and the prereflective and thereby indeterminate nature of what Iser has called a text’s “blanks.” 22 When turning from the merely metaphorical to the spatial, we ought to not understand the text’s matrix of intrinsic in-betweenness as the actual representation of intradiegetic in-between places, in-between characters, in-between narratives, etc. Rather, to scour a text for its in-between spaces means to experientially ‘enter’ a text by way of being actively associative, i.e. to not only comprehend and actualize the assemblage of aesthetic, structural 21 Rita Felski, “Introduction.” New Literary History 45.2 (Spring 2014): v-xi; vii. 22 Wolfgang Iser, Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) 217ff. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 227 and narrative associations, but to outrightly perform the ontic presence of the associative as such. The act of reading is to actively represent (as in the performative meaning of the German darstellen) the ‘network of associations.’ Yet here, the questions arise: (1) How can we talk about the formal features, i.e. the ‘architecture,’ of the specific space of our experience, and (2) how does the text’s inherent in-betweenness productively relate to it? What complicates straight answers to these questions is the fact that the space in-between is utterly prereflective. The reader co-produces it, but she cannot grasp it. She can move through it, but she cannot all-encompassingly come to terms with it. She cannot store it. 23 As we are always already ‘being with’ the text, we are not merely ‘using’ it to uncover a fictive world and elucidate our judgments about it. Or, as Rita Felski puts it, “while we cannot help but impose ourselves on literary texts, we are also, inevitably, exposed to them.” 24 And even though “[t]he ethos of academic reading diverges significantly from lay reading,” 25 both reading practices treat the literary text as an extraordinary medium of communication, thus providing concentrated insights into the aforementioned network of associations. In either reading mode, the reader engages in this network, searching for in-between spaces in which to tie and secure more connections. Within these spaces and through these connections the reader leaves traces in the text. In a way, it becomes her text and hers to (re-)account for. That is to say that with regards to the tradition of reception aesthetics and literary hermeneutics, we are no longer looking for “the figure in the carpet.” We are knitting it into the fabric. Hence, the reader understands herself to be in proactive relationship with the text. She does not withdraw meaning from a text but co-produces it in her individual and ephemeral space in-between. Or, as Cyrus Hamlin puts it: The reader is thus made aware not only of what [she] understands by reading the text and how the text as discourse communicates such understanding, but more important [she] recognizes the basis for understanding to be the relationship established between [herself] and the text through the act of reading. 26 Thereby, the act of reading can very well be understood as a spatial practice. Arguably, it proves to be impossible to accurately reproduce one’s acts of reading, i.e. one’s experience with a text. Yet I argue that a reception theory, which understands aesthetic experience as the production of and the indulgence into in-between spaces, allows us a more concrete visualization of the network of associations that materializes in our experience with the text. Iser 23 This again relates to Bohrer’s understanding of presence in the literary aesthetics of suddenness (see fn. 19). 24 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature 3. 25 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature 12. 26 Cyrus Hamlin, “The Conscience of Narrative: Toward a Hermeneutics of Transcendence.” New Literary History 13.2 (Winter 1982): 205-30; 206 [emph. C.H.]. 228 d ustin b reitenWischer argues that “the text is the playground,” 27 to which I would like to add that it opens a play-space in and through which it represents its own hermeneutic potential. And even though the reader cannot fully seize the in-between, for there is no outside from where to seize it, the in-between automatically provides the reader with the distance necessary for introspection and self-perception, while at the same time having her in a state of a most immediate and prereflective sensation. 28 With regards to the temporal order of the in-between we may want to think of it (as I noted earlier) as a space of radical suddenness (Bohrer) and presence (Gumbrecht). 29 It is for the sake of its spatiotemporal intensity and its individual elusiveness that the in-between can never solely be equated with the formal features of the object (the structure of the text, the design of the narrative, the language, etc.), the actual space of reception (the living-room, the library, the park), 30 or the diegetic universe of the text (the Pequod, Yoknapatawpha County, or East Egg). Only and strictly in the conjunction of the totality of the literary text and the reader’s aesthetic attitude is it possible for the experience’s imaginary in-between space to emerge. 31 27 Wolfgang Iser, “The Play of the Text” 250. 28 This paradox might be adequately explained with what Winfried Fluck calls “the double reference of fiction.” He writes: “The double reference of fiction creates an object that is never stable and identical with itself. And it is this non-identity that can be seen as an important source of aesthetic experience, because it allows us to do two things at the same time: to articulate imaginary elements and to look at them from the outside” (Winfried Fluck, “The Imaginary and the Second Narrative.” The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Literature after the Transnational Turn. Eds. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar and Johannes Voelz. [Dartmouth: The UP of New England, 2013] 237-64; 241). 29 See fn. 20. 30 And since the in-between functions as somewhat of a fundamental-ontological ‘super concept,’ the actual space of our experience must have a more or less significant influence on the production of the experience’s in-between space. 31 Towards the end of his academic career, Wolfgang Iser had devoted a number of publications to the phenomenon of emergence. He understood his work on emergence as a logical continuity of his work on aesthetic experience and literary anthropology. “Emergence,” Iser writes, “designates the coming into being of hitherto non-existent phenomena” (Wolfgang Iser, “Modes of Emergence.” Aesthetic Transgression: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature. Eds. Thomas Claviez, Ulla Haselstein and Sieglinde Lemke [Heidelberg: Winter, 2006] 19-37; 19). Or, as Aleida Assmann writes in an essay on Iser’s theory of emergence: “Emergence as a solely future-oriented worldview must be marked by extraordinary trust in the free development beyond human will and consciousness. […] Emergence thus signifies permanent movement; the emergent is defined as that which causes the incessant change of lifeworlds” (Aleida Assmann, “Nachwort.” Wolfgang Iser. Emergenz: Nachgelassene und verstreut publizierte Essays. Ed. Alexander Schmitz [Konstanz: Konstanz UP, 2013] 309-20; 316 [transl. D.B.]). With regards to both claims one might very well argue that the in-between is somewhat of an emergent phenomenon. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 229 IV. Being In-Between; or, An Exemplary Reading of Sylvia Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” In the following, I will turn to one of Sylvia Plath’s early poems, “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” (1956), in which the author indulges in a curious celebration of her speaker’s subjectivity. 32 I want to provide an interpretation of this poem by scouring for the self-representation of its inherent in-between spaces. The poem’s first stanza reads as follows: I? I walk alone; The midnight street Spins itself from under my feet; When my eyes shut These dreaming houses all snuff out; Through a whim of mine Over gables the moon’s celestial onion Hangs high. Torn between insecurity and omnipotence the speaker opens the poem by asking “I? ”, ultimately putting herself up for dispute. “I? ”, as in “Am ‘I’ speaking? ”, “Am ‘I’ here? ”, or even “Do ‘I’ exist? ” The “I? ” must strike the reader as a curious question, for it strangely negates matters of self-abstraction as a subject at a point where such self-abstraction is pragmatically and grammatically necessary. 33 For usually, when one is called upon, but in doubt whether it is really oneself who is addressed, the reaction is “Me? ”, as in “Are you calling upon me? ” or “Do you want me to do a particular thing? ” The “I” as a subject towards the world is never in dialogue as an “I” but as a “me.” The “I” is by definition active, not reactive. The addressee is, in short, is never subject but object of an address. The proper grammatical, pragmatical, social and, ultimately, aesthetic reaction of the “I” is therefore to turn itself into a responsive “me.” It is the latter that is spoken to, expected to, looked upon. Hence, Plath’s speaker deliberately breaks with the common social structure of a dialogue by having the “I” put her allegedly prereflective core subjectivity in the place of the usually responsive “me.” Yet I want to suggest that from the outset the speaker’s lack of self-abstraction is not solely a matter of confident self-empowerment but also already an expression of her insecure disposition towards her own poetic universe. Very much in line with what Frederick Buell writes about Plath’s Esther in her novel The Bell Jar, I argue that in her poem “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” Plath’s speaker immediately puts forth herself as her own dialectical other who 32 Sylvia Plath, “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” (1956). The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. 37-38. 33 The following paragraph roughly paraphrases and follows one of George Herbert Mead’s central arguments on self-declamation. Cf. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972) esp. 174ff. 230 d ustin b reitenWischer reveals herself as vulnerably, anxiously, and obsessively self-conscious, yet with a frightening lack of an inner, stable “self”; external events are caught in the web of an intense and ruthlessly analytic self-awareness, one which is anxiously preoccupied with an insufficiency or a vacancy where a self should be. 34 “I? / I walk alone; ” are the first two verses, the alleged loneliness of the second verse immediately referring back to the self-questioning “I? ”. It seems as if there is no need for a responsive “me” when there is nobody around. The “I” revolves around itself. Yet by way of putting herself in question as an “I” the speaker originates in a world that is venturing in existence. For in the beginning, the “I” is without a world. It is upon her as an “I” to create it: “I walk alone; / The midnight street / Spins itself from under my feet; ” It is midnight, the beginning of a new day, and the world literally opens up from underneath the speaker’s feet. Both on the level of the ontological and the poetical, the speaker’s ways of worldand self-making are extraordinarily intriguing for an understanding of what I am calling reading in-between. Ontologically, to employ one of Heidegger’s central insights, the speaker experiences that “[t]he Self, which as such has to lay the basis for itself, can never get that basis into its power; and yet, as existing, it must take over Being-a-basis.” 35 What is more, the “I” as self “is its world existingly,” 36 meaning that the world is always already by way of the self’s being. The self “has to lay the basis” but cannot possibly control that basis - the poetic paradox of all worldmaking. Yet the advantage of poetry is to call the self into coexistence with itself as a self. This is to say that, as Timothy Morton argues, “[t]o write poetry is to force the reader to coexist with fragile phrases, fragile ink, fragile paper: to experience the many physical levels of a poem’s architecture. […] [S]heer coexistence is what there is.” 37 Poetically, the speaker thereby conflates the acts of writing and reading in the practice of worldmaking. The second and third stanzas read: IMake houses shrink And trees diminish By going far; my look’s leash Dangles the puppet-people Who, unaware how they dwindle, Laugh, kiss, get drunk, Nor guess that if I choose to blink They die. 34 Frederick Buell, “Sylvia Plath’s Traditionalism.” boundary 2 5.1 (1976): 195-212; 196. 35 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 330. 36 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 416 [emph. M.H.]. 37 Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History 43.2 (Spring 2012): 205-24; 222. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 231 I When in good humor, Give grass its green Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun With gold; Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold Absolute power To boycott any color and forbid any flower To be. The speaker’s way of worldmaking thus depends on subjective will (“Make houses shrink”), perspective (“And trees diminish / By going far”), moods (“When in good humor”), imagination (“sprang out of my head”), and, most of all, dialogue (“you appear”). The speaker has equipped herself with the task of bringing an aesthetic object into the world, namely herself as an unconditional “I.” It is in and through the appearance of the first person singular and her air of questioned self-examination where an in-between space most notably opens up. The conjunction of writing and reading demolishes the soliloquy. The self-declamation and the self-questioning of the “I” have been turned into the representation of utmost uncertainty and structural openness. As Gadamer writes: “To ask a question means to bring into the open. The openness of what is in question consists in the fact that the answer is not settled. It must still be undetermined, awaiting a decisive answer. The significance of questioning consists in revealing the questionability of what is questioned.” 38 In “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” the speaker is henceforth caught in an aesthetically auspicious balancing act: it is on her to empathetically experience herself in order to enter into a dialogue with herself. In a way, the poem draws a poetic line between early-20th century theories of aesthetic sympathy (Einfühlungstheorie) and mid-20th century literary and philosophical hermeneutics, for, on the one hand, it stages a subject that seems lost in practices of self-externalization (in order to authentically produce art); and, on the other, it forces its subject into a dialogue with itself as someone else (in order to produce understanding). In doing so, the reader witnesses the constitution of a poetical tension, which is aesthetically auspicious, but radically metaphorical, for it is upon her to performatively represent the part of the other in order to establish the poem’s interior dialogue. At this point, I would like to return to the beginning of this essay. As Heinz Schlaffer argues, reading poetry is a performative act because in a way one is always reading a poem out loud, meaning that one cannot browse a poem without the risk of not comprehending anything at all. 39 Schlaffer therefore claims that this mode of reading ultimately leads to the fact that whoever speaks a poem becomes its speaker. This is what he calls the appropriation of poetry. Poems are not merely read; they are taken over: “Whoever speaks or recites a poem […] affords the pronoun’s grammatical person 38 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 357. 39 Heinz Schlaffer, “Die Aneignung von Gedichten” 39ff. 232 d ustin b reitenWischer steadiness and identity through bodily presence.” 40 Much in line with Iser’s aesthetic theory of us as readers being “both ourselves and someone else at the same time,” Schlaffer argues in favor of a specific role-acquisition, which is based on ontic desire and ontological self-understanding. I would even go so far as to say that Schlaffer’s aesthetics of poetry reception radicalize Iser’s understanding of reading as role-play, for the act of appropriation infers deliberate willingness towards instantaneous possession. Plath’s poem stages this powerful and almost authoritative move by having the speaker perform (and, at the same time, ridicule) the role of an omnipotent creator. The speaker makes “houses shrink / And trees diminish”, she gives “grass its green” and “endow[s] the sun / With gold”, and she holds “Absolute power”. The “I” is putting itself into a tense and expectant relationship with itself as that “I,” thus surrounding herself with an aura of “the partially frustrated, partially satisfied will to create.” 41 Accordingly, each of the four stanzas starts with the verse “I.” Yet for the speaker to be that selfproclaimed “I” means to be utterly alone, separated and secluded from the imperfect world and all its inhabitants around it. At this point, one could read the “I” as a precursor of the speaker in Plath’s 1961 poem “Mirror.” 42 Here, the objectified I (as subjectified object) opens the poem by saying: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. / Whatever I see I swallow immediately / Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. / I am not cruel, only truthful -“. Therefore, one can very well attest these poems a fissure between the figure and the texts that contain it, since the texts are themselves traces of the imagination. Torn between Plath’s overwhelming need to write and her equally overwhelming self-doubt, the poems implicitly contradict themselves, denying the possibility of their own existence. Their voice is energized by its very disablement. 43 “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” is an artist’s dialogue with its object, with herself, with the reader, with the public, with an imaginary or a significant other. Hence, the final stanza reads as follows: IKnow you appear Vivid at my side, Denying you sprang out of my head, Claiming you feel Love fiery enough to prove flesh real, Though it’s quite clear All you beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, From me. 40 Heinz Schlaffer, “Die Aneignung von Gedichten” 42 [transl. D.B.]. 41 Steven Gould Axelrod and Nan Dorsey, “The Drama of Creativity in Sylvia Plath’s Early Poems.” Pacific Coast Philology 32.1 (1997): 76-86; 78. 42 Sylvia Plath, “Mirror” (1961). The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992. 173-74. 43 Steven Gould Axelrod, “The Mirror and the Shadow: Plath’s Poetic of Self-Doubt.” Contemporary Literature 26.3 (Fall 1985): 286-301; 290. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 233 Here, the “you” can be understood as a multitude of others, whereas according to the logic of the soliloquy the speaker first and foremost turns to herself and (or rather, as) the poetic universe she embodies. Due to this tilted mirroring effect and since we cannot possibly equate the speaker with the outside author the “I” is as much part of that universe as the “houses,” the “trees,” the “sun” of the first three stanzas, and, not the least, the “you” of the final stanza. Following Schlaffer, to be the speaker of a poem ultimately means to not simply be the producer and reproducer of one’s own speech act but to play an essential part in the verbalization of one’s core self. The speaker’s power to potentially “forbid” her world “to be” signifies the fragile state of imminent self-annihilation. This is stressed by the embracing rhyme of “to be” and “from me.” Being is a self-given gift, for nothing can be by the speaker, which is outside her speech (and, hence, her reach). Whereas the “you” believes to “prove flesh real”, the “I” knows that reality is always already staged reality. In a two-fold way, the speaker’s world is a mindscape: on the one hand, it is a fictive ‘as if’ world with its own aesthetic self-purpose; on the other hand, it is a potential ‘not yet’ world that distributes its dividend to the real. Both these worlds deny the legitimacy of truth (“forbid any flower / To be”) and rather embody the truthfulness of their possibilities. It is the highest principle of these worlds to be proclaimed, and it is only upon (self-) proclamation that they are possible, which amounts to the presumption of the aforementioned staged reality. *** As to the potential politics of the in-between, the discussed struggle in Plath’s poem can also more generally be understood as an extensive, i.e. space-consuming, act of longed-for recognition and/ or resistance. From this perspective, the aesthetic would not demolish the politics of the poem but instead stage its own politics as a gateway to individual, social, and cultural identification (which, of course, refers back to my earlier discussion of predominantly non-aesthetic ‘in-between’ spaces). This is to say that a theory of aesthetic in-betweenness bears the potential to not only counter anti-aesthetic sentiments but to make them obsolete. In the past thirty years, as Heinz Ickstadt argues, “particularly in American Studies, the aesthetic - mostly for political and ideological reasons - has fallen into disrepute. 44 ” Due to radical antihegemonic revisions and the (necessary) implementation of a wide range of identity studies the aesthetic has come under scrutiny to be ominously indifferent to matters of identity, difference and ideological resistance. “The aesthetic,” Ickstadt continues, “has been denounced from various positions as repressive, as immoral, as hopelessly fetishistic and ideological.” 45 In accordance with Ickstadt’s analysis, my theory of aesthetic theory and literary reception argues in favor of “aesthetics different in purpose, use, and 44 Heinz Ickstadt, “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliot (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002) 263-78; 263. 45 Heinz Ickstadt, “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics” 264. 234 d ustin b reitenWischer function at different historical moments or for different social groups,” 46 for this allows us to exceed the in-between’s aesthetic limits by way of turning towards its sociopolitical inclusiveness. This means that we must not equate the in-between, as I presented it, with a space of cultural hegemony, in which preordained suppressions establish their full potential (race, class, gender, etc.), but rather as a play-space for an infinite amount of participatory roles and identity conceptions (i.e. the role of woman, man, lover, poet, etc.). With regards to my reading of Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist,” one would underestimate the aesthetic potential of the “I” were it merely understood as a hegemonizing apparatus, a gap, a void, or an empty signifier. As an offer to the experience’s space in-between the “I” becomes a performative display of an aesthetically forced (and forcefully produced) rift - a rift between diegetic speaker and non-diegetic reader. Hence, in the appropriation of the “I” the reader also appropriates this rift. The in-between thereby appears as a site of struggle over the poetic life-world, a site of “vivid appearance.” In turn, the speaker’s excess becomes an invasion of the poem’s non-diegetic counterpart. At this point, it becomes deliberately unclear whose “beauty” and whose “wit” is a “gift” from whom. Both poem and reader claim: “From me.” In fact, the speaker discharges a force against the anxiety of her own looming disappearance. Her turn towards the non-diegetic life-world of the reader is an expression of a dire melancholic struggle. At the same time, it is the most powerful poetic expression of her utter unknowability of herself without the mirroring, i.e. appropriating, other. The “I” cannot know itself as an “I.” The latter constantly appears as a presence, which it tries to comply with. Both modes of “I” and “I” that have been sketched here do not entirely match because they are doomed to exist in slightly separate temporal spheres - the spheres of appearing and appropriation. Yet this unresolvable aloofness marks the space in-between, which the reader’s experience desires to fill. It is at this point where also the reader is fundamentally invited to overcome the boundaries of her own identity. The speaker, on the other hand, turns from being a poetical force to an aesthetic presence. Even though she might be, in Iser’s words, “entangled” with her self-depiction, her entanglement proves to be an extraordinary entry point for the reader’s own intratextual entanglement. 47 But the reader, as it turns out, is not solely entangled in a world that opens up in front of her eyes. Rather, she is grabbed and held by the dilemmatic disposition of her non-identical appropriation. Both speaker and reader are drawn into parallel ‘to and fro’ movements between self-extension and self-recovery. However, this partially self-estranging move allows the reader to use the semblance of her self-estranging otherness in order to find out what she has experienced. The experience the reader has made immediately becomes part of her present aesthetic (and productive) ‘self-abandonment.’ Gadamer refers to this state as the moment of being outside oneself (Außersichsein), 48 in which the reader is capable to remain true to herself and also step outside herself 46 Heinz Ickstadt, “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics” 264. 47 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading 230. 48 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 122. Reading In-Between: Interpretation as Experience 235 in order to grasp the complete playfulness of a text’s excessive ‘as if’ world and its relation to the reader’s self-understanding. In fact, in Plath’s poem the reader experiences her own self in radical openness. We might, in the words of Georgiana Banita, speak of a “unique interplay between image and self-image.” 49 Being outside herself turns out to be the mode in which she, as Gadamer puts it, “acquired a new horizon within which something can become an experience.” 50 In and through these modes of poetic and aesthetic self-abandonment, the poem manages to openly turn towards an in-between space, in which the radical act of scrutinizing an undisputed deixis performatively stages the surrounding reality and the truthfulness of human subjectivity. By resiliently moving to and fro, extension and appropriation become modes of performative doubling that go well beyond the appearance of mirroring effects. The “I” does not ask the reader to face her; she rather transforms herself into becoming that very gaze. 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