191
This subject is discussed in relation to El amigo Manso in my «Máximo Manso: The 'Molde' and the 'Hechura'», Anales Galdosianos, 12 (1977), 63-70.
192
The Experimental Novel, p. 30.
193
Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), p. 155.
194
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1969), p. 307.
195
Francisco Ruiz Ramón, Tres personajes galdosianos (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1964), p. 198.
196
For a discussion of this critical device, see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 223-24.
197
«Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction», in J. Hillis Miller, ed., Aspects of Narrative (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 14 and 10.
198
Roland Barthes' consideration of a related problem in the final sentence of a story of Balzac is also interesting in this context, although it would be more defensible to stress the invitation to thought in «And the Marquise remained pensive» rather than «infinite openness». Barthe's own earlier analysis -not to mention his theory about the parsimonious plurality of the classic text- would seem to contradict him at this juncture. Nevertheless, these pages confirm Iser's theory and further illuminate the Torquemada issue. See S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 216-17. Other studies that are particularly useful for the study of indeterminacy and commentary include Iser's own The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974) and his The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), as well as Ross Chambers' «Commentary in Literary Texts», Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 323-37. Chambers sees commentary as «an invitation to interpret..., a form of textual strategy aimed at involving the reader in the concerns of the text» (p. 329). «Commentary does not not in any way designate the right way to read a text; it must, on the contrary, be read as part of the text, and most particularly as forming a part of the text's strategies of meaningfulness; so a correct reading of the text will necessarily include an interpretation of the relationship between commentary and topic in the text» (p. 334).
199
The character/person dichotomy is stressed here because of seeming confusion en this distinction in relation to the religious question when an earlier version of this paper was discussed at the 1976 MLA convention. A revealing treatment of the problem can be found in William H. Gass' Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), pp. 34-54. Gass, himself a novelist, considers a literary character to be «(1) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling conception, (5) an instrument of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy. But... not a person. He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him» (p. 44). For corroboration of this position from another novelist, see John Updike's amusing but revealing poem on the subject, «Marching Through a Novel», in Tossing and Turning (New York: Knopf, 1977). For a critic's view, see Norman N. Holland's chapter on «Character and Identification» in The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Norton, 1975). pp. 262-80. All this is not to deny, of course, that a novelist -and most assuredly a nineteenth-century realist- has multiple intentions, among them being the reader's illusion that the work is presenting «real people». However, a distanced critic's concerns are formal -as opposed to those of an in-dwelling reader- and he must escape the spider's web if he is to understand its snare. In an essay originally published in 1924, J. Tynjanov tells us that «Only recently have we outgrown the type of criticism which considers (and judges) the heroes found in novels as living people». See «Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse», in Matejka and Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics, p. 126. On the contrary, we have still not outgrown such criticism.
200
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), p. 65.