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The Way of the Chameleon in Iser, Beckett, and Yeats: Figuring Death and the Imaginary in"The Fictive and the Imaginary" Author(s): John Paul Riquelme Source: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter, 2000),

pp. 57-71Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057587Accessed: 14-03-2015 07:16 UTC

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The Way of the Chameleon in

Iser, Beckett, and Yeats:

Figuring Death and the Imaginary in The Fictive and the Imaginary

John Paul Riquelme

When I try to put it all into a phrase, I say, Man

can embody truth but he cannot know it. I must

embody it in the completion of my life. The

abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its

contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not. . .

the Song of Sixpence. W. B. Yeats, Letter of 4 January 19391

Chameleon in spite of himself, there you have

Molloy, viewed from a certain angle. Samuel Beckett, Molloy2

I. Hodos Chameleontis: Plenitude and Death

In their quite different texts and styles, Samuel Beckett and

Wolfgang Iser follow what Yeats in his autobiography, alluding to

alchemical traditions, calls hodos chameleontis, the way of the chame

leon. Iser takes Beckett up into his own travelling of this path most

obviously when he writes about Beckett's work. The merging of their

paths is particularly arresting in the discussion of Beckett that Iser inserts at a crucial moment in The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting

Literary Anthropology, which is a work of theoretical speculation, not

literary interpretation. His remarks on Beckett there are a part of his

theoretical discourse rather than a digression from it.

The dual standing of Beckett's works in Iser's writings, as texts for

interpretation and as, in effect, a component in the theorizing, invites

looking through both ends of the telescope: at Beckett through Iser and at Iser through Beckett. Doing so necessarily raises the -issue of the fit between theory and interpretive method, an issue that Iser has been concerned with frequently, most explicitly in his essay "Key Concepts in Current Literary Theory and the Imaginary."3 One hermeneutical fit between theory and literature can come into being when the reader or

New Literary History, 2000, 31: 57-71

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58 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the writer of a theoretical text brings to the text attitudes generated by

literary works that have themselves contributed to producing the

theoretical text. That fit is possible again when we turn eventually from a theory to the interpretation of literary texts that have contributed to

the theoretical formulations. A dynamic crossover between literary text

and theoretical discourse is likely to be a matter of rhetorical figures and

their implications, not primarily a matter of logical argumentation, whether speculative or interpretative. Looking through both ends of the

telescope can become a kind of binocular vision of a sort that is

potentially self-testing, self-adjusting, and self-correcting. The testing,

adjusting, and correcting are neither a technical matter nor an abstract

one.

The path of the chameleon discernible in both Iser and Beckett is, as

in Heraclitus's fragment about the hodos that is both catahodos and

anahodos, a way up that is also a way down, a way forward that is a way

back, and a response to living, even the end or goal of living, that is also

a response to dying, another kind of end to and of living. Traversing the

path enables looking in two directions. Yeats concludes the section

called Hodos Chameleontis in his autobiographical writings by introducing his theory of masks.4 He takes Oscar Wilde's ideas about masks and

elaborates them into the notion that self and anti-self in the artist are

linked. Wilde expressed the double, antithetical vision that Yeats took

over in his essay "The Truth of Masks," from Intentions, when he says in

the closing

sentences that "A truth in art is that whose contradictory is

also true."5 It is this kind of insight about the simultaneous coexistence

of opposites, with its challenge to Aristotelian logic, that links Beckett

and Iser in ways that make Wilde and Yeats also relevant. Although I do

not pursue such a description here, a coherent sketch of modernism

from Wilde to Beckett could be elaborated from the connections among these writers. Any persuasive description of modernism would have to

take such connections centrally into account.

In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser scrutinizes various thinkers'

descriptions of imagination. He does so as part of an attempt to clarify the central role in culture of literary play. His attempt provides access to

the path of the chameleon, as does Yeats's statement about embodying truth but not knowing it and about refuting philosophical arguments

but not poetry. The unsayable, ungraspable character of truth for Yeats,

his reference to death in the ambiguous phrase "completion of my life," the recognition that abstract language is not adequate to express life's

truths, and the suggestion that art can realize those truths more fully than philosophical discourse are all pertinent to reading Iser's work and

Beckett's.

"Completion of my life" in Yeats's statement "I must embody it [truth]

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 59

in the completion of my life" suggests that life as something partial can

be made complete, presumably by aesthetic means. The artist is capable of bringing life to a state of completion. But "completion of my life" also

suggests my death, which Yeats was contemplating, as a primary way in

which humankind embodies a truth that it can neither know nor

control. Imaginative activity and death bring life to apparently antitheti

cal completions that are, in fact, linked. They are connected because art

responds to and even arises from our shared human experience of

limits, with death as the ultimate form of unavoidable limitation that we

all face.

Iser draws on Beckett to articulate a related view in language quite different from Yeats's ambiguous statement about completion, but he

does so, nevertheless, in a way that invites extension and interpretation

concerning human limits and potentials. In an essay first published in

English over twenty years ago, "The Pattern of Negativity in Beckett's

Prose," Iser comments on the way that Beckett's work reveals "the nature

of man's inescapable limitations" (P51), which involve the retaining of

something within an "insurmountable finiteness" that is the opposite of the finite. He goes on to say: "Herein lies the true significance of

Beckett's negativity, for finiteness means being without alternatives, and

this intolerable condition explodes into an endless productivity" (P51). Iser concludes the essay by asserting that we recognize through Beckett's

achievement that "explanations are not

possible?the most we can do is

experience the unknowable." Iser begins the same commentary by

quoting Sartre's statement that "'concrete negativity

. . . retains for itself

that which it rejects, and is completely colored by it.'" In my Yeatsian

reading of Iser's reading of Beckett, the concrete negativity of Beckett's art involves a

recognition of mortality in a mortal no that permeates his

art's proliferating response to finitude. That response cannot explain

the truth of finitude's unbounded plenitude, but it can evoke and even

embody it. A related evocation and embodiment of finitude's abun dance in The Fictive and the Imaginary emerges in a dense pattern of

figurative language as part of an

apparently abstract discourse.

II. Iser's Figures: Chameleon and Holophrase

In The Fictive and the Imaginary, the phrase "the chameleon of

cognition" occurs prominently as the rubric for the concluding section of the third of six chapters.6 With regard to the book's chapter arrangement, this section is located exactly in the middle. In the third

chapter Iser surveys and comments on ways in which fiction has been thematized in philosophical discourse. He uses the word "protean" in

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60 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

this section, but the chameleon calls attention to itself more emphati

cally because it is mentioned both in the section title, "The Chameleon

of Cognition: Some Conclusions about Fiction," and in the discussion.

The chameleon then apparently vanishes, but in my reading it only

changes color, recurring later in a variety of hues (as the protean,

kaleidoscopes, shifts, transpositions, self-transposings, boundary cross

ings, dual counterings, contraflows) and in numerous oppositional

pairings (decomposition and composition, nullification and enabling, free and instrumental play, and the like). The book's character changes with the introduction of the chameleon, which is an early note of an

eventual crescendo. The change involves Iser's use of the

phrase "the

chameleon of cognition" as a figure for fiction that differs from the

thematizing of fiction in philosophical discourse. Iser's writing has the

appearance of an abstract, cognitive discourse that forms part of a

tradition of philosophical speculation about creativity and culture.

Because many of his terms contribute to a sequence of mutually

illuminating, reciprocally defining figures, they suggest that The Fictive

and the Imaginary is, in fact, not discursive at crucial points. This

nondiscursive quality is one of the truths that the chameleon embodies.

At each of the book's nondiscursive moments, the conceptual implica

tions of the language tend to be emphatically nontotalizing and self

transforming. A particularly clear example

of this tendency occurs at

another important point in the sequence of the book's argument, in the

final pages of the last section, "Staging as Anthropological Category." In

these concluding pages, Iser introduces a curious compound term,

"fractured 'holophrase'" (?T302). The unusual term holophrasedenotes a

single word that stands for a complex of ideas. The term appears three

times in the final two pages, first simply as "'holophrase'" (cited from the

work of Sir Richard Paget), then as "fractured 'holophrase,'" and finally,

in the antepenultimate sentence as "ever-fractured 'holophrase.'"

The

increasingly emphatic repetition marks the maximum moment of the

book's rhetorical and conceptual crescendo.

This is the point in the book's final paragraph at which Iser asserts

that, because "cognitive discourse cannot capture the duality" of staging, "we have literature" (7<7303). If we accept Oscar Wilde's claim that truth

in art involves a doubling,

Iser's statement resembles Yeats's stance in his

letter concerning the difference between philosophy and verse. Iser's

assertion about cognitive discourse is a conclusion that emerges from

the argument that he has pursued for more than three hundred pages. At the same time, in so far as the argument has relied on cognitive discourse, it is an act of stepping back from that argument. The difficulty that Iser faces and acknowledges is one that Beckett notes in the fifty

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 61

fifth section of /// Seen III Said, where he writes: "How explain it? And

without going so far how say it?"7

Many of the terms in Iser's book, including key phrases such as

"fractured 'holophrase,'" are not

quite at home in

cognitive discourse.

As a consequence, they invite and enable us to recognize something that

the argument cannot itself articulate precisely. The discussion contains

its own figurative supplement that turns out to be a primary way to evoke

the character of the study's subject. The figures "say it," but they do not

"explain it." Any attempt to describe the book's methods and proce dures that does not attend to this supplement is incomplete, since the

supplement is not a distraction or digression from the study but rather an integral part of it. The book's lengthy penultimate paragraph, for

example, is marked by a rhetoric of plasticity and openness that

prepares us for the final statement of the closing paragraph. It includes

unfolding (twice), opening up (twice), exhibition, changing patterns, the mirror of possibilities, luring into shape the fleetingness of the

possible, shifting, transposition, and self-transposing.

"Fractured 'holophrase'" is an important example

not only because of

its placement but because as a trope it pulls

us simultaneously

in two

directions. Iser ascribes related dualities of effect to staging but claims

that cognitive discourse cannot capture them. The term is a compound, antithetical figure. Holophrase is a synecdoche, for it means that one

thing stands for a complex whole, even for a network that we

might

ordinarily understand metonymically as the conjoining of many parts. The adjective fractured, however, qualifies

or even removes the whole

ness. The figure, then, resembles a golden bowl that has been cracked, or Humpty Dumpty, whose fragments are permanently sundered. The

synecdoche (holophrase) that stands for a metonymy (the complex of

ideas) is transformed by "fractured" into an irony (something that is not

identical with itself), or into another metonymy (the fractured parts). No matter whether we understand "fractured" as

creating an

irony or a

metonymy, the synecdoche of holophrase has been countered. In the

compound trope, figures with contrary implications have been con

joined in a way that poses difficulties for cognitive discourse. In this case, it pushes the discourse in directions that it otherwise could not go.

Having climbed as far as possible up the rhetorical and conceptual ladder of cognitive discourse, Iser here kicks off from the top rung.

Iser's chameleon is as puzzling and revealing a figure in its context as "fractured 'holophrase.'" The English word chameleon and its German

cognate come to us through Latin from a Greek root, khamai, which means "on the ground." The Indo-European root dhghem- that stands behind the Greek root gives us various words, all of which refer to the

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62 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

earth, including chthonic (having to do with gods and spirits of the

underworld), autochthon and autochthonic (referring to something sprung from the land itself, something aboriginal or indigenous), humus (a word that evokes decomposition and decay but also renewal and

enabling), inhume and exhume (having to do with burial and its oppo

site), transhumance (the seasonal transfer of livestock from one locale to

another), and finally the word human. These words can help bring Iser's

wide-ranging book into a general focus and throw some light on the

chameleon's status in his discourse and on the chameleonic character of

that discourse.

The large issues in Iser's book are obviously anthropological ones;

they pertain to the question of what it means to be human. He looks into

something that he argues is autochthonous, or indigenous, or aborigi nal, or innate about the human. That intrinsic aspect of the human is for

Iser chameleonic. Transhumance and related matters are elements

sometimes mentioned in pastoral or bucolic literature, which Iser

discusses at length in his writings, including in chapter 2 of The Fictive

and the Imaginary. We can think of the shifting of positions that is

transhumance as a boundary crossing (from one locale to another, one

season to another, one stage of development to another). A boundary

crossing, as Iser uses that term, is the activity of a chameleonic creature.

Inhume and exhume may remind us of the excursus at the end of

chapter 4, which together with the immediately preceding section,

"Interplay between the Fictive and the Imaginary," occupies a place

parallel to the section at the end of chapter 3 involving the chameleon.

These structurally parallel, related closing sections of chapters 3 and 4

concerning the fictive, the imaginary, and Beckett work in tandem in the

crucial late middle of the book's argument. The excursus deals with

Beckett's "Imagination Dead Imagine," which has to do with the

simultaneous inhuming and exhuming of imagination. Beckett's title

captures this double movement if we read it in the way that Iser does as

the imagining of the imagination as dead. The issue of death, called up

explicitly by the title of Beckett's work, in relation to the fictive and the

imaginary is important at various points in Iser's book, including in the

closing of the section immediately preceding the one on interplay. Death

is the chameleon's other, both its opposite and its mutually defining

counterpart. In death we cross a boundary that cannot be recrossed; the

ground claims us. There is no humus in Iser's commentary, but there is

decomposition, and that too brings us back to ground and to mortality.

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 63

III. Capturing Beckett and Other Imaginary Creatures

Beckett's "Imagination Dead Imagine" holds a surprising place in The

Fictive and the Imaginary. We can understand that place by drawing an

analogy between Iser's work and Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.

The analogy has to do with contradictory tendencies and implications within Iser's writings and Beckett's. Iser provides us with a thorough

typology of concepts of the imagination, in effect a periodic table of the

imagination, as it has been conceived in intellectual history; he provides an equally thorough typology of play. The typological tendency is also

evident frequently elsewhere in his writings. In the essay "Representa tion: A Performative Act," for instance, he sketchs the variety of forms

that representation, understood as a process of bridging, can take. His

attempt to map imagination and related aspects of aesthetic experience in the process of "charting" literary anthropology bears comparison to

the chart that the Captain uses in Carroll's poem. In the words of the

crew, that map is "A perfect and absolute blank," as is apparent in the

Ocean chart illustrated in Carroll's text.8

The quality within humanity that Iser attempts to elucidate always eludes capture, except to the extent that, through

a reaching that

exceeds our grasp, we conceive of it and express its character as

inherently double and antithetical. Dual in character, imagination, a

strange compound like Carroll's snark (snake/shark), avoids capture by our usual conventions for mapping positions. Carroll's illustration

presents the snark's location as a fluid one in an ocean that cannot be

adequately framed because there are no landmarks. Its fluidity is countered by its opposite, a frame based on assumptions about

determinacy and positive knowledge that helps make fluidity recogniz able for what it is through a conjunction that in turn allows for

recognition of the frame's dimensions by comparison with all that the frame is not. Like cognitive discourse, the frame, which sets limits, has its limitations. The blank space that represents the ocean in Carroll's text,

like the various blanks, gaps, and other indeterminate openings that Iser identifies in his writings about aesthetic response, stimulates our imagi

native activity and resists easy explanation. It is rendered in the poem's language by details that present the conflation of opposites. The

Captain, for

example, instructs the helmsman to "Steer to starboard, but

keep her head larboard." In the hunting process, the vessel is "snarked" when "the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes." The way forward has become the way back. To be "snarked" can be both to be

misled by the attempt to follow the snark's path and to participate in its character.

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64

NORTH

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

EQUATOR

Scale of Milts.

From The Hunting of the Snark, "Fit the Second.'

Ocean chart

The literal blank in Carroll's poem, one of the few in the history of literature accompanied by an illustration, finds its counterpart and

opposite in the black page of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a text about which Iser has written extensively.9 The emptiness of that page is of another kind, though it resists explanation as persistently as the unchartable ocean.

This other unusual instance of a literal textual blank does not

represent the fluidity and life of an imaginary creature who cannot be

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 65

From Tristram Shandy, Ch. 12.

captured and whose location cannot be mapped. It represents instead a

heart of darkness that remains perpetually to be mapped by those who

attempt to explore its precincts. This literal emptiness and silence

respond to the death of Yorick, a double for Tristram, who narrates his own story in a vain but determined attempt to capture the shape, direction, and meaning of his own life. Taken together these illustra tions provide a conjunction like that of the yin and the yang. The limitless plasticity of imagination that comes into focus as a kind of blank and duality when we attempt to frame it is matched and reversed by the

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66 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

fact of death as both an unalterable limit in human experience and a

motive for the workings of imagination. Iser allows various islands to float into the cognitive grids by which he

maps the imagination. Central among these is "Imagination Dead

Imagine." But the result of his doing so resembles Robert Graves's

poem, "Warning to Children," in which the opening of a box on an

island reveals a simulacrum of the scene in which the original box was

placed. Because of the nature of play, the box has to be opened, in spite of the warning that accompanies it. A related, potentially endless,

nesting and repetition of elements occurs in Jan Potocki's film, The

Sarragosso Manuscript, which Tzvetan Todorov discusses in The Fantastic.

When Iser turns to "Imagination Dead Imagination" in his "Excursus" on Beckett and "Fantasy Literature," he engages a literary text that

conjoins opposites in chiastic patterns of oscillation and recursion. The

linking of imagination and death in Beckett's work involves a spiraling process in which the imagination is invited to imagine itself as dead; in

effect, to imagine death. The details of the text frequently take the form

of chiasmus, a rhetorical structure marked by repetition and reversal.

Chiasmus occurs as a rhetorical figure and structurally in the work, for

example, in the movement of "resuming, or

reversing," and in "the rise

now fall, the fall rise" of light and heat, as both recede and return "till

the initial level is reached whence the fall began."11 Two

figures, a man and a woman, are described in a structure

presented geometrically that resembles the form of the yin and the yang. This human yin and yang consists of "partners" both lying "On their

right sides" "back to back head to arse" (184) .The narrator describes

them as if inscribed in a circle that is intelligible as part of a mathemati

cal "proof." Each is "inscribed" in a "semicircle" defined by identifiable

points, ACB and ADB. The description recalls the positions of Leopold and Molly Bloom, with Leopold's head at the foot of the bed, at the end

of the "Ithaca" episode and in the "Penelope" episode of Ulysses. The

geometrical figure also recalls Joyce's geometrical construction in the

"Schoolroom" episode of Finnegans Wake, a construction that alludes to

Yeats's presentation of the gyres graphically in A Vision as a way to

understand the deaths and births of civilizations. But Beckett's structure

is also Heraclitus's stream, since within it we experience "never twice the

same storm." A related experience of difference and doubling is made

possible by Beckett's language. The diagram, as in Joyce's schoolroom

and Yeats's prophetic writings, is part of a "proof," but more precisely it

is "world still proof against enduring tumult." It is stillness set against tumult, that is, in antagonistic relation to tumult and physically set

against a background that can be called tumult. But the proof is "still," both continuing and dead. This world as proof provides an argument

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 67

against the "enduring" character of tumult. "Enduring," however, can be

a present participai

rather than an adjective.

As a consequence, the

proof's validity has to be judged against the fact that we continue

"enduring tumult." On the one hand, we have a "world" that is still, but

it is also whirled still in a tumult that is rendered as a situation with limits

but whose oscillations are aleatory and unpredictable in character. Like

a M?bius strip or the surface of a sphere, the text's space and the

character of the experience evoked in it are finite but unbounded. As

Iser says in his essay on Beckett's negativity, we are faced with an

apparent lack of alternatives but also with the possibility of "endless

productivity." The yin and the yang and its avatars have a place in Iser's writings

from his early publications in English to the much later The Fictive and

the Imaginary with its double, antithetical formulations and figures. The

yin and the yang are implicit as early as Iser's influential 1971 essay

"Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction" in his

reference to the work of Rudolf Arnheim (.P36). The essay by Arnheim

that Iser cites there concerns the perceptual analysis of the tai chi tuan, or yin and yang, as a symbol for interaction.12 In his later writings about

creativity, like Beckett in "Imagination Dead Imagine," Iser turns to

structures of interaction presented as doublings and oppositions in

order to map the way new things come into being in human experience. Beckett himself reflects on how writing comes into being in various

works in ways that provide a counterpart and perhaps

even an inspira

tion for some of Iser's insights and discursive strategies. "Company," for

example, can be understood as a text about "devising

it all for company"

(NO 33), producing works for an audience, who are invited as company, and for performers,

who are a company of actors, but also to keep the

writer company in an act of doubling involving resemblance and

reversal. Beckett's representations of the creative act lend themselves at

times to being understood and inscribed as a version of the yin and the

yang. This is so in "Company" when the narrator presents his character

"feeling the need for company again" and telling "himself to call the

hearer M at least": "Himself some other character. W." (NO SI). Rather

than psychological presences, these characters are characters of the

alphabet. In "Company," Beckett could have presented M and W, like

the figures in "Imagination Dead Imagine," as man and woman, but male

pronouns are applied

to both. "W" could be writer, whose creature "M,"

perhaps W's me, is his double, though orthographically inverted in a

curious mirroring. The orthographical inversion but identical shapes of

M and W as they are presented in this context encourages their

representation as a version of the tai chi tuan:

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68 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

"Devising it all himself included for company," the character W speaks of his devised character M as if it were himself: "He says further to

himself referring to himself, When last he referred to himself it was to

say he was in the same dark as his creature" (NO 31). Being in the dark

in this text is both a literal situation and the position of not knowing where or who we are. Out of that position, there emerges the recogni

tion that there is "no improvement" (NO 33) likely but that there are

questions to be asked and statements to be added. The questions give rise not to answers of a determinate sort but to ambiguities, indetermi

nacies, and openness. One of these questions involves the possibility of

choosing: "Could he now if he chose move out of the dark he chose

when last heard of and away from his creature into another?" (NO 31

32). Whether this is the narrator's report of the characters thoughts or

a question the narrator raises about W, it is not clear if the language concerns

moving into another "creature" or into another "dark." In

effect, it leaves us in the dark. Because M is characterized by

"unnamability" and the fact that "M must go," "W reminds himself of his

creature" (NO 33). The ambiguous language suggests that W remembers

his creature, whose qualities he has temporarily forgotten and must

remind himself of, and that he resembles M, who reminds him of

himself. Finally, in this process of the "Devised deviser devising it all for

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 69

company," W is "In the same figment dark as his figments" and "for good not yet devised" (NO 33). His permanent state is to be "for good," or

always, in an unfinished condition, and that situation, which involves

being in the dark, is beneficial, or "for good," as a condition of perpetual

potential.

Play's doubled, self-differentiating, self-transforming character, as

literature realizes it, is its chameleonic quality. Chameleons change color under certain circumstances, including

to protect themselves from

enemies, to attract mates, or to threaten rivals, but probably not as a

matter of play or performance in the way that we would predicate play or performance of humans. Human play includes the alliterative play with language by children. At age nine my son Victor told me about "the

chameleon's curious color-changing capabilities." The echoic language of writers (devised deviser devising) is also a matter of play, as is the use

of chameleons, or ground lions, to describe fiction's relation to

cogni

tion, a relation that includes echo-like doublings. Fiction is the chame

leon of cognition. It refuses to maintain a singular shape

to accommo

date abstract attempts to define it by cognitive discourse, which threatens

it. Iser's discourse, which is not narrowly cognitive, changes its rhetorical

colors so that this unnamable creature will not disappear entirely from

view.

IV. The Chameleon as Translation

Iser's discourse is a matter of translation, as is Beckett's writing. The

writing process for both involves translation. As with Beckett's works, Iser's exist in two versions, neither of which takes precedence

over the

other. Each text has a double with which it is not identical, though the

doubles are counterparts, like W and M. The Fictive and the Imaginary is a

work of theory, but it is also a form of practice in various ways, including the practice of translation. It is constituted by translation in a transitive

way through the act that turned a German text into an English one. And

it includes various kinds of intransitive translations, or crossings-over.

One of the boundary crossings, death, puts an end to those preceding it,

against whose enduring tumult we understand it imperfectly. It is the last

translation in the sense of final and not just previous. The word chameleon is itself a translation of two Assyrian words, nes

qaqqari, that mean ground lion; that is, the figure in the middle of Iser's

translated book is already the result of a boundary crossing, for it rests

on an attempt to render literally into Greek a phrase from Assyrian that

was already complexly figurative, simultaneously metonymical (next to

the earth) and metaphorical (like a lion). I would speculate that the

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70 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

word is a kind of diminutive that combines terror and play, tragedy and

comedy, which for Wilde constitute together the truth of masks and of art. As with a child's stuffed animal, the chameleon looks fierce, like a

lion, but its threats and its potential are of a different order. This fused and already translated figure typifies Iser's book, literally a work in

translation whose language is dual in its fusion of cognitive discourse with complex figurations. The book's chameleonic character linguisti

cally and rhetorically embodies but does not explain its subject. Beckett once said of Finnegans Wake that it was not "about something" but was

instead "that something itself." Iser's book may be as close an enactment

of its subject as anyone is likely to achieve by means of language that is

ostensibly discursive. The study's own processes and terms become a

staging of its subject. At the end of the section that deals with

"Imagination Dead Imagine," Iser remarks that "only language that consumes itself can give articulation to the imaginary" (FI246). He has Beckett in mind, but in another mode The Fictive and the Imaginary is itself an

example of that self-consuming articulation.

One point that Iser makes repeatedly is that the fictive is groundless, that it has no substratum and is not a substratum. He says that in the

section that refers to the chameleon, and he makes the claim emphati

cally for the fictive, for the imaginary, and for play in the last two sections

of chapter 5. His subject is a groundless chameleon, a lion of the ground that has no

ground, that subsists on a kind of air, as chameleons

traditionally were thought to do. Rather than a debilitating contradic

tion, we have here a duality that marks the need for staging and defies

cognitive unraveling. Like "Imagination Dead Imagine," the groundless chameleon is a truth in art, in this case a truth of and about anthropo

logical tendencies.

Humankind is a groundless

creature that finds itself on the ground, in

the midst of multiple translations that have a singular end. It embodies

truth but does not know it as it changes forms through performance,

including the performance of translation and other echoic, boundary

crossing processes. The interplay of fictive and imaginary that produces

proliferating possibilities is living, but its apparently endlessly changing character is no more knowable or namable than a creature of the

ground who has no ground. Endless change in this context responds to

and vivifies a life that changes because it is mortal, the human always on

its way to becoming humus. Is the chameleon a figure of living or of

dying? The answer is surely yes. Is it possible to "refute" Iser, as Yeats says we can "refute Hegel," on abstract grounds? Section 33 of "111 Seen 111

Said" provides an answer: "Was it ever over and done with

questions? . . .

Over and done with answering. With not being able. With not being able

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 71

not to want to know. With not being able. No. Never. A dream. Question answered" (NO 70).

Boston University

NOTES

Renderings of the navigational chart, the black page, and the yin and yang were produced

by Marie-Anne Verougstraete, whose work I acknowledge with gratitude. 1 W. B. Yeats, The Letters ofW. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York, 1955), p. 922.

2 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels (1959; New York, 1965), p. 30.

3 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,

1989), pp. 215-35; hereafter cited in text as P.

4 W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York, 1965), pp. 183-84.

5 Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann

(1969; Chicago, 1982), p. 432.

6 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,

1993), p. 164; hereafter cited in text as FI.

7 Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, III Seen III Said, Worstward Ho (New York, 1996), p.

83; hereafter cited in text as NO.

8 All citations from Carroll's poem are from "Fit the Second, The Bellman's Speech," The Annotated Snark: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll's Great Nonsense Epic The Hunting of the

Snark and the Original Illustrations by Henry Holiday, ed. Martin Gardner (New York, 1962),

pp. 47-52.

9 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (New York, 1967).

10 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, tr. Richard

Howard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), pp. 27-31.

11 Samuel Beckett, "Imagination Dead Imagine," in The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989,

ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York, 1995), p. 183; hereafter cited in text.

12 Rudolf Arnheim, "Perceptual Analysis of a Symbol of Interaction," in Toward a

Psychology of Art (Berkeley, 1966), pp. 222-44.

13 Samuel Beckett, "Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . .Joyce," in Our Exagmination Round His

Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London, 1936), p. 14.

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