Journal of the British SOciety for Phenommology. Vol. 6 No.2, May 1975 ~OOI( ~VIEWS mE LITERARY WORK OF ART. Translated with an introduction by George G, Grabowicz, Foreword by David M. Levin. Northwestern University Press. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, pp. Ixxxiii + 415, S15.00, This brilliant work, "an investigation on the border* lines of ontology, logic and the theory of literature" is now, over forty years after its appearancc in German, the first major work by Ingarden to become available to English readers. It can be described as an account of all that must be given in a literary work if it is to be a literary work, lngarden's investigation being carried oul not in respect of a work's aesthetic value but of its ontological structure, for it is only by first revealing the clements essential to that structure that we can show the axes along which a mere 'literary work' can truly partake in the natme of a 'literary work of art'. Grabowicz in his able historical introduction shows the way in which Ingarden's ontological philosophy has influenced the conceptual framework of especially German and Polish literary criticism. logarden's interest in the philosophy of literature arose out of his life-long attempt 10 grapple with Ihe traditional ontological problem of idealism-realism, a problem which had been newly raised by precursors of phenomenology such as Brentano, Twardowski and Mcinong. Through HusserI, with whom he had studied in Frciburg, Ingarden shared with these pbilosophers a common background, involving in particular the assumption tbat thought can create its own objects. This meant, for example, that for Ingarden it was unquestioned thaI when we read a novel we conccm ourselves with objects: the novel's characters, etc., and nol only with as some positivists would claim the mere words or word-shapes whicb make up the work, or the thoughts which ran through its author's mind in the process of creating iL HUSserl himself in the idealism-realism dispute bad adopted the transcendental idealist position, claiming the ontolOgical dependence of the real world upon acts of COnsciousness or, in other words, that thought creates all the objects of that world. But lngarden, whilst he continued to utilise the insights and methods developed by Husserl (The Literary Work of Art is 'peppered with references to Husserl and his early disciples Pflindcr. Rcinaeh, Conrad-Martius, etc.), Cell the need to take up a position against the transcendental idealist doctrine believing that it could not be reconciled with the remtance to thougbt, the self-sufficiency (in Ingarden's terms: the 'ootic autonomy') of real objects as they are given to us in experience. He conceived the project oC d:rnonstraling how objects which were clearly dependent upon conscious acts (i.e., which were 'onticaUy heteronomous') -for example, the as-if-real objects brought into being by literary works differ radically from real objects ill ways whicb would point to the latter's possessing antic autonomy. In order to give some idea of the range of IDgarden', acbievement we must first call to mind the ceotral insight into the intentional nature of all thinking activity on which it rests. Every thought points beyond itself in ways precisely determined by the thought. Where the object of our tbinking actually exists we might be tempted to identify lhis outward-pointing "ith the tbought's simply having the given object as ufO'tnl, but reflection on our thought about noo-6istellt and nODpresent objects reveals a further component as being essential not only to sueb acts, bul to every act of thinking. This component Ingarden calls the 'projec:lioo' in the act of thought of an 'intentional objecthity', which we can think of as that which, wbilst not itself being present to consciousness, is somehow the 'QJTjer' of those states of affairs, objects :md properties which do become presenl 10 consciousness in a given thought It we first consider thought about the purely imaginary -let us take the example of A's imagining a unicorn .... then it is the projected intentional obj«thity ... hieb maintains this (ontically heteronomous) unicorn in being for A having properties which depend preci~ly upon what A himself in term; of content Iud put into his thought the unicorn which A is IIdng enabled [0 think about is prrcisely ro-<>rdill3tcd to A's 'stock' of it\ properties (being male; harned; four'~ real iI A was not aware that unicorns do oot exist; imaginary. if A was conscious of merely imagining a unicorn; and :.0 on), Turning DOW [0 thought about real objects; let In take A's thought about an uDcle, U. he is due to meet for the first lime tomorrow. Here . the intcntioll3l ob~ tivity projected by Xs thought Is no Ion&er required til maintain il$ object in being. bot it still doc$ play au 141 e"cntial role, and this we can see if we question how we are to account for the difference between U as an unknown object present in the thought of A and as he is in himself. 'transcendent' to such thought. The intentional objectivity here serves the function of carrier for the uncle as determined with respect to the properties which he is known by A to possess and as otherwise totally "bare". We can say that it serves as the carrier for the IIncle*as-inlended-by-A, but A's thought is "about" the uncle himself: he is never aware of this carrier nor of its attendant "bareness". When the time comes for the uncle to become experientially present to A. whether as a voice on a telephone or as a bald man shaking A's hand, then the intentional objectivity on the one hand becomes enriched in ways precisely coordinated to A's experience of the uncle, and on the other hand, since the need for an intervening carrier of properties falls away, the intentional objectivity becomes inessential and completely 'transparent' allowing A's thought to pass directly through on to the uncle himself, We can say that the intentional objectivity falls back to the half-light of A's mind, he is thinking immediately about the co-present uncle. Thought, therefore. always involves the projection of intentional objectivities which play an essential role wherever the object of thought is non-existent or nonpresent. One important species of thought is that which becomes. as it were. incarnated in language when we bestow meanings upon words and word-complexes: these project (or can, at leas!. be conceived as projecting) what Ingarden calls 'derived' (i,e. non-actual) intentional objectivities precisely correlated to the meanings of the given words and complexes. The 'actual' intentional objectivities projected when thoughts are activated in the reading or use of words will not be so precisely correlated, since they will possess subjective (e.g. intuitive) impurities: the derived objectivity of a given complex lies transcendent to all such actual objectivities projected when we think that complex, but it is in these latter that the derived objectivity has what rngarden calls its 'ontic basis': that is to say, it is only through becoming actualised in consciousness that a derived objectivity becomes more than a mere empty possibility. We have seen, by considering what must lie on the . ide of the objecti.-e linguistic fonnalions, how we must conccive of an as it were "definitive" derived intentional objecti,';ty being projected by a word-complex as precisely dctennined to its meaning, and how this derived objecti • .;ty must 5tand in correlation with, on the side of subjective consciousness. the aC/llal (and more or less impure) intentional objectivities projected when we read or use words: the fanner standing 'transcendent' to the laller. 142 Let us now extend this two-sidedness to the wordcom pie" which forms the literary work as a whole, approaching the work with respect to what must bC contained on its side if we are to account for all the constituents given as essential to readings of it. Ingarden puts forward the concept of a 'concrctisation' of a literary work, which is the structure of intentions and intentional objects constituted by consciousness in a given reading. A concretisation involves not only streams of sound-and thOUght-material passing through OUT minds, but also the characters, setting, actions, etc., of the work: as made actual by the reader in a given reading to which he will have imported his own subjective impurities. Ingarden argues that given these arrays of actual constituents on the side of consciousness, we must conceive of their being on the side of the work itself corresponding derived constituents shorn of SUbjective impurity and lying transcendent to their actualisations. All these latter derived constituents taken together form what he calls the 'structure' of the literary work, and it is the recognition of this structure and the uncovering of its essential 'anatomy' that form the central accomplishment of Ingarden's investigation. He shows how we can distinguish in the structure of the work separate 'stmta' of intentional constituents, separ' ate 'voices' of the work which interact to produce a 'harmonious polyphony'. Essential to every work are: (1) The stratum of word-sounds and higher-order phonetic fonnations. (Language is an essential element of literary works as is seen most clearly in the case of poetry. But as an element of an intentional structure language must appear in intentional formations or 'Gesla/len' transcendent to all concrete aural material; otherwise. since all such materia I varies from reading to reading, we should have no intersubjective identity of a literary work. It will be observed here that Ingarden ignores any suggestion of a written or printed component as perhaps being essential to the structure of a literary work. In this he has been waylaid by the tradition, from Aristotle to Husserl. of assuming a special intimacy between speech and tbought: Ingarden excludes from view the visual-symbolic component, surely essential to post-Homeric literature as is seen when we refer to such 'border-line cases' of the literary work as concrete poetry and works of mathematics or symbolic logic.) a) The stratum of meaning units, (Speaking ontologically, i.e., in terms of the constitution of all the strata of a work in readers' concretisations, it is the meaning stratum which is most important, and Ingarden devotes almost half his boole in setting forth for us a complete phenomenology of meaning (and hence also of language). This is powerful enough, in letting what is essential to <"Wy different kind of meaning especially where we deal with word-complcxes which are meaningful despite tbe lack of external referent, and here we must even include nonsense verse come forward unmarred by any Ockhamist presuppositions. to include within i~U many less far-seeing philosophies of language as special cases.) (3) The stnatum of represented objects_ (We can sec that a cencretisation of a literary work involves a making actual of objects (characters, chairs, cI~cks, let,:.) as engaging in certain actions and as located In certam spatio-temporal settings. In the structure of the work itself there belong. we can say. the definitive such objects. actions. settings, etc., which make possible their actualisation on the p3.rt of the reader.) (4) The stratum of sequences of schcmatised aspects. ( .... 11 objects appear in one aspect or another (as colour- «I, as red, as an apple, as mine, etc.). Real ohj~ appear in a continuous manifold of shifting and merpng concrete aspects which depend on what, from moment to moment is thematic to our consciousness. Such concrete aspects can clearly have no place within the structure of the literary work itself since the stratum of objects of that structure has the full extent of its being determined by only a finite number of sentences; in this sense literary aspects will always be 'skeletal' or 'schemati,ed', possessing 'spots of indeterminacy' which will, to some extent. become filled by readers importing subjective. e.g. sensory data to their concretisations.) Having moved, with Ingarden, from the readings Which we experience: to the transcendent structure of the worle which make those readings possible, we can now return to the experiential level and see what light is thrown upon reading literature when we become con,cious of stratification, of schematisation, and of the projection by word-complexes of intentional objectivities. As we read a literary work the stream of conscious thought and intentions activated by the work is accompanied by an ever-growing, ever-clianging projected manifold of intentional objectivities: this manifold serves as the carrier of all the interrelated elements released in the unfolding of the work including the rePfCScnted objects, the represeoted space and time in the work. and so on from the experience of which We derive aesthetic appreciation of the work. First of all this intentional manifold effects a 'colouring' of our thoughts derived from phonic qualities in the work: in poetry, for example, our experience: is coloured by {acton sucb as verse-melody, rhyme, rhythm and assonance. Secoodly the manifold of intentional objecti~~es has embodied within it aesthetically valent qualitu:s deriving from the meaning-stratum of the work; our ~Pericnce of the world of a literary work is meditztf'd by the meanings formed by the author. The peculiar .Iyle of this mediation in a given work depends on the fact that meanings can be formed so as to be, for example, systematicaUy opaque, indeterminate, or ambiguous: in such cases intentioll2l objectivities give their objects as it were only through a haze or, in the case of ambiguity, the intentional objectivity is 'opalescent', it gives a double object in a shimmering way which provokes us to shift from one lived intention to another_ The author can thus create an aesthetically satisfying background of indeterminateness or impossibjJjty in our concretisations of the work; ( Garlic and sapphires in the mud ) Clot the bedded axle-tree ... or he can create, by choice of precise meaning-formations, an air of sharpness or optimism in our concretisations. Finally the manifold maintains in being Cor us the objects, most especially the characters in the work: and the properties which they possess. As we begin to read about, say, Mr. Pickwick, the manifold of intentional objectivities projected by our intending Dick:ens' words and sentences hrings before us a Mr. Pickwick who is. in terms of the content of our thought about him, al first totally bare (although this bareness is never something of which we arc conscious); but in the course of our reading this manifold becomes the earrier of ever more and more richly determined qualities given as possessed by Mr. Pickwick, such that Mr. Pickwick can himself become the object of aesthetic appreciation. But he is not an object which we can view "from all sides": be is accessible to us ooIy as presented within the schematised aspects held in readiness in the structure ot the work, as partaking in those actions and relatioll> determined by his author, and we can say that the sequences of aspects in which Mr_ Pickwick is given can also themselves become the object of aesthetic appreciation. A truly aesthetic concrctisatioD of a work, then. is constituted in a reading which is faithful to aU that is given in each of the strata of the wort and which takes unto itself, as the work unfolds, all the aesthetically important interrelations bewecn the strata such that the work is concrctised as a harmonious unity of all its constituents. Such a concrctisation is to be contrasted with a partial concretisation when the reader as it ~ gets Mlost" in just one stratum of the wod by becooaIn, absorbed. say, in the style of its author or in the aclveolUres of its characters. I n adopting his dctibc:rately narrow scope Inprden has produced a remarkable well-rounded wort. but its significanoe extends far beyond the theory of literature. lngarden develops. for ewnpl_e. ~ ~on of Husser!'s demolition of psyc:hologlsm m IOgle such that we can now see the way out of psycllOlopsm in 143 ' .0 .. _ dcstbetics, and we have already referred to his philosophy of meaning which reveals hitherto hidden components of language in both its phonetic and its cognitive aspects. Indeed, besides Ingarden's own three-volume Ha.uptwuk on The Controversy over the Existence of the World. this work is challenged in suggestiveness only by the major works of Heidegger. Sartre and, of course, Husserl himself. In the present review we have been concerned to outline Ingarden's ontology of The Literary Work of Art: discussion of the influences upon Ingarden in this 144 work and of its reception in the wider world is to be found in Grabowicz's admirable Introduction but perhaps for English readers it will be useful to refer here to the little-acknowledged indebtedness to Ingarden of Rene Wellek in his The Theory of Literature (written with Austin Warren) and to the review in Mind. 1932, which seems to have sunk without trace. The first valuable review. written by Spiegelberg, is to be found in Zeitschrift fiir Aeslhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. XXV, 1931. Barry Smitb University of Manchester