INGARDEN AND THE PRAGUE SCHOOL

Abstrac t

Commentators have pointed out a number of noteworthy connections between Prague SchoolStructuralism and the phenomenological tradition. Examining Roman Ingarden’s

Das literarische Kunstwerk – first published in German in 1931 – vis-à-vis the theories of thePrague School yields additional insight into the phenomenological contexts of CzechStructuralism. Yet the importance of Ingarden’s aesthetics for literary bohemistics is notmerely historical. Above and beyond the obvious influence of Ingarden on Prague theoristslike Felix Vodicka, Ingarden’s stratification of the literary text into four levels or modali-ties of signification, and his emphasis on the world-creating properties of fictional discourse,reveal the possibilities and limits of both the Structuralist and the phenomenological orien-tations. Indeed, viewed in tandem with the polyfunctionalist theories of the Prague School,Ingarden’s aesthetic theory shows how we might work toward a richer, more productiveapproach to verbal art generally – an approach that draws on phenomenological and func-tionalist ideas, but that also recasts those ideas in light of more recent developments inlinguistic and literary theory, especially developments associated with linguistic pragmaticsand possible worlds semantics.

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Commentators have pointed out a number of noteworthy connectionsbetween Prague School Structuralism and the phenomenological tradition.Elmar Holenstein, for example, has gone so far as to characterize RomanJakobson’s research as a species of “phenomenological structualism” –and by extension Prague School linguistics and poetics as a branch of thephenomenological movement. Holenstein identifies in both Jakobson andHusserl core concerns that include, in addition to anti-psychologism and theconcept of signification, an emphasis on the intersubjective constitutionof language and the isolation of structural invariants amid variable featuresand relations.1 Constructing an alternative genealogical model, Peter Steinerhas shown how Gustav Spet, a student of Husserl’s, functioned as a “usefulally” to Prague School theorists like Jakobson and Mukarovsky “in theirattack against the epistemological underpinnings of nineteenth-centurypositivism.”2 Steiner suggests that Spet’s writings on semiotics in corpo-rate the distinctions between meaning, expression, and indication set outby Husserl in his first Logical Investigation.3 In turn, Spet’s influence mayhelp explain why Jakobson seems to have based his early notion of thepoetic, emotive and practical “functional dialects” upon Husserl’s under-standing of names, and also why Jakobson’s later definition of poeticlanguage as an essential “set toward expression” may remind us of Husserl’seidetic reduction of phenomena to essences.4 Both Holenstein and Steiner,in other words, trace a lineage that leads from phenomenology to the PragueSchool, exploring how intermediary figures like Spet transmitted, but also

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81: 481–487, 1997. 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

inflected, the phenomenological ideas and methods that helped shapeStructuralist inquiry.

Examining Roman Ingarden’s Das literarische Kunstwerk (The LiteraryWork of Art)5 – first published in German in 1931 – vis-à-vis the theoriesof the Prague School yields additional insight into the phenomenologicalcontexts of Czech Structuralism. Those contexts are of course only partof the story: we find significant differences, as well as analogies, betweenthe work of Ingarden and that of the Prague School. As with their recep-tion of Russian Formalism, the Czech Structuralists were favorably disposedtoward only some of the leading motifs of phenomenological analysis.6 Inthis connection, however, the importance of Ingarden’s aesthetics for literarytheory is not merely historical. Above and beyond the obvious influenceof Ingarden on Prague theorists like Felix Vodicka, Ingarden’s stratifica-tion of the literary text into four levels or modalities of signification, andhis emphasis on the world-creating properties of fictional discourse, revealthe possibilities and limits of both the Structuralist and the phenomeno-logical orientations. Indeed, viewed in tandem with the polyfunctionalisttheories of the Prague School, Ingarden’s aesthetic theory shows how wemight work toward a richer, more productive approach to verbal art gen-erally – an approach that draws on phenomenological and functionalist ideas,but that also recasts those ideas in light of more recent developments inlinguistic and literary theory, especially developments associated with lin-guistic pragmatics and possible worlds semantics. Accordingly, my aim hereis not to portray Ingarden as a sort of phenomenological precursor of thePrague School; my aim, rather, is to locate and describe areas of concernat the heart of both phenomenological and Structuralist research, and tosuggest that language theorists and poeticians are still trying to reckon, inmore or less sophisticated ways, with those same areas of concern.

It is in the writings of Vodicka, of course, that we find the most explicitconnections between Ingarden’s aesthetics and the theories of the PragueSchool. Vodicka, generally acknowledged along with Ingarden as the chiefforerunner of what is now called reception or reader-response theory, directlyalludes to Das literartische Kunstwerk in several of his writings.7 AlthoughVodicka borrows the term “concretization” directly from Ingarden, however,the Czech theorist is careful to stress how his usage of the termdiffers from the Polish philosopher’s. Thus, whereas for Prague SchoolStructuralists “the work is understood as a sign whose meaning and estheticvalue are comprehensible only on the basis of the literary conventions ofa specific period,” Ingarden, says Vodicka, “finds the source of the differ-ence in concretizations primarily in the schematic and indefinite nature ofsome strata of the work, while other strata maintain their identity and thework itself . . . is a structure whose esthetic value is independent of theliterary norm of the period.”8 By contrast, Vodicka insists that we anchorthe process of concretization in “the evolutionary dynamics of overall

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literary structure” – that is, in the “evolutionary sequence of the changingliterary norm.”9 The life of the literary work construed as an aesthetic objectjust is, for Vodicka, an ordered multiplicity of changing concretizations, eachindexed to changes in the structure of the work vis-à-vis emergent literarynorms. More generally, we can say that Vodicka radicalizes Ingarden’sconcept of concretization by refusing to exempt any element of the text fromthe concretizing activity of readers guided by interpretive norms. It is notthat predominantly stable literary works contain spots of indeterminacy –schematized components that different readers will differently fill in. Rather,for Vodicka, the text is schematic to the core, and has the shape it does ata given time only against the backdrop of the norms that circulate withina given interpretive community.

Prima facie Vodicka’s arguments open the door to a relativism thatIngarden avoids by assigning a more restricted role to concretization. Yetthe implicitly communal nature of norms suggests that Vodicka’s is less arelativistic than a contextualist or broadly pragmatic line of argumenta-tion. Hence my larger point: namely, that we find a basic tension betweenIngarden’s phenomenological style of analysis – his attempt to isolate essen-tial, enduring structures of signification beneath the more or less variableprofile of the literary text – versus the socially based, norm-driven styleof analysis conducted by Vodicka and typical of the Prague School atlarge. These different styles of analysis suggest that phenomenology couldhave exerted only a partial, fitful hold on the Structuralist imagination. Still,by going on to examine two problems on which Ingarden and the Praguetheorists developed manifestly different perspectives, I want to explore waysin which the functionalist and phenomenological approaches can be usedto supplement and enrich one another. At issue, first, is Ingarden’s conceptof textual “strata” in view of the Prague School’s ideas about interlinkedcommunicative functions, and second, the question of literary semanticsin both the phenomenological and the Structuralist settings.

First, then, we have Ingarden’s famous description of the four strata ofthe literary text: the stratum of linguistic sound formations, the stratum ofmeaning units, the stratum of represented objects, and the stratum ofschematized aspects, by means of which “represented objects can be madeto appear in a manner predetermined by the work itself,” as Ingarden putsit.10 Drawing on the account of “founding” presented in Husserl’s thirdlogical Investigation, Ingarden sketches dependency relations between eachstratum, with the higher strata of represented objects and schematizedaspects being founded by, or grounded in, the lower strata of linguistic soundformations and meaning units. The activity of concretization pertains chieflyto the higher textual strata, where we find the spots of indeterminacy orUnbestimmtheitsstellen characteristic of represented objectivities and theirmodes of presentation. As Ingarden puts it, “the very possibility that oneand the same literary work can allow any number of concretizations, which

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frequently differ significantly from the work itself and also, in their content,differ significantly among themselves, has its basis . . . in the schematicstructure of the object stratum of a literary work, a structure which allowsspots of indeterminacy.”11 At the same time, Ingarden talks about “thestratified polyphonic structure of the literary work,” noting that the “diver-sity of the material and the roles (or functions) of the individual strata makesthe whole work, not a monotonic formation, but one that by its nature hasa polyphonic character.” Thus “the form of the work arises from the formalelements of the individual strata and their concurrent action.”12

It is tempting to find in Ingarden’s theory an exact analogue for thePrague School’s conception of all verbal messages (including literary texts)as micro-systems of interlocked communicative functions. On closer exam-ination, however, Ingarden’s four-tiered model of the literary text contrastsmarkedly with the polyfunctionalist theory developed by Mukarovsky andJakobson in particular. Ingarden starts from the Husserlian premise thatanalysis should isolate invariant textual features, in part through study ofthe relatively more variable features subject to concretization. By contrast,the Prague theorists begin with Karl Bühler’s insight that every speech eventis made up of several communicative factors – factors whose foregroundingand backgrounding relative to one another produce corresponding changesin the communicative functions of the message.13 Hence the message itselfhas no essential structure, other than that of its functional variability.

True, the idea of foregrounded and backgrounded communicative factorsdoes produce, in Jakobson’s 1960 version of the polyfunctionalist model,an attempt to categorize messages according to the hierarchical dominanceof a specific function over other functions. This hierarchy, however, isalways only local and provisional; the verbal message is for Jakobson lesspolyphonic than polymorphic. Thus, as Jakobson says, “even though a settoward the referent, an orientation toward the context – briefly the so-calledreferential, “denotative,” “cognitive” function – is the leading task ofnumerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions insuch messages must be taken into account.”14 Indeed, for Mukarovsky,“Because of the dominance of the structural bond among functions overindividual functions it is sometimes possible to identify one and the samefunction in two different historical or social contexts only with great dif-ficulty.”15 Furthermore, functional dominance is not rooted in the structureof the message or the text as such; rather, it derives from the way a givencollectivity responds to textual structures on the basis of emergent inter-pretive norms. As Mukarovsky puts it, “A phenomenon which, in one timeperiod, country, etc., was the privileged bearer of the aesthetic function maybe incapable of bearing this function in a different time, country, [and soon] . . . . As soon as we change our perspective in time, space, or evenfrom one social grouping to another . . . we find a change in the distribu-tion of the aesthetic function and of its boundaries.”16 Like Vodicka, then,

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Jakobson and Mukarovsky adopt an inherently functional approach to textualstructure itself; texts have the form they do not just because of what is inthe text, but because of the way what is in the text gets paired with contextsto license interpretations about what a given work means.

We see here how the Prague School anticipated crucial argumentsadvanced much later on by workers in the field of linguistic pragmatics,which likewise studies how we use context to make inferences aboutmeaning. Given impetus by researchers such as J. L. Austin, YehoshuaBar-Hillel, and H. P. Grice, pragmatic arguments have only very recentlybeen extended to the analysis of literary texts.17 If the Prague Structuralistshave much to teach us about the pragmatics of literary interpretation,however, Ingarden has much to teach us about literary semantics. Indeed,because of their penchant for functionalist analysis, the Prague Schooltended, like the later Wittgenstein, to subsume questions of meaning underquestions of use. They therefore largely neglected the formal semanticmodels that were inspired by Gottlob Frege late in the nineteenth centuryand disseminated by Rudolf Carnap and others in the twentieth.18 Bycontrast, Das literarische Kunstwerk, by virtue of its phenomenologicalheritage, participates in what I have elsewhere characterized as a largertradition of object-theoretical inquiry – a tradition devoted to the studyof real as well as irreal objects.19 Historically and conceptually linkedto Fregean varieties of semantic analysis, object theory prefigures ideasdeveloped later under the heading of possible worlds semantics, whoseapplications for literary theory were pioneered, ironically, by an imme-diate descendant of the Prague School, Lubomír Dolezel.20

Compare Mukarovsky’s with Ingarden’s account of the referential prop-erties of literary discourse. In an essay on “Poetic Reference,” for example,Mukarovsky distinguishes between poetry and “informational language”as follows: “in [informational language] attention is focussed above allon the relation, important from the practical point of view, between refer-ence and reality, where [in poetry] it is the relationship between the referenceand the context incorporating it that stands to the fore . . . for poeticreference, the weakening of its immediate relationship with reality makesof it an artistic device. That means that the poetic reference is not evalu-ated in terms of an extralinguistic mission but with relation to the roleimposed upon it in the organization of the work’s semantic unity.”21 Bycontrast, and in agreement with later semantic models based on the con-struct of possible worlds, Ingarden holds that literary discourse experiencesno weakening of its relationship with reality, but rather refers to objects,situations and events located in an alternative possible reality. Thus, inhis discussion of what he calls the modes of spatial orientation of repre-sented objectivities, Ingarden notes: “If, in our reading, we want toapprehend the world exactly as it is represented, we must, so to speak,fictiously transpose ourselves into the represented center of orientation

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and wander about in the represented world in fictione with the given person.A good representation itself forces us to do this. We have to forget to acertain extent our own center of orientation, which belongs to our perceivedworld and wanders everywhere with us, and assume a certain distancingattitude toward the world” (231; cf. 238–239).22 These lines bear a remark-able resemblance to the idea of “fictional recentering” elaborated some sixtyyears later by Marie-Laure Ryan, another leading practitioner of possibleworlds approaches to literature. For Ryan as for Ingarden, “Fiction is char-acterized by the open gesture of reentering, through which an APW[alternative possible world] is placed at the center of the conceptual universe.This APW becomes the world of reference . . . . The ‘fictional pact’ isconcluded when hearers (readers) become in make-believe temporarymembers of the recentered system.”23

Ingarden’s recognition of the world-creating properties of literary dis-course – his intuition that literature marks the redirection but not thedissipation of reference – was certainly ahead of its time. But the point tostress here is that study of both the semantics and the pragmatics of literarytexts is as yet in a nascent state. Despite the groundbreaking researchesof theorists like Ingarden and Mukarovsky and Jakobson, we have yet todevelop analytical tools precise enough to understand the forms as wellas the functions of literary discourse. Modern-day linguistic and literarytheory can help us craft such tools; but in our search for new models andmethods, we should not forget the visionary thinkers who taught us tolook for them. Thus Ingarden’s Das literarische Kunstwerk is importantfor literary theory not just because it reveals how phenomenology affectedPrague School Structuralism; more than this, it teaches us that only a dualallegiance to text and context, structure and function, can give us real insightinto the literary artwork.24

North Carolina State University DAVID HERMAN

Dept. of EnglishBox 8105Raleigh, NC 27695-8105USA

Notes

1. See Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jokobson’s Approach to Language; PhenomenologicalStructuralism, trans. Catherine Schelbert and Tarcisius Schelbert (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 1976), pp. 1–24. Cf. Holenstein, “Prague Structuralism – A Branch of thePhenomenological Movement,” in Language, Literature and Meaning I: Problems in LiteraryTheory, ed. John Odmark (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1979), pp. 71–97.

2. Peter Steiner, “Gustav Spet and the Prague School: Conceptual Frames for the Studyof Language,” in Semantic Analysis of Literary Texts, eds. Eric de Haard et al. (Amsterdam:Elsevier Science Publishers, 1990), p. 554.

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3. “Gustav Spet and the Prague School,” p. 558.4. Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1984), pp. 201–204.5. Roman Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,

1960); Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evenston:Northwestern University Press, 1973).

6. See Peter Steiner, “The Roots of Structuralist Esthetics,” in The Prague School:Selected Writings, 1929–1946, ed. Peter Steiner, trans. John Burbank et al. (Austin: Universityof Texas Press, 1982), pp. 174–219.

7. See, for example, Felix Vodicka, “The Concretization of the literary Work: Problemsof the Reception of Neruda’s Works.” in The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929–1946,ed. Peter Steiner, trans. John Burbank et al. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp.103–134, and also “Response to Verbal Art,” in Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions,ed. and trans. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titnik (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), pp.197–208.

8. “The Concretization of the Literary Work: Problems of the Reception of Neruda’sWorks,” p. 110.

9. “Response to Verbal Art,” p. 206.10. The Literary Work of Art, pp. 276–277.11. The Literary Work of Art, p. 252.12. The Literary Work of Art, pp. 29, 31, 33.13. Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1965).14. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language,

ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), p. 353. Cf. David Herman, “Pragmatics,Prague-matics, Metapragmatics: Contextualizing Pragmatic Contexts,” Neophilologus 76(1992): 321–346, and Universal Grammar and Narrative Form (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1995), pp. 139–181.

15. Jan Mukarovsky, “On the Problem of Functions in Architecture,” in Mukarovsky,Structure, Sign and Function, ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1978), p. 238.

16. Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E.Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 3, 5.

17. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press,1962); Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, “Indexical Expressions,” Mind 63 (1954): 359–379; H. P.Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

18. See, e.g., Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference,” in Translations from thePhilosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds. Peter and Max Black (Oxford: Basil BlackwellPublishers, 1970), pp. 56–78, and Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1947).

19. Herman, Universal Grammar and Narrative Form, 95–138.20. See, e.g., Lubomír Dolezel, “Narrative Modalities,” Journal of Literary Semantics

5 (1976): 5–14; “Narrative Semantics,” PTL 1 (1976): 129–151; and “Possible Worlds andLiterary Fictions,” in Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences, ed. Sture Allén(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 221–242.

21. Mukarovsky, “Poetic Reference,” in Semiotic of Art: Prague School Contributions,ed. and trans. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titnik (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), p. 157.

22. The Literary Work of Art, p. 231; cf. pp. 238–239.23. Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 26.24. A Czech-language version of this paper is forthcoming in the Proceedings of the First

Annual World Congress on Literary Bohemistics, ed. Lubos Merhaut (Prague: Institute forCzech Literature). My thanks to Professor Merhaut for permission to publish the essay inEnglish.

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