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Roman Ingarden's theory of reader experience: A critical assessment

Article  in  Semiotica · January 2013


DOI: 10.1515/sem-2013-0027

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DOI 10.1515/sem-2013-0027    Semiotica 2013; 194: 171 – 188

Peer F. Bundgaard
Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader
experience: A critical assessment
Abstract: Roman Ingarden (1973a, 1973b) developed an ontology of the literary
artwork with implications for a theory of reader experience. An upshot of the fact
that narratives represent only incompletely determined states of affairs, endowed
with “spots of indeterminacy,” is that readers fill out the blanks left by the author.
Filling-out is therefore considered a quasi perceptual act leading to the constitu-
tion of a full object in the reader’s experience. In this paper, I challenge the de-
gree to which readers’ concretization of texts depends on such completing acts. I
point to the fact that perception itself is schematic, and that the analogy to per-
ception would rather imply that concretization does not imply full filling-out. On
the contrary, there seems to be a correspondence between the standard level of
descriptive granularity in literature and the schematic coarse-grainedness of per-
ception. To corroborate this claim, I show how deviations from that descriptive
baseline produce a variety of meaning effects.

Keywords: Ingarden; filling-out; concretization; schematic perception; narratol-


ogy; significant deviations

Peer F. Bundgaard: Aarhus University. E-mail: sempb@hum.au.dk

1 Preamble
In The Literary Work of Art (1973a) and the Cognition of the Literary Work of Art
(1973b), Roman Ingarden lays down the tenets of what could be considered a phe-
nomenology of reading experience, that is, a description of the fundamental con-
straints to which reading of fictional works is submitted. Famously, he leads the
specificity of the reading experience back to an ontological distinction between
real objects and fictional objects represented in literary artworks. Whereas ob-
jects in the real world possess an infinite number of properties, qualities, and
perceptual attributes, which are a priori accessible for experience and inquiry,
fictional (or purely intentional) objects possess only those properties that are
­explicitly mentioned in the artwork. It follows, then, that since a fictional text
consists of a finite number of sentences (expressing such properties), the number
of their properties is also finite. This further implies that objects represented in

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literary artworks are necessarily incomplete; they possess blanks or ontologically


irremovable “places of indeterminacy,” as Ingarden put it. Now, this ontological
distinction has immediate phenomenological (“experiential”) consequences:
whatever is not mentioned in a text must be completed or “filled out” by the
­reader (so, for example, if it is never said that the protagonist has hair on his
head, we still make the default assumption that he is endowed with hair).
This paper is devoted to a critical examination and assessment of this rela-
tion between the ontological indeterminacy or incompleteness of the fictional
object world and the reader’s phenomenological filling-out. More specifically, it
will call into question the correspondence between imaginative filling-out and
perception championed by Ingarden; it will not consider the schematic character
of objects represented in literary artworks as deriving simply from the ontological
constraints and limitations literary artworks are submitted to; rather it will con-
sider the schematicity of represented fictional objects in positive terms as reflect-
ing the default level of granularity and specificity in human perceptual experi-
ence. The schematic nature of represented objects in literary artworks is a natural
counterpart to the schematic nature of perception, which – as Merleau-Ponty
quoted Malraux for saying – “already stylizes” (Merleau-Ponty 1960: 67). A cru-
cial semiotic upshot of this is that deviations from the default level of descriptive
accuracy are significant and can thus, and indeed have been, used as a device for
meaning construction in literary art.

2 Concretization and filling-out: The ontology of


the text and the phenomenology of reading

2.1 Spots of indeterminacy

As just mentioned, Ingarden derives fundamental properties of reading experi-


ence from an essential ontological distinction between the degree and manner of
determination of real objects and the degree and manner of determination of
­represented objects in literary artworks. The former, Ingarden remarks, are
­“unequivocally, universally . . . determined” (Ingarden 1973a: 246); which means
that there is no part of them, in whatever dimension, which is left undetermined
(as regards, say, physical properties and perceptual, qualitative attributes). More-
over, the properties or determinations of a real object form an open, infinite set:
however many properties of an object we have determined, there are always more
to be found. Now, even though we can never have access to the whole open-ended
range of determinations, even though our apprehension of objects is inadequate

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    173

– in the phenomenological sense of the word: i.e., limited by our attentional fini-
tude, restricted to a point of view, partial, and so forth – this does, of course, not
affect the ontology of the object that remains determined in all respects (Ingarden
1973a: 247).
Since, all other things being equal, objects represented in literary works are
intended as real objects, behaving like real objects, displaying the usual proper-
ties of real objects, and so on, one could expect them to be part of the same ontol-
ogy as the latter. This is not the case, however: fictional objects are intentionally
represented objects, and as such the only determinable properties they possess
are those explicitly mentioned in or directly derivable from the text. Since a text
is per definition finite, it consists of a limited number of sentences, only a limited
number of properties can be explicitly mentioned. Furthermore, since the repre-
sented object is intentional, there is no other possible access to it than through
the state of affairs laid down in the text: whatever property of the object is not
mentioned remains undetermined and undeterminable: intentional objects rep-
resented in literary artworks contain, for essential reasons, “spots of indetermi-
nacy.” Here is how Ingarden famously puts it:

It is impossible to establish clearly and exhaustively the infinite multiplicity of deter­


minacies of the individual objects portrayed in the work with a finite number of words or
sentences . . . We find such a [spot] of indeterminacy wherever it is impossible, on the basis
of the sentences in the work, to say whether a certain object or objective situation has a
certain attribute. (Ingarden 1973b: 50)

If, e.g., a story begins with the sentence: “An old man was sitting at a table,” etc., it is
clear that the represented “table” is indeed a “table” and not, for example, a “chair”; but
whether it is made of wood or iron, is four-legged or three-legged, etc., is left quite unsaid
and therefore – this being a purely intentional object – not determined. The material of its
composition is altogether unqualified, although it must be some material. Thus, in the given
object, its qualification is totally absent: there is an “empty” spot here, a “spot of indetermi-
nacy.” (Ingarden 1973a: 249)

This ontological distinction has obvious consequences for the phenomenology of


reading experience (and also for meaning making in literary artworks, as we shall
see later). Consider this passage from about the second page of Hemingway’s “Big
Two-Hearted River I” (all we know is that a person, named Nick, has arrived by
train to a burnt down countryside in the hills where there used to be a town):

Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track.
He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung
the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off
his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was
too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning

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f­ orward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that
paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and then turned
off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into
the country. He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack.
(Hemingway 2003: 164)

As Ingarden acutely remarks, even though objects in literary artworks (and in


everyday language) are often referred to in general terms (with basic level con-
cepts, as Rosch [1978] puts it), they nevertheless all as often serve the function of
designating concrete units, specific things with particular experienced properties
in the represented world. So despite the fact that nominal expressions as “pack,”
“shoulder straps,” “rod-case,” “road” “country,” and many others, in the above
passage do not specify the exact (nor even the approximate) material nature of
the objects they refer to (shape, size, subtype of, say, rod-case and pack, as well
as exact qualitative properties), the objects referred to are, of course, formally
intended to have such properties, these are just left undetermined. In short, the
represented object is projected as a concrete entity, but contrary to real objects it
is not “an unequivocally determined individual,” rather is it is a “schematic for-
mation with spots of indeterminacy of various kinds” (Ingarden 1973a: 251).
Hence, reading consists in – most often automatically, unconsciously –
­putting flesh to the schematic formations that are represented in literary art-
works, but that nevertheless are projected as full-fledged individuals. This com-
pletion is, according to Ingarden, made out of two sub-processes: concretization
and filling-out. At some general level, the definition of these sub-processes goes
without saying, but as we shall see, the apparent straightforwardness of their
meaning may conceal a couple of, quite intricate problems.

2.2 Concretization and filling-out

Now, as regards concretization taken at face value, it concerns the reader’s repre-
sentation of the actually mentioned objects, events and their properties. So in,
“The man was eating at the wooden table,” the reader will concretize the act of
eating, the fact that the agent was a man, and that the table was made of wood.
Importantly, concretization also encompasses properties inherent in the concept
through which the object is projected; so “man” implies default representation
(concretization) of humans’ default bodily layout (legs, arms, etc.); the same goes
for roles and sub-actions inherent in global event schemas (so that “He checked
in at 7am, got through security control, and arrived at 11pm” implies the whole
“travel by airplane”-script). In more recent, cognitive science terms, concretiza-

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    175

tion could thus suitably be considered a “simulation” in Lawrence Barsalous’s


(1999) sense: the imaginative running or reenactment of an evoked scene/event
relative to background knowledge about such events (and thus also previous
­experiences of the sort evoked in that scene).
In contradistinction to this, filling-out consists in completing the non-stated
elements in a given representation (what Ingarden also calls the variables): the
size, age, and specific physical constitution of the man above, the exact wood the
table was made of, whether it was a three- or four-legged table, its color, etc. In a
nutshell: readers concretize the stated while filling-out the non-stated.
At this point, a number of questions arise, which in different and often inter-
related respects involve the phenomena of concretization and filling-out. Each of
them deserves comprehensive discussion, but I shall concentrate mainly on the
last issue.

2.2.1 The artwork versus the concretized aesthetic object

Because of the influence he exerted on Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser,
through concepts such as “empty” spaces, “spots of indeterminacy,” readers’
“concretization” and “filling-out,” Ingarden’s determination of the essence of the
literary work has often been considered as pertaining less to an ontological inves-
tigation proper than to a sort of prolegomena to a reception theory of reading ex-
perience. However, even though he minutely describes how the aesthetic object is
constituted in the individual reading process – so that there are as many experiences/
concretizations of the artwork as there are readings – he by no means champions
a relativistic or subjectivistic position according to which the meaning or semiotic
nature of an artwork is coextensive with the ever changing socio-­cultural or psy-
chological circumstances under which it is read. The fact that there are as many
concretizations of the artwork as there are reading experiences follows from the
fact that an artwork necessarily represents underdetermined objects, which re-
quire imaginative specification, Now, from this circumstance it cannot be inferred
that just any concretization goes, or that concretizations should not be con­
sidered  in relation to the structure of the artwork itself: concretizations can of
course be tinted with all sorts of idiosyncratic associations foreign to the meaning
universe of the artwork, but in that case they can rationally be rejected as irrele-
vant. The aesthetic object constituted by any reader in an individual reading pro-
cess cannot be considered independently of the artwork an author constructed in
order to produce some and not other effects in the readers. Here’s Ingarden’s
­caveat:

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In a word, the literary work itself is to be distinguished from its respective concretizations,
and not everything that is valid for the concretization of the work is equally valid for the
work itself. But the very possibility that one and the same literary work can allow any num-
ber of concretizations, which frequently differ significantly among themselves has its basis,
among other things, in the schematic structure of the object stratum of a literary work, a
structure which allows spots of indeterminacy. (Ingarden 1973a: 252)

As Ingarden himself stresses in the Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1973b;
cf.  also Mitscherling 1997), when the artist shapes his meaning intentions in
the  artwork, he defines constraints on the readers’ concretizations, thus fur­
thering the constitution of an aesthetic object that matches the meaning inten-
tions laid down in the artwork itself. Here is, then, the essential point: if only
some concretizations are valid relative to the artwork itself, there exists an essen-
tial semiotic relation between the objective properties of the artwork and the
meaning effects it is intended to produce in the reader. How is this relation to be
established? What means do authors dispose of to the shape the concretizations
of their readers? These are questions that follow directly from Ingarden’s ap-
proach, but which he has not himself developed in any particular way; probably
because such a problem is semiotic, rather than ontological: if it is seems pretty
safe to claim that, say, narratives consist of these and these properties (or strata,
as Ingarden himself has it, cf. also Talmy [2001] and Herman [2009] for other
such “ontological” approaches to narratives), if they are to be narratives at all,
it is much more problematic to establish a closed list of meaning shaping tools
and on these grounds to claim that if an author is to make narrative sense in
the first place, he must use these and these instruments; first, because the list
of  tools is neither closed nor pre-established: any author can pick up certain
tools  (e.g., viewpoint, narrative structure), while ignoring other (temporal
­structure, descriptive density, etc.); second, because it is impossible to establish
that one formal property of narratives, or tool, (say, indirect free speech or
­focalization) is consistently linked to a stable counterpart meaning, that is, it
is  impossible to determine a priori what meaning effect such properties will
have independently of context: they are protean, they may and do take on dif­
ferent semiotic functions in different contexts (cf. Jahn 1997; Bundgaard 2010,
2011).
This is not the place to further develop this problem in any significant detail;
however, the claim to the effect that there exists a motivated and determinable
relation between the (objective) artwork and the (subjective) concretized aes­
thetic object does indeed inform the present approach, as will be clear in the
­discussion of the relation between varying degrees of descriptive density in the
artwork and correlated meaning effects in the reader.

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    177

2.2.2 Filling-out versus inferences at large

The above point addresses a general epistemological issue: how can insight
into the significant facts and relations of the aesthetic object be founded in the
artwork and thus acquire an import that exceeds the individual reading? This
­issue can be suitably framed in filling-out terms, thereby taking on a more spe-
cific ­signification.
When Ingarden talks about and illustrates the phenomenological act of
­filling-out spots of indeterminacy in a text, he mainly resorts to (quasi) percep-
tual examples; that is to say, cases where the reader must individuate the non-­
specified variables in the concepts used to represent certain states of affairs. In
the above Hemingway example this would concern, for example, the exact kind
of train which brought Nick to the burnt down town, the exact burnt quality of the
landscape, the actual properties of Nick’s body, the color of his leather rod-case,
etc. When, according to Ingarden, the reader completes the (in this case quite)
sparse cues in order to obtain a full experience1 of the represented world, he can
be said to perceive2 the fictional world in a sense that is analogous to the way in
which we genuinely perceive1 nonfictional individuals, situations, and actions:

The aspects are that which a perceiving subject experiences of a given object, and as such
they demand a concrete perception or at least a vivid act of representation on the part of the
subject if they are to be actually concretely experienced. Only when they are concretely
­experienced do they exercise their proper function, that of bringing to appearance an object
which has just been perceived. Applied to our problem, that means the following. If the
­aspects are to be actual for the reader during reading and thus to belong to the stock of
the work, then the reader must perform a function analogous to perception, since the ob-
jects portrayed in the work by means of the states of affairs are not in effect perceptible.
(Ingarden 1973b: 56)

However, filling-out does obviously not reduce to this sort of perceptual2 comple-
tion. Readers do not fill in only the phenomenal gaps, but also, and crucially so,
the non-explicitly stated intelligible relations. If for the sake of argument, we
­accept that having a rich, immersed reading experience requires active presenti-
fication (perception2) of the fictional world, this may indeed constitute only the
very first level of meaning construction in reading: readers are generally also
busy filling out all sorts of non-perceptual gaps. Ingarden himself is aware of this

1 “Full experience” means here simply that, despite the missing information to the contrary, we
don’t experience Nick as a stickman moving in some sort of cartoon landscape. Our perception2
of Nick in the reading experience is in this sense akin to what our perception1 of the correspond-
ing real scenario would have been.

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178    Peer F. Bundgaard

when he mentions the kind of higher-order filling-out involved in the representa-


tion of what a character is, what his condition is, why he acts as he acts, how he
is related to this and that other character, etc. Moreover, such sorts of filling-out
of “intelligible” gaps seem to distribute on a continuum, going from, say, I. simple
attribution of viewpoint (or focalization, to use Genette’s term), as when we cap-
ture the difference between a. The room was dark, John opened the door and b.
John opened the door, the room was dark (cf. Jahn 1997: 451); through II. determi-
nation of the function of an episode in a narrative relative to the rest of the story;
and up to III. the full-blown reflection of what the point with the text is.
To sum up: text reading is loaded with such micro inferences, larger qualified
guesses, and macro abductions that all require that the notions of filling-out and
concretization be both extended and refined, and that the means thanks to which
authors constrain the readers’ constitution of an aesthetic object be minutely
characterized.2

2.2.3 Filling-out as a quasi-perceptual act

However crucial it is to further investigate the above issues, I would now prefer to
concentrate on yet another aspect of the filling-out problem: how are we actually
to characterize filling-out (as an analogon to perception?) What do we fill out,
how much, to what extent? And what is the exact relation to perception?
As suggested in the above quotation, a default assumption in Ingarden’s the-
ory of the reading experience is that the analogy to perception is not only produc-
tive, but also constitutive. The analogy runs a bit like this: when I open my eyes
and thereby access the natural world of forms, shapes, and qualities, I have a full
experience; although perception is aspectual or adumbrational (i.e., I only see
certain aspects of things at a time), the qualitative properties of things are given
immediately to me in their exact individuality. Perception is qualitatively fully
saturated in this respect. Now, when I read, I also have a full experience, in an-
other, imaginative modality, of course, but I do attend to fully embodied (fiction-
al) beings and things, and I do grasp them as absolute individuals. However, as
we have already seen, and contrary to the way the natural world is given in per-

2 This is, of course, what narratology, in its different versions – and despite the different contro-
versies within it – has been doing for the last forty years. Even though I do suggest that Ingar-
den’s concept of filling-out is a bit sloppy as it stands, it should be stressed, again, that he does
not pretend to develop a semiotics of the narrative text (in which it is an urgent task to stratify the
concepts of filling-out and concretization). His aim is to develop a general ontology of the literary
artwork and its implications for a general phenomenology of the reading experience, that is, to
define the structure of the constitution of the aesthetic object.

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    179

ception, the represented states of affairs are, as it were, minimally cued, incom-
pletely represented: filling-out is then the cognitive process by virtue of which my
representation of the states of affairs becomes fully saturated: I specify the vari-
ables, the size of Cesar’s feet, the hue of Tadzio’s blond hair, the exact nature of
the nasty insect into which Gregor Samsa is transformed, etc.
I would now like to call into question the fact that plain perceptual experi-
ence is saturated in this respect, that is to say: that it should be characterized in
terms of an intake of fully qualitatively saturated individuals qua individuals;
hence I shall also call into question the claim to the effect that the reading ex­
perience and filling-out should be assessed relative to the complete character of
perceptual experience. I will claim, however, that there exists a fundamental
analogy between the way things are given in perception and the way things are
represented or described in literary artworks, and thus between perception and
reading experience: in both domains, i.e., also in perceptual experience, objects
are mainly given as schematic entities; we attend to them with respect to only a few
of their properties; we do not pay particular attention to exact qualitative proper-
ties; and even though we experience individual things, we intend them rather as
tokens of general types. Only significant objects are qualitatively ­profiled. The
latter point will lead me to the final claim: since there exists a schematic baseline
of both experience and representation (an average level of perceptual and de-
scriptive granularity), particular significance can be assigned to given objects or
to given experiences by deviation from this standard. An object or an experience
can be selected as particularly significant simply by increasing descriptive granu-
larity (or reducing descriptive scope: zoom-effect). Such variations are thus genu-
ine tools for meaning making, devices by means of which authors constrain the
readers’ constitution of the aesthetic object (cf. Bundgaard 2010, 2011).
I will now go through these claims in more detail.

3 The schematic or aspectual character of


perceptual experience
Perception can be said to be schematic in at least two respects, in an intentional
sense and in an attentional sense. In this context it is primarily the latter we will
be interested in. Intentional schematicity simply reads what we suggested above:
when we attend to things we do so according to some of their qualities: I can per-
ceptually intend an apple as an object of a certain size (and abstract from all the
rest), or a certain shape, or as being red, or being a fruit, or being edible because
I’m hungry. To use John Searle’s expression (Searle 1997, 1998), in perception we
aspectually shape the object of experience according to the properties through

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180    Peer F. Bundgaard

which we intend it. So it is not just that we only see apparent aspects of an object
because of the limitations inherent in perspectival perception, it’s also that we
attend to the object through some of, and not all, its contentual aspects. The ob-
ject of experience can, in this sense, be said to be underspecified relative to its
other properties. The access to the manifestation of the object is aspectual be-
cause of the limitations inherent in point of view, and it is aspectual in its access
to the properties of the object because of the selective character of intentionality.
Ingarden himself is evidently aware of this point, which is almost commonplace
among phenomenologists:

First, I think that in sense perception there are facts which one can denominate “schematism”
– as you do – and which I call in Husserl’s language “inadequacy.” This was a well known
fact in Husserl’s circles before the first World War; Husserl speaks many times about “inde-
terminateness” in sense perception and also in (inner) horizon. “Unbestimmtheit” and
“bestimmbare Unbestimmtheit, conf.” Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie and ­already
Logische Untersuchungen, vol. II. (Ingarden 1970: 541)

Now, Ingarden’s point here is of course still that the fact that I don’t pay attention
to certain properties of an object – or, for that matter, that humans never have and
never will pay attention to it – does not imply that the object doesn’t possess that
quality, or that it is unspecified in that respect. Yet, if a property of an object is not
represented in a literary artwork, it is simply not there, and that makes the whole
difference between schematicity in perception and schematicity in the repre­
sented objects. Phenomenologically, objects are incompletely given in experi-
ence; ontologically, however, they remain completely determined:

In perception the determination of a given thing (object) is only partly known, and only a
part of it is given explicitly, and the rest is unknown though it exists and is univocally deter-
mined. The object (thing, process, or event) is given as independent in its existence and
determination from the perceiver and his cognitive acts. In a literary work there are objects
represented (things, persons, processes, events), and all of this represented world that is
given to the reader is dependent in its existence and determination upon the meaning of the
text (a finite set of propositions). That which is not designated – explicitly or implicitly – by
the text does not exist in the represented world at all. In consequence of this there are areas
of indeterminateness. (Ingarden 1970: 541)

So much for the intentional schematicity. Let’s now turn to the attentional sche-
maticity. When Ingarden in the above quotation claimed that the reader’s filling-
out of the blanks in the represented object served a function analogous to per­
ception, he seems to suggest that even though perception is aspectual or
adumbrational, there actually is a full intake of the individual qualitative proper-
ties of the perceived object. The object in perception is immediately given in its
qualitative individuality, it is fully individualized in perception.

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    181

Now, it is a plain, empirically attested fact that perception is highly sche-


matic also at an attentional level. Humans are by and large unaware of perceptu-
ally given properties and (even huge) qualitative changes if these intervene in
(manifest) parts of the object or the referent scene to which we don’t pay attention
or which are not as such relevant for the perceptual task we are accomplishing.
Here are some examples: Pylyshyn’s (2000a, 2000b) “multiple object-tracking”
(MOT) are tasks where subjects are shown a number of identical circles, then four
or five of them flicker for a couple of seconds, and hereafter all the circles start to
move around randomly. The task consists in keeping track of the circles that flick-
ered. Humans are good at keeping track of four to five of such circles even in
pretty messy environments. The point is now that subjects do not notice changes
in size and color of the very objects they are asked to track, for the simple reason
that these properties – given in perception – are not relevant for the task, which
consists in paying attention to relative positions in space (cf. also Jeannerod and
Jacob 2005). Kevin O’Regan and Daniel Simons have labeled this phenomenon
“inattentional blindness.” They have in numerous experiments attested subjects’
inability to detect conspicuous qualitative changes (color changes, changes of
size, introduction of incoherent beings [gorillas] in action scenes, changes of per-
sons between cuts in short films, etc.) as long as such changes do not intervene
within the focus of attention (cf. O’Regan et al. 1996; O’Regan et al. 2000, O’Regan
and Noë 2001; Simons and Levin 1997, 2000; Simons and Chabris 1999).3
In short, there are modes of perception where objects given in experience are
not individualized in any significant respect, they are directly categorized as
­tokens of types, or perhaps rather type-instances, and their qualitative specificity
is perceptually and attentionally discarded as irrelevant. And again: this percep-
tual abstraction is not only intentional, it’s not that we actually register the qual-
itative individual characteristics, but don’t pay attention to them, or do that in
varying degrees, it’s that we actually don’t register them, because our attention in
general is working at a higher-order object or type-oriented mode. So: the full
ontological accessibility of the world does not imply its full qualitative givenness
in experience.
In the final section I shall consider what consequences this fact may have for
Ingarden’s theory of filling-out understood as the quasi-perceptual act fulfilled by
readers in order to compensate for the essential incompleteness of objects repre-
sented in fictional works. In particular I shall make an empirical claim to the ef-
fect that readers, because of the schematic character of perceptual experience,

3 Compelling demonstrations can be consulted at Kevin O’Regan’s homepage: http://nivea.­


psycho.univ-paris5.fr/#IB (accessed 20 December 2012); and at Simon’s website: http://www.
theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html.

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182    Peer F. Bundgaard

may all as well be disposed to keep filling-out (or representational simulation)


general, vague and underspecified unless the text gives them reasons to do other-
wise; finally, I will show how this fact can be exploited by authors, in a variety of
ways, as a device for meaning making in literary art.

4 Implications for a theory of reading experience:


Descriptive density as a tool for meaning
making
Consider again the passage from Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River I.” Even
though the granularity is coarse and density of described objects is low, the pre-
sentation seems lively, straightforward, easy-going. Why is that? A hypothesis,
which follows from the schematic character of perception, is that there is a natu-
ral match between the degree of granularity and density in the linguistic descrip-
tion and the level of attentional specificity with which such actions and interac-
tions would have been experienced. The coarse-grained description fits the
coarse-grained phenomenology – the core of the description is made out of ac-
tions and sensations: to take on a pack, to tighten the straps, and what matters is
that the backpack is heavy above average, to walk, to distractedly pay attention to
the surroundings (the goal of the journey being something else), to feel happy –
in short, no place for details, since the name of the business, at this moment, are
plain doings, plain emotional states, simple interactions with plain objects re-
gardless of qualitative specificities.4
Now, if we take Ingarden’s claims at face value, we should predict the con-
trary, namely, that texts with many spots of indeterminacy, like Hemingway’s,

4 In contradistinction, passages where Nick performs specific actions, involving manipulation
of specific objects, the description is much more fine-grained: for example when he catches
grasshoppers, or puts a grasshopper on the hook, when he sets up his tent, or cooks or fishes for
trout. This probably mirrors the fact that manipulation of objects requires specific attention to
precise object properties, such as actual shape and size. It is well known since Ungerleider and
Mishkin (1982), and particular since Goodale and Milner’s groundbreaking work (1992, 2004)
that humans have two perceptual systems: one for vision proper (semantic perception involved
in categorization), and one for action (pragmatic perception involved in monitoring human’s
physical interaction with objects). Whereas precise shape, size, color, and textural qualities
don’t play a significant role when it comes to recognizing what kind of an object we are perceiv-
ing (i.e., for semantic perception), such properties do play a crucial role when it comes to grasp-
ing or manipulating that object in an adequate way (i.e., for pragmatic perception). Cf. again
Jeannerod and Jacob (2005).

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    183

would require much more effort from the reader with gaps to be removed, blanks
to be filled out, etc. However (as also Grünbaum [2007] has observed), this is
­arguably not so. Consider the following passage from Peter Weiss’ novella The
Shadow of the Body of the Couchman:

The four walls, the floor and the ceiling forming his room are furnished in such a way that,
upon entering, one sees a long, coarse wooden table, so rough that it seems put together by
the doctor’s own hands, jutting out from right next to the door into the middle of the room
where it touches a second table going to the right in a right angle which again touches a
third table jutting out to the left in a right angle, nearly up to the window-wall opposite the
door so that only a narrow space is left between the table and the wall; one can just squeeze
through sideways, but with difficulty and in doing so pass a window to the left . . . (Weiss
2004: 23)

What Roland Barthes (1981) noticed in his essay on Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, also
holds true for Weiss: the (pedant) accuracy of description, the overspecification,
the fineness of granularity do not in any way ease the reader’s access to the rep-
resented world but rather specifies how the latter appears to the experiencing
character, namely, as an “optical resistance.”5 Descriptive overspecification may,
thus, impose on the reader a representation (or a simulation) that matches the
way the represented character is intended to experience the world: in Weiss’
­cases as an epistemically impaired consciousness that compensates the incapac-
ity of getting a general idea of what is going on with an hypertrophied attentional
sensitivity and descriptive overaccuracy above some threshold level. The effect
on the reader is simple to account for: it is much more demanding6 to concretize
the details than to do the schematic filling-out or imaginatively simulation of well
known goal-driven actions, involving well known objects, taking place in

5 Here’s the passage:

Yet Robbe-Grillet’s scrupulosity of description has nothing in common with the artisanal
application of the naturalistic novelist. Traditional realism accumulates qualities as a func-
tion of an implicit judgment: its objects have shapes, but also odors, tactile properties,
memories, analogies, in short they swarm with significations; they have a thousand modes
of being perceived and never with impunity, since they involve a human movement of dis-
gust or appetite. Instead of this sensorial syncretism, at once anarchic and oriented, Robbe-
Grillet imposes a unique order of apprehension: the sense of sight. The object is no longer a
center of correspondences, a welter of sensations and symbols: it is merely an optical resis-
tance. (Barthes 1981: 14)

6 Demanding in a sense close to the one suggested above, namely, that humans don’t or in fact
cannot take in the world in all details. As Rolf Zwaan remarks: “. . . perception itself is limited by
attentional capacity and thus the experiential traces that are used during comprehension are
schematic to begin with” (Zwaan 2004: 41).

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184    Peer F. Bundgaard

s­ urroundings that make out convenient spatial frames for such actions (as is the
case in the Hemingway passage).
Here’s then the principle governing the accessibility of a represented scene
(and thus the degree of filling-out demanded and the load of concretization in-
volved for the reader): whenever a description sets up a space in which an action
is performed, the description of the space is assessed and processed relative to
that action and its purpose; in such cases, concretization does not imply any par-
ticular filling-out: the space is concretized as a pure background to a profiled
­action-figure; the objects are concretized as correlates of an interaction (cf. again
Grünbaum 2007).7
Obviously, this principle may serve as a ground for determining meaning ef-
fects connected to description (granularity, density, etc.). First, we have already
seen that deviations from the principle are significant: a major means of repre-
senting or directly conveying the tone and grain of a consciousness, which is
­affected in some respect, is by rendering its deviant degree of sensitivity. Descrip-
tive accuracy here reflects different kinds of overawareness (due to jealousy
[Robbe-Grillet, Proust]; to psychopathology [Bateman in Easton Ellis’ American
Psycho]; to epistemic impairment [Weiss], and so on). Next, changes in descrip-
tive granularity may, of course, be an efficient means to directly convey changes
in a represented character’s mental states, for example accrued interest in an ob-
ject or emotional involvement in an object. The following passage, also from
Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River I,” epitomizes this. It is from the very begin-
ning of the text, just before the already quoted passage. Nick has just got off the
train and considers the landscape:

[1] Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scat-
tered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the
river. The river was there. It swirled against the log piles of the bridge. [2] Nick looked down
into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping
themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their
positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a
long time.

7 This principle transposes in fact to cinema: in Lars von Trier’s Dogville the characters are
­moving around on a minimalist scene where houses are suggested with a couple of mock walls,
a bit of furniture, and the rest of all other objects in the narrated world are outlined with white
paint on the floor, sometimes endowed with labels specifying the nature of the object. Now, since
the narrated world is directly given to perception in this case, it does not make much sense to say
that spectators fill-out (perceive2) while actually perceiving1: rather, as suggested above, we take
in the space as a schematic support for the human actions and interactions, and ensuing emo-
tional meanderings, displayed before our eyes.

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    185

[3] He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in
deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy con-
vex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of
the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not
see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold them-
selves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the
current. (Hemingway 2003: 163, my numbering)

Here the point is simply that the progression in descriptive detail from [1] (with
only a river) through [2] (with trout in the water) to [3] (with big trout on the ­gravel
bottom) obviously mirrors the character’s interest in rivers, trout and big trout.
This sort of descriptive variation is thus a device that serves the function of select-
ing objects of particular interest and of immediately rendering the conscious life or
mode of consciousness of a character (without any intervention of a narrator: the
elements described in the passage are elements pertaining to Nick’s online expe-
rience; nobody is seeing over his shoulder).8 Interestingly, thus, description is not
simply a way of mapping the world, but also (and, in many cases, crucially) a way
of disclosing the mental landscape of a character: what the reader is asked to
concretize here are not only a series of phenomena, but rather Nick’s experience
of and keen interest in those phenomena.
In this respect, the above passage is an extension of, rather than a deviation
from, the above principle: the description of the space (and its degree of ac­curacy)
is adapted, here not to the kind of actions the character performs in it, but to his
emotional involvement in it or in the objects present in it. So, to put it in yet
­another way, when the author provides the reader with detailed description, in
this or in the above mentioned deviant examples, the idea is not as much to give
him access to a full-blown, rich represented space (provided the right filling-out),
but to enable him to concretize, in a first person manner, the mode of conscious-
ness of another person conveyed to him in a third person discourse.

5 Conclusion
In this essay, I have critically assessed the importance assigned by Ingarden to
the notions of concretization and filling-out. There is no doubt that the ontologi-
cal distinction Ingarden draws between real objects (which are fully determinate)
and fictitious objects (which, for essential reasons, are only partially determi-
nate) holds true. Now, however ontologically pertinent, the distinction need not

8 Cf. Zeuthen (2009) and Chafe (1994) as regards this fundamental claim: both insist, rightfully
so, in considering descriptions as the above as a way to rendering in one and the same complex
representation both the object of experience and the quality of the experiencing it.

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186    Peer F. Bundgaard

be phenomenologically significant, that is to say: the ensuing signification Ingar-


den assigns to the removal of spots of indeterminacy, the filling-out, may be over-
stated. It may be so in two respects. First, nothing seems to confirm that percep-
tion is qualitatively saturated, as Ingarden seems to think: rather, empirical
research in this domain massively indicates that perception is fundamentally
schematic, and is so in a sense that exceeds the classical phenomenological con-
ception of perceptual schematicity. It is not only that we perceive objects in
sketches, adumbrations, one-sidedly, and so on, it is that we don’t even pay atten-
tion to, register or take in huge parcels of qualitative properties that are not sig-
nificant for determining the type of objects or actions we are perceiving or which
do not play any significant role for the type of situation in which we are interact-
ing with such objects. Second, it follows from this that the lively imaginative sim-
ulation of scenery represented in language does not depend on the existence of
quasi-perceptual acts which, in different ways, complete the linguistic sketch and
deliver a full-fledged internal image: it does not depend on such acts since genu-
ine perception does not concretize its objective correlate in all its individuality.
Thus: liveliness, vividness are not functions of qualitative saturation.
Consequently, I have tried to show that there exists a level of descriptive den-
sity (with all its ontological indeterminacies) that matches a level of attentional
coarse-grainedness (with all its psychological indeterminacies), so that qualita-
tively underspecified actions, objects, and surroundings may still appear, be con-
cretized as fully (sufficiently well) described actions, objects, and surroundings
because they are linguistically given in a manner that corresponds to the rough,
schematic manner in which they are given in experience.
In other words: concretization is by no means correlative to filling-out; some-
thing can be experienced as a rich, lively description without the reader filling-
out all the blanks, or filling them out in any particular detail (as the Hemingway
example showed). Concretization (in the sense of the reader’s building up a vivid
representation of the narrated world) does not (or not always) require the kind
of quasi-perceptual acts in which our inner eye sees or presentifies what is not
stated (as Ingarden suggests). Concretization may rest on a not exclusively per-
ceptual, and for sure not perceptually full-blown comprehension (or simulation,
to use Barsalou’s term again) of what, say, a given action is, what its value may be
for someone, what it is like to be someone in that situation, doing and perceiving
things under those conditions, etc.
Finally, I have argued that in view of the fact that the default level of descrip-
tive density is correlated with the space of purposeful actions and interactions
with objects evoked by the text, deviations in granularity are as a rule significant.
In that sense descriptive granularity and density is a genuine tool for meaning
making: it is not only reader-oriented in Wallace Chafe’s (1994) sense of the term,

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Roman Ingarden’s theory of reader experience    187

(it does not only provide the reader with relevant information), it is also, and
crucially, character-oriented: it immediately displays the character’s mode of
consciousness, his degree of attention toward this and that, the interest he shows
given objects, etc.
Ingarden used to claim that composition in literature is the art of choosing
the gaps, selecting the blanks and the spots of indeterminacy as well as their
­extension. Correspondingly, he considered narrative theory as the investigation
of which gaps a given author has selected and what shape they take on. In light of
what has been developed above, the inverse claim seems more correct: given that
we are naturally geared to cope with blanks, rough representations, given that the
baseline level of experience is schematic, literature is the art of introducing ex-
plicit elements that individuate objects, sceneries or experiences – that is to say:
it is the art of providing excessive information; narrative theory is then corre-
spondingly the theory that lays down the means authors dispose of to do so, and
that tracks down the meaning effects linked to such individuations or establishes
the relevance of the excessive information.

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Bionote
Peer F. Bundgaard (b. 1967) is an associate professor at aarhus University
〈sempb@hum.au.dk〉. His research interests include aesthetic semiotics and the
crossovers   between cognitive linguistics and phenomenology of language. His
publications include “Towards a cognitive semiotics of the visual artwork”
(2009); “Husserl and language” (2010); and “The grammar of aesthetic intuition
– on Ernst Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms in the visual arts” (2011).

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