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. 57-71
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057587 .
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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. Imust

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 Samuel Beckett and

styles,

Wolfgang Iser follow what Yeats in his autobiography, alluding to

alchemical traditions, calls hodos chameleontis, the of the chame
way
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 which is a work of theoretical not
Anthropology, speculation,
His remarks on Beckett there are a of his
literary interpretation. part
theoretical discourse rather than a digression from it.
The dual standing of Beckett's works in Iser's writings, as texts for
and as, in effect, a in the invites
interpretation component theorizing,
looking through both ends of the telescope: at Beckett through Iser and
at Iser through Beckett. so raises the -issue of the fit
Doing necessarily
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 or interpretative. Looking through both ends of the
speculative
telescope can become a kind of binocular vision of a sort that is
potentially self-testing, self-adjusting, and self-correcting. The testing,
and are neither a technical matter nor an abstract
adjusting, correcting
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 that is also a way down, a way forward that is a way
up
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 sentences that "A truth in art is that whose contradictory is
closing
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 into account.
centrally
In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser scrutinizes various thinkers'
of imagination. He does so as part of an attempt to clarify
descriptions
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" inYeats's statement "Imust 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
to and even arises from our shared human of
responds experience
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 for finiteness means without alternatives, and
negativity, being
this intolerable condition explodes into an endless productivity" (P51).
Iser concludes the essay by asserting that we recognize through Beckett's
achievement that are not most we can do is
"explanations possible?the
the unknowable." Iser the same
experience begins commentary by
Sartre's statement that "'concrete . . . retains for itself
quoting negativity
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 of in a mortal no that his
recognition mortality permeates
art's to finitude. That cannot
proliferating response response 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
as of an abstract discourse.
figurative language part apparently

II. Iser's Figures: Chameleon and Holophrase

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

cognition" occurs prominently as the rubric for the section
concluding
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 ismentioned 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
color, later in a of hues (as the
changes recurring variety protean,
shifts, cross
kaleidoscopes, transpositions, self-transposings, boundary

ings, dual counterings, contraflows)

oppositional and in numerous
pairings (decomposition and enabling,
and composition, nullification
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 involves Iser's use of the "the
change phrase
chameleon of cognition" as a figure for fiction that differs from the

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

of an abstract, discourse that forms of a
appearance cognitive part
tradition of philosophical speculation about creativity and culture.
Because of his terms contribute to a of
many sequence mutually

illuminating, reciprocally defining figures, they suggest that The Fictive

and the Imaginary is, in fact, not discursive at crucial points. This
nondiscursive is one of the truths that the chameleon embodies.
quality
At each of the book's nondiscursive moments, the conceptual implica
tions of the language tend to be emphatically nontotalizing and self
A clear of this occurs at
transforming. particularly example tendency
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 Iser introduces a curious term,
concluding pages, compound
"fractured (?T302). The unusual term holophrasedenotes a
'holophrase'"
word that stands for a complex of ideas. The term appears three
single
times in the final two pages, first simply as "'holophrase'" (cited from the
work of Sir Richard then as "fractured and
Paget), 'holophrase,'" finally,
in the sentence as "ever-fractured The
antepenultimate 'holophrase.'"
marks the maximum moment of the
increasingly emphatic repetition
book's rhetorical and crescendo.
conceptual
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 Iser's statement resembles Yeats's stance in his
doubling,
letter between and verse. Iser's
the difference
philosophy
concerning
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 so far how say it?"7
going
Many of the terms in Iser's book, including key phrases such as
"fractured are not at home in discourse.
'holophrase,'" quite cognitive
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
is not a distraction or from the but rather
supplement digression study
an integral part of it. The book's lengthy penultimate for
paragraph,
is marked by a rhetoric of and openness that
example, plasticity
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
and
possible, shifting, transposition, self-transposing.
"Fractured is an not because of
'holophrase'" important example only
its placement but because as a it us in two
trope pulls simultaneously
directions. related dualities of effect to staging but claims
Iser ascribes
that cognitive discourse cannot capture them. The term is a
compound,
antithetical figure. Holophrase is a synecdoche, for it means that one
stands for a whole, even for a network that we
thing complex might
ordinarily understand metonymically as the conjoining of many parts.
The however, or even removes the whole
adjective fractured, qualifies
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 an or a
creating irony
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 up the rhetorical and conceptual
possible
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 The word chameleon and its German
'holophrase.'" English
cognate come to us a Greek Latin from
root, khamai, which
through
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.
are obviously
The large issues in Iser's book anthropological ones;
to the of what itmeans to be human. He looks into
they pertain question
that he argues is autochthonous, or indigenous, or aborigi
something
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 or bucolic literature, which Iser

pastoral
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 one locale to another, one
boundary crossing (from
season to another, one of development to another). A
stage boundary
as Iser uses that term, is the activity of a chameleonic creature.
crossing,
Inhume and exhume remind us of the excursus at the end of
may

chapter 4, which together with the immediately preceding section,

between the Fictive and the Imaginary," occupies a place
"Interplay
to the section at the end of chapter 3 involving the chameleon.
parallel
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 and exhuming of imagination. Beckett's title
inhuming
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
is at various points in Iser's book, including in the
imaginary important
of the section the one on interplay. Death
closing immediately preceding
is the chameleon's other, both its opposite and its mutually defining
In death we cross a boundary that cannot be recrossed; the
counterpart.
us. There is no humus in Iser's but there is
ground claims commentary,
and that too us back to ground and to mortality.
decomposition, brings

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 63

III. Capturing Beckett and Other Imaginary Creatures

a
Beckett's "Imagination Dead Imagine" holds surprising place in The
Fictiveand 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 can take. His
bridging,
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 to the extent that, a that
capture, except through reaching
exceeds our we conceive of it and its character as
grasp, express
double and antithetical. Dual in character, a
inherently imagination,
strange compound like Carroll's snark (snake/shark), avoids capture by
our usual conventions for mapping Carroll's illustration
positions.
the snark's location as a fluid one in an ocean that cannot be
presents

adequately framed because there are nolandmarks. 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 that in turn allows for
conjunction
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 the ocean in Carroll's text,
represents
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
for instructs the helmsman to "Steer to starboard, but
Captain, example,

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 in its
participate
character.

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 64 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

NORTH EQUATOR

Scale of Milts. Ocean chart

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

The literal blank

in Carroll's poem, one of the few in the
history of
literature accompanied by an illustration, finds its and
counterpart
opposite in the black page of Laurence Sterne's Tristram a text
Shandy,
about which Iser has written The of that
extensively.9 emptiness page is
of another kind, though it resists explanation as as the
persistently
unchartable ocean.

This other unusual instance of a literal textual blank does not

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

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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 to capture the shape,
attempt
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 ismatched and reversed by the

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66 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

fact of death as both

an unalterable limit in human and a
experience
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 a
and "Fantasy Literature," he engages 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 itself as dead; in
imagine
effect, to imagine death. The details of the text frequently take the form
of chiasmus, a rhetorical structure marked and reversal.
by repetition
Chiasmus occurs as a rhetorical and in the work, for
figure structurally
in the movement of or and in "the rise
example, "resuming, reversing,"
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 a man and a woman, are described in a structure
figures,
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" of Wake, a construction that alludes to
episode Finnegans
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 "never twice the
experience
same storm." A related experience and doubling ismade
of difference
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 that can be called tumult. But the proof is "still,"
background
both continuing and dead. This world as proof provides an argument

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THE WAY OF THE CHAMELEON 67

the character of tumult. however, can be

against "enduring" "Enduring,"
a rather than an As a the
present participai adjective. consequence,

validity has to be judged against the fact that we continue

proof's
tumult." On the one hand, we have a "world" that is still, but
"enduring
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 we are faced with an
negativity,
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
are as as Iser's influential 1971 essay
yin and the yang implicit early
"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 as doublings and oppositions in
presented
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 a and even an
provide counterpart perhaps inspira
tion for some of Iser's and discursive for
insights strategies. "Company,"
can be understood as a text about it all for
example, "devising company"
(NO 33), producing works for an audience, who are invited as company,
and for who are a of actors, but also to the
performers, company keep
writer company in an act of doubling involving resemblance and
reversal. Beckett's of the creative act lend themselves at
representations
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 these characters are characters of the
psychological presences,

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

the figures in "Imagination Dead Imagine," as man and woman, but male
are to both. "W" could be writer, whose creature "M,"
pronouns applied

perhaps W's is his double,

me, 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
as a version of the tai chi tuan:
representation

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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 there the
position, emerges 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 indetermi
ambiguities,
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 the narrator raises about W, it is not clear if the language
question
concerns into another "creature" or into another "dark." In
moving
effect, it leaves us in the dark.
is characterizedBecauseby M

"unnamability" and the fact that "Mmust

go," "W reminds himself of his
creature" (NO 33). The ambiguous language suggests thatW 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

same figment dark as his figments" and "for good

company," W is "In the
not yet devised" (NO 33). His permanent state is to be "for good," or
always, in an unfinished condition, and that situation, which involves
in the dark, is beneficial, or "for good," as a condition of perpetual
being
potential.
character, as
Play's doubled, self-differentiating, self-transforming
literature realizes it, is its chameleonic quality. Chameleons change
color under certain circumstances, to themselves from
including protect
enemies, to attract mates, or to threaten rivals, but not as a
probably
matter of play or performance in the way that we would predicate play
or of humans. Human play includes the alliterative play
performance
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 lions, to describe fiction's relation to
ground cogni
tion, a relation that includes echo-like doublings. Fiction is the chame
leon of It refuses to maintain a to accommo
cognition. singular shape
date abstract attempts to define it by cognitive discourse, which threatens
it. Iser's discourse, which is not its rhetorical
narrowly cognitive, changes
colors so that this unnamable creature will not from
disappear entirely
view.

IV. The Chameleon as Translation

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

writing.

writing process for both involves translation. As with Beckett's works,

Iser's exist in two versions, neither of which takes over the
precedence
other. Each text has a double with which it is not identical, though the
doubles are counterparts, likeW 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
discursive. The own and terms become a
ostensibly study's processes

staging its subject. At

of 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 of that articulation.
example self-consuming
One point that Iser makes repeatedly is that the fictive is groundless,
that it has no substratum and is not a substratum. He that in the
says
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 that subsists on a kind of air, as chameleons
ground,

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 creature that finds itself on the in
groundless ground,
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 ismortal, the human always on
its way to becoming humus. Is the chameleon a figure of or of
living
dying? The answer is surely yes. Is it possible to "refute" Iser, as Yeats says
we can "refute on abstract grounds? Section 33 of "111Seen 111
Hegel,"
Said" an answer: "Was it ever over and done with . . .
provides 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

of the navigational chart, the black page, and the yin and yang were produced
Renderings
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 Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,
Wolfgang
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 byHenry Holiday, ed. Martin Gardner (New York, 1962),
pp. 47-52.
9 Laurence The Life and Opinions
Sterne, of Tristram Shandy (New York, 1967).
10 Tzvetan The Fantastic: A Structural Approach
Todorov, 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 . . in Our Exagmination Round His
.Joyce,"
Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London, 1936), p. 14.

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