Microworlds

becomes impossible when the reader has no knowledge whatsoever of the object and has none of the normative guidelines fixed in his memory for how the object “should be” described. These “wobbles” of perception cannot be enclosed within any strictly conceived semantic theory, because they are problems of practice, in which the receiver of the information is an inseparable part of the informational system. (For us, living in the present, the Man on the Moon can already be a specific person, or a specific historical event, whereas for people living only a few years in the past he was a purely fantastic creature, whose fictive nature deprived him of the solid objective qualities unique to intersubjectively demonstrable facts.)

The principle of “transposing and displacing” descriptive structures in relation to their objects can produce valuable results, both aesthetically and epistemologically. But when this “mix-up” is the result of a writer’s ineptness and ignorance, the narrative clings to any available structure like some fragile vine, and the effort can only end in failure. This sort of indifference usually reduces anthropological problems to stereotypical adventure novels, social phenomena to psychological and personal phenomena (e.g., the conflict of two cultures played out as if it were the conflict of two individuals), and the alternations of cultural codes and norms to primitive reorientations on the order of “Aha! so this is how it should be done!” By the same token, escape from realistic dilemmas into illusory solutions is the general rule (for example, the resolution of the conflict between socialism and capitalism through the arrival on earth of “highly developed cosmic beings” who compel humans to live in peace, etc.).

The crisis of art in our age stems from the general disappearance of normative rules of action, which in turn results from the erosion of a view of culture as sacred and unquestionable because its commandments form a more ancient code than do civil laws. Whether one could break cultural rules if they became inconvenient was a question that one simply could not pose publicly in former times. It was empiricism that proved to be culture’s Trojan Horse, since its principal criteria are those of utility, which naturally raise questions of comfort and convenience. For empiricism, the only inviolable barrier is the totality of the attributes of nature it calls the body of physical laws. Thus, observing the human world from an empirical standpoint necessarily leads to the complete relativization of cultural norms everywhere where they impose “unfounded” imperatives and restraints. Art can never be content with the basic stock of prohibitions that empiricism respects — merely because it cannot transgress them — for that would reduce art to nothingness. If art were to confine itself to the goals of empirical knowledge, it would begin to resemble empiricism more and more, until it became a faint replica, a shadow of science.

Art — and specifically literature — had in its province structures inherited from a venerable past governed by the untouchable norms of religious doctrines and myths. Literature has all but completely exhausted these models, and it has not been enriched by new ones, for the sources of such structures have dried up. It is irrelevant whether they dried up when their creative power was naturally exhausted or whether the invasion of technogenic pragmatism had dammed them before they could reach maximum potential. Even if such latent, historically untested meaning-structures might still be “inventable” in theory, they would be of no use for either humanity or art. A structure of significations that had never shone with the light of sacred solemnity, and had never been treated with the respect, fear, and love with which humans react to the presumed presence of the transcendental secret, would have no value for art.

The collapse of every kind of taboo created a freedom so vast that literature quickly began to feel acutely uncomfortable. From there on, its only forum of appeal is culture, in a necessarily nonsacred sense. Literature can still operate with the model structures generated by this secular culture. But the sense that all the actual, synchronically functioning structures of the cultural field are unsatisfactory has led to hybridizing techniques, with combinations of extremely divergent structures and their superimposition over one another. For example: the deterministic structure of myth alloyed with the indeterminate structure of reality, as in Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Joyce’s Ulysses, or Frisch’s Homo Faber. The principle of such works is allusion. The writer must arrange his ostensibly realistic material, drawn from the fund of common experiences, in such a way that its resemblances to the structure of some venerable myth (Faust, Odysseus, Oedipus) is evident to the reader. The reference to myth not only serves to give a lofty sanctification to things that would ordinarily be meaningless, however. Myth can also be parodized, treated iconoclastically, or even forcibly demolished. In Lolita, Nabokov discredits the myths of the innocence and angelic purity of adolescent girls, for in the novel it is the young girl who seduces the would-be ravisher, not he who defiles her. Elsewhere, as in Nabokov’s more recent novel (Ada, or Ardor), the author exploits the cultural arsenal of prohibitions against incest in a “ludic” mode, by extending them to other relations parodistically superimposed over one another: between blood relations of a certain family, between the signs of the code invented by the incestuous lovers, between the “aristocracy” and the “plebeians.” Even empirical truth contradicts the postulates of the incest taboo, because, as it turns out, due to the sterility of incestuous relationship, “nothing would have come of it anyway.”

The hallmark of such creative strategies is their authors’ constant search for ever more emphatically expressed resistance. As far as creative motivation is concerned, this situation differs radically from previous historical situations, because the artist who believed in the uniqueness of the norms guiding and regulating his creative activity naturally did not consider it his primary responsibility to attack them. These norms were “programmed” into him, having been perfectly internalized intellectually and emotionally, and he obeyed them with grace. As a consequence, originality — the personal irreproducibility of the work — manifested itself above all in the form, since the lofty canons of religious-cultural faith did not prescribe down to the last atom what forms works of art were to take.

This “search for resistance” — the initially clandestine erosion of existing norms -developed gradually in art. Historically, it predates the advent of technical civilization, since Don Quixote already introduces the (otherwise quite ambivalent) collision of the “myth of chivalry” with a prosaic, nonmythic reality. But as more and more norms disappear from social praxis, literature faces ever-growing difficulties. Its predicament is beginning to resemble that of a child who has discovered that his incredibly understanding parents will let him break with impunity all his toys, indeed everything in the house. The artist cannot create specific prohibitions for himself in order to attack them later in his work; the prohibitions must be real, and hence independent of the writer’s choices. And since the relativization of cultural norms has not so far been able to disturb the given characteristics of human biology, that is where writers today seek the still perceptible points of resistance — which is why literature is preoccupied with the theme of sex. But such tactics are short-lived, an accelerating escalation sets in, and the “law of diminishing returns” goes into effect. A cultural taboo is too fundamental to be a pliable barrier; once it has collapsed, it can no longer serve as a wall for wall-shattering rams to knock down, piece by piece. Thus the removal of the administrative, and not culturally generated, censorship barriers has produced such a lightning-fast “pansexualization” of literature that an amusing competition has begun in the description of the most obscene scenes.

Writers require the resistance of matter as they require air. In literature it is particularly meaningless to storm gates that are standing wide open. When the solid foundations of the cultural norms began to crack, then crumble, literature tried to establish for itself a special autarchy and self-sufficiency, but this could never be complete. Through its aesthetic means, its concrete works, literature attempts to prove what is both logically and empirically unprovable. This is the source of those polyvalent and ambiguous structures that are susceptible to divergent interpretations. Kafka’s The Castle, for example, can be read as a caricature of transcendence, a heaven maliciously dragged down to earth and mocked, or in precisely the opposite way, as the only image of transcendence accessible to a fallen humanity. In the first instance, the revelation is compromised; in the second, its earthly interpretation. Works like this do not expose those main junctures that could reveal their unambiguous ontological meanings: and the constant uncertainty this produces is the structural equivalent of the existential secret. The secret is neither explained nor given a secondary meaning. It simply remains — not merely as an enigmatic reference, but vividly displayed as a tangible presence, created by the palpable, irreducible indeterminacy of the work’s own structure. This “rock solidity” of the secret produced by the cunning structuration of the work is one possible response to the destruction of cultural norms.

The other possibility is the approach mentioned earlier: superimposition of very different structures, some of which are harmoniously striving toward the same goal, while others are in dissonance and headed toward collision. The result is a peculiar feeling of depth, since it is not always possible to determine anew which structure is fundamental and which is relative, or, rather, which is the “absolute system of relations,” and which are the variables whose values must be interpreted with reference to the system’s standards. In neither case is the guiding principle of the work arbitrary. Just as a breeder does not act blindly, fortuitously, or chaotically when he sets out to develop a superior strain from the original animal or plant prototypes, so a writer also does not act