fortuitously when he cross-breeds and combines complex narrative structures in new ways. This does not mean that such a writer makes only pragmatic “improvements.” For, as a linguistic system, the literary work is often simultaneously homogeneous and disparate: it can be perfectly coherent on some levels, in certain constitutive structures, whereas on other levels it may even be internally contradictory. Moreover, it may keep some of its potential structures open — leaving, as it were, a way out for the work to transcend its own sphere, as is done in “The Monkey’s Paw,” for example. This short story proposes an “appended transaction”: we must either accept the existence of the “ghosts,” and thus the hypothesis of transcendence, which makes the story a coherent whole, or we discard the hypothesis, and the work dissolves into a series of fortuitous, coincidental events. The acceptance of transcendence is the price one must pay for the work to be coherent.
The approach of the French antinovel has been a most interesting example of creative exploration. This exploration moved into extremely dangerous territory; for the novelists, instead of “cross-breeding” various kinds of order, reached a point where the paradigmatic forms of order and disorder collided. This is an altogether understandable approach when the author’s guiding principle is the attempt to maximize the number of semantic levels in his work. Every message loses its clarity when it is damaged, either through collision and intermingling with another message, or because it is caught up in a flood of “pure noise.” If we posit that the task of literature is not ever to give a definitive explanation of what it presents, and is therefore to affirm the autonomy of certain enigmas rather than to enter into explanations, then the most enigmatic of possible secrets is a purely random series. Every code that holds a hidden message has some key that will open it and decipher it, except pure chance, which is not a mask that can be ripped away, and thus will always resist every attempt at a definitive understanding. There is an unintentional trap in this situation, however. Every chance situation can be transformed into a nonrandom system if one employs adequate supplementary hypotheses. For instance, one can state that the Scandinavian peninsula resembles the outlines of a seal not because of chance geographical occurrences, but because of intentional actions (i.e., God Himself willed it so when He created heaven and earth). In accordance with Occam’s razor, one can designate any state to be intentional through such extraneous hypotheses, even when there is not a trace of intentionality in them.
The majority of the works of the French antinovelists are the semantic equivalents of the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, in that a certain kind of “semantic nudity” — a lack of intentionality induced by turning on the “noise generator” — is seen by its recipients as “new clothes,” or as a new type of literary narrative that is, in its own way, intelligible.
The antinovelists have employed this generator on many different levels of creative work. Nothing explains the superimposition of the following structure in
From the reader’s point of view, Kafka’s method (endowing the total structure of the work with a multidimensional “indeterminacy”) and that of the antinovelists (depriving the work of clarity of meaning through quasi-accidental interventions to produce obscurity) have similar semantic results. The reader, in the activity of reading, reconstructs the work in a way that explains it, and invests its partially random qualities with order. The only problem is that such works, like the ink blots of a Rorschach test, have no “true” interpretations. This state of affairs favors the writer, since the broader a work’s field of cultural references, the better it defends itself against devaluation. Any work that extends deep roots through its semantic references can serve to integrate the culture in which it originates. But the practical problem remains of convincing the reader to make the necessary interpretative effort, to integrate through hidden cultural references something that appears, at first sight, impossible to integrate, because it is a product of chance. Readers must be persuaded that there is a real need for their efforts, and the author is aided in this by zealous and resourceful critics who become the veritable coauthors of such emphatically indeterminate texts (which is probably why these texts hold such an attraction for many of them).
The difference between the works constituting multi-structured sandwiches and the works that represent “noise-damaged” messages is the same as that between the information of an authoritative palimpsest and a pseudo palimpsest in which the work of monks illustrating a manuscript is interlayered with that of houseflies making their own “corrections.” It goes without saying that the use of the noise generator as a creative device is not a trick, since cultural consensus approves of chance in the creative process (this fact is self-evident in the fine arts, and can be seen in such extravagant methods as pitching fistfuls of paint at the canvas, or tracking shoe soles dipped in paint across it, and so forth). It is another matter that these works are essentially mechanisms for the creation of semantic mirages, even when they give an impression of semantic richness; to search for their inherent significance is akin to searching for the objective correlation between the delusions and nightmares of the hallucinating mind. If the organizing principle of the work is chance, it cannot also be intentional at the same time. This means that intentionality is displaced onto another, more inclusive level of the work, since the choice to use chance as a creative technique is itself not a product of chance at all. It is the result of calculation or conscious intention — a calculation sanctioned by game theory, which tells us that if one player makes a random move, his partners must also resort to a random strategy. And this is where the anti-novel defeats us, because as readers we cannot justify chance strategies of reception, because that would mean the dissolution of articulation.
As a result, we are forced to strive for integration, to pretend that the work is a coherent whole.
Another factor in this context is that literature makes general use of the structures of indirect description or allusion. Whenever something is completely known — i.e., when it is fully rooted in a given culture — it can be understood or deduced from a single sign or allusion, and because of this, any given state of affairs can be made vividly present for the “culturally practiced” reader even through the remotest circumstantial reference. This indirect description is a method of structuring a work by “remote control” guidance of the reconstructive efforts of the reader’s imagination, not only in space, but also in time. Every description of a situation taken from the repertoire of culturally known situations invokes the repertoire of possible issues appropriate for it, and these issues are what the reader will anticipate. Within the framework of this structured anticipation, he will make his decisions by following directions given in the text, even when they are few, or barely present. (For instance, we can speak of blatantly erotic situations, or others which have hidden erotic content held in constant suspension.) Indirect, “remote control” description is dictated either directly by cultural norms (as, for example, the prohibitions against expressly naming and presenting what the culture considers too drastic), or by the author’s individual choices and thought. In the latter case the descriptive structures are generally full of gaps; they are either incomplete, or they are dim mirror images of completely different, unnamed, unarticulated, and thus merely intuited, structures. This displacement of description into circumscription can happen gradually, and, furthermore, either discontinuously or continuously. To transform circumscription into description, one can either move over into the as yet unnamed, untouched center of the problem by offending cultural prohibitions (by speaking plainly of things that had been previously forbidden, or by introducing obscene words into the vocabulary); or one can go in the opposite direction and attach to the culture’s generalized structures of reference still other references, whose proper territories are even further from the concrete events.
Because of this systematic refusal to speak plainly, the reader begins to feel unsure whether he or she really understands what the description is concretely about, and this gives rise to the semantic wavering that characterizes the reception of contemporary poetry. (Not all poetry, certainly: there is randomly composed poetry, but we can discern a high level of “systematic indirection” in the finest poems of Grochowiak, for example.) All these approaches have a common origin: as the level of the reception’s indeterminacy rises, the reader’s own personal determinations begin to waver. In practice, it is often impossible to determine whether a given narrative structure is only very indirect and elliptical, but essentially homogeneous, or one deliberately damaged by “chance noise,” or even perforated, softened, and bent by another, discordant structure. Furthermore, since one can also create multilayered structures, even the concrete quality of the described object or situation can be transformed beyond recognition and reshaped from one level of articulation to another. Thus, it is often impossible to determine categorically whether the basic structure of description is an image of order or of chaos. We cannot always
