Microworlds Read online

  The simplest procedure, as we know, is simple inversion. What could be simpler than to achieve new effects by inverting the conventional structures petrified by tradition: this is the principle behind Mark Twain’s “antistories.” It would be easy to construct a theory of literature if only the descriptive language did not damage the reality depicted in the work, but simply represented it in a different mode. The problem is that this is not the case at all. Language, the instrument of description, is also the creator of what it describes. (Language can describe itself, as well, thereby becoming an object, and not only in a linguistic sense; for the language that describes language has a different semantic function from the language it describes.)

  As cultural prohibitions weaken, it becomes impossible for literature to confront them. An approach that a century ago would have been considered “blasphemous” or immoral now rises to the level of artistic innovation. To cite the most readily available example: dispassionate descriptions of things that customarily are not permitted to be presented “coldly.” This is the principle behind Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and this is how modern experimental prose often describes the sexual act. The result is a kind of culture shock — characteristic of many works by Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Sexus, Nexus, Plexus), in which the author describes his characters with great precision as though they were machines, naming their bodily parts by their functions, and intentionally ignoring all relevant social-erotic taboos. But in such situations we can at least distinguish between the structure of the description and the immanent structure of the object described. This 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 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 The Erasers: (1) the myth of Oedipus, (2) “time loops,” (3) the detective story. If we must, we can deduce the detective story from the myth, or the time loops from the investigation. But we cannot explain without contradiction the meanings of the whole triadic structure, unless we invoke an elaborate edifice of additional tortuous and arbitrary interpretations. In The Erasers, the heterogeneous narrative structures were aligned by chance. In another of Robbe-Grillet’s works, La Maison de rendez-vous, the principle of chance operates in the fragmentation and gradual recombination of the plot, and the method of fragmentation is also random. (Thus, in The Erasers, the chance generator operates on the fundamental level, the level of total structure, whereas in La Maison de rendez-vous, it operates on the subordinate ones.)

  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 t
he 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.