LITERARY HISTORY, MODERNISM, AND POSTMODERNISM

UTRECHT PUBLICATIONS IN
GENERAL AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Utrechtse Publikaties voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap
(UPAL)

Series Editors:

Keith Busby
C. de Deugd
J.J. Oversteegen
Institute of General and Comparative Literature
Utrecht, The Netherlands
The volumes to be included in the series will fall into three main groups:
a) studies which contribute to the understanding of the problems of literary
theory, past and present;
b) works which can be said to fill existing lacunae in the fields of general and
comparative literature, including text editions;
c) works which reflect the research interests of the department itself. This
includes comparative literature from the Middle Ages to the present, as well
as particular aspects of and approaches to the theory of literature.

Volume 19

Douwe W. Fokkema
Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism
 Douwe W. Fokkema

LITERARY HISTORY, MODERNISM,

AND POSTMODERNISM
(The Harvard University Erasmus Lectures,
Spring 1983)

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY

AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1984
 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Fokkema, Douwe Wessel, 1931-
Literary history, modernism, and postmodernism.
(Utrecht publications in general and comparative literature, ISSN 0167-8175; v. 19) (The
Harvard University Erasmus lectures; spring 1983)
1. Literature-History and criticismTheory, etc.- Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Mod-
ernism (Literature)--Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Postmodernism-Addresses, essays,
lectures. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series: Harvard University Erasmus lectures; spring 1983.
PN 441.F59 1984 809'.91 84-23498
ISBN 90-272-2194-4 (hb.)
ISBN 90-272-2204-5 (pb.)
Copyright 1984 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
 CONTENTS

Preface vii
I. Literary History from an International Point
of View 1
II. Modernist Hypotheses: Literary Conven-
tions in Gide, Larbaud, Thomas Mann, Ter
Braak, and Du Perron 19
III. Postmodernist Impossibilities: Literary
Conventions in Borges, Barthelme, Robbe-
Grillet, Hermans, and Others 37
Notes 57
 Preface

The lectures published in this volume were originally an-

nounced under the title "Dutch Literature in its Euro-
pean Context" and delivered at Harvard University on
9, 16, and 23 March 1983. In view of the fact that they
were presented as the "Erasmus Lectures on the Civili-
zation of The Netherlands," the title was fully justified.
The attention to Dutch literature, however, is rather
subdued, and now that they appear in print it is appro-
priate to emphasize their general character. In fact, they
gave me an opportunity to present an outline of my
thoughts on the writing of literary history, in particular
with respect to twentieth-century European literature.
They also carry the major results of the research under-
taken by my wife, Elrud Ibsch, and myself in the field of
Modernism. Furthermore, they explore some of the
conventions of Postmodernism. The lectures are pre-
sented largely in the manner in which they were read; I
have made no attempt to remove traces of oral delivery.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the Eras-
mus Committee of Harvard University and its chair-
man, Professor Arthur L. Loeb, for having invited me to
spend a semester at Harvard. I also feel indebted to the
Comparative Literature Department, in particular Pro-
fessor Claudio Guilln and Professor Walter Kaiser for
their hospitality and collegial cooperation, as well as to
Miss Bette Ann Farmer and Mrs. Anne Smith for their
secretarial support. I thank Lidy van Roosmalen of the
Vill PREFACE

Institute of General and Comparative Literature, Uni-

versity of Utrecht, for giving the manuscript its final
shape.

University of Utrecht
May 1983 Douwe W. Fokkema
I. Literary History from an International Point of View

It is my intention to deal with various aspects of modern

literary history and to pay some attention in particular to
contributions made by Dutch writers and scholars. The
position of The Netherlands between its German,
French and English speaking neighbours makes it al-
most impossible to discuss the fate of Dutch literature in
isolation. My topic, therefore, will be modern Dutch lit-
erature in its European context, in particular the litera-
ture of the interbellum and that of the period since
World War II. I shall focus on Modernism in the 1920s
and 1930s in my second lecture, and on traces of Post-
modernism in contemporary literature in my third lec-
ture. Today, however, I will devote most of my time to a
number of rather general issues with respect to literary
history.
This distinguished and sophisticated audience will
have little confidence in the naive narrative of literary
history as an enumeration of great and less great writers
and their works. Similarly, in The Netherlands the
methods of literary history have been questioned to the
extent that the art of writing literary history has almost
been lost. The effect of Russian Formalism and later de-
velopments has been that the writer-oriented, bio-
graphical method was discredited and abandoned. The
Formalists' criticism of earlier literary history, of
course, was largely correct. Their interest in literary
form enabled them to draw a clear, though not always
convincing line between art and non-art. One of the
2 LITERARY HISTORY

Russian Formalists, Jurij Tynjanov, however, observed

as early as 1924 that it is impossible to give a general de
finition of artistic form without reference to the particu
lar historical moment of its production and reception.1
Tynjanov was correct in postulating that the restriction
to purely formal issues prevents the literary historian
from resorting to explanations which have their basis
outside the literary series. As Jurij Striedter and others
have shown, there is a line that connects the incipient
criticism of the early Formalist position by Tynjanov
with the insights of Czech Structuralists such as Jan
Mukarovsky and Felix Vodika, and the idea of a Rezep-
tionsgeschichte, launched by Hans Robert Jauss in
1967.2 The focus on the reception of literature by the
reader appeared to be fruitful and gave rise to numerous
theoretical comments and several valuable studies of
the response to particular texts and writers.
I will not go into the hermeneutic entanglement
which at times has obscured Jauss's position, nor into
Wolfgang Iser's approach which sometimes appears to
be closer to text-immanent criticism than to reception
history. Let us restrict ourselves to the question why, so
far, no serious attempt has been made to write a reader-
oriented history of literature that aims at a considerable
degree of completeness. A problem with Rezeptionsge
schichte, of course, is that there are so many recipients,
and a criterion for selecting particular readers as worth
mentioning in a history of literature cannot easily be
found. The function of the artifact, or Ausgangstext, the
text that is being received, is also problematic. Should it
remain a point of reference in a reader-oriented literary
history? Or should the reception historian merely focus
on the processing of the text by the reader, on Textverar
beitung, as Gtz Wienold has called it?3 An answer to
 LITERARY HISTORY 3

these questions would by implication settle the issue of

the adequate interpretation or, in the plural, the prob-
lem of whether it is possible for the historian to distin-
guish between adequate and inadequate interpreta-
tions. Do we in our capacity of literary historians
have criteria to reject or ignore certain interpretations
and other forms of reception because they are gross dis-
tortions, the far-fetched fantasies of idiosyncratic
minds? I fear we do not, as evidenced by the irresistible
wave of Deconstructionist criticism and, in general, the
continuing multiplication of interpretations.
When the Formalists and Structuralists left the
solid ground of the biographical method and attempted
to replace the historical narrative focussing on the writer
by a text-oriented, and at a later stage by a reader-
oriented literary history, they met with grave difficulties
which have led many scholars to question the value of
both the Formalist and the reception-historical insights.
The quandary of the literary historian has not remained
unnoticed in The Netherlands. A couple of months ago,
Ton Anbeek, a newly appointed professor of Dutch lit-
erature at the University of Leiden, argued in his inau-
gural address that the text-immanent or formalist ap-
proach to literary texts had virtually ended the writing of
literary history.4 The search for the one, adequate in-
terpretation had destroyed interest in larger historical
concepts and explanations. I consider his diagnosis
largely correct. Like Anbeek, I also regret that work in
the field of literary history has come almost to a
standstill. The cure which Anbeek offers, however,
would never be my prescription. He considers reception
studies of interest only insofar as they are confirmed by
later interpretations, in particular those of Anbeek him-
self. There are other problems in his argument as well.
4 LITERARY HISTORY

The program Anbeek proposes consists of a literary

history based on correct interpretations supported by
reception studies and narratological analysis. I am pre-
pared to give his text-oriented approach the benefit of
the doubt, but am not convinced that text interpretation
by the scholar should be the cornerstone of literary his-
tory. The obvious question, of course, is whether the
scholar can ever interpret and evaluate literary texts in a
way that transcends his own interests. If we view in-
terpretation as the attribution of significance or, more
precisely, as the construction of a meaningful relation-
ship between the world of the text and the lifeworld of
the reader, the answer to that question is no. Any in-
terpretation remains tied up with the interests of the
reader. The historian who relies on his own textual in-
terpretations as a criterion for interpretations by others
will write a literary history that is restricted by the scope
of his own interests. It is doubtful whether such a literary
history can still have the pretension to explain anything
at all.
As Claudio Guillen has argued: unlike the critic,
the literary historian cannot be satisfied with an atomis-
tic approach to literature.5 It may be advisable to dis-
criminate from the outset between text interpretation
and literary history. The latter includes, among other
things, the history of text interpretation, even though
the historian at times cannot avoid resorting to his own
interpretations for lack of reception documents or other
reasons. After having abandoned the writer as the pre-
dominant point of reference in literary history, it is not
at all self-evident that the recipient or the text (i.e. tex-
tual interpretation by the scholar) should take his place.
The literary historian may be concerned with issues that
can neither be described nor explained by focussing ex-
 LITERARY HISTORY 5

clusively or mainly on the text or the recipient. One of

the crucial phenomena in literary history is the change of
norm systems: the replacement of Romanticism by
Realism, of Realism by Symbolism and Modernism,
and of Modernism by Postmodernism are major events
in literary history. The Russian Formalists, particularly
in their later publications, laid the foundation for the
systematic examination of the succession of literary sys-
tems. They were interested in stylistic and composi-
tional devices that can be found in more than one text,
and they considered the effect literary texts in general
may have on the reader. In short, they paid much atten-
tion to the system of compositional and thematic con-
ventions which governs the production and reception of
texts, and they studied the literary system not only in its
synchronic appearance but also in its diachronic aspects.
Inspired by Edmund Husserl and Ferdinand de Saus-
sure, they laid the basis for a semiotic study of literature.
The system of conventions that regulates the or-
ganization of a text can be called a code. In a recent de-
finition by Jurij Lotman, a code is "a closed set of mean-
ingful units and rules governing their combination, rules
which allow for the transmission of certain messages."6
Evidently, the organization of a literary text depends on
more than one code. This has also been observed by
Lotman, who distinguished at least two codes in any lit-
erary text: the linguistic code and the literary code. Lot-
man emphasizes that a code is a system that models our
perception, and at times he appears to be closer to the
Sapir-Whorf thesis than seems advisable. In his view the
code of language determines our perception and think-
ing to a considerable extent. The same applies to the
code or codes of literature, which are conceived to be
supralingual, i.e. not restricted to a particular language.
6 LITERARY HISTORY

In other words, the codes of literature do not respect lin-

guistic barriers. The code of Romanticism, or of
Realism, can be found in the literature of most Euro-
pean nations as well as in America. The generic code of
fiction, or of tragedy, or of the sonnet has played a role
in text production in all major Western languages. The
idiolect of individual writers, such as Dostoevsky or
Beckett, appeared to be translatable into other lan-
guages. The codes of literature may superimpose them-
selves on the linguistic rules. They may contradict and
overrule the standard linguistic usage, as appears from
the exceptional semantic and syntactic options in
Futurist or Surrealist poetry, which have been accepted
by thousands and thousands of readers.
Obviously, the comparatisi interested in literary
history from an international point of view will be curi-
ous to know to what extent the concept of code can serve
his ends. Let me repeat Lotman's definition of code that
I gave earlier: "a closed set of meaningful units and rules
governing their combination." Lotman clearly distin-
guishes between the semantic and the syntactic compo-
nents of codes. Codes also have a pragmatic component
which determines under what conditions the semantic
and syntactic rules are applicable.7 When we deal with
the code of Postmodernism, it is usually taken for
granted that those who apply or admire it will not do so
under all circumstances. Neither Donald Barthelme,
nor Thomas Pynchon, nor their admiring readers, will
always speak the disturbing language of Postmoder-
nism. I cannot elaborate now on the pragmatic aspect of
literary codes.
One of the issues in the debate on codes is their de-
gree of rigidity. In his Theory of Semiotics, Umberto
Eco distinguished between strong and weak codes.8 The
 LITERARY HISTORY 7

Morse code and the numerical system are examples of

strong codes; in each there is a clear one-to-one relation-
ship of signifier and signified. Other codes, such as cer-
tain types of symbolism in literary texts or connotative
codes, are supposed to be weak. I do not believe that the
distinction between strong and weak codes has been
helpful. The problem with a code of connotations is not
that one is relatively free to use it for encoding or decod-
ing a text, but that one must know more of the pragmatic
situation in which the potential signifier occurs before
one can decide that the connotative code is applicable.
A connotative code is based on rules as rigid as in other
codes, but its validity is limited to a particular and rather
restricted context. In the novel Les Faux-Monnayeurs
of Andr Gide the term "dpersonnalisation" has a
favourable connotation, but in his Retour de VU.R.S.S.
the connotation of the same term is negative.9 The latter
book, however, appeared many years after Les Faux-
Monnayeurs, referred to a different social context, and
aimed at a different audience. In short, the pragmatic
conditions of the connotation were completely different
and the later connotation of "dpersonnalisation" did
not interfere at all with the earlier use of the word.
Another objection that has been made to using the
concept of code in the study of literature is that codes
should be based according to a definition of George
A. Miller on "prior agreement between the source
and destination."10 It appears to me that this require-
ment can apply only to artificial codes, not to the codes
of language, literature, manners, fashion, and other sys-
tems of verbal and non-verbal communication that are
rooted in a long history of social behaviour. I am not at
all inventing here a new usage of the term code. Let us
recall that Virginia Woolf in her famous essay, "Mr.
8 LITERARY HISTORY

Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924) observes that the

"code of manners" of the Edwardians is no longer ac-
cepted.11 One year later, the Dutch novelist Carry van
Bruggen wrote in her essay Hedendaagsch Fetischisme
(Contemporary Fetishism) that language can be consid-
ered a code.12 George Miller also called the English lan-
guage a code, distinct from other codes such as French
or German in spite of his own definition.
Non-artificial codes do not rely on prior agreement
between sender and receiver. The receiver, however,
must learn the codes that are used in the community of
which he is a part. In social communication most codes
are subjected to some degree of gradual change, and it
is useful to distinguish between the synchronic and dia-
chronic study of codes. The diachronic aspect involves
sign production to which Umberto Eco has devoted
much attention and is of considerable importance
for the study of literature. However, before going into
the motives for sign production and code changing in
literature, we must attempt to make the concept of code
more concrete.
Lotman distinguished at least two codes; I, how-
ever, would suggest that there are at least five codes that
are operative in virtually all literary texts (my five codes
are quite different from the five codes distinguished by
Roland Barthes13): 1. the linguistic code, which, for
example, directs the reader to read the text as an English
text; 2. the literary code, which predisposes the reader
to read the text as a literary text, i.e. a text with a high
degree of coherence, with obvious consequences for the
production and acceptability of connotations and
metaphors; 3. the generic code, which instructs the
reader to activate certain expectations and to suppress
others, depending on the genre that has been chosen; 4.
 LITERARY HISTORY 9

the period code or group code, which directs the reader

to activate his knowledge of the conventions of a period
or particular semiotic community; and 5. the idiolect of
the author, which, insofar as it is distinguishable on the
basis of recurrent features, also has the character of a
code. At this point several questions can be raised, such
as, how we should conceive the interrelationship be-
tween the five codes mentioned. Another question, of
course, is, why these five codes and not less or more?
Umberto Eco suggests that, in text production, each
subsequent code further restricts the selection of seman-
tic units and the rules for their combination that was pos-
sible on the basis of the preceding codes.14 Thus the liter-
ary code restricts the options that are open under the re-
gime of the linguistic code. The choice of a genre further
restricts the options of the two preceding codes. The
selection of a group code further restricts the range of
options open under the three preceding codes. Finally,
resorting to a particular idiolect limits the range of possi-
ble options once again. It is due largely to the habitual
interests of the student of literature and the state of our
discipline that I do not mention more than five codes,
but the number is far from sacred. If one would conceive
of more than these five codes, in principle their inter-
relationship would not change. Any additional code will
further restrict the range of options the sender has in en-
coding his text.15 It is in accordance with Jurij Lotman to
conclude that the more codes the sender uses for encod-
ing his text, the greater the amount of information the
text contains. And, similarly, the greater the knowledge
the recipient has of the codes that have determined the
text, the more information he will be able to elicit from
that text.
It is not at all certain, however, that a poet or writer
10 LITERARY HISTORY

when he begins to write first picks a language, then de-

cides to write in a literary way, next selects a genre, then
joins a particular group or movement, and finally sets
his idiolect free. He possibly takes all these decisions,
but not necessarily in this order and not always in full
awareness. Whatever the case, his final text is a product
of a hyperselection, which can be fairly well represented
by the model of the five interrelated codes that we have
sketched. It cannot be maintained, however, that the
selection process always takes place along lines which
attribute more weight to the general decisions than to
the specific ones; for instance, more to the choice of lan-
guage than the selection of the various codes of litera-
ture.
Apart from making the selection more specific, the
next step in the selection process may also jeopardize
the earlier steps. The period code, for instance, not only
restricts the options of the linguistic code but may also
contravene the rules of the linguistic code. Likewise, the
idiolect may to some extent contradict the conventions
of the period code or genre code. The final individual
decisions of the author may be the beginning of a new
period, stretch the conventions of the genre, challenge
the literary code and even go against the basic rules of
language. Joyce's Finnegans Wake provides the obvious
example, but few literary texts have reacted against the
existing conventions with similar vehemence. The fact
that what we have presented as the later steps in the
selection process may overrule earlier decisions, corres-
ponds with our intuition that deviation from the stan-
dard language in literary texts cannot be considered a
mistake, and also with the more general notion that
creative innovation should be valued more highly than
the correct clich.
 LITERARY HISTORY 11

Please accept my apologies for this rather long and

tedious explanation of the concept of codes in literature.
Unwarranted simplification would not have been in the
spirit of the Erasmus lectures. The concept of code in lit-
erature provides a clue to the writing of literary history,
in particular the history of literature in various lan-
guages. Our distinction of five codes operative in liter-
ary texts now appears to be helpful. For it is not the lin-
guistic code that yields much material for the writing of a
literary history, nor the literary code, which predisposes
the reader to look for coherence (and internal refer-
ences and connotations based on the assumption of a
strong coherence). The genre code, too, is still relatively
stable throughout historical change; variations in the
system of genres and subgenres coincide, however, with
the rise of new period codes, or rather group codes.
Therefore, I would suggest that the literary historian
who wishes to come to any general observations, and
possibly also explanations, should work with the con-
cept of group code or sociocode, i.e. the code designed
by a group of writers often belonging to a particular gen-
eration, literary movement or current, and acknow-
ledged by their contemporary and later readers. To-
gether, these writers and their readers form a semiotic
community in the sense that the latter understand the
texts produced by the former.
There are several reasons why the term period code
is not very appropriate. First, it assumes a unilinear de-
velopment of all literature, which is wrong, even if one
tacitly restricted oneself to European and American lit-
erature. Not only are there Asian and African litera-
tures which do not participate in the European periodi-
zation, but the quick succession and frequent coexis-
tence of different avant-garde movements in twentieth-
12 LITERARY HISTORY

century European literature in fact forbid the term

period code and suggest its replacement by group code
or sociocode. Second, the term period code obscures the
simultaneous existence of avant-garde, canonized, and
popular literature (Trivialliteratur), produced and read
by different semiotic communities. The concept of
period code tends to obfuscate the fact that, apart from
the succession of avant-garde literature, older types of
literature are still being read. The period code of
Realism is supposed to have ended about 1880 or 1890,
but there are still many readers of Flaubert and Tolstoy.
The literary historian should create concepts to deal
with such facts; the term sociocode may enable us to de-
scribe the protracted existence of codes that once were
avant-garde but later became canonized or even trivial.
Literary history, then, can be described with refer-
ence to more or less dominant sociocodes, and in order
to make more concrete what I have in mind, I will pre-
sent a brief sketch of the syntactical aspects of the
sociocode of Modernism. I shall mention the main con-
ventions of Modernism, which are constraints on the op-
tions of the writer in the field of the syntactical and com-
positional arrangement of the text. In my next lecture I
shall also discuss the Modernist preference for particu-
lar themes, in other words, the constraints on text se-
mantics.
My view of Modernism has been very much in-
spired by Harry Levin's well-known article, "What Was
Modernism," written in 1960, and coincides to a consid-
erable extent with the concepts of Modernism in Peter
Faulkner's little book Modernism (1977) and in David
Lodge's The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), but it
rather differs from the position expressed in the collec-
tion of papers edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James
 LITERARY HISTORY 13

McFarlane under the title Modernism 1890-1930.16 In

my opinion Modernism as a forceful code in literary his-
tory begins in or about 1910, when, as Virginia Woolf
noted, "human character changed,"17 Larbaud's novel
Fermina Mrquez was published in the Nouvelle Revue
franaise, and Joyce's Dubliners were waiting for publi-
cation. It is before World War I that Proust completes
the first volume of his A la Recherche du temps perdu
(1913) and Gide writes Les Caves du Vatican (1914),
known in English as Lafcadio's Adventures. Much ear-
lier Thomas Mann published his Tonio Krger (1903),
which in many respects anticipates the Modernism of
Der Zauberberg (1924). Robert Musil began publishing
his critical essays before World War I. In Holland Carry
van Bruggen published her novel Heleen in 1913, which
announces the Modernism of her later essays and Eva
(1927). In general Dutch Modernism has a somewhat
later start than French or English Modernism. It is not
accidental that the very first traces of Modernism can be
seen in France, where Symbolism originated, and was
parodied from a Modernist point of view by Andr Gide
in his aludes as early as 1895. The sketches of Monsieur
Teste by Paul Valry, published one year later, describe
a character that fully conforms to Modernist conven-
tions: "une sorte d'animal intellectuel [...], capable de
tout, ddaignant tout."18
There is a basic difference between Realism on the
one hand and Modernism on the other. "The Realist
creates an epic world, by means of a comprehensive, en-
circling and inclusive narrative,"19 writes Peter Demetz
in one of the best studies of Realism. The Modernist
does not try to be complete and lacks the certainty that
would make him attempt to discover the laws governing
human existence. Like Monsieur Teste, however, he is
14 LITERARY HISTORY

an intellectual who never gives up thinking, even if he

knows that the results of his deliberations can be only
provisional. Therefore, he often presents them as
hypotheses, as indeed Proust has done using hypotheses
which repeatedly are qualified. In the description of Al-
bertine, the hypothesis of absolute virtue is launched
and subsequently amended. Proust writes: "Pour ce qui
concerne l'hypothse d'une vertu absolue/.../, je ne
laissai pas de la remanier plusieurs reprises."20 The
poetical device of the hypothesis used by Proust was
soon recognized, for instance, by Jacques Rivire who
in 1920 in the Nouvelle Revue franaise expressed his ad-
miration for Proust's dislike of obscurity. He observes
that if Marcel does not know enough to characterize a
person, he is to present his hypotheses: "faute de mieux
il les peuplera de ses hypothses."21 Here the sender's
code has been acknowledged and confirmed by a
reader. Such confirmation by a critic is a crucial event in
literary history, as it shows that communication on the
basis of the new code has taken place. A new code that
has never been acknowledged by an audience can hardly
count as an important historical fact, and perhaps
should not be called a code. Obviously, here is a role for
reception history, which may help us to clarify when and
in what respect new codes at first have been recognized.
It may help us to detect the primary facts of historical
change in literary communication. Similar facts of early
acknowledgement of the Modernist code occurred, of
course, in English literature; for instance, when in 1917,
J.C. Squire in the New Statesman hailed the author of A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for his intellectual
integrity, sharp insight and "detachment."22 In The
Netherlands the recognition of Modernism occurs
somewhat later but perhaps clearer than anywhere else;
 LITERARY HISTORY 15

in the early 1930s Menno ter Braak and E. du Perron ex-

press their admiration for an array of Modernists, such
as Thomas Mann, Gide, Proust, Larbaud, Joyce, Al-
dous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Pirandello, ostensibly
regarding them as a group with which they would like to
identify themselves.
The major convention of Modernism with regard to
the composition of literary texts is the selection of
hypothetical constructions expressing uncertainty and
provisionality. It affects the relations between the text
and other factors of the communication situation, as
well as the organization of the text itself.
(a) With respect to the relation between text and
author it is a Modernist convention to consider the text as
not being definite. As Paul Valry said: "Un pome n'est
jamais achev."23 After having completed his Confes
sions of Zeno (1923), Italo Svevo continued to write
stories which were published in English as Further Con
fessions of Zeno. If the text cannot be considered defi-
nite and complete, the notion of the ending becomes a
relative one. In principle, any text, the Modernists be-
lieve, can be continued, precisely as Edouard, the main
character in Les Faux-Monnayeurs, puts down in his
diary; he wishes to finish the novel he is writing with the
words: "pourrait tre continu."24 This explains the
Modernist preference for the diary or quasi-diary,
which ends A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as
well as Du Perron's Het Land van Herkomst (Country of
Origin). In fact, the last pages of Du Perron's novel con-
tain a letter, asking for an answer which we never see.
Apparently, the text is never completed, and can always
be continued, qualified, improved, even revoked.
This attitude also has repercussions on the organi-
zation of the text. We have already mentioned the diary
16 LITERARY HISTORY

with its suggestion of continuation as a means of

camouflaging the ending. We must further point to the
lack of well-constructed plots in Modernist texts, to the
reliance on rather arbitrary intrigues often borrowed
from the available stock of myths and to the stylistic
devices of enumeration and continuing qualification.
All these devices express provisionality, both at the
level of the sentence and of the text. They are based on
intellectual experiments which defer any final conclu-
sion.
(b) As to the relation between text and social con-
text, the Modernist preference for hypothesis forbids
any sort of law-like explanation of human behaviour as
was common in Realism. One remembers Virginia
Woolfs criticism of the Edwardians as being
"materialists. "25 The polemics between Andr Gide and
Maurice Barrs is also of importance in this respect and I
intend to go into that dispute in the next lecture. In Mod-
ernism the relation between text and represented world
is characterized by the convention of epistemological
doubt. There is no pretension that the text indeed de-
scribes the world it aims to describe, nor that the expla-
nations it gives are more than an approximation of truth.
With regard to the organization of the text this implies a
preference for the continuing flow of the stream-of-con-
sciousness, which never aims at a definite result and
even less at general validity. The tendency towards epis-
temological doubt has implications with respect to the
intrigue, such as Gide's playing with unmotivated action
(l'acte gratuit), and Thomas Mann's resorting to
lengthy, essaylike dialogue. The composition of the text
is very much determined by the opposition of conscious
deliberation on the one hand, and action dictated by the
natural and social environment on the other, with an ob-
 LITERARY HISTORY 17

vious preference for the first.

(c) With respect to the relation between text and
code, it is a Modernist convention to resort to metalin
gual comment, that is, to discuss the codes used, either in
the text itself or on other occasions. As Robert Alter has
shown, this type of self-reflexivity also occurred before
the Modernist period. It acquires, however, considera-
ble importance in the Modernist code, where it leads
Gide to write a Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, in which
he discusses the writing of his novel. It motivates
Thomas Mann to comment on his major novels. It
makes Virginia Woolf discuss her fiction in her diary and
letters. It causes Du Perron and Ter Braak to engage in a
correspondence that precisely in view of this Moder-
nist convention of metalingual comment may be con-
sidered as belonging to the corpus that provides material
for literary history. The metalingual discourse of the
Modernists may pertain to all five codes mentioned ear-
lier: the linguistic code (cf. James Joyce, Ezra Pound,
Thomas Mann, Carry van Bruggen), as well as the liter-
ary code (Menno ter Braak, for instance, argued that
the boundaries of literature are or should be shifting,
and he quotes H.L. Mencken in support of this view26).
The metalingual comment may also refer to the generic
code (an obvious example is Gide's Les Faux-Mon
nayeurs, but also Du Perron's Country of Origin), or to
the sociocode (Virginia Woolf discussed her affinity
with the "Georgians," Lytton Strachey, Joyce and
Eliot, and her criticism of the "Edwardians," Bennett,
Galsworthy and Wells;27Gide's Prtextes (1903) pro-
vides similar examples, as does the correspondence of
Ter Braak and Du Perron). It also happens that the
idiolect was made object of metalingual discussion: both
Gide and Thomas Mann discussed their own intentions.
18 LITERARY HISTORY

So did Ter Braak and Du Perron, who moreover re-

flected on their differences: "I believe," wrote Ter
Braak, "that Stendhal is your 'Urbild' and Nietzsche
mine."28
Indeed the significance of Nietzsche for Modern-
ism can hardly be overestimated. His influence is great
in the work of Musil, Thomas Mann, Larbaud, Gide,
Paul Valry, Carry van Bruggen, and Ter Braak. His
Sprachskepsis, reinforced by Bergson's philosophy of
language, lies at the basis of the Modernist convention
of metalingual considerations, which underline the pro-
visionality of all that can be said. Nietzsche disclaimed
the possibility of the adequate use of language: "die For-
derung einer adquaten Ausdrucksweise ist unsin-
nig."29 This attitude may also be discerned in the organi-
zation of Modernist texts. They easily shift from one re-
gister to another, as happens in Barnabooth, Les Faux-
Monnayeurs, Ulysses, and Country of Origin. The belief
that adequate expression was impossible prevented the
Modernists from indulging in linguistic experiments of
the sort the Futurists, Expressionists and Surrealists had
undertaken.
(d) Last but not least, the Modernists assigned a
rather important role to the reader. Gide paid explicit
attention to the reader when he, on the last page of his
aludes, provided a blank space for writing down "les
phrases les plus remarquables de aludes."30 The re
spect for the idiosyncrasies of the reader became a Mod
ernist convention which, as will be shown in our next lec
ture, also appears from the textual organization.
IL Modernist Hypotheses: Literary Conventions in Gide,
Larbaud, Thomas Mann, Ter Braak, and Du Perron

In my previous lecture I discussed the Modernist prefer-

ence for hypothetical constructions, specifying the main
compositional and syntactical conventions as (a) the
presentation of the text as not being definite or complete
(b) epistemological doubt with respect to the possibility
of representing and explaining reality, (c) metalingual
scepsis as to the possibility of expressing adequately
whatever knowledge about the world one thinks to have
found, and finally (d) respect for the idiosyncrasies of
the reader, or the idea that reading is a private affair
upon which even the writer should not intrude. This
made Valery Larbaud describe the act of reading as an
unpunished vice, "ce vice impuni." Gide was even more
explicit and wrote, as early as 1895: "Il suffit qu'il y ait
possibilit de gnralisation; la gnralisation, c'est au
lecteur, au critique de la faire."31 The artist creates only
the possibility of generalization, the generalization itself
is up to the reader, to the critic.
All four points can be elaborated, and it would be
worthwile doing so, in particular as they also seem to
form a good starting point for our discussion of Post-
modernism. Today, however, I shall focus mainly on the
issues of epistemological doubt and metalingual com-
ment, which so strikingly set Modernism off from
Realism as well as Symbolism, and also provide an ap-
proach to the study of Modernist semantics.
In Le Trait du Narcisse (1891) Gide still presented
20 LITERARY HISTORY

a Symbolist poetics. He called the work of art a crystal,

something self-sufficient, that cannot be affected by the
vicissitudes of historical change: "paradis partiel ou
l'Ide refleurit en sa puret suprieure."32 Four years
later, in his Paludes, Gide abandoned the Symbolist
poetics he had helped shape. He denied that there could
be an untouchable, superior idea and derided the use of
symbols. The epistemological issue comes to the surface
where Angle comments: "Il n'y a plus de vrit du tout,
puisque vous arrangez les faits comme il vous plat."33
We hear the same criticism thirty years later in Les
Faux-Monnayeurs: the Symbolists did not want to know
life, denied life, turned their back on life.34 Paludes is
built on the theme that resignation will lead to fossiliza-
tion. Gide proposes "rvolte" as an alternative to "ac-
ceptation," travel is to replace immobility, the open
window is considered as superior to the stuffy room. In
Paludes the first traces of a Modernist semantic universe
become visible.
Somewhat more complex was Gide's criticism of
Realism, which goes back to the last years of the
nineteenth century, when he had read Maurice Barrs'
novel Les Dracins (1897). In opposition to Barrs'
over-appreciation of family ties and fatherland, Gide
praised again the notion of travelling, which provides
the joy of no longer feeling attached, of not having any
roots: "la joie qu'il y aurait ne plus sentir d'attaches, de
racines si vous prfrez."35 Gide took a position com-
pletely opposite to that of Barrs by advocating "d-
paysement (physique ou intellectuel)," "dracine-
ment,"36 and "dtachement."37 His argument is strik-
ingly similar to that of James Joyce who in A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man described Stephen's emanci-
pation from the ties of home, fatherland and church,
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 21

and with Virginia Woolf's criticism of the "materialist"

Edwardians. The early polemics between Gide and Bar-
rs, which became known under the somewhat odd
name "Querelle du peuplier,"38 had serious political
overtones. In the polemics, Charles Maurras, the foun-
der of the Action Franaise and later collaborator of
Ptain, sided with Barrs. Gide showed that a choice
had to be made between provincial determinism and
intellectual freedom, between narrow-minded na-
tionalism and a cosmopolitan concept of culture. In
fact, Gide fought against the ideological basis of the
later National Socialism, and this confirms his signifi-
cance as a thinker and a writer. He was one of the first to
criticize a form of Heimat-ideology. His remarkable
story Le Promthe mal enchan (1899), of which the
title is polemical as well, continues his argument for at-
tempting to conceive of a way of life that is not deter-
mined by natural or social conditions. In his view, man is
human insofar as he is not conditioned by his natural en-
vironment or social background. Like William James,
whom he admired,39 Gide thinks in terms of an opposi-
tion between consciousness on the one hand, and natu-
ral and social conditions on the other.40
In this context the problem of free will, which in
Gide's work is related to l'acte gratuit, is of paramount
importance. It has a strong bearing on the concept of
Modernism, and the concept of Postmodernism, too,
can be discussed in terms of free will, namely, an excess
of free will. In fact, the dilemma of free will is expressed
by Alexandre in Gide's Paludes: "Il me semble, Mon-
sieur, que ce que vous appelez acte libre, ce serait,
d'aprs vous, un acte ne dpendant de rien; suivez-moi:
dtachable remarquez ma progression: supprimable,
et ma conclusion: sans valeur."41 This is a rather
22 LITERARY HISTORY

adequate summary of what Gide had to say about the

acte gratuit, the unmotivated and therefore also super-
fluous action. The rest is elaboration, further considera-
tion, qualification. The idea haunted Gide for more
than forty years, and yet it is impossible to say whether
he ever advocated the acte gratuit or whether he be-
lieved that it was possible. In his discussion of the free,
gratuitous act, Gide was a Modernist launching his
hypotheses without giving a final judgment. As he
explained in the Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, the ar-
tist should not imitate what nature proposes, but should
propose to nature what it might imitate.42 This view is in-
dicative of the wide rift between Realism on the one
hand, and Modernism on the other. The text is seen as a
hypothesis which is to be confirmed by reality.
It is tempting to trace the development of the con-
cept of l'acte gratuit through Gide's work, from Paludes
and Le Promthe mal enchan, to his comment in Pr
textes on Kirilov's suicide in Dostoevsky's Possessed, to
the unmotivated crime of Lafcadio in Les Caves du Vati
can and the Russian roulette in Les Faux-Monnayeurs.
The gratuitous act has been studied by others, but to my
knowledge not in its contrast to the determinism of
Realism. The theme of intellectual freedom, in particu-
lar the topos of the gratuitous act, is a distinctive feature
of Modernism. Valery Larbaud deals with it in Bar-
nabooth where he describes an experiment with klep-
tomania as an "action indiffrente."43 The influence of
Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Bse is unmistakeable
in Barnabooth, as it is in the work of Gide. In Les Faux-
Monnayeurs, however, the concept of the gratuitous act
is broadened to an ethical principle of far greater scope,
and we will conclude our discussion of Gide by trying to
characterize that principle of ethical behaviour.
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 23

It may be surprising to interpret Les Faux-Mon-

nayeurs as an argument for a particular ethics. Not only
has the novel been criticized for not being anchored in
reality or verisimilitude,44 but it has been plainly re-
jected as "un livre hassable, une oeuvre [...] dsagr-
ablement immorale."45 In The Netherlands there was
similar negative criticism, mainly based on arguments
indigenous to a Realistic world view. Matthijs Ver-
meulen wrote in De Gids of 1927: "I cannot accept that
all French lycens are amoral bandits, who possess the
cunning, impenitence and insolence of old, experienced
criminals. I just read this week that a seventeen year old
lycen from Paris has beaten the English champion in
swimming. [...] I must laugh when I think what contrast
he makes with Gide's degenerate gang, which indulges
in all sorts of common and uncommon prostitution,
steals letters from their fathers' mistresses, blackmails
the parents with these letters and circulates counterfeit
money."46 What kind of ethical lesson is one to learn
from such a book?
Nevertheless, Gide's criticism of the Symbolists as
having produced only an aesthetics and not an ethics,47
is indicative of his own ethical concerns. His ethics is
based on relativism. One of the characters considers the
sinister paradox that each time a person sacrifices him-
self for others, he should be valued higher than they.48 It
appears that Bernard comes close to Gide's own posi-
tion, with which we are acquainted through the Journal.
Bernard argues "que rien n'est bon pour tous, mais
seulement par rapport certains; que rien n'est vrai
pour tous, mais seulement par rapport qui le croit tel;
qu'il n'est mthode ni thorie qui soit applicable indif-
fremment chacun; que si, pour agir, il nous faut
choisir, du moins nous avons libre choix."49 Bernard
24 LITERARY HISTORY

knows that one is not always free to choose. He then ob-

serves that the most important thing in life is to maintain
one's authenticity byapersonal consideration of the fac-
tors which determine a decision: "Je voudrais, tout le
long de ma vie, au moindre choc, rendre un son pur,
probe, authentique."50 This is all Gide has to offer, but
perhaps it is a good deal. The rejection of an ethics that
is valid for everyone means that everyone is to design his
own ethics, which must be reworded for every new situa-
tion. Gide does not offer a ready-made solution for ethi-
cal problems, but lays the responsibility for ethical be-
haviour at the door of the person who is to act. This is
strikingly similar to his concept of reading. The interpre-
tation of his novel is up to the reader. The writer has only
provided the possibility for interpretation. The reader
may do whatever he wishes, he may add or leave outit
does not matter. Tant pis for the lazy reader, but Gide is
not interested in him; he desires other readers. "Inqui-
ter," he says, "tel est mon rle."51 The question may
arise as to what Bernard's ideal of authenticity is; but
that, too, is a problem to be solved by the reader. The
precise semantic load of authenticity will differ from
person to person. Gide's appeal to the reader to draw his
own conclusions discharges him of the necessity to fill in
every empty spot. The code of Modernism provides a
justification for Leerstellen.
Let us further examine the relation between Gide's
ethics and his poetics. It was his aim in Les Faux-Mon-
nayeurs to develop a relativistic ethics on the basis of the
principle that "nothing is good for everyone." Every
human being must find his own solution to his relation
with his fellow human beings. This attitude alone can be
called pure or authentic. Similarly, in the field of epis-
temology: "Nothing is true for everyone," says Ber-
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 25

nard. "There is no method, nor a theory which is appli-

cable under all circumstances." With respect to poetics
this means that no story is equally valid for everyone,
and that there is no one single way of telling a story. The
definite and complete description of reality, valid under
all circumstances and for all readers, is impossible. This
explains Gide's need for continuing metalingual com-
ment, qualifying the texts already written and avoiding
the finality of a definite ending. The specific form of a
text can be considered adequate only from a particular
point of view and in a particular context of time and
place. If the moment for which it was created has pas-
sed, the text needs comment or rewriting. The aim of au-
thenticity Bernard's idealis closely connected with
a sense of history, with the awareness of a personal,
momentary and unique experience.
One may wonder whether Gide is so important as a
Modernist writer that I should pay so much attention to
him as I do. I think he is, and he certainly is from the
perspective of Dutch Modernism. Both Du Perron and
Ter Braak, the authors who are the central figures of
Dutch Modernism, closely followed the French scene
and were admirers of Gide. They knew much less of
English literature. We cannot even be certain that Ter
Braak ever read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
although Du Perron did.52 We know, however, that
both were rather critical of the Joycean experiment in
Ulysses. In The Netherlans Joyce was imitated by Vest-
dijk in his novel Meneer Vissefs Hellevaart (Mr. Vis-
ser's Descent into Hell). This irritated Du Perron to
such an extent that in a letter from Paris where he
lived he charged his friend Ter Braak to discuss the
matter with Vestdijk. On July 5, 1934, Ter Braak re-
ported back to Du Perron: "He accepted your observa-
26 LITERARY HISTORY

tion concerning the imitation of Joyce, and seemed to

agree, but in the meantime he had almost again com-
pleted another novel, which, as I wrote earlier, indeed
does not resemble Joyce, but rather Larbaud."53 The
new novel by Vestdijk to which Ter Braak referred must
have been Terug tot Ina Damman (Back to Ina Dam-
man), which, like Larbaud's Fermina Mrquez, de-
scribes the life of schoolchildren and their first sensations
of love. However, it seems to have been inspired much
more by Proust than by Larbaud.54
For various reasons, Valery Larbaud became Du
Perron's model, in particular, his work that came to be
known as Barnabooth, but which was published in 1913
as A.O. Barnabooth, Ses Oeuvres compltes, c'est--dire
un Conte, ses Posies et son Journal intime. Eddy du Per-
ron, the son of wealthy parents who had returned to
Europe from the Dutch East Indies shortly after World
War I, recognized much of himself in the Latin-Ameri-
can multimillionaire Archibald Olson Barnabooth, who
economically independent thanks to an annual in-
come of 10 million pounds sterling interest travels
through Europe in pursuit of intellectual experiments
and freedom. Indeed, in 1908 Gide advised Larbaud to
call Barnabooth's diary, "le journal d'un homme
libre."55 Although Larbaud ignored the advice, the
theme of freedom in the Modernist sense of indepen-
dence and intellectual detachment is central to the
"Journal intime." The point is that Barnabooth often
feels his wealth as a burden. People do not believe that a
multimillionaire can think. For the popular press the
combination of original ideas and millions of pounds ap-
pears an impossibility. Barnabooth feels the danger of
becoming a slave to his possessions, and in his own way
he fights the economic determinism that was also
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 27

criticized by Andr Gide and Virginia Woolf.

It would be wrong, however, to focus exclusively on
the "Journal intime" and to isolate it from his Oeuvres
compltes. The combination of the story about "Le
pauvre Chemisier," the poetry in free verse, and the
diary in these so-called "complete works" gave Larbaud
an opportunity to describe his hero from different ang-
les. The narrative mode is explicitly mentioned as a
problem. When in "Le pauvre Chemisier" the character
Barnabooth is introduced, the narrator explains that he
prefers to talk of himself in the third person: "Je prfre
parler de moi la troisime personne, c'est plus conven-
able."56 In the poetry and the "Journal," however, the
first person is used. The differing narrative modes and
the different genres provide the kaleidoscopic view that
is characteristic of Modernism. Barnabooth is not iden-
tical with Larbaud himself, not only because he under-
takes things which have only been imagined by the au-
thor, but also because the portrayal of a person never
can show the complete truth about the living person.
Epistemological doubt is very much present in the
Oeuvres compltes, but perhaps even more important is
the metalingual scepsis. The text, including the poetry,
is never fully adequate, and the reader is advised not to
be content with what he reads but to look for what trans-
pires from it in spite of the poet's efforts: "Prenez donc
tout de moi: le sense de ces pomes,/Non ce qu'on lit,
mais ce qui parat au travers malgr moi."57 In the diary
there are explicit comments on earlier sections, which
are characterized, for instance, as "de pauvres
paradoxes d'colier."58 The metalingual comment is
motivated by an uncertainty rising from the awareness
that absolute correctness may be a norm, but can never
materialize. Barnabooth is afraid of finding more and
28 LITERARY HISTORY

more certitude in writing and would regard such a de-

velopment as fatal: "Alors j'crirai 'je' sans hsiter,
croyant savoir qui c'est. Cela est fatal, comme la
mort." 59 Doubt is preferred to certainty, the first is
equated with life, the second with death. This is typical
of Modernist semantics.
After the publication of the complete works of Bar-
nabooth and his earlier novel Fermina Mrquez, Lar-
baud occupied himself primarily with international liter-
ary traffic, for example, in his function of editor of the
journal Commerce. Just as Barnabooth listened to his
friends Putouarey and Stphane, Larbaud paid much at-
tention to the work of others; he read and translated
Samuel Butler, Walt Whitman, Joyce, and Svevo. His
interpretations, introductions and translations are the
products of an exemplary cosmopolitan spirit. Here,
too, I see a Modernist aspect: the Modernist role of de-
tached observation is close to that of being an inter-
mediary. The Modernist does not see the text as final,
but looks for the dialogue and expects comment. The
boundaries of the text, of the genre, and even of litera-
ture are violated.
In 1923 Eddy du Perron read Barnabooth during a
journey through Italy. Repeatedly Du Perron conceded
that he felt he had much in common with Larbaud and
also physically resembled him. Apart from this, it is Lar-
baud's preference for the clarity of the common word
that impressed Du Perron. He experienced the re-
lativism and Sprachskepsis in Barnabooth as an anti-
dote, both to the neologisms of Dutch sensitivism ("het
Nieuwe Gids-jargon") and the absolutist pretensions of
Marinetti, Cubism, Surrealism, and Dadaism. In the
1920s the latter were often grouped together as "moder-
nism," a term used in a somewhat different way than I
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 29

propose to do now. It appears from his correspondence

with Paul van Ostaijen, the Flemish poet, that Du Per-
ron in his early career as a writer took some interest in a
modernism that borders on Cubism. In 1929 he stated in
an interview that he had also wanted to be modern and
that he still considered the modernism of the 1920s to be
a healthy illness.60 After his cubo-modernist interest,
Du Perron took quite another course. Deeply impress-
ed by Larbaud and Gide, he wrote the novel Een Voor
bereiding (A Preparation), first published in 1927 and
rewritten in 1928. It imitates many of the tricks Les
Faux-Monnayeurs also has it is a novel about a writer,
who writes a novel and discusses his work in a diary
which is extensively quoted. I prefer to proceed, how-
ever, immediately to Du Perron's major work, Country
of Origin, for which I use the English title under which it
may be known one day in the Anglo-Saxon world. A
translation has been finished and is in the hands of an
American University Press. One can also read Het Land
van Herkomst, first published in 1935, in French. In
1980 it was published as Le Pays d'origine, in an excel-
lent translation by Philippe Noble and with a preface by
Andr Malraux, who served as a model for one of the
main characters in the novel.
Country of Origin is partly based on memories of
the Dutch East Indies, where Du Perron spent the first
twenty years of his life, but in truly Modernist fashion it
also describes the process of recovering and reporting
these memories. There is a resemblance to Proust's un-
dertaking, but Du Perron adds geographical and cultur-
al distance, and is fully aware of the political situation of
his time. The book has chapters devoted to the years in
East India and to his European experiences, but they in-
terfere, especially where he describes the workings of
30 LITERARY HISTORY

his memory and reports on the faithfulness and modality

of precision of his recollections. Both the epistemologi-
cal doubt and the metalingual scepsis are fully present in
this lengthy novel, which I consider one of the major
texts of Modernism. Like Barnabooth and A la Re-
cherche du temps perdu, it is not an autobiography. The
character that most resembles Du Perron is named Du-
croo. As in these other novels, the narrator is aware of
"the untruth of all chronology."61 Where chronology
fails, consciousness is to order the material, and pre-
cisely in order to underline the important role of con-
sciousness, the laws of chronology are violated. There
are a few instances where Du Perron describes (recon-
structs) moments of "mmoire involontaire." There is a
continuous opposition between chronology and a-
chronological awareness. Within the achronological con-
sciousness there is another opposition between personal
experience on the one hand and the upheaval of contem-
porary political events on the other.
Through the visit to Ducroo of Wijdenes, a charac-
ter modelled on Ter Braak, the threat of National
Socialism is reported in the novel, and so are the rather
confused political developments, strikes and demon-
strations in Paris during the years 1933-34. Marxism is a
more frequent topic of discussion than National
Socialism. Here the position of Hverl, a rather accu-
rate representation of Malraux, is interesting. Hverl,
the Marxist and man of action, confesses to living with-
out memories. Ducroo's position is exactly the oppo-
site. Ducroo uses his memories to resist the schematiza-
tion of the future. Hverl urges him to join a political
party, but Ducroo hesitates and faces the dilemma in
terms of the qualifications of an active consciousness on
the one hand and the schematization of a promised fu-
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 31

ture on the other: "At this moment nothing seems to me

to be so poor a solution as to devote oneself to a part of
humanity, called a party, which wants to occupy a par-
ticular position. To have no time any more for qualifica-
tions, to sacrifice everything to the idea of 'getting
there,' a goal that again and again turns out to be only
'temporary'! To be a human being only, for instance, as
a communist, to find oneself back as a human being only
through Marx."62 Ducroo decides to remain loyal to
himself and he adds a particular Modernist phrase:
"This so delicate and endlessly variable self."63
Nevertheless, he is fully aware of the fact that political
forces may want to destroy him. He does not resign him-
self to such a fate, however, and, again in a typically
Modernist train of thought, adds: "Let us keep open
other possibilities."64
In his preface to the French translation Malraux ob-
served that Ducroo remained rather unaffected by the
conditions under which he lived, whether in the East In-
dies or in Brussels and Paris, whether living in wealth,
or, when he had lost everything, working for his daily
bread. In Malraux's words, "Les dcors le touchent
peu," and "Il est dans un constant dtachement en face
d'un monde d'apparences."65 Here, Malraux hits on the
Modernist convention of anti-determinism, which made
Barnabooth say: "les vnements ne peuvent rien sur
nous." 66 This detachment, which Malraux considered
characteristic of Du Perron, is a distinctive feature of
Modernism, and is in contrast to Malraux's own novels,
in contrast to Existentialism, and, of course, Socialist
Realism.
One may wonder whether Thomas Mann shares
this disengagement. He certainly does in his Be
trachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918). It was only a few
32 LITERARY HISTORY

weeks before Hitler came to power that Thomas Mann

in an open letter expressed the conviction "dass der geis-
tige Mensch brgerlicher Herkunft heute auf die Seite
des Arbeiters und der sozialen Demokratie gehrt."67
This, however, is a political statement and did not affect
his artistic production, including Doktor Faustuswith
the exception, as Elrud Ibsch has shown, of certain judg-
ments by Serenus Zeitblom and the very last lines of the
novel.68 In Der Zauberberg (1924) and later works
Thomas Mann is evidently a Modernist. He explained
his poetics as follows: "Schn ist Entschlossenheit.
Aber das eigentlich fruchtbare, das produktive und also
das knstlerische Prinzip nennen wir den Vorbehalt."69
Intellectual reservations, detachment, and irony
characterize Mann's idiolect. He feels congenial to Gide
and, after having read Harry Levin's book on James
Joyce, comes to the conclusion that there are also pro-
found similarities between Joyce and himself. Their
common basis is their aim to destroy the "reality" of the
Realistic novel.70
In 1935, Menno ter Braak observed this anti-
Realism in Der Zauberberg (1924): "Those, who insist
on reading Der Zauberberg as a realistic novel of life in
Davos, cannot escape disillusion."71 Many readers, ar-
gued Ter Braak, make the mistake of beginning to read
this novel with antiquated conceptions of the novel in
mind. Indeed, Modernism had changed the existing
norms of the generic system; the novel had partly given
way to the essay, the primary form of intellectual consid-
eration. Ter Braak recognized the metalingual scepsis in
Thomas Mann's works, and with evident agreement
quoted Mann's view that truth does not coincide with
particular words: "Die Wahrheit [...] fllt nicht mit
einem bestimmten Wortlaut zusammen, vielleicht
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 33

sogar ist das ihr Haupt-Kriterium."72 Of course,

Nietzsche had expressed himself in a similar way, and if
Ter Braak admires Thomas Mann and Andr Gide, it is
partly a tribute to Nietzsche. Apart from many longer
and shorter essays, Ter Braak wrote also two novels,
one of which, Hampton Court (1931), was criticized for
being an "unsuccessful pastiche of Proust."73 Ter Braak,
however, confessed he had never read Proust. By then,
however, the devices of Modernism were rather well-
known, whether through Proust or Mann or Gide or
Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Hampton Court begins with a
monologue intrieur which reduces time to the aware-
ness of a split second, and has several moments where
the mmoire involontaire does its work. Andreas, the
protagonist, emancipates himself from the bonds of
love, but also from the predictable workings of cyni-
cism. At the end of the book we find a change of register
with ironic implications expressing metalingual scepsis.
The material I have dealt with is rather diverse.
Surely, induction seldom leads anywhere and should be
used only for didactic purposes. Let me now jump to
conclusions and present a rough model of the semantic
universe, in which the Modernists felt at home.
Our model is to visualize what in fact are certain
preferred options of the mind. As in the case of the syn-
tactical aspects of the Modernist code, also its semantics
is set up in contrast to other codes, mainly Realism and
Symbolism. It also differs sharply from the coexisting
code of Surrealism. Any semantic universe can be
thought to be divided into segments, segments which
consist of large semantic fields or groups of semantic
fields. Whereas, in principle, everyone has access to all
of these segments and the semantic information they
contain, a person can only handle this information if he
34 LITERARY HISTORY

has learned the necessary semantic code.

Apart from the possibility of having no knowledge
of particular segments of the semantic universe, there
also is the possibility that a person (writer or reader) will
consider certain segments as being irrelevant, and
others of crucial importance. His view of the world im-
plies a certain hierarchy of semantic segmentation. For
the Modernists, the center of the semantic universe con-
sists of the notion of awareness, which we can view as a
semantic field containing several related wordswords
having the semantic feature [+ awareness] in common
, among them the lexemes "awareness," "conscious-
ness," "deliberation," "thinking," "intellectual," etc.
To specify the hierarchy of the Modernist semantic
universe we may use the metaphor of concentric circles.
The semantic field of awareness can be thought to oc-
cupy the space enclosed by the first of three concentric
circles around the "I," the thinking subject, or, as Du
Perron said, "this so delicate and endlessly variable
self." The second circle should enclose the semantic
field of detachment, accomodating words such as "sep-
aration," "departure," "depersonalization," or in
French: "dpersonnalisation," "dracinement," or in
German: "Vorbehalt." The third concentric circle en-
closes the semantic field of observation, containing
words such as "observation," "perception," "view,"
"window," etc. Of course, the Modernists also show a
preference for words which belong to two or all three of
these semantic fields: "intelligent," "subtle," "experi-
ment," "hypothesis," "adventure." The list can be ex-
tended, but I must restrict myself to one more addition:
the metaphor "kaleidoscope," which one finds in
Proust, Musil, Carry van Bruggen, and elsewhere, has
the semantic features of [+observation, + detachment,
 MODERNIST HYPOTHESES 35

+change, - finality] and is particularly characteristic of

the Modernist preferences.
The three concentric circles form a first zone, which
is at the top of the semantic hierarchy in all Modernist
texts. There is a second zone which consists of a number
of neutral semantic fields, which can be arranged in con-
formity with the rules of the idiolect of the various writ-
ers. Finally, there is a third zone which comprises se-
mantic fields which in all Modernist texts are at the bot-
tom of the semantic hierarchy. The semantic fields of re
ligion and nature, which were at the top of the Symbolist
semantic universe, belong to this third zone in Moder-
nism: they have a negative connotation or are simply not
used. The semantic fields of agriculture, industrial pro
duction, and economy, which occupy a rather important
place in Realist texts, also belong to this third zone in the
Modernist universe, although an exception must be
made for the speculative aspects of the economy charac-
terized by adventure and personal risk. Speculation in
securities, banking and inheritance are subjects which
are dealt with rather extensively by Larbaud, Paul Va-
lry, Svevo, Pessoa, and Du Perron.
Modernism has introduced a number of topics
which were rarely or never treated in Realist or Sym-
bolist texts. The semantic field of sexuality (including
homosexuality) is a Modernist acquisition. The seman-
tic fields of psychology, science and technology were ex-
panded. In Modernist texts, words belonging to the field
of criminality acquire a neutral, or even positive conno-
tation, namely [+ adventure, +consciousness].
One may wonder whether this is more than pure
speculation, and whether any testing is at all possible.
Word counts may lead to some confirmation or refuta-
tion, although one should not blindly believe in the rele-
36 LITERARY HISTORY

vance of statistical data with respect to literary texts.

Contrastive analysis, for instance, of Realist and Mod-
ernist texts, Symbolist and Modernist texts, may pro-
vide some further ground for testing. Our concept of the
structure of a semantic universe may be confirmed by
psycholinguistics, in particular, research into the or-
ganization of memory. The production of new codes in
literature provides an argument against the linguistic
determinism of the Sapir-Whorf thesis and can be
explained in terms of the dual-coding theory of Allan
Paivio, based on research in the field of long-term mem-
ory for linguistic and non-linguistic events.74The role of
perception, irrespective of the linguistic and literary
codes in use, should not be underestimated. Indepen-
dent perceptual coding provides the basis for metalin-
gual considerations and made Thomas Mann define truth
as something that does not coincide with a particular
phrasing. The awareness that the world differs from our
verbal representation of it may explain the attempt to
design new codes, which we notice throughout literary
history.
By now, we can be rather certain that the organiza-
tion of Modernist texts is basically different from that of
Realist and Symbolist texts. It is tempting to describe
that difference as precisely as possible, and the concept
of sociocode can help us to do that.
III. Postmodernist Impossibilities: Literary Conventions
in Borges, Barthelme, Robbe-Grillet, Hermans, and
others

It seems quite appropriate that the certitude with which

I could deal with the hypothetical constructions and se-
mantic preferences of Modernism, shrinks considerably
when I come to my last topic: international Postmoder-
nism and its reflection in Dutch literature. Let me raise
some of the problems what we encounter. (1) The prob-
lem of continuity versus discontinuity: does Postmoder-
nism provide a break with the past or is it merely a con-
tinuation of the more extreme aspects of Modernism? If
this is a historical problem, there is also a geographical
one, namely, (2) Where are the boundaries of Post-
modernism? And where did it originate? The latter
question is closely related to (3) the semiotic problem of
whether one should distinguish between various
branches of the Postmodernist code, or rather take them
together at a higher level of abstraction.
If we treated these preliminary questions carefully,
there would be no time for going into a description of
what I propose to call the hard core of Postmodernism,
which consists of texts written by Borges, Cortzar,
Garca Mrquez, Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon,
Fowles, Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Calvino, Handke, Bern-
hard, Rosei, and others. Let me add immediately that
not all of their work bears the hallmark of the Post-
modernist code, but the texts that I will quote certainly
do. In The Netherlands, Postmodernist devices can be
38 LITERARY HISTORY

found in the writings of Willem Frederik Hermans, Cees

Nooteboom, Gerrit Krol and Lon de Winter, and pos-
sibly other writers, such as Sybren Polet and Gerrit
Komrij, but within the scope of this paper I have to re-
strict myself to the most evident cases.
As to the relation between Modernism and Post-
modernism, I will try to show in what respects Post-
modernism departs from Modernism; I am interested in
the difference, but will never be able to prove that the
discontinuity is more important than the continuity, or
the continuity more important than the discontinuity.
The argument by Frank Kermode and Gerald Graff for
continuity is always won, if one selects a level of abstrac-
tion that enables one to see more similarities than dis-
similarities.75 My interest in the difference is justified by
the historical fact that many writers and readers believe
they see a difference although from a great historical
or geographical distance, say a thousand years from
now, or from the point of view of contemporary Chinese
readers studying Western literature, the difference be-
tween Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, between Gide's Les
Faux-Monnayeurs and Robbe-Grillet's Dans le
Labyrinthe, Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and Borges'
story "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" may hardly be rele-
vant and not worthwile devoting much reflection to.
It can be argued that Postmodernism is the first lit-
erary code that originated in America and influenced
European literature, with the possibility that the writer
who contributed more than anyone else to the invention
and acceptance of the new code is Jorge Luis Borges, ac-
tive as a writer of fiction since the 1930s. His stories were
first translated into French in 1952 under the title
Labyrinthes, and ten years later also into English.
Borges, who usually is considered to be highly original,
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 39

strikingly exemplifies the problem of continuity and dis-

continuity by translating Virginia Woolf's Orlando (in
1937). Borges' preference for this novel, which makes
its principal character not only change sex but also live
several hundreds of years, is closely linked to his own
imaginative treatment of time, which has set a paradigm
for Postmodernism. Whatever the case, the context of
Dutch literature which we are discussing is no longer
European, but Atlantic or international.
It also could be argued, however, that the Nouveau
roman is a tributary of the code of Postmodernism, pro-
viding another instance that rather similar literary codes
can be invented simultaneously or almost simultane-
ously at different places. Perhaps Postmodernism was
born independently in France and in Latin America; in
either case it became a powerful code through its accep-
tance in North America, from where it influenced the
later development in the Nouveau roman which, in turn,
affected the work of Italo Calvino. It is unclear how the
sudden and rather recent production of Postmodernist
texts in the German language came about. Even if some
future comparatisi proved the influence of the Nouveau
roman or American Postmodernism, the popularity of
Peter Handke, Botho Strauss, Peter Rosei, and Thomas
Bernhard (born in The Netherlands but an Austrian
writer) will not have been explained. The German and
Austrian Postmodernist writers are a group apart. The
autogenetic aspect of their code seems more important
than what they learned from foreign examples, and yet
they found solutions in their writings which show a strik-
ing similarity to solutions that were found in France or
America. This leads inevitably to the question of to what
extent historical and social conditions restrict the op-
tions open to the writer and pave the way for the rise of
40 LITERARY HISTORY

typological similarities, as defined by Viktor irmunskij

and Dionz uriin.76
In an attempt to view Postmodernism as a code
dominating all of Western literature since the 1950s, one
may want to look at its outer fringes, such as Concrete
Poetry, so well described by Mary Ann Solt, and Pop
Literature, which Leslie Fiedler and Jost Hermand have
regarded as part of the mainstream of post-war literary
production.77 Also the relation to the Absurd Theater,
to Beckett and Ionesco, should be determined. Pos
tulating one literary code for the post-war period, how
ever, may make us blind to the differences between the
various branches of which it supposedly consists, and
also to other codes that lead a protracted existence:
Realism, Surrealism, Dada. Since the semiotician Luis
Prieto was unable to decide on such a simple question as
to whether or not traffic lights and the round red shield
with a white bar signifying "do not enter" belong to the
same code,78 I may perhaps be forgiven for deferring a
decision on whether the Absurd Theater, Concrete
Poetry and Pop Literature should be included in a de
scription of the code of Postmodernism. Today, I shall
mainly focus on the prose writings of the authors I men
tioned. This list of names is long enough and will itself
prevent me from treating each of them in a fair and equal
way.
Whereas the Modernist aimed at providing a valid,
authentic, though strictly personal view of the world in
which he lived, the Postmodernist appears to have aban
doned the attempt towards a representation of the world
that is justified by the convictions and sensibility of an
individual. The Modernist did not claim a general valid
ity for his views, but defended his private assumptions
and value judgments. The Postmodernist may have his
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 41

private views, but sees no justification for preferring

them to views held by others. He rejects the intellectual
hypotheses of the Modernist as arrogant and arbitrary,
and therefore irrelevant. As early as 1940, in his Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dylan Thomas expressed
his criticism of English Modernism when one of his
characters asserts "that the everyday man 's just as in-
teresting a character study as the neurotic poets of
Bloomsbury."79 The Postmodernist does not discrimi-
nate. He is eager to dethrone the intellectuals, who in a
time of secularization tried to climb on the empty throne
of God in order to spread the gospel of their private se-
mantic universe. With the Postmodernist abuse of intel-
lectual thinking, the capacity for discerning, judging
and selecting also goes down. One might be tempted to
say that the Postmodernist is driven by a democratic,
even populistic, iconoclastic impulse, but such a state-
ment would obscure the historical fact that on the eve of
World War II, Modernism had already been thoroughly
weakened. The Modernist writers and their intellectual
followers had not succeeded in preventing World War
II, in spite of their participation in congresses "pour la
dfense de la culture" or committees of anti-fascist intel-
lectuals. They knew that Modernism could not survive
in an environment of war, as was dramatically
exemplified by the death of both Menno ter Braak and
E. du Perron on the day the Dutch government capitu-
lated to the German armies.
It is not political history alone, however, which
paved the way for Postmodernism. At the same time,
the restrictions of the code of Modernism restrictions
that are inherent in any code, also in any code of litera-
ture were subjected to internal criticism. In Finne-
gans Wake (1939) James Joyce departed from the care-
42 LITERARY HISTORY

ful reconstruction of a past moment in order to embrace,

as Harry Levin wrote, "the timelessness of a millen-
nium."80 In Doktor Faustus Thomas Mann showed the
limitations of intellectual scepsis and detachment. In
more than one way, the publication of Doktor Faustus
signalled that the time for criticism of the Modernist
code had come.
A programme of Postmodernism could read as fol-
lows: "We may not advance any kind of theory. There
must not be anything hypothetical in our considera-
tions. We must do away with all explanation, and de-
scription alone must take its place. And this description
gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philo-
sophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical
problems." 81 The quotation is from an unexpected
source, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations,
from the part that was completed in 1945. Of course,
Wittgenstein was not a theorist of Postmodernism, but
provides now from a philosophical angle an addi-
tional argument as to why the Modernist search for
hypotheses and explanatory devices, however much of a
provisional and corrigible nature, had to be abandoned.
Whereas Modernist texts relied on the selection of
hypothetical constructions, the sociocode of Post-
modernism is based on a preference for nonselection or
quasi-nonselection, on a rejection of discriminating
hierarchies, and a refusal to distinguish between truth
and fiction, past and present, relevant and irrelevant.
Yet, as a code it has contributed to texts that as a result
of their discussions of basic philosophical problems,
such as the nature of causality, or morality, or evolution,
or time, or infinity, are highly relevant to contemporary
thought.
Let us examine how the major convention of Post-
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 43

modernism affects the composition (text syntax, as well

as sentence syntax) of texts and their function in the
communication situation. My exposition, of course, re
lies to a large extent on work done by others, such as
Ihab Hassan, Jerome Klinkowitz, David Lodge, Bruce
Morrissette, Jean Ricardou, Robert Scholes, and many
others.82
(a) The relation between text and author is a much
less strained one than in the Modernist code. The author
is seemingly unconcerned with the status of his text,
where and how it begins, how it connects, where and
how it ends, and whether it consists of linguistic or other
signs. Still quite an exception in Modernism, Gide
suggested an alternative ending in his aludes (1895),
but in Postmodernism the device of the multiple ending
is fully exploited, as appears from Fowles' The French
Lieutenant's Woman (1969), Malamud's The Tenants
(1971), Nooteboom's Een Lied van Schijn en Wezen (A
Song of Appearance and Essence, 1981) and other texts
of fiction. In a rare case, as in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-
Two-Birds (1939), the multiple ending is matched by a
multiple beginning. Donald Barthelme's City Life
(1970) provides an example of a text that is interspersed
with illustrations which belong to the text, and so is Italo
Calvino's Il Castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of
Crossed Destinies, 1973). John Barth made an attempt
to challenge the conventional idea of a book by making
"fiction for print, tape, /and/ live voice" (Lost in the
Funhouse, 1968). In Boomerang (1978), the third vol
ume of Le Gnie du lieu, Michel Butor presents several
texts more or less simultaneously, printed in black, blue
and red in order to preserve a minimum of readability.
Whereas the Modernist presented his text as non-
final, the Postmodernist may end his story at any arbi-
44 LITERARY HISTORY

trary moment. Whereas the Modernist kept up a stan-

dard of well-connected sentences, paragraphs, and
chapters, the Postmodernist aims at destroying the idea
of connectivity by inserting texts that emphasize discon-
tinuity, such as a questionnaire or other unrelated frag-
ments (Barthelme's Snow White, 1967). Many Post-
modernist texts are a collection of relatively uncon-
nected fragments, which challenge the literary code that
predisposes the reader to look for coherence. Connec-
tivity may also become problematic within the para-
graph or sentence; sentences are not always completed,
in which case stock phrases must be supplemented by
the reader (Barth's Lost in the Funhouse). A favorite
option is the inventory or enumeration, which in a mod-
erate way can be found already in Gide's Paludes and
Les Caves du Vatican, as well as in Thomas Mann's Der
Zauberberg, but which is regularly employed by the
Postmodernists. One remembers Borges' poem "Inven-
tario,"83 but the device occurs also in texts by Barth-
elme, Handke, Strauss, W.F. Hermans, Lon de
Winter and other Postmodernists. Like other mathe-
matical devices, such as duplication, the enumeration
suggests a high degree of arbitrariness. Duplication or
mirroring is of crucial importance in Borges,84 in Cor-
tzar's "All Fires the Fire" ("Todos los Fuegos el
fuego," 1960) and Fuentes' Aura (1962). Multiplication
appears in the multiple endings, but multiplication that
leads nowhere is a labyrinth. In Robbe-Grillet's Dans le
Labyrinthe (1959), Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
(1966), Hermans' Het Evangelie van . Dapper Dapper
(The Gospel of O. Courageous Courageous, 1973), the
development of the plot provides no conclusion. De-
stroying our commonplace conceptions of time and
place, the labyrinthine plot is a crucial compositional de-
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 45

vice of Postmodernist fiction.

(b) With respect to the relation between text and
social context, the Modernist rejected any law-like ex-
planation of "reality," but the Postmodernist, much like
Wittgenstein suggested, has completely given up the at-
tempt at explaining. In his descriptions he will rather
provide a parody of explanation, developing a logic
which admits inner contradictions, such as in Borges'
story, "The Garden of Forking Paths," ("El Jardn de
los senderos que se bifurcan," 1941), or granting an on-
tological status to objects that exist merely in the mind,
such as the hrnir in Borges' "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Ter-
tius" (1941). The suggestive slogan of the French stu-
dents' revolt, "l'imagination au pouvoir," itself a
popularization of a Surrealist heritage, captures an im-
portant aspect of Postmodernism, in particular the
Latin American version of it. It is Carlos Fuentes, who
in an address to a congress of the International Com-
parative Literature Association in August 1982, ex-
panded the nonselective, arbitrary position of "nothing
matters" by coining the slogan "nothing matters, any-
thing goes." Having listened to him again here at Har-
vard University, where on March 2,1983, he presented
the Renato Poggioli memorial lecture, we now know
that anything goes as long as it has received a name. In
the universe of Postmodernism, words invent our
world, words shape our world, words are becoming the
sole justification of our world. Therefore, the Post-
modernist keeps talking, even though he may be con-
scious of the fact that he cannot do more than recycle
petrified meanings. In his story Die Widmung (1977)
Botho Strauss defined the vocation of the writer in Post-
modernist terms: "Dennoch liegt, nach wie vor, die
Technologie der Wiederaufbereitung verbrauchten
46 LITERARY HISTORY

symbolischen Wissens, das recycling des Bedeutungsab-

falls in den Hnden einiger ungeschickter Leute, Dich-
ter!"85 This rather accurately describes what Strauss
himself, Handke and Rosei do, as well as John Barth,
Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme, or W.F. Her-
mans and Gerrit Krol: they recycle semantic waste.
The Postmodernist is convinced that the social con-
text consists of words, and that each new text is written
over an older one. Edmund Wilson was the first to use
the metaphor "palimpsest" as a characterization of a
Postmodernist text, when in Axel's Castle (1931) he dis-
cussed Joyce's "Work in Progress."86 Since then the
term has become popular, not only in relation to Post-
modernism but also with reference to intertextuality in
general and the workings of memory, as appears, among
other things, from Grard Genette's early essay,
"Proust Palimpseste" (Figures, 1966), and his recent
book Palimpsestes (1982). The device of the palimpsest
is used by Donald Barthelme (Snow White), Edward
Bond (Lear, 1971), Peter Handke (Der kurze Brief zum
langen Abschied, 1972), Michel Butor (Envois, 1980),
and others. If the Postmodernist believes that the social
context is predominantly made up of words and calls for
more words, there is an exception to his attitude of non-
selection. The Postmodernist evidently prefers words
over silence, logocentrism over Taoism. Like all codes,
Postmodernism has its bias as well: the Postmodernist
ontologicai doubt can be expressed and contained only
by words.
(c) In fact, the relation between text and code has
already partly been clarified by what I have just said. In
Postmodernism the emphasis on the code is even clearer
than in Modernist texts. In certain cases, the question of
how a story should be told appears to be more important
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 47

than the story itself. This applies to Fellini's film 8 and

Antonioni's Identificazione di una donna, as much as to
Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Butor's L'Emploi du
temps (1957). Barthelme's Snow White shows that
much of the meaning of the story consists of learning to
understand its code a code that opens our eyes to our
habit of repeating semantic waste without being aware
of it. In several metalingual passages the code is discus-
sed, for example when "the 'blanketing' effect of ordi-
nary language" is explained. This refers "to the part that
sort of, you know, 'fills in' between the other parts. That
part, the 'filling' you might say, of which the expression
'you might say' is a good example [...]."87 Here the code
is exposed by its very use, but there is also a more
explicit warning which sheds light on how Snow White
was written: "We like books," one of the characters
says, "that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which pre-
sents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all rele-
vant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind
of 'sense' of what is going on. This 'sense' is not to be ob-
tained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing
there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines
themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feel-
ing not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect,
but of having read them, of having 'completed' them." 88
Barthelme's hint not to go "reading things into things"89
is strikingly similar to Robbe-Grillet's warning in the
preface to Dans le Labyrinthe (1959) that the text should
not be subjected to allegorical interpretation, and to his
advice in L'Anne dernire Marienbad (1961) that the
characters are nothing else than what one sees of them.
The code is not supposed to produce "sense." This
also applies to the work of W.F. Hermans, which can
easily be overexplained as was done in the case of De
48 LITERARY HISTORY

God Denkbaar Denkbaar de God (The God Thinkable

Thinkable the God, 1956), for instance by J.J. Over-
steegen, who was criticized for this by the author in a
sequel to this novel, Het Evangelie van . Dapper Dap
per.90 The polemics with a critic in a novel about the in-
terpretation of an earlier novel is certainly an example
of metalingual comment. It also shows that the criteria
of the genre are hardly respected. It further points to the
important role assigned to the reader.
(d) In Postmodernism, the most "democratic" of
all literary codes, the role of the reader is emphasized
even more than in Modernism. Of course, the reader is
often addressed, instructed, questioned in the text. If
there are multiple endings, he may select the one that he
prefers, although it would be more in accordance with
the sender's code to express no preference. At times,
there is an attempt to make him into a major character,
or to describe a character as if he were the reader or lis-
tener. This explains the second person narration in
Butor's La Modification (1957) and Fuentes' Ar.
Most important of all, however, is that there is no sym-
bolic explanation of these texts to be sanctioned by the
author or a community of educated readers. The advice
of Donald Barthelme not to go "reading things into
things" should be taken seriously. Of course, how could
a literary system that questions the familiar distinctions
between truth and fiction, mind and matter, now and
then, here and there, invite any sort of textual explana-
tion? Within the terms of the Postmodernist code, any
interpretation relying on some sort of knowledge of the
world, on common sense logic and testability is superflu-
ous, if not plainly wrong. The scholar, however, may be
tempted to interpret precisely this position, as we are
doing now.
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 49

The semantics of the Postmodernist code can also

be described in contrast to the Modernist code. There is,
however, a difficulty. If the Postmodernist has a prefer-
ence for nonselection and if on purpose he does not want
to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant, how
can one distinguish between semantic fields that are
more relevant, and others that are less relevant to him?
We have noticed a certain bias toward verbosity in the
Postmodernist code already, but if the Postmodernist
were equally nonselective in every respect, he would, in
fact, have made a choice. By keeping to the principle of
nonselection, the Postmodernist is taking a decision.
Here we hit on one of the contradictions within the Post-
modernist code, one of its impossibilities.
In describing the structure of the Postmodernist se-
mantic universe we may take seriously the Postmoder-
nist intention to let nonselection prevail. After all, that
intention materializes to a large extent. As a result, at
the center of the Postmodernist semantic universe we
find the semantic fields inclusiveness91 and assimilation.
The psychological considerations of narrator and
characters, typical of Modernism, have been relegated
to the background. In Postmodernism, the semantic
fields awareness and detachment belong to the third
zone, consisting of semantic fields that are to be dealt
with polemically, or simply to be abandoned. Instead of
discussing the various options open to him in a de-
tached, intellectual way, as the Modernist did, the Post-
modernist assimilates and absorbs the world that he per-
ceives, without knowing or wanting to know how to
structure that world so that it might make sense. The se-
mantic field of perception, including "observation," but
also "reading," "listening," and "talking," is close to the
center of the Postmodernist semantic universe, but this
50 LITERARY HISTORY

perception is assimilating and possessive, rather than re-

served and judicious, as in Modernism.
Each sociocode betrays itself by selecting certain
words (used repeatedly and in a prominent context),
which, through their semantic features, belong to the se-
mantic fields central to the code. We assume that all
words with the semantic feature [+poly] or [+pan] can
be subsumed under the semantic field inclusiveness. As
far as Borges is concerned, many of his semantic prefer-
ences have been compiled and investigated by Ana
Mara Barrenechea and Jaime Alazraki.92 "Labyrinth"
is one of those words, appearing also in Robbe-Grillet,
but the notion of labyrinth appears in the work of all
Postmodernists, e.g. Barth ("funhouse"), Rosei ("die
Stadt und ihr Winkelwerk"), Calvino (Le citt invisi
bili). The word "mirror" and other words expressing
duplication or multiplication are used prominently by
Borges, Garca Mrquez, Robbe-Grillet, Calvino, and
others. The word "journey" is a privileged term in
Butor, Borges, Handke, Rosei, Calvino, De Winter,
and others, in particular in the collocation or with the
connotation: journey without destination ("Reise ohne
Ziel"), which expresses the vastness of space and the
vanity of human effort, and makes the meaning of the
word different from the Modernist usage. In their fiction
the Postmodernists do not avoid the world of mechani-
cal devices and science, nor the world of science-fiction,
as Teresa L. Ebert has shown.93 Instead of focussing on
the inner self, as the Modernist was tempted to, the
Postmodernist does not respect any frontier. His
characters may go as far as outer space, or into the dis-
tant future. They experiment with drugs or automatiza-
tion; they indulge in the unstructured mass of words, the
library, the encyclopedia, advertising, television and
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 51

other mass media. Each writer has his own preferences.

Borges may favour the library and the encyclopedia,
Cortzar and Robbe-Grillet the photograph or film,
Handke and Strauss the mass media, Butor the
6,810.000 Litres d'eau par seconde (1965). In their vari-
ous idiolects they share a common interest in things
which are "poly-" or "pan-", lacking uniqueness.
This sketch of the Postmodernist code, brief
thought it is, nevertheless provides a basis for the thesis
that some of the novels of the Dutch author, W.F. Her-
mans, are characterized by Postmodernist devices. Re-
cently other writers in The Netherlands have also disco-
vered the Postmodernist code.
In his De (Ver)wording van de Jongere Drer (The
(De)formation of the Younger Drer, 1978), Lon de
Winter, who closely follows contemporary German fic-
tion, describes a journey without destination, as
Handke and Rosei did earlier, and plays with variable
narrative possibilities, including a title and an ending
that allow for two interpretations. He provides an
enumeration of articles on sale in a department store,
fights the clichs of polluted speech, and rewrites
Eichendorf's Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. Cees
Nooteboom's novel Een Lied van Schijn en Wezen
(1981) is a book that addresses itself to the problem of
fictional truth. It is a story about writing a story, no-
thing new since Les Faux-Monnayeurs. Nooteboom,
however, knows and quotes Borges. The writer in his
novel believes himself to be a character in another story,
whereas the characters of his own story come to life and
feel a real pain when the writer decides to burn his
manuscript. One could argue that the text has more than
one ending and through its title and an epilogue refer-
ring to Frederik van Eeden and Caldern de la Barca, it
52 LITERARY HISTORY

is firmly rooted in intertextual relations. The third au-

thor I wish to mention, Gerrit Krol, has written a novel
from the point of view of a robot, who in the course of
the story acquires more and more human features. De
Man achter het Raam (The Man behind the Window,
1982) is a story about an artificial human being without a
soul, without a past, without a sense of time. One could
classify it as science-fiction. "Everything that he will ex-
perience, has already been experienced as it has been
written down, although the programme [.../ is changing
continuously."94 The robot maintains that there is no
criterion for distinguishing between good and bad. Like
Escher, whom he admires, he admits "impossible"
thoughts. He seems to express a Postmodernist position
when he believes that he has many more, infinitely more
thoughts that human beings can have; they, however,
have something the robot does not have: thoughts that
one likes, the so-called hypotheses.95 For the robot, be-
ginning and ending can be the same. Of course, the
novel has more than one ending (one on p. 16 and one on
p. 119).
There is more Dutch fiction in which Postmodernist
devices have been employed, but I should proceed now
to a discussion of two novels by Willem Frederik Her-
mans, a prolific writer, active since the 1940s. He is criti-
cal of Ter Braak and Du Perron, and an admirer of
Wittgenstein. We may see an approximation of the Post-
modernist code in De God Denkbaar Denkbaar de God
(The God Thinkable Thinkable the God). One can read
it as a persiflage on the rise of a new religious sect, but it
also parodies the devices of the mystery novel and por-
nography. Certainly our common sense conceptions of
cause and effect, chronological and spatial order are
challenged by the miraculous adventures of Mr. Thinka-
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 53

ble. The text also challenges our expectations of coher-

ence and well-connectedness. The plot is a labyrinth:
there are secret papers hidden in some fake embassy in
Paris and enemies prevent Mr. Thinkable from finding
them, but who his enemies are and why they are his
enemies remains unclear. The development of the plot
is highly arbitrary, and so is, in many instances, the con-
nection between words and sentences. The connection
is often motivated by phonetic similarity or homonymy.
There are parodies of both scientific and religious lan-
guage, and there is a continuous criticism of all kinds of
clichs, whether they occur in travel guides or in ad-
ministrative forms, such as: "Doorhalen wat niet ver-
langd wordt; het bedrag in cijfers" (Delete whatever
does not apply; the amount in figures).96 Hermans' ver-
bosity equals that of Donald Barthelme, and, like the
latter, he employs the device of exposing the clich by
using it. The name "Thinkable" provides an interesting
clue. Mr. Thinkable explains himself as follows: "In me
every separation between act and thought has been
transcended. I am everything that can be thought."97
Because to him everything that can be thought is possi-
ble, Mr. Thinkable assumes a power usually attributed
only to God, therefore he becomes God, and assembles
a huge crowd as followers. The only thing that he lacks is
"the secret papers." These are never found and this
throws a shadow on his omnipotence. Mr. Thinkable be-
comes involved in a war with a new god, called "Horri-
ble Baby" (Afschuwelijke Baby), and dies.
Het Evangelie van O. Dapper Dapper employs the
same codes: the genre of the phantastic, parodying the
mystery novel; the sociocode of Postmodernism; and, of
course, Hermans' own idiolect, with his preferences for
biting irony, sadistic pleasure in the description of
54 LITERARY HISTORY

cruelty, humor and puns. A difference with the De God

Denkbaar is the greater role that has been attributed
now to the reader, a greater role also for the self-
generating production of the text on the basis of taking
clichs literally, phonetic similarities, and repetition.
Indeed, Hermans is recycling semantic waste, and his
criticism of the codes that we use without being fully
aware of them seems more important than the referen-
tial function of this story, which takes place five billion
years later than De God Denkbaar, but has the same
characters as the earlier novel and professes to be an
exemplification of the "Ewige Wiederkunft des
Gleichen."98 As in Finnegans Wake, time in Het
Evangelie has become cyclical, as it probably must be in
any true gospel on resurrection from death.

Why did I speak of Postmodernist impossibilities? The

Modernist wrote about conceivable, possible worlds;
the Postmodernist writes about conceivable, at least
thinkable, but impossible worlds, worlds that so
reason tells us can exist only in our imagination."
Here one should remember Borges' story of how Pierre
Menard recreated Don Quixote. With Borges, the
reader conceives how this is to be done, and in agree-
ment with the narrator his conclusion must be that "the
undertaking was impossible from the very begin-
ning."100 Here, the word "impossible" refers to an em
pirical possibility based on our knowledge of the world.
There is also a logical impossibility in Postmoder-
nist texts, based on an internal contradiction in the
structure of the Postmodernist code: the paradox that
the preference for nonselection is a preference, a
choice. In his novel De Man achter het Raam, which we
briefly discussed above, Gerrit Krol carried this
 POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 55

paradox to its ultimate conclusion. He created a nar-

rator who most consistently displays a sort of intelligent
indifference or nonselection. In truly Postmodernist
fashion the narrator has neither a past, nor a future, at-
tachments nor worries, and does not distinguish be-
tween relevant or irrelevant, but can answer all ques-
tions, though sometimes in a way human beings cannot
understand or appreciate. The more this robot acquires
human features, the more he begins to have prefer-
ences. The story clearly shows that consistent indiffer-
ence, if at all possible, is not in the least interesting. This
is one of the major "philosophical" problems that Post-
modernism has brought forward. Consistent indiffer-
ence or nonselection does not seem to be a human qual-
ity, and can hardly be conceived.
In most Postmodernist texts, however, the princi-
ple of nonselection has not been as rigorously main-
tained as in De Man achter het Raam. In general, Post-
modernism shows a preference for words over silence,
imagination over experience, verbal texts over the em-
pirical context. It is here that the Postmodernist code
shows its bias. The moment this bias is exposed and
known to a larger group of writers and readers, the time
will have arrived for replacing the code by another one
which necessarily will be biased in other respects.
The Postmodernist code can be linked to a particu-
lar way and view of life, common in the Western world,
including part of Latin America. The literary preference
for nonselection coincides with an "embarras du choix"
offered by luxurious living conditions, which enable
many people to have numerous options. The Post-
modernist appeal to the imagination is out of place in the
world of Ivan Denisovic, or in the People's Republic of
China. The Chinese have a proverb which could have
56 LITERARY HISTORY

been derived from a story by Borges, namely, "painting

a cake to satisfy hunger. " In the code of the Chinese lan-
guage, however, this expression has a strongly negative
connotation. For this and other reasons, a favourable
reception of Postmodernism in China is inconceivable.
Or, if we focussed on another part of the world, the
Postmodernist anti-empirical emphasis on imagination
cannot provide an answer to the problem of religious
fanaticism. The Postmodernist code clearly has its geo-
graphical and sociological limitations. This is an addi-
tional factor as to why in the near future certain writers
may want to design a new code, which will initially be
difficult, disturbing and embarrassing, but which may
turn out to be well suited for expressing and perhaps
solving some of our current problems.
Notes
1. Jurij Tynjanov, "Das literarische Faktum," in Jurij Striedter, ed.,
Texte der Russischen Formalisten, I: Texte zur allgemeinen Literatur
theorie und zur Theorie der Prosa (Mnchen: Fink, 1969), pp. 393-
432.
2. See Jurij Striedter's "Einleitende Abhandlung" in his Texte der Rus
sischen Formalisten, pp. LXXI-LXXXIII.
3. Gtz Wienold, Semiotik der Literatur (Frankfurt: Athenum, 1972).
4. A.G.H. Anbeek van der Meijden, 'In puinhopen voel ik mij prettig,
ergens anders hoor ik niet thuis': Over de wederopbouw van de Neder
landse literatuurgeschiedschrijving (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers/
Wetenschappelijke Uitgeverij, 1982). Inaugural address, Leiden.
5. Claudio Guilln, Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of
Literary History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971),
p. 483.
6. Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon
(Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Uni
versity of Michigan, 1977), p. 20.
7. Doede Nauta, The Meaning of Information (The Hague: Mouton,
1972), in particular pp. 220-222. Teun A. van Dijk, Text and Context:
Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse (London
and New York: Longman, 1977), pp. 189-191.
8. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Advances in Semiotics
(Bloomington, Ind. and London: Indiana University Press, 1976),
pp. 56 and 125-126.
9. Andr Gide, Romans, rcits et soties, oeuvres lyriques, ed. Maurice
Nadeau, Pliade (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), pp. 1008-1009, and Retour
de U.R.S.S., suivi de Retouches mon Retour de U.R.S.S. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1978), p. 40.
10. George A. Miller, Language and Communication (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 7: "Any system of symbols that, by prior
agreement between the source and destination, is used to represent
and convey information will be called a code."
58 NOTES

11. Virginia Woolf, The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (New
York: Harcourt etc., 1950), p. 115.
12. Carry van Bruggen, Hedendaags fetisjisme, met een voorwoord van
Annie Romein-Verschoor (Amsterdam: Querido, 1980), p. 145.
13. Cf. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics
and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1975), p. 203. Roland Barthes introduces his five codes in S/Z (Paris:
Seuil, 1970); English translation by Richard Miller (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1974).
14. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 44.
15. Cf. Roger Fowler, "Preliminaries to a Sociolinguistic Theory of Lit-
erary Discourse," Poetics 8 (1979), pp. 531-556. Fowler observes
that language "varieties are not divisions of language but options
within a repertoire" (p. 547).
16. Harry Levin, "What Was Modernism," repr. in Refractions: Essays
in Comparative Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
1966), pp. 271-295; Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London: Methuen,
1977); David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor,
Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London:
Arnold, 1977); Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Moder
nism 1890-1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
17. Virginia Woolf, The Captain's Death Bed, p. 96.
18. Paul Valry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, Pliade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1957-1960), 2, p. 1383.
19. Translated from Peter Demetz, "Zur Definition des Realismus,"
Literatur und Kritik 2 (1967), pp. 333-345. Quoted from p. 336.
20. Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu, ed. Pierre Clarac et
Andr Ferr, prface d'Andr Maurois, Pliade, 3 vols. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1954), 1, p. 940.
21. Jacques Rivire, "Marcel Proust et la tradition classique," Nouvelle
Revue franaise 14 (1920), pp. 192-200. Quoted from p. 199.
22. Robert H. Deming, James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 101.
23. Valry, Oeuvres, 2, p. 553.
24. Gide, Romans, p. 1201.
25. In "Modern Fiction," in The Common Reader, First series (London:
Hogarth Press, 1962), p. 185.
 NOTES 59

26. Mencken is quoted to have denied "that immutable truths exist in

the arts." See Menno ter Braak, Verzameld Werk, 7 vols. (Amster-
dam: Van Oorschot, 1950-1951), 4, p.269.
27. Virginia Woolf, The Captain's Death Bed, p. 96.
28. Translated from Menno ter Braak and E. du Perron, Briefwisseling
1930-1940,4vols. (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1962-1967), 2, p. 183.
29. Quoted by Elrud Ibsch, Die Stellung Nietzsches in der Entwicklung
der modernen Literaturwissenschaft (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972), p.
10.
30. Gide, Romans, p. 149.
31. Gide, Romans, p. 118.
32. Gide, Romans, p. 10.
33. Gide, Romans, p. 94.
34. Gide, Romans, p. 1043.
35. Andr Gide, Prtextes: Rflexions sur quelques points de littrature
et de morale (Paris: Mercure de France, 1947), p. 45.
36. Gide, Prtextes, p. 50.
37. Cf. Angle's advice "Dtachez-vous" in Le Promthe mal enchan
(Gide, Romans, p. 337).
38. Gide, Prtextes, p. 53.
39. Cf. Andr Gide, Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs (Paris: Gallimard,
1927), p. 43.
40. Robert J. Richards, "The Personal Equation in Science: William
James's Psychological and Moral Uses of Darwinian Theory," in A
William James Renaissance, Four Essays by Young Scholars, A Spe-
cial Issue of The Harvard Library Bulletin 30 (1982), pp. 387-425,
in particular p. 408.
41. Gide, Romans, p. 115.
42. "La rgle de l'artiste doit tre, non point de s'en tenir aux proposi-
tions de la nature, mais de ne lui proposer rien qu'elle ne puisse,
qu'elle ne doive bientt imiter" (Gide, Journal des Faux-Mon
nayeurs, p. 39).
43. Valery Larbaud, Oeuvres, prface de Marcel Arland, notes par G.
Jean-Aubry et Robert Mallet, Pliade (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p.
158.
60 NOTES

44. By Andr Thrive, see Bulletin des Amis Andr Gide 1, no. 22
(April 1974), p. 44.
45. By Andr Billy, see Bulletin des Amis d'Andr Gide 7, no. 22 (April
1974), p. 24.
46. Translated from Matthijs Vermeulen, "Fransche letteren," De Gids
91 (1927), pp. 456-466. Quoted from pp. 463-464.
47. Gide, Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, p. 58.
48. "Chaque fois que quelqu'un se sacrifie pour les autres, on peut tre
certain qu'il vaut mieux qu'eux" (Gide, Romans, p. 1128).
49. Gide, Romans, p. 1089.
50. Gide, Romans, p. 1093.
51. Gide, Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, p. 95.
52. As appears from a reference in Het Land van Herkomst, cf. E. du
Perron, Verzameld Werk, 7 vols. (Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1955-
1959), 3, p. 294.
53. Translated from Ter Braak and Du Perron, Briefwisseling 1930-1940,
2, p. 463.
54. Cf. Toke van Helmond, "Simon Vestdijk en Marcel Proust: een
vergelijking," in Engelbewaarder, Winterboek (Amsterdam, 1978),
pp. 117-148.
55. Larbaud, Oeuvres, p. 1134.
56. Larbaud, Oeuvres, p. 31.
57. Larbaud, Oeuvres, p. 61.
58. Larbaud, Oeuvres, p. 98.
59. Larbaud, Oeuvres, p. 94.
60. G.H. 's-Gravesande, Vergeten en gebleven: Literaire beschouwingen,
ed. Dirk Kroon ('s-Gravenhage: Bzzth, 1982). p. 165.
61. Translated from Du Perron, Het Land van Herkomst, in Verzameld
Werk, 1, p. 126.
62. Translated from Du Perron, Verzameld Werk, 7, p. 533.
63. Translated from Du Perron, Verzameld Werk, 7, p. 540.
64. Ibid.
 NOTES 61

65. E. du Perron, Le Pays d'origine, traduit du nerlandais par Philippe

Noble, prface d'Andr Malraux (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p. 9 and
11.
66. Larbaud, Oeuvres, p. 110.
67. Thomas Mann, Politische Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt: Fischer,
1968), 2, p. 249.
68. Cf. Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, Het Modernisme in de
Europese letterkunde (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1984).
69. Thomas Mann, Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1967-68),
Moderne Klassiker vols. 101-120. The quotation is taken from vol.
113, p. 216.
70. Th. Mann, Werke, 115, p. 133.
71. Translated from Ter Braak, Verzameld Werk, 5, p. 504.
72. Quoted by Ter Braak, Verzameld Werk, 7, p. 328.
73. Jacob Hiegentlich, "De Jongeren Schrijven Romans," De Nieuwe
Gids 47 (1932), pp. 405-414. Quoted from p. 409.
74. Ailan Paivio, "The Relationship between Verbal and Perceptual
Codes," in Edward C. Carterette and Morton P. Friedman, eds.,
Handbook of Perception, vol. 8: Perceptual Coding (New York:
Academic Press, 1978), pp. 375-399.
75. Frank Kermode, "Modernisms," in Bernard Bergonzi, ed., Innova
tions: Essays on Art and Ideas (London: MacMillan, 1968), pp. 66-92;
Gerald Graff, "The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough," in
Malcolm Bradbury, ed., The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers
on Modem Fiction (Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1977), pp. 217-249.
76. Cf. Dionz uriin, Vergleichende Literaturforschung: Versuch eines
methodisch-theoretischen Grundrisses (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag,
1972), and Sources and Systematics of Comparative Literature
(Bratislava: Slovart, 1974).
77. Mary Ellen Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington,
Ind. and London: Indiana University Press, 1970); Leslie A. Fiedler,
"Cross the Border Close that Gap: Post-Modernism," in Marcus
Cunliffe, ed., American Literature since 1900 (London: Sphere
Books, 1975), pp. 344-366; Jost Hermand, Pop International: Eine
kritische Analyse (Frankfurt: Athenum, 1971).
78. Luis J. Prieto, Messages et signaux, Le linguiste 2 (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1966), p. 34.
62 NOTES

79. Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (London: Dent,
1968), pp. 144-145.
80. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber
and Faber, 2nd ed., 1960), p. 165.
81. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophi-
cal Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell,
1963), section 109.
82. Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (Ur-
bana, III.: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Jerome Klinkowitz,
Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American
Fiction, 2nd ed. (Urbana, III.: University of Illinois Press, 1980);
David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy,
and the Typology of Literature (London: Arnold, 1977); Bruce Mor-
rissette, "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film," Critical
Inquiry 2(1975), pp. 253-262; Jean Ricardou, Le Nouveau Roman
(Paris: Seuil, 1978); Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Ur-
bana, III.: University of Illinois Press, 1979).
83. Published in English translation in Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of
Sand, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni and Alastair Reid (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 147.
84. Cf., for instance, the duplication of lost objects (hrnir) in the story
"Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
85. Botho Strauss, Die Widmung: Eine Erzhlung (Mnchen and Wien:
Hanser, 1977), p. 85.
86. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the imaginative Literature
of 1870-1930 (New York and London: Scribner, 1936), pp. 234-235:
"The style he /i.e., Joyce/ has invented for his purpose works on the
principle of a palimpsest: one meaning, one set of images, is written
over another."
87. Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York: Atheneum, 1982). p.
96.
88. Barthelme, Snow White, p. 106.
89. Barthelme, Snow White, p. 107.
90. Schrijver Dezes [=W.F. Hermans], Het Evangelie van O. Dapper
Dapper, met een voorwoord van Willem Frederik Hermans (Amster-
dam: De Bezige Bij, 1973), p. 211. The name of Oversteegen is
spelled as Oversteegjes. Oversteegen's criticism of De God
Denkbaar appeared first in Merlyn 1:3 (1962-63), pp. 29-53, and was
 NOTES 63

reprinted in Voetstappen van WFH (Utrecht: Hes, 1982), pp. 29-54.

Oversteegen observed correctly that Thinkable does not distinguish
between reality that is experienced and reality that is thought.
91. The difference between the inclusiveness of Realism and that of
Postmodernism should be specified. The distinction can probably be
made in terms of orderly versus random inclusiveness.
92. Ana Maria Barrenechea, Borges, the Labyrinth Maker, ed. and
trans. Robert Lima (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press,
1965). The Spanish original appeared under the title: La expresin
de la irrealidad en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges (Mexico: Colegio de
Mexico, 1957). Jaime Alazraki, La prosa narrativa de Jorge Luis
Borges: temas, estilo (Madrid: Gredos, 1968); idem, Jorge Luis
Borges (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1971);
idem, Versiones, inversiones, reversiones: el espejo como modelo
estructural del relato en los cuentos de Borges (Madrid: Gredos,
1977).
93. Teresa L. Ebert, "The Convergence of Postmodern Innovative Fic-
tion and Science Fiction: An Encounter with Samuel R. Delany's
Technotopia," Poetics Today 1:4 (1980), pp. 91-104. Mrs. Ebert
writes: "The function of technology in metascience fiction has been
backgrounded relative to its function in the traditional science fiction,
whereas in innovative and contemporary fiction technology has been
foregrounded" (p.95).
94. Gerrit Krol, De Man achter het Raam (Amsterdam: Querido, 1982),
p. 7.
95. Krol, De Man achter het Raam, p. 79.
96. Willem Frederik Hermans, De God Denkbaar Denkbaar de God
(Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 7th printing, 1980), pp. 51, 146, 150.
97. Hermans, De God Denkbaar, p. 54.
98. Hermans, Het Evangelie van O. Dapper Dapper, pp. 11,14,16 etc.
99. The "impossible" worlds of Postmodernism can still be described in
terms of the possible worlds theory. Cf. Lubomr Doleel, "Narrative
Worlds," in Ladislav Matejka, ed., Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quin-
quagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle (Ann Arbor, Mich. : Michi-
gan Slavic Publications, 1976), pp. 542-552.
100. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings,
ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, preface by Andr Maurois
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 66.