[In the following essay, McCaffery expounds on the “inadequacy of the concept of fantasy” as it is currently defined as useful in understanding the “nature and purpose of much contemporary literature” identified with that label.]

It may be that men ceaselessly re-inject into narrative what they have known, what they have experienced; but if they do, at least it is in a form which has vanquished repetition and instituted the model of a process of becoming.

Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text

The Poet, without being aware of it, moves in an order of possible relationships and transformations. … Here is the final and noblest game of skill and hazard, the wager against odds, number and calculation versus chance and probability.

Paul Valéry, Aesthetics

1

In “The Library of Babel” Jorge Luis Borges creates an image of writing and of the universe which haunts the contemporary literary imagination. The universe, Borges suggests, can be compared to an unthinkably large library filled with mysterious texts. The organizing principles underlying the library's structure of the books contained within it are rigidly determined: “Five shelves correspond to each of the walls of each hexagon; each shelf contains thirty-two books of a uniform format; each book is made up of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines; each line, of some eighty black letters” (the letters themselves consist of twenty-five orthographic symbols).¹ The library contains one—but only one—of each combination of symbols that can be generated from this set of orthographic symbols, meaning that every possible book of this format is contained within the library somewhere. Thus, although the number of volumes contained in the library is not infinite (the library can be shown to contain precisely 25 ^1,312,000 volumes), for all practical purposes the combinatory possibilities are endless. Naturally, however, most of the books contained in this library appear to be nonsense, random arrangements of symbols which fail to produce any sense of order or pattern. These combinations, then, remain maddeningly inscrutable, useless from any practical sense, aesthetically displeasing to all but the most fervent Dadaists.

The allegory implicit in this tale is obvious: the universe, like Borges's library, is composed of a near-infinite number of elements which combine to create “shapes” that mankind attempts to decipher. From an ontological standpoint, all such combinations are equal, since all have been generated from precisely the same set of elements; but, because man has devised certain useful but arbitrary methods of imposing order upon the chaos—the methods of language, myth, game, mathematics, scientific and judicial laws, and so forth—various “constellational patterns” which assist man in navigating through life have gradually emerged. In his desire to uncover hidden patterns and meanings in the jumble around him, man is quite naturally tempted to hang on desperately to any sense of order that mysteriously emerges, lest it disappear once more into the flux. Still, one comforting thought that does arise from this view of the universe is the idea that, given the workings of eternity, other patterns, other meaningful sequences are bound to emerge if we are patient—sequences of greater beauty, of greater utility, of greater power to excite our senses and delight our aesthetic tastes than those we previously admired. In Italo Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies, a story which explores, in miniature, a similar view of the generative potential of life and literature, Faust provides a striking summary of this outlook:

The world does not exist … there is not an all, given all at once; there is a finite number of elements whose combinations are multiplied to billions of billions, and only a few of these find a form and a meaning and make their presence felt amid a meaningless, shapeless, dust cloud; like the seventy-eight cards of the tarot deck in whose juxtapositions sequences of stories appear and are then immediately undone.²

I shall return to Calvino's remarkable book near the end of my discussion, but for now let us consider the view that literature is a sort of generative game in which a limited number of elements, subjected to fixed rules of association, combine to produce literary texts. Yet, because writers who adhere to this model for the creation of literary forms are often labeled “fantasy” writers, perhaps we must first consider the relation of this generative structure to the various models currently proposed to define fantasy as a mode or genre. In the context of Borges's library, it is obvious that the “reality” against which fantasy, in the most naive sense, sets itself and exists by declaring itself other, is a referential category whose privileged ontological status is arbitrarily determined. Less obviously, but still patently referential, are the more sophisticated categories of recent theoreticians of the fantastic. In distinguishing between the “fantastic” and “fantasy,” W. R. Irwin states that it is the former which involves an opposition of the “anti-real … against an established real,” whereas the latter must be understood as a rhetorical strategy, a “game of the impossible” where “narrative sophistry” is deployed to make nonfact appear as fact.³ Yet, even on this level of game, the system of fantasy creation is still defined by reference to ontological absolutes: nonfact, impossibility. What I am proposing here—the substitution of a generative for a relational system—will, I hope, shed light on the inadequacy of the concept of fantasy as it currently exists as a tool to define the nature and purpose of much contemporary literature tagged with the label. Thus even where, as in the case of fantasy's most subtle commentators, the model proposed may seem generative, it may not actually be so. Eric S. Rabkin's system, for instance, based on the reversal of “ground rules” and narrative expectations, appears relativistic. And yet, in its exclusion of such categories as the “irrelevant,” it opens the way to a reinvestment of the relational model on a different plane. For, if we accept that all the works in Borges's library, however inscrutable to us and indifferent to our aesthetic codes (and Rabkin affirms that, “as Gestalt psychology teaches us, there is no narrative world, any more than there is a physical world, without a set of ground rules by which to perceive it”),⁴ then the statement that “the truly irrelevant has nothing to do with ground rules”—indeed the a priori assertion of a “true” irrelevance—merely reinstates an external “other” as privileged category, oddly enough as the “reality” against which fantasy now becomes the guarantor of narrative relevance. Our generative model, on the other hand, by recuperating the irrelevant, better describes the formulas and forms of such contemporary literature; more importantly, it also defines a mode of creation which, while appearing to be fantastic, may actually obviate the concept of fantasy along with that of realism by refusing all such privileged perspectives sanctioned by the humanist tradition, all limits which seek, in one subtle way or another, to restore the referential axis.

The hypothesis of literature as generative game, of course, is hardly unique to Borges or Calvino; it was explored almost a century ago by Mallarmé and Valéry and has been recently more systematically developed by such structuralist critics as Roland Barthes, Brémond, Greimas, Propp, and Todorov.⁵ Although the specifics of applications differ, these critics all agree with the idea that all narratives are expressed by means of a finite narrative code—a process characterized by the insistent, paradoxical interplay between the uniformity of the system and the variety of its specific manifestations.⁶ The full range of implications of this view of literature lie far beyond the scope of this paper, but, on a very basic level, the structuralist hypothesis strikes at the heart of the Romantic myth of the creator's producing an absolutely unique work as a result of certain inner motives and experiences to which he has absolute privilege.⁷ Just as the fact that all books have already been written in Borges' library makes all writing plagiaristic, so too does the idea that all discourse can be analyzed in terms of a finite number of elements suggest that all works are already implicit within the generative potential of its elements—it simply remains the project of writers to choose certain alternatives and explore them, for, as Valéry remarked, “Formally the novel is close to the dream; both can be defined by consideration of this curious property: all their deviations form part of them.”⁸ In actual practice, of course, this reduction of literature to a sort of “verbal algebra” (in Borges's terms)⁹ does not automatically destroy the value or utility of artistic production, for not only does the potential number of narratives which can be generated by this process approach infinity, but obviously there also remain various means by which individual narratives can be judged. As Calvino explains in a recent essay, even though “the writer is already a writing machine,” this does not imply that all narratives are equal:

Yes, literature is a combinatory game which follows the possibilities implicit in its own material, independently of a personality of the author, but it is a game which at a certain point is invested with an unexpected significance and which puts into play something of supreme importance to the author and the society to which he belongs.¹⁰

The key phrase in Calvino's commentary is his contention that literary games are capable of possessing “an unexpected significance … something of supreme importance to the author and society.” for the question immediately arises as to how this process occurs. What “significance” do these literary narratives have and how is this significance transferred from the realm of a formal game to the real world? This question has been pondered by writers, scholars, and readers for centuries; it also has direct bearing on the more general issue of the relationship between any system of signs—such as is found in logic, mathematics, science, and the novel—and the outside world. In the case of the novel, the traditional emphasis on mimesis seemed to solve the problem: fiction could be “significant” to the extent that it “mirrored the world”; its truths resulted from the writer's ability verbally to recreate or imitate actual conditions in the world. Insofar as fiction successfully duplicated these conditions, it could reproduce the truth functions that existed in the world. Much the same case, we might recall, was made by Wittgenstein for logical propositions in the Tractatus: language, in the form of logical propositions, could lead man to truths about the world to the extent that the words contained in the propositions corresponded to (or “pictured,” to use Wittgenstein's famous analogy) elements in the world.

As is evident today, however, major problems arise if we accept this view of fiction or this view of language's general ability to picture reality. Eventually, Wittgenstein completely overhauled his view of language's functioning, and mimesis was shown to be merely a narrative convention. Indeed, it is no accident that Wittgenstein's later theory of language employs exactly the same metaphor—that is, language games—as Calvino uses in the passage cited above, for both suggest that the meaning of a given discourse, whether it be personal conversation, logical theorems, or a literary text, derives not from its correspondence with any state of affairs in the world, but from an ongoing dynamic transformation of basic elements on the basis of certain arbitrary but fixed rules. Roland Barthes explains the basic flaw in the mimetic view of narrative:

In all narrative imitation remains contingent. The function of narrative is not to ‘represent’, it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order. The ‘reality’ of a sequence lies not in the ‘natural’ succession of the actions composing it but in the logic there exposed, risked, and satisfied. … Narrative does not show, does not imitate; the passion which may excite us in reading a novel is not that of a ‘vision’ (in actual fact, we do not ‘see’ anything). Rather it is that of meaning, that of a higher order of relation which also has its emotions, its hopes, its dangers, its triumphs. ‘What takes place’ in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its becoming.¹¹

Obviously, the overthrow of such notions as mimesis, absolute truth (except in a tautological sense), and substance had a profound effect on all fields which relied, in one way or another, on narrative discourse—and, as Robert Coover recently commented, “Even a formula is a type of sentence.”¹² This growing understanding of the way narrative principles functioned in various disciplines was very liberating: there no longer being any “higher truth” to appeal to, intellectuals in many fields were forced to examine the accepted paradigms from new perspectives. This self-reflexive examination of the processes and forms of disciplines, rather than of their content per se, is evident in the proliferation of metadisciplines, the dominance of linguistic analysis in philosophy, and the emergence of metafiction and the various structuralist applications.

The plight of fiction writers during this period of reevaluation is evident: people reading fiction, indeed, all people responding to coded systems, have traditionally preferred systems which masquerade as part of the natural world. As Roland Barthes puts it, “The reluctance to declare its codes characterizes bourgeois society and the mass culture issuing from it: both demand signs which do not look like signs.”¹³ If fiction loses its direct representational ability, where does its “significance” and “importance to the author and the society” reside? Closely related to this issue was the question of the viability of certain fictional conventions—elements like plot, character, causality, the use of mythic patterns, and so on. One of the most obvious results of this self-questioning process was the outburst of a certain type of highly self-conscious, nonrealistic fiction which Robert Scholes has designated as “fabulation.”¹⁴ Another development in the turn away from mimetic norms was a renewed interest in literary modes which had never claimed verisimilitude as their primary goal—modes such as science fiction, fairy tales, and mythological stories. A wide range of writers began to perceive that realistic fiction had been naively and rigidly structured on the basis of certain questionable, anthropocentric norms (chief among these is the view that the world and the people who inhabit it can be analyzed on the basis of causal, empircally determinable operations). But these principles are by no means revealed truths; they are merely conventions that have been greatly undermined as this century has moved forward. Consequently, it is not surprising that writers have been drawn to science fiction and other literary approaches which are, in Darko Suvin's terms, “a mapping of possible alternatives” to reality.¹⁵ In his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Suvin also suggests that science fiction's movement can be seen as shifting “from a basic direct model to an indirect model”¹⁶—a movement which, as I have indicated, is evident in all such “fabulation” as well. Suvin later admits that, although science fiction is defined by having the reality it describes be “interpretable only within the scientific or cognitive horizon,”¹⁷ the realm of literature is theoretically much larger:

But besides the “real” possibilities there exist also the much stricter—though also much wider—limits of “ideal” possibility, meaning any conceptual or thinkable possibility, the premises and/or consequences of which are not internally contradictory.¹⁸

If literature is viewed as a game, governed primarily by internal rules of consistency rather than by allegiance to outer laws or conditions, it becomes quite natural for writers to wish to explore literary games which can be played with fresher, more vital rules. One consequence of this spirit of formal exploration, evident in writers such as Barth, Coover, Hawkes, Pynchon, Delany, Zelazny, and Calvino, was a revival of interest in ancient mythic patterns and in prenovelistic fictional forms—older games, long ignored because of the popularity of the realistic novel, but which possessed fascinating, intricate rules all their own. At the same time, wholly original formal approaches were being pursued, and new myths and new patterns of perception were developed. In the remainder of this paper, I would like to examine briefly several representative works which illustrate these tendencies. Although these works are formally somewhat different, they all abandon realism in favor of more blatantly artificial approaches and thus convey a shared distrust of previous literary patterns and structures (a distrust which typically becomes a metafictional self-commentary within the text); more centrally, they all tend to approach prior literary forms, myths, and conventions purely as formal elements which can be freely manipulated to generate new shapes. I begin with Samuel R. Delany's Einstein Intersection, for here is an acknowledged classic of science fantasy which quite literally “deconstructs” its genre. In his novel Delany does not create a structure where “ground rules,” either those of our referentially verifiable world or those of an agreed-on set of narrative conventions, are reversed. Rather, he gives us a narrative where the generative patterns of the very referential system that determines this reality-fantasy axis are themselves explored. Significantly, Delany's “aliens” are seeking to become human by adopting the myriad and contradictory norms and codes which constitute that field of investigation Michel Foucault calls science humaine—that closed system of generative functions in which man has traded ontological status for a role as problematic element in an interacting set of “human” models. Delany's figures, then, are neither the victims of this world nor the masters of some other, fantasy realm, but rather energy in search of form.

2

Mythological patterns, like scientific paradigms, offer man a comprehensive, understandable image of the world around us, telling us what our universe looks like and where we belong in it. Yet, like all other systems for organizing our experience, myths possess the dangerous potential for controlling us. In The Einstein Intersection, Delany develops this view of the oppressive nature of myth as a means of exploring the more general issue of man's relationship to all prior patterns which have lost their freshness and utility. In the process the book becomes a metafictional inquiry into man and the fiction-making process itself, and exhibits the popular contemporary tendency to manipulate prior literary and mythic formulas in order to undercut the hold which their content might have on us.¹⁹

Set on earth in some undetermined future, The Einstein Intersection tells the story of young Lo Lobey's journey in search of the murderer of his beloved Friza. Lobey's race has arrived on Earth from some unspecified region in outer space after mankind's departure (either literally or metaphorically); they are currently trying to use our legends, myths, and stories as models from which to structure their own experiences on this alien planet. Their central problem, of course, is that mankind's patterns and myths are not necessarily appropriate for Lobey's race: not only have thousands of years passed since man left the earth but, more fundamentally, Lobey's race is not even human, thus making their appropriation of man's perceptual structures a problematic venture. As the Dove, a sort of futuristic reincarnation of Jean Harlowe, tells Lobey near the end of the novel, “We have tried to take their forms, their memories, their myths. But they don't fit. It's an illusion.”²⁰ This opinion that past methods of ordering existence are inadequate to deal with present realities is expressed in one way or another by most of the figures encountered by Lobey on his odyssey. For example, Lobey's most important guide, Spider, explains to him the novel's key concept of “difference” as follows:

Some people walk under the sun and accept … change, others close their eyes, clap their hands to their ears and deny the world with their tongues. Most snicker, giggle, jeer and point when they think no one else is looking—that is how humans acted throughout their history. We have taken over their abandoned world, and something new is happening to the fragments, something we can't even define with mankind's leftover vocabulary. You must take its importance exactly as that: it is indefinable; you are involved in it; it is wonderful, fearful, deep, ineffable to your explanations, opaque to your efforts to see through it. …²¹

The response required of Lobey to this sense of the present moment's “difference” would appear to be obvious: he must abandon mankind's myths and other principles of organization and pursue his own vision, create new stories and legends which better serve his current needs. As the story concludes, this is what Lobey does, for he castrates cross-hung Green-Eye (the image of mankind's resurrection) and vows to leave Earth for the stars—a realm which he knows will be different. Along the way, however, Lobey must first work his way through various prior patterns and ways of dealing with things before he can break free of their constricting power. Thus Lobey's pursuit of “difference” is ironically portrayed as a series of archetypal reenactments of mythical and literary conventions: the pastoral journey-to-the-city convention, the initiation motif, the descent into the labyrinth, several ritualistic encounters with death and sexuality, and many others. The logic of this process is provided by phaedra, who explains, “You have to exhaust the old mazes before you can move into the new ones,” and by the Kid, who says, “We have to exhaust the past before we can finish with the present. We have to live out the human if we are to move on our own future.”²² The point here seems to be that the structural elements of mythic experience may retain a sense of validity even though their specific applications may no longer be useful. Myths, as Lévi-Strauss constantly points out, can be useful only insofar as they provide the basis for active regeneration of their arguments; to the extent that myths insist on an ontological equivalence with the real, they hinder our ability to use them. Thus, in a recent discussion of the role of myth in the modern novel, Eric Gould comments that

myths are hugh interlocking systems of transformational variants, exhibiting the same intentions to ask “ultimate” questions, and to answer them as factually as possible by referring to concrete events in the natural world, which are instigators rather than objects of myth. With a particular myth, we always deal with a hypothetically comprehensive narrative, a compromise text because the strength of that myth is its logical persistence to tend to a conclusion, to be a self-evident truth, even though we know that it cannot be a final statement.²³

It is this potentially dangerous quality of myths “to tend to a conclusion, to be a self-evident truth” that Lobey is constantly warned against.

Lobey's journey, then, contains the seeds of a universal quest for an authentic personal vision freed from the outmoded constrictions of previous methods of organizing perceptions. Yet Lobey is also an artist figure as well as a quester whose machete plays music as well as it kills; thus his journey also portrays the difficulties contemporary artists always face in attempting to define their art in relation to artistic conventions of the past. When Lobey announces, “I'm tired of the old stories, their stories. We're not them; we're new, new to this world, this life,” he anticipates dozens of similarly phrased expressions of dissatisfaction voiced by authors and characters recently (for example, Barthelme's Snow White, who exclaims, “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!”).²⁴ The artistic issue is central to contemporary fiction: how to escape from stale conventions and exhausted story lines while yet acknowledging that certain fundamental patterns remain essential to the artist in defining our existence. The parameters of this conflict between the desire to seek the new, completely outside prior patterns and the belief that the new can only be defined in terms of the past are clearly delineated in an important conversation between Lobey and Spider:

[Lobey] “The stories give you a law to follow—”

“—that you can either break or obey.”

“They set you a goal—”

“—and you can either fail that goal, succeed, or surpass it.”

“Why?” I demanded, “Why can't you just ignore the old stories? … I can ignore those tales!”

“You're living in the real world now,” Spider said sadly. “It's come from something. It's going to something. Myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore. They confound all family love and hate. You shy at them on entering or exiting any endeavor.”²⁵

Since “myths always lie in the most difficult places to ignore,” it is not surprising that one of the most common structural approaches employed by contemporary writers is to adopt directly a mythic framework as an organizing method. However, various factors mitigate against the use of myth except in an ironic, highly self-conscious manner.²⁶ Thus in most recent works which employ overtly mythic materials—Barth's Giles Goat Boy and Chimera, Barthelme's Snow White, Pynchon's works, Zelazny's Lord of Light, Steve Katz's Creamy and Delicious—there exists a central tension between the mythic framework's tendency to organize and rigidify its elements into teleological wholes and the ambiguous, fragmented nature of contemporary experience, which refuses to yield to formulas and patterns. The result is usually a sense that the textual elements are struggling against their roles, threatening to break out of the preset patterns in order to open us up to new constructive possibilities.

A good example of this tendency can be found in the “Mythologies” sections of Steve Katz's Creamy and Delicious, in which Katz, like Delany, aims at exploiting the transformational possibilities of myth. Katz, however, develops a more radical formal method of allowing prior mythic and literary materials to generate new fictional shapes. Roland Barthes has claimed that “the very end of myths is to immobilize the world; they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions.”²⁷ Katz, on the other hand, seeks to disrupt any sense of myth's universality, fixated order, and immobilizing power by introducing new and actively disruptive elements into the system. In each of his “Mythologies,” Katz begins by selecting a name which will be certain to evoke a rich series of associations from his audience. These names are “mythic” in the sense that they suggest specific story lines and clusters of other narrative elements. But in addition to the usual names (Faust, Achilles, Hermes, Goliath, Apollo), Katz devotes equal time to more recent mythological characters (Nancy and Sluggo, Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, Ghandi, and Nasser). Once the stories begin, however, Katz defiantly divorces the names from their traditional associations—as when Nancy and Sluggo are revealed to be a gay cowboy and a “terrible gulch-riding bandit,” respectively²⁸—and goes about the business of creating pure narrative adventures. The “Faust” mythology, for example, begins:

Don't believe any of those stories you had to read in college about Faust, the big scientist who wanted to know all the shit in the world, so he turned on with the devil. Don't believe all that. It's big put-on, and maybe some of it is almost true, but none of it is really true, and if you fall for it you deserve to be pasted on the wall like a wall-paper pattern.²⁹

The remainder of the story has nothing to do with the Faust legend; rather, it tells of Faust, a farmer “who loved girls better than he loved his daily chores,” his amorous adventures with one notorious Lulu, and a later encounter with a “befouled beauty” named Margaret. The Katzian Faust story, then, turns our expectations—which have been aroused by Katz's use of the coded signal “Faust”—upside down as he pursues a completely new story line. Since all received versions of the past have been fundamentally falsified in their transmission, Katz implies, the contemporary writer should feel free to invent whatever variations he chooses; indeed, Katz even suggests as the story concludes that “telling the truth” about Faust interferes with the storytelling impulse:

It is a bitch to really tell the truth about Faust, as you can guess. Even this story fudges a little bit. Faust couldn't have got his farm farmed ever if he carried on like this, even if he farmed like the devil. You can't seem to say anything about Faust without lying.³⁰

If Katz is intent on defying all the mythic patterns, we might ask ourselves, why use the name at all? The answer appears to be that Katz uses the name purely as an arbitrary formal departure point—it immediately establishes a context of meaning and story structure which Katz can disrupt (thus creating a sort of dialogue with the earlier text) while freely inventing a narrative line all his own.

Another, more rigidly controlled generative approach to fiction can be found in various fictions collected by Robert Coover in Pricksongs and Descants. In most of these stories Coover is clearly interested in using prior literary and mythic material as formal elements which he can rearrange into new, harmonious designs. As the title of the collection suggests, one useful way to view many of these fictions is as variations or “counterpoints” (a “pricksong” or “descant”) to the basic line of the familiar mythic or literary “melody.” Several of these stories use the simple method of retelling familiar stories from unfamiliar points of view. For instance, in “The Brother” and “J's Marriage,” Coover takes biblical material which clearly is selected for its familiarity and its power to evoke a cluster of responses from us: he then creates a series of new revelations about this material by refocusing our angle of vision on it. In “The Brother,” the more successful of the stories, Coover tells the story of Noah's Ark, not from the perspective of the holy survivor of God's wrath, but from the point of view of one of the flood's victims—Noah's brother. From this angle Coover can capitalize on many dramatic ironies by presenting the frightened “other side's” position—a position we probably had never considered before. Told in an unpunctuated Joycean monologue that uses an incongruously modern-sounding idiom, the story quickly wins our affection for Noah's unnamed brother. Much of the early material in the story is comical: before the storm Noah is seen as a ludicruous, helpless figure, “him who couldn't never do nothin in a normal way just a hugh oversize fuzzyface boy.”³¹ We also see the bemused attitude of the brother and Noah's neighbors as they watch the building of the huge ark on the top of a hill and the not so amused reactions of Noah's wife to his activities. But because we know the eventual pattern of the events, our laughter is strained. After it begins to rain, the brother swallows his pride out of concern for his pregnant wife and runs to the ark to seek Noah's help. If our perspective of these events is not yet transformed, it surely is changed by Noah's cold refusal of aid. Since Coover has deliberately left out one element crucial to the biblical story—the biblical logic justifying Noah's actions—we are forced to view the situation from a purely human standpoint. The story ends with the narrator precariously perched at the top of a hill, soon to die, his wife already dead. The story is typical of the way contemporary writers are capitalizing on the forms of prior literary material while undercutting the hold their content has for us.

Coover achieves much the same effect with a different formal approach in a series of related fictions that I have elsewhere described as “cubist” in structure.³² In many ways the sensation created by these stories is similar to watching film rushes of the same scene shot from several different angles, with the “action” moving slowly forward because of so many retakes. Basically, Coover assembles all the elements of a familiar literary or mythic situation—the characters, setting, symbolic motifs, plot structure—and then starts the story on its way. But as soon as any pattern or design begins to assert itself, he stops the action, retraces his steps, and allows other plot lines to develop. The result is a sort of miniature version of Borges's famous hypothetical novel, The Garden of the Forking Paths, which was designed by its creator, Ts'ui Pen, to present all possible variations of a given fictional context.

A good example of this method can be found in “The Gingerbread House,” a tale which takes as its primary structural components the elements of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. Coover builds this story out of forty-two short sections, many of which are only one or two lines in length, to present a fragmented variety of possible outcomes to the story. In the process Coover allows parts of the original tale to mix freely with other possibilities rather than simply create a single alternative pattern, as he did with “The Brother.” Thus “The Gingerbread House” is a good example of the way Coover deliberately undercuts, reverses, obscures, and builds upon the familiar associations we may have brought to the story. For instance, Coover freely introduces plot or character elements which are extraneous or even contradictory to the original story (as with the appearance of an old man and a dove). At other times he suddenly switches the symbolic or allegoric implications that we are familiar with from the original: rather than having the black witch (who should represent evil, experience, the adult world) kill the dove (purity, grace), Coover has the young Hansel figure perform the task. Even the basic opposition between the two innocent children and the evil witch is undercut by a variety of hints that there is a willing sexual connection between them.

In addition to such manipulations and reversals, Coover also plants an overabundance of familiar images and symbols (doves, butterflies, flowers, colors, and so on), but deliberately refuses to allow them to link up and establish a single meaningful pattern. We probably notice, for example, that some sort of color imagery is being employed, since specific colors recur in section after section. But if we seek to establish a consistent “meaning” for this color imagery, we find our analysis is futile; like the whiteness of the whale in Moby-Dick or the white found in Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the final “meaning” of certain colors is denied. If we approach Coover's story aware of the usual associations of “white”—“white suggests purity,” for example—we will feel on solid ground at the early mention of the girl's “white petticoats” and at the appearance of the “lustrous white dove,” for these are narrative codes that have assumed a conventional meaning over the years; but what are we to make of the witch's “ghostly white leg,” or the fact that the old man who takes the children to the witch has “white hair” and a “white jacket”?³³ As the readers-critics we are placed in much the same position as Lobey in The Einstein Intersection as we attempt to apply previous patterns of meanings to new, fragmented, ambiguous material. And, of course, this is precisely Coover's intent: because the materials refuse to cohere or develop into single, mutually exclusive patterns, the reader is forced to acknowledge the possibility that all fictions, including the fiction we call reality, is composed of discrete elements which can be manipulated into a wide variety of shapes. The result is a structural emphasis on literature as a formal design rather than as an imitation of something exterior to itself—an emphasis which establishes the freedom of the artist, the exemplary fiction maker, to alter preexisting patterns whenever the old ones have lost their vitality and usefulness.

The last and most complex example of recent generative approaches to be discussed here is Italo Calvino's remarkable work, The Castle of Crossed Destinies. As with Coover's cubist stories, The Castle of Crossed Destinies unmasks literature as a kind of “combinatory game”³⁴ whereby the author combines narrative elements into pleasing, often revealing shapes on the basis of certain “ironclad rules.”³⁵ As Calvino explains it, his role as author is really that of “a juggler, or conjurer, who arranges on a stand at a fair a certain number of objects and, shifting them, connecting them, interchanging them, achieves a certain number of effects.”³⁶ In both of the novellas which constitute the book, Calvino creates a framing story which brings together a group of travelers who find themselves unable to speak; being thus frozen in the mysterious, atemporal realm of literary generation—“suspended in a journey that had not ended nor was to begin”³⁷—the travelers are forced to resort to telling their respective stories with the aid of tarot cards, which the narrator proceeds to interpret for us with the assistance of certain facial and bodily gestures displayed by the travelers. The tarot cards themselves are reproduced in the margin of the text, and, since there are only a limited number of cards (seventy-eight in all), the players are forced to construct their stories so as to intersect with cards that have been played earlier. Eventually the reader, together with the narrator, discovers that

the stories told them from left to right or from bottom to top can also be read from right to left or from top to bottom, and vice versa, bearing in mind that the same cards presented in a different order often change their meaning, and the same tarot is used at the same time by narrators who set forth from the four cardinal points.³⁸

As with Coover's shuffling of literary elements into various possible narrative sequences, the structure of The Castle of Crossed Destinies implies that fiction arises from the transformational possibilities inherent in minimal narrative units being operated upon by fixed laws of association. The seventy-eight tarot cards can be compared to the “minimal units or fictional universals of narrative”³⁹ that recent structuralist critics have postulated as lying at the basis of all fiction. In his afterword to the book, Calvino comments that the “tarots were a machine for constructing stories” and that “the game had a meaning only if governed by ironclad rules” at first appear to undercut the author's (and the reader's) freedom in relationship to the text.⁴⁰ But as is suggested by the narrator's startling discovery that the stories can be read in different sequences, Calvino's text possesses the same freedom that all texts do: they can be read from an infinite number of perspectives, just as Borges's story “Pierre Menard” demonstrates. Thus new games with new rules and new meanings can always be imagined. Just as importantly, the possibility always exists for new combinations of the old material: when the castle's mistress-maidservant, the final storyteller of the first novella, finishes her tale of her new husband's betrayals, she redirects her attention:

And now she is setting a table for two, awaiting her husband's return and peering at every movement of the foliage of this wood, at every card drawn from this pack of tarots, every turn of events in this pattern of tales, until the end of the game is reached. Then her hands scatter the cards, shuffle the deck, and begin all over again.⁴¹

Her shuffling has effectively destroyed the existence of the previous stories, of course, but it also anticipates the laying out of new sequences, just as the shuffling of any deck of cards signals the conclusion to the previous structure of relationships, but also demonstrates the possibility that new combinations can be played out.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies, like The Einstein Intersection and the other generative narratives I have examined, also portrays the artist as the archetypal creator of vitalizing patterns. As Lo Lobey learned in his journey to the city, the raw materials of life may be limited, but their meanings are not; it is the artist's duty to recombine these meanings into patterns more suitable to the demands of the current age. Calvino's book clearly insists that the symbols which comprise narratives—and reality—are not isolated units with fixed meanings assigned to them. “Each new card placed on the table,” Calvino comments, “explains or corrects the meaning of the preceeding cards”;⁴² thus stories are built of elements which acquire meaning only as a result of their relationship with other elements in the narrative code. By extension, the entire process whereby meaning arises in the world is dependent on specific structures of meaning—games which produce meanings on the basis of certain coded sequences of interplay. As with each of the works examined, The Castle of Crossed Destinies demonstrates that fixed patterns are a sham, that meaning and truth make sense only within specific contexts, that the potential always exists for new combinations, new insights, new fictional patterns which can free us from exhausted perceptual systems. Appropriately, then, Calvino compares the role of the poet to that of the Jester, or Fool, who enlightens his master by ridiculing all venerated systems:

It is an ancient and wise custom at courts for the Fool or Jester or Poet to perform his task of upsetting and deriding the values of which the sovereign bases his own rule, to show him that every straight line conceals a crooked obverse, every finished product a jumble of ill-fitting parts, every logical discourse a blah-blah-blah.⁴³

In conclusion I would like to suggest that, from the contemporary standpoint, the fiction writer or the poet, like all men, inhabits a realm which greatly resembles Borges's Library of Babel—a world in which all order is but a fragile sequence of combinations which emerges briefly from the torrent of chaos and then disappears. Still, such order does emerge in the best of our music, poems, and fictions, in the most satisfying scientific laws and mathematical systems, even in absurd but magnificently developed structures such as medieval scholasticism and the system employed by our nation to select presidential candidates. Yet to call this creation of order simply another form of fantasy is as misleading as it is impoverishing. For the generative structure I have described is the opposite both of the closed Tolkienesque mode of fantasy—where the “other” world created bears continuous metaphorical relationship to something we have absolutely and yet arbitrarily designated “our” world—and of the so-called open-ended extrapolations of science fiction earlier described by Darko Suvin, where apparently metonymic shifts from “real” to “ideal” possibilities still conceal a metaphoric relationship founded on closure by fiat, the positing of a real and an ideal. By redirecting our attention, however, to structures that remain genuinely open-ended, by reformulating our perceptions of previous narrative elements, writers such as Delany, Katz, Coover, and Calvino reward the reader with a view of the world as a narrative (that is, fictional) construct and publicly perform what Roland Barthes calls narrative's “adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.”⁴⁴

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Ficciones, no trans. (New York: Grove Pr., 1962), p. 80.

2. Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1979), p. 97.

3. W. R. Irwin, The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Pr., 1976), p. 9.

4. Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1976), p. 15.

5. See, for example, Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: Univ. of Texas Pr., 1968); Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); A. J. Greimas, Sémantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966); Tzvetan Todorov, Grammaire du Décameron (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); and Claude Brémond, Logique du récit (Paris: Seuil, 1973).

6. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastic (Paris: Seuil, 1970); in English, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Pr., 1973), p. 7. See also Propp's contrast of the “amazing multiformity, picturesqueness, and color” of the Russian folktale with “its no less striking uniformity, its repetition” (p. 21).

7. JoAnn Cannon discusses this role of debunking the Romantic myth in her analysis of Calvino's Castle, “Literature as Combinatory Game: Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies.” Critique 21, no 1 (1979): 88.

8. Cited by Roland Barthes in “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephan Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 177.

9. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: Univ. of Texas Pr., 1964), p. 164; cited by Cannon, p. 88.

10. Cited by Cannon, p. 88.

11. Barthes, “Introduction,” pp. 123-24.

12. “Interview with Robert Coover,” conducted by Larry McCaffery, to appear in the summer 1981 issue of Genre.

13. Barthes, “Introduction,” p. 117.

14. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Pr., 1979).

15. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1979), p. 12.

16. Ibid., p. 12.

17. Ibid., p. 67.

18. Ibid., p. 66.

19. In the dedication to Pricksongs and Descants (1969; reprint ed., New York: Plume, 1970), Robert Coover comments that “great narratives remain meaningful as a language-medium between generations, as a weapon against the fringe-areas of our consciousness, and as a mythic reinforcement of our tenuous grip on reality. The novelist uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms” (pp. 78-79).

20. Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection (1967; reprint ed., New York: Ace, 1973), p. 147.

21. Ibid., p. 127.

22. Ibid., pp. 39, 85.

23. Eric Gould, “Condemned to Speak Excessively: Mythic Forms and James Joyce's Ulysses,” Sub-Stance, 22 (1979): 71.

24. Delany, p. 94; Donald Barthelme, Snow White (1967; reprint ed., New York: Bantam, 1968), p. 6.

25. Delany, p. 132.

26. As Robert Scholes has suggested, one of the problems faced by current writers who wish to use myth is precisely our increased self-consciousness about it. Scholes notes that “Once so much is known about myths and archetypes, they can no longer be used innocently. Even their connection to the unconscious finally becomes attenuated as the mythic materials are used more consciously” (p. 100).

27. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 155.

28. Steven Katz, Creamy and Delicious (New York: Random, 1970), p. 19.

29. Ibid., p. 29.

30. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

31. Coover, p. 93.

32. See Larry McCaffery, “Robert Coover's Cubist Fictions,” Par Rapport 1 (1978): 33-40.

33. Coover, pp. 64, 65, 74, 62.

34. Cannon's phrase.

35. Calvino, p. 127.

36. Ibid., p. 105.

37. Ibid., p. 6.

38. Ibid., p. 41. Although this passage refers to the operations of the first novella, “The Castle of Crossed Destinies,” an analogous process occurs in the second novella, “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies.”

39. Cannon, p. 85.

40. Calvino, p. 126.

41. Ibid., p. 48.

42. Ibid., p. 75.

43. Ibid., p. 81.

44. Barthes, Image—Music—Text, p. 124.