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The Open Work
were in a state of perpetual transformation. Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and finds that he is faced (both in art and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part. The poetic treatises concerning «maraviglia,» «wit,» «agudezas,» and so on really strain to go further than their apparently Byzantine appearance: they seek to establish the new man’s inventive role.

He is no longer to see the work of art as an object which draws on given links with experience and which demands to be enjoyed; now he sees it as a potential mystery to be solved, a role to fulfill, a stimulus to quicken his imagination. Nonetheless, even these conclusions have been codified by modern criticism and organized into aesthetic canons. In fact, it would be rash to interpret Baroque poetics as a conscious theory of the «open work.»

Between classicism and the Enlightenment, there developed a further concept which is of interest to us in the present context. The concept of «pure poetry» gained currency for the very reason that general notions and abstract canons fell out of fashion, while the tradition of English empiricism increasingly argued in favor of the «freedom» of the poet and set the stage for the coming theories of creativity. From Burke’s declarations about the emotional power of words, it was a short step to Novalis’s view of the pure evocative power of poetry as an art of blurred sense and vague outlines.

An idea is now held to be all the more original and stimulating insofar as it «allows for a greater interplay and mutual convergence of concepts, lifeviews, and attitudes. When a work offers a multitude of intentions, a plurality of meaning, and above all a wide variety of different ways of being understood and appreciated. then under these conditions we can only conclude that it is of vital interest and thatitisapureexpressionofpersonality.»‘

To close our consideration of the Romantic period, it will be useful to refer to the first occasion when a conscious poetics of the open work appears. The moment is latenineteenthcentury Symbolism: the text is Verlaine’s Art Poitique:

De la musique avant toute chose, et
pour cela préfere l’impair
plus vague et plus soluble dans fair
sans rien en lui qui pose et qui pose.
Music before everything else.
and, to that end. prefer the uneven more
vague and more soluble in air with
nothing in it that is heavy or still.

Mallarme’s programmatic statement is even more explicit and pronounced in this context: «Nommer un objet c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poême, qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu a peu: le suggerer . . . voila le rêve» («To name an object is to suppress threefourths of the enjoyment of the poem, which is composed of the pleasure of guessing little by little: to suggest . . . there is the dream»). The important thing is to prevent a single sense from imposing itself at the very outset of the receptive process. Blank space surrounding a word, typographical adjustments, and spatial composition in the page setting of the poetic

text—all contribute to create a halo of indefiniteness and to make the text pregnant with infinite suggestive possibilities.

This search for suggestiveness is a deliberate move to «open» the work to the free response of the addressee. An artistic work that suggests is also one that can be performed with the full emotional and imaginative resources of the interpreter. Whenever we read poetry there is a process by which we try to adapt our personal world to the emotional world proposed by the text. This is all the more true of poetic works that are deliberately based on suggestiveness, since the text sets out to stimulate the private world of the addressee so that he can draw from inside himself some deeper response that mirrors the subtler resonances underlying the text.

A strong current in contemporary literature follows this use of symbol as a communicative channel for the indefinite, open to constantly shifting responses and interpretative stances. It is easy to think of Kafka’s work as «open»: trial, castle, waiting, passing sentence, sickness, metamorphosis, and torture—none of these narrative situations is to be understood in the immediate literal sense.

But, unlike the constructions of medieval allegory, where the superimposed layers of meaning are rigidly prescribed, in Kafka there is no confirmation in an encyclopedia, no matching paradigm in the cosmos, to provide a key to the symbolism. The various existentialist, theological, clinical, and psychoanalytic interpretations of Kafka’s symbols cannot exhaust all the possibilities of his works.

The work remains inexhaustible insofar as it is «open,» because in it an ordered world based on universally acknowledged laws is being replaced by a world based on ambiguity, both in the negative sense that directional centers are missing and in a positive sense, because values and dogma are constantly being placed in question.

Even when it is difficult to determine whether a given author had symbolist intentions or was aiming at effects of ambivalence or indeterminacy, there is a school of criticism nowadays which tends to view all modern literature as built upon symbolic patterns. W. Y.

Tindall, in his book on the literary symbol, offers an analysis of some of the greatest modern literary works in order to test Valery’s declaration that «il n’y a pas de vrai sens d’un texte» («there is no true meaning of a text»). Tindall eventually concludes that a work of art is a construct which anyone at all, including its author, can put to any use whatsoever, as he chooses. This type of criticism views the literary work as a continuous potentiality of «openness» in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings. This is the scope of the wave of American studies on the structure of metaphor, or of modern work on «types of ambiguity» offered by poetic discourse.’

Clearly, the work otlames Joyce is a major example of an «open» mode, since it deliberately seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world. The «Wandering Rocks» chapter in Ulysses amounts to a tiny universe that can be viewed from different perspectives: the last residue of Aristotelian categories has now disappeared. Joyce is not concerned with a consistent unfolding of time or a plausible spatial continuum in which to stage his characters’ movements. Edmund Wilson has observed that, like Proust’s or Whitehead’s or Einstein’s world, «Joyce’s world is always changing as it is perceived by different observers and by them at different times.»‘

In Finnegans Wake we are faced with an even more startling process of «openness»: the book is molded into a curve that bends back on itself, like the Einsteinian universe. The opening word of the first page is the same as the closing word of the last page of the novel. Thus, the work is finite in one sense, but in another sense it is unlimited. Each occurrence, each word stands in a series of possible relations with all the others in the text. According to the semantic choice which we make in the case of one unit, so goes the way we interpret all the other units in the text.

This does not mean that the book lacks specific sense. IfJoyce does introduce some keys into the text, it is precisely because he wants the work to be read in a certain sense. But this particular «sense» has all the richness of the cosmos itself. Ambitiously, the author intends his book to imply the totality of space and time, of all spaces and all times that are possible. The principal tool for this allpervading ambiguity is the pun, the calembour, by which two, three, or even ten different etymological roots are combined in such a way that a single word can set up a knot of different submeanings, each of which in turn coincides and interrelates with other local allusions, which are themselves «open» to new configurations and probabilities of interpretation.

The reader of Finnegan Wake is in a position similar to that of the person listening to postdodecaphonic serial composition as he appears in a striking definition by Pousseur: «Since the phenom ena are no longer tied to one another by a termtoterm determination, it is up to the listener to place himself deliberately in the midst of an inexhaustible network of relationships and to choose for himself, so to speak, his own modes of approach, his reference points and his scale, and to endeavor to use as many dimensions as he possibly can at the same time and thus dynamize, multiply, and extend to the utmost degree his perceptual faculties.» 6

Nor should we imagine that the tendency toward openness operates only at the level of indefinite suggestion and stimulation of emotional response. In Brecht’s theoretical work on drama, we shall see that dramatic action is conceived as the problematic exposition of specific points of tension. Having presented these tension points (by following the wellknown technique of epic recitation, which does not seek to influence the audience, but rather to offer a series of facts to be observed, employing the device of «defamiliarization»), Brecht’s plays do not, in the strict sense, devise solutions at all. It is up to the audience to draw its own conclusions from what it has seen on stage.

Brecht’s plays also end in a situation of ambiguity (typically, and more than any other, his Galileo), although it is no longer the morbid ambiguousness of a halfperceived infinitude or an anguishladen mystery,

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were in a state of perpetual transformation. Now if Baroque spirituality is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modern culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for