Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth-Century Literature and Literary Theory

Mette Leonard Høeg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032155418
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000568547
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Undecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores the essential literary notion and its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. The book traces the notion historically, providing a map of central theories addressing interpretative challenges and recalcitrance in literature and showing 'theory of uncertainty' to be an essential strand of literary theory. While uncertainty is present in all literature, and indeed a prerequisite for any stabilisation of meaning, the Modernist period is characterised by a particularly strong awareness of uncertainty and its subforms of undecidability, ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. With examples from seminal Modernist works by Woolf, Proust, Ford, Kafka and Musil, the book sheds light on undecidability as a central structuring principle and guiding philosophical idea in twentieth-century literature and demonstrates the analytical value of undecidability as a critical concept and reading-strategy. Defining undecidability as a specific 'sustained' and 'productive' kind of uncertainty and distinguishing it from related forms, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy and indistinction, the book develops a systematic but flexible theory of undecidability and outlines a productive reading-strategy based on the recognition of textual and interpretive undecidability.

1 The Concept of Undecidability

DOI: 10.4324/9781003244622-2

The Constitution of Literary Undecidability: Author, Text, Reader

The conceptualisation of undecidability presented here is based on a view of the meaning of a literary text as constituted in combination by the author, the text and the reader. My interest is undecidability in the objective sense of the incapability of being decided, i.e., as a textual feature and quality, as well as undecidability in the subjective sense as the incapability of deciding, i.e., the effect of textual undecidability on the reader’s interpretation and reaction in the meeting with a work of undecidability. I define undecidability as a specific form of uncertainty applied by the author as part of a narrative strategy, as a form of uncertainty that characterises the readerly experience of a narrative, and as a textual feature that renders it impossible for the reader to decide on one single reading of a text. This entails a distinction between undecidability on different levels of meaning-production in a literary text – and a distribution of the authority over the meaning between author, text and reader – and at the same time a view of undecidability as a consolidation of the meanings activated on these interdependent levels.

The conceptualisation of undecidability includes a cognitive perspective in literature and draws on the theory of Terrence Cave in which the fundamentality of uncertainty in literature and its effect of reader engagement are cognitively explained. In Thinking ‘with’ Literature, Cave shows that, cognitively speaking, the very act of reading is a process of filling out gaps by inferring meaning – mostly done unconsciously, unhesitatingly and with ‘extraordinary rapidity’ (2016: 26). Cave introduces the term ‘underspecification’ which designates the ‘empty spaces’ in a text that allow the reader to use the basic human skill of recognition and assumption of agency, pointing out that ‘[u]nderspecification and inference are constantly present as the fundamental conditions of human cognition itself’ (2016: 2). Cave’s study is based on Relevance theory. This theory of language entails a model of communication according to which language is offered by the speaker as evidence of his/hers intentions, thoughts, sensations, ideas etc. with the expectation that this evidence ‘will evoke analogous forms of thought in the interlocutor and thus modify his cognitive environment’ (Cave 2016: 24–25). Language is thus viewed as a communication based on the speaker’s assumption that the interlocutor will infer relevant meaning from the utterance. The evidence given by the speaker is always only partial and its effect is dependent on there being a shared context between speaker and interlocutor in the sense of shared knowledge and cultural habits. Cave points out that from this perspective literature and language generally ‘are highly under-specified: speakers rely on a continuous inferential calculus on the part of the interlocutor’ (2016: 25). In the reading of a literary work, then, readers ‘unconsciously and unhesitatingly draw an enormous number of inferences that allow [them] to project [themselves] into the mind of the speaker, fill out the sketch she has provided, and to make it into something [they] can understand and imagine’ (2016: 25).

Recognising that the underspecification of Modernist literature is particularly demanding, Cave states that a cognitive reading of literary texts seeks to

uncover the hidden work of rapid inferencing and on-the-wing construction of meaning that makes it possible for an experienced reader to make sense of even the elaborate prose of Proust, Henry James, or Thomas Mann without stopping to reflect (although stopping to reflect is also part of the reading process)

(2016: 23)

While such a basic cognitive account presents reading as an act of completing the meaning of a literary work and resolving its inherent uncertainty and thus does not account for the possibility of readers consciously, strategically and productively resisting a move towards interpretive closure, it does clarify the fundamental effect of uncertainty of reader-engagement. It also brings to light the function of uncertainty and underspecification in the shift from immersive and non-reflective reading to a self-conscious reading mode. Cave points out that ‘[a]t a certain point, which is hard to locate precisely, cognition moves from unreflective or pre-reflective to reflective’ (2016: 22). Viewed within this theoretical context, the interest in this book is the literary underspecification that prompts the reader to move from a non-reflective to a reflective mode of reading, i.e., the use of undecidability to make the readerly inference and thus the question of interpretational choice become a conscious and self-reflective act.

Cave also explains how meaning from a cognitive perspective is indeed constituted on both the level of author, text and reader in the sense that the reader connects with the intention of the author through the gaps of meaning in the text. Literature is the mutual exploitation by the author and reader of their respective mental resources and potential imaginings and it is by nature ‘porous’ and ‘full of spaces waiting to be filled’ (2016: 26). Literature is a form of language and utterance, and reading necessarily involves engaging with the mind of the author. It thus entails a degree of ‘mind-reading’ in the sense that the reader imagines the intention of the author and infers relevant meaning accordingly.

Undecidability refers not only to the incapability of deciding between several meanings in a narrative but also to the incapability of a single meaning being either proved or disproved within the logic of the narrative. As such the concept echoes Frank Kermode’s view expressed in relation to Ford’s The Good Soldier that ‘[w]e are in a world of which it needs to be said not that plural readings are possible (for this is true of all narrative) but that the illusion of the single right reading is possible no longer’ (1983: 102; emphasis and parenthesis original). Undecidability is a demonstrative form of uncertainty in the sense that it draws attention to this illusion of the single right reading on a meta-level. Undecidability in Modernist literature, then, entails a meta-literary and -theoretical dimension and relates to general epistemological and hermeneutic problems of fiction, narration, meaning and interpretation.

My main focus is the forms and functions of undecidability in Modernist works, and the concept of undecidability is developed in order to improve the understanding of Modernist literature specifically and to describe a specific prevalent form of uncertainty. Undecidability as an analytical and critical concept is developed to capture the meanings of those literary works that were written under the influence of predominant theories of uncertainty in the early twentieth century and which responded to certain scientific, psychological and philosophical insights and ideas through literary and narrative experimentation. At the same time, undecidability is put forward as a critical and analytical concept that can be applied as part of a general interpretive approach to literature. This reflects the view that literature, language and discourse are characterised by a fundamental uncertainty, indeed that uncertainty is a precondition for any meaningful utterance and attempt at fixation of meaning.

Undecidability, then, is developed in this book, both as a specific and as a general concept. On the one hand, the concept designates an inherent textual feature and quality that constitute the very openness and the point of engagement that characterise high quality literature, and on the other, it refers to a historically situated and specific phenomenon, deliberately invoked and formed in a particular socio-historical and cultural context.

The view of undecidability as a fundamental quality of narrative and of all narrative as characterised by undecidability reflects the perspective that undecidability is a prerequisite for the very production of meaning. The concept of undecidability put forward here is aligned with the Derridean view of undecidability as a precondition for any utterance or statement. Although undecidability in a text is always singular and situational, it is a precondition for all literary texts and manifestations of meaning. The focus here is, however, the forms of textual uncertainty of which the author is aware and which are foregrounded in the text in order to produce specific meanings and to activate and intensify the reader’s meta-literary awareness.⁴ The works included in this book all display a clear awareness of their own uncertainty and clearly relate to central ideas of uncertainty of their contemporaneity, such as Ernst Mach’s functionalism, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, the phenomenological inclusion of subjectivity in the description of reality, the insight into the undecidability of physical phenomena, the notion of observer-influence of quantum mechanics, and the notion of ambivalence and the distinction between the conscious and unconscious in psychoanalysis. These works are ethically inquisitive but characterised by an absence of moral judgment; they are characterised by a non-essential subjectivity position; and they are preoccupied with the uncertainty of cognition, perception and reality – and more specifically of interpretation and the nature of literary representation. Undecidability, then, is a form of textual uncertainty that is enhanced by the author who acknowledges the text’s fundamental authority over meaning as well as its undecidability. Undecidability is deployed in these works in order to draw the reader’s attention to the constitutive and potentially disruptive nature of fiction, create self-awareness of the act of reading and the process of interpretation and thus to turn the reader into an accomplice in the literary experiment with subjectivity, representation and epistemology.

The concept of undecidability is based on the view that the attraction to coherence and completion of meaning is, as Wolfgang Iser notes, a basic human instinct. Narratives of undecidability depend on the human interpretive drive towards completion in the sense of unification and synthesis of the meanings, perspectives, actions, behaviours and ideas presented in a literary text. The distinctive tension of a text of undecidability is rooted in objective textual features and in the authorial awareness of the uncertainty of meaning but the recalcitrance of the text is actualised by the reader’s search for resolution. The very productivity of undecidability depends on the pre-existence in the reader of conventional notions of and expectations to oppositions, dichotomies, genres etc.

4 My approach is, however, not strictly deconstructive in a Derridean sense. I am less interested in uncovering the points in a text that reveal the undecidability of its philosophical or narrative system, i.e., the points of incoherence or contradiction that the author conventionally seeks to hide and suppress. Instead my main focus is the kind of uncertainty that is used deliberately by the author to express a particular literary intention and which relates to central twentieth-century issues of epistemology, subjectivity and morality. In this respect my approach is more closely aligned with that of Paul de Man who views the author as aware of the textual authority and undecidability in his own writing.

At the same time the concept is based on the presumption that readers possess self-reflective, flexible minds and are capable of changing and modifying their approach and conceptions, and that as literary strategies and conventions change, so do readers’ interpretational attitudes. As such the concept of undecidability reflects Geoffrey Hartman’s view of the reader as flexible and self-conscious, presented in Chapter 2. The reader is part of the same cultural and societal system of reciprocal influence in which the exchange between the different spheres of knowledge and scientific disciplines generates development. As undecidability and uncertainty of (physical) phenomena and of interpretation and observation become increasingly central ideas in science, psychology, philosophy and the arts in the early twentieth century, these notions also become increasingly central to readers’ expectations and methods of understanding the world and consuming literature.

The concept of undecidability as a sustained and productive form of uncertainty of meaning and interpretation thus entails an acknowledgement of the mutual determination and co-dependence of the different levels of meaning-production in literature. ‘Sustained’ can refer to the author’s deliberate sustaining of undecidability, to the text’s formal effectuation and further development of this as well as to the reader’s acceptance of undecidability and deliberate interpretive sustaining of it.

Distinction of Undecidability as a Textual Feature and Quality

Undecidability is a form of uncertainty that is sustained in the sense that it is left unresolved by the author and unresolvable by the text. As such it is distinct from temporary forms of productive uncertainty such as classic suspense, which is characterised by a resolution of undecidability and release of tension. And undecidability is ‘productive’ in the sense that it generates and nurtures meanings. It produces a tensional field of meaning and prompts an interpretive oscillation between several possible interpretations that cannot be united in one fully coherent explanation. It is a more complex form of uncertainty than that of ambiguity defined as an uncertainty between strictly two possible meanings. Crucially, undecidability differs from indeterminacy as defined by Derrida. Indeterminacy is a type of unlimited uncertainty of meaning without any demarcation, i.e., uncertainty in the form of there being no identifiable, determinate possibilities of interpretation and so no possibility of oscillation or interpretive movement between options of meaning. The concept of indistinction understood in accordance with Giorgio Agamben’s theory, which is elaborated below, as uncertainty in the form of a point or space on a continuum between oppositions, is arguably a type of undecidability. Like undecidability, indistinction is a case of either-or and both-and, and it differs from ambiguity precisely in that the two possibilities between which meaning is suspended are not dichotomies, but polarities and as such interconnected. The notion of indistinction, then, shares with undecidability an undermining of the notion of contradiction.

Different forms of literary undecidability can be defined on different levels and in various dimensions of a narrative. Some of the more obvious forms have already been pointed to in the introduction, namely generic undecidability, such as the undecidability between fictional and nonfictional modes or between referentiality and construct, and narrative undecidability such as the productive uncertainty that results from the use of an unreliable narrator or the use of free indirect discourse. Undecidability can also appear and be manifested metaphorically and figuratively, for instance through the physical conditions and reactions of literary characters, which is the case in The Good Soldier where the heart becomes a central motif of undecidability, and in The Man Without Qualities where the physical reaction of trembling in the characters reflects the sustained undecidability expressed in the narration and on the thematic level. The critical approach to the meaning-structure of undecidability and its effect should acknowledge this situational character. The present investigation does not, then, offer an inventory of the possible types of undecidability in Modernist literature. Its purpose is, rather, to shed light on the significance of undecidability for the production of meaning in literature and to encourage further identification of specific and situational forms and motifs of undecidability in literary works.

The literary works analysed in this book are referred to as ‘works of undecidability’, which implies not simply that undecidability can be identified locally on different levels in the narratives, but that the effect of such specific undecidabilities transcend their local context. In works of undecidability the specific uncertainties of meaning create a broad, tensional field, the dimensions and structures of which vary from work to work, but which is essentially ‘stretched out’ between a number of interpretive options. In this space, between the markers of interpretive possibilities, the meaning of the narrative unfolds and oscillates with the reader’s engagement. Meaning in works of undecidability is flexible and takes the form of a movement, along lines that run between (determinate and identifiable) oppositions or poles, between different overlapping or contradictory explanations and perspectives. Undecidability is a case of simultaneous either-or and both-and. The different possibilities of meaning in narratives of undecidability cannot be unified but neither can any one of them singularly provide sufficient or satisfactory explanation. They appear on one level mutually exclusive, on another complementary and interdependent. Narratives of undecidability thus represent a multidimensional system which is highly productive of meanings and perspectives and which does not allow the reader to fully resolve its contradictions and tensions.

The Affective Dimension

As undecidability challenges generic and narrative conventions, subverts conventional meanings, deconstructs established oppositions and expectations and resists closure, it provokes a participatory and meta-reflective reader-response and creates readerly disorientation, excitement, even uneasiness. These distinctive affective implications have repeatedly been noted in the theory of uncertainty and interpretation. Wolfgang Iser points to the ‘keen disturbance’, the ‘stimulation’ and the ‘provocation of a nervousness in the reader’ caused by the ‘gaps of indeterminacy’ in a literary text. Paul De Man similarly writes of the ‘pathos’ that results from indeterminacy as one of either anxiety or bliss. A key characteristic of works of undecidability is this encouragement of a participatory and meta-reflective mode of reading which breaks the undi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Uncertainty and Undecidability
• 1 The Concept of Undecidability
• 2 Literary Theory of Uncertainty
• 3 Scenes of Literary Undecidability
• 4 Palpitation of Heart, Perception and Meaning: The Good Soldier
• 5 Trembling: The Man Without Qualities
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index