ABSTRACT
The way in which novels participate in the production of meaning would itself be a sufficiently worthy object of investigation, but the very fact that the novel is conventionally tied to the world in a way that poetry is not gives it a range of critical functions which have interested structuralists even more. Precisely because the reader expects to be able to recognize a world, the novel he reads becomes a place in which models of intelligibility can be ‘deconstructed’, exposed and challenged. In poetry deviations from the vraisemblable are easily recuperated as metaphors which should be translated or as moments of a visionary or prophetic stance; but in the novel conventional expectations make such deviations more troubling and therefore potentially more powerful; and it is here, on the edges of intelligibility, that structuralist interest has come to focus. In S/Z Barthes begins his discussion of Balzac with a distinction between readable and unreadable texts – between those which are intelligible in terms of traditional models and those which can be written (le scriptible) but which we do not yet know how to read (p. 10). And although Barthes’s own analysis suggests that this distinction is not itself a useful way of classifying texts – every ‘traditional’ novel of any value will criticize or at least investigate models of intelligibility and every radical text will be readable and intelligible from some point of view – it does at least indicate the appropriateness and fecundity of taking the play of intelligibility as the focal point of one’s analysis. Even when the novel is not explicitly engaged in undermining our notions of coherence and significance, by its creative use of these notions it participates in what Husserl would call the ‘reactivation’ of models of intelligibility: that which is taken as natural is brought to consciousness and revealed as process, as construct.1
