ABSTRACT
Donald Barthelme's story with the tantalizing title "The explanation" is a consummate cybernetic fiction. The black box stands at the core of "The explanation," an irreducible, atomistic sign, telling that "The explanation" is inexplicable. Barthelme leads to see that the text and the black box, by their opacity and reticence, mirror each other and are very special sorts of machines. The punner in Locus Solus is, like the black box, also the ordering metaphor-machine of its text. They direct the discourse and yet give rise to further discourse of their own. Whereas Raymond Roussel's puns create a closed verbal space, Barthelme's language is uncertainly punned, the text is filled with lacunae and ellipses, and the whole is left open to interpretation. Roussel overdetermines, Barthelme not only underdetermines, but chooses a symbol of underdetermination itself as the central feature of his text. Roussel, the ultimate literary positivist, is confronted six decades later by Barthelme, the mock empiricist and ironic counterfeiter.
