ABSTRACT

Games appeal to modern literary sensibilities. They also pertain to modernist concerns that explore, question and challenge the very idea of fiction. Realism deals with games on a thematic rather than a formal level to describe what characters do or how societies are laid out. Hans-Georg Gadamer uses play as an analogy for the aesthetic experience, an analogy that is in line with modernist thinking. For him play is 'the mode of being of the work of art itself'. As implied by Gadamer, play points to its self-sufficiency, explicating the logistics of the act rather than its outcome. Equally, modernist poetics concentrates on the dismantling of the literary work rather than on the meaning this work produces: the observed and conspicuous fictional object, the transparent truth of the realist agenda. Obscurity, a key term in modernist aesthetics, implies a deliberate complication of the communicative act performed during the reading process.