ABSTRACT
This chapter gives analyses of undecidability in three key Modernist texts: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, thereby demonstrating the broad relevance and analytical value of the concept of a sustained productive form of uncertainty and illustrating its central function in meaning-production. While the interpretive challenge posed by Modernist texts is widely acknowledged, this chapter offers a re-description of the aspect of recalcitrance in terms of the theory of uncertainty and point out the connection between ideas and notions in literary and theoretical texts. The chapter shows that it is precisely the production of tensional, often contradictory-seeming meaning-possibilities which accounts for the strong effect of stimulation and thought-provocation that these works are known to prompt in readers. This effect accounts for both the reader-appeal and -frustration caused by the works. It is from the points and sites of undecidability in the narratives that their most interesting, striking and stimulating meanings spring; and it is by the use of undecidability on the level of aesthetics, structure, theme and narration that the experimental works convey their literary, existential and philosophical visions and intentions.
