Godel's "Incompleteness Theorem" and Barbey: Raising Story to a Higher Power

Abstract

A story, according to conventional wisdom, is the composite of two elements, a hero and his observer, the storyteller; that is, the paradigm for is made up of one who performs significant actions and one who relates that person's exploits. A fiction always entails at least this sequence of two since there is no such thing as a heroic storyteller. But, of course, there is no story without its audience. A message does not exist by reason of its having an addressor; it must have an addressee to come into existence. A story is only constituted when there is someone to hear about the exploits of the hero. The briefest reflection makes us aware that there are more than two steps in the sequence which creates a story: there has to be a third entry in the chain, the receiver who assembles and gives a design to what is dispatched by the sender. That is, the receiver is not merely acted upon; the story assumes a configuration and a meaning insofar as it responds to the values and experience of its audience, the mold into which it must flow in order to take form. The story takes to the extent that the receiver (reader or listener) has the shock of recognition at some level; that is, the addressee of the narrative message is the model as well as the spectator, the observed as well as the observer. He is, in fact, both figure and ground ground, indeed, because he is in some sense the figure. Framed stories dramatize this circularity, making it evident that the addressee plays two kinds of roles in the creation of every narrative, and thus compelling us to move beyond the original intuition that a story is the representation of successive steps in a sequence. If we are accustomed to imagining that the diagram for story-qua-story would take the form of an arrow's path, moving along a horizontal axis from left to right, framed narrative, in projecting the listener as protagonist, substitutes a circle for that path. In Le Dessous de cartes d'unepartie de whist, Barbey d'Aurevilly's explicit, rhetorical demonstration of a story which loops back on itself illuminates the profound shift in world view--and thus in concept of narrative implicit in this passage from depiction of arrow to