Nodality or Plot Displaced: The Dynamics of Sollers's H

Abstract

It seems axiomatic that an increasing number of books advertising themselves as novels refuse to tell tales. To the extent that such books retain vestiges of plot and narrative discourse, both are attenuated and/or sublimated. Questions of plot, character, setting, and point of view, if not of narrative tension, are displaced by the question of organization, and that is most often nodal. Such texts are frequently informed by systems of interrelated passages (scenes, images, visions, treatments of topics, etc.) which do not contribute to a coherent and generalized narrative development, but rather break the narrative surface, standing out against or being readily isolable before blending into the verbal context. The passages in question can best be thought of as nodes or clusters of signifiers in open works.' In their nature and function, fictional nodes will vary from text to text, but generally a major node is a complex, foregrounded moment capable of subdivision and subject to expansion. Typically, a fully developed node will find enriching echoes in other parts of the book. While they need resolve nothing on the level of plot or argument, such echoes gradually contribute to the formation of nodal systems. Nodes tend to be fundamental statements of the textual predicament; so we may expect aspects of a given group of nodes to overlap with those of others, contributing to networks that gradually reveal their significance and simultaneously give the reader a sense of the text's articulation, its essential structure. The latter, while displacing linear discourse by complementing other structuring systems, ultimately reassures by imposing, through