“Risk and Redundancy”

Abstract

THE RISK of Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward is that the reader has no choice but to consider the imminence of death. He must confront the patients' question: in the face of death, what is the meaning of life? He has no recourse but to consider one of the ethical problems of modern medicine: the doctor's right to cure as opposed to the patient's right to dispose of his own life. These are unsettling matters, which most human beings would just as soon avoid or postpone, but if person reads Solzhenitsyn's novel, he is not permitted to avoid them. Similarly, the risk of Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener is that the reader, like the lawyer-narrator, must confront an insoluble problem, an inoffensive but stubbornly insistent man who prefers not to cooperate in anything. reader, who cannot approve the lawyer's acts, cannot free himself of them: what would he do about Bartleby?1 reader is ordinarily quite content to shelve such demanding questions in favor of more immediate and practical matters, but in these cases he must entertain them. question that arises is, why does he consent to this implication? Hamlet correctly predicts that The play's the thing / Wherein I'11 the conscience of the King (Il.ii). King, as surely as Hamlet, knows that the play is fiction. Why, then, does he permit the play to catch and trouble his conscience? initiation of the reader into the premises and mode of the story creates the crucial linkage between one kind of reality and another. This initiation is the point at which the reader relinquishes autonomy, suspends disbelief, or accepts the authority of the author. He gives himself up, in other words, to imaginative experience. Certain avenues of experience and communication are closed off immediately and the reader is directed to specific kinds of experiences, sympathies, and judgments. He must not only understand these experiences, but must consent to undergo them. Indeed, the very persuasiveness of linguistically conjured experience, which is the source of reader's human educability, is also the source of risks. To counter those risks, there must be reassurances that reliable communication is taking place, that both author and reader know what is going on. O e kind of risk in any linguistic transaction is that even carefully contrived communication sometimes fails. Misunderstanding is common phenomenon in everyone's life: its consequences can range from mild confusion to disaster.2 When misunderstanding occurs, the manifold and subtle agreements (lexical, grammatical, interpretive, logical, etc.) that allow communication to take place are breached. Think, for instance, of the risk Dostoevsky runs in trying to prove that murder is psychically intolerable to the murderer. He does this by associating the reader with Raskolnikov and making it unbearable to be Raskolnikov. What if Dostoevsky had meant to make this clear, but had constructed proof that was ambiguous, so that the novel might be read as an endorsement of murder? Misunderstanding is risk because the act of successfully completed communication is an important part of community, and community is chief protection against isolation, nonidentity, and incoherence. Any failed communication implies significant threat to survival.3 However minor any one instance of misunderstanding may seem, each is potentially isolating or excluding. Should misunderstanding come to be the order of the day, one of the primary sources of human survival as we know it would be endangered. It is worth digressing to point out, briefly, that while linguistic failures are bound to occur, deliberate obscurity in either writing or speech is like lying. Both obscurity and falsehood work in significant ways to injure social cohesion, to reduce continuity and trust, to increase hostility and the likelihood of conflict, and generally to destroy the social state. Claude Levi-Strauss notes that many specific social taboos prohibit a misuse of language, and on this ground they are grouped together with the incest prohibition.4 Unsuccess-