The Semiotics of the Foreseen: Modes of Narrative Intelligibility in (Contemporary) Fiction

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Contemporary fiction, whether innovative or traditional, is marked by its desire to transgress the established boundaries of intelligibility and the frames of vraisemblance articulated in cultural, logical and literary models of coherence. Although these fictions partake in a variety of literary codes constitutive of narrative genres and their forms of intelligiblity, participation, in Derrida's words, never amounts to belonging (1980:212). The narratives that do belong and thus conform to the dominant models of intelligibility are, as Todorov has argued (1975), in fact no more than formulaic genre fictions. The teasing and troubling, if not outright violation, of frames of intelligibility in postmodern fiction has led some critics to believe that such innovative texts lie beyond the codes of verisimilitude altogether, and in a state, as it were, of total non-discursive freedom. The best way to read such texts, these critics suggest, is to approach them free from the interventions of the codes and conventions of vraisemblance, since it is only through such a free encounter that the presence of meaning and semantic plenitude can be experienced. The myth of unmediated writing/reading is a very powerful one in contemporary critical practices and is a new version of the hermeneutic mystification based on a rather naive empiricism which maintains that meaning is directly graspable by the reader.'