formulations that scholars can give to conventions in the expectation that they will thereby become rules. Indeed, to have that kind of knowledge of the conventions probably frustrates the absorption into the text that makes reading both significant and enjoyable. The more the reader knows, in the cold, formulaic sense of having the conventions at his command, the less likely he is to be run away with. There is thus a division between knowledge and experience in reading literature that runs counter to the fusion of the two in gameplaying. In games, commentary (always a kind of decoding) is the direct application of known rules to describe and predict; in literature, commentary (always a kind of intepretation) is the movement away from the experience to a model of significance. In literature the intepretive model succeeds the act of reading; in games, the model is an extrapolation of a known code that precedes the act of playing. If literary texts are games, then they are certainly paradoxical ones, to be accounted for in terms of the inverse of those normally apposite to games. A consideration of the way in which feelings enter into the activities of game-playing and reading further supports the argument that the procedures of commentary in the two activities (decoding, on the one This content downloaded from 157.55.39.129 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 06:18:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 24 South Central Review hand; interpretation, on the other) are in reverse order. In games, the feelings that players have during the course of play are beside the point; they are, simply, irrelevant to the game and to the definition of game, though on the subjective level they may not be irrelevant to the players themselves. One may feel that a certain game, or a certain state of play, is beautiful or ugly but that does not matter insofar as it is a game. There are chess games, such as the Immortal, that are remembered for their elegance and beauty and are often recapitulated for these reasons. Nabokov, looking back upon his novel, The Defense, remarks that replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky-who is doomed to accept it over and over again through an infinity of textbooks, with a question mark for monument.17 But this esthetic tradition has nothing to do with games as games: the Immortal is neither more nor less a game of chess because it is elegant, beautiful, and haunting. One's feelings that the Immortal possesses these qualities have no more to do with its essential gamefulness than if one were to sneeze while recapitulating it. Yet literature clearly entails feelings, and certain kinds of literature entail an explicit range of feeling. Todorov defines an entire genre, the Fantastic, upon the quality of feeling that reading engenders (a hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations),18 and more than a hundred generations of Aristotle's followers have made the feelings of pity and fear a part of the definition of Tragedy. The second paradox is as starkly simple, and as central to the concerns of literary analysis, as is the first. No doubt a game's pattern, a particular situation (as in the case of a chess-problem), or even the code of rules itself may be transposed into the steps of a narrative. Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass demonstrates that this is not only possible but narratively effective. Yet once this has happened, the game ceases to be a game and becomes something else; the game rules that have shaped the narrative structure metamorphose into aspects of the text's conventionality. In this way, something (a game) that is essentially inflexible and abstract becomes something else that is flexible and concrete. This metamorphosis leads directly to the second paradox. Whatever the abstract game-pattern that may have informed a narrative, it cannot be seen intuitively in the text that (perhaps) it has made possible. Just as given conclusions may have a plurality of premises or any actual event a plurality of possible causes, so a particular text may be seen to have a number of structural patterns. Furthermore, texts seem to swallow their assumptions; the more abstract these are, the more deeply swallowed they become. Perhaps a critic could, given a highly precise and analytic method, recover an underlying game-pattern from a literary text. Still, the operation would be neither evidentially simple (as it would be to find the presupposed rules in any actual game) nor intuitively easy. To This content downloaded from 157.55.39.129 on Thu, 28 Jul 2016 06:18:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms