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290 18. Literary Form, Fate, Freedom, Chance I would like to give another illustration of the restrictive effect that literary form has on interpretation by focusing on the relation between literary form and the concepts of freedom and chance. Because it has been claimed in recent years that freedom, contingency, and the general randomness of life are Tolstoy’s main concerns in Anna Karenina, I thought it would be useful to follow a discussion of fate in the novel with a discussion of the difficulty of demonstrating fate’s absence from it. But first I would like to sketch some of the general considerations relevant to this issue.1 The existence of freedom is one of the most common and unquestioned assumptions of our times, especially in modern liberal Western societies (and I am being intentionally agnostic about whether or not this belief is correct). From conceptions of human nature to the principles of ethical behavior, and from the constitution of the state to sexual practices and choice of life path, everything is underlain by faith in the possibility, indeed, the imperative, of existential self-fulfillment and self-creation. A related conviction about the role of chance in human existence is equally widespread. That things simply happen, without any ultimate necessity or reason, is inherent in many contemporary systems of belief, especially among academic intellectuals, and embraces everything from humankind’s place in the cosmos, to the processes of evolution, to the minutiae of daily existence. There are obviously countercurrents to these dominant beliefs that are predicated on various forms of causality or determinism , but they do not disprove the larger generalizations. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a belief in the role of freedom and chance in human existence would also be reflected in literature, both from the point of view of writers who thematize freedom and chance, and from the point of view of readers who believe that both must exist in literature as they do in life. However, this transference of beliefs from life to literature is highly problematic, because chance and freedom are usually incompatible with literary form, especially the kind of form we find in Tolstoy. Explanations for this state of affairs are suggested by several of Lotman’s formulations about randomness or contingency in life as compared to literature. One of his seminal observations is that “[w]hat is asystemic in life is reflected in art as polysystemic.”2 In other words, in a highly organized literary work, the illusion of freedom from systematicity is achieved, paradoxically, via polyvalence—via the relation of a particular detail to many textual series. Thus, a detail that can be related to six thematic contexts in a novel, for example, will seem less fixed and more free than a detail that can be related to only two. What also follows from this is that there will always be a limited (although possibly large) number of relations between a detail and other elements in a structured utterance like a literary work, which means that genuine asystematicity in literature is not possible . Lotman also states that everything that is “noticeable in an artistic text is inevitably perceived as meaningful, as carrying a specific semantic load” (195). This is another way of saying that readers will search for connections among details that will allow them to fit whatever they focus on into a system of meaningful relations via the process of the hermeneutic circle (see 5.4). Why do readers behave this way? In the end, because this is a cultural norm. As Lotman puts it: “The listener is inclined to believe that all the elements in a work of art are the result of the poet’s designing actions insofar as he knows that there is a certain design in them but does not yet know what that design is” (195).3 One could argue that the inertia of cultural practices implicit in this formulation is precisely what an author could try to thwart via techniques that disrupt the reader’s ability to discern textual designs. But this possibility is difficult to reconcile with the even more fundamental principle of the relational nature of linguistic meaning. Thus, claiming that a detail in a text is free or present in it by chance would require denying that it has any meaning beyond its limited and localized one because the particular detail is unrelated and cannot be related in any significant way to any other...

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