manner of confusion. In talking of computers, for instance, we have to
make various level distinctions between the computer’s hardware—that
is, its actual circuitry, the semiconductors inside its plastic frame—and
the software—the program running on it. In the language of complexity,
the software constitutes a higher level than the hardware. Similarly, if we
were to run a chess program on a computer, the rules of chess would
constitute yet another, higher level. We can’t talk about chess by refer-
ring to computer codes or silicon chips. Though it arises from the pas-
sage of electricity through semiconductors and the chunked rules of a
digital software program, the game you play against your computer is an
emergent phenomenon—like human consciousness. To talk about it, you
need a new language—of gambits and strategies, advantage and disad-
vantage, placement and position.
In a similar fashion, in speaking of a poem or story, we have to avoid
confusing the various levels involved. At the lowest level, the printed ink
on the page is a novel’s “hardware” analogous to the computer’s circuits.
Pride and Prejudice, for instance,can be printed on different types of
paper with various inks and fonts and it’s still Pride and Prejudice.
At the next level, we find the “software” of the grammatical and syn-
tactic rules of English. At a still higher level, we find the generic rules
of novelistic fiction. When we read a story or novel, we engage several
levels at once. At the lower levels, we run our eyes across a printed page,
decoding words and their grammatical relationships. At higher levels,
we follow imaginary characters living out their lives in a “virtual” world
of the imagination. Emergent levels include this dramatic unfolding of
fictive lives, the novel’s “theme,” and the alteration in consciousness we
experience when observing—or reflecting on—the tragic or comic
nature of the imagined experience.
The problem with much modern literature is that writers from Sterne
to Silliman have deliberately concocted strategies to thwart the emer-
gence of higher-level orders from lower ones. In “laying bare” the
devices of fiction and calling attention to the “constructed” nature of
their language, postmodern writers often frustrate a reader’s attempt to
imagine a story’s characters and events. Similarly, one of the key prob-
lems with deconstructive criticism is that it dwells mostly on the level of
linguistic coding—on the hardware of printed “grapheme” and the soft-
ware of grammatical and semantic form. By isolating linguistic ele-
ments in order to reveal their incomplete, self-contradictory, or
indeterminate nature, they give short shrift to emergent orders such as
character, voice, theme, or the tensions and resolutions of a work’s
unfolding form.148 Paul Lake