Play as a formal paradigm in modern fiction

Typescript (photocopy).This study investigates the function of game-play as a structuring device in modern fiction and proposes a formal paradigm for fictional narratives using the rhetoric of play. It surveys the philosophical, psychological, sociological, and literary discussions of play from Plato to modern times, and suggests that a ludic context presents four essential features: the ethos of game-play is separate from and independent of the common reality of everyday living; a game takes place within limited time and space; so that it begins with the entry of the players in a play arena and ends with their return from there; a game controls and is controlled by the players, its rules functioning as the determinants of interaction among the players just as social, political, religious and economic constraints structure life outside play; and game involves a frame of mind in which the paradoxical realities of play and non-play come together toward either a coalescence or clash. Historically, fictional form has depended on the world view of people living in the author's milieu and the moment. The biblical mythos, beginning with Genesis and ending with Apocalypse, colored the world picture of early Western writers; and the secular model of human life--birth, reproduction, and death--replaced it in the eighteenth century. The ludic fiction of our time provides a new view of human life and the world. The formal paradigm for the fictional representation of this new view has five parts: Seclusion; Escape and Observation; Equation, Interpretation, and Discovery; Connection and Return; and Celebration. The order of these five "indispensable elements" exhibits a progression from an initial conflict to its final resolution, the moment of discovery coming during a ritualized symbolic imitation of life, which is play, rather than during the regular activities of the protagonist. The model presents the narrative structure as a process of inversion, and concludes that ludic fiction has a circular form rather than a linear one. The model is applied to Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire