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Game-Play in Fiction: A Critical Paradigm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
Toward the end of Light in August, in the climactic scene in Chapter 1 where the authorities of justice pursue the elusive Joe Christmas through the streets of Jefferson, William Faulkner introduces a new character, Percy Grimm, a twenty-five-year-old captain in the State National Guard who has relentlessly acquired the rank of a special deputy for the search. As the town closes for the weekend, Grimm keeps vigil at a downtown store where other townsfolk have begun a poker game to stay awake through the night as the search goes on. In their zeal to uphold law and justice, his men revel in their fantastic make-believe that they are doing the work of “a hidden and unsleeping and omnipotent eye watching the doings of men.” The poker game goes on through Saturday night until Christmas is spotted and given chase. As Grimm runs through the streets after the fleeing man, Faulkner presents to us the deputy's stream of thought from an omniscient point of view: “There was nothing vengeful about him either, no fury, no outrage. He was moving again almost before he had stopped, with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the Board” (437). Through the rest of the chapter, Grimm, who has not participated in the poker game at all, thinks and acts as if he is engaged in a chess game, not as a player but as the stake or the pawn in a board game in which Jefferson is the board on which he and Christmas are being moved from place to place by two larger forces, he by the benevolent Providence and Christmas by the powers opposed to God. Finally, when Christmas is cornered and fatally shot in Reverend Hightower's kitchen, this fantasized game seems to end.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © 1986 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
Footnotes
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Part of the research on this paper was made possible by a Faculty Research Grant from LSU-Shreveport in Spring 1985.
References
1 William Faulkner, Light in August, New York, Modern Library, 1968, p. 432. Subsequent page references are to this edition.
2 Kenneth Burke discusses this concept of the "kill" and the scapegoat at length in Philosophy of Literary Forms, Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 1967, Ch. 1.
3 I am aware that here, as in several other examples can think of, the game is an extended metaphor or model for deterministic force. American naturalists in particutar often used games to represent the way (they thought) real life works—the game structure's logic forces the players to make their decisions. The players have free will but they cannot will what they will, since the game supplies their logic. Though characters like Grimm may appear heroic, I believe that Grimm is the author's projected parody of the typical fanatic who fails to distinguish between a fantastic game and the reality of life.
4 This shift in fundamental beliefs is as true even in the realms of science, where "truth" is thought to be empirically proven and, so, perennial. See Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolution, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962.
5 Frank Kermode, Sense of an Ending, New York, Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 45. The new novel, Kermode says, has departed from the norm of the nineteenth-century novel: it "repeats itself, bisects itself, modifies itself, contradicts itself, without ever accumulating enough bulk to constitute a past—and thus a ‘story', in the traditional sense of the word" (19).
6 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. 103.
7 For a sample of critical views suggesting game-play as an appropriate metaphor for the new reality of our time, see the following: Gabriel Josipovichi, The Lessons on Modernism and Other Essays, London, Macmillan, 1977; Frank Kermode, Sense of an Ending, New York, Oxford University Press, 1967; Jose Ortega, Meditations on Hunting, New York, Scribner, 1972; Philip Stevick, ed. Anti-Story, New York, Free Press, 1971; and Tony Tanner, City of Words, New York, Harper & Row, 1971. In addition, John Barth, Lawrence Durrell, Vladmir Nabokov, and other "metafictionists" have found play a convenient vehicle to express their view of the world.
8 The varying criteria readers have used to classify the ludic elements in literature presents a broad spectrum of the creative uses of play by authors. See, especially, Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barasch, Glencoe, Illinois, The Free Press, 1961; Robert Detweiler, "Games and Play in Modern American Fiction", in Contemporary Literature 17. 1 (1976): 44-62; and Ronald Foust, "The Rules of the Game: A Para-theory of Literary Theories" in the special issue of South Central Review on "Game, Play, and Literature", Winter 1986 (forthcoming).
9 If we consider the real action in a game, such absurdity becomes evident. Think, for instance, in soccer, of twenty-two after a leather ball with the single goal of kicking it into a net at one end of the field or the other, and, in golf, of players religiously hitting a tiny ball into a small hole in the ground. A game may sometimes be so acutely alien to the inherited patterns of life of a people that it will never be culturally accepted, as in the case of soccer in America, or American football in many other countries.
10 In Words in Reflection, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984, Allen Thiher argues that Beckett's characters play games in order to assert their individualities. From such a perspective, play seems to be a mechanistic action, that is, players set certain goals and follow certain strategies to reach those goals. Even in games of chance, players calculate the probabilities and risks with some degree of certainty.
11 Thiher, p. 157.
12 Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barasch, Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1959, p. 7.
13 Caillois, p. 7.
14 "In the oscillation between consistency and ‘alien associations', between involvement in and observation of the illusion, the reader is bound to conduct his own balancing operation", says Iser, "and it is this that forms the aesthetic experience offered by the literary text" (p. 286). This "shifting of perspectives", he holds, brings to the text realism, its proximity to the experience of life. The audience's secret desire for surprise was evident in the pre-game TV projections about the 1985 NCAA basketball championship game between Georgetown, the incumbent team, and Villanova, the challenger. Spectators, even supporters of the Georgetown team, admitted a secret sympathy for the underdog.
15 The umpire's role in a game symbolizes the paradox of play in a unique way. The official is within the game, but he always protects the rules which control the game. When abuse of the game's rules is of external origin and is out of control of the umpire, the public acts against the team or the players. Tulane University's basketball program in 1985 is a case in point: under charges of bribery and point-shaving, the sixty-five-year program was disbanded.
16 For example, as professional athletics loses its status of pure play, new play models of the teams with exact statistics are created. These models idealize and ritualize the players and the teams.
17 Jacques Ehrmann, "Homo Ludens Revisited", Yale French Studies, 41 (1968), 5.
18 Diacritics, 1.1 (1971), 38-40.