A dazzling whiteness is the blank slate containing the full spectrum; the allowable bare minimum that is not the dreaded Nothing in the whitewashed absolutist sense, is not outside of any discursive community insofar as it is a response to the prohibition of creation ex nihilo. To perceive this constructed space is to enter upon an opening or clearing that is not caught up in a misdirected recursiveness ending in identity politics.

The challenge seems to be in how minimally compact information can be for there to remain that which a story, the universe, is about. Say, as well, a narrative ordered around a wound, however minimal the wound, cannot be considered kavya, the work without fault, insofar as it is marred by obsession over this lack.

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison took up the literary challenge of what minimal set of relations in a short fiction format would best lend itself to the holding together of a work to give meaning on the other side of analysis.

Morrison’s answer was an ingenious literary operetta that ended with the birth of conscience. Yet, the content of this conscience still is haunted by obsessional thought with respect to my being implicated in a past injustice (bringing into view a separate line of inquiry on the relation between conscience and obsessional thought).

In another short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Ernest Hemingway ingeniously sidestepped the temptation to hang his literary art on the wounds of another. Both Hemingway and Morrison employed logical appeals to a bare minimum set of relations. Hemingway’s modulations in quality – the character of being negative or positive – gave positive connotations to negative aspects:

It was late and everyone had left the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the daytime the street was dusty, but at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.

Here, uncertainty as to ‘what’s the good news and what’s the bad news,’ to borrow from Kurt Vonnegut, is not eliminated. The shade affords protection, and there is a protective indirection being imparted generally. In terms of kavya, it is this indirection that saves the work from being defined on the basis of privation. Even the condition of deafness in the old man is selected not for it as a disability to be lamented or else reclaimed, but for its perfection as minimally portable art object, insofar as it conveys the risk of isolation and loss in connectivity that attends being in the world.

The question itself speaks to anxiety over potential, even probable, loss of meaning. It’s not a little concern. According to Philip Hoare, Martin Luther feared what the revolution of the printing press would produce for this very reason. The arrival of this technology carried huge potential for the irrevocable loss, withholding, and concealment of control of the narrative thread. And Durer’s multitudinously reproduced art plates did in fact impose a mechanically wrought hyperreality that imagined for you an imminent Armageddon.

This says something else about the nature of a wound, if there is to be a wound for a narrative to be meaningful. It does have to do with the loss of narrative control, as Hoare seems to suggest, but it can’t be exclusively this without running the risk of my telling you who you can love. Recursiveness is, among other things, a property of language. It has nothing to do with the fairy tale longing for recognition in the stupid way we’re given to understand; rather, it has everything to do with responsiveness from the environment. In terms of AI, this immersive feature is what accounts for a greater or lesser intelligence. In terms of literature, it’s what allows for the feeling of difference in the face of more or less abject circumstance.

This felt-ness of the presence of intelligence as the minimally sufficient ordering condition for flight explains the line in James Joyce’s boyhood narrative: “I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow.” Charles Baxter similarly informs readers of the “stacked and stashed papers that survived” his brother’s death: “The air was bad.”

Yet the fear of being in the midst of a ruse at the expense of my “narrative control” might also be what animates the present time of carbon bias. Is this The Crying Game? Am I a robot? These are especially thorny questions if the price for answering incorrectly is my forever being immured by my actions. The feeling of immersion, without its counterpart in actuality, could be what compensates for the other kind of loss, which is just as well because it solves along the way the cheap interpretation of the desire for contact as the narcissistic craving for attention.

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