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Page 53
cism increasingly argued in favor of the 'freedom' of the poet and set the stage for the coming theories of creativity. From Burke's declarations about the emotional power of words, it was a short step to Novalis' view of the pure evocative power of poetry as an art of blurred sense and vague outlines. An idea is now held to be all the more original and stimulating insofar as it ''. . . allows for a greater inter-play and mutual convergence of concepts, life-views and attitudes. When a work offers a multitude of intentions, a plurality of meaning and above all a wide variety of different ways of being understood and appreciated, then under these conditions we can only conclude that it is of vital interest and that it is a pure expression of personality.'' 3
To close our consideration of the Romantic period, it will be useful to refer to the first occasion when a conscious poetics of the 'open' work appears. The moment is late-nineteenth-century Symbolism; the text is Verlaine's Art Poétique:
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De la musique avant toute chose,
et pour cela préfère l'impair
plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air
sans rien en lui qui pèse et qui pose.
Mallarmé's programmatic statement is even more explicit and pronounced in this context: "Nommer un objet c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème, qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer. . . voilà le rêve . . . . " The important thing is to prevent a single sense from imposing itself at the very outset of the receptive process. Blank space surrounding a word, typographical adjustments, and spatial composition in the page setting of the poetic textall contribute to create a halo of indefiniteness and to make the text pregnant with infinite suggestive possibilities.
This search for suggestiveness is a deliberate move to 'open' the work to the free response of the addressee. An artistic work which 'suggests' is also one which can be performed with the full emotional and imaginative resources of the interpreter. Whenever we read poetry there is a process by which we try to adapt our personal world to the emotional world proposed by the text. This is all the more true of poetic works that are deliberately based on suggestiveness, since the text sets out to stimulate the private world of the addressee in order that he can draw from inside himself some deeper response that mirrors the subtler resonances underlying the text.
A strong current in contemporary literature follows this use of symbol as a communicative channel for the indefinite, open to constantly shifting responses and interpretative stances. It is easy to think of Kafka's work as 'open': trial, castle, waiting, passing sentence, sickness, metamorpho-

 
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