triumphantly dispatches it into the past more adequately than the doomed, gallant, vain, peremptory Faulknerian evocation of what has long since vanished

At this point, however, interpretation has turned around in production, and reception has begun to be recycled as use. This particular dialectical reversal -- which might also be taken as the very opposite of Luhmann's processes of infinite fission and differentiation, in which all of those new microscopic subsystems are now powerfully reassembled into a unified form of praxis -- is perhaps the most interesting the nouveau roman has to offer, and the most historically original feature of its innovations (about which it seems less significant that they may themselves already have passed into history as so many false starts or unsuccessful patents). I want to argue, in particular, that it is the linguistic focus of Simon's "new novels" that uniquely -- and for one long moment, the one in which we read these texts -- renders reception (or consumption) indistinguishable from production. We have to read these sentences word by word, and that is something already fairly unusual (and painfully unfamiliar) in an information society in which a premium is placed on briefing and instant recognition, so that sentences are either skimmed or preprepared for rapid assimilation as so many signs. The discipline of the word by word (Simon's own expression, by the way) is enforced by the practice of cross-cutting, the possibility that the subject may change without warning at any minute. There is, in any case, no point whatsoever to speed-reading books of this kind; they have no supplemental content or information to offer us, nothing to store up and carry away, not even anything to find out (as at the end of a mystery story), unless it is the one simple tragic discovery that there is nothing to find out in the first place.