Implicitude and the complexity of literary texts

Implicitness is a central topic in studies of language understanding, being at one time an intrinsic feature of verbal language and a powerful instrument of communication. Consequently, the study of implicitness has been tackled from various perspectives, all converging on the difficulty of defining exactly when and how implicit meanings arise. In this paper I would like to show that some categories of analysis of the implicit which have been developed with reference to ordinary language actually turn out to be inadequate when applied to literary texts, where implicit meanings contributing to what I have called elsewhere “text implicitude”, far from being rationally computable, seem to “emerge” from the non-linear dynamics of text complexity (Bertuccelli 2008). The underlying assumption is that if the power of literary expression is such as to allow a potentially unlimited number of interpretations, then there must be something in the conceptual representation of meanings which makes them never totally and definitely explicit. As Eco remarks, language is actualised in literary texts, but literary texts turn out to be complex inferential mechanisms pointing back to the nonfinite nature of language meanings (Eco 1979).