oa Game over. Speltheorie en het ludieke experiment in Ivo Michiels’ Exit

In Exit (1971), the third book of Ivo Michiels’s Alpha Cycle, the text is moving towards a zero point in language and communication. Michiels’s literary experimentation leads to a radical gesture: the last page but one displays nothing but an ‘o’ or ‘0’. Leading up to that zero point, the text introduces several forms of ‘playing’ as metafictional performances of language, text and communication. In my essay, I will focus on the interpretive implications of the TEXT AS GAME metaphor in Exit. Drawing on Marie-Laure Ryan, Linda Hutcheon and Katie Salen & Eric Zimmerman among others, I will explain how the performed games function as metafictional references to writing and literature. In Exit, games reveal the workings of the literary experiment.