In the following article, Lock examines the psychoanalytic approach to literature and the need for critics and readers to find meaning in stories that ofter have meaning imposed on them by the author

Readers of modern authors (Joyce, Kafka, Borges) are accustomed to becoming Egyptologists, undergoing what Deleuze has called "an apprenticeship in signs." We have been initiated into the impenetrable and interminable through the decoding of modern texts. In The Genesis of Secrecy Frank Kermode suggests that all great works have about them an air of the opaque, the enigmatic and the unknowable, and that it is we who are tempted to confer upon them some structure and meaning without which our lives would be unendurable: "This is the way we satisfy ourselves with explanations of the unfollowable world—as if it were a structured narrative, of which more might be said by trained readers...