Does such an architectural intention cause a novel to lose the charm of its liberty? Its quality of game? But just what is a game, actually? Every game is based on rules, and the stricter the rules, the more the game is a game. As opposed to the chess player, the artist invents his own rules for himself; so when he improvises without rules, he is no freer than when he invents his own system of rules.

Reconciling Rabelais's and Diderot's freedom with the demands of composition, though, presents the twentieth-century novelist with problems different from those that preoccupied Balzac or Dostoyevsky. For example: the third and last of the books that constitute Hermann Broch's novel The Sleepwalkers is a "polyphonic" stream composed of five "voices," five entirely independent lines: neither a common action nor the same characters tie these lines together, and each has a completely different formal nature (A = novel, B = reportage, C = short story, D = poetry, E = essay). In the eighty-eight chapters of the book, these five lines alternate in this strange order: A-A-A-B-A-B-A-C-A-A-D-E-C-A-B-D-C-D-A-E-A-A-B-E-C-A-D-B-B-A-E-A-A-E-A-B-D-G-B-B-D-A-B-E-A-A-B-A-D-A-C-B-D-A-E-B-A-D-A-B-D-E-A-C-A-D-D-B-A-A-C-D-E-B-A-B-D-B-A-B-A-A-D-A-A-D-D-E.

What is it that led Broch to choose precisely this order rather than another? What made him take precisely line B in the fourth chapter and not C or D? Not the logic of the characters or of the action, for there is no action common to these five lines. He was guided by other criteria: by the charm that comes from surprising juxtaposition of the different forms (verse, narration, aphorisms, philosophical meditations); by the contrast of different emotions pervading the different chapters; by the variety of the chapters' lengths; finally, by the development of the same existential questions, reflected in the five lines as in five mirrors.