Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: Prolegomena to the Narrative Sublime

These philosophical remarks, prolegomena to a theory of fiction, have been printed as originally conceived and composed, provisionally set out, in relation to the writing of a novel called ABANDONED BY THE GODS. Here, they are preserved in the material immediacy of their contingent thought—even when generative misreadings—as a critical placeholder for further investigation. They bear directly upon the formal, historical, and aesthetic aspects of narrative as an embedded practice of the body-mind, one analytically grounded in the constraint of the phenomenal, the actual, the cultural. In their compression and ellipticality of prose, corrective in clinamen, however provisional and broad in nature, the reader may find, within the form of the philosophical argument, a literary logic of some interest and instruction, if not pleasure, as in the reading of poetry.