Fictional Fuels

Dichotomies can sometimes delight.

Gass's essays rarely pursue a single line of thought, and they offer not a progression of ideas so much as an experience, all feints and nuance, and with the argument itself vanishing within the sportive accretions of his prose. But then that play of mind is itself the argument, and where the theorist believes that language can cripple, the novelist knows that it may set you free.

This is Michael Gorra in an introduction to On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Strange that he marshals an opposition such as novelist to theorist to account for the generative power as a struggle against restraint. Funny, I mark Gass as working under the sign of Copia. Whatever the case may be, Gorra's words spur us on to read Gass.

And so for day 1679
19.07.2011