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[...] For instance: If we are (a) fully to understand Helen’s surprise at the arrival of her relatives (if the event is in this primary sense to have meaning; never mind the larger philosophical implications), and if we’re (b) to be convinced that her relatives really did come in such astounding nu…

A basic characteristic of all good art, then—all man-made works that are aesthetically interesting and lasting—is a concord of ends and means, or form and function. The sine qua non of narrative, so far as form is concerned, is that it takes time. We cannot read a whole novel in an instant, so to b…

By definition—and of aesthetic necessity—a story contains profluence, a requirement best satisfied by a sequence of causally related event

Two central tenets, for the traditional point of view, are, first, the Coleridgian notion that true literary art is “the repetition in the finite mind of the infinite ‘I AM’”—the idea, that is, that, like God opening his fist, the writer creates everything at once, his characters, their actions, an…

[...] If the assembly of made-up materials in a fiction creates a portrait of the artist, the importance of the portrait is not that it tells us what the artist looks like but that it provides us with a focus, an aperture, a medium (as in a séance) for seeing things beyond and more important than t…