Forster lamented, must occupy time but the exemptions associated with reading are now a more pressing concern. Whether or not a frame or a telling intervenes, the act οf reading is a frame. And the impact οf disorder is suspended.Īll art, οf course, demands suspension οf disbelief, οf belief. By their nature, stories imply names for disorder: chance, fate, Gothic, something out there. It allows the imagination to play with deconstructing horrors. And we as readers share the exemption: our order will not be much threatened by fiction. The king’s complacency and his choice remain. The telling has only nature οf fiction: it is beside the real point οf life.

Louis listens with pleasure, is entertained, even moved. Fagon wants his story to alert the king to the baleful influence the confessor will exercise and the harm it will do the nation. Louis has just chosen a new confessor, and his old physician, Fagon, narrates to him the sufferings this confessor once inflicted on a simple boy. As readers, we are a bit like Louis the Fourteenth in C. Often, the safety surrounding strangeness is so safe that one οf the tasks οf the fiction is to push us off into a distress οf interpretation.

Melville’s narrator, the lawyer who employs Bartleby, is an unambiguous, comfort-loving Wall Street type. Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, whose terrible battle to force justice into being rent his family and his world, is a decent, law-abiding salesman οf horses. The action οf nineteenth-century novels begins upon the common ground: a security οf types, places, dealings, and values.

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje