Reviews for The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (with a New Epilogue)

The average rating for The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (with a New Epilogue) based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-24 00:00:00 David Borci This was a sublime book that asks the big questions of the writer--what is fiction? how is formed? what is its purpose in human life? Invaluable for both readers and writers concerned with meaning and how it's constructed in a work of fiction. My journal is filled with quotes from this book: "The difference between myths and fiction--people know that fictions are fiction." "Anti-semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth. King Lear is a fiction. Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making changes. Myths are agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myth calls for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now… Lear changes our posture towards life and death. If fictions lose their operational effectiveness, they're relegated to the dump." "The registration of what we fail to take in--an essential tool of narrative fiction. The situation as it's originally viewed, and the final understanding that its significance is other." A kind of deja vu. "It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for coexistence with it only by our fictive powers. This may in the absence of a supreme fiction… be a hard fate, which is why the poet of that fiction is compelled to say: 'From this the poem sings. That we live in a place that is not our own, and much more, nor ourselves. and hard as it is, in spite of blazoned days…' ==Wallace Stevens, Notes towards a Supreme Fiction. I loved his analysis of the issue of Kairos--the opportune moment. The moment, as opposed to Chronos, which is time. Kairos is all about 'why now?' 'That thou doest, do quickly,'--John xii:27. Lady Macbeth chooses to shrink the gap between desire and action--'the shrinking allowance of time in which men are permitted to consider their desires in terms of God's time as well as their own.' Meaning lies in that gap. Christ waited for his Kairos, refusing to anticipate the will of of the Father. Macbeth is penetrated by the language of times, seasons, prophecies--Kermode believes the tragedy of Macbeth was time's revenge upon him for trying to hurry time, rather than waiting for succession. Refusal to await the season. Kermode's got me thinking about the parts of fiction--the itch that fiction scratches. Everyone thinks that they live in a moment of crisis. That they live in the period of crisis and transition. The apocalypse now. We certainly think we do right now--the end of the planet, the end of the public sphere, the end of democracy and literacy and intelligence,. Global warming is the universal apocalypse in our time. Terrorism the horseman. Drowning, then end of the animals, the inundation of the waters, the acidification of the seas, the burial of the earth in garbage, diseases, population explosion, flesh eating staph. Terrorism the horseman. Monopoly capitalism requiring fewer and fewer people to run it. Huge, endless squalor and the richest of the rich. Is this time worse than others? "The belief that one's own age is transitional between two major periods turns into a belief that the the transition itself becomes an age…. Crisis is a way of thinking about ones' moment." It's so rare to come across a book this full of ideas, a look at not only the writing but the matrix of writing. Belongs right up there with Skhlovsky.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-30 00:00:00 Tracy Franklin Whoa. Recondite stuff. I will need to re-read.