Abstract

I write, as Robert Graves put it in his Oxford poetry lectures, both matador and judge, both as a novelist and as philosopher and literary theorist. Considering the present aggressive stance of literary theorists, detonating, denuding, and deconstructing the humble scrivener's offerings as if works of fiction were the shoulders of midgets on which the giants of critical theory may grind their jackboots, you will think me rash to confess to the jejune offense of novel writing, but I mean not only to confess but also to explain and justify--even, indeed, to revel--in the inversion of fiction and life that is our lot, revel, that is, in an inversion both more enduring and more significant than that between fiction and literary theory.