An Unpalatable Suggestion

A long time ago, when I was still in high-school, I wrote a poem called “A Night Out” for the school poetry competition. It is not the world’s best poem – I include it though because the ideas the motivated me to write it are ones that still occupy me today. It follows below.

            A Night Out

            Impotent accountants with ulcers

            Slip glistening oysters down rippling throats

            In acrylic restaurants; their wives raise toasts

            And roll back their eyes. Outside traffic pulses

            An unsteady rhythm; the swimming night

            Intoxicates the burning crowd that flood

            The pavement; passions dissolve in blood

            And breath that breaths “I love” but shies from light.

            Alone in bright swarming dark, think of those

            In silent homes; fevered dreams like dew dry;

            Trembling reach for hollow pills, clench cold eyes,

            To extinguish pain felt in unknown bones.

            Night-club beat echoes pound a sound through nerves;

            The pavement stirs like ocean waters;

            Unheard by all, the faint rustling mutter

            Of earnest prayers rising from cancer wards.

            The accountant and wife find some satisfaction;

            The revelling crowd unravels at dawn;           

            The pavement seems solid, substantial and calm;

            The vivid mind contrives a worldly remission.

            The psychic from the next room bends a fork.

            The audience claps then chats as before.

            The thoughts crystallize and drop to the floor.

            My body billows and wavers like smoke.

This is a poem, at heart, about the Placebo effect. When I was young I was hyper-rational, rejecting all notions that evoked the supernatural, such as the idea of ghosts or God – consequently, when I learned about the Placebo effect, I found it profoundly disturbing. How could the mind have influence over the body, how could a disease be arrested or cured by belief alone? It seemed bizarre and frightening and so strongly affected me that I have worried about it ever since. Despite my youthful faith in science, I now have a grudging acceptance of the power of magic. The Placebo effect is real, and I understand furthermore that it is increasingly being recognized by the medical world as an integral part of any treatment. According to Supernatural Selection, an anthropological work about the origins of religion that I am currently reading, it has even been suggested that the term ‘placebo effect’ should be replaced by another term, ‘contextual healing’ – the author Matt Rossano offers evidence that people who attend church regularly live around seven years longer than non-attendees and have significantly lower rates of mental illness. If religion can bring about health benefits, it can only be as a result of the Placebo effect (unless one wants to entertain the alternative hypothesis that God exists and actually answers prayers).

Realistically, the mechanism through which the placebo effect operates must be suggestion. If I consult with a physician, I put my trust in her and am inclined to accept the diagnosis that she makes. Much of the therapeutic value of medicine, as it was in the middle ages, is still based on the power of subconscious suggestion. (Consider homeopathy or acupuncture, therapies that are, when exposed to rational scrutiny, totally risible – and yet often successful.) Naturally, the general public don’t want to know that their doctors are more shamans than scientists, and the doctors themselves certainly don’t want the public to know this. Nevertheless, it is true.

It is at this point in the post that I want to propose my unpalatable hypothesis. Regular readers of my blog will know that, although I usually focus on literary theory, I occasionally touch on other topics, such as schizophrenia and my own stories. I have also on occasion alluded to issues of sexuality, such as in the post on David Foster Wallace and, more humorously, in the short story 69.  My unpalatable hypothesis is this: that homosexuality might be caused by subconscious suggestion. Homosexuals are made, not born. The unconscious suggestions that produces it may occur over many years, starting in childhood or adolescence, or may occur infrequently but at times when a person is under stress and highly suggestible. This hypothesis, that homosexuality is caused by subconscious suggestion, I imagine will seem ridiculous to most ordinary heterosexuals, heterosexuals who, if they think about it all, attribute the cause of homosexuality to ‘a gay gene’ or to some aspect of the mother-child relationship in infancy. The inconvenient truth, though, is that a person’s sexuality can change. It is possible, although I admit this seems incredible, for a person’s sexual identity to be destabilized by something amounting to hypnosis. The hypothesis is disagreeable, yes, I admit, because it amounts to an attack on the idea of an inviolate Self, but this does not make if false.

Consider the following scenario. An eighteen year old male presents in the psychiatrist’s office with psychosis. He believes that God is talking to him though television advertisements and the newspaper. Perhaps there is a sexual component to his psychosis. The psychiatrist, out of malice perhaps, decides to diagnose the patient as a repressed homosexual and advises him to “stop avoiding”. The young man, who is in a highly vulnerable and suggestible state, understands the implication but is unable to fight back. Because it is oblique rather than direct, the patient cannot challenge his psychiatrist’s opinion. The ‘suggestion’ (and this is what it effectively is) does not have immediate effect, though.  Rather it worms its way into the young psychotic’s subconscious mind and lies dormant for a long time, perhaps for years, before erupting into a full blown sexual crisis at some later stage. By the time the crisis occurs, the original suggestion may well have been forgotten.

The Placebo effect can create illness as well as cure it.

This unpalatable hypothesis seems to be bourn out by the world. If you talk to Gay men, you often find out that they don’t know themselves why they are Gay – I think this supports my hypothesis. These men have forgotten the original suggestions that destabilized their identities; furthermore they reshape their memories to fit their current identity. Interestingly, I believe it is more intelligent people who are most susceptible to suggestion. Stephen Frye is no mental slouch and neither was David Foster Wallace. You may believe me an idiot for making the claim that something so apparently essential as sexual identity can be altered by subconscious suggestion, but the evidence is all around us – and is often found in popular music. I would adduce, for example, the song “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies” by Faith No More and the song “Knives Out” by Radiohead – or, to pick a song from the Gay perspective instead, “Bang and Blame” by REM.  The unconscious mind is not separate from the situations in which its possessor finds himself and is collective rather than individual. Jung had a point.

You may wonder why I am interested in this topic. I feel I should confess that I have experienced psychosis myself – but the scenario I invented above is not autobiographical. For one thing, significantly, I was twenty-seven (not eighteen) when I first became ‘unwell’ and came to the attention of the psychiatrists. At the time, I had formed the delusional belief that the world was ruled by a massive conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I didn't tell anyone what I believed at this time. This was the Bush era. Perhaps my belief was credible. (I jest of course.) It is true, though, that my psychiatrist told me, at the first consultation, to ‘stop avoiding’ and I have hated him ever since.

I hope that disclosing this rather stupid episode in my history does not impugn my credibility as a scholar of film and literature. It was a long time ago now. 

Literature as Speech-Act

I have decided not to apologize for this post as I did for the previous one. So what if I want to write abstrusely about epistemology and ontology? The discussion may be difficult but I believe what I have to say about fiction and truth is both notable and progressive. The theory that I am proposing is, I believe, quite a radical departure from previous theories of literature and I want to hope that some reader will stumble over it accidentally, understand it, enjoy it and recommend it to their friends. This does not seem, I hope, too immodest an ambition.

The last few essays, beginning with the post “Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature”, have been concerned with approaching literature from the position of Formal Logic. In today’s post I want to take this discussion a little further and tie up some loose ends. In particular, I would like to relate my project to John Searle’s theory of Speech-Acts. In passing, I will be saying something about the real world as well as about fiction.

Any literary text can be decomposed into a broad set of simple statements or propositions, propositions that the text makes either explicitly or implicitly. For example, the novel Ulysses can be broken down into ‘facts’ such as the statement “Leopold Bloom is married to Molly Bloom” or the statement “Bloom carries a potato in his pocket wherever he goes”. The number of statements asserted by a literary work can be enormous, particularly in the case of a novel as sprawling as Ulysses. Literary interpretation is tasked with the job of reproducing these statements in a different format, particularly those statements that are made implicitly rather than explicitly. (Analysis also, of course, is engaged with the task of finding relationships between these statements, a process we can describe as structural analysis.) One can make an important distinction between two different types of proposition. Some propositions refer to our shared reality and some refer only to the fictional world represented by the story. For example, on the 16^th of June 1904, the horse Throwaway won the Dublin Gold Cup, an event to which Ulysses indirectly refers. Consequently, one proposition that Ulysses asserts is “Throwaway won the Gold Cup”. This statement is open to historical scrutiny with respect to its truth or falsity. The statement “Bantam Lyons won a lot of money by betting on Throwaway” is, however, not a statement susceptible to independent verification; Bantam Lyons is a fictional character who exists only in Joyce’s Bloom-world and not in the real one. Our only source for information about him is the novel itself.

 The most important non-fictional propositions a story makes are the ‘thesis’ and the ‘antithesis’. I have spent quite a bit of time talking about these concepts in earlier posts, perhaps most clearly in the post “Applying Predicate Calculus to Literature”. In today’s post, though, I want to talk some more about the fictional propositions a text makes rather than its real-world relevant ones. How do we assess the truth or falsity of a statement drawn from Star Wars like “Luke Skywalker is Princess Leia’s brother”? In the previous post “Meongianism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge” I argued that these statements could be usefully understood as true statements concerning fictional worlds. Tolkien, I argued, had privileged access to a fictional world called Middle-Earth and faithfully in his stories transcribed facts about it, such as “Gimli is a dwarf” and “Frodo is a hobbit”. From this perspective, all the ideas in The Lord of the Rings are true statements concerning the fictional world to which he had access. We believe these ‘facts’, not because we can objectively, empirically and independently test them, but because we put our faith in Tolkien as an absolute authority on the history and inhabitants of Middle-Earth.

This construal has its advantages. It is helpful with respect to a number of problems concerning the status of fictional statements. Moreover it sheds light on an interesting aspect of literary criticism: stories are usually written in the past perfect but criticism tends to be written in the present tense. This is an indication that critics tacitly subscribe to the idea that fictions are windows on other worlds. However, one can wonder if this proposal is really feasible. Surely Tolkien invented Middle-Earth rather than discovering it? The rest of this post will be concerned with an alternative perspective on this issue, which employs ideas attributable to the philosopher John Searle.

I don’t have Searle’s works on hand and so I am working from memory. Searle, as I remember, argued that many types of language-use are not representational or referential propositions but are, rather, speech-acts that effect changes on the world. For example, the speech-act “By the power invested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife” is a statement that, when said by a cleric or justice of the peace, alters the world. The statement is, itself, neither true or false but (when said by someone with the right kind of authority) it creates new conditions of future verifiability. Thereafter, if I say “Sam is Mary’s husband” or “Mary is Sam’s wife” I am making true statements. The speech-act has changed the world. Another such speech-act is the phrase “You are under arrest” ­– an order that only has effective power if said by a member of the police.

Although I don’t think Searle talks about this as much, there is a class of speech-act that is highly salient to the discussion– definitions. Suppose I say, “I define the term ‘psueoJedi’ as designating that class of people who identify themselves as Jedis on census reports but do so ironically or facetiously” and supposing that this term takes off, people may, in the future, be capable of making true statements such as “I call myself a Jedi but really I’m a pseudoJedi”. My original definition of the term, though, is not itself either true or false. A real world example of a definition type speech-act is furnished by the ‘discovery’, in the late nineteenth century by Arnold Pick and Emil Kraeplin, of a new disease that Pick called dementia praecox and which later came to be called schizophrenia. In coining a label for a collection of symptoms that he had observed, Pick redefined reality. What had formerly been loosely considered a type of madness would now be categorized as a physical illness. By coining this term, they changed the world.

A literary work can be viewed as an extended speech-act – and the type of speech-act it most closely resembles is a definition. The original definition is, from this perspective, neither true nor false, but it creates the conditions for future verifiability. The meaning of the word ‘hobbit’ as established by Tolkien includes the idea that hobbits walk bare-footed and have hairy feet. If I say “Frodo has hairy feet”, I am not only making a true statement, I am making a statement that is analytically true. (I touched on this idea in the post “Ascribing Attributes to Imaginary Entities”). According to Kant, analytic truths are known a priori. I think this is wrong. The mistake Kant and very many other philosophers make is that they forget that language is acquired. When I was very young and was basing my understanding of the world largely on The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher, I thought all fish were called ‘minnows’. Words are learned. Most garden-variety words are learned via ostensible definition: for example, we learn what the word ‘apple’ means by being shown one and being told the word. Later, we extend the term to all other objects that resemble this original example. Other words, though, obtain their meanings from some authority that has, at some point, defined the word (using other words) and has had his or her definition accepted by the relevant linguistic community. The meanings of words always rest on some authority and, critically, can change if the community decides to put its faith in a different authority.

I hope I am expressing myself clearly. I may have to write about these ideas again some time. I should say though that I have thought about these issues for years and, as proof of this, thought I would finish this essay with an anecdote. In around 2004, I wrote a number of Research essays on the poet John Ashbery; I decided to write about him quite arbitrarily, mainly because he was very influential on the post-modern poetic scene. I set myself the task of reading and interpreting his incredible long and difficult autobiographical poem Flow Chart. Having read it twice, I was forced to conclude that Ashbery must be gay and that this poem was his ‘coming-out’. Coming out as gay is a pre-eminent example of a speech-act, a verbal utterance that changes the world, and this was the gist of my essay about Ashbery’s poem, that it was a ‘presentation’ rather than a ‘representation’. This was years before I had read John Searle. Even then, though, I believed in speech-acts. These days I have wondered if I made a mistake in the essay I wrote about Ashbery. Perhaps he was attempting that most bizarre of actions, coming out as straight. The world is a strange place and such things are not impossible.

Meinongianism and the Phenomenology of Knowledge

The last couple of posts have been concerned truth and logic and, I am sorry to admit, this one and the next will also be concerned with fairly dry and abstract ratiocination on these themes. I apologize in advance. I feel my readers may be more interested in stories and critiques of films like Ghostbusters and A Beautiful Mind – but I have my reasons for wanting to write about predicate calculus and ontology. It is all part of the same process. I am endeavouring to devise a new theory of literary criticism and one cannot do so properly without addressing these issues. Any account of fiction must also account for reality.

Today’s post takes as its subject the question of whether existence is a property of things, a property that individuals can either possess or lack, or a ‘second order property’, that is, an instantiation of a first order property. This is a serious issue in logic and metaphysics. The second view, that existence is not a properly a property but rather the instantiation of a property, was put forward by Frege and Russel; the first view was proposed by Meinong. We can explore the difference between the opposed positions by considering the following two propositions: “Pegasus is a winged horse” and “There is a winged horse called Pegasus.” According to the descriptivist account, the one adopted by Frege and Russel, these two propositions are equivalent and can be alternatively expressed “Something in the world exists that is called Pegasus, has wings and is a horse.” According to the descriptivists, both propositions are not only equivalent but also false. They are false because Pegasus does not exist. For the Meinongian however, these two propositions are qualitatively different: the first is true and the second false. The first can be alternatively expressed: “Some individual, either real or imaginary, is called Pegasus, has wings and is a horse.” This the Meinongian (or at least some Meinongians) regard as true, true because an individual need not exist to be the object of a predicate. The second can be alternatively expressed: “Some individual, either real or imaginary, is called Pegasus, has wings, is a horse and actually exists.” This second proposition, which ascribes to Pegasus the property of actual existence, is the one Meinongians would decry as a falsehood.

Although the descriptivist proposal is the one more commonly accepted, I think I have to throw in my lot with the Meinongians. Extreme Meinongians believe that for every predicate or set of predicates there is at least one individual, real or imaginary, which satisfies all the relevant conditions. This can be contrasted with descriptivists who restrict the domain of propositional functions to real existing individuals. I am unsure (at the present state of my understanding) that I would go so far as to describe myself as an Extreme Meinongian, but I definitely would describe myself as some kind of Meinongian. I have no choice in the matter. If one wants to say that interpretations of fictional works can be true or false, we need to allow at least some imaginary entities into the tent. How else can we talk meaningfully about them? In the rest of this post, I am going to consider some of the objections to Meinongianism from I think an unusual perspective, an epistemological perspective, and attempt to show that these objections fail. (I should say that this post is indebted to the article on existence included in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu/entries/existence , for including these objections and forcing me to think of replies. The article is worth a look.)

One objection to Meiongianism is that it permits incomplete objects. An incomplete object is one that does not have the full set of properties one associates with a complete object. Consider the proposition “Sherlock Holmes has a mole on his left shoulder.” According to critics of Meiongianism, this proposition is neither true nor false and so fails the test of bivalence (because all propositions must be either be true or false.) It fails because the object in question is incomplete –all complete objects either have moles or don’t and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never mentions whether Holmes does or not. I want to disagree politely with this way of construing the objects predicated by fictive statements. I propose that Holmes is, in fact, a complete object and that this proposition is definitely either true or false. The issue is not that the proposition lacks a truth-value but that we have no way of knowing the proposition’s truth-value. Consider, as a counter-example, the proposition “Socrates had a mole on his left shoulder”. This proposition is definitely either true or false but we have no way of knowing, now, whether it is or not. Socrates’s mole has been lost to the sandstorm of time. The proposition concerning Holmes is comparable. Perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle always imagined Holmes as having a mole on his left shoulder but never informed anyone; perhaps he even wrote a story that mentioned it but never published it or told anyone about it. Perhaps this story was exiled to a remote drawer of an obscure bureau and has never seen the light again. Just because we don’t know a fact does not mean it does not exist. Not having any means of knowing the truth-value of a proposition does not mean that it lacks a truth-value.

We can view the imaginary objects represented by literature in the following way: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had access to another world, call it Holmes-world, and selected facts about this world to inform his stories. Doyle is an absolute authority on Holmes-world in the same way that Tolkien is an absolute authority on Middle-Earth. With respect to the characters, locales and events peculiar to Middle-Earth, Tolkien is, like the Pope, infallible. Putting our faith in Tolkien, we can truly say that Gimli is a dwalf, Frodo is a hobbit and Arogorn truly the rightful scion to Gondor’s throne. All of these propositions are true, because Tolkien says so, and because Tolkien is the only one with privileged access to the domain of individuals and relationships that constitute the fictional world of Middle-Earth. (I appreciate the fact that Tolkien’s account may be internally inconsistent. Such inconsistencies are problematic for the proposal now under consideration but I do not have space to explore this issue here.)

A second objection to Meiongianism relates back the example I gave at the beginning of the essay. I quote the Stanford entry on existence: “Consider the condition of being winged, being a horse, and existing. By the naïve comprehension principle, there is an object with exactly those features. But then this object exists, as existing is one of its characterizing features. Intuitively, however, there is no existent winged horse; existing seems to require a bit more substance… This is overpopulation not of being but of existence as well.”

The hole in this objection concerns the argument’s use of the word ‘intuitively’. It is not intuitively obvious that Pegasus does not exist. Perhaps Pegasus is tenanted in Area 51 with Sasquatch, the water-powered automobile and Elvis. In truth, Pegasus’s lack of existence is something we accept on faith – it is part of ‘consensus reality’, the shared system of beliefs that inform our language and behaviour. The definition of Pegasus that most people accept is “a mythical winged horse”: if I say Pegasus is winged, or is a horse, or is mythical, I am making true statements – because a majority of people, I think, accept that these propositions are true. If I say that Pegasus exists in the real world, only a confused minority, I think, would believe me. This is, by the way, the problem with most discourse about logic. It depends too heavily on ‘intuitive’ (read ‘obvious’) facts.

I am arguing that true statements are true not because they correspond to entities in the world but because they conform to what people believe. And our beliefs not only concern ordinary properties but also concern whether objects are real, mythical, fictional or nonsensical. This is not to suggest that consensus reality is homogenous. People disagree frequently about many issues all the time. (I often find myself totally at odds with consensus reality.) Sometimes empirical facts have input into these debates, as when a scientist performs an experiment, but generally, when there is uncertainty, people make decisions about what to believe by trusting in some authoritative source. I believe that light can usefully be thought of as consisting of photons but my belief in this is based not on direct observation but on my faith in my Physics textbook; I believe that Socrates was mortal but this is because I trust in those sources that say he died when forced to ingest hemlock in 399 BC, rather than those sources that say he is still alive and is now domiciled in Area 51 with Elvis and the other aliens. If we are to accept that knowledge is phenomenological, we must also accept some form of Meiongianism, because we must accept that the reality of entities is contestable. 

Other objections to Meiongianism involve paradoxes related to meta-logic. I am not going to attempt to counter these objections here except to say that the descriptivist accounts are not free of paradox themselves. Consider, for example, ‘the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves’ or the issue of whether the word ‘heterological’ refers to itself or not. (I might mention in passing that the greatest problem with Predicate Calculus is not to do with fictional characters but rather the issue of time and change. Does the domain of a Quantifier cover only individuals existing currently? Or should it be extended to cover entities that used to exist but now no longer do? And, if so, should it also be extended to cover those entities that don’t exist, have never existed but will in the future?)

The key idea I want readers to take away from this is that a fiction is a partial description of another, albeit fictional, world and that the author of a fiction is an absolute authority on the elements of that world. There is another way of approaching the issue, employing the notion of speech-acts as proposed by John Searle. This will be the subject of my next post.

Ascribing Attributes to Imaginary Entities

I would be the first to admit that this blog is a loose, baggy monster. Sometimes I use it to promote my own theory of narrative, sometimes to present interpretations of written fictions and of films, and sometimes as a vehicle for my own short stories. I hope that those who stumble over this blog by accident forgive me for so often digressing. It is the prerogative of all bloggers to write about whatever they want. In today’s post I thought I would follow up the previous one by talking a little more about truth and logical propositions. I concede that this post is quite abstract and difficult - I feel that people generally prefer to read my short stories rather than my philosophical musings. But perhaps someone might find this post at least a little interesting.

The current post concerns logical statements. Consider the proposition “All unicorns each have a single horn.” This is a universal proposition that would be falsified by the existential proposition “At least one unicorn exists that does not have a single horn.”   One of these two statements must be true and the other false. Empirically, it must be the second proposition that is false – we say this because no unicorns exist at all. Consequently, by the law of non-contradiction, the first proposition must be true.

Now consider the proposition “All unicorns each don’t have a single horn.” The counterpart to this statement is “At least one unicorn exists that has a single horn.” Once again, the existential proposition is false and so, consequently, the universal proposition must be true. We seem to have hit on a paradox! It seems that, logically, the proposition “All unicorns each have a single horn” and the proposition “All unicorns each don’t have a single horn” are both true - and yet they can’t both be true at the same time because they contradict each other. The problem we have here is that unicorns are imaginary and so one can’t truly attribute properties to them. One route out of this impasse is to decree that all propositions about imaginary entities are necessarily false. Another is to define all such propositions as meaningless. I believe (although I am not sure) that the later solution was the one adopted by Bertrand Russel.

There is a third approach. We could say that the proposition “All unicorns each have a single horn” must be true because it follows quite simply from the definition of the word ‘unicorn’. (The second universal proposition mentioned above would then be false.) The proposition "All unicorns each have a single horn" would be what Kant calls an ‘analytic truth’. Analytic truths are true by virtue of how we define the words we use. A famous example of another analytic truth is the proposition “All bachelors are unmarried.” This statement is true by virtue of the definition of the word ‘bachelor’ and (according to Kantian logic) would be true even in universes that do not have bachelors. If you were to ask the average man in the street which universal proposition concerning unicorns he believed to be true he would probably pick the one above; he would do so because it follows directly from the generally accepted definition of the word ‘unicorn’. Analytic propositions are true or false not by virtue of empirical evidence that verifies, supports or refutes them but rather by virtue of what people believe concerning the meaning of words.

So we must accept two types of truth, empirical truths and presumptive truths, truths based on fact and truths based on belief (presumptive is not quite the right word but I am unsure of a better word to use). In the real world there is, in fact, no clear-cut distinction between these two types of truth. Statements concerning ‘God’ or ‘love’ or ‘morality’ do not easily fall into either category. In antiquity, people believed that unicorns actually existed - reality is to some extent what we make it.

This discussion has enormous importance to the interpretation of literature. Literary criticism is entirely concerned with fictional entities – and yet we would like to think that some interpretations are true and others false, or, at least, that some interpretations are better than others. Consider the statement “Hamlet is a Dane” or the statement “Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father”. Neither proposition is empirically verifiable and yet we would like to think that neither is meaningless, that both are actually true. The film “The Empire Strikes Back” defines Darth Vader as Luke’s father and consequently all future statements concerning Darth Vader must fall back on this definition.  The better solution to the paradox concerning imaginary entities it is to say that statements about fictional characters are analytic rather than empirical truths, that they are based on definition rather than on fact. In literary criticism and in many other discourses, it seems, truth does not depend upon factual evidence but rather upon an established consensus among the relevant community.

Obviously this discussion hinges on the notion of ‘definition’ and this opens up a whole other can of worms.  I may have to talk about it in a later post. For those interested I recommend an earlier post “On Metaphor and Interpretation”, a somewhat less dense and more readable essay. Those interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the literary theory I am proposing might want to have a look at it.