Just for the Record

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 11 May 2000, Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:

> 
> Paul Mackin schrieb:
> 
> >  Does it make a lot of sense to have a special
> > classification for novels that are a bit hard to read, indeterminent in
> > outcome, slightly leftish, and with a generous melding together
> > high and low culture. 
> 
> 
>    no, it does not. & when i look at a highly complex novel like "the 
>    counterlife" [1986], it also doesn't make a lot of sense to call roth a 
>    "realist" ...


True. My next question here may sound a little radical but would it be
feasible at this stage of our scientific knowledge of Narrative Language
to devise an objective classification system--a Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory for Fiction as it were? Let's start trying to think
up suitable variables. My first suggestion would be something I picked up
from the Wallace List called anti-confluentuality, meaning the degree to
which various characters and plotlines lack relationship to each other. 

			P.