"History does not abide by traditional narrative explanations. It isn’t that narrative explanation doesn’t have its place—it is a great instrument—but uncritically examined, its assumptions about the world are, well, unlikely. Within a specific human realm, when we are busy giving meaning to human events selecting, choosing, arranging a story at a dinner party—we may be so taken with the result that we forget that another arrangement could have yielded something quite different. I am not suggesting what some have seen as an inevitable consequence of this particular mode that everything is relative; it’s much more that there are modes of explanation equally satisfactory within their own prescribed realms of discourse." -- William H. Gass (interviewed by Arthur M. Saltzman in "The Review of Contemporary Fiction," Fall 1991, Vol. 11.3)
Posted on: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 10:46:12 +0000
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