Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

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Three in a bed: it’s a kinky cultural affair. I had better identify the partners.

Politics and morals, as concepts, need no introduction, although their relationship is shadily ambiguous. But fiction has defining responsibilities that I shall be questioning all through what I have to say, so I shall begin right away with the basic, dictionary definition of what fiction is supposed to be.

Fiction, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘the action of feigning or inventing imaginary existences, events, states of things. . prose novels and stories collectively’. So poetry, according to the OED, is not fiction. The more I ponder this, the more it amazes me; the more I challenge it. Does the poet not invent imaginary existences, events, states of things?

If I should ask any erudite and literary gathering to give examples of the powers of the poets’ invention of imaginary existences, events, the poets’ matchless evocation of ‘states of things’, all drawn, just as the prose writers’ is, from life — the fact of life — as the genie is smoked from the bottle, I could fill pages with quotations. If fiction is the suprareal spirit of the imagination, then poetry is the ultimate fiction. In speaking of fiction, I should be understood to be including poetry.

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