The Best of It

The novelist draws some from life; if not a single word, an entire world. To resolve an allusive text the novelist forgets the origin, or obsessively adheres to it for the sake of alike truths, but more often the text adhering to an origin in the life of the writer fails. This the critic called the old horse. The old horse was a man on the critic's campus who touted a manuscript around for years, telling people he was working on a book. The book's contents, found after the man's eventual death, amounted to descriptions of a horse, his wife, as she ate to obesity and 'found the fields too far and wide to bother'. She kept to the barn stall and the farmer's oats and salt licks. To exclude the real the novelist redefines the real as an edifice, stood obliquely, available for the allusion. The origin torments the critic and of course he can not know what stone the novelist chisels from to build piles. The critic disagrees with his earlier sentiment, making use of interviews and the vast knowledge of the author's life kept in texts around a text. This arrose in discussions in his studies and he realized he could not stand a woman who argued that a text should be mined for its allusion's origins, the author, then, an adhered piece of the artifice. He wanted to allow the novelist anonymity from the text just as the simple minded are allowed their sideways conversations without question.