Though it lingers playfully, this breathlessness is not capricious. The ache of wanting to breathe hasn't come yet, and he won't realize he thinks of the process of breaking free from breathlessness, but that the process itself involves the words in pages behind the last blank page to suffer accordingly by a process of forgetting. Creative forgetting, an Emersonian-like word, will get him somewhere. He searches without pause for an absolute picture without seams, an entire whole, but the impressions and lengths of stay on each allow only parts to examine at once, and only parts without their exactness in the text, but exactness in his creative memory of them, his creative forgetting.
He respects the author, a new development, for what the author has done to the reader, a trifecta now en scéne. He conceives an opposition to the author, while consuming creative forgetting, re-negotiating situations between characters, and he forgets the essential portion of his combativeness for a genuine liberty of creating the novel with the author, but disconcerted by the sheer magnitude of the author's range and ability in this constructive role the critic searches out a character who will empathize with these virile outsiders, the reader the critic. A flare of omnipotence comes in the attempt to imagine the author, a flare to blind the critic back to the thousands of single second realizations of the read, consumed, processed, but alive text. Henry Green was right to never show a public image of himself save for a sketch, as the image in modern minds destroys the absolute anonymity of the narrator, giving the voice to Henry, and not to God.
Conor Robin Madigan