Now, two new things become possible

for the erstwhile critic on his way

to reincarnation

as a real artist

(a new Pinocchio syndrome perhaps).

The first is the invention of new texts:

you enlarge a piece of

Scythian jewelry

to the point

at which

it becomes the equal of

a monumental frieze

in another civilization.

The critic, then, by the invention

of new nomenclature and neologism,

and by the framing in a new paradigm

of aesthetic or cultural history, transforms

an inert text of some sort

into a bearer of new form

and new perception

and thereby transforms it into an object

of especial and hitherto untheorized significance.

That text then becomes a first of some kind,

and itself a paradigm and model of things to come,

as well as a privileged symptom of Zeitgeist.

Meanwhile that creation—in which the new significance of the curatorial role

can be identified, precisely as just such

a framing of objects that are to be

allegorically transvalued—is intimately related

to the other one that interests us here,

namely the invention of wholly new historical stories

about such objects—the creation of new ideas or concepts of literary or artistic history.

This is then why, in my opinion,

we cannot exactly write new literary histories today,

we cannot execute them in the way the older

framers of projects (artistic or not)

then patiently brought these first glimmering ideas to full realization

step-by-step and in concrete detail.

For such new ideas are not to be realized,

they are and remain purely theoretical,

the task

is to spring them onto the screen of consciousness

precisely as new ideas for this

or that new narrative paradigm of history.

What the writers of new literary history

have to do today is to invent new ideas

of literary history, to pursue the goal

of a Novum that is immediately recognizable as

something hitherto unthought about the process,

and whose examples are not pieces and segments

of the execution of that research so much as themselves

ideas that dramatize what such an execution would look like.

In other words, they try to show us what a carrying out

of this new idea of literary or artistic history would look like

if it really could be carried out (which it can’t be).

Now I have little enough time

to say why this is not relativism or fiction.

It must be marked by an imperative to multiplicity—

to invent one new idea for literary history

must be understood as calling for many more.

These then begin to stake out the bounds of the Real,

they approach it asymptotically

in their very variety and in their contradictions,

like the legendary blind men feeling

the equally imaginary elephant’s sensory properties

—tail, trunk, hide, tusks, and so forth—and reporting

back on their contradictory findings.

This is then the triangulation of the Real,

the identification of a heavy

yet invisible body at the heart of space

that moves all the counters and the pointers

on all the dials of the universe

in a barely perceptible yet inescapable way,

a uttering and a fluttering

through which the Real

becomes as

inescapable

as it is