far from fictional setting that happens to be, among other things, the setting for this and every other of my works of fiction. And if I report that I trust certain narrators, I am thereby announcing my confidence that those fictional presences would approve of the previous sentence.
One of the many sorts of fiction that became briefly fashionable during the past fifty years was called by most commentators self-referential fiction. I can recall reading several examples of such fiction in the 1970s, or was it the 1980s? Self-referential fiction was never more than a small part of the body of fiction published at the time, but those who wrote it or praised it seemed to suppose that no sort of self-referential works of fiction had been published in earlier times and, predictably, that writers and readers would soon agree that self-referential fiction was better able than more traditional modes to achieve the aims of fiction, whatever they might be. In the 1970s and the 1980s, I was easily deceived as a reader. Even so, I was just sufficiently alert to be able privately to refute the claims of the advocates of self-referential fiction. I had read Tristram Shandy and some of the fiction of Anthony Trollope and much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy. I admit that I was dazzled at first by If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, by Italo Calvino, but I did not fail to note soon afterwards how little I could recall of its intricate contrivances or of the seeming-qualities of its glib narrator, not to mention its stock characters, and if I think of the book nowadays I think of its author as someone for whom writer and reader are opposed to one another as the players on either side of a chessboard are opposed. Even the undiscerning reader of this fiction of mine should have understood by now that I, the narrator, would dread to feel that we were separated even by these sentences.
I can recall today no instance of my admiring some or another work of self-referential fiction, much less of my trying to write such a work. (I will explain briefly in the following paragraph why this present work of fiction is not self-referential, although it may have seemed so already to a certain sort of undiscerning reader.) The more extreme examples of their kind repelled me. The narrators of these works would sometimes pause in their reporting and would affect to be unable to decide which of several possible courses of events should follow from that point or, as an undiscerning reader might say, what should happen to the chief characters. And yet, I myself was not discerning enough at that time to be able to explain to myself why I turned away instinctively from such writing.
The narrators who postured in front of their readers and who wondered aloud, as it were, what fates to assign to various characters, were deriving enjoyment, so I now believe, from what they supposed was the dispelling of an illusion held by most, if not all, of their readers. The illusion is that the characters described in fiction are, if not actual persons of the same order as the readers themselves, ideal persons, so to call them, who live out their lives in the same sorts of place as are depicted in films while their authors are required merely to report on them in the way that the makers of films observe their characters. It is not for me to guess how many readers of fiction might be under the illusion mentioned or how many of the deluded, so to call them, might have revised their beliefs after having read that the subject-matter of fiction depended on the mere whim of some or another belittler of the long-held trust between reader and narrator. All that I can do is to state here what seems to me self-evident: while the writer and the reader, together with the words that they write or read, may be seen to exist in this, the visible world, what they are pleased or driven to write about or to read about – their subject-matter – is nowhere to be seen: those seeming persons and seeming events and the seeming scenery behind them are present to one writer alone or one reader alone in the cramped foreground of somewhere vast and vague; and while I would never presume to understand the laws or principles operating in either of the two places – the visible or the invisible – I could never doubt that those in the one differ greatly from those in the other and could never consider any writer claiming otherwise to be anything but a fool.
I recalled just now an earlier undertaking of mine to explain in the previous paragraph why this is not a self-referential work of fiction. The discerning reader should have found the promised explanation in the paragraph as it stands. For the sake of the undiscerning reader, I shall repeat the simple fact that I am the narrator of this work and not the author. In the matter of my fate, so to call it, I am no more able to exercise choice than is any narrator of any of the texts going forward in room after room in this wing of the house of two or, perhaps, three storeys where this text is to be understood as going forward, or any character, so to call him or her, in any work of fiction reported to be going forward in any of those rooms.
The subject-matter of a work of true fiction may be understood as extending infinitely backwards and forwards, for want of better terms to denote the twin axes of what I called earlier the narrative dimension. The same subject-matter may also be understood as extending infinitely sideways in opposite directions, and again I use words less than appropriate for concepts seldom written about. Had I been more mindful of this when I began the fifth section of this work, then I might well have written such as the following.
He had been attracted, during his long lifetime, by hundreds, perhaps thousands of female faces. He had no doubt that if ever he were to visit one or another parlour or reception room where visitors were received in the distant wing that was said to be occupied mostly by females – he had no doubt that he would see there during his first visit one at least of the sort of female whose face would cause him to suppose, before he knew her name or the least detail about her, that she might be better disposed towards him and less bothered by his peculiar ways than many another of her gender and age-group. He had long ago given up trying to define, or even to isolate, the features of the faces that drew him. He recognised, however, that the hair framing the face was more likely to be dark than otherwise. This, then, was all that he knew about her whom he was likely to see in the distant wing, wherever it might have been: that her hair was dark. And although he had not the least intention of visiting the place, he was readily able to foresee what would happen if he did so: his looking at her for what he believed was no longer than some or another man might have looked at some or another woman who held no interest for him but his learning soon afterwards from her way of looking at him that he had given himself away yet again, by looking either more often or more intently than he had been aware, and that she had learned about him already what he hoped she might not learn until much later, if at all.
He had never been able to make sense of the theories popular during his time for their seeming to explain the workings of the mind. In this, as in every other field that interested him, he trusted in his concern for particulars and for details. What others might have called meaning he called connectedness, and he trusted that he would one day see (revelation being for him always a visual matter) among the multitudes of details that he thought of as his life or as his experience faint lines seeming to link what he had never previously thought of as being linked and the emergence of a rudimentary pattern, which word had always been one of his favourites.
He had forgotten, of course, many of the dark-haired females. He recalled most clearly those from his earliest and his latest years. The very latest and, so he had promised himself, the last had been young enough to have been his granddaughter if he and his children had not been the human equivalents of those animals that his farmer-grandfather had called shy breeders. He, the personage in the upper room, had wanted only to exchange handwritten letters with the dark-haired woman. He foresaw a correspondence lasting for year after year in which two oddly matched persons came gradually to learn how closely they stood as readers of one another’s handwriting, but in her third letter she had rebuked him for something that she claimed was inappropriate in an exchange between what she called an older writer and a younger reader. He had been so stung by her words that he had never afterwards dared to look at his copy of the offending letter or even of his subsequent hasty letter of apology. Each wrote once or twice more until she claimed not to have anything more worth writing about, which claim seemed to him absurd, although he believed he understood why she made it.
