Fugue 22 - Fall 2001 (No. 22)

(the muses and abusers of' our interior lives) and of belief in oneself as their author." If 1J1is Keatsian negative capability is al first aJI epiphaJ1y, we shouJdn'l linger, lo r our way leads liS IO the vale or soul-making, where the real work of a mUTative relationship begins.

Titus Baxter writes: "To line up with the anti-epiphaJ1ic is lo "~th颅 draw from ofiicialdom. Ollicials, and official culture, arc full or epiphaJ1ies and insights and d ogmas. One is free to be sick or that mode of discourse." The confessional soup boiling in talk-show TV-IaJ1d Gcr11路 Springer, Ricki Lake), and MFA programs everywhere, is smui1ed in the stock image or "people acting meaninglillly or stewing in lheir own juices." W e wa.nr lhat epiphaJty, but 1J1e "epiphaJ1Y was never meant lo he used for merch;-m dising aJtd therapy. IL is not easily adapted to a mass market. But practical measures have been applied. Tl1e job has been done." To refuse the epiphany is thus to read aJld write one's way out of the box or sorrow and depression. This is a narrative voice that is "quarrelsome, hilarious, aJ1d mulish." This voice in our stories is needed, it is necessary: "It has to be. It 's a correction." Anti-depresSaJ11 aJ1d resistance movement? Same thing - at least in fiction. In "Talking Forks: Fictions aJ1d the Inner Life of Objects," Baxter explores the idea "that contemporary liction has gradually been developing a fascinated relationship with ol~ject s that parallels in some respects 1he concerns of various ecolo~,rical movements." Perhaps the idea of "objects and humans" as a "collaborative" is risky in that Baxter veers perilously close to "crackpot New Age dogma," but that which "may he good for fiction is not necessarily good in the realm of ideas." Perhaps the apologia is required - an academic product disclaimer? - but Baxter's attempt to recover lo r fiction a, so to speak, secret life of objects is most welcome. This recovery is needed because, as Baxter points 0111, there occurred a split around the time of tl1e Romantics iu which "Poetry was supposed to get the spirit, aJtd fiction got the material world." Baxter locates a knot in the Nineteenth-century essayist j ohn Ruskin's notion of the "pathetic fallacy." Ruskin thought the "literal)路 response to nature" of his time was ".tmhinged." I think Baxter takes this personally, and 74