Metaphysics and Gossip: Notes Towards a Manifesto for a Novel of the Future

Abstract

In my more honest moments, I am inclined to admit that I find only two things in the world truly fascinating: metaphysics and gossip. Everything between these two limits, between the general structure and meaning of the universe on the one hand and, on the other, who exactly went to bed with whom and what they did there, is of less compelling interest. Most of the things that are important to the material well-being of the human race lie in this in-between zone — how to cure pneumonia, how to overthrow tyrants, the structure of polymers, etc. are equidistant from metaphysics and gossip. And I take these things as seriously as anyone. But I am not concerned here with the serious and the important. I am concerned with the truly interesting; I am concerned with art; in particular with the art of fiction.

The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet… consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of a graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universais, whereas those of history are singulars.

Aristotle (Poetics 1451)