By the time structuralism, as a school of literary criticism and theory, fully arrived in America in the 1960s by way of translations from the French, it was already in the process of being unsettled, reconsidered and reshaped into a yet newer mode of thinking about literary texts, a mode that has come to be called post-structuralism. The term is a broad umbrella covering a variety of viewpoints, and its relation to its predecessor, classical structuralism, is by no means one of complete separation; post-structuralism is clearly an outgrowth and extension of structuralism. Critical theorist Richard Harland has even coined the term superstructuralism to cover the enormous range of critical and interpretative activity from early “scientific” structuralism all the way to post-structuralism in its most modern and radical forms. Classical structuralism as a way of thinking has of course spanned many fields, including linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, as well as literary criticism. In application to literature, the chief methodology of the post-structuralist approach to textual commentary—though it resists being characterized as “methodology” in the usual sense—is that of deconstruction.
The sort of thinking from which the theory of deconstruction has developed has been with us for longer than is widely believed. Some commentators have found suggestions of deconstructive thought as early as the fifth century B.C., in the writings of Gorgias, and the similarity between some deconstructive attitudes and certain aspects of ancient Eastern philosophy has been noted. But deconstruction has flowered into an intellectual “movement” from the late 1960s onward due primarily to the impact of contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and to the taking up of his banner (carried at various angles) by those critics who have become known as the Yale deconstructionists: Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and (to a lesser degree and with greater reservations) Harold Bloom. Derrida’s founding contributions to the theory owe much to relatively recent philosophical sources, particularly to Friedrich Nietzsche (directly) and to Martin Heidegger (somewhat obliquely). In all respects deconstruction has a way of continuing to seem new, however old its roots. The primary reason, it seems to me, is its radically “strange” nature—its open courting of paradox, its encouragement of peculiar and seemingly perverse (if rigorous) modes of reading texts. Deconstruction is not the sort of thing with which one can ever fully “come to terms.” One does not experience a sense of final mastery over deconstruction, does not reduce it to any pat formulaic paradigm. Understanding and coping with deconstruction is a bit like nailing Jello to the wall; some of it sticks, but some of it always slips mockingly away. If it were not so, deconstruction would not be itself, if indeed it is itself, which it would not hesitate to dispute. Deconstruction is an unsettling way of thinking, but, I do not fear to predict, it is here to stay.
Structuralism became post-structuralism essentially because of developments in linguistics—or, rather, changes in attitude toward linguistics as a well-formed science. It is not the purpose here to describe this process of metamorphosis in great detail, but we may note that classical structuralism, especially in its early, “scientific” style, before it began to shade off into a sort of proto-post-structuralism in the later writings of Roland Barthes, always took the attitude that mastery over language and over textuality was possible—that one could develop, from an adequate theory of language, a fully rigorous methodology for interpreting literary texts, a methodology capable of finding their rock-bottom “truths.” This expectation, of course, had also been entertained in some earlier schools of criticism, particularly among the old New Critics with their view of the text as organic unity. The idea, for structuralists, was that if literary texts reside in the domain of language—and structuralists and post-structuralists would agree on the point that they do—and if language, through a science of linguistic signs (semiology or semiotics) could be thoroughly and finally understood through making the study genuinely “scientific,” then so could literary texts. Make linguistics rigorous as a science, and you make textual interpretation and criticism so as well. But it is this premise—the possibility of reducing language to a wholly understandable and controllable discipline, a science of signification—that post-structuralists have called into question.
Language is far more unstable and mysterious, far more given to radical undecidability, far more elusive than has previously been thought.
Literary texts, as objects of “scientific” or masterfully methodological scrutiny, are surprisingly ill-behaved subjects. As laboratory specimens, they tend to slip off the pins on which we try to impale them, and run free. As conveyors of recoverable, univocal “meanings” or “truths,” they are titteringly uncooperative. As examples of figural language at work (and play), they are, in other words, typical.
Since the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, we have understood that language functions essentially through differences. A linguistic signifier is what it is by virtue of its difference from other signifiers. Cat is cat because it is not hat or cot or cab, etc. That is, cat is in a sense the sum of the things that it is not: it contains the “trace” of those other signifiers with which it contrasts itself to maintain its own form. But where does one stop, in the process of observing such traces? If cat contains the trace of hat, then hat in turn contains the traces of ham and chat. Ham contains the traces of dam and hang; chat contains the traces of chair (which contains the traces of flair and chain and cheer) and that (which contains the traces of than and what and thought), and so on, in endless and labyrinthine branchings into what one begins to glimpse as the sprawling field of language itself, that differential web or network in which texts live. Linguistic signifiers are like sums of differences. Like elements of the quantum field such as the electron, they are defined not in terms of self-presence or self-identity, but in terms of the field in which they are embedded. Indeed the analogy between the field of language and the quantum field of particle physics is rather intriguing. Each field is essentially a relational realm, and each has its undefinable, elusive terms—the linguistic trace to which we have alluded is just as slippery, but just as necessary, as the quark.
A linguistic sign was once thought to be a fairly pat and stable entity, consisting of a signifier together with a “signified,” or concept-as-meaning. It “contained” its meaning in an immediate presence that satisfied the notion of Western metaphysics (the metaphysics of presence) that meanings should be directly represented by language—that language should be transparent and should simply express our thoughts about the world. The mode of speech was thought to be the purest such expression, since with speech the speaker is present and the transfer of meaning is presumably immediate. Writing (from Plato onward) was considered secondary, was considered an unfortunate fossilization of speech, was sometimes even considered (e.g., by Rousseau) a dangerous and decadent successor to speech.
But with the modern view of the nature of language, we recognize that, to begin with, the linguistic sign is not the trim little device it once was thought to be, with its “meaning” nestled inside for ready access. Meanings do not reside “in” signs, because signifiers point not to “signifieds” but to other signifiers, which in turn point to still other signifiers, and so on. This is not to say that signifiers are meaningless—this is to say, rather, that meanings are scattered and relational in nature. A meaning does not shine forth as a local phenomenon; it flickers through chains of signifiers, never quite “present” in any one location. Even the use of spoken signifiers presupposes these semantic circumstances, and there is, accordingly, no privilege of speech over writing. Meanings are dispersed, deferred, always yet to come, in any use of language. Derrida coined the term différance to suggest the never-quite-here nature of meaning. Différance, like trace, is not strictly definable, but has something in it of at least two suggested meanings: “differing” and “deferring.”
The implications for reading literary texts are profound. First of all, texts reside in language and must partake of the mystery and complexity that that residence in language implies. We must of course abandon the quaint notion that a literary text has a fixed, single “meaning.” Such a view would in fact be insulting to the text—it would suggest that somehow the text fails to partake of the richness of the linguistic web in which it finds itself woven. But this is not entirely new with post-structuralist thought. Many previous critical points of view have recognized that texts are “plural,” or variously interpretable. Such viewpoints have, however, always tended to incorporate, however subliminally, the notion that there is a “total meaning” present in a text, and that by putting forward various readings, we are simply approximating an access to that meaning, which could be reached and controlled and wholly understood were we but clever enough. What the post-structuralist view of language says, in part, is that the “meaning” of a text can never be totalized or encapsulated or reached, because the nature of language is such that there are always elements of indeterminacy and is such that texts do not have edges or borders. If we try to enclose a text with borders (Warning: Interpretative reading can never proceed beyond this point.), then the text, whose edges are fuzzy, will overrun the borders and find its own way out into farther regions. Even thinking of texts as being physically limited—This text begins on page 65 and ends on page 85—is artificial. Any piece of writing, in finding its way past our attempted borders out into the field of language, encounters other wandering texts there and interrelates with them. All text becomes intertext. Literary texts dwell in language, and language is intrinsically unstable, “polysemic,” and everywhere traced through with undecidabilities. It was Nietzsche’s cardinal insight that all language is figural rather than referential—that metaphor operates everywhere, that even the “rigorous” dialectical language of philosophy is simply rhetoric that has forgotten its own metaphoricity.
We can dispense with “authorial intent,” a notion belonging to that old metaphysics of presence that would treat language as having self-present and fixed meaning and would treat the text as being a ready access to the author’s mind, a mind unambiguous and all made up as to its intentions. Even if we could suppose we knew the author’s intentions (say, through letters describing them), we would have to ask: Did the author really know them? And even if the author in some sense knew them, do they survive in the writing and rule out all other possibilities? If the author were to provide a line-by-line, word-by-word gloss attempting to forestall all pluralities of interpretation, the gesture would be self-deconstructing. It would amount to an admission that alternative readings must be possible.
The modern view is that a text, once written, is a creature of language and is a public document. As a creature of language, it is something that the author could in no imaginable way have controlled totally. Language precedes the author, and language will survive the author. If the author is articulate, the text will say, presumably, what the author intended—but will always say many other things as well, quite independently of authorial intent or authorial ability at expression. Texts, again, reside in language, and language leads a life of its own. As a public document, the text is ours to read, to help create by reading. Texts, in my view, continue to write themselves by being read. And as Roland Barthes has commented, even the author, like anyone else, can visit the text only as a guest. The author produces a written work, but the work when read becomes text, of which the reader or critic is not merely a consumer but a fellow producer.
Some people have felt that such “open” textual views by post-structuralists suggest that texts either mean nothing at all or can be made to mean anything (which would be tantamount to meaning nothing). Both suggestions derive from misconceptions. To begin with, texts end up meaning more than we might have thought, not less, when we submit them to the close readings that post-structuralism champions. We do not empty texts of their meaning; we deny only the privilege of univocal meanings to which texts might have been reduced. “Full” meaning is always deferred, always around some corner yet to come—but meaning deferred is not meaning denied. Yet texts cannot be made to mean just anything, either. They dwell within language, and language, though infinitely sprawling and complex, has form, within which texts function.
But post-structuralism recognizes and highlights the fact that the manner of functioning of texts within language is problematic. Texts tend to unravel themselves, tend to subvert their own apparently “ruling” logic. It is the purpose of deconstructive reading to discover how this self-subversion comes about. In pursuing the matter, we are not carping at the text for failing to have a consistency or integrity that it could have had. We are, on the contrary, showing that the text has the figural richness to partake fully of language. We are throwing light upon textual features that more simplistic readings would allow to remain hidden.
All modern schools of criticism, however, have sought to do that—to elucidate texts. So how is deconstruction different? We will compare it with its immediate predecessor.
One of the main features of classical structuralism’s attempts to arrive at the “true” content of texts is to try to demonstrate the presence in those texts of binary oppositions, or bipolarities. These structures, critics have argued, stand close to being the most basic, pervasive, and reliable features of texts. They represent, some would say, the reflection in texts of something fundamental in the human mind itself. Examples of such binary oppositions are endless: good and evil, high and low, inside and outside, order and chaos, kindness and cruelty, knowledge and ignorance, sound and silence, light and dark, large and small, hope and despair—in general, anything and its opposite. These binary oppositions may occur in any manner in a text, for example, as simple narrative description, as symbolism, as expressed or implied thematic content. Structuralist thought, in any case, insists on strict distinctions between the poles of the bipolarity, whatever it is: good is good and not evil, evil is evil and not good. Boundaries are drawn between the terms of the opposition, and the thinking is essentially ideological.
Going beyond this ideologizing tendency and looking at the matter more closely, post-structuralist thought sees the boundary between two terms of a binary opposition to be highly provisional, wobbly, ultimately imaginary. One approach that deconstructive reading takes is to demonstrate, in the text, that within each term of the binary opposition the other term secretly and necessarily dwells. If the opposition is “x versus y,” then x contains a y-aspect that must be there in order for x to function as x, and y contains an x-aspect that must be there in order for y to function as y. Thus the differences operative in the text are not so much a matter of x‘s difference from y as they are a matter of x‘s difference from x and y‘s difference from y. Neither term is “self-identical” or indivisibly characterizable. Indeed the superficial “difference” between x and y remains possible to entertain only as long as we suppress, or fail to notice, those more subtle differences, ways in which each term differs from “itself.”
In a somewhat different but closely related formulation, we may see deconstruction as dealing with supplementarities: ordered pairs of terms in which the first term mentioned is considered to have privilege, superiority, or primacy over the second term. A common example is “nature/culture.” The idea is that nature is the original, pure state, which is “supplemented” by (added onto by, and ultimately perhaps threatened with replacement by) culture. Deconstructionist reading often reverses the supplementarity, upsetting the order and the privilege afforded the first term, without, however, fully allowing the reversed structure to become a privileged, settled reading in its own right.
For example, one could easily turn the supplementarity nature/culture on its head by pointing out that nature is, at least from a certain point of view, a construct of culture. If there were no culture, no human community, no commonality of shared thought, and if there were only (presuming we can imagine such a thing) a pure state of nature uncomplicated in any way by what we call culture, then the term nature would have no meaning for us whatever, above simple “being” or existence. A hypothetically cultureless person living alone in a cave and having no prior experience with human community would not look around and say, Well, now, this is the pure, natural state, uncontaminated by culture. Nature, as the first term in the supplementarity nature/culture, is understandable as a concept only by contrast, only from the point of view of culture—and even then, perhaps, only as a signifier to which we can never quite attach a definite mental image. We would say, then, that nature is (to repeat the oft-used term of Barthes and Derrida) always already (toujours déjà) infiltrated by culture: there is no “original” nature, but only a context-dependent term nature that is already contingent upon culture. Derrida, following the practice of Martin Heidegger, often crosses out such an always-already-supplemented term as “nature,” putting it under erasure (sous rature) in such a way that both the crossing-out and the term crossed out are visible, to show that although we cannot get along without such a term as “nature” altogether, its status is highly provisional. In effect we have unsettled and reversed the given configuration, suggesting an alternative—culture/nature.
But—and this point is often missed—simply to reverse a supplementarity in this way is to perform only a partial deconstruction. The suggestion is not that the new supplementarity now takes over. We do not say, Well, now, you see, it’s culture/nature, pure and simple, the way it always should have been, and leave the matter at that. A deconstructive reading finally refuses to grant privileged status to the new supplementarity, just as it refused to grant it to the old one. We refuse, for example, to favor “culture” over “nature” altogether, since culture as a condition of human community or commonality can only be defined by the possibility of its absence: people live together by virtue of not living apart. Thus neither term in a supplementarity has absolute, unquestionable privilege over the other, however strenuously the surface-level reading of a text may suggest such a privilege for one term or the other. Texts themselves subvert such suggestions even while making them. The reader arrives not at Hegelian-style dialectical synthesis of opposing terms but rather at “aporia” or impasse: an irresolvable textual oscillation between poles of an opposition or between competing configurations of privilege in a supplementarity. The reductive ideological thrust of supplementarities is undercut, uncentered, unsettled. The “logocentric” quest for hermeneutic certitude, the hankering after semantic fixity or the final ground of “truth” in the text, must be thwarted. There is always a surplus over settled or “exact” meaning, always a continued textual flickering. The text achieves a kind of teasing perpetuity by resisting reduction to truth. We pass beyond ideology.
At least we try to pass beyond it. In all honesty one must admit that there is no total escape from the metaphysics of binary oppositions and hierarchical supplementarities. We cannot simply lift ourselves out of all that and look down upon texts from the rarefied atmosphere of a metalanguage or metaphilosophy not itself tainted with the metaphysical underpinnings that it seeks to dislodge. There is no metalanguage; when we dismantle binary oppositions to show how texts unravel themselves, we do it all from inside the system. But this is like saying that whatever we do, we do inside the universe. It is not so much a description of boundaries within which we must work (though some have spoken of the “prisonhouse of language”) as an admission that we do not get outside the system to subvert it and do not get outside the text to comment upon it. Derrida is often quoted as saying, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”—there is nothing outside the text. We work within language. But language is a dizzyingly enormous and variegated field in which to work. If it is indeed a prisonhouse, then it is an immense and exceedingly well-furnished (if often bewildering) one.
In this regard, we may note that critics of deconstruction sometimes complain that in attacking the notion of stable logic in texts deconstruction itself employs a logic that tries to be stable. But as Derrida has pointed out, we must “bore from within.” We must essentially work within the structures of the Western metaphysical tradition to show the speciousness of the self-validating claims of “privilege” that those structures espouse. It follows, of course, that deconstruction of a text can itself be deconstructed, and that deconstruction of deconstruction can be deconstructed, and so on ad infinitum. There is no level at which critical commentary rises with immunity above this process; critical commentary is an outward-spiraling explosion of ever more text.
Again, close textual reading is the stuff that deconstruction is made of, and such reading will often point up, in fairly ready fashion, the manner in which we may dismantle oppositions or supplementarities, to show that the text has a surprising inability to say what it “thinks” it says—and thus an uncanny ability to say more than it thinks it says.
The precise manner in which we may achieve such results varies, of course, from one instance to another. One of Jacques Derrida’s favorite practices is to fasten upon some apparently marginal or trivial detail in a text and worry and worry at it until it reveals, in itself, the unstable nature of the text generally. It is frequently at such places, where one sees a textual detail seemingly having little to do with anything, that texts, upon closer reading, most uncannily and unwittingly expose their deeper and more subversive workings. A point at which the text deals in a rather subtle ambiguity with some term, for instance—a graft-point, where the text brings together disparate ideas—may be such a point of marginality, a place from which the whole deconstructive effort may derive its energies for reading.
Some post-structuralists, notably Derrida and Hartman, also make what at first seems to be a rather startlingly free use of puns in writing critical commentary. Derrida, with his multilingual puns, has exasperated countless readers, no doubt. This practice of course raises the question of whether such commentary is to be taken seriously. Much depends, in general, upon how and to what effect such punning is done. In the hands of a Derrida or a Hartman, there is no question that the device can be one of amazing power. I would say that to claim, outright, that puns are not to be taken seriously (assuming we can know what we mean by “taking” something “seriously,” which I think is far from clear) is to operate with an exceedingly naive and antiquated view of language. If I am writing, for example, about the poetic imagery of swans adrift in a stream, and if I refer at some point in my commentary (as indeed I have done in a journal article) to those swans as “floating cygni-fiers,” and if I connect that notion with the general flow of my argument, then I have made what some might consider a groaner of a pun—but I have not merely done something frivolous or nonserious. The pun can be a rightful and powerful part of critical commentary, because it is an aspect of language that cannot be denied. That is just (perhaps even justly) the way language is. Language, as is increasingly clear in post-structuralist studies, has a decidedly ludic or playful nature. And again, this is not to say that we are dealing in frivolities.
Why do we suppose, especially in America, that there is something suspect, something less than respectable, in the notion of play? Think how besmirched is the concept of being ludic, how sullied is the concept of playfulness, by the popular connotations of the word ludicrous. Play, of course, in another of its many senses, suggests performance, as in music or drama; perhaps we “play” a poem or a short story much as we play a sonata. But even if we take play in its frolicsome sense, we are merely giving the nod to, and opening our eyes to, the realities of language. Language is playful, and its playfulness can readily be observed. When we speak, as we often have occasion to do, of the “free play” of signification, we may mean, by play, either frolicsomeness or “slack” in the sense of released tension. Either way, free play does not mean freedom in any anarchistic sense; but it does suggest a wider range of significational possibility than more traditional views of language would have recognized. In any case, there is nothing wrong with a certain ludic element in textual commentary.
Indeed one of the major differences between post-structuralist critical commentary and earlier kinds of commentary is that, there being no hard-and-fast boundary postulated between text and commentary, now the reader or critic can be, and should be, more creative: again, a producer, not merely a consumer, of text. Creative reading may well spring from (the wellspring of) reader-response wordplay or from an uncovering of the text’s own subtle or unwitting double entendres. Derrida has produced such effects in his much-celebrated examination of the Greek word pharmakon in Plato, showing that whereas Plato evidently intended the word in the sense of “poison,” it also punningly subverts his intentions by meaning “cure” as well. Thus it is not, for example, Plato who really “speaks” in a text—it is language that speaks.
Another approach, one much used especially by J. Hillis Miller, is etymology. One traces words in the text back, often all the way to Indo-European roots, finding that roots and derivatives entangle themselves in patterns of mutual suggestion, bifurcating and dispersing in ways that produce deep internal differences where there appeared to be unity, or similarity where there appeared to be only difference. I shall find this etymological resource a useful device here in reading the Lovecraft texts.
A criticism sometimes leveled against deconstruction is that it appears to produce a sort of “sameness” in texts—that binary oppositions always collapse, that textual logic always unravels, that a literary text, as Paul de Man says, always “simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode.” And indeed, like other critical approaches, deconstruction does proceed from an awareness that when one looks for certain things in a text sufficiently rich in figurality, one will find them. In particular, one will find the sorts of linguistic indeterminacies and self-subversions that we have been considering here. But what this criticism of deconstruction ignores is the astonishing variety of ways in which various texts respond to this manner of reading. Texts reveal themselves to be capable of generating unlimitedly variegated self-deconstructive energies and of thus enriching and unfolding the critical “method” itself as one proceeds from text to text. What we thus find is a sort of variegation in sameness, a variegation underscored as remarkable for its emergence in the constancy of linguistic and textual instability. That is to say, language is always unstable, yet it is precisely the extent to which we can rely upon it to be that enables us to continue to visit text after text and discover seemingly inevitable yet somehow ever-fresh surprises that await us there. If such notions as “variegated sameness” and “inevitable surprise” seem paradoxical, it is just this spirit of paradox on which deconstruction thrives.
As I have suggested, post-structuralist criticism does not seek to expunge the insights of more traditional critical viewpoints. Indeed it may use them, build upon them, carry them off in new directions. Consider the role of thematics in criticism. We have always asked, what themes are operative in the work? Post-structuralist thought has always been somewhat divided about the role of thematic considerations in, say, a radical deconstructive reading of a text, because such a reading may often reveal deeper themes, themes other than the ones the text “knows” it is dealing with. In particular, it is common for texts to turn out to have self-referential levels, often discussing, covertly, their own textuality, so that there may dwell in the text hidden themes concerning language itself. But it is my position that themes may function as points of departure for deconstruction as well as anything else. Themes themselves, on their own level, in fact can be deconstructed, as my final chapter here on Lovecraft’s major thematics will show. Likewise, symbolism in a literary text is problematic in a way, because post-structuralist linguistic theory shows metaphor, metonymy, symbol, and allegory to be everywhere. Elements of a text may be allegorical, for example, without our counting them among the allegorical elements that a more traditional reading would identify. But the “obvious” symbols in a literary text, though they may not be ultimate in terms of figurality, may certainly lead, like considerations of thematics, into deconstructive reading. Both themes and symbols may readily, for example, posit binary oppositions of some sort, and these may be deconstructed. I shall not hesitate to appeal to such sources in the text.
Approaches vary, as do texts. But any sufficiently substantial text offers opportunity, in one manner or another, for deconstructive reading. As I have said, my belief is that in fact the potential for such reading is a measure of how substantial or “literary” a text is. One deconstructs Joyce. One deconstructs Yeats. One does not usually bother to deconstruct Harlequin romances. It is true that we hear of Roland Barthes’s deconstructing French menus and of Umberto Eco’s deconstructing Superman comics. No doubt one could find some deconstructive activity even in Harlequin romances, if one wished to pursue the matter. But in practice one generally chooses texts for deconstruction on the basis of all sorts of confluent critical awarenesses—witness Derrida deconstructing Rousseau, de Man deconstructing Shelley and Proust and Rilke, Barbara Johnson deconstructing Melville. Clearly these are not targets chosen at random. It is my own current project here to show that the writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft will quite nicely support the readings that post-structuralism insists upon bringing to literature.
There remains a question of textual value. Is deconstruction a valuational critical activity? Strictly speaking, the answer would seem to be no: post-structuralist thought at least suspends, where it does not categorically deny, questions of value. But the irony is that, in a sense, value reasserts itself anyway. A text deconstructed is a text reinvigorated, reconsidered, reinscribed in the differential field of language and literature. It is a text shown to be deeper and more mysterious than one had thought, and as such, it is a text upon which readers may, if they are so inclined, confer newly formulated notions of textual value. While post-structuralism does not itself credit such notions of valuation, it opens up new vistas of possibility in which other schools of thought may entertain valuational responses. Deconstruction attacks systems that would seek to establish values, yet it may be thought valuable, by some, in doing so. Paradox, as always, abounds.
We proceed to an examination of the Lovecraft texts—thirteen short stories. In taking the stories on one after another, I am aware of a certain discomfort, emanating from the realization that all text is intertext—that stories do not have boundaries or edges that separate them from each other or from other texts, that they may even be spliced or woven together, if we wish. My placing them in sequence, in this setting, and considering them in that arrangement, is merely a matter of spatial and typographical convenience of organization of material and not a matter of metaphysical implication. I should also mention that I have arranged the stories in the approximate order in which Lovecraft wrote them—I say “approximate” because the precise dating of a few of the stories, down to, say, the month, is unclear—essentially because I know of no reason not to arrange them chronologically. There are countless formats in which to read a body of text(s). Rather than saying, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Let me count the ways,” let us choose one way and begin.