272
EDWARD MARCOTTE
eyes), the situation amounts to a sustained lack, an exclusion.
Setting remains that most ambiguous part of the novelist's
art, attesting to his unquenchable yearning to seize and incor–
porate landscape, to achieve the ideal fusion of the spatial and the
schematic.
In
certain arts, such as painting, where the object is set
before us in space, we speak of contemplation as the ideal relation–
ship between the perceiver and the work. But it would be spurious
to designate our mode of participation in a fictional narrative as
contemplative. There is nothing, strictly speaking, to contemplate.
Certainly we do not contemplate the words on the page, for, as
already suggested, they disappear into their meaning. Fiction, in
the final analysis, presents us with strictly verbal information, and
in
spite of the popular saying, no amount of words will ever add
up to a picture.
