SHIFTING FROM DETAILS TO STRUCTURES


The two primary brac-
kets mutually invert the
causal priority of war-
fare and sexual division.

"Perspective" emerges
as an unconscious pro-
 duct of narrative pro-
 cesses.


The primary brackets of
 Night I


plot, ontologically and narratively invert one another. In "Tharmas/En-
ion" war is narratively generated from sexual division; in "Eternity" sexual
division is narratively generated from war. In elaborating this inver-
sion, these competing primary structures cancel out the priority of one
origin over the other, for the fiction of origin is in each case constituted by
the perspective in which it is embedded. At the same time, with respect to
identity, this mutual inversion makes possible dislocations and discon-
tinuities among textual details so radical that not one character or event in
Night I retains even an approximately consistent identity.5 Because these
embedded structures exist only to render possible the disappearance of
Newtonian origin and identity, they are dimensions of the narrative's
identity as continual origination and not ontologically reifiable patterns
that inhibit the narrative's subversive operations.


 Embedded Structures in Night I

 In order to grasp the interplay between local microscopic details and
supervening patterns in Night I's narrative, it is useful to begin by con-
structing a model of the dominant embedded structures that facilitate the
mutual interconstitution of reader and text in Night I. The first step in
developing a model of these embedded structures is to bracket the two


"Eternity groand"(18:9)


THARMAS/ENION THARMAS/ENION
(4:6) (18:8)
 9 1"


ETERNITY
(21:1)


ETERNITY
 (20:15)


Fig. A.1