CONSUMMATION AND CONCRESCENCE

My recent essays on the concept of the master-thread have sparked some re-consideration of the titular categories.

When I wrote CONSUMMATING PASSIONS in 2011, I may have contemplated the notion of using consummation to explain certain operations of fictional narrative, more or less in the same fashion that I now utilize "concrescence." However, I didn’t end up using “consummation” as a consistent term over the years. I now believe that the term is too static. Going by the standard usage of the word and its opposite, a work can only be consummate or inconsummate insofar as the parts of the narrative do or do not work in harmony to give the reader a sense of “completion.” PASSIONS, though, was written before I began formulating my concepts of the four potentialities, and of discourse between the various *quanta * of those potentialities.

In contrast, concrescence is not about the relationship of the parts to a hypothetical whole; it concerns the relation of parts to other parts within the narrative, in a rough parallel to the mundane medical use of the word. One part, as I’ve written at the beginning of the master-thread series, is always dominant within the narrative, and the other parts are woven around this central thread. The thread-metaphor helps to explain how a given narrative may be strong within a given potentiality, mythopoeic or otherwise, even if the narrative develops only the superordinate master thread but no subordinate threads. I’ll provide further explication of the proper terminological relationships of these two categories in my next essay.