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.
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