Daredevils

Stephen Booth writes, “Great works of art are daredevils. They flirt with disasters and, at the same time, they let you know they are married forever to particular, reliable order and purpose. They are, and seem often to work hard at being, always on the point of one or another kind of incoherence-always on the point of disintegrating and/or of integrating the very particulars they exclude-always and multifariously on the point of evoking suggestions of pertinent but syntactically impertinent auxiliary assertions and even saying things they cannot want to say, things irrelevant or antipathetic to their arguments or plain untrue.”