Yet all narratives are capable of darkness, the oracular is always there or thereabouts, accessible if only by a sensory failure; and much writing we think of as peculiarly modern is in part a rediscovery of the oracular, and sometimes an exploitation of sensory failure. One motive of this modernism was the desire to break with a tradition of writing supposed to have been based on a mistaken or dishonest desire to eliminate the oracular by simple plausability in the registration of a real world, and by connivance with vulgar notions of cause and closure – to make false sense of a false realism. We should not forget (reminding ourselves that forgetfulness is also an important factor in the history of criticism) that narratives of this kind – intermittent, forgetful, at times blind of deaf – existed long ago; their varying focus, fractured surfaces, overdeterminations, displacements, have constituted a perpetual challenge to those more sober interpreters who want to know how they came to be as they, very idiosyncratically, are.
– The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1980), pp. 14-5