ABSTRACT
Years ago, after writing and then rewriting and then again rewriting a rather morbid, solipsistic, and thank God never-published novel, called Finishing Proust, I decided to attempt-simultaneously-two very different works of nonfiction. The first of these was a Foucauldian study of twentieth-century neatness. One premise of this would have been that Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Apollonian” character, together with Sigmund Freud’s “anal” character, had caused an epistemic shift in Western culture that had demonized obsessive order. That premise, though, I soon realized, is spurious.1
