ABSTRACT
Detachment, distance, segregation: These are words I’ve repeated now several times, and I’ve done so in in the hopes of conveying how unanticipated they are in oral narrative, if not downright intentionally and necessarily preempted. Yes, today we can muse for hours over a passage in Homer or analyze a character from Norse saga down to increasingly tinier and more abstracting bits. But this capacity and even relish to probe, parse, and dissect lengthy narrative as if we were lab technicians is thoroughly a derivative of what writing permits us.
