In Fein’s car—a 1959 Mercedes-Benz, deep blue exterior, pale and slightly soiled beige interior—parked at the edge of an anonymous woods, in a damp snowfall; in room 14-C of the Shamrock Motor Inn some ten or twelve miles from the university; in the stately old dining room of the university’s faculty club; in Fein’s dim-lit study, where damp and cold exuded from the floorboards, and his antiquated space heater clicked noisily on and off, radiating a singularly dry heat. Sometimes the quarrel seemed to be about the fact that Fein wanted her with him (“at his side,” “close by his side”) more and more frequently, at his convenience; sometimes it was about the fact that Marya was lonely, Marya was ill-treated, Marya was feeling distinctly unloved and unwanted. (“You derive pleasure from pushing me closer and closer to the edge, don’t you,” Marya accused him. She made fists, dug her nails into her flesh, heard the childish whine in her voice and hated him the more for it. “You want me to be like yourself, a form of yourself, don’t you!” she whispered fiercely. She had no idea what she was saying, the words simply tumbled out. It was sheer passion, sheer despair. And of course Fein comforted her. He was enough of a gentleman, yet enough of a lover, to know how to comfort her.)

Marya’s quarrel with Fein in the faculty club was low-pitched but hardly less passionate. Fein had invited her to have lunch with him and a colleague of his in Comparative Literature—a well-known critic of contemporary French literature and culture with whom Marya had not yet studied but one day would. The man was Fein’s age but portly, ruddy-faced, resolutely cheery, provocative. He and Fein discussed the possibility of a uniquely structural analysis of narratives, independent of meaning. For was not the very concept of meaning now outmoded, stale? the language of art being entirely self-referential, a language sui generis, linked to nothing beyond itself. Literature is comprised of such units as words and sentences—Flaubert, for instance, recognized the anguish of the situation and lamented ecstatically of having spent his life making sentences: separate, finite objects. As for the old notion of character as revealed by narrative, the naive prejudice that fiction is “about” real persons—even Aristotle had questioned it, saying that character is subordinate to action; there may be actions without “characters” in a narrative, but never characters without an action. Narrative is a matter of units—words, sentences—possessing weight in themselves in proportion as they are cleansed of meaning.