When, in the last paragraph of Pym's narrative, fallouts of whiteness begin to cover the escape canoe, the captured islander, Nu-Nu, expires. Flying high above the linked gorges they decode the lithic lettering below and translate it in their cry. We also should try to read in the same way, not literally, at word-level, but from a height, looking down metaphorically, as we do physically. Only thus can the spirit of the text be discerned. Pym's last adventure, in symbolizing a page of writing, tells us that literature borrows from the material world only in order to call attention to itself.
Fiction is about itself.
Ricardou's prose is not without its own opacities, but my first reaction after reading his essay was to feel exhilarated rather than wearied. Right or wrong, this is the work of an unusually agile intelligence. Yet even if one objects to the thesis in its entirety there are insights incidental to it that certainly reward examination. Though admiring the essay as a whole, I can see at least two important grounds for dissent. For him it is the key passage in the enigmatic text.