David Larsen's going off on that tangent last week kind of mimics the interruptions that come between Adeline and the long-awaited reading of the manuscript. For a whole night and all the following day she is occupied with overheard conversations and the entreaties of the Marquis. Not til after the Warton epigraph does she get any alone time with it, finally giving us the novel's primal scene: "She now took it from the drawer in which it had been deposited, and, intending only to look cursorily over the first few pages, sat down with it by her bed-side."

And with this I want to get up and just dance away from Alli's readers. The subject of writing (and reading, its pal) is something the writers I most admire have written too well about already. Which I guess is why I admire them so much --starting with Chloe Chard, who begins her Introduction with the scene of Adeline and the manuscript, observing: "The reader of a work of Gothic fiction... is constantly urged onwards by that very emotion of 'curiosity' which, in Adeline's case, fails to conquer her fear of what she may discover if she reads further. In order to stimulate this response of curiosity, the moments of climactic horror and terror which the reader is led to anticipate are, in fact, regularly deferred: the dangers which threaten the heroine are continually averted, or displaced by new developments in the narrative. An article by Michel Foucault, 'Language to Infinity,' provides an analysis of this process of deferral as it operates in French eighteenth-century novels of terror, which is highly relevant to the English Gothic as well."

Now roll your eyes if you must at an introduction that can't get past p. 2 without a quote from Foucault. But if you think back to 1986 you'll find it's quite daring. And for our purposes here it's dynamite, because it's going to lead us to the "too-muchness" of writing and reading and why they're such hard habits to break. Yes I am writing this as a devoted student of Avital Ronell, who (in case you're wondering) never pushed Foucault all that hard in her class. But did I ever learn about the mise en abime: that vertiginous moment when the text dramatizes its own composition and consumption, as when Homer represents the performance of Homeric singers (cf. Od. 8.470ff). Or think of South Park and the self-reference made possible through the characters of Terrence and Phillip. Well that's what's going on with Adeline and the reading of her manuscript: the chronic deferrals, the mingled fear and fascination, the nighttime setting... In other words it's all about David Larsen, and anyone else made sleepless by Gothic captivity narratives consumed in bed. Scary, huh? Just wait til we read the manuscript together, because it's Murder Plus Theory Most Foul all week on The Ingredient --