Douglas Shields Dix The Eternal Return

Annotation

The Eternal Return is not a novel. It has a narrative, a setting, characters & dialogue, but it is largely non-fiction. It is not a work of philosophy. It undertakes philosophizing, but it is not reducible to a specific philosophical school or doctrine. It is not a biography. It explores the period of Percy Bysshe Shelley's self-imposed exile in Italy, but employs a high degree of conjecture - opening gaps & fissures that are usually knit into a seamless continuity within a traditional biography. It is not an autobiography. While the protagonists have real-life correlates, they are merely tracings — like the shadows emerging out of an endless afternoon in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. It is not a work of literary criticism. It contains considerations of any number of literary works, but no academic analyses or comprehensive interpretations. It is not a work of socio-historical analysis. It reflects upon the period between 1789 & 1989, Enlightenment & Post-Enlightenment; Romanticism, Modernism & Postmodernism; Capitalism & Communism - but in a speculative and open-ended manner. The Eternal Return is none of the above, but it combines aspects of all of the above: it is in the margin between philosophical narrative & narrative philosophy - it is equally fiction & non-fiction, philosophy & literary narrative, literary criticism & socio-historical analysis, biography & autobiography, travelogue & poetry. Above all it is a reflection on time & eternity, memory & forgetting, love & loss.