[Let] us postulate one overriding function of this contraption called V., namely to call attention to history not as a nightmare from which we're trying to awake, but as a fantasy into which we've been mythically herded. It should be pointed out that V. proposes no history at all, not even a fake one, since to be historical is to be fictional in the least rewarding sense…. Such history-oriented fictions—and it makes no difference whether the history is personal or public, social or psychological—all accept the whims of chronology, the arbitrary daydream of events poised in sequence. Yet we have every reason to believe that this long-accredited view of the universe is as false as the Ptolemaic Disneyland it managed to replace, that it is only in our contrived histories of what never was that events could not stall into psychic tableaux, pockets of occurrence. Far...