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Dear M.F., I think the original discussions was about some statements by Nadezdha Mandelstam, where she attempted to characterize Osip M's sense of the "imperative command" of the poetic voice (muse?) as something different from what she called literature and fiction. I tried to elaborate on that by pointing out M's own "charismatic" compositional process - he prided himself on "composing with the voice" rather than writing on paper, for one thing. My point was that this is a case of the difference between oral poetry - embodied in the presence of an actual living person, singing - and writing, which imposes a distance and an objectivization (the book) between the poet and the poem. The Iliad and the Odyssey are not simply paradigmatic epic poems, but also paradigmatic fictions, instituting many of the narrative techniques that would later be used in prose. Homer's genius was to make shapely fictions out of the matter & procedures of oral poetry. Later epics like Virgil's Aeneid or Milton's Paradise Lost were models of oral poetry at a third remove - imitations of the Greek epics as the Greek epics were "imitations" of oral poetry. It is in this sense that I think of literature as an attempted return to an original state of oral composition, a recursive process which is thematized again and again, beginning with the nostalgia of the primary texts (Bible, Greek epics), to the state of nostalgia/exile expressed in the later re-formations and imitations of these primary texts. The original state - the source of Mandelstam's sense of the "imperative voice" - is the process of improvised oral composition by a living poet before a living audience. The "command" to the singer to respond musically in a situation of collective immediacy is diametrically opposed to the notion of the scribe writing in private. Henry