While teaching a survey course in American literature some years ago, I encountered a truly puzzling student essay. In lectures, I had remarked (or thought I had remarked) that the Puritan Anne Bradstreet's poetry was generally apostrophic, that the occasions for her verses were usually a feeling of absence or loss. We noted her animal imagery in, for example, “In Reference to Her Children, 23 June, 1659.” One of the assigned essay topics asked students to discuss “either the importance of separation and absence or the use of animal imagery” in one or two of Bradstreet's poems. One student, apparently disregarding the word “either” and misreading a conjunction for a preposition, wrote about the absence of animal imagery in “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment.” Where the zodiacalastronomical conceit of the poem aptly expresses the paradox of feeling loneliness and unity simultaneously, the essay flatly stated that horses, chickens, and the like would be completely out of place. “I here, thou there, yet both but one”: indeed, what room is there between this couple for a symbolically charged buffalo, say, or even a wee fruit bat?

A comic misunderstanding, certainly— the absurdity of the argument rivals Monty Python, an astute literary theorist I will bring up again later in this essay— but it was not easy for this instructor to explain, in written comments returned with the paper, what was wrong with this approach, besides the easy initial chiding for not following instructions. Intuitively, perhaps, it makes more sense, is of clearer purpose, to discuss what is in a given poem than what is not, and words to this effect were what I wrote, with hesitation, to the student. That hesitation, however, has remained. Is the act of analysis necessarily predicated upon a subject invested with some sense of presence or even reality? To affirm such a definition lands the scholar of literature in a highly paradoxical position, since one who studies fiction studies events that did not happen, and in some instances, never could.