The Sense of Open-Endedness in the Ancient Novel

Of the many fictions academics foist upon unsuspecting students, the most transparent is surely the principle that the first step in producing a written composition is to prepare an outline. The assumption behind this advice is that one should somehow have finished the entire composition before actually beginning to articulate it in writing, so that it can be brought forth whole, with all the parts organically connected to each other. But anyone who has ever written anything knows that one of the best ways to defeat the blank page is to plunge in somewhere with some general idea and see where that beginning leads. After something has taken shape, it is then possible to reflect on the outcome and produce an outline or, better yet, an introduction that recasts the entire writing process as a teleological one aimed at what is now known to be the actual telos. What interests me here is the analog that exists between this notion of how texts ought to be composed and the practice of reading by literary critics. For the assumption that texts are brought forth as a