I LEFT the University of Chicago symposium called "Narrative: The Illusion of Sequence" last October exhilarated and depressed (even my emotions were expressing themselves in binary opposition). The meetings were fully subscribed-indeed, many who applied were turned away-and all ten sessions and ten panel and open discussions were fully attended. The two and a half days were tightly packed with people and ideas. None of the presentations seemed offhand or warmed-over; all those who gave papers took their roles seriously: Paul Ricoeur with high seriousness, Frank Kermode with urbane seriousness, Seymour Chatman with somewhat nervous seriousness, Hayden White with casual seriousness, and Jacques Derrida with seriously playful seriousness. Even Ursula LeGuin's brilliant, half-extemporaneous narrative fiction about the nature and function of narrative, and about the symposium itself and its cast of characters, was seriously responsible-and demonstrated once more that writers are the mistresses, critics the maids (pace the unblushing maiden Bloom). The panel was responsive and responsible (I thought Barbara Herrnstein Smith particularly pointed, probing, and forceful), though it allowed itself to be too restricted, I felt, to the focus of the papers (which was in many respects narrower than and not always relevant to the announced topic of the meeting). The audience, on the rare occasions when it was given a chance to participate, was also serious, engaged-and narrowly focused. Whence, then, the depression? It was not merely a letdown from the sixty hours of high intensity. It was not, I finally decided, my disappointment in the failure of the symposium to debate the issue of sequentiality-illusory or not-directly, seriously, concretely, sequentially, or consequentially-a subject central to a seminar I had just finished teaching and one that is addressed so challengingly in Meir Sternberg's Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, which I had just finished reading. It was instead, I concluded as I was leaving Chicago and the "middest," the insistent formalism, for all its varieties, that dominated the conference. Was it the presence of the absent Wayne Booth? or the present of the past Aristotle? Virtually