IN has length THIS been elsewhere PAPER, historically I (see CONTINUE constituted" Going the by the Distance") and argument around that elaborated and American through at literature what greater so length elsewhere (see" Going the Distance") that American literature has been historically constituted by and around and through what so often can become effaced in foundational appropriations of human expe-rience and of human subjectivity in particular: namely, a constitutive space, at once dark, mysterious, unspeakable, that Joyce Carol Oates in a recent novel characterizes as

" the black hole in the firmament where God used to be...[and that, given their]'yearnings of infinitude/... Americans are likely to feel...[they] never grow out of"(Broke Heart Blues 92)

In a literature as self-referential as America's, I view this lettered space, moreover, as a radical locus of misrecognition-a space inveterately and omnivorously and indefatigably about the cultural work of distancing texts as various as novels, poems, stories, memoirs, even people themselves, from essences, origins, ends, and ultimate truths. In response to the ageold demand to describe what is life and what is death, the ancient female sage in Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize address a decade ago, we notice, is guardedly silent:" she does not [answer]; she keeps her secret; her good opinion of herself; her gnomic pronouncements; her art without commit-ment. She keeps her distance, enforces it and retreats into the singularity of isolation, in sophisticated, privileged space"(5; emphasis added). Let me suggest even further that the" sophisticated, privileged space," in Morrison's own words here, that opens up between the self and the