![]() ![]() A central concern of metaphysical literature is to reject viewing life as singular, meaningless, physical events. I see a continuity at least between figurative language on the one hand, which we might associate with the metaphysical poets or the imagery of metaphysical painting, and figurative narrative or composition, which we might find in a writer like Kafka. There is probably a gradient or continuum that moves from less to more metaphysical. “Literature can free us from the burden of living in a world made of lots and lots of small lies” It often employed classical imagery, almost like emanations from a collective cultural memory, but it subjected this to something like the logic or pregnant symbolism of dreams. Then in the early twentieth century there was metaphysical painting, representational art that assembled realist imagery into non-realist, even ‘surreal’, scenes and tableaus. By so doing they performed an original synthesis of various sides of life-bodily and spiritual, earthly and transcendent. In the seventeenth century there were the metaphysical poets, who wrote in extravagant analogies and metaphors that yoked diverse parts of experience together through farfetched comparisons. I think it’s helpful to consider what we have called ‘metaphysical’ at different times. It takes place largely in a world we recognise, not an invented past or imagined future, but it gradually leads us to understand its events in more than a literal sense: to see them as manifestations of psychological experiences or philosophical dilemmas. ![]() But for me the metaphysical is not predominantly fantasy, science fiction, or allegory. ‘Metaphysical’ is trickier because it can mean different things to different people, and I won’t suggest that my definition is how everyone needs to see it. And it must deliver some resolution that feels fitting to the mystery, although this doesn’t have to be resolution on the level of plot. For me, a thriller is any gripping story with a mystery at the core that we want resolved. Well, I think the idea of the thriller is simpler-we can dispatch that quickly. What is a metaphysical thriller? And why might we want to read one? Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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