no interest in acquiring one. It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way.

I was also uninterested by what I knew of literary theory and history. It was a received idea in those days that "theory" was bad for writers, infecting them with a hostility toward language and making them turn out postmodern; and what did it have to offer, anyway, besides the reduction of a novel to a set of unpleasant facts about power structures, or the superficial thrill of juxtaposing Pride and Prejudice with the uncertainty principle? As for history, it struck me as pedantic, unambitious.