Process Imagining

Where the expert seeks to reduce the surplus of knowledge and would thus reduce profitable volatility-fiction turns toward the unknown without seeking to legislate or capitalize on its relation to the knowable; indeed, fiction precisely encourages the impact of the unknown as unknown on the known and its persistence therein. This is the ability to remain open, or “negative capability”-“of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason” that Keats famously identified as Shakespeare’s core talent (and found so lacking in Coleridge).

Fiction as Method, 24.