Defoeis an epic where images of -battle become meditations, an epic wherein events flap in silence as the narrative moves toward a place where the reader and text become one. The images of this fiction don't resemble events, but are new occurrences in time and space. In Part I, Waking Life, the heroine, in love with James Dean, discovers herself in a desert pocked with fires in which the "henna man"--a drug dealer--is being carried in a white cocoon. And throughout Scala-pino's work the reader is taken into a world where the written word creates "an event retrieved from so far back that it is separated from memory."