But if epiphany itself is a mirage, then the most authentic vocation of romance in our time would not be that reinvention of the providential vision invoked and foretold by Frye, but rather its capacity, by absence and by the silence of the form itself, to express that ideology of desacralization by which modern thinkers from Weber to the Frankfurt School have sought to convey their sense of the radical impoverishment and constriction of modern life.
