particles and waves

Harold Bloom's thesis is that no literary creation is truly original. All writers revise what other writers have written. He posits a series of six revisionary 'ratios' whereby this revision process takes place. Each of the ratios is based on a different trope. Tropes are like figures of speech - ways of conveying meaning by expressing things that aren't literally true. The most well-known tropes are similes and metaphors.

Tropes are the fundamental building blocks of all communication. Even that sentence contains the trope of metaphor because tropes are not really building blocks at all. And 'that sentence contains' is another trope because a sentence can't literally contain anything.

Irony is another trope. The word 'literally' is one of the most ironic words, because when something is strictly and objectively true, we say it is 'literally' true. So, the literal and the literary are opposites.

Consider a story, any story. When a character in a story says that something about that story is true, it's ironic (whether or not the writer is deliberately being ironic) because, of course, it's not true because it's happening in a story. But it's still true in some sense because in the world of the story it's true.  Irony works because of the quantum nature of reality. Contradictory conditions can both exist. It happens more than you realize. We think, that can't possibly be right, only because our limited intelligence can't comprehend it.