Even Faulkner had a sense of Nelson's archive delirium: "It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's." The William Faulkner Home Page has news, excerpts, and commentaries on the author's life and work.

Nelson's thoughts about versioning, backtracking, comparing, etc., seem more useful perhaps to lawyers, architects, and anatomists than to fiction writers, but then fiction writers are also structure-building anatomists with heads full of specious arguments, so in various ways they apply here, too. The history of a text's development is for the most part only temporarily useful to the artist, unless the very theme of his work is backtracking from tree to seed, but as a text metamorphoses there is often a lot of advance-and-retreat motion between "versions" ("drafts") which can be helped by easy-to-see intercomparisons. As described, it is more a building tool than a mode of presentation, but one can well imagine fictional texts which interlink a variety of "models" of a given "event" (Faulkner's perspectivism comes to mind) and provide the reader with versioning browsing tools.