The only way of being a demiurge is to fashion a material world out of the one already on hand, not allusively but close-up, so much so that things the words denote seem right on top of the words, on top of the reader too. The ideal is to create a complex verbal world that has as much presence, as much apparent physical bulk, as the world around it. So you get it both ways: the words evoke the world that isn't made of words, and they - as far as possible -enact it too. The prose, especially when it's purple, seems almost to be made of the same material as what it's about.

This is an illusion, to be sure, but art is illusion, and what's needed is an art that temporarily blots out the real. So, reading Thomas Mann's description in ''The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man'' of a delicatessen window should, for a while, be nearly the same as staring into a comparable deli window in Manhattan. It's when the words blot out the real, and displace it, that prose comes into its own, conjuring, fooling, aping, yet never quite achieving the impression that, in dealing with an elephant, it is actually working in elephant hide. There lingers always, just out of view, on the conjectural fringe of vision, the fact that what's going on is verbal. The prose will not turn to the sun, like a plant, or wither without actually falling off its stem, or spawn tapeworms in its interior. Yet it has mass, texture and shape. It calls into play all the senses, and it can interact at the speed of ionization with the reader's mind. HOW extraordinary: our minds loll in two states, ably transposing words into things, things into words. What goes on in this hybrid mental shuttling to and fro is something passive but active, a compromise in affairs of scale, dimension and abstraction. The phrase ''teddy bear'' is smaller than the toy animal, which in turn is smaller (usually) than the big bear from the wilds; is almost entirely flat (a printed phrase stands up a little from the surface it is printed on); and lacks physical attributes conspicuous in any bear. The words represent, but they also re-present, and when the wordsmith turns to purple various things happen. The presence of the supervising wordsmith becomes more blatant, but the objects being presented in words have a more unruly presence. They bristle, they buzz, they come out at you.

Purple isn't quite onomatopoeia, whose modern meaning is different from what it meant in Greek. Now it means making a word sound like its referent (''hiss,'' ''crack,'' ''cuckoo''), but it used to mean ''word coining,'' which is wider. When it isn't just showing off, purple is phrase coining, an attempt to build longish units of language that more or less replicate sizable chunks of Being in much the same way as the hiss-crack-cuckoo words mimic a sound. There is language that plunges in, not too proud to steal a noise from Mother Nature, and there is language that prides itself on the distance it keeps from nature. Then there is purple, which, from quite a distance, plunges back into phenomena all over again, only to emerge with a bigger verbal ostentation.

This plunge is almost like revisiting our ancestors. After all, words must have begun as acts of abstract approximation, a simultaneous closeness and removedness that nabbed the essence of a thing in a shout, a grunt, a hiss, but partly in order to refer to it in general. Take the word ''muscle,'' for instance, which comes from some Roman's impression that when a muscle flexes, a small mouse -a musculus - seems to be running underneath the skin. We have all but lost that mouse, and I am not saying that purple will retrieve it; it might, it might not, depending on how much etymology the purplist has. But purple will perhaps restore the shielded, abstracted modern reader to that more atavistic state of mind in which the observer can imagine a subcutaneous mouse. It is not a matter of coming up with new words, but fiercer - of coming up with new and more imposing combinations of words.

Purple is certainly a long way from the clinical doting on particulars we find in the French New Novel, but is quite near to Latin American magical realism, which is both a literary and a sociological thing. What might seem a literary flight of fancy exists already in part of Brazil, where birth certificates actually name freshwater dolphins as the fathers of certain children. Purple relishes that sort of thing, zeroing in on it or concocting it as part of the thing it loves to make: a paste as thick as life itself, a stream of phenomena delighted in for their own sake. And it is not a matter of inventing something out of nothing, for that cannot be done; everything is derivative, so there is no getting away from what might be thought the bases of life, of art. The farfetched always takes you home again, never mind how strained its combinations, how almost unthinkable its novelties. The color we have never seen, the smell we have never smelled, the mind we have never known, can only be made from the colors, the smells, the minds, we already know.

I am suggesting that purple prose reminds us of things we do ill to forget: the arbitrary, derivative and fictional nature of language; its unreliable relationship with phenomena (''cuckoo'' is close, but ''indri,'' meaning ''look!'' in Malagasy, got tagged on to the monkey of that name by mistake); its kinship with paint and voodoo and gesture and wordless song; its sheer mystery; its enormous distance from mathematics and photography; its affinities with pleasure and luxury; its capacity for hitting the mind's eye - the mind's ear, the mind's very membranes - with what isn't there, with what is impossible and (until the very moment of its investiture in words) unthinkable.

All this may sound like the latest variant of the old Classical-versus-Romantic quarrel, and maybe it is; but, even more, it is the quarrel between those who know what literature is allowed to be and those who want to let it evolve. If you write in stripped-down prose, you will probably do better commercially than if you, as the idiom has it, indulge yourself. What's a self for, anyway? For every hundred people with a hair-trigger response to what they think excessive, there are a few with a hair-trigger response to prose stripped down. The objection is empirical, not moral. It says life is infinitely more complex and magical than we will ever know unless we stop trying to pin down feeling in pat little formulas or sentences so understated as to be vacant, their only defense the lamebrain cop-out that, because they say so little, they imply volumes.