Question

For three decades, Arthur occupied the corner desk of the study, a space circumscribed by towers of draft paper and the rhythmic clatter of his Remington typewriter. Every evening, with a deliberation that resembled a solemn ritual, he unraveled the prose he had spent the daylight hours spinning, returning the manuscript to a heap of loose, disconnected clauses. His publishers, writing from their sleek offices in the city, called it a rare and noble perfectionism, a devotion to the craft that few modern writers possessed. To Arthur, however, the daily deletion was the only barrier keeping the end at bay. So long as the novel remained unfinished, the room remained a sanctuary, and the world outside—with its drafts, its cold wars, and its collapsing markets—could be safely ignored. Like Penelope at her loom, he wove his tapestry of words not to complete a final pattern, but to stave off the suitors of reality. For him, the endless cycle of composition and erasure was not an attempt to capture truth, but a mechanism of perpetual delay, transforming the act of creation into a fortress of absolute stasis.

In the context of the passage, the allusion to Penelope primarily serves to do which of the following?