Language, the unending dishevelled calculating intelligence of Dostoevsky’s prose, dissolves the picture instead of creating it.
This is more like most living, a closer representation of actual consciousness, which cannot perform art’s godlike feat of immortalising days and events, objects and people.
In life, we could say, things only seem to happen, whereas in fiction they really do. The novel has come to feel guilty about this art (the guilt may even be the symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds.
This is more like most living, a closer representation of actual consciousness, which cannot perform art’s godlike feat of immortalising days and events, objects and people.
In life, we could say, things only seem to happen, whereas in fiction they really do. The novel has come to feel guilty about this art (the guilt may even be the symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds.
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