Aug
4
“I simply wish to argue that, in order to form an idea of the novel, it is necessary first to try and imagine what a fiction is, how it is possible and what attitudes it presupposes in those who become involved in it, whether they create it through writing or produce it through reading. It is perhaps the case that the novel tends in essence to be a fiction that contests itself as fiction, an imagined narrative that desperately, and by the most diverse paths, seeks to be reunited with the world and with the responsibility and seriousness of the world. If however, as I would argue, this tendency is constitutive of the novel in the sense that the novel could not abandon it and survive, it can only be understood and made meaningful within fiction and on the basis of fiction, against which it is pitted in an unremitting and hopeless struggle.”
from The Novel is a Work of Bad Faith (1947) by Maurice Blanchot (trans. Michael Holland)
