He believes in them, he takes them seriously, just so far as he needs to in order to give them the fullest and profoundest expression. To the artist new experiences of “truth” are new incentives to the game, new possibilities of expression, no more.
Belief in fiction is always belief ‘as if.'” Wood follows this with an apposite and characteristically subversive quote from Thomas Mann: But is this a sufficient accounting for, say, Middlemarch-which Virginia Woolf described as one of the very few novels written for grown-ups-or The Golden Bowl, or Samuel Beckett’s Molloy? In his essay collection The Broken Estate, James Wood observes that “fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie, knows that at any moment it might fail to makes its case. At the simplest, we may observe that inside every adult there lives on a child who must have stories that thrill or soothe, and that even novels of the grandest seriousness are no more than elaborated fairy tales. What is fiction for? This is one of those questions-How does a compassionate God permit cruelty? What do women want? Why is there dandruff?-which are probably not susceptible of an answer but which yet continue to niggle.
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