Fiction is an Attempt to Control and Accept the World

The novel form to which I have devoted so much time, and still attempt, is no mere story (favored word of newscasters), nor dialogue among scene settings, nor anything "well made," nor a page turner, so called, but a visionary plunge into what cannot be kept out of the mind, a "tale" its vehicle, that vision its tenor. If we have not yet learned this from Broch and Proust, Lowry and Frame, Joyce and Woolf, Lezama Lima and Roa Bastos, we have not learned much at all. Fiction is an attempt to control and accept the world, perhaps a reminder to all readers, and therefore on the side of life, that those who bite the bullet need not eat the gun.

PAUL WEST