"BAD PAPER: The Bursting of the Fiction Bubble"

read it here.

December 14, 2009

Considering "How Fiction Works" as a Painting

“You must push your head through the wall. It is not difficult to penetrate it, for it is made of thin paper. But what is difficult is not to let yourself be deceived by the fact that there is already an extremely deceptive painting on the wall showing you pushing your head through. It tempts you to say: ‘Am I not pushing through it all the time?’”

Franz Kafka

2 comments:

ROBERT GARLITZ said...

Brilliant.

How did you find this?

Edmond Caldwell said...

It is pretty great, isn't it? Phillipe Sollers uses this Kafka parable as the epigraph for his essay, "The Novel and the Experience of Limits" (which itself functions as a kind of an avant-la-lettre critique of Wood). It's in a translated collection of Sollers' early Tel Quel essays, Writing and the Experience of Limits, which is definitely worth reading if you can find it.