There’s a manner of presenting ideas in fiction that corresponds roughly to Yeats’s claim that man can embody truth but cannot know it. A story can embody thoughts it never spells out. So we take Kafka’s work to be saying all sorts of things – about God or his absence, about the general predicament of modernity – that it never actually says. It’s this kind of suggestive reticence that Eliot was reacting to when he remarked that Henry James had a mind so fine no idea could violate it. Along its outer border, the desire not to state ideas explicitly approaches the desire not to have them, as expressed by Flaubert’s ideal of a book about nothing.

LRB 5 April 2012 | PDF Download