Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel: "Every novel says to the reader: ”Things are not as simple as you think.” That is the novel’s eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and lock it off.

“For Musil," Italo Calvino recalls in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, "knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude-or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality –while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos. Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands…”

“the art of the novel relies on our ability to believe simultaneously in contradictory states,” says Orhan Pamuk in The Naïve And the Sentimental Novelist.

J.M.Coetzee makes a similar point as he concludes his exchanges with consultant clinical psychologist Arabella Kurtz (The Good Story, Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy). This is the second 'intellectual engagement' between them. The first titled ‘Nevertheless, my sympathies are with the Karamazov’s’ was published in the journal Salmagundi.

“As a genre," Coetzee says, "the novel seems to have a constitutional stake in the claim that things are not as they seem to be, that our seeming lives are not real lives. And psychoanalysis, I would say, has a comparable stake.”

Instead of following a ‘linear train of thought’ Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz-- starting with `a well-shaped story versus telling the true story,' poetic and pragmatic truths, memories (procedural and episodic), consciousness, remorse et al--  pursue lines of thinking without always knowing where they will lead in the hope that they may here and there ‘open a new or unusual perspective on the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and on the psychotherapeutic project in its wider social forms.'

Here's an illuminating observation Arabella Kurtz makes: “You write about an objective or a transcendent truth, a truth outside or above the realm of human understanding. I am working on the basis of a subjective and an intersubjective truth, a truth to experience, which is what I believe to be at issue when one is trying to help a patient who is suffering. People come for psychotherapy because they feel dreadful and are in subjective distress, not because they do not know if God exists or how to read the weather...”

This is one of the books I'm presently re-reading.