Over at Granta, Greg Jackson thinks about fiction in contrast with nonfiction, and how writers choose to write fiction precisely because they do not know exactly what they want to say, although it is expected that they do and are hiding it. He goes on to explore the process of achieving meaning, or at least the implication of meaning, in writing:
What may distinguish literature is it may offer us a method to investigate and arrive at points where the pregnancy of meaning is as great as the meaning itself is unnamable. The more accurate the word, the less it means—until at last we reach the proper name, the totem meant to encompass the full being, meaning precisely nothing in itself.
