As with O’Connor, I had to think and write circumspectly around Faulkner, because he loomed so oppressively large in my consciousness. Some great writers are permissioning—that is, the more time you spend with them, the more permitted you feel to speak, to respond, to participate. But other great writers, whom one can read and return to with just as much or even greater pleasure, have the opposite effect. When I read Faulkner I find myself slipping into Faulknerian pastiche in my own writing and then going silent. So I must ration my reconnaissances.
I think the real legacy Faulkner left with me, which I dimly apprehended even before I wrote poetry, was mystagogy, that leading through mystery and revelation. Not an explanation—and therefore an exorcism or dispelling—of mystery and revelation: rather a leading-through. Faulkner performed that for me, at the time, in terms of a shared southern past, in ways no other writer did or could.
Julian Barnes, on Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels:
Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route maps. Instead of a journey through a city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. . . . Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does, except with greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in The Beginnings of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says, ‘There are no accidental meetings.’ The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is.
Philosophy in general knows two styles, the contemplative and the didactic, although there are many writers to whom neither belongs to the complete exclusion of the other. Those who practice the first let us into the secret workings of their minds and are less careful to send us away with a precisely formulated doctrine. Philosophy for them is a conversation, and, whether or not they write it as a dialogue, their style reflects their conception. Hobbes’s way of writing is an example of the second style. What he says is already entirely freed from the doubts and hesitancies of the process of thought. It is only a residue, a distillate that is offered to the reader. The defect of such a style is that the reader must either accept or reject; if it inspires to fresh thought, it does so only by opposition. And Hobbes’s style is imaginative, not merely on account of the subtle imagery that fills his pages, nor only because it requires imagination to make a system. His imagination appears also as the power to create a myth.
My impression is that most people would probably consider [C.S.] Lewis’ theological works to belong to the didactic rather than the contemplative style. Yet, in the course of studying his thought I have come to believe that this is far from true. If his fiction can be didactic as well as imaginative, his “standard” theology does far more than argue for certain propositions believed to be true. He is serious of course; for he has read his Plato well and knows that discussion of how a man ought to live is not trivial subject. And, indeed, he strives to present his theology consistently. But it is, he thinks, a consistent picture of an untidy world. The world as Lewis experiences it resists systematization—which is what we should expect from one who knows himself to be a pilgrim. (emphasis added)