To fictionalise is to bring closer, to join self with other for an hour or a day or a lifetime, and the attempt to bring closer distorts. If you remain true to the facts you cannot sustain the interest of the reader who wants fiction, and if there is too much imagination applied to the facts – well, witness what happened to David Malouf under the coruscating pen of Germaine Greer.

Fact is stranger than fiction. Raul Hilberg’s meticulously detailed accounts of the machinery of the holocaust make the inconceivable true; to fictionalise would leech the data of strength. Hilberg’s work is better than Sophie’s Choice if one wants to know about the holocaust, as is Primo Levi’s, and Levi’s lyrical non-fiction is better than his fiction. But unlike factual accounts, fiction can shape the facts, can drive them more directly to the heart, and it is this that imbues fiction with its power and persistence. Take Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. in which Hitler, now an old man, is given voice again, or Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl, both of them works of the imagination that were triggered by real events. These works approach horror in a way that has not become clichéd, and it is the fiction that makes the horror knowable. We seem immune to bodies stripped to the bone hurled one on top of another bouncing as they fall, but Ozick’s single baby hurled against the electrified fence of a concentration camp sets the reader’s flesh alight.

And what of Paul Celan’s Death Fugue?

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

It is the case of making horror and evil personal, which fiction (and I include much poetry under the term) can do, and if it is personal, it can be taken into the body, can become part of the fabric of understanding. But to reduce millions to one or two cases, does this mean the millions are forgotten?

I think not. Whether it is a limitation of fiction, or a limitation of mind, fiction does the single idea, the single event brilliantly. (A work of fiction is a natural hedgehog, to draw on Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay. ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ And if it is the dark event or the horrendous idea fiction does it best, for fiction is the work of the imagination and the imagination, in theory, has no limits. The imagination, in practice, falling short as it does so often in the course of everyday life, has become something else – a scrap of human functioning sclerosed by habit, made brittle by routine.

The imagination when left to its own devices is fuelled by passion – bloodied passion, perfumed passion, clenched-fist passion, soothing passion. Take the passion out of imagination and one is left with bland predictability – pretty enough, but if it is prettiness one is seeking there is plenty of chocolate box art to satisfy that need.

In the past year there has been a flurry of essays on the various passions, beginning with a book on the deadly sins. The sins were passions – passions as illicit pleasures. (Recall Pushkin: ‘Whatever threatens us with doom / hides in itself, for mortal hearts, / unspeakable pleasures ...’) So much writing about passion, and I am suspicious, as if we are trying to convince ourselves that we have not lost touch with it, with its essence, as if we want to deny that passion has been squeezed into a G-string and put between the sheets, or dyed a lurid pink for display at a rock concert. The truth is that as fuel to our everyday lives and as the motivating force to fiction passion has been depleted.

The domain of the imagination can be anything and is often not pretty. As it happens, when the imagination turns itself to fiction it is the dark side, the underbelly of people and events, that it does so well. Fiction has always fed on the transgressive. Take Euripides’ The Bacchae. Ignore the imagination at your peril is the message of the play, embrace it without reason and you are similarly doomed. The narrative is tight, corrosive and unforgiving, slamming against the Judeo-Christian ethos so familiar to us. Cadmus, Dionysus’s grandfather, provides a reasoned and elegiac repentance for ignoring the gods, yet still he is punished; as for Pentheus’s mother, who unwittingly kills her son, her punishment is ferocious. In our own times, confession, whether to priest or therapist, qualitatively changes the deed and lets us off the hook, but in The Bacchae, wrong is wrong. If this idea were expressed in journalism, it would be condemned as opinionated, as dogma, but in fiction it is revenge or justice, in fiction it finds a home. As can anything: slaughter, torture, perversion.

Bron Nicholls’s recent novel, Reasons of the Heart, is centred on a relationship between an adolescent boy and an adult man, a loving relationship and a sexual one. Fred, the older of the two, is a paedophile, the target of police campaigns and newspaper features, but in Bron Nicholls’s fiction Fred, although often weak and unworldly, is not portrayed as immoral. In journalism, Fred would be a cardboard cutout of evil; in fiction he has flesh on his bones, he breathes and bleeds, and through the seductive pull of fiction the mind of a man who is attracted to young boys is revealed. Fiction can do anything: mothers can kill their babies, men can have sex with boys, murderers can strip their victims of skin, children can be evil.

It has been argued that fiction can get away with murder by virtue of being fiction, that anything can be said because it is not true. This argument ignores the essence of fiction as a human product from human imagination. We have a dark side, we have a wild, unfettered, fleshy, flaying, leering violence in us all, call it Dionysian, call it the id, call it what you will, but it is there, and it is found in the best of fiction and the best of readers. Without its Bacchanalian rorts, the fictive imagination is shrivelled grey flesh.

There is a type of sensibility that can embrace the novel in all its potential. It is a particular imagination, one that does not seek to amputate itself, one that includes not only the Panglossian but also acknowledges the dark and is drawn to it. Imagination cannot be fettered and still be imaginative; imagination is that part of us that roams free, that fossicks in the filth as well as the bed of roses. Imagination is fuelled by passion, by hate as much as love, by fear as much as courage.

The Judeo-Christian ethos has encouraged art to serve truth and goodness – either directly through alabaster – skinned figures with gauze – covered genitals or indirectly through allegory and moral tales. But one has to question the morality of the imagination, to acknowledge that when given its head (and what is imagination when not given its head?) it is essentially amoral. Tsvetaeva was not the first writer to acknowledge this, but she puts it well:

Artistic creation is in some cases a sort of atrophy of conscience – more than that: a necessary atrophy of conscience, the moral flaw without which art cannot exist. In order to be good (not lead into temptation the little ones of this world), art would have to renounce a fair half of its whole self. The only way for art to be wittingly good is – not to be.

If we ask where are our modern-day Dantes, our modern-day Kafkas, where the black-edged gaze of an Emily Brontë, then what we are truly seeking are not literary icons but the blood-stained imagination, imagination that has not lost its nerve. If we complain we lack books that change lives, then it is the pretty story we are complaining about. Or the weak imagination. For to connect with imaginative works one must have a lively imagination oneself. How else can one reader pronounce The Volcano Lover a good enough read while another claims it will change the course of the modern novel? And when one reader crudely dismisses Anita Brookner as a women’s novelist and another lauds her for her cutting characterisations, it is the quality of the reader’s imagination that demands scrutiny.

The imagination has been forced underground in our present era of control and categorisation. All too easily the mysterious, the dark and the difficult are classified and dispatched into pre-defined pigeon-holes and are thereby watered down, transformed. That the imagination has survived to poke its head above ground in the art of a Juan Davila, or the music of a John Adams, or the fiction of a Sontag or Patrick White, says as much about the tenacity of the imagination as the limits of any orthodoxy. Such an efficient system of simplified knowledge and still the imagination exists, and yet if the impetus to order were less successful we would have more imaginative work.

Bourdieu explored the concept of cultural capital, but what about imaginative capital? Is the purse empty? Or has it simply been lost, mouldering in cobwebs and dust behind the second TV and the sound system, or crushed in the rubble of thundering feet running to the latest spectacle? What about the ‘quiet clamour of print’, as Cynthia Ozick calls it? What about the novel of ideas? And· the political novel? Historically, the novel has taken as one of its primary concerns a meshing of the private with the public, ‘the body with the body politic’ (George Steiner), but given CNN, is there any point in devoting a week to what can be contracted to a news bite?

We live in mean and violent times; these days more than any other the horrors of distant places and foreign peoples are brought home to us. Such a steady supply of the stuff there hardly seems any time to reflect on it. But when we stop, when we turn down the babble, turn away from the bars and coffee shops, do we want the patient rendering of horror that the novel can do so well? Do we want and can we afford to live with fiction that forces an examination of our lives and the world in which we live? It is not just the substance of fiction that must be considered here, but the dynamic of fiction. The printed word allows a tampering with time. The reader can look up from the page, stare out the window, relive scenes or thoughts presented in the novel, can make them deeper and sharper, can bring his/her own imagination to transform and extend and make connections, and an hour later return to the book having been changed. The novel allows time for understanding, it proceeds at the reader’s speed, responsive to the reader’s knowledge. The novel, arising from passions of the mind, finds a home in passionate inquiry.

The novel has never had a single purpose or single reach. Alongside the political novels of Orwell and Gordimer, the social novels of Wharton and Zola, and the dark humanity of a Mann and a Nabokov, there are the novels that provide escape. Each period has its Mills and Boons, its Wilbur Smiths. But the need to escape, to find comfort, has picked up speed in recent times. We go to therapy to feel better, we sleep to feel better, we sit in the shade of a tree attached to our walkmans to feel better, and if someone shoves a modern-day Euripides in our hands, will we thank them? And alongside the desire to feel better, which is, in fact, to feel nothing at all, is the desire for order, for predictability. Imaginative inquiry, which is what imaginative fiction demands of us, is not only hard work, it is also a stepping into the unknown. These days, there is little time and even less inclination for such adventures.

In order to justify what they do, writers have always puzzled these issues – and if they have not, are alive to attacks of have self-indulgence. What is new is the context of the times, the ways in which we define the creative forces of the late twentieth century. Rather than the ‘quiet clamour of print’ we are assailed with electronic music, computer-generated graphics, endless TV. In the visual arts and music, modern technology has, in some ways, extended the free-wheeling imagination, but it has also facilitated the production of increasing amounts of derivative work. A major exception is contemporary ‘serious’ music. Passion as fuel to the imagination seems to be most readily understood in music. It is a passion that drives the musical imagination in all directions, to the minimalism of a John Cage, the rhythmic wonderland of a Xenakis, the heart-stopping harmonies of a John Adams, the eerie sound shadows of a Liza Lim. It is as if we are more willing to give music a mortgage on the soul, give it possession of that part of us that cannot be confronted full on. That, and the fact that music, non­linguistic sound, can make its own meanings and is not confined by the rules of syntax and semantics. Consequently, music has forged ahead, fuelled by imagination and riding high on the new technology. Drive language to the edge and it becomes gibberish  – Finnegans Wake probably took it as far as it could go; but keep it safe, well, witness what happened in Nazi Germany, or separate structure from semantics to a point where meaning is lost, then literature is killed – not left to die, but killed.

I make no redemptive claims for art; after all, art never saved anyone. The Nazis listened to their Bach and Beethoven in the evenings and went out and murdered in the morning; art never saved anyone. But it does have the capacity to make people think.

In 1787 Goethe wrote, ‘I too believe that humanity will win in the long run. I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into a huge hospital where everyone is everyone else’s humane nurse’. The therapeutic state that Goethe predicted is upon us. The desire for nurses to guide us through the rocky times, to wipe away our tears when we fall, to bandage our wounds, to administer anaesthesia, is far more pervasive than the desire to understand why we fall and why it hurts and whether anyone else is falling too. Imaginative writing, writing that makes us think, plays nursemaid to no one. And yet if people do not want to know, if people do not want to do the work, can such writing find a home?

The changing nature of contemporary culture seems to be unpicking the seams of fiction and remaking it into something else. Consider the book of the month: the book as commodity. Consider Madonna’s Sex: the book as spectacle. Once the book becomes spectacle it is difficult to take it seriously any more; like television, its very form trivialises. Consider the remark of a friend of mine after my first novel was published: I’m putting together a book, too, she said, and so, she added, was her husband. Book as assemblage, as meccano. If putting together is what is wanted, why sit at a desk for years in search of sentences? Consider, too, the fate of a book in this age of individualism. The book is readily subsumed beneath the personality of the writer. Pity then the mouse who creates mountains, for his/her work will likely be doomed to obscurity, and, in these times, obscurity is failure.

I expect we should be grateful that literature is still being taught in schools and universities. But when we consider those courses where the text includes posters, advertising copy and bus tickets, there is cause for concern. There are bad theorists like there are bad novelists, indeed, good theorists are probably as rare as good novelists. The secondary discourse surrounding literature is a burgeoning industry the quantity of which can create a distance from the original work. But it is not only the quantity that is a worry, a good deal of this theorising seems to have only a weak connection with the primary work; rather than propelling the reader to the original source as does a theorist such as Steiner, the original work becomes lost in jargon-filled expositions which are often mechanistic, didactic and prejudiced. Imaginative literature is already fighting to be heard above the cacophony of contemporary culture, but when the attack comes from within its own household what ensues threatens both parties. Good theory amplifies literature, bad theory, riding high on the sound of its own voice, leads to a silencing of the imagination.

So what of the intrinsic power of imaginative writing? These days, when it comes to the darker side of the human psyche, it is the genre forms – thrillers, science fiction and the like  – not literature that claim the territory. When literary novelists attempt similar transgressions the protests are shrill as if those writers are expected to play it safe. Margaret Atwood has felt the ire of certain feminists for both Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride, and similarly Joyce Carol Oates for her recent girl-gang book. Both Oates (Because It ls Bitter and Because It Is My Heart) and Lessing (The Fifth Child) have been criticised for writing books about evil children. But surely all those thrillers about pretty blond children possessed by the devil or about women who kill are dealing with similar issues.

The genre form protects its novels from serious consideration while at the same time allowing them more moral scope. In fact, the genre reader would be disappointed if the horror that is, for example, associated with the thriller were absent. But it is horror presented, according to the genre’s convention, in a predictable and manageable fashion. When horror comes in an unexpected form from the pen of a contemporary ‘literary’ writer it is destabilising and disturbing, it makes people nervous and they want to resist it. So they try to despatch it into safe little boxes with labels like anti-feminist or socialist idealism, or trivialise it by claiming it is not up to the author’s usual standard. In short, the fictive imagination is sabotaged.

If literature is to survive it has to assert its rights to the imagination, it has to take the same risks as Juan Davila. There cannot be a polite compromise, and no pragmatic pacts to be made, only a reaching hard and deep into the crevices of the imagination. Literature needs to flaunt itself, and in so doing can borrow from the genre forms. Literature must exploit the visceral aspects of art, the imagination made flesh. For after all, as Tsvetaeva wrote, ‘Art is a temptation, perhaps the last, subtlest, most insuperable of the earth’s seductions, that last cloud in the last sky’ – and is worth preserving.