Just read Coetzee's review of Naipaul's Half A Life (the final essay in Inner Workings, a collection of articles about authors that have influenced Coetzee). What I take away from such articles nowadays varies in fundamental ways from the enthusiastic but finally callow appraisals of style that have marred my thought in the recent past; I have begun to understand, for example, that the primary function of a literary novel lies in the themes that surreptitiously inhabit it: what it is about, what it appears to be about, what it wants to be about. Style on the other hand does not seem a commodious enough vehicle to contain the separations between the social and individual that distinguish art from reality. Structure in a novel, by this token, can be interpreted as a desire to frame the more meaningful aspects of one's reality (a necessary combination of social events and individual thought and expression) while omitting those that do not appear to contain any meaning. Such a structure, far from being (as I previously felt) a vulgar attempt to make the art more 'presentable' to an audience, tokens a perhaps genuine desire to say what is meant. There is nothing inherently social in the desire to impart form to a formless reality; in fact, I feel now that this is more scrupulous an aspiration than a more obviously individual, specious subversion that is a hallmark of the stylistic writer.
(From a journal entry dated January 7.)