establish c. The analytical style rigidly separates reason from imagination, precision from imprecision. IN Life & Arts The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch spoke, in a 1978 interview, of "a certain cold clear recognisable voice" necessary to philosophy, one that has "a special unambiguousness and hardness about it". She might have added that it is a voice unsuited to reflecting the actuality of people's lives or "the close connexion of bliss and bale", as Henry James put it in his preface to What Maisie Knew (1897). The more novels I read at university, the more I felt that fiction was where truth was to be discovered. I seemed to experience Melville's "shock of recognition"; which is to say re-cognition , for it was there already, waiting to be reawakened -- the knowledge that some things, not least what it is that makes us human, can never be adequately expressed in conventional philosophical prose. It is not immediately obvious why this should be. From ancient times, philosophers have addressed the question of how best to live; which is also, quintessentially, the concern of storytellers everywhere, especially those engaged in "serious fiction". The pursuit of knowledge and truth -- this too is common ground, and if only Plato had seen it that way, he might not have banned the poets from his Republic. But Plato regarded the poets -- the forerunners of novelists -- as troublesome and lacking in the right kind of knowledge (not pure enough). They dealt in dangerous emotions