I believe in the Republic. And when at last upon my settle bed I lie, brutally done to death by a surfeit of porter and Nana Mooney's griddle cake, I shall take the hand of comrade Dinny - by his side his brother Batt (hero of the Tullypass Ambush) - and gaze into their misty eyes and, weakly, but with fortitude, intone: "Weep not, boys, for this poor wretch - just to see to it his periodicals do not lapse, including An Phoblacht, The Sacred Heart Messenger, The Readers' Digest, Our Boys, Ireland's Own, Rod & Gun Monthly, Photoplay, The Spectator, The New Yorker, The New Statesman, Peoples' Friend, Men Only, Viz, Shoot!, Charles Buchan's Football Monthly, Fabulous 208, Criterion, Blackwood's Magazine, The Bell, New Review, and all the rest of them, and let me know when storming heaven for the repose of my soul whether Dr Who finally met his death at the hands of the Zarbies or not."

Which drags us by The Nose (and a Tarantino-esque edit) to the great Russian genius Gogol and the second part of his masterpiece, Dead Souls, which, it is generally agreed, was not quite up to scratch. It has been suggested that this is in some measure due to the author's self-declared obsession with "saving his country". It was his intention to reveal the mysterious substance, as he saw it, that lay buried deep in the Slav soul and by introducing "colossal figures" into his novel somehow prevent the lemming of his native country from hurling herself over a cliff. Except that in so doing, it was towards that abyss he succeeded in propelling both himself and his fiction. The "souls" or "serfs" of Dead Souls on which the whole of the Russian economy of his time was based, are today truly dead, while the characters in his novel have achieved immortality as universal human types. Such crusading notions (these days, I really must say it, whenever I hear the word "zeitgeist", I reach for a large rock - or shillelagh, if I feel like it - as I do when high priests of the chemical generation come spottily groaning about cowsheds and grannies and turf) can result in one's creations ending up not as living men but simply as pegs upon which to hang naive ideas on the complex and social problems of the time.

In his excellent book, On Moral Fiction, John Gardner has written of fiction and its essence being a matter of process rather than doctrine, pointing out - incredible as it may seem - that in Two Marriages, an early draft of Anna Karenina, Anna marries Vronsky. Gardner goes on to assert that what the good fiction writer does, in fact, is provide the reader with a dramatic equivalent of the intellectual process he himself went through. Writers, essentially, keep on tinkering until everything seems right. The "intrusion of the essayist" (in Gardner's words) is to be avoided at all costs.

From the age when my pudgy fingers could grasp a HB pencil, I have always considered the world a place of chaos, wild and exuberant although also dark and dangerous, and somehow, fiction a means of taming it, as, perhaps, did the Book of Genesis. Clearly, as Ireland was the first place into which I found myself tumbled, there must be something special and intimate, indeed precious about it for me. But it is only, ultimately, a tiny part of the Republic of the Soul. In the end, what matters is what Gogol called "the sound of hitherto untouched chords" and the style and matter and form employed in the search for this unborn music.

It is of little interest to me that Ireland as a country is wealthier now or that our trousers don't sag at the backside and that our politicians are hurtling towards a squeakiness that would make Mr Sheen proud. Puff-chested assertions that we can "now hold our heads up high" leave me cold, except to ponder why, if this is true, such stridency should be necessary. Pronunciations of "new dawns" and "eras" also tend to make me yawn.

I have always been of the opinion that the fictional chroniclers of epoch-making, glacial movements of history will tend to be authors who, when they first sat down at their desk, were convinced that their chosen subject involved being bitten by a crab at the age of seven or rejected by a woman at the age of 21, theirs among the first eyebrows to raise when it emerges their story is, in fact, about the displacement of millions and the collapse of empire. Re-reading Closely Observed Trains by Bohumil Hrabal, which I have just finished, did nothing to persuade me that I might be entirely wrong in this analysis, moving as it does between the hilariously gross misuse of a railway station's official stamps upon the telegraphist's anatomy and the horrifically poetic, silverlit bombing of Dresden.

And that is the reason why I still find myself stuck in the bog, fishing. The bog of the unconscious, that is, searching for "epiphanies", and such evolutionary moments as Tolstoy found when his Anna, to his amazement, committed suicide. For it is here, alongside, and against the backdrop of the sweep and swirl of history, that truth must be located.

At the time of writing, I am working on a chapter of a novel which is provisionally entitled Krakatoa, East of Java, a place of which, until last week, I had never heard, and which I have since discovered is actually west of Java, smugly liberating me to relocate it once again.

This is something which I fully intend to do, in the southernmost region of Co Cavan, to be exact, a place where until now they did not realise they had volcanoes (never mind deep-sea divers, claustrophobic inventors, strange sounds on the horizon or thousands of dead fish littering the ocean surface) as onward the characters plough, in both the tradition of Joyce and Charles Maturin - but also that of Melville, Poe and James - set free this world to ramble, from the Old Bog Road to Valparaiso back by Arva, Co Cavan, but knowing in their hearts that it is in the one which holds the greatest mysteries their quest will end (if it ever can), that place where the map is always changing - the tranquil, explosive, gentle yet horrific, permanently impermanent, ancient and post-modern, seductively insurgent Republic of the Soul.

Pat McCabe's most recent book is a collection of short stories, Mondo Desperado, published by Picador