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PARTISAN REVIEW
indeed he is rich in all the virtues that today's man, sad, shackled,
and weary, lacks . He is close to us as a model, because of his merrily
curious spirit, his amiable skepticism, his faith in tomorrow and in
man; and also because of his way of writing, so alien to genres and
rules. Perhaps we can trace back to him and his Abbey of Thelma
that manner, which is triumphant today and so evident in Sterne
and Joyce, of "writing as you please," without codes or precepts,
following the thread of imagination, just as out of spontaneous
necessity a carnival procession winds along, different and surprising
at every turn. He is close to us, chiefly because in this boundless
painter of terrestrial joys we perceive the permanent, firm con–
sciousness matured through many experiences that not all of life is
here.
It
would be difficult to find a single melancholy page in all of
his work, and yet Rabelais knows human misery ; he is silent about it
because , also a good physician when he writes, he does not accept it,
he wants to heal it:
Mieulx est de Tis
que
de larmes escrire
Pour ce
que
rire est Ie propre de l'homme.
II.
After thirty-five years of apprenticeship and camouflaged
or open "autobiographism," I decided one day to step over the em–
bankment and try to write a novel without paying too much atten–
tion to the ongoing polemic as to whether the novel is alive or dead ,
and, if alive, whether it is in good health. Now that the enterprise is
accomplished, and the book printed and in the bookstores, I have
the agreeable impression of returning from an exotic trip, and like
all those who return I want to tell about the things I've seen and
"show the slides" to friends . It is well known that sometimes during
those unasked-for exhibitions friends get bored; if so, in this case
they have only to turn the page .
What does one feel when writing about invented things? Writ–
ing about things seen is easier than inventing, and less joyful. It is
writing-describing: you have a trail, you dig into your close or dis–
tant memories, put the specimens in order (if you have a talent for
it), catalogue them, then you pick up a kind of mental camera and
snap: you can be a mediocre, good, or even "artistic" photographer;
you can ennoble the things you portray, or report them in an imper–
sonal, modest, and honest manner, or, on the contrary, give them a
