26
PARTISAN REVIEW
your reader?) , love, wealth, and genius. But only in the abstract,
because you are tied to them more than it may seem.
Every one of these phantasms is born from you, has your
blood, for good or evil.
It
is your bloom. Worse , it is a spy assigned
to you, reveals a part of you, your tensions , like those glass tassels
that are used to reveal whether a crack in the wall is bound to grow
wider. They are your way of saying "I": when you make them move
or speak, reflect on what you are doing for they might say too much .
Perhaps they will live longer than you, perpetuating your vices and
errors .
The characters of a book are in truth strange creatures. They
have neither skin nor blood nor flesh, they have less reality than a
painting or a nocturnal dream, they have no substance but words ,
black doodles on a white sheet of paper, and yet you pass the time
with them, converse with them through the centuries, hate them,
love them, fall in love with them. Every one of them is a depository
of certain rights, and knows how to enforce them, have them recog–
nized. Your freedom as author is only apparent .
If,
once having con–
ceived your homunculus, you thwarted it, if you want to impose on
him a gesture contrary to his nature, or forbid him an act which will
be congenial to him, you meet with resistance, muted but indubita–
ble : as if you tried to command your hand to touch a red-hot iron or
an object which repells you (or it) . He, the nonexistent, is there-he
is, he weighs, pushes against your hand : wants and does not want ,
silent and stubborn . If you persevere, he becomes morose . He with–
draws , ceases to collaborate with you , to prompt you with his lines;
he loses body, becomes flat, thin , white . He is paper and turns back
into paper.
There also is another way in which your freedom of invention is
apparent. Just as it is impossible to transform a real person into a
character, that is , fashion an objective undistorted biography of him,
so it is impossible to perform the reverse operation, to coin a char–
acter without pouring into it not only your moods as the author but
also fragments of people you have met or of other characters.
The first impossibility is demonstrated by thousands of years of
literature . The success of the written portrait is always limited , even
in the best texts : the entire
Odyssey
is not enough to give us the image
of Ulysses, but not even in the novel in the classic mode, or in the
straight biography, where the author strives to describe for you the
height of his subject, the color of his hair, eyes, and complexion ,
