358
PARTISAN REVIEW
achieved the boring feat of only narrating true facts and describing charac–
ters whose biographies neatly fit their novels, my novels would not have
been, for all this, any less lying and any more true than they are now.
Because it is not the story which in essence decides the truth or lies of
a work of fiction, but the fact that this story is written rather than lived,
that it is made of words and not concrete experiences. Facts suffer a
profound change when they are transformed into words. The real fact–
the bloody battle that I took part in, the Gothic silhouette of the young
woman that I loved-is one, while the signs that could describe it are innu–
merable. By choosing some and discounting others, the novelist privileges
one and kills off a thousand other possibilities and versions of what he is
describing: this, then, is altered:
what
is
described
becomes
what has been
described.
Am I referring only to the case of the realist writer, that sect,
school or tradition to which I doubtless belong, whose novels recount
events that the readers can recognize as possible through their own lived
experience of reality? It would seem in effect that for the writer of fanta–
sy, who describes unrecognizable and blatantly inexistent worlds, that the
comparison between reality and fiction does not even arise. It does arise,
however, albeit in a different way. The "irreality" of fantastic literature
becomes, for the reader, a symbol or an allegory, that is, a representation of
realities, of experiences that can be identified in life. What is important is
that it is not the "realist" or "fantastic" nature of a story that draws the
line between truth and lies in a fiction .
Accompanying this first transformation-that words impose upon
deeds-there is another which is no less radical: that of time. Real life
flows and does not stop, it is incommensurable, a chaos in which each story
mingles with all the other stories and thus it never begins or ends. Fictional
life is a simulacrum in which that dizzying disorder becomes order: orga–
nization, cause and effect, beginning and end. The sovereignty of a novel is
not just derived from the language in which it is written.
It
is also derived
from its temporal system, from the way in which existence flows within
it: when it stops, when it accelerates and the chronological perspective
from which the narrator describes this invented time. If there is distance
between words and deeds, then there is always a chasm between real time
and the time of fiction. Novelistic time is an artifice fabricated to achieve
certain psychological effects. In it, the past can come after the present–
the effect precede the cause-as in that story by Alejo Carpentier,
Viaje a
fa semilla
(Journey Back to the Source), which begins with the death of an
old man and continues up to his gestation in his mother's womb; or it can
be just a remote past which never manages to dissolve into the near past
from which the narrator is narrating, as occurs in most classic novels; or an
eternal present without a past or a future, as in the fictions of Samuel
