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Beckett; or a labyrinth in which past, present and future coexist and cancel
each other out, as in
The Sound and the Fury
by Faulkner.
Novels have a beginning and an end and even in the most formless and
intermittent of them, life takes on a meaning that we can perceive because
they give us a perspective that real life, in which we are immersed, always
denies us. This order is an invention, an addition by the novelist, a
simulator who seems to recreate life whereas in truth he is amending it.
Sometimes subtly sometimes brutally, fiction betrays life, encapsulating it in
a weft of words which reduces its scale and makes it accessible to the read–
er. This reader can therefore judge it, understand it, and above all live it,
with an impunity that real life does not allow.
What is the difference, then, between fiction and a newspaper article
or a history book? Are they not all composed of words? Do they not
imprison within the artificial time of the tale that boundless torrent that is
real time? My answer is that they are opposing systems for approximating
to reali ty. While the novel rebels and transgresses life, those other genres
can only be its slave. The notion of truth or lies functions in a different way
in each case. For journalism or history, truth depends on the comparison
between what is written and the reality that inspires it. The closer the one
is to the other, the more truthful it is; the further away, the more deceit–
ful. To say that
The History
if
the French Revolution
by Michelet or
The
Conquest of Peru
by Prescott are "novelistic" is to scoff at them, to insinu–
ate that they lack seriousness. On the other hand, to document the
historical errors in the depiction of the Napoleonic Wars in
War and Peace
would be a waste of time: the truth of a novel does not depend on that.
On what, then? On its own capacity for persuasion, on the communicative
force of its fantasy, on the skill of its magic. Every good novel tells the
truth and every bad novel lies. Because to "tell the truth" for a novel
means making the reader live an illusion and "to lie" means being inca–
pable of achieving this trick. The novel, then, is an amoral genre, or rather
it has its own particular ethics in which truth and lies are exclusively aes–
thetic terms. Brecht's argument that works of art should strive to achieve
"critical objectivity" misses the mark: without "illusion" there is no novel.
From what I have said up till now, it would seem that fiction is a gra–
tuitous creation, a casual conjuring trick. Quite the reverse for, however
delirious it might seem, its roots draw nutrition from human experience.
A recurrent theme in the history of fiction is the risk that is implied in tak–
ing novels
Ii
terally, in believing that life is how novels describe it to be. The
romances of chivalry befuddle the brain of Alonso Quijano and propel
him along roads where he battles with windmills, and the tragedy of
Emma Bovary would not have occurred if Flaubert's character had not
tried to be like the heroines of the romantic novels that she reads. Alonso
