360
PARTISAN REVIEW
Quijano and Emma suffer terrible damage. Do we condemn them for this?
No, their stories move us and we admire them: their impossible attempt to
live the fiction
seems to us to personify an idealist attitude which honours
the species. Because the human aspiration
par excellence
is to want to be
different from what we are. This desire has been the cause of the best and
worst moments in history. It has also led to the birth of fiction.
When we read novels, we are not just ourselves but we are also those
conjured-up characters into whose midst the novelist transports us. This
transportation is a metamorphosis: the asphyxiating enclosure of our real
life opens up and we leave it to become others, to live vicariously experi–
ences that novels make our own. A lucid dream, a fantasy incarnate, fiction
completes we mutilated beings that have had imposed on us the terrible
dichotomy of having only one life and the desires and fantasies to desire
one thousand lives. This space between, between our real life and the
desires and fantasies that demand that it be richer and more diverse is the
terrain of fiction.
In the heart of all these fictions, protest is ablaze. The person who
imagined them did so because he could not live them and whoever reads
them (and creates them through reading) finds in their phantoms the faces
and adventures that he needed to add to his life. This is the truth that the
lies of fiction express: the lies that we are, the lies that console us and com–
pensate for our nostalgia and frustrations. What confidence, therefore, can
we have in what novels say about the society that produced them? Were
those men like that? They were, in the sense that they wanted to be like
that, that this was the way that they saw themselves loving, suffering and
enjoying pleasure. These lies do not document their lives, but the demons
that were stirred up, the dreams in which they found pleasure, which made
the life they were leading more bearable. An era is not just peopled with
beings of flesh and blood; but also by the ghosts into which these beings
change in order to break through the barriers that limit and frustrate them.
The lies of novels are never gratuitou s: they compensate for the inad–
equacies of life. For that reason, when life appears full and absolute and, due
to a faith that justifies and absorbs everything, men are content with their
lot, novels usually have no function. Religious cultures produce poetry and
theatre but only rarely great novels. Fiction is an art of societies where fai th
is experiencing a certain crisis,
where one needs to believe
il1
something,
where
the unitary, trusted and absolute vision has been replaced by a fractured
vision and a growing uncertainty about the world in which one lives and
the afterlife. In the guts of novels we find not just amorali ty, then, but also
a certain scepticism. When religious culture comes into crisis, life seems to
slide away from the structures, dogmas and rules that bound them and
revert to chaos; this is the privileged moment for fiction. Its artificial orders
