362
PARTISAN REVIEW
express profound and unsettling truths which can only see the light of
day in this oblique way.
When Joanot Martorell tells us in
Tirant
10
Blanc
that the French prince
was so white that one could see wine going down his throat, he is telling
us something technically impossible which, however, under the spell of
reading, seems to us an undying truth, because in the false reality of the
novel, unlike what happens in our own reality excess is never the exception,
but always the rule. And nothing is excessive
if
everything is. In
Tirant,
excess is to be found in the apocalyptic battles wi th their punctilious ri tu–
als and in the deeds of the hero who, alone, defeats multitudes and literally
devastates half of Christendom and all of Islam. It is to be found in the
comic rituals like those of the pious and libidinous character who kisses
women in the mouth three times in honour of the Holy Trinity. And love,
in its pages like war, is always excessive and is likely to lead to cataclysmic
results. Thus, when Tirant sees for the first time in the darkness of a funer–
al chamber the insurgent breasts of Princess Carmina, he falls into an almost
cataleptic state and stays stretched out on a bed without eating, sleeping or
uttering a word for several days. When he finally recovers, it is as if he is
learning to speak once again. His first stammered words are "I love."
These lies do not describe what Valencians were like at the end of the
fifteenth century, but what they would have liked to have been and done;
they do not describe the flesh and blood beings of this terrible time, but
their phantoms. Their appetites, their fears, their desires, their resentments
are given form. Successful fiction embodies the subjectivity of an epoch
and for that reason, although compared to history novels lie, they commu–
nicate to us fleeting and evanescent truths which always escape scientific
descriptions of reality. Only literature has the techniques and powers to
distil this delicate elixir of life: the truth hidden in the heart of human lies.
Because in the deceptions of literature, there are no deceptions. At least
there should not be any, apart from those naIve people who think that lit–
erature should be as objectively faithful to, and dependent on, reality as
history is. And there is no deception because when we open a book of fic–
tion, we adjust ourselves to witnessing a representation in which we know
very well that our tears or our yawns depend exclusively on the good or
bad spell that the narrator casts to make us live his lies as truths and not on
his capacity to reproduce lived experience faithfully.
These well-defined boundaries between literature and history–
between literary truths and historic truths-are a prerogative of open
societies. In these societies, both coexist, independent and sovereign,
although complementing each other in their utopian desire to include all
of society. And perhaps the greatest demonstration that a society is open,
in the meaning that Karl Popper gave to this term, is that fiction and
