364
PARTISAN REVIEW
In a closed society, history is imbued with fiction, becomes fiction,
because it is invented and reinvented in accordance wi th contemporary
religious or political orthodoxy, or more crudely, according to the whims
of the controllers of power.
At the same time, a strict system of censorship is usually set up where–
by literature must also fantasize within strict limits, so that its subjective
truths do not contradict or cast a shadow over official history but rather
serve to disseminate and illustrate it. The difference between historical
truth and literary truth disappears and they become fused in a hybrid
which bathes history in unreality and empties fiction of mystery, initiative
and rebelliousness towards the established order.
To condemn history to lie and literature to propagate the truths manu–
factured by the powers that be, does not hinder the scientific and technological
development of a country or the establishment of certain basic forms of social
justice. It has been proved that the Inca system-an extraordinary achievement
for its time or for our own---ended hunger and managed to feed all its sub–
jects. And the modern totalitarian states have given a great impetus to
education, health, sport and work, putting them within the reach of all, some–
thing that open societies, despite their prosperity, have not achieved, because
the price of the freedom that they enjoy is often paid for by tremendous
inequalities in wealth and what is worse-in opportunities for its members.
But when a state, in its desire to control and decide everything, wrests
from human beings the right to invent and believe whatever lies they
please, appropriates this right and exercises it through historians and cen–
sors-like the Incas through the
amautas-a
great neuralgic center of social
life is abolished. And men and women suffer a loss that impoverishes their
existence, even when their basic needs are satisfied. Because real life, true
life, has never been, nor will ever be, sufficient to fulfil human desires. And
because, without this vital dissatisfaction that the lies of fiction both incite
and assuage, there is never authentic progress.
The fantasy that we are endowed with is a demonic gift. It is contin–
ually opening up a gulf between what we are and what we would like to
be, between what we have and what we desire.
But the imagination has conceived of a clever and subtle palliative for
this inevitable divorce between our limited reality and our boundless
desires: fiction . Thanks to fiction we are more and we are others without
ceasing to be the same. In it we can lose ourselves and multiply living many
more lives than the ones we have and could live if we were confined to the
truth, without escaping from the prison of history. Men do not live by
truth alone; they also need lies : those that they invent freely not those that
are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in
beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes
