The Concept of Fiction
We never know how James Joyce was
like. From Gorman to Ellman, his official biographers, the main progress is solely
stylistic: the first is told with vehemence, whereas the second assumes an objective and circumspect tone, giving the story an
illusion greater than truth. But many sources of the first like the second –
comprising interviews and letters – are unreliable, to say the least; we could
recall the sentence, ‘the man who saw the man who saw the bear’ – aggravated by
the fact that the one by Gorman, which is the more fanciful of the two, the main
informant was the bear in person. Apart from the latter, it is obvious that
neither the conscientiousness, nor the honesty of the informants could be doubted,
and our interests should be oriented towards theoretical questions and
methodologies.
Within this order, the much celebrated objectivity of Ellman is overtaken,
as we read progressively, by an unpleasant feeling that the biographer is
quietly trying to gain access into the aura of the biography, assuming his point
of view and infiltrate his subjectivity in a gradual manner. This unpleasantness
is transformed into a real discomfort in section 1932-1935, which is chiefly
occupied with the most painful episode of Joyce’s life, the mental illness of
Lucia. At the edge of objectivity, Ellman, with his emphatic, confused arguments
and disregards for the psychiatric and literary aspects of the problem, seems
to accept Joyce’s insane claim that only he is able to cure his daughter. Many
times, when it comes to mere external events and anecdotes, the biography
manages to retain its objectivity, but it just went by the interpretative field
with hesitance, and the problem of the object contaminates the methodology. The
basic demand of biography, the veracity, its pseudoscientific quality, is
nothing but the supposed rhetoric of a literary genre, no less conventional
than the three acts of classical tragedy, or the unmasking of the murderer in
the last few pages of the detective novel.
The honest rejection of all fictitious elements is not the criteria of
truth. Positing that the same concept of truth is uncertain, and that its
definition integrates disparate, and even, contradictory elements, is also to
posit truth as the univocal objective of the text. And when it comes to the
biography or autobiography genre, it is not only the presence of fictitious
elements which deserves a thorough discussion.
The same could be said about the genre called – so fashionably today,
with certain excessiveness – non-fiction:
its specificity is based on the exclusion of all fictitious traces, but this
exclusion is not itself a guarantee of truth. Even when the intention is
sincere and the facts are narrated with rigorous exactitude – which is not
always the case – the obstacles regarding the authenticity of the sources
continue to exist, from the criteria of interpretation and the instability of
all verbal constructions. Familiar to logic and filling the field of human
sciences with debates, these difficulties seem not to worry the happy
practitioners of non-fiction. The
undeniable advantage of a mundane life like Truman Capote must not make us
forget that a proposition, being not fictitious, is not necessarily true.
We could therefore establish that truth is not necessarily contrary to
fiction, and when we opposed with the practice of fiction, we are not making a
vague proposition of misrepresenting the truth. Regarding the hierarchical
dependency between truth and fiction, according to which the first possesses a
greater positivity than the second, it is of course, within the area of our
interest, a sheer moral fantasy. Even with the highest degree of volition, accepting
this hierarchy (to truth, the field of objective reality, and to fiction, the doubtful
expression of subjectivity), the basic problem persists, i.e. indeterminacy not
caused by subjective fiction, relegated to the realm of the useless and
capricious, but from the supposed objective truth and the genres which claims
to represent. Since autobiography, biography, and all those classified under non-fiction, the different genres that
turned away from fiction, by having decided to represent the supposed objective
truth, are those who would supply the proof of their efficacy. This obligation
is not easy to fulfil: all that is verifiable in this type of story is
generally the anecdote and background, but the credibility of the tale and it
status would be threatened whenever the author drifts from the plane of the
verifiable.
Fiction, according to its origins, is known to have been emancipated
from these chains. But no one should be confused: it is not to write fiction to
escape, due to immaturity or irresponsibility, the rigours which the ’truth’
procedure demands, but rather for demonstrating the complex character of the
situation, the complex character of the limited process to verification implies
an abusive reduction and impoverishment. Making a leap towards the
unverifiable, fiction multiplies infinitely the possibilities of the process.
By not turning its back from the supposed reality, it is, on the contrary, caught
in the turmoil, disdaining the naïve approach of claiming to know beforehand
how reality is made. It is not a claudication [claudicación] before this or
that ethic of truth, but the search for one that is less rudimentary.
Fiction is, therefore,
not a vindication of the false. Even for fictions that incorporate falsities in
a deliberate manner – false references and attributions, confusing historical
data with the imagined, etc. – the aim is not to confuse the reader but to point
out the double character of fiction, which combines, in an unavoidable way, the
empirical and the imaginary. This combination –ostentatious only in certain
type of fiction until it becomes a determinant aspect of its organisation, as in
the case of some of Borges’s short stories or Thomas Bernhard’s novels – is,
however, presented in a greater or lesser extent in all works of fiction, from
Homer to Beckett. The self-paradox of fiction resides in how, if it uses the
false, it is done to increase its credibility. The muddy mass of the empirical
and imaginary, which others have the illusion of fractionating a piacere slices of true and false, leaves
the author of fiction nothing more than a possibility: of being immersed. Hence,
perhaps, in the words of Wolfgang Kayser: ‘It is not enough to feel attracted
to this act; we must also have the courage to act.’
However, fiction, and
only as fiction, does not require one to believe it as true. This desire is not
the capriciousness of the artist, but the first condition of its existence,
because only being accepted as such, it will be understood that fiction is not
a fictionalised display of this or that ideology, but a specific treatment of the world, inseparable from
what is treated. This is the essential point of the whole problem and we must
always keep in mind, if we want to avoid the confusion of the genres. Fiction
has maintained a distance from the prophets of truth as from the euphoria of
the false. Its total identity with the treatment could perhaps be summarised by
Goethe who Kayser quoted in his article (Who
recounts a novel?) ‘The Novel is a subjective epic in which the author asks
permission for his way of treating the universe; the only problem consists in
whether there is a way or not, the rest falls into place.’ This description,
not from the pen of a militant formalist nor an anachronic avant-garde, is of
an equidistant with identical independence from the true and the false.
To clarify these
questions, we could take some contemporary writers as examples. We do not want
to be modest: we can take Solzhenitsyn as the paradigm of truth. La Verdad-Por-Fin-Proferida
[The Truth-Has-Finally-Spoken] transcribes his stories, if there is no doubt about
what needs to be said, what is the point of using fiction? What is the point of
romanticising something that is already known before one takes the pen? No
obligation, if you already knew the truth, and if the sides are taken, to pass
through fiction. Employed this way, truth and fiction are mutually relativized:
fiction is turned into a dry skeleton, skinned and returned a thousand times to
recover with the flesh of different truths that replace each other. These same principles
are the foundation of another aesthetic form: Socialist Realism, which the
narrative concept of Solzhenitsyn perpetuates. Solzhenitsyn differs from the
official literature of Stalinism in terms of his conception of truth, but
agrees with the latter within the framework of fiction as the servant of
ideology. For his task, no doubt necessary, information and documents would
suffice. What we would demand from enterprises such as his is a civilised determination
and vigilance in the field of verifiable. His aesthetic incursions and his
inclination towards prophecy would be revealed in a quick glance as the most
superfluous – in addition to how he keeps a beard to achieve the Dostoyevskian
Restoration.
As for Umberto Eco, the
housewives of the entire world have understood him without running into any
danger: the man is a medievalist, a semiologist, a professor, well-versed in
logic, computing and philology. These heavy weapons, at the service of ‘truth’,
had frightened things that Eco, as a mercenary who switches side in the middle
of the battle, has managed to avoid thanks to his survivor instinct, putting
himself at the service of ‘falsehood’. From what this eminent professor says,
the executives who read his novels while shuttling between airports will not
believe in them because, by their very nature, they all belong to the side of
falsehood: the reading is a fugitive pastime that leaves no traces, being tickled
superficially when the knowledge of the author is at the service of a futile
object constructed with ingenuity thanks to the ars combinatoria. In this sense, and only this, Eco is the direct opposite
of Solzhenitsyn: like the grand revelation that Solzhenitsyn proposed, Eco
responds that nothing is new under the sun. The ancient and the modern are
confused, the detective novel is transplanted into the Middle Ages, which
itself is a metaphor of the present, and the story makes sense thanks to an
organised conspiracy. (Before Eco, it came to me spontaneously from the spirit
of a phrase by Barrés: ‘Rien déforme plus l’histoire d’y chercher
un plan concerte’.) His
interpretation of the story is shown ostentatiously as something not to believe.
The artifice, which impersonates art, is exhibited continuously in a way where
no ambiguity persists.
The essential falsity of the fictional genre
authorised by Eco is not solely an apologia of falsehood which, by positing
that we live in a democratic system, has all the rights, but also a
falsification. For example, placing Borges as the librarian in The Name of the Rose (a very Borgesian
title), is not solely an homage or an intertextual resource, but also an attempt
to affiliate. But Borges, as was proven
by many of his texts, is different from Eco or Solzhenitsyn, for him it is
about neither falsehood nor truth, as the opposite that excludes. Rather, it is
about the problematic concepts that embody the principle reason of being for
fiction. If we were to recognise Ficciones
as one of his most important books, it is not in order to exalt the false
at the expense of truth, but to suggest that fiction is the most appropriate
medium to handle their complex relationship.
Other notorious falsification of Eco is the claim about
Proust’s excessive interest in feuilleton. Something obvious stems from it:
stressing Proust’s excessive interest in feuilleton is a theatrical gesture by
Eco to justify his own novels – just as dubious candidates, in order to win the
local election, claim they have the support of the President of the Republic. This
observation does not have any theoretical or literary value. The opinion is
just as highly inconsequential as the fact, as is known universally, that
Proust liked madeleines. Instead, it is noteworthy that Eco has not written
about Agatha Christie’s or Somerset Maugham’s passion for feuilleton – but of
course, not without reason: to use Proust to testify and exalt feuilleton, it is
precisely because he wrote In Search of
Lost Time. It is behind this book that Eco seeks shelter, not Proust’s
supposed taste for feuilletons. Just by reading a novel of Eco or Somerset Maugham,
one would know that these authors like feuilleton. And for one to be convinced
that Proust do not like it as much, reading In
Search of Lost Time would be more than enough.
My objective is not to
judge morally and much less to condemn, but even in the most savage market economy,
the customer has the right to know what s/he buys. Including the law, so
distracted in other occasions, being intractable regarding the composition of
the product. Thus, we cannot ignore the major fictions of our time, and maybe
of all time, which present the critical intersection between truth and
falsehood, the intimate and decisive tension, extended to neither the comical
nor the sombre, as the central order of it all. Sometimes the subject is
explicit and sometimes it is the underlying foundation of the structure. The aim
of fiction is not to deal with such conflict but to turn it into its material,
modelling it after ‘its way’. The affirmation and negation are equally strange,
and it has more affinity with the object than the discourse. Books such as Don Quixote, Tristam Shandy, Madame Bovary, and
The Castle do not pontificate about
the prior reality to its textual concretion, yet they are neither resigned to
the function as entertainment nor artifice: even though declared as fictions,
they want to be taken literally. This claim could seem illegitimate, even
scandalous, for many prophets of truth just as for the nihilists of the false,
identical (although with paradoxical results) with the same pragmatism, since
it is for not having the conviction of the first that the second, deprived of
all affirmative truth, is abandoned, euphoric and false. From this point of
view, the demand of fiction could be judged exorbitant, and yet, we all know that
it is precisely how by marginalising the verifiable Cervantes, Sterne, Flaubert
or Kafka seems to us truly worthy.
It is because of this
principal aspect of fiction, and because it is also the intention, its practical
resolution, from the singular position of the author between the imperative of
objective knowledge and the turbulence of subjectivity, that we can define a
comprehensive way for the fiction to be a form of speculative anthropology. Maybe – I dare not affirm – this way of
conceiving could neutralise all kinds of reductionism, from the past century, which
stubbornly attacks. Understood as such, fiction would not able to ignore, but to
assimilate, to incorporate its own essence, stripping it from the claim of the absolute.
But this is a difficult subject that should be left for another time.
(1989)
Translated by Justin Loke (2014)
