The Failed Reader

Rating systems for books are ridiculous. It does not matter if the reviewer is a professional or an expert for sunday reviews of a petit bourgeois papers. It projects a one-sided notion of reading of how 'good' the book is, as a passive object awaiting judgement, if the text has failed and disappointed the reader, but failed to take into account of their own ability as reader, the chances of their own inadequacies that made them, often the consumer-readers, failed the text. [...]

Even in the worst text, an active reading beyond passive reception of plot and content to structure and form could produce an effective reading. [...]

The issue would not be if this is a good book but if one has read the worst book well. This also demands the reader to question their position when they approach the text. Stop judging if you are reading a failed writer but start thinking if you are a failed reader.

The Tragedy of an Honorable Man - Roberto Arlt

The Tragedy of an Honorable Man

(from Aguafuertes Porteñas)

Roberto Arlt

Every day I witness the tragic life of an honourable man. This honourable man has a cafe valued at thirty thousand pesos or more. Well, this honourable man has an honourable wife.

By putting his honorable wife in charge of the Victrola, he saves eighty dollars per month, instead of paying for a victrolista. From this system of management, my good guy saves, at the end of the year, the respectable sum of nine hundred and sixty pesos excluding interest. After ten years he will save ... 

But my honourable man is jealous. So what if I understood it as jealousy! Keeping on guard behind the counter, monitoring, not just the consumption of his customers, but also how they look at his woman. And he suffers. Suffershonourably. Sometimes turning pale, sometimes his eyes gleam. Why? Because how could anyone be duller than to look at the plump calves of his spouse. Under these circumstances, the honourable man looks up to ascertain whether his wife responded to the arousing glimpses of the customer, or is entertaining herself, reading a magazine. He suffers. I see him suffering, suffers honourably; but what he suffers is forgotten the moment his wife hands him the account book of two pesos and sixty-five centavos; when his legitimate wife made deposits to the bank, of  nine hundred sixty dollars annually. He suffers.  The honourable heart of this man of prudence, in terms of money, is disturbed and forgets his interests when a butcher, bus driver or caregiver, study the anatomical contour of his also honourable wife. But suffers more, when the person who enjoys contemplating her charm is a sturdy lad, with moustache as stiff as his back, powerful enough to withstand any extra work. Then my honourable man looks up desperately. The jealousy that Greek gods had immortalized, upsets his sense of economy, cast into the stillness, undermining his joy of saving two pesos and sixty-five centavos per day; desperate and grinding his teeth as if wanting to bite a huge chunk off the customer’s kidney.

I understand him, without having spoken a word with this man, the problem that his honourable soul is facing. I understand, with sympathy, it eats into me [lo ‘manyo’]. The man is faced with Hamlet’s dilemma, the problem of Balaam's donkey, before ...before the awful problem of saving eighty bucks monthly! They are eighty pesos. Do you know the packers, las canastas, work how many days of eighteen hours to earn eighty dollars a month? No, no one can imagine.

Thus, I understand. At the same time he loves his wife. How not to?! But cannot reduce the work – like the famous miser Anatole France who never fails to cut some barbs with the gold coins offered to the Virgin: remaining true to his habit.

And eighty pesos is eight ten pesos bills, sixteen of five and… sixteen bills of five pesos for five dollars, they are money ... money...

And the proof that our man is honourable is how he suffers when they start to look at his wife. Suffering visibly. What to do? To give up eighty pesos? Or to resign oneself to a possible marital disappointment?

If this man was not honourable, he would not mind if his wife was being courted. All the more, he would devote himself to it like the famous Monsieur Bergeret who endured the misery stoically.

No, my cafe has no money for the too obliging husband. In him, it is still El Cid, don Juan, Calderon of the Barca and all the glory of the race, mixing with the voracious greed of people of the land.

They are eighty pesos a month. Eighty! Why would one renounce eighty dollars a month? He loves his wife, but their love is not comparable to the eighty pesos.

He loves the front to be cleared of all adornments, and he also loves his trade, well-organized finance, the deposit slip at the bank, cheque book. How this honourable man loves money! Fucking honourable!

Sometimes I go to his cafe and stay for an hour, two or three. He believes that when I look at his woman I'm thinking about her. But he is wrong. The one who I am thinking about is Lenin ... Stalin ... Trotsky ... I am thinking with the profoundest joy of the devilishly contorted face that this man would have if tomorrow a revolutionary regime told him:

'All your money is worthless.’

Translated by J. Loke (Nov 2014)

 


https://www.academia.edu/9217735/The_Tragedy_of_an_Honorable_Man_-_Roberto_Arlt

The Sadness of English Saturday (from Aguafuertes Porteñas) Roberto Arlt

The Sadness of English Saturday (from Aguafuertes Porteñas)

Roberto Arlt

Could it be that because I have been wandering throughout the week that Saturday and Sunday became the most boring days of my life? I think Sunday is pure old boredom and English Saturday is a sad day – with sadness characterized by the name of the race.

English Saturday is a colourless and tasteless day; a day "with neither kicks nor pricks" [no corta ni pincha] in the routine of the people. A hybrid day, without character, without gestures.

It is a day for marital brawls to thrive, and for drunkenness which are more lugubrious than the "de profundis" in the twilight of a cloudy day. A grave silence hangs over the city. In England or Puritan countries, that is.  The lack of sun, which is surely the natural source of all joy. And when it rains or snows, there is nowhere to go, not even to run. So people stay at home by the fire, and tired from reading Punch, they browse the Bible.

But for us the English Saturday is a very modern gift that failed to convince us. We already have plenty of Sundays. Without money, nowhere to go and no desire to go anywhere, why would we want Sunday? Sunday was an institution which humanity could live without very comfortably.

Daddy God rested on Sunday, because he was tired of having made this complicated thing called ‘world’. But what has been done during the six days, all those slackers out there walking around, to rest on Sunday? Besides, no one has the right to impose a day of idleness. Who asked for it? What for?

Humanity had to impose a day from the week dedicated to doing nothing. And mankind was bored. A ‘lean’ day is suffice. Here comes the British gentleman, what a great idea! Let’s add another day more, on Saturday.

Regardless of the amount of work, one day off per week is more than enough. Two are unbearable in any city in the world. I am, as you see, a sworn enemy of English Saturday.

The necktie used for a week left in the trunk. Suit with ostensible stiffness well-kept. Boots creaking. Glasses with gold frame, for Saturday and Sunday. And this is the self-satisfying aspect that made you want to kill him. Like the kind of boyfriend, one of those couples that bought a house on monthly installment. One of those couples kssing to fixed term.

So carefully polishing his boots when getting out of the car that I did not forget to step on one of his foot. If there are no people the man would kill me.

After this fool, there is another man on Saturday, the sad man, the man grieves me deeply every time I see him.

I've seen him numerous times, and he has always given me the same painful impression.

I was walking down a sidewalk one Saturady, under the shade, by Calle Alsina - the most dismal street of Buenos Aires, when at the opposite sidewalk, along the path of the sun, I saw a hunchback employee, walking slowly, carrying a three year old child.

The creature exhibited her innocence with one of those little hats with cintajos, already deplorable without being old. A freshly pressed pink dress. Some shoes for the holidays. The girl walked slowly, and the father, even more slowly. And suddenly I had a vision of the room in a lodging house, and the mother of the child, [urea] young woman wrinkled by hardship, ironing the baby’s hat with cintajos.

The man walked slowly. Sad. Bored. In him I saw the product of working twenty years by the sentry box, of fourteen hours a day and with starving wages, twenty years of deprivation, of stupid sacrifices and holy terror being fired and left unemployed in the street. Saw him at Santana, the character of Roberto Mariani.

And in the city centre, during Saturday afternoon is horrible. When businesses are exhibited with hideous nakedness. The metal shutters have aggressive rigidness.

Basements of importing houses vomit the stink of tar, benzol and overseas items. Stores stink of rubber. The hardware stores by paint. The sky seems so blue, which is illuminating an inconspicuous factory in Africa. Taverns for stockbrokers remain empty and dismal. A gatekeeper playing mus with floor cleaners by the edge of a table. Guys procreated by the spontaneous generation from the moss-house benches, appearing at the door of "employee entrance" of the cash deposits. And has experienced the terror, the awful horror of thinking that at the same hour in many countries people are forced to do nothing, but are willing to work or die.

No, no turning back, no day sadder than English Saturday, and those employees on a Saturday, still checking, at twelve o'clock, for a company that has seven million of capital, the two cents discrepancy of the end of the month balance.

Translated by J. Loke (Nov 2014)

借问 jio men

At GM Tower, an old man walked towards our table. Spoke in Hokkien say 'jio men zi le', he was asking for direction, it is not the first time I heard this phrase, but after some years, my sensitivity towards language, especially my real mother tongue, has changed. The first word of the sentence 借 (borrow) has a different ring. He had to 'borrow' me to ask me a question 借问. He had to loan my time or use me, perhaps. The usuage when I was a teenager has already degenerated into ruffians challenging ruffians from another area. When a friend called to say he was 借问 (jio men) somewhere, it implies he ran into trouble, asking which 'number' he is from. The questions that follow would be if he was outnumbered, was he beaten up, or he was so courageous and heroic and escaped unscathed. So literally, I was jio men at Golden Mile not by some street hooligans but an Ah Pek who walked slow and unsteadily. He could have used 请问 qi' ah men (invitation/to ask). I told him I do not belong here,  I am just as unfamiliar. In a larger sense, more than just the building,  this could also mean my sense of estrangement with the island, its inhabitants, and their ideologies, I have developed unwittingly over the years. I am not sure if jio men is originally considered a formal or an informal term, but I am sure people who used in the non-Ah Beng sense are dying out.

Perfect Day - Ricardo Piglia

Perfect Day 

Ricardo Piglia

Sunday

Here in the east, the sun is setting. Somebody once told me that for the Greeks sunset was not a poetic theme. Everything was written in praise of sunrise, with its metaphors of aurora, dawn, and awakening. Only in Rome, with the decline of the empire, had Virgil and his friends began to celebrate sunset, the twilight, the dying day. 

Would we then have writers of dawn and writers of dusk? These are lists I do enjoy making. But now it is nightfall, and I light an old Uruguayan lamp that brings back a feeling I associate with the sun. How do we define a perfect day? Perhaps it would be better to say, how could I narrate a perfect day?

Is that why I kept a diary? To fix or to reread one of those unforgettable days. For example. 

Friday July 6, 1973

My first impression of China when the plane was landing: a square sampan floating along the river, the trees and the white silhouette of a farmer with round hat working on the rice field. I thought he will be the only man that I'm going to see from now on. 

At the airport in Shanghai I was separated from other passengers and led down a corridor into a secluded room with plush couches and coffee tables. There were screens to protect me from prying eyes. For your safety, the tall and relax Mr. Liang told me in French. Smiling, without making a move, he asked, shall we spend the night in Shanghai. No, I will follow you to Beijing. We drank Chinese tea, slightly perfumed. 

A tense and monotonous music coming out from a speaker, a chorus of women, sounding like ashes, like cats meowing. Then came an old man in blue Mao suit, asking firm but gently, how was my journey? Repeatedly, asking me to watch my steps, while he led me into the dining room with Mr. Liang. Another official wearing a grey Mao suit saluted at the door. The one in grey is lower ranking than the one in blue which in turn is superior to the one in brown. We ate rice with vegetables and seafood. A bitter tasting beer.

During the flight to Beijing. Hostesses in white shirts, braids, socks, always smiling. Sandalwood fans, sweets and fruits. All the passengers are Chinese except for a blond girl sitting on the side, and an Italian delegate at the far end. The hostesses explain the direction of flight, the light function and the significance of the national anniversaries. 

Not long after, the young blonde girl approached me. Are you South American? She noticed me reading a newspaper in Spanish (Pasado y Presente). She is Chilean, daughter of a diplomat. Chinese-speaking, she has been living Beijing for many years, since high school. Her name is Maria Pilar U. She thinks I will be staying at the Nationalities Hotel. She works as a Spanish translator in Xinhua agency. Beautiful, very elegant. I was very careful. Glad that you are Chilean, I said. My favourite Chilean is Nicanor Parra. Oh no, he is a terrible reactionary, he had tea with Nixon, he says. Well Mao too, I told her. She looks at me seriously, it's not the same. Very young, smooth legs, blue eyes, she looks German. There are many Germans in Chile. Yes, they are all bums, she said. Then we got up. I will look for you, she told me. What are you going to do here? Don’t you worry.  Great, I said to her, I need a guide ... You could be my Beatrice. Don’t joke , there no need to, anyway I am married.  All the more I have to then, I say. I'm so disoriented that I fall for the first woman who speaks to me. ("I swear I no longer remember her name, / but I know what to call her: Maria" as in a verse by Nicanor). 

In Beijing, there is a very young man from the reception committee. He is in charge of the cultural work in the city. He has the face of a bird, speaks to me in Chinese. I reply in Spanish: I'm so glad to be in Beijing. Affectionate, with smiles. He offers us a maotai (a kind of rice wine). 

I got on to a rather sinister looking limousine, alone under the starry night. A long avenue of six lanes, tall poplars, the world's most populous city is serene and calm. Men and women cycling by silently like ghosts. We finally entered the infinite and empty Tiananmen Square. English lamps.

The Nationalities Hotel, seems like the Majestic de Avenida, of Mayo. The traveler thought and smiled.

A large living room and a large bedroom, large windows, high ceilings. The hot running water is yellow and rusty. The bathtub has feet like bear claws. The bed is hard, the pillows are too flat. On one table a thermos flask with green tea. Two cups with lids. On the bedroom walls, (rivers, rushes, yellow birds) are Oriental landscapes. No telephone. But there is a bell on the side of the bed. When I pressed it, it rang somewhere far away. But no one came to attend to the call. 

One evening, unexpectedly, I bumped into Bernardo Kordon at Calle Corrientes. The publishing house where I work has published her complete short stories. We had a coffee and chatted, Kordon pulled a notebook and asked if I wanted to travel to China. There was a vacancy, Edgar Bayley at the last moment pulled out. Many brothels, said Edgard. Kordon is president of the Friendship Association China-Argentina, several national writers have already travelled to the Celestial Empire, as he calls it. No obligations to, but if I want to write something about China, it would be better. I thought I could write a travel journal, and at the same time, the observations of a man alone. 

(I was thirty, and on the other side of the world. Would this be considered a perfect day?)

Translated by J. Loke

http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2012/05/02/actualidad/1335952444_526104.html

The Concept of Fiction - Juan José Saer

The Concept of Fiction

Juan José Saer

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)