The Concept of Fiction

Juan Jos 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 Joyces 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 Joyces 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 nave approach of claiming to know beforehand how reality is made. It is not a claudication
[claudicacin] 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 Borgess short stories or Thomas Bernhards
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 Barrs: Rien
dforme plus lhistoire dy 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 Prousts excessive interest in feuilleton. Something
obvious stems from it: stressing Prousts 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 Christies or Somerset Maughams 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 Prousts 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)