This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes [Fuentes, Carlos]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2015-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

N

Novel

What can the novel say that cannot be said in any other manner? This is the very radical question asked by Hermann Broch. It is answered, specifically, by a constellation of novelists so extensive and so diverse that together they offer a newer, broader, and even more literal notion of the dream of Weltliteratur, the world literature that Goethe envisioned. If, as French critic and novelist Roger Caillois said, the first half of the nineteenth century belonged to European literature, then the second half belonged to the Russians, while the first half of the twentieth century belonged to the North Americans, and the second half to the Latin Americans. Then, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we can speak of a universal novel that encompasses Günter Grass, Juan Goytisolo, and José Saramago in Europe; Susan Sontag, William Styron, and Philip Roth in North America; Gabriel García Márquez, Nélida Piñón, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Latin America; Kenzaburo Oe in Japan; Anita Desai in India; Naguib Mahfouz and Tahar Ben-Jeleum in North Africa; and Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Athol Fugard in South Africa. Nigeria alone, from the “heart of darkness” of the shortsighted Eurocentric conceptions, has three great narrators: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ben Okri.

What is it that unifies these great novelists beyond their respective nationalities? Two things that are essential to the novel. . . . and society. Imagination and language. They answer the question of what distinguishes the novel from journalistic, scientific, political, economic, and even philosophical inquiry. They give verbal reality to that part of the world that is unwritten. And they all share the urgent fear of all authors of literature: if I don’t put this word down on paper, nobody else will. If I don’t utter this word, the world will fall into silence (or gossip and fury). And a word unwritten or unspoken condemns us all to die mute and discontent. Only that which is spoken is sacred; unspoken, unsacred. By saying something, the novel makes visible the invisible aspect of our reality. And it does so in a manner that is entirely unforeseeable by the realistic or psychological canons of the past. To the full (plenipotentiary) manner of Bakhtin, the novelist employs fiction like an arena in which characters appear along with language, codes of conduct, the most remote historical moments, and multiple genres, causing artificial walls to crumble, endlessly broadening the territory of human presence in history. The novel ultimately reappropriates the very thing that it is not: science, journalism, philosophy. . . .

For this reason the novel is much more than a reflection of reality; it creates a new reality, one that did not exist before (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, Stephen Dedalus) but without which we could not imagine reality as we know it. As such, the novel creates a new kind of time for readers. The past is rescued from the museums, and the future becomes an unattainable ideological promise. In the novel, the past becomes memory and the future, desire.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.