After his thirty-seventh year, a certain man would sometimes catch sight of a certain few volumes on one of his bookshelves or would see in some or another book review or literary essay the name of a certain writer in the German language and would then remember one or another moment from the many hours that he had spent in reading one or another volume of a certain unfinished work of fiction by the writer.
Of the several hundreds of thousands of words in the English translation of the work of fiction mentioned, the man had forgotten, soon after he had read them, all but nine. The man remembered, however, his state of mind on many an occasion while he had been reading the work or while he had paused in his reading.
The man mentioned could have said that the long work mentioned was the most difficult work of fiction that he had tried to read. The man could have said that he had had to read many a passage and even many a sentence twice and more before he seemed to understand it. During the few moments after he had seemed to understand such a passage or such a sentence, the man felt entitled to consider himself an intellectual. And yet, whenever he had tried afterwards to report in his own words what he had understood he had been unable to do so.
Of the nine that were the only words remembered by the man soon after he had read the long work mentioned, four comprised the title of a chapter or a section far into the work while the other five were part of a sentence in that chapter or section. Often, while the man struggled to understand the earlier parts of the work, he looked at the words The lunatics hail Clarisse and felt relieved. He expected that he would readily understand the chapter or the section that bore this title. He even looked forward to finding one or more humorous passages in that chapter or section. The man found the character of Clarisse impossible to comprehend, let alone to like or to admire. The passages reporting her fictional thoughts and feelings were among the densest in the long work of fiction. It seemed to the man that the fictional character Clarisse was concerned mostly with abstractions or with states of mind impossible to describe or even to suggest in plain words, and he hoped that her being hailed by an assembly of fictional lunatics would give rise to a passage of less exacting prose.
How Clarisse came to meet up with the lunatics the man mentioned never afterwards remembered, although he seemed to recall that she had sometimes expressed a desire to study the extremes of human experience and that she had sometimes discussed certain lunatics with a doctor who worked in a certain asylum. Surely Clarisse would have been reported in the long work of fiction as having met up with a number of lunatics during what would surely have been a conducted tour of some or another asylum, and surely the word hail would have denoted a variety of behaviour. Nevertheless, the man who had once read the fictional report of the visit by the character Clarisse to some or another fictional asylum could remember soon afterwards only that one of the male fictional lunatics, when Clarisse had approached him, had set about masturbating like a caged monkey.
A certain man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write. The man had made notes for many works of fiction during many of the previous fifty years. Some of those works he had gone on to write, and some of the works that he had written had later been published. During the previous ten years, however, on the few occasions when the man had felt urged to write fiction he had relieved his urge by making notes for one or another work that he expected never to write.
In one of the published works of fiction by the man mentioned was a report of a fictional man’s having read a certain book: a translation into the English language of a book written in the Hungarian language and first published in Hungary three years before the birth of the man mentioned. Even though the man’s published book was fiction, any reader might have learned that the existence of the book mentioned in the fictional narrative was a fact and that the book itself purported to be a book of non-fiction. (Why did I write just then the expression a book of non-fiction? Why is the expression a factual book so seldom used? Is this our way of acknowledging that most seeming-facts are, in fact, fiction? And, if books of fiction are not called non-factual books, is this because we understand that most matters reported in books of fiction have a factual existence?)
Although it was never reported in the published work of fiction mentioned in the previous paragraph, the chief character of the work mentioned wished often that some of the purported facts in the translated book mentioned had not been facts: that certain events reported as having happened in the world where he had sat while he read the translated book had not in fact happened. In particular, the chief character wished that a certain young woman, the daughter of farm servants on a large estate in Tolna County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, had not been compelled, on a certain frosty evening in the first decade of the twentieth century, to visit the quarters of the assistant bailiff of the estate; or, if the young woman had been thus compelled, that she had not decided, at some time during her visit, to run from the bedroom of the assistant bailiff without even pulling on her boots; or, if the young woman had decided so to run, that she had run towards the long thatched building where she lived with her parents and her siblings in one of the many cramped apartments and not towards the well that stood among the out-buildings of the estate; or, if the young woman had run towards the well, that she had not vaulted over the low wall and had not fallen into the freezing water, afterwards to have her corpse hauled out at first light by cowherds and laid on the nearby grass, there to be observed later in the morning by a party of children on their way to school, one of which children, thirty years later, would include his report of what he had seen in a book that would be translated, during his lifetime, into twenty languages, one of them English, but had stared into the water, in which reflection of stars had appeared as pale rays on a dark background that included, perhaps, an image of the face and the upper body of a young woman.
The man who was aged nearly seventy years was making notes for a work of fiction in the belief that the power of fiction was sometimes able to resist, if not to overcome, the power of fact. The man understood that a fact could never be other than a fact, even though it might be reported in a work of fiction, but he believed that any fictional event or any fictional character might be said to have acquired a factual existence as soon as the event or the character had been reported in a published text.
The man mentioned had to accept as a fact that a certain young woman had drowned in a certain well in a certain foreign country thirty and more years before he had been born, but he was able to accept as an image-fact that a certain young image-woman stared into an image-well where pale image-rays appeared on a dark image-background in the mind of a man who was making notes for a work of fiction that he expected never to write.
The man who was aged nearly seventy years left off making notes and felt as he had sometimes felt during the past fifty years whenever he had left off writing some or another work of fiction or even some or other notes. The man felt as though writing fiction was too easy. It seemed to the man the easiest of tasks to report image-deeds done by image-persons in image-scenery or even to report the image-thoughts of the image-persons. It had been too easy, for example, for him to report many years before in a certain work of fiction that a certain image-man had read a report of a certain young woman’s having drowned in a certain well. It had been too easy for him to report the image-details in his mind as though they were no more than actual details in some or another actual scenery that surrounded him continually. A more demanding and a more worthy task would have been for him to write as though the report he had read had been part of a work of fiction: as though the young woman who had drowned was a fictional young woman, one of those entities likely to become an image-entity in his mind and whose image-fate it would be useless for him to wish changed.