There is a reader with whom I cannot reconcile myself: the reader who wants what all novelists have coveted, to their shame: Hallucination. I want the reader to always know he is reading a novel and not watching the living, not attending to a “life.” The moment the reader falls into Hallucination, that ignominy of Art, I have lost rather than gained a reader. What I want is something very different, which is to win him over as a character, so that for an instant he believes that he himself does not live. This is the emotion for which he should thank me, since until now no one has thought of procuring it for him.
The reader should know that this impression, never before achieved for anyone by the written word — this impression that, along with my novel, seeks an introduction into the human psyche, in the natural consciousness of man — is a benediction for all consciousness, because this impression obliterates and liberates the mental or emotional fear that we call the terror of ceasing to exist. Whoever experiences even a moment of the state of belief in not existing and later returns to the state of belief in existing, will forever understand that the whole content of the verbalization or notion “not to be” is the belief in not being. It’s not possible to believe that one does not exist without existing. For example, Descartes’s metaphysics had to begin with “I don’t exist” in order to substitute the lamentable “I exist.” In sum: existence is frequented just as often by the belief in non-existence as it is by the belief in existence. Whoever believes, exists, even if his belief is that he does not exist; whoever exists can in effect believe that he does not exist and, alternatively, believe that he exists. “I think” never had anything other than innocent consequences, but it can be said lazily or even distractedly; or, it can be a fact and a judgment that is felt. To exist is a fact, but I exist can never be a “felt” judgment: it is a mere juxtaposition of words, as it does not contain a moment of belief; it just happens that words come together. He who assures you of all this is one who laments it, in contrast to all of those great readers of Kant, who understood him too much, which is to say, had not a single doubt that Kant was a metaphysician. (The French demolish a deified painter every twenty years, a deified poet every fifteen, and a deified novelist every ten; at a hundred and fifty years it’s high time Kant were thrown into doubt. This isn’t daring, it would be more daring to call him a metaphysician. With these antecedents I anticipate future arguments for the demolition of my Art.)
It seems to me that no one else has used this method, or that it would be applicable to any other genre but the novel. Besides technique, there is a series of contrivances of in-verisimilitude and denials of the reality of the story. This is the doctrine, and it is executed most notably when it explains expositionally, not artistically, a fact that never happened, but which was fully deliberated in a living consciousness, (Sweetheart’s father’s consciousness), and which constitutes the defining fact of her destiny.
Even if I have invented the novel-museum, it won’t matter if I’m able to raise interest in the story if all the while the reader believes himself to be only a reader. If to him the characters are only characters in a novel and in the prologues (although delicate, smokily glimpsed and in truncated actions and facts, I believe that Eterna, Sweetheart, Maybegenius, and The Lover will be unforgettable even though I’ve barely put them in the story) I’ll have failed to effect a “shock of inexistence” in the psyche of the reader — the shock of being here, not reading, but being read, being a character, in favor of the conscious carelessness obtained by interestedness.
If the novel fails as what is called a novel, my Aesthetic will save the day: I admit that it could be taken as a novel, a good fantasy, a substitute novel. So if the novel fails as a novel, it could be that my Aesthetic will make a good novel.
THE CHARACTERS' NOVEL
I have entrusted the execution of my novel to the following characters, having selected them carefully based upon their conduct in other novels. I have indoctrinated them in everything a “character of art” should know, I’ve made them read my prologues, which are studies in Aesthetics. If the novel turns out badly, don’t blame me. I did everything that as an author it was incumbent upon me to do: to prove the characters’ discipline by means of their previous conduct, and give them a theory that they didn’t have before, of the character of art.
Every character only halfway exists, because none was ever introduced who wasn’t taken by half or more from “real life” people. That’s why there’s a subtle discomfort and agitation in every character’s “being,” since there are several humans wandering the world that a novelist used partially for a character and who feel a discomfort in their “being” in life. Something of them is in a novel, fantasized in written pages, and it can’t truly be said where they really are.
All the characters are under obligation to dream of being, which is their proper way of being, inaccessible to living people, and the only genuine stuff of Art. To be a character is to dream of being real. And the magic of them, what possesses us and enchants us about them, and what only they know as the form of their being, is not the author’s dream, but the dream of being, in which they avidly participate, that makes them act and feel. Only realist art — which is not Belarte — the art of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Quixote, Mignon, lacks “characters,” which is to say, these characters don’t dream of being, because they think they are copies.
What I don’t want and what I’ve tried to avoid twenty times over in my pages is that a character seems to live, and this happens any time the reader hallucinates the reality of an event: the truth of life, the copy of life, which is my abomination, and certainly, isn’t that the genuine failure of art, the worst, perhaps the only frustration or abortion of a character, that he appear to live? I can admit that they want to live, that they attempt life and even covet it, but I cannot admit that they appear to live, in the sense that events seem to be real; the abomination of all realism.
For my pages, I want constant fantasy, and faced with the difficulty of avoiding a hallucination of reality, which is a blemish on the face of art, I have created the only character ever born whose consistent fantasy is the guarantee of the firm irreality of this novel, which is irreducible to the reaclass="underline" the character who does not appear, whose existence in the novel makes him fantastic with respect to both the novel and the world, being — he seems real to us because daydreams exist. To him I have entrusted the vouchsafing of fantasy here, if all else fails; to the Traveler who in life itself perhaps never existed, since I don’t believe in Travelers; the two sentiments that define the Traveler of quality are the faculty and desire to forget, and the desire to be forgotten. The magnificent Forgetter, complete with this latter faculty of indifference to being forgotten and even the valor and knowledge to want his image to die in the mind of others, a death more fearful than personal death, perhaps because we all sense that personal death does not exist. The death that exists in oblivion is what leads us to the error of believing in personal death. But this belief is very weak, that’s why we do a lot more to avoid being forgotten than to avoid dying.