Cervantes and the novel

This speech by writer Carlos Fuentes, entitled "In praise of the novel", was given at the Literature Festival Berlin, on September 6.

Fuentes talked about Cervantes' place in literature, looked at larger questions that fiction and literature can address. Fuentes acknowledged the enduring voice of Don Quixote.

Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605, and has continued to sell ever since, whereas William Faulkner was definitively a bad seller if you compare the meager sales of "Absalom, Absalom" (1936) to those of the really big-seller of the year, Hervey Allen's "Anthoy Adverse", a Napoleonic saga of love, war and trade.
...
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality. Plato puts immortality in perspective when he states that eternity, when it moves, becomes time, eternity being a kind of frozen time. And William Blake certainly brings things down to earth: Eternity is in love with the works of time.

I don't agree with Fuentes and his take on reality. The nature of reality and truth is a topic for another time, but I believe the most powerful fiction affects us precisely because it is a snapshot of reality.

Religion is dogmatic. Politics is ideological. Reason must be logical. But literature has the privilege of being equivocal. The quality of doubt in a novel is perhaps a manner of telling us that since authorship (and thus authority) are uncertain and susceptible of many explanations, so it goes with the world itself.

Reality is not fixed, it is mutable. We can only approach reality if we do not pretend to define it once and for all. The partial verities proposed by a novel are a bulwark against dogmatic impositions.

Fuentes does understand, though, the power of the novel:

Enter your own self and discover the world, the novelist tells us. But also, go out into the world and discover yourself.
...
I find, in all great novels, a human project, call it passion, love, liberty, justice, inviting us to actualize it to make it real, even if we know that it is doomed to fail.

This is what I was getting at when I wrote about patterns. In literature we see patterns we can overlay onto our own lives, and suddenly things make sense, we see meaning in the events of our lives.