The Conversations (New Directions Paperbook) Read Online Free PDF Page B

to a subject as banal as Hollywood fluff. He did not know the codes of what came under the heading “mass entertainment,” and he feared he would commit errors of evaluation, not only of the quality, as he had mentioned earlier, but even of the meaning itself. At the same time, he admitted that no object was too small for an inquisitive mind.
    I agreed, and when I remembered the words I used to tell him so, I also remembered, in a blinding flash, my years of practice in conversation, which was a grand object, capacious enough to hold cultural profundities, yet also small and minimal in its parts and in the parts of its parts: everything, the small and the large, had been bathed in the same impartial light of repetition.
    He warned me that he would have to make certain assumptions, some of them quite risky.
    Go ahead, I said.
    In order for what we were doing to not seem like a dialogue of the deaf, he began, he would start with my ideas in the hope of getting me to see the flip side.
    I had spoken of verisimilitude, right? In fact, I had based my argument on it. That it was not verisimilar for a humble mountain herdsman to be wearing a fancy Rolex. So, if ours had one, this would create a rupture in verisimilitude, and there my syllogism ended.
    I thought that it wasn’t that simple, or at least I had made it not that simple because I had gone back to the root of the problem, but at that moment I didn’t feel like arguing (perhaps due to the residual effect of my super-brief depression), and I wanted to see where he was going, so I merely assented with a quick nod of impatience. Anyway, if we were perfectly frank, it was that simple.
    Hence, he continued, my error consisted of me having limited myself to a static concept of verisimilitude. He proposed a different, more dynamic one. According to this concept, and seen within the movement of creation, verisimilitude could be, and was, a generator of stories. Th at attribute was a byproduct of its very raison d’être, which was to rectify an error. A real or virtual error, because it didn’t matter that one had not been committed or that never in a million years would it have crossed the mind of the author to commit it: the possibility of the error or anachronism or nonsense was enough, and the authors of stories, even if they didn’t know it, cultivated this possibility, protected it, and treasured it as their most precious asset.
    With one wave of his hand, he silenced my request for an explanation, even if one was not necessarily forthcoming (I didn’t even know if it was).
    We had to go a little further back, he said, to focus in on the question. Stories that are told or written or filmed, whether they belong to the realm of reality or fiction, have to have qualities that make them worthwhile, because they are neither facts nor natural occurrences. A rock along the side of the road, or a cloud, or a planet does not need to justify itself with its beauty or interest or novelty, but a story does. Because stories are gratuitous and have no specific function, other than whiling away the time, they rely on their quality. Inventiveness has to be maximized in each instance: each time, a new rabbit has to be pulled out of the hat. One recourse they use is verisimilitude. But not a static and narrow verisimilitude, which reality itself provides, but rather “emergency” verisimilitude, the one that arrives at the last minute, like firefighters with their sirens blaring, coming to the rescue in a dangerous situation.
    Once he had established that premise, he returned to me. I was wrong to consider the Rolex an error or an anachronism or the result of a momentary oversight during the filming. Completely wrong. But even so, it could be considered a “possible” error, that is, posited as an error in the original generation of the story. This was not difficult to do. I had already thoroughly outlined the conditions for doing so: where was a primitive goatherd in the mountains