I’m not sure why I finished this nearly 700-page book. The only other book I had read by Jorge Volpi was El fin de la locura, which I read many years ago. It wasn’t anything special, but it was an entertaining novel, and the chapter with Fidel Castro’s psychoanalysis session—which is what drew me to it—was very good, or so I thought at the time.
The Invention of All Things: A History of Fiction (Alfaguara, 2024) is, on the other hand, disappointing from the very beginning. The “False Prologue” already announces the book’s many flaws: “Upon waking one morning after a restless sleep, I find myself transformed into a monstrous creature,” reads the first sentence, and eight numbered dialogues between the aforementioned creature and Felice Bauer—the woman to whom Kafka wrote more than five hundred letters between 1912 and 1917—introduce each of the books that make up the volume, which are in turn divided into chapters (five per book) with titles in the style of the Golden Age and explanatory subtitles. For example: “On how to converse with clouds, chestnut trees, and lizards. Animism, myths, and the collective unconscious,” or “On how to assemble the pieces of the self. From Descartes to the Enlightenment.”
These dialogues are possibly the worst thing about a book that fails on every level, from its very conception (due to the extreme vagueness of its subject matter, as we shall see later) to its composition and structure, which is too precise and orderly for such vagueness, to the point of creating a persistent dissonance, but also—and this is evident from the very first pages—on the surface, that is, the prose itself. “My early fictions were embedded in the Catholic education imposed on me by the Marists,” we read in this sort of introduction. But the ‘early’ here would be the subject who is writing, a former student of a Catholic school, never the fictions taught to him there by the priests; these are, in relation to him, “first,” not “early.” Later in the book, we come across other misused terms and expressions—“a Scheherazade avant-la-lettre” (p. 137)—as well as redundancies and clichés.
Elsewhere in this “False Prologue,” the author declares: “In this story, silences will weigh as heavily as music. To thread it together, I will use the arrow of time that pierces our consciousness: this does not mean that the development of the fiction has necessarily been progressive—all history is, after all, artifice—but the chronology will help to distinguish its mutations and metamorphoses, even if the narrative often jumps forward and backward with the random restlessness of an electron” (p. 20). This last image is, on the one hand, unfaithful to the book it purports to describe, because it is not true that such temporal leaps abound in it (unless the author is alluding to the shaded boxes that sometimes appear out of the blue, in some cases offering complementary information—such as the one dedicated to Chomsky’s generative linguistics in the chapter on the origin of language— but without always following a defined logic), and on the other hand, it exemplifies the facile use of figurative language that characterizes Volpi’s prose. Yet another example: “After spending my entire life immersed in fiction, I am now preparing to perform an autopsy on it. I invite you, in the pages that follow, to join me in dissecting them, tearing them apart, and cutting them open” (p.19). Each of these last three verbs means more or less the same thing as the others; the graphic crescendo of the image is just another example of quasi-adolescent sensationalism.
On the other hand, there is the second person with which each chapter begins: “You open your eyes and find yourself on an immense beach. The sand stretches as far as the eye can see. The turquoise of the sea merges with the sky. You hear the whistle of the wind, the waves on the rocks, the squawking of the seagulls. Impatient, the sun steals the color from your hands, feet, and thighs. You crouch down on the sand” (p. 161), in the case of the chapter dedicated to Greek philosophy. These passages reminded me a little of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, but there the use of the second person made sense because they were letters, and the intimacy of the epistolary dialogue contributed to the didactic, Socratic tone of the philosophy course that forms the core of that young adult novel. Here, however, these passages, which also appear in the middle of chapters, always addressed to a female reader, seem gratuitous and corny. It doesn’t matter that at the end, in the “Last Dialogue,” it is revealed—and this has been hinted at throughout the book—that the second person is none other than Felice, the recipient of this story within a story: that indeterminate scene, without any context, in which she converses with the author transformed into a bug.
After the “False Prologue” and “Dialogue 1. Where Felice and the Bug Meet and Debate Fiction and Reality,” there is a first part, or book, which contains a chapter on the origin of the universe, another on the origin of life, another on the origin of consciousness, another on the origin of language, and another on the origin of fiction itself, in the strict sense in which, according to Yuval Noah Harari, it is precisely this, the capacity for fiction, that distinguishes the human species and has determined its history. These first pages of Volpi’s book are, in my opinion, the least successful (I find particularly exasperating the use, instead of the usual conventions, of negative numbers to designate the years and centuries before our era, as in “around 2300, in the rich city of Ur…” or “In Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries”), and the most forced within the general framework of “the history of fiction,” because they do not deal with things such as the New Testament, Greek mythology, or literature, which are the result of the imagination, whether collective or individual, but with others such as the physical world and the human species, that is, not with the fictions created by men, but of that sequence of realities which, in a progression from the inanimate to the conscious, have made human life possible and, with it, fiction itself. Thus, in a certain sense, this entire first part, insofar as it does not refer to fiction but to the conditions of its possibility, is superfluous, and it would have been more coherent to begin the volume with the second book, entitled “Fictions of Origin,” which goes from the most ancient animistic beliefs of humanity to Hesiod’s Theogony, the Hindu Mahabharata, and the Popol Vuh of the Quichés.
What the author offers from this point on is, rather than a history of what is usually understood as fiction—which would include the Odyssey but not The Prince, King Lear but not The Origin of Species, Frankenstein but not The Communist Manifesto, Wuthering Heights but not The Pillow Book—a history of culture; it discusses the Code of Hammurabi and Renaissance painting, the Iliad and Hernán Cortés’ letters, opera and the French Revolution, Don Quixote and Newtonian mechanics. and although the author points out that there is a difference between science and the type of fiction created by Cervantes or Shakespeare, by incorporating everything under the heading of fiction, it becomes an empty name: if everything is fiction, nothing is. With “fiction,” the author seems to have found a catch-all term that, since Harari’s aforementioned bestseller, is, on the one hand, fashionable (what in English is called a buzzword), and on the other, gives him the opportunity to write a very long book—obviously another aspiring bestseller—effortlessly drawing on his knowledge of the various fields that make up what we call “general culture.” (This knowledge includes, of course, contemporary popular culture, to which he devotes an exaggerated amount of space, as in the superfluous note—another of the shaded boxes—in the chapter on Homer, dedicated to Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy.) Not only the difference between science and art, and between these and philosophy, but also that between historical events, such as the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and works that are products of the imagination, such as 19th-century novels—the author dwells on those of the Brontë sisters, Balzac and Zola, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—or romantic poetry—Sturm und Drang, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, and Byron—are thus erased, subsumed into a kind of stew with such a variety of ingredients that it is impossible to tell what it tastes like. The supposed history of everything is, in the end, the history of nothing.
To this fundamental lack of discernment is added, to the detriment of the book, a certain lack of rigor, when the author suggests, for example, that classicism produces realistic fiction (p. 272), or asserts that “the Comedy has a tragic ending” (p. 250), or that “the madness of Don Quixote fascinates and destabilizes us: at every turn, it reveals the flimsy and volatile nature of reality” (p. 339). Or when his alter ego, the bug, explains to Felice that “analogy […] works in two ways: as metaphor or as metonymy” (p. 65). Or when the first sentence of In Search of Lost Time is quoted as “For a long time I went to bed early” (p.563), even though “de bonne heure” means “early” in Spanish and has appeared as such in all translations of Proust’s work into our language. This lack of rigor contrasts, incidentally, with classic works of popularization such as Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy or Peter Watson’s The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century.
In the case of the Mexican tradition, we inevitably think of Alfonso Reyes’ magnificent breviary on Hellenistic philosophy or certain areas of Octavio Paz’s essays. And here, incidentally, the comparison once again reveals the insubstantiality of Volpi’s historiographical endeavor. When it comes to commenting on the epic of Gilgamesh, he falls headlong into cliché: “Nothing remains of the wonderful Uruk except a few stones in the dust. The Uruk of Sînlēqi-unninni, on the other hand, remains as alive, resplendent, and bustling as Balzac’s Paris, Dickens’ London, Joyce’s Dublin, Döblin’s Berlin, Rulfo’s Comala, Onetti’s Santa María, or García Márquez’s Macondo” (p.85). (Comala, alive and bustling?!) If in the pages where Paz talks about Gilgamesh—in The Bow and the Lyre, in The Children of the Limbo…—the commentary—which clearly distinguishes epic poetry from lyric poetry—is always in function of an idea proper to poetry, a point of view, which is Paz’s, this is precisely what Volpi lacks in his approach to fiction.
And this lack of an authentic point of view seems to be compensated for by the more obvious form of point of view, which is the use of the first person. The chapter on Roman law ends with the story of how the author studied law, in what he considered a “historical mistake,” but hardly practiced it and then tried to forget about that profession; in the chapter on the Iliad and the Odyssey, he recounts a frustrated excursion to the island of Ithaca as part of a literary festival; in the chapter on Greek tragedy, he recounts the long rivalry with his older brother… But these autobiographical passages not only add nothing, they are also distracting; in a book that purports to be a history, such digressions are unnecessary or impertinent. “The adjective, when it does not give life, kills,” said Huidobro, and this seems true to me also for the use—or abuse—of the first person, as well as the second, in La invención de todas las cosas.
The volume concludes with a nonsensical “Chronology of Fiction,” subtitled “Index of the main works of fiction mentioned in this book,” but it is not an index and includes many works not mentioned in the book, and where the disparity of the elements considered “fiction” is once again very evident. Here we find critical and philosophical texts such as Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Democracy in Latin America” by Aníbal Quijano (1993), historical events such as the fall of Mexico-Tenochtitlán (1521) and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (2020), and technological advances such as the invention of the wheel (-3000) and the public launch of ChatGPT (2022).
To top off the nonsense, the chronology does not end in 2023; it includes six more entries, the closest of which is “1 billion”: “Extinction of almost all known life on Earth due to lack of oxygen” (p.688).
I don’t know for sure why I finished reading this nearly 700-page book.
