1. Two thousand years ago, Plato wrote in the tenth book Republic: “All the poets, beginning with Homer, imitate the images of excellence and other things they create, without ever having access to the truth.”

2. Speaking about the poet, he adds: “it is fair to attack him”. Therefore: “it is fair that we will not recognize this in a state that will be well regulated by law”.

3. And the auction: “Poetry cannot be taken seriously.”

Tribute to Carlos Calderon

4. I read it again Republic Plato after a few years. The trigger was an invitation from the cafeteria-bookstore Tres Gatos, on the occasion of the Philosophical Café coordinated by Aurora Albán and Daniel Acosta. They made a bet that they would meet once a month and talk at night as a counter to this escalating fear of insecurity that was beginning to affect Quito. The topic of the conversation was “Truth in Literature”.

5. And that is a big topic. I suggested that I focus on what concerns me: the novel. With a little precision, some edges are open.

6. To begin with, from Plato to Kant, passing through Aristotle Poetics, they are all thinkers before novels. Not even Kant, who published Criticism of the verdict 1790, which paved the way for the defense of aesthetic experience as a type of knowledge, can be included in what will become the century of the novel.

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7. The century of the novel, the 19th century, in which Balzac, Dickens, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Melville, Tolstoy, Clarín, Stendhal, Dostoevsky or Zola stood out, bet that the novel could be responsible for the research of society. It was a positive attitude. Specifically, they learned to give voice to different social classes. The novel has become an agora of contrasting voices. When you listen well, then you can open the way for the search for truth.

8. There are, therefore, other novelistic thinkers: Bakhtin, Šklovski, Lúkacs, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Marthe Robert, Claude-Edmond Magny, Ricoeur, Kristeva, Ángel Rama, Isaiah Berlin, Georges Steiner, Dorrit Cohn, Iris Murdoch , Franco Moretti. And no less, but the decisive thought of the novelists themselves: from Tolstoy’s epilogue to G.war and peace to Henry James’s prologues for his novels, from Edith Wharton’s essays to those of Nathalie Sarrauta, Marguerite Yourcenar or Kundera. These are the philosophers of the age of novels.

9. Of course, there were novels from the second century, such as Ethiopian Heliodora, who admired Cervantes so much. But none of them were known to Plato and Aristotle. They dealt with poetry, the idea of ​​a poetic outburst (v Ionfrom Plato).

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10. Novelists are also irresponsible, they cannot be politically correct, they do not glorify ideas: they criticize systems, ideologies, fanaticism. When a novel glorifies an idea or proposes a struggle, there is no novel but pamphlets and demagoguery.

11. There is a size u Republic from Plato. It is a narrative book. They are dialogues between characters – Socrates is Plato’s greatest invention – and storytelling is his resource. whatRepublic like a protonovela? The irony of time Centuries later, Schlegel would say: “novels are the Socratic dialogues of our time.”

12. What novels contribute are perspectives, contrasting voices, revealing mistakes, questioning reality as a constructible representation. It is the school of skepticism.

13. The double path of error detection is a rich narrative. In Proust’s novel, Swann says goodbye to Odette de Crécy, his lover. After a while, he has a jealous rage and returns. He thinks that Odette is waiting for another man. He surrounded the building and hid to spy. Then he sees a light in Odette’s window and, as confirmation of his jealousy, the shadow of a man. Wanting to embarrass her, he goes over, touches the lighted window and discovers that he has the wrong window. Two old men open it.

14. What is jealousy? It is an assertion of truth based on heightened suspicion. This is due to emotional insecurity, psychological instability. A person who is too convinced of his truth is similar to jealousy. And jealousy, like dogma, can kill.

15. The problem with truth claiming to be unique occurs when it is carried over to the range of absolutes. Everything that becomes dogma leaves behind a trail of death, even from its heralds. The Muslim fundamentalists, the leaders of the One Party, know this. We don’t have to go far: Catholic dogma stands on the crucified man.

16. Unique ideas, unique religions and unquestionable books are real problems. Novels, on the other hand, are ready to disappear. They want you to run over them quickly. They operate on memory. They don’t want to be remembered. From time to time there is talk about the “death of the novel”, about the “death of the author”. But novels and novelists are reborn. They do not pretend to become the only voice.

17. Should we bet on cultural relativism? Not. Fiction never fails to notice that it is fiction. The opposite of the truth is not fiction, but delusion, fraud, silence. The deceiver intends to deceive: this is a case of post-truth. First you lie, and then, at another time and place, you deny it. Novels do this in the same space: a misunderstanding is revealed. Silence hides the elements of truth-seeking. Not mystical silence, but the silence of those who are silent not to share. Novels are, in the best sense of the word, talkers. They ask for silence to read. They learn to listen to others.

18. What do others say? That the world is much bigger than you imagine, than you can know. That not only do we have to know what interests us. What does the novel say? He says: open your eyes, you didn’t notice this, pay attention, I will make it interesting for you. (OR)