Then the story of Roberto della Griva would be merely the tale of an unhappy lover, condemned to live beneath an exaggerated sky, a man unable to reconcile himself to the idea that the earth wandered along an ellipse of which the sun was only one of the fires.
Which, as many will agree, is too little to make a story with a proper beginning and a proper end.
Finally, if from this story I wanted to produce a novel, I would demonstrate once again that it is impossible to write except by making a palimpsest of a rediscovered manuscript—without ever succeeding in eluding the Anxiety of Influence. Nor could I elude the childish curiosity of the reader, who would want to know if Roberto really wrote the pages on which I have dwelt far too long. In all honesty, I would have to reply that it is not impossible that someone else wrote them, someone who wanted only to pretend to tell the truth. And thus I would lose all the effect of the novel: where, yes, you pretend to tell true things, but you must not admit seriously that you are pretending.
I would not even know how to come up with a final event whereby these letters fell into the hands of him who presumably gave them to me, extracting them from a miscellany of other defaced and faded manuscripts.
“The author is unknown,” I would, however, expect him to say. “The writing is graceful, but as you see, it is discolored, and the pages are covered with water-stains. As for the contents, from the little I have seen, they are mannered exercises. You know how they wrote in that century….
People with no soul.”
Footnotes
- The reader can easily verify the truth of what I have written byconsulting P. A. Leupe, “De handschriften der ontdekkingreis van A. J. Tasman en Franchoys Jacobsen Vissche 1642–5,” in Bijdragen voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidkunde. N. R. 7, 1872. No objection can be made, surely, to the documents collected as Generale Missiven, including an extract from the “Daghregister van het Casteel Batavia” dated 10 June 1643, in which Tasman’s return is reported. But my hypothesis is still plausible, for it would be easy to suppose that in order to maintain a secret like that of longitude, even a document of this sort would be manipulated. With communications that from Batavia had to reach Holland (and there is no telling when they arrived there) a gap of two months would pass unnoticed. Moreover, I am not at all sure Roberto arrived in the area in August and not earlier.
- Absolutely no log or documentation of this voyage exists. Why?
The end
