12 FICTION(S)

The end of a labyrinth, if it exists,
is to stimulate the intelligence to find it,
enigmas are always much more important than solutions.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES

What is fiction and what is it for? To live, at least in our imagination, lives fuller than those we live, which will always leave us dissatisfied. Fiction helps us to understand reality. It is friendlier and more intense than the so-called real. It is a place where facts have meaning.

Reality is linked to truth, with all its brands, responsibilities, needs, the morality of facts, in brief, the weight of the common and normative. Therefore, fiction appears to be connected with leisure, gratuity, waste of meaning, chance, with what it is not possible to be taught and explained in a traditional way. It is associated with the seductive and passionate politics of the impossible, of the forbidden, the neglected, and the uncanny.

Fictions, thus, are nothing more than the reverse of reality, covered with the veil of a revelation and the tender ability to suggest. The more ambiguous and suggestive the creation is, the more distanced from the creator, the better the work of art. What is relevant to the artist is not to explain the metaphor. An artist is allowed to tell the story but not to reveal the moral.

All art is essentially fantastic, remote from reality, an artifice; the idea of realistic art is already in itself a chimera. Once the fiction is created, it is convenient to test it in time and space; that is the task of an artist.

—ENTKUNSTUNG