The Philosophy Is in the Telling: How Narrativity Embodies Cogitation in Javier Marías’s The Infatuations

Abstract

The celebrated Spanish novelist Javier Marias is often called a philosophical fiction writer, whereas he himself claims that novels—also his novels—are sui generis, quite unlike philosophy. To him, narrative fiction offers a unique kind of “literary thinking” not subject to reason yet leading to the recognition of truths, however contradictory these recognized truths. Thus, Marias actually frames the novel less as narrative than as fiction—as a world of fiction that paradoxically reveals truth. As I analyze his novel The Infatuations, I agree that Marias illustrates a unique aspect of novelistic literary thinking, but I suggest that this uniqueness is more about the narrative process of swinging between knowledge and ignorance than about finding truth and recognition in fiction. Though said to be “devoid of plot,” the novel orchestrates the reader’s ignorance and doubt so as to produce strong “narrativity” for the page-turning mind (Sternberg in Poet Today 13(3):463–541, 1992; Narrative 9(2):115–122, 2001; Poet Today 31(3):507–659, 2010) and this ignorance-based narrativity makes the reader feel—that is, embodies—the philosophical ideas praised in Marias’s oeuvre: ignorance, doubt, hypothesis, truth, fact, knowledge, bias, untrustworthiness, and evil. The Infatuations does have a thin plot but it uses narrative “gapping techniques,” digression eminently included, to give philosophy a feel and to become a kind of philosophical crime fiction. Marias is therefore more philosophical than he might be willing to concede, though by way of (fictional) narrative. The essay intends to draw Marias experts to the relevance of Sternberg’s narratological framework and to show how Marias’s oeuvre throws light on narrativity.