"How sweet it would be to forget the monster that saps our brief lives as cement for its vain monuments. How sweet it would be to forget History!" (Life Is Elsewhere) If history is going to end (though I cannot imagine in concrete terms that "end" the philosophers love to talk about), then let it happen fast! But applied to art, that same phrase, "the end of history," strikes me with terror; that end I can imagine only too well, for most novels produced today stand outside the history of the novel: novelized confessions, novelized journalism, novelized score-settling, novelized autobiographies, novelized indiscretions, novelized denunciations, novelized political arguments, novelized deaths of husbands, novelized deaths of fathers, novelized deaths of mothers, novelized deflowerings, novelized child-births-novels ad infinitum, to the end of time, that say nothing new, have no aesthetic ambition, bring no change to our understanding of man or to novelistic form, are each one like the next, are completely consumable in the morning and completely discardable in the afternoon.

To my mind, great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history. It is only inside history that we can see what is new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what is imitation; in other words, only inside history can a work exist as a value capable of being discerned and judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall outside its own history, for it is a fall into the chaos where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived.

Improvisation and Composition

During the writing of Don Quixote, Cervantes did not mind altering his hero's character as he went. The freedom by which Rabelais, Cervantes, Diderot, Sterne enchant us had to do with improvisation. The art of complex and rigorous composition did not become a commanding need until the first half of the nineteenth century.