Pares cum Paribus Nº 4: Índice - Facultad de Ciencias Sociales ...

UNIVERSITY OF CHILE
FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
Morton Marcus
SPANISH VERSION
The Novel
PARES CUM PARIBUS No. 4
FALL-WINTER 1997
Several characters in a famous novel moved to another town. They were tired of enacting the
same old adulteries, fistfights, and successful marriages, and when they heard about a Tibetan
guru living on the California coast, they went to learn from him the way to escape from life's
miseries.
The characters who remained in the novel were outraged or confused. A number of them just
stopped in the middle of a gesture or a conversation, refusing to budge from page 20 or 60 or
203, even though other characters kicked or slapped them, shouting words like, "Get up! Get
up! We'll show them! They weren't that important anyway." Or, "I never liked Tom. He ruined
chapter 5 with his arrogance." Or, "That Margaret. Did you see what she was wearing on page
179?"
Many of these remaining characters married, cheated, had affairs with, beat up or befriended
the wives, children, brothers and secretaries of those who had abandoned the novel, in more
than a few cases revealing desires and grudges that had never been suspected before.
All of these changes caused extraordinary alterations in the millions of copies of the novel that
had been published in dozens of languages around the world. Pages where the characters
who left had loved, dreamed and argued were now white spaces like unexplored territories on
maps, which in a number of places the other characters would not, or could not, cross, and
approached with scorn or trepidation.
The new marriages, arguments and friendships expanded some chapters while shortening
others, hopelessly confusing not only personalities but scenes as well, so that where two
characters had previously strolled by shopfronts on a mild spring day in New York City, smiling
and whispering and occasionally stopping to kiss, now one character was talking and gesturing
to himself and turning a corner into the middle of a firefight in the jungles of Vietnam.
As a consequence of such realignments, the pages of the novel seemed to rearrange