Por qué nos creemos los cuentos
Pablo Maurette

ESSAY | 2021 | 160 pages

Don’t the characters in novels we’re passionate about exist? Aren’t the figures in the painting that absorbs us or the scenes in the movie that terrifies us real? Why do they make us so emotional, then? Why do we believe them enough that we burst into sobs or laughter?

Updating a classic theme in Western thought—the question of the status of reality that corresponds to artistic creations—Pablo Maurette composes a brilliant, precise, and delightful essay. Armed with the Greco-Latin concept of evidence, Maurette covers artistic and philosophical cornerstones of our tradition (from Plato to Susan Sontag, passing through Giotto or Proust), paying special attention to a story by Julio Cortazar and a film directed by Quentin Tarantino to undress the key tools and strategies of that magical fabric of truth that is fiction like never before.

“We’re in the opening pages of a novel, the first few minutes of a movie, the third episode of the first season of a show—maybe still a little disoriented, rubbing our eyes like someone who has just woken up or looking around us with a sense of strangeness like someone who has just landed in a new country. And all of a sudden, without warning or mediation, without a bang and without even realizing it, we accept the world presented to us. We get involved with it, project our emotions onto it; we suffer and rejoice. We aren’t crazy, and we aren’t dreaming either. We know that the fictional world of the story, the film, the painting, is constructed with bricks that are very different from those that make up the world we inhabit as flesh and blood. And yet, we accept it, like one who simply accepts the reality of.a of a chair when sitting down.”

RIGHTS: spanish CAPITAL INTELECTUAL

the cover of "Por qué nos creemos los cuentos" by Pablo Maurette