The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialized disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, “the forgetting of being.”

It was then that the “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect if against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light. That is the sense in which I understand and share Hermann Broch’s insistence in repeating: The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

C.S.: Let’s summarize. There are several means of grasping the self. First, through action. Next, through the interior life. As for yourself, you declare: The self is determined by the essence of its existential problem. This view has a number of consequences for your work. For example, your insistence on understanding the essence of situations seems to you to render all descriptive techniques obsolete. You say almost nothing about the physical appearance of your characters. And since the investigation of psychological motives interests you less than the analysis of situations, you are also very parsimonious about your characters’ past.

A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he’s capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this or that human possibility. But again, to exist means: “being-in-the-world.” Thus both the character and his world must be understood as possibilities. In Kafka, all that is clear: the Kafkan world does not resemble any known reality, it is an extreme and unrealized possibility of the human world.

Against that reduction of the world to the causal succession of events, Sterne’s novel, by its very form, affirms that poetry lies not in action but there where action stops; there where the bridge between a cause and an effect has collapsed and thought wanders off in sweet lazy liberty. The poetry of existence, says Sterne’s novel, is in digression. It is in the incalculable. It is beyond causality. It is sine ratione, without reason. It is beyond Leibniz’s statement.