On reading Under the Volcano for the third time (a fiction)

The less real, the more true encapsulates fiction's strategic gambit as a flight from systems of information. Upon adopting it as the motto of their approach to the world, fiction's readers assume an advantage of the form that is not completely reducible to artifice, escape or deception (although these are integral to its operation), an advantage which is more suitable to the particularities of their circumstance than theoretical or empirical discursive modalities. The moment a reader makes the perceptual adjustment, 'this is fiction', error's domain is suspended. Nothing is wrong in fiction, all is as it should be. Where information-based discourses function as the necessary repository for human mistakes, and where all literalisms perform their inevitable slippage towards the self evidences of journalism (in which fact checking, balance, counter-hypothesising, rebuttals are deployed as the very weapons of mystification), fiction preserves strategies of the not-real as an antenna, a feeler, for that in the world which otherwise evades perception. Fiction is specifically charged by the reader with the task of finding whatever could not be brought to attention by other means. Here we note how mescal is the final form taken by fate - the protagonist freely chooses it and yet, bound by narrative, he also could not have chosen otherwise.