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[] 
On Possible Impossibilities
By Jennifer de GuzmanLet me tell you a story:The winter of the year I turned sixteen was especially cold. Not the waythe winter when I was thirteen was cold, when I had the chicken pox and layin bed for two weeks, spotted with calamine lotion and reading biographies of Mozart. The frost lined our windows and killed my mother’s bougainvillea, but Ishouldered it through the cold and sickness with Mozart and my family. It wasinnocent, almost impossibly so. Three years later, I layered my clothing againstthe cold on weekend nights and sneaked out of the house to visit my boyfriend.It didn’t take long for me to be discovered. My grandfather died one night in De-
cember, and my parents didn’t nd me in my bed when they came to wake me. I
forget how long it was before I could leave home for anything other than schoolafter that. But one night, in a sort of desperation, I sat on the sidewalk outsidemy house, where my father could see me from his chair near the living room window. The cold of the concrete chilled me through my jeans and my rebelliousblack boots, and my entire sixteen-year-old being was completely committed tothe effort of being angry and alienated.In the distance came the tinkling sound of a Christmas carol. I don’t remem-
ber which one; probably something that isn’t specically religious, something
 
Jennifer de Guzman [] 
about Santa Claus. And then there was a re truck, bright red even in the coldnight, lit up with Christmas lights, a reman dressed like Santa Claus waving in
the back. It rolled to a stop as some of my neighbors emerged from their homes.
I went up to the re truck, to the Santa wearing a re ghter’s helmet, and he
gave me a candy cane, the miniature kind that are individually wrapped in crin-kly plastic.A few years later, I tried to turn this scene into a short story, with what seemlike predictable results now. The story was too weird, my readers said, unbeliev-
able. Was it supposed to be symbolic? It made no sense, they said. I was deantat rst, at least inwardly.
But it really happened 
, I thought. But at that point, it was strangeness with no meaning to convince anyone that it could have hap-pened, that it
belonged 
. I put the story aside, and I didn’t think about it againuntil just a few weeks ago, when I read a passage of Aristotle’s
Poetics 
in a foot-note in
Tom Jones 
: “The Poet ought rather to chuse Impossibilities, provided theyhave Resemblance to the Truth, than the Possible, which are Incredible with alltheir Possibility.” In a modern translation: “With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet pos-sible.”A probable impossibility. What does that mean? The words jar. Oxymoron.But think, I tell myself, of all the impossibilities you seemed perfectly willing tobelieve as you read them. Think of 
Midnight’s Children 
, magical children, freak-ish children, Parvati the witch, Saleem the psychic, Shiva the killer. Blood turn-ing to rubies, tears to diamonds; a ghost haunting Saleem’s ayah, spirit seduc-tresses in an abandoned jungle temple, memory of time that does not correspond
 with history. From the moment you read the rst word of that novel you were
prepared to believe every word of it. Salman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai drew you in.He told you, “I am,” and you believed him. Why did you believe him? Why do you
still 
believe him? Why didn’t the spell wear off when you read the last word?And to my breathless self, another one replies: You are the reader, comingto a story perfectly willing to be credulous, prepared to be convinced that every-thing in the novel is truth—of a certain type. Poetic truth, Aristotle might have
said. Keats’s truth. Or Yeats’s. Or Wilde’s. The truth of art lies in its very arti
-ciality, they tell us—the cold pastoral, the monuments of unageing intellect, the
 
On Possible Impossibilities [] impression du matin 
. The artice of eternity. Fiction is a series of moments —like
those on Keats’s Grecian urn or the one in Yeats’s gold mosaic or Wilde’s Londonmorning—that are captured, frozen, like the blood and tears of Aadam Aziz as
he tried to pray on a mountainside in Kashmir. The ction writer must so subtly 
stretch credulity that the reader does not feel the pull and weave these scenes of poetic truth together to form a world in which anything that must happen in hisstory can happen—even impossibilities—and remain believable.So how does Rushdie—or Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende, anyof our favorite fabulists—retain that credulity the reader has coming to a bookand mold it into belief? What do they do that I, when I was twenty years old andtrying to convince readers that something that
had 
happened
could 
happen,failed to do? Márquez has said that he writes his stories as his grandmother toldhers. She described, he said, “the wildest things with a completely natural toneof voice.” That is one method, that of the South American magical realists. Intheir books, even if the amazing occurs, it does not seem at all unexpected. Thedark-haired beauty who ascends to heaven in
One Hundred Years of Solitude 
, thegreen-haired beauty who turns men mad with desire in
The House of the Spirits 
,the four years of rain, the dancing furniture—we believe they are real becausethe narrative knows them to be real.But Rushdie, like a magician revealing his tricks, takes the opposite meth-od. His Saleem Sinai knows his impossibilities to be true, and yet tells us thathe will have trouble convincing us. “I admit it:” he writes at the beginning of hisnarrative, “above all things, I fear absurdity.” He knows his story is strange—“sodense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane!”—but asks us to be-lieve him, pleads with us to believe him. “Please believe that I am falling apart,”he says (and here Yeats returns to us for a moment), meaning it literally, thathe is cracking beneath the surface and will fracture, then crumble, and we wantto believe him. We do believe him. The narrative he creates, each scene anotherpiece of the world where children converge for meetings in the mind of SaleemSinai, demands it.As for Saleem’s fear of the absurd—“The element of the irrational,” Aristotle wrote, “... are justly censured when there is no inner necessity for introducingthem.” In all these books I’ve mentioned, those elements that might seem irra-
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