Novels Defeat the Law of Diminishing Returns

César Aira. Photo: Nina Subin.

You can’t write a novel the night before dying. Not even one of the very short novels that I write. I could make them shorter, but it still wouldn’t work. The novel requires an accumulation of time, a succession of different days: without that, it isn’t a novel. What has been written one day must be affirmed the next, not by going back to correct it (which is futile) but by pressing on, supplying the sense that was lacking by advancing resolutely. This seems magical, but in fact it’s how everything works; living, for a start. In this respect, which is fundamental, the novel defeats the law of diminishing returns, reformulating it and turning it to advantage.

This law, which I’m always referring to, can be explained in the following way: imagine there’s a steel spring, a yard high, standing on the ground. We put a three-pound weight on it, and it goes down thirty-two inches, so now the spring’s just four inches high, but to make it go down another inch, you have to add a weight of three hundred pounds. And then to make it go down another fraction of an inch, you have to pile on tons … The same thing happens in intellectual work, not because there is some necessary relation between the intellectual and the physical, it just happens to happen—analogy wins out. Somebody opens up a new field of