By Thomas Sanfilip

I am not a believer in destiny or fate, neither chance nor serendipity, but rather fatedness, that is, the congruence of certain factors that coalesce in synchronous fashion to bring about an inevitable outcome. But as a writer of fiction one has to consider exactly what is being pursued. To say it is truth is too broad, because facts bend the writerly perspective in ways too unpredictable. The laying down of plot, characterization, action, the linearity of the process is ultimately self-defeating. Aristotle’s dictum that any projected vision of the future is based on what is possible of the real is true, and this serves the linearity of fiction as a hard and true structural dynamic that no writer can ignore. But this structurality does not in my view ultimately point us to the truth—at least in fiction. Here is where I believe the road diverges from endless fictional redundancies and opens us to the possibilities that truth ultimately lies outside the perimeters of the delineated, and that language and all of what we presume of reality laid out as fiction does not lead to a clear linear line to a predicable narrative outcome. The more real, ascertainable truth of the human experience expressed vis-à-vis fiction I believe lies beyond fictional methodology. To the degree structural elements are handled skillfully, fiction will infer a greater metaphysical truth beyond the fiction portrayed.

“’Everything is in flux.’ And perhaps that is the very point at which to begin,” said the Austrian philosopher and logician, Ludwig Wittgenstein. “One movement orders one thought to the others in a series, the other keeps aiming (sic) at the same place (sic) . . . If we think of the world’s future, we always mean the place we’ll get to if it keeps going as we see it going now and it doesn’t occur to us that it is not going in a straight line but in a curve & that its direction is constantly changing.”

Let me bring this closer to home and offer an illustration.

On a recent visit to Italy, I visited a nearly deserted villa that was strangely a replica of the villa I described in my last novel. I wandered from gallery to gallery just as the main character did in my book. Not realizing it at the time, I realized later that certain salient factors seemed to have aligned themselves along an invisible line of continuum leading me to an exact replica of the villa I had invented as one of the principal settings of my novel. How was it that my steps replicated my literary invention after the fact, leading me to a near deserted villa filled with paintings, some galleries closed, others open, exactly as I had written? My footsteps echoed the deserted hallways just as my main character did in his fruitless search for artistic authenticity and of which there was none—most of the galleries were empty because of ongoing renovation, so there was no artistic work available to see, except works shuttled into obscure corners of the villa. This completely replicated the setting and narrative impetus to my novel.

Did I know this at the time, or did I foresee the whole scenario after the fact? And why was it—visiting a 17^th century Genoese mansion in another town on the same trip—did I find two statues flanking an ascending walkway directly to the mansion high above the town and exactly as described in my novel?

Here is the scene as I wrote it over a year before I visited the mansion—

“Standing in the middle of hazy sunlight, I turned to look back at the villa and caught sight of two statues flanking the upper steps of the stairway, two pale 17th century statues, their figures like faded negatives bathed in obscure, white light. Their shadows fell over us in jagged lines and right angles. Balanced on two plinths, they were pale, grainy and non-descript in a way difficult to describe, as if everything of aesthetic value amounted to shadows alone. They were for a moment shimmering and moving, alive and sanguine, impossible to ignore. Their shadowy personas hovered over us as we descended the stairway to the walkway that met the lake spreading out before us, like a great carpet of refracted blue.”

The only difference between my novel’s description and the actual scene in reality was that the two statues flanked the walkway at the steps leading upward to the mansion, and the lake in my description was somehow a transfiguration of the “refracted blue” of the Mediterranean I saw from the veranda of the mansion.

I think a clue to understanding these unexpected synchronicities—what I see as salient, metaphysical intersections somehow inserting themselves into my creative process—can best be explained in the analogous process of analyzing a dream, its images, its often outlandish and incongruous scenarios, the people in it who are seemingly alive and speaking, interacting with you as the active persona and participant in the action you have no way of knowing why or how created. There is a sense after waking that behind the dream’s incongruities, there is something logical, though at first beyond reach until its illogical details are examined without prejudice under the rules of its own laws, requiring an unwavering faith in the innate illogic of the dream which forces you to accept its ambiguities—until you realize it is the very ambiguity of reality that is the truth, that whatever is the source of its meaning and power is, in fact, what I call its metaphysical soul speaking—so out of the same unknown, true fiction I believe creates and reveals its true meaning. 

Details can be extrapolated to infinity—if they touch the borderline of truth and reality. No part of a fictional narrative is left untouched, nothing stands still, everything breaks and reassembles. The imagination takes over where reason and logic fall to the wayside and exercise no more influence. The impossibility of a perfect narrative morphs into endless possibilities because all truth carries a fictional guise exceeding reason and logic, every character’s fate existing beyond the scope of the narrative. For me, fiction’s ultimate power rests in its innate metaphysical prowess, its ability to exceed the real and in the process reveal the truth that exists outside the limits of reason and logic.

Listen to the chastisements and yelling voices of a young boy and his mother arguing, periodically shouting to make their points heard, erupting in all their insipid mockery of each other. Someone mimics the boy’s crying voice and resistance, but it’s hopeless. The arguing and yelling go on—the choking cries, a female voice, a warning, something must happen, but what? The boy’s resistance becomes whining cries that go nowhere, falling on deaf ears, neither the mother’s nor the father’s, the spiral down into pointless violence—but for the writer every detail is a launching point to expose the truth beyond the point of entry to the narrative. Everything is used, everything remembered, nothing lost. No relenting, no retreat, the writer witnesses everything that can be retained.

“Every singular thing or anything which is finite and has a determinate existence, can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence,” the Portuguese philosopher Spinoza pointed out, “and again, this cause also can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on, to infinity.”

In the end, I believe every novel’s fate exists beyond the narrative construct and engages the fatedness of all existence beyond the recognizable, the known, the predictable—it is only after the fact that meaning is revealed. Causes are logical, but outcomes exceed what is at first illogical, but eventually explained. For me, everything that exceeds logic and reason in the construction of fiction exists in the realm of the unknown, but through inferences, symbolic or otherwise, reason and logic are found again intact on the other side of a seemingly illogical narrative or characterization. Their resolutions have to be pursued to a logical end no matter how driven a narrative or characterization into what on the surface are ambiguous cul-de-sacs. But though at first impossible to see, the writer must have absolute faith that the truth will eventually be revealed—provided the writer pursues every avenue of the seemingly illogical to its logical denouement that brings the reader to the metaphysical truth that both writer and reader must ultimately realize together.

References:

• Ludwig Wittgenstein fr. Culture and Value, ed. by G.H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Blackwell, 1980).
• Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (Penguin, 2004).
• Thomas Sanfilip, In the Wilderness of the World’s Being (Bigio Morato, 2026) *publication Sept. 2026.