Who he might be—or perhaps, who the publisher Scherping stands for in reality—doesn’t need to be disclosed: it’s all too obvious. By the same token, however, it’s evident how Aristides (or the author concealed behind that pseudonym) understands the concept of “reality.” His skepticism toward this “most protean of all abstractions” is a leitmotif running through all his works and he leaves not a shred of doubt that for him, however fictive it may be, “literary reality” seems to come closer to the actual truth of what’s happening than the multiple interpretations of the factuality of events. This makes it a priori impossible to read The Death of My Brother Abel as a roman à clef; to be sure, its supposed transparency would allow us to recognize the flesh-and-blood models for the figures and occurrences contained therein, but we would lose sight of the meaning of the book. And of course, the same goes for Folder C. In my capacity as editor of the writings in Folder C, its distinct “literary reality” seemed to me more important than finding a key to the factuality concealed in the fiction, a key which—as Dr. Engelhardt assumes with forensic persistence—could possibly correct if not totally eliminate the discrepancies between the accounts in Folder C and those in The Death of My Brother Abel. All it takes is a few pages from Folder C and one soon falls under the narrative’s spell and has to admit that the apparently accidental and heterogeneous arrangement of its accounts actually represents a carefully structured and coherent literary product with a thoroughly justified claim to unmediated authenticity. Even such a puny intellect as Wohlfahrt’s, whose own sense of business ethics often tends to manipulate and relativize the substance of reality, recognized that what we have here is not a supplement to or, if you will, a completion of the book The Death of My Brother Abel, but an independent piece of literature in its own right. Let the grotesque nature of his preface bear witness to that fact.

Surely the motive behind the notes in Folder C that seem fragmentary and, at first glance, unrelated to one another is the same as in Abel, namely, an attempt to get to the bottom of the act of writing—that is, novel writing, the authentic invention of reality. Aristides’s various approaches to this problem, his “wrestling with the angel of truth in the ‘as-if’ ” and continual failure in the attempt, as agonizingly and tortuously reported to the literary agent Brodny and to Schwab in Abel, seem to be continued here, although they stay closer to the topic, deteriorate less into blather, and thus seem more disciplined and orderly—small wonder: they are pieces of work that Schwab collected and sequenced with a view to completion and eventual publication which he, Schwab, would have overseen as an editor at Scherping Publishers. Aristides could at this point interject: it’s a job Schwab would have had, had he not died. But that was not the case: Schwab was still alive when the cover of Folder C was closed.