by Sergio Pitol
It is also possible that Valéry, distracted by other interests or busied by other subjects and other times, did not recognize that the novel was no longer what it once was, and that far from Morand, Maurois, and Montherlant, who had their own appeal, new writers in France and, above all, in other latitudes were determined to transform narrative language and were beginning their novels in a very different way:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.
There is an explicit coarseness present in this paragraph. Its reading does not produce a delightful chill heralding the appearance of a marquise on the street. Instead of a lady dressed by Molyneux or Schiaparelli, frantic to arrive promptly for an engagement, which could well change her life, with the handsome son of an Italian banker, or to go to her jeweler’s shop to have him adjust the setting to one of her famous emerald stud earrings, or to the office of a seedy pawnbroker to hock them then and there, we find ourselves in the presence of a fat man, a few pedestrian barber utensils, and an untied yellow gown that establish a pronounced oxymoron, that is still very funny, with the liturgical Latin: “Introibo ad altare Dei.”
Let’s consider the beginning of another novel:
He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut.
The reference to the gender of the protagonist, his aggressiveness toward the head of a Moor hanging from the rafters, the similarity with an old soccer ball immediately produces in us a slight bewilderment. What world have we entered? The brutality of striking a head, whether of a Moor or anyone else, immediately dissolves, and is made unreal by the levity of the narrative tone. There is instead a kind of peculiar humor that is enhanced by comparing the head to a soccer ball and his dry hair to a coconut. We cannot be sure whether the exquisite lady wished to leave her home at five to witness such an uncommon spectacle. She was not prudish, no, nothing of the sort, rather she lacked humor and was therefore extremely disquieted by certain eccentricities; she did not know how to behave, and that was the worst thing that could happen to her. Instead of going out that evening she was left to play with a pair of moss-green kid gloves, waiting for a telephone call that never came. In the end, she was so prostrate with anger that she could have chewed the gloves to shreds.
The first quote is from 1922. They are the first lines of James Joyce’s Ulysses; the second, from 1928, belongs to the beginning of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. A few years later, in the heart of Europe, Vienna to be precise, a young military engineer began a novel that would fill four large volumes that would remain unfinished on the author’s death. A novel that still radiates throughout universal narrative:
A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and the setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapour in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.
You have probably recognized it by now; this is the first paragraph of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, published in 1930. A stunning twist, a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn, has occurred in writing. It would seem to be a section of a scientific essay, or rather a weather report written by a highly skilled employee. However, it is a novel. In these ten lines, full of isotheres and isotherms, of monthly aperiodic fluctuations and phases of the moon, of Venus and of the rings of Saturn, in addition to other phenomena that are incomprehensible to us mere readers, a mystery is communicated, in just eight words of quiet language, that, in the end, clarifies for us that it was a beautiful day in August 1913. This wordy pomp and, moreover, its subsequent clarification, grates on the nerves of our acquaintance, the marquise. For as long as she can remember, she has detested those Teutonic witticisms that, in her view, demonstrate a monumental lack of tact and taste. That beautiful day, she did not go out at five or any other time; she spent her time leafing through some magazines and writing several drafts that she angrily crumpled up, until she was finally able to write a dry, so very, very dry letter, in which she ended a long-standing romantic relationship. She then began to laugh like a mad woman, took sedatives with champagne, and soon had to be put to bed.
And on the other side of the Atlantic, a North American, a Southerner to be exact, began one of the most beautiful novels ever written as follows:
From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or husband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed Voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.
These are the first lines of Absalom, Absalom!, the brilliant novel that William Faulkner published in 1936. If our friend—I imagine that by now we can allow ourselves such familiarity—had gone out that day at five to take part in the conversation that Quentin Compson held with Miss Coldfield, she would surely have been on tenterhooks. She had dealings in recent years with many highly esteemed Americans: the Gereths, the Prest-Coovers, Mrs. Welton, and Howard Blendy, a young diplomat of whom she was a trifle enamored. Aristocracy of another kind, so to speak; rich, sophisticated, lighthearted, quite the opposite of that sleepwalking couple from the South that reminded her of a pair of ill-tempered crows who mumbled in some nonsensical language. Her education—although she’s not entirely sure about this—is firmly rooted in Descartes, which, combined with other limitations that the reader has probably noticed, cause her to rebel against that ecstatic verbal delirium. To hear that children’s feet have an air of impotent rage and that the summer dust was “biding and dreamy and victorious,” affects her in such a way that she could have slapped anyone who dared repeat those words to her.
Several years passed, almost forty since Ulysses appeared, until, in 1960, Julio Cortázar took Paul Valéry’s remark and crushed it with joyous abandon. The first sentence of The Winners reads:
“The
marquise went out at five,” Carlos Lopez thought. “Where in the hell did I read that?”
Our poor, dear, old, powdered marquise! The years have taken their toll on her. She had imposed on herself a long and strict internal exile, and had completed it with exemplary rigor. The Argentine writer’s attack had wrested her out of her lethargy.
She lay awake all night, plagued by two opposing impulses. On the one hand, she felt the temptation to repair to a convent where she would take a vow of perpetual silence. An innate pride compelled her to punish the world by turning away and making her contempt known. The sacred music, the smell of wax and incense, the proximity of angels, the locks of hair on the floor around her, the coarse habit of cloister, the tears, all of it, everything, drew her closer to God. It was possible, she thought, hopeful, that some writer understood the nobility of her gesture and would one day be tempted to write: “The marquise went out at five o’clock. A simple black tailleur by Patou accentuated her elegance as she left the house alone. A car took her to the gate of the convent that would house her earthly body for the rest of her days.” An instant later, she recalled the allegations against Ives-Etienne, her niece’s fiancé, who was also a distant nephew of hers, a brash and insolent boy, though not devoid of a certain charm, who, to the astonishment of his entire family, sympathized with the so-called popular causes. Suddenly, the old woman saw herself marching through the streets, erect like a steel stiletto, her left fist raised. She heard her voice suddenly become powerful, her cries of hatred for militarism, and her commitment to the fight in Algeria. Her brave decision to betray her class to march arm in arm with the downtrodden and the oppressed moved her to tears. Her courageous attitude would certainly inspire some author, who would one day write: “The marquise went out at five o’clock only to fall all at once into a sea of flags.” And then he would describe with elegance the moment she leaned her arm on the arm of a metal worker to continue the march. They were wrapped in the music of L’Internationale, and they felt protected, secure in their cause, convinced that victory was near.
For a moment some other ideas swirled around her feverish mind. She dreamt, for example, that she was the heroine of libertine novels; she smiled ambiguously as she thought of certain terribly lascivious images, but those visions did not last, and the woman returned stubbornly to the previous dichotomy. At times she trembled, sobbed, admired the courage that was needed to cloister herself in the strictest order of silent nuns and, immediately, was even more dazzled by her own erect figure, rallying from a platform of the Mutualité to a throng of workers and students, or by the feat of having chained herself to the bow of a ship that would deliver arms to Southeast Asia. But such is life. Clinging to the possibility that she would once again grace the pages of some yet-to-be-published extraordinary novel, her heart grew weak, faltered, until a sudden blow shattered it completely.
The next day, the marquise went out at five o’clock. She did it inside a modest coffin. So far, to my knowledge, no one has recorded her departure.
Xalapa, July 1994
ON RECONCILIATIONS
AND THE WORD BECAME FLESH
“In the beginning was the Word,” says the Gospel of John. I do not know if that was the first, but surely it is the highest praise language has ever received. “In the beginning of all literature we find form,” declared the young Shklovsky during the second decade of the twentieth century, the brilliant theoretician from the Russian Formalist School, which revolutionized linguistic and literary studies. And around the same years, Stephen, James Joyce’s adolescent artist, will discover that “in the virgin womb of the imagination the word was made flesh.” That is to say, he sets the moment when the creation of form begins through language, the emergence of literature.
Perhaps the greatest enlightenment of my youth was the language of Borges; reading it allowed me to turn my back both on the telluric as well as the bad prose of the period. I read him for the first time in México en la cultura, the remarkable literary supplement edited by Fernando Benítez. The Borges story appeared as an illustration to an essay on fantasy literature by the Peruvian José Durand. It was “The House of Asterion”; I read it with amazement, gratitude, and boundless wonder. Upon arriving at the final sentence, I had the feeling that an electric current was running through my nervous system. The words: “‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ said Theseus, ‘the minotaur scarcely defended himself,’” said in passing, as if by accident, revealed the hidden mystery of the story: the identity of the strange protagonist and his resigned sacrifice. I was speechless. I never imagined that language could reach such levels of strength, subtlety, and strangeness. I left immediately to look for books by Borges; I found almost all of them, covered in dust, on the shelves of a bookstore; during those years, one could count the Mexican readers of Borges on two hands.
Literary genres and their transmigrations emerged from the union between form and language. The novel, by its mere existence, is representative of freedom; everything in it is possible provided the following elements are present: lively language and the intuition of a form. The novel is the polyphonic genre par excellence; it recognizes only the limits demanded by these two components: word and form, to which we may add another: time, a specifically fictional time. And one more: a proximity to society, its records: the never-ending round: the human comedy: vanity fair, all that.
Xalapa, May 1995
WRESTLING WITH THE ANGEL
For Marek Keller
The undersigned, a writer who vaguely sensed his vocation for literature in a sugar mill in Veracruz, also encountered—and violently so!—the dark upheaval that afflicted Tonio Kröger in Wiesbaden: the struggle between the temptation of the world and the solitude essential to the creative process. That is, a hunger for the world and at the same time its rejection. For Kröger, steeped in a tradition where, for centuries, energy and discipline have been revealed to be a mere extension of nature, arriving at the correct solution seems no longer to possess merit. The world of Veracruz, as is well known, has virtues and charms that the Germans do not know, but that makes it prone, as few are, to all sorts of temptations. To resist a desire, whatever it may be, signifies a loss, being no one, living in error. The effort to reconcile life experience with the practice of writing made me feel oppressed for many years, disorganized, diminished. Now, when the world has become smaller to me, to the point of almost vanishing, that apparent struggle has become for me disconcertingly trivial. Either way, it has left a mark on my life. It has been a source of agony, but also, secretly, the most extraordinary creative stimulus.
I try to reproduce an afternoon in Warsaw, where the fragile balance between life experience and discipline threatens to cause crisis at any moment. From the top floor of the Hotel Bristol, I watch the lively crowd that roams the Krakowskie Przedmieście, perhaps the city’s most beautiful avenue. People stop to admire the lilacs in the park beneath my room, to take some sun, eat pastries and ice cream, talk. The park’s layout is rectangular; the front, which is narrower and borders the Krakowskie Przedmieście, is civilized, a tamed garden where benches abound so that passersby can rest and mothers can watch their children run on the sandy trails. The back of the park is deep: a tangle of wild bushes, a bit of English forest, they say, where games less innocent than children’s are played. My desk is situated at an angle in front of the window. The sun illuminates my workplace from the left, as the manuals recommend.
As a rule, I would rise late, study Polish for a couple of hours, walk around town until mealtime, and, then, from four on I would sit down to work and would not leave the hotel until nine or ten at night, occupying the time preparing an anthology of contemporary Polish short stories, reading, selecting, translating, and constantly revising my translations. I would also devote time to working on a collection of stories I intended to send to Mexico. At night, I would socialize or read. While working, I would get up occasionally to make coffee, which, as a rule, I would drink on the large stone window ledge.
On the afternoon in question, the spectacle in the street and garden was both attractive and troubling. A sunny day in mid-May. The lilacs have appeared, a floral vision that is the first certain announcement of spring. The movement of the passersby is very festive. It must be Friday, when the activity is greater than any other day of the week. The heavy furs, the leather and simple wool coats have disappeared to make way for lighter clothing or trench coats. Most of the men are no longer wearing hats; the women wear hats made of straw or light fabric, adorned with small bouquets of artificial flowers. Among the young people of both sexes, one frequently sees sunglasses that protect their almost transparent blue or green eyes from the timid spring sun. On the balconies of nearby buildings, geraniums are in bloom.
During one of the breaks I devote to coffee, I see three young men enter the garden at about the same time but from different points; one is wearing a military uniform, one is obviously a university student, and the third seems, I don’t know why, to be a boy who has just arrived from the provinces to carry out a commission in Warsaw or, perhaps, determined to remain in the capital indefinitely and set in motion, like Lucien de Rubempré, the still unclear threads of his ambition and transform his will into supreme law. To be someone! What does it mean for him to reach such heights? He is very young and possesses an imagination as passionate as it is limited. To become the husband of the daughter of a Rockefeller or an Onassis, should they one day decide to holiday in Poland? Or, at the very least, marry a less famous heiress, the daughter of a Polish millionaire living in Hamburg or Chicago, the owner of a beautiful cottage on the Baltic coast? This is his plan. Indeed, he considers any other attempt to shape his future to be pointless. I can also see three beautiful girls sitting on three different benches in the garden. One, a charming blonde would justify her presence there by the fact that she works in the bookshop across the street; she’s waiting for the cashier—with whom she commutes daily on the trolleybus back to her neighborhood—to leave work; another, even more blonde, would tell whomever bothered to ask that she studies French literature and is waiting for some friends who will be there at any moment with the necessary books so they can do a translation exercise together that afternoon; the third, not as young but more attractive, with a full, perfectly shaped figure and short black hair that reveals a perfect neck, who’s wearing nicer clothes and shoes made with better materials, would say curtly that she was unable to resist the temptation to enjoy a few minutes of sun while she waits to go to a movie; she would say it in a contained, intense, and somewhat dismissive tone, which suggests a sensuality that the two blondes lack and which always causes the listener to want to divert his gaze toward the more gifted parts of her body; she would then add in a stern, almost pedagogical voice, that she’s attending an international film festival at the Skarpa cinema, without mentioning that her husband would be waiting for her there just before the function begins.