by Sergio Pitol
The motive for that trip had been a reading of Bernard Berenson on some peculiarities of the Byzantine legacy in Sicily, illustrated with splendid photographs of the monumental apse at Cefalù. However, just before leaving, I decided to remove Italy from my trip in response to a bitter argument with some elderly aunts, for whom that country, that of our ancestors, was a beacon whose light reached all the way to their home in Colonia del Valle, allowing them to forget at times the thick darkness in which they claimed to be stagnating, in the land of Indians where our ancestors had mistakenly settled. Chance governed, above all else, my stay abroad. I lived, as I have already said, many years in Europe and, yet, I was never able to see the Byzantine apse at Cefalù or the Flemish paintings that I would presumably find in Antwerp. One morning in Paris, in early August 1961, almost without realizing it, I found myself in line at the Italian consulate to apply for a visa to travel to the country I had sworn never to set foot in, and from which, after arriving, it was a year before I was able to extricate myself.
The prelude to my arrival in Europe was marked by that grave international disturbance that involved the building of the Berlin Wall. Many extremely important events took place over the next thirty years; among others, ultimately, the collapse of that wall. But I never witnessed any of them. Either they had just occurred when I arrived somewhere, or they were about to happen as I was about to leave. Only once did I find myself in the middle of a popular uprising. It was in Istanbul. I was traveling with an Englishwoman and a Polish friend as absent-minded as me. Suddenly, we saw an agitated and raucous crowd that spilled out into the streets and squares of the city’s center. There was a constant sound of gunfire; occasionally, groups of police, guns drawn, would stop our taxi, force us to get out, and subject us to a rather thorough body search. The driver acted as if it were a cheerful routine. There was no reason to take the incidents seriously, he told us with a reassuring smile. In the restaurants, the waiters quickly lowered the metal shutters, and we remained locked in for a while, hearing knocks at the door and screams from outside. The headwaiter approached the table with a beaming smile. Nothing was going on, boys playing games, mischief, excessive happiness, everything was in order; it would only be a matter of minutes until we could leave. The same thing happened in the Grand Bazaar, in the museums. There was merrymaking everywhere, singing students, boys roused by the mere joy of being young. Public order was perfect. Under the circumstances, we visited everywhere that the Baedeker guidebook recommended. Any excess was possible, we thought, in that unlikely city, although the noisy eccentricity of local customs and celebrations had begun to wear on us. Days later, far from Turkey, while reading Le Monde, I discovered that my trip to Istanbul had coincided with an attempted coup. The tourist services had worked to perfection, just as in Death in Venice, where everyone, from the manager of the grand hotel to the most humble gondoliers, did everything possible to exaggerate the festive mood so that the tourists would not suspect the city was being ravaged by the plague. In those days of peril, ignorance of civil drama stripped all meaning from the facts. Nothing that I read later about “les émeutes de Stamboul” existed as a real experience for me. However, perhaps because of that ambiguous and oblique quality, I introduced Istanbul into one of my novels as a scene that was not intended to be convincing in any way, and the trip on the Marburg, as well as the landing in Bremen, more precisely, have only served me as anecdotes, unable to crystallize into a narrative.
In Europe, I held various jobs, and at times I managed to survive without one. I moved frequently from one side of the famous wall whose appearance marked my arrival to the other. The thread that ties these years together, I’ve always known, is literature. All my personal experiences, in the end, have converged. For many years, my experiences traveling, reading, and writing merged into a single experience. The trains, the boats, and the airplanes have allowed me to discover worlds that were either wonderful or sinister, but all of them were surprising. Travel was the experience of the visible world; reading, on the other hand, allowed me to undertake an inner journey whose itinerary was not confined to space but rather let me move freely throughout time. Reading meant accompanying Mr. Bloom to the taverns of Dublin at the beginning of this century, Fabrice del Dongo through post-Napoleonic Italy, Hector and Achilles through the streets of Troy and the military camps that for many years surrounded it. And writing meant the possibility of embarking toward an elusive goal and fusing—thanks to that dark, inscrutable, and much-talked about alchemy one comes closer to the process of creation—the outside world and that subterranean one that inhabits us.
I was in Germany recently. Passing through Wiesbaden, I set out to find the house where Turgenev lived and wrote most of his work. Suddenly, I came across a raucous protest of neo-Nazi youths who were celebrating the second anniversary of German reunification with a bloodcurdling uproar. The disgust I felt as a result of a protest fraught with violence caused me to abandon my search for the palace where the Russian writer had lived. The next day, at more or less the same time, I was in Milan walking to the church of Santa María delle Grazie to once again see The Last Supper. As I approached the dazzling stonework of that noble building, one of Bramante’s best, I was barely able to contain my excitement. I felt like applauding in front of everyone to celebrate that remarkable triumph of form. In a full state of grace, the march I had witnessed the day before in Wiesbaden crossed my mind. It is impossible to imagine a more crushing disparity! It was revealed to me once more with an almost physical intensity that in the face of a permanent irradiation of works of art, in the face of its finality and fullness, everything else is incidental, tangential, and superficial. Works of art express, and do so once and for all, the best energy humans are capable of producing. Any political episode pales or becomes diluted before the splendor of a work of Palladio, Giorgione, Orozco, or Matisse, in the same way that before a literary work one discovers everything common and irrelevant contained in the language of practical politics, of business, of worldly ceremonies, that language that Galdós defined as “the daily diet and training-school of ordinary minds.”9
Shortly after having settled in Italy, Bernard Berenson said that man is the perfection of the universe; the spirit, the perfection of man; and art, the combination and summary of all human perfections.
I think about Mikhail Bakhtin, about the many years that the Russian thinker was confined to a tiny village lost in the immensity of the Siberian tundra where he was serving a sentence of banishment. Knowing how to read and write allowed him to survive; in a region of illiterates, he was in charge of drawing up the administrative documents of the local kolkhoz. The living conditions might have been very different from those of Berenson, who wrote in a beautiful castle in Tuscany with the aid of a private library of forty-five thousand volumes, surrounded by paintings and objets d’art and a circle of friends that included several of the most eminent figures of our century. The conclusions of both humanists, however, are similar: ultimately, the spiritual life is the only one that counts. Only the fruits of thought and artistic creation truly justify man’s presence in the world. With an energy characteristic of the Titans, Bakhtin was able to establish a delivery network so that some friends and disciples could send him the materials needed for his research. These were highly specialized books, in six or seven languages, difficult to obtain in Stalin’s Russia. With them, he was about to finish while in Siberian exile a refreshingly learned book: Rabelais and His World, an erudite and passionate defense of the body and the human spirit against all forms of repression and intolerance. In it, the Russian humanist outlines an idea that several decades later thinkers as diverse as the Spaniard María Zambrano and the Pole Leszek Kolakowski would take up: against the discourse of power, the philosopher and the poet would impose the supreme efficacy of the jester’s devices. The steely rigidness of the Prince—his immense power—would be ineffective to the halting step, the astonished gaze, and the vacuous smile of the clown. Nothing irritat
es the powerful like the ridiculing of their gestures and words, to be transformed not into an object of worship but one of mockery, among other reasons because their language usually exists on the edge of parody. By making a handful of minor alterations and intensifying a few gestures, Chaplin was able to transform a speech by Hitler into a perfect example of the grotesque. Over time, the circumstances surrounding Bakhtin’s life will be remembered as one of many heinous periods that history insists on repeating with mediocre imagination. His books, on the other hand, will remain as an immense triumph of intelligence.
What exploit by Napoleon could be compared in splendor or permanence with War and Peace, the National Episodes, The Charterhouse of Parma, or The Disasters of War—works that paradoxically grew out of the existence of these exploits?
For the writer, language is everything.
Form, structure, and every element of a story—plot, characters, tone, gestuality, revelation, or prophecy—are all products of language. It will always be language that announces what paths to follow. Robert Graves said that the primary obligation of the writer is to work without granting himself a truce in, from, with, and about the word.
The exceptional moments in literature occur when the author, no matter what course he follows when starting a work, manages to immerse himself into the deep currents of language in order to, in this way, lose his own identity. E. M. Forster suggests that at the core of every great creation beats a longing for anonymity. In the imaginary world of Tlön, dreams Borges, “there is no concept of plagiarism: it has been established that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous.” “Every poet,” Octavio Paz concludes, “is only a pulse in the river of language.” A literary work is revealed as genius when the author succeeds in finding the dark current that carries vestiges of everything spoken since the time language was born, that is to say at the moment the writer feels he is transcribing a dictation, when the word makes its appearance even before being convened. If that moment is produced, life is saved! Thus the best pages of literature possess something at once luminous and unfathomable. All of us, as readers, have witnessed at some time this wonder. Speechless, astonished, excited, we have been conscious of the miracle that emerges from a page, one in which language and instinct have merged and the will of reason is overtaken by an energy that is greater, a page whose beauty is absolutely impossible to explain in its entirety. I am thinking of a very short story by Chekhov: “The Student.”
Like Berenson, I have concerned myself with the construction of “the house of life,” that is, the effort to understand the relationship between the individual and society, and the wish that this relationship be governed by the concepts of virtue and justice. Four years ago, shortly after returning definitively to Mexico, the wall that was a prelude to my first landing in Europe collapsed. A hopeful air spread across the world. It seemed that at last an age of freedom, fullness, tolerance, and prosperity had begun for everyone. At the same time, a dangerously narrow view was integrating the idea of democracy into a purely commercial mechanism: free trade. The results are obvious. The press repeats the unwelcome words everywhere: crisis, unemployment, recession, disillusionment, instability.
I returned to a Mexico very different from the one I left in 1961. It’s clear that there exist today signs of a civil society that was unthinkable when I left. It is an encouraging phenomenon that coexists with images of profound devastation: an uninhabitable city, a degraded landscape, an almost nonexistent sky. In Coyoacán, in the Plaza de la Conchita, upon opening the door of my house, I have seen doves fall like rotten fruit, poisoned by acids that contaminate the air. And in the main square, also in Coyoacán, I have witnessed scenes similar to others I witnessed some fifty years ago that lay hidden in the depths of my memory. There were the squalid Indian women dressed in rags who arrived at the coffee plantations during harvest time, the same ones who arrived at the end of the workday, kneeling beside their husband or children whose hair they carded with furtive and stern expressions. Seeing them in Coyoacán, dedicated to the same labor, I once again seemed to hear the snap of lice crushed with thumbnails. The indigenous women of my childhood spoke Popolaca or Mixe; those of Coyoacán—possibly Otomí. Instead of cutting coffee, they sell poorly executed weavings while their offspring beg for alms around them.
Do those ghostly presences that appear around my home not prove the futility of a language that conceives of itself as velvet-like and triumphant, even when it does not cease to be a regrettable stammer?
Traveling and writing! Activities that are both marked by chance; the traveler and the writer will only be certain of the departure. Neither of them will know for sure what will happen on the way, let alone what fate awaits them upon their return to their personal Ithaca.
Xalapa, March 1993
9Translated by Robert Russell
AN ARS POETICA?
For Ednodio Quintero
I was invited to attend a biennale of writers in Mérida, Venezuela, where each of the participants was to explain his own concept of an ars poetica. I lived in terror for weeks. What did I have to say on the subject? The best I could do, I told myself, would be to draft an Ars Combinatoria. Or, more modestly, to enumerate certain issues and circumstances that in some way define my writing.
Regrettably, my theoretical grounding, throughout my life, has been limited. Only later in life, during a stay in Moscow, did I begin to take an interest in the work of the Russian formalists and their disciples. I met Viktor Shklovsky, who invited me to his studio where I listened to him talk for an entire morning. I was speechless! I was at a loss to explain how I had been able, until then, to do without that universe filled with brilliant provocations. I decided to study, as soon as I finished with the Russians, the fundamentals of linguistics, the various theories on form, to address the Prague School, then structuralism, semiotics, the new currents, Genette, Greimas, Yuri Lotman, and the Tartu-Moscow School. The truth is, I never got beyond the study of Russian formalism. I did read, with indescribable pleasure, the three volumes that Boris Eichenbaum dedicated to the work of Leo Tolstoy, Tynyanov’s book on the young Pushkin, Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose, since his literary theory was also based on concrete works: those of Boccaccio, Cervantes, Sterne, Dickens, and Bely. My interest grew more intense when I got to Bakhtin and read his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky. When I attempted to delve into more specialized texts, the so-called “scientists,” I felt lost. I was confused at every turn; I did not know the vocabulary. It was not without regret that little by little I began to abandon them. From time to time I suffer from abulia, and I dream about a future that will afford me the opportunity to become a scholar. Lacking any knowledge in classical rhetoric, how could I dare lecture on an ars poetica?
In Mexico, during my adolescence, I was a devoted and frequent reader of the work of Alfonso Reyes, which includes several titles on literary theory: El deslinde (The Demarcation), La experiencia literaria (The Literary Experience), and Al yunque (To the Anvil). I read them, I imagine, for the pure love of their language, for the unexpected music I found in them, for the ease with which he suddenly illuminated the most necessarily obscure topics. In a poem to the memory of the Mexican writer, Borges declares:
In his labors he was helped by mankind’s
hope, which was the light of his life
to create a line that is not to be forgotten
and to renew Castilian prose.10
His modesty was such that even today few are aware of his extraordinary achievement: transforming—and in the process reinvigorating—our language. As I reread his essays, I continue to be amazed by a prose that is unlike any other. Cardoza y Aragón maintains that anyone who has not read Reyes’s work cannot claim to have read his.
I owe to our great polygraph, and to several years of tenacious reading, my passion for language; I admire his secret and serene originality, his infinite combinatory ability, his humor, his talent for inserting everyday expressions, seemi
ngly at odds with literary language, into a masterful exposition on Góngora, Virgil, or Mallarmé. Even though I may have been deaf to the theoretical reason present in Reyes, I am indebted to him for introducing me to the various fields to which I might otherwise have been slow to arrive: the Hellenistic world, medieval Spanish literature, the Golden Age, Brazil’s sertão novels and avant-garde poetry, Sterne, Borges, Francisco Delicado, the detective novel, and so much more! His tastes were ecumenical. Reyes carried himself with a slight air of confidence and extreme courtesy, moving with an insatiable curiosity through many different literary spheres, some unenlightened. He complemented the hedonistic practice of writing with other responsibilities. The teacher—because he was that too—conceived of sharing with his flock everything that delighted him as a kind of ministry. He was a patient and hopeful shepherd who endeavored to, and in some cases succeeded in, cultivating generations of Mexicans; my generation’s debt to him is immeasurable. During a time of closed windows and doors, Reyes urged us to embark on every journey. As I recall him, I am reminded of one of his first stories, “The Dinner,” a horror story situated in an everyday setting, in which, at first sight, everything seems normal, anodyne, one might even say a bit saccharine. Between the lines, however, little by little, the reader begins to sense that he is entering an insane, perhaps criminal, world. That “dinner” must have hit the right spot. Years later, I started writing. Only now do I realize that one of the roots of my narrative lies buried in that story. A large part of what I have done since is little more than a mere set of variations on that story.