The Art of Flight

by Sergio Pitol

  My apprenticeship has been the result of an immoderate reading of stories and novels, of my efforts as a translator and the study of some books on facets of the novel written almost always by storytellers, such as E. M. Forster’s classic Aspects of the Novel, or the exhaustively prepared Notebooks of Henry James, or the fragmentary Notebook of Anton Chekhov, as well as a long list of interviews, articles, and essays on the novel by novelists, not to mention, of course, conversations with people from the profession.

  These decalogues, enumerations of instructions for use by aspiring young writers, have proven fascinating to me for the mere fact that they allow me to read the authors’ work again in an unforeseeable light. The precepts that Chekhov wrote to guide his younger brother who was determined to take up the literary profession are a clear explanation of the poetics that the Russian author had forged. They are not the cause but rather the result of a work in which the author outlined and defined his world and his literary specificity. But will we understand Chekhov’s world better because we know those precepts taken from his own professional experience? I think not. In return, the knowledge of the craftsmanship he employed to write his remarkable stories surely intensifies the pleasure of reading them. Knowing those precepts allows us to discover, if not his conceptual world, then surely some secrets of his style, or, rather, the mysteries of his carpentry. Only if we apply as a rule the same precepts to Dostoyevsky, Céline, or Lezama Lima must we disqualify them as storytellers, because both their universe and their methods and purposes are in total opposition to the Russian writer. Indeed, could Horacio Quiroga’s decalogue be applied to the work of Joyce, Borges, or Gadda? I am afraid not. For no reason other than they belong to different literary families. In the end, each author has to create his own poetics, lest he be content to be the succubus or the acolyte of a teacher. Each will establish, or perhaps it would be better to say that he will find, the form that his writing demands, since no narrative is possible without the existence of form. And in this way, the hypothetical creator must be guided by his own instincts.

  One learns and unlearns at every turn. The novelist must understand that the only reality he is responsible for is his novel, and therein lies his fundamental responsibility. Everything he has lived, his personal conflicts, social preoccupations, his good and bad loves, his readings and, of course, dreams, must come together in it, because the novel is a sponge that will wish to absorb everything. The author will take care to feed and strengthen it, preventing any tendency toward obesity. “A novel is in its broadest definition,” Henry James maintained, “a personal, a direct impression of life.”

  Having quoted this great storyteller, I should admit that I owe some of the crucial lessons about the craft to reading him. I was fortunate enough to translate into Spanish seven of his novels, including one of the most fiendishly difficult to be found in any literature: What Maisie Knew. Translating allows one to enter fully into a work, to know its bones, its structure, its silences. James validated for me a trend that was present in my very first stories: a furtive and sinuous approach to a fringe of mystery that is never entirely clear and that allows the reader to choose the solution he believes most fitting. To achieve this, James adopted a highly effective solution: the removal of the author as an omniscient subject who knows and determines the behavior of his characters and in his place one or, in his most complex novels, multiple “points of view,” through which the character tries to arrive at a meaning of some incident he has witnessed. Through this device, the character constructs himself, in an attempt to decipher the universe around him: the real world undergoes a process of deformation upon being filtered through consciousness. We will never know to what extent that narrator (that “point of view”) dared to confess in the story, nor what portions he decided to omit, nor the reasons that led to one decision or another.

  Similarly, even before reading James, my stories were characterized by their representation of an oblique view of reality. In general, there is a hole in them, an ominous void that is almost never covered. At least not entirely. The structure must be very solid so that the vagueness that interests me does not become chaos. The story must be told and retold from different angles and in it each chapter functions to add new elements to the plot and, at the same time, blur and contradict the schema that the previous elements have established. A kind of Penelope’s weave that is continuously done and undone, in which a plot contains the germ of another plot that will in time lead to another, until the moment when the author decides to end his story. It is a literary convention that can be arduous, but is in no way novel. The origin of this literary tradition dates back to One Thousand and One Nights. In the Far East, this device has been employed frequently and has produced works that we must inevitably call masterpieces: Cao Xuequin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, written in China in the eighteenth century, and the short story “Rashomon,” by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, written in early twentieth-century Japan. Its Occidental counterpart is easier to trace. We find it, of course, in the Quixote, in The Canterbury Tales; it reemerges in the Enlightenment, with amazing energy, in Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, by Diderot; in Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa; and in that wonder of wonders, Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. In our century, this type of novel, whose composition has always been associated with Chinese boxes or Russian matryoshka dolls, and which today theorists call mise en abyme (placed into abyss), has found a legion of fans. Allow me to cite three remarkable titles: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges.

  The writing of my first novel, in the late sixties, coincided with a universal attempt to discredit narrative, a hatred of storytelling. Expressing even a moderate interest in Dickens, to cite just one example, could be considered a flagrant provocation or a confession of ignorance or provincialism. It was a time of never-ending innovation. Literature, cinema, visual arts, theater, all switched languages with extreme frequency. I was excited about many of these innovations, as was almost every member of my generation. We were convinced that a renovation of form was essential in order to return the novel to the state of health it needed. We applauded the innovations, even the most radical ones; but, in my case, the interest for the new never diminished my passion for plot. Without it, life to me has always seemed diminished. Relating real things and undoing, while at the same time enhancing, their reality has been my calling. Whatever doubt I had vanished when I read Galdós. Even if admitting it in Spain is at times scandalous, he has been my true teacher. In his work, as in that of Goya, I discovered that the quotidian and the delirious, the tragic and the grotesque, do not have to be different sides of a coin, rather they are able to be a single fully integrated entity.

  But, to return to the storyteller’s ars poetica: Does a single, valid universal principle exist? Golden rules of compulsory application? Does each period add new norms and proscribe others? And yet I still wonder: Is it not true that what is a source of energy for most writers can also be poison for some of them? Are there cases in which a writer, by violating the canon, succeeds in creating masterpieces? Jan Potocki and Jane Austen are contemporaries, but their works seem to illustrate genres that bear no resemblance to each other.

  A basic rule, articulated by Gide: “Never take advantage of momentum already gained.” Does each book, then, have to start from zero? We have been witnesses to the fall of authors who for years were our idols, whose audacity we admired without reservation; we came to think that their prose and their vision not only renewed narrative language but also modified our perception of existence until, paralyzed, suspicious of our own faculties, we began to discover through one of their books that their language left us cold, that we had become insensitive to their subjugation, only to be convinced in the end that the faculties that should be regarded with suspicion were not ours but those of the formerly idolized writer, whose prose was devoured by a vegetative language from which he coul
d not or did not know how to defend himself, whether out of slapdashness, self-indulgence, or exhaustion; a language that, like a golem, had begun to mark the rules of the game, only to go its own way, to confuse the author, to convert him into a mere amanuensis. Félix de Azúa recalled once a conversation with Eduardo Chillida in which the sculptor told him that in his youth he suddenly felt surprised by the ease with which he carried out his work until, frightened by his extraordinary skill, he forced himself to sculpt with his left hand so he could again feel the tension of the material. It seems clear to me that Gide’s warning requires no mechanical change of style, devices, themes, or language. It does not require the writer—in each novel, drama, or poem—to transform himself into someone else. That would be foolish, a masquerade. How do we understand, then, the work of Henry James, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Valle-Inclán, Borges, Saramago, and Gombrowicz, for example, for whom excellence depends on the permanent exacerbation of a personal style? In the end, it is really a matter, I imagine, of preventing language from passing, by sheer inertia, from one book to another and becoming a parody of itself, lulled by the energy of the momentum gained. The only influence that one must defend oneself against is one’s own, declares the master of clarity, Bioy Casares. But there, as in everything that has to do with writing, lies the instinct of the writer who will have the last word.

  Another definitive rule: never confuse the act of writing with the art of writing. The act of writing does not tend to intensify life, which is the goal of the art of writing. The act of writing will scarcely allow the word to possess more than a single meaning; in the art of writing, a word is by nature polysemantic: it speaks and is silent, reveals and obscures. The act of writing is reliable and predictable, the art of writing never is; it rejoices in delirium, in darkness, in mystery and in disorder, no matter how transparent it may seem. Marguerite Duras: “Writing comes like the wind, it’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.”11

  Writing for me has meant—if I may borrow a phrase from Bakhtin—leaving a personal testimony of the world’s constant mutation.

  Xalapa, September 1993

  10Translated by Harold Morland

  11Translated by Mark Polizzotti

  HERE COMES THE PARADE!

  1980

  19 APRIL (ON A FLIGHT FROM SAN FRANCISCO TO MEXICO)

  I keep toying with the idea of writing a novel with a detective plot. Convert the building where I live into a setting with the typical (or topical) characteristics of a microcosm. I’m thinking about a dominant figure, a kind of monster: a very fat woman who lives with a son whom she hides. The tenants: people in some way tied to movements organized thirty or forty years ago by the radical right; also a few intellectuals whom the others see as rabble; and poor tenants, protected by rent control, whom no one ever sees. And a lonely, maniacal, and annoying madman named Pedrito…

  26 MAY (IN MEXICO)

  I had dinner last night with my niece Elena Buganza. She told me about the thesis she’s preparing for her licenciatura en letras degree. As I listened to her, I had an idea that could be the engine of my novel. Her thesis deals with the work of Bernardo Couto Castillo, a decadent from the late nineteenth century. A young Mexican aristocrat who died at twenty-one, disowned by his family and demonized by the people of good conscience of the time. I imagine, from what little I know, he probably died from an excessive use of absinthe and a violent fit of syphilis. “He enjoyed every vice, even the most perverse,” wrote one of his contemporaries. My niece searched for Couto’s grave and could not find it. She then located some of his relatives and went to see them in search of information about his life and work. When they heard she was researching him and had already gathered some relatively obscure texts, they grew uneasy and closed the door in her face. They probably feared that details that could once again tarnish the family’s reputation would come to light. I am tempted to write a kind of Aspern Papers, except, instead of love letters in my novel it would be secrets that compromised the honor of a poet who has gone down in history as a moral example.

  1981

  9 MAY

  …set everything in the late thirties or early forties. I would like this detective novel to also shed light on certain political issues. Unfortunately, the characters I’m thinking about are too parodic and could only serve as incidental figures (Pedrito Balmorán, for example). A clandestine committee has tried a fellow party member in secret and sentenced him to death. Another man, named Martínez (a blackmailer, among other things), is murdered in jail so he can’t reveal the details of the trial. Someone had paid Martínez to falsely confess that he was the perpetrator. They had promised him all sorts of things: to prepare his getaway, a substantial reward, etc…but I’m missing something… something related to the Central European Jews who began to arrive in Mexico, fleeing Nazism? Some sort of scam? A marriage of convenience undertaken so a woman could leave Europe? Jealousy, betrayals, vendettas, and all that trove of grisly emotions that complement these topics? I can’t figure out how to begin. Everything boils down to the incidental characters, good only for creating atmosphere. The tenants of the building live their life dreaming of a new Cristero uprising and triumph of God on earth…fierce hatreds and rivalries at the core of the rightwing organizations…

  1982

  11 MAY (PASSING THROUGH MADRID)

  As I walked through the city center this morning, I thought obsessively about the building where I live in Mexico, in Plaza Rio de Janeiro, and about my hypothetical novel…A character who was nine years old in 1942 returns thirty years later to visit the building where during his childhood a crime was committed that was never solved. He questions several tenants: his Aunt Hedwig, the bookseller Balmorán, the doorman; and thus the plot begins to take shape. An old German woman who never has visitors lives in the building. I’ll need to spend a few days locked in the archives…by the end, readers will have learned several things, all more or less trivial, eccentric, but the mystery will not be completely revealed to them.

  12 MAY (IN MEXICO)

  The story unfolds at the level of masks. The faces will never be seen. The biggest enigma lies in the identity of the protagonists.

  12 JUNE

  …a novel that isn’t a mere divertimento but a moral reconstruction of the period…Try to get the microcosm to shed some light on our present. A novel with a more or less hidden moral? No, thank you. Although, at the end of the day, why not take that risk? Attempt a search for the truth, a reflection on the past and its persistence over time. The conclusion is almost topical: the truth, the true truth of the truth, is not likely to be within our reach. We rely only on certain intuitions that allow us to approach it, perhaps to brush against it. Knowing a phenomenon only partially is as if we did not know it at all. However, it is impossible to conform and maintain a passive attitude. An ethical obligation requires us to continue our search. The building in Plaza de Rio de Janeiro becomes a house of Babel.

  15 JUNE

  …I’m thinking that a theme I tried to develop for several years in a short novel that I never managed to finish (the relationship between a brilliant mother and a timid and unsociable adolescent) will have to be incorporated into this novel. A celebrated hostess holds a dinner for a famous painter and his son who has just returned to Mexico after spending a couple of years or more in a boarding school in the United States.

  17 JULY

  …another parallel theme: a possessive mother, a possessive son. Widowhood. The mother falls in love again and is eager to remarry. The son sets out to undo the relationship. He embarks on a long trip with his mother through Europe. She begins to deteriorate, succumbs to morphine, becomes a nymphomaniac. Years later, on the skids, they return to Mexico. On the verge of death, she calls him, insults him terribly, and curses him.

  1 SEPTEMBER

  …the same old story. I abandoned the project about the house in Plaza de Rio de Janeiro to r
eplace it with two stories, two variations of the relationship between mothers and children. I should attempt to summarize all the themes that come to mind into a single plot.

  21 SEPTEMBER

  Luis Prieto told an amazingly absurd and extraordinarily amusing story last night about a fake Mexican castrato from the nineteenth century that I am planning to develop. A chronicle of the life of the castrato would be the document that saves Pedrito Balmorán and creates panic in a family of whitewashed tombs that fear the revelation of family secrets.

  1983

  3 JANUARY

  Silvia Molina lent me a stack of documents that belonged to her father. They detail the subversive activities of the German colony in Mexico during World War II.