I adore eccentrics. I have perceived them since adolescence, they have been my companions ever since. There are some literatures in which they abound: English, Irish, Russian, Polish, and also Hispano-American. In their novels all the protagonists are eccentrics as are their authors. Laurence Sterne, William Beckford, Jonathan Swift, Nikolai Gogol, Tomasso Landolfi, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Franz Kafka, Ronald Firbank, Samuel Beckett, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Virgilio Piñera, Thomas Bernhard, Augusto Monterroso, Flann O’Brien, Raymond Roussel, Marcel Schwob, Mario Bellatin, César Aira, Enrique Vila-Matas are exemplars of eccentricity, like each and every one of the characters who inhabit their books, and so their stories are different from those written by others. There are authors who without being entirely “odd ones” enrich their work through the participation of an abundant cast of eccentric characters: tragic or comical, demonic or angelic, geniuses or dunces, at the end of the day almost always all “innocents.”
The “odd ones” and their attendant families are able to free themselves from the inconveniences of their surroundings. Vulgarity, ungainliness, the vagaries of fashion, and even the demands of power don’t touch them, or at least not too much, and they don’t care. Their view of the world is different than that of everyone else; parody is as a rule their form of writing. The species is not characterized only by attitudes of negation, but rather its members have developed notable qualities, they know very wide ranges of knowledge and organize them in an extremely original way. There is a chasm between the eccentric writer and the avant-gardist. There is a notable difference between the work of Tristan Tzara, Filippo Marinetti, and André Breton and the tales of Gogol, Bruno Schulz, and César Aira, for example. The first three represent the avant-garde; the second correspond to a literature that was very novel in its time for its eccentricity. The avant-gardist forms a group, struggles to oust the writers who proceeded him from the canon because he considers their literary processes and use of language to be obsolete, and that their work, that of the Dadaists, futurists, expressionists, surrealists, is the only and truly valid one. They consider that the step forward has illuminated writing in their language, or even beyond their borders, purifying the canon of authors that they disdain. They rationalize, disagree, create theories, sign manifestos, launch battles with the literature of the past and also with the contemporary literature that doesn’t come close to theirs. In general, this doesn’t happen to the eccentrics. They propose neither programs nor strategies; on the contrary they are resistant to forming coteries. They are dispersed throughout the universe almost always without knowing each other. It is once again a group without a group. They write in the only way their instinct demands. The canon doesn’t disturb them nor do they try to change it. Their world is unique, and because of this their form and subject are different. The avant-gardists tend to be harsh, severe, moralistic; they may proclaim disorder, but at that moment disorder becomes programmatic. They adore trials; they are prosecutors; to expel a member from time to time is considered a triumph. They exclude pleasure. As they rail against the past, as a rule they become weighed down with dreadful moods. By contrast, the writing of an eccentric is almost always blessed by humor, even if it is black.
Some of the odd ones have in their life known fame, glory, tributes, awards, all varieties of prestige, at the end of their lives; others knew nothing of this, but even after dying have left a small disbanded flock, which will continue to be faithful to them and which perhaps will be happy to be known as small in order to venerate their obscure deity. In short, an eccentric writer is capable of leaving a mark in various ways on the life of those readers for whom, almost without realizing it, he definitely wrote.
HENRY JAMES IN VENICE. The attraction exerted by the Mediterranean over men of the North is lost in a time when literature was oral and the idea of Europe was far from being forged. The barbarian was dazzled and attracted by the splendor and diversity of the ancient cultures that flourished in hot climes. Christianity gave rise to an endless procession of believers who flocked to Rome to confirm their faith. Romanticism scattered throughout the South dazzling waves of neopagans of all kinds, eager to consummate in southern lands their marriage to the Light. The attitude of the men of the South toward Nordic fogs has been, by contrast, the result of an intellectual enterprise, never of the senses: the search for the ultima Thules of knowledge or of consciousness.
The Elizabethans, the Romantics, the Decadents, the Symbolists have found the Italy they craved. The works of Shakespeare in which it is possible to divine happiness generally take place in lands where the lemon tree blossoms. Macbeth, Hamlet, and the aged and crazed Lear remain forever trapped in the native mist. Romanticism populates the cities of Italy with a colorful fauna of fevered visionaries, who will reveal to English, German, and Scandinavian readers an ample repertoire of characters, metaphors, cadences, and new settings. In the second half of the nineteenth century, late but impetuous, two new figures appear thereabouts: the Russian and the American. The first acquires a letter of naturalization in Europe through Turgenev; the second is introduced by Henry James.
Thanks to both writers, both the Russians and the North Americans soon ceased to be exotic representatives from abrupt distances, or mere incarnations of the noble savage for exemplifying generous theses. What’s more, they were revealed as individuals of extreme psychological complexity, fearless in the face of Europeans, whose cultures they assimilated rapidly. In addition, they moved with enviable facility while being ignorant of the servitude imposed by tradition, even enriching it by being fully conscious of its vitality and its deficiencies.
With James, the international scene is enriched visibly. Prosperous Americans, characters who seemed to be reared in greenhouses, with a rigidly established moral conscience and an awakened intellectual curiosity, among whom lurks furtively an unscrupulous or falsely pitiable figure, whose foolishness or excess provides the necessary touch so that the human comedy remains duly composed, they embark on the “siege of London” and are at times victorious, or they take up residence in Paris, where their worldly education receives a final touch, which they endeavor to make more rigorous in Geneva, or they drop by Rome, Florence, or Venice to transform their marriage to the Sun into a marriage to Art and to experience vicissitudes and conflicts of excruciating complexity given the tension between the exigencies of a puritan formation (with the implicit feeling of renunciation for which they seem to have been born) and the relaxation of the men and women of those sun-drenched lands, who seem to have been created for the mere pleasure of enjoyment, despite finding themselves shaped by social norms and customs more rigid than those of the pure and uncontaminated citizens from the other side of the ocean. The encounter takes places always in a dramatic way between the dapper offspring of Italian aristocracy and the young female heirs who devote their time to perfecting themselves in museums and cathedrals.
For Southern Europeans the feeling of pleasure is a reality and a daily necessity; it would seem that, from childhood, they had known how to orient themselves in its labyrinths and been familiar with the sophistry necessary to obtain it with the greatest possible intensity. Outside of pleasure there exists only one desire: concealing on the outside all possible intimate vicissitudes. However, for the children of puritan society, the capacity for discrimination and choice become resolved in general in a vocation for resignation, as a voluntary and painful option of self-sacrifice. These characters are almost always women: intense points of light in the thickness of a dark weave.
Who was better prepared than Henry James to describe the triumphs and moral uncertainties of those characters? His years of schooling in Europe seemed to predestine him to carry out this task. Born in New York in 1843, James was barely six months old when he crossed the Atlantic with his parents to spend two years in France and England. His father, Henry James, Sr., heir to a sizeable fortune, rebelled in his youth against the narrow doctrine of the Calvinist fa
ith of his family and set out for Europe, where he discovered two traditions of thought that would change the course of his life: the mysticism of Swedenborg and the utopian socialism of Fourier, of which he became a fervent apostle upon his return to the United States. This man, quite rare for his time, ensured that his children, William—who would become one of America’s most important thinkers—Alice, and Henry, received from a very early age a privileged and unconventional education, in order to familiarize them with the idea that they belonged to a family unlike no other. The young Henry’s second stay in Europe, from twelve to seventeen, during which he undertook studies in Geneva, Bonn, and Paris, led him to take as his own several languages and to adopt a culture that the youth of his country lacked, in addition to making him understand that within a family different from others, he, at the same time, was radically different from the other members of his family.
From this second trip, a feeling of estrangement seems to become an inseparable part of the writer. At the end of his life he wrote an autobiography in three volumes in which he resolved to withhold from his readers any details of a private nature. Like Juliana, the protagonist of The Aspern Papers,30 he must have considered that the life of a writer, like that of anyone else, was sacred, and that the only thing that should arouse interest in the reader was the work itself. Hence his contempt for journalists, especially the authors of interviews. Each time he alludes in his memoirs to some personal aspect, he does so with such reticence, with such ambiguity, scatters it between various ellipses and demurrals in a maze of such intricacy that not only douses the reader’s curiosity but rather gives rise to the most adventurous of hypotheses. So was the case, for example, with the wound he suffered at eighteen years of age, while helping to put out a fire, which prevented him from participating in the Civil War, in which his brethren and the majority of the youth of his generation fought. He described the condition of that “horrid even if an obscure hurt,” as he characterizes it, in the following way:
The twenty minutes had sufficed, at all events, to establish a relation to everything occurring round me not only for the next four years but for long afterward—that was at once extraordinarily intimate and quite awkwardly irrelevant.31
On two other occasions, he returned to Europe, spending a couple of years during each one and making the grand tour through the lands of France, England, Germany, and Italy, until deciding in 1875 to take up residence indefinitely in England, where he lived the remainder of his forty years of life. His existence in Europe lacked any public events of note: he never intervened in any public dispute, and there exists only conjecture as to his personal life. He frequented certain circles of high society and some of the most celebrated writers of his time. In 1897 he withdrew to a country house, where he devoted his days to dictating new novels and rewriting those already published.
Photos offer us the image of a man of portentous visage and a gaze between childlike and visionary. It was as difficult for his contemporaries to reconcile the personage as to understand his books; that ungraspableness is reflected in the varying definitions that each assigns to him. He was compared to a romantic actor, a retired admiral, a drunken tortoise, a Jewish banker, an elephant, a preacher disillusioned with life, a ghost, a Frenchman of letters, an old gypsy woman in the throes of solving a mystery with her crystal ball, and to many other equally dissimilar personalities.
During its time, the work of James lacked readers and critical resonance. It is possible that even within the small group of faithful around him he may have been misunderstood; that the admiration they paid him had arisen from misunderstandings, for the wrong reasons. Only a handful of writers understood his originality. Joseph Conrad believed that his work could be defined as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe,” apt praise directed at an author for whom the essential quality of narration lies between the lines, becomes submerged and hides in the undersoil of plot, where it is possible to progress thanks only to the powerful presence of visual elements. Conrad’s remark anticipates another by James himself: “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life.”
If his novels were viewed with indifference by his contemporaries (and many of them would have gladly admired him), it was largely due to their being extremely different from all others. James was unlike any other American or English writer; his books did not fit neatly into any known literary tradition. Thirty years would pass before he received any recognition. Around the centenary of his birth, 1943, there was almost unanimous agreement that he was both a classic and an exceptional innovator.
What innovations did James introduce and to what was the immediate failure of his novels due? If his contributions were so important, why did his books not burst onto the literary scene with the same fury with which the supporters and detractors of Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, or To the Lighthouse greeted those works? Perhaps because his transformation of the genre possessed nothing that smelled of rebellion. His discoveries, which later made possible the birth of Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, and To the Lighthouse, were achieved with stealth, reserve, and neutrality. But it may also be due to the nature of renunciation of vital impulses, of the hero’s ineludible defeat (James’ protagonist lives, unlike the Romantic hero, as a captive of society, without challenging or transgressing its rules. An antiheroic subject, he is content to exalt inner exile as the only possibility of confronting the corruption and baseness that surround him; defeat is transformed, paradoxically, into his only possible triumph); it gives off such an odor of ashes that it satisfied neither the conventional reader nor the reader who associated the avant-garde with a libertarian enterprise, as a way of struggling against the dominant puritanism. Some of his remarks on Maupassant and Zola reveal an almost perverse modesty in the face of any incident that might even remotely approach the physiological. James’ success is only achieved in that moment when programs of social and sexual liberation have been treated by other authors and therefore are no longer demanded of his work, and when the many illusions of liberal imagination have been demolished by the excruciating reality of false paradises; the rescue of personal dignity and moral resistance seem to be almost necessarily linked to the concept of inner exile.
His great contributions to the novel were formal in nature, and the most important consisted of eliminating the author as an omniscient subject who knows and determines the actions of the characters in order to replace him for one or, in his most complex novels, multiple points of view, through which consciousness is interrogated while trying to reach the meaning of certain events to which he has been witness. Through this device the character constructs himself in an attempt to decipher the universe around him.
The body of a James novel is made up of the sum of observations, deductions, and conjectures that a character makes of a particular situation. The author introduces an observer from whose point of view the reader can only know a fraction of the truth available to him. The real world becomes deformed as it is filtered through a consciousness; hence the ambiguity of Jamesian characters: a character witnesses or lives a determined situation and at the same time attempts to relate his perceptions. We shall never know how far he dared to go when telling us a story, nor what elements he decided to conceal so as not to be indiscrete.
In every work by James a relentless struggle occurs between the forces of the libido and those of Thanatos, between desire and the renunciation of desire, a struggle between what remains of the Romantic hero and his libertarian longings and his antithesis, a society with its set of rules and conventions to suppress, discredit, and correct any impulse of nonconformity that may survive in the individual. From that tension emerges a chiaroscuro that is uniquely his, a taste for certain lugubrious fires inherited from gothic literature, which is manifested in his ghost stories and even in some of the fundamental scenes of his most realist novels. There exists in his creation a desperate attempt to reconcile certain visions and irrationa
l impulses with the cult that order deserves. That coupling surely gave birth to the most labyrinthine dark gothic tales of English literature.
In The Aspern Papers, James employs a narrator whose (real as well as false) name the reader never comes to know. He is at once a person in whom one may or may not have confidence. His constant tricks and lies are glaringly obvious. At times not even he seems aware of it; already in the first chapter he declares that the only weapons he possesses to achieve his objective are hypocrisy and prevarication. His objective is to seize the letters and documents in the possession of Juliana Bordereau, an elderly woman of almost one hundred, that once belonged to the Romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern, who had died several decades before, and to the study of whose work the narrator and a friend had dedicated their entire lives. During that period in which James seems determined to demystify institutions, customs, and beliefs, the rancor with which he treats the character is scarcely mitigated by a subterranean humor that runs throughout the story. It is clear that the narrator loves poetry, that he has surrendered his body and soul to the revalorization of a great poet, but his stature is minimal, his moral values are less than meager; in a certain way he has been transformed into a parodic image of the poet. Like many people who meander through the world of letters, he fails to realize that his task is spurious. More than that of culture, his world is that of commerce, and although he believes that he is contributing to the splendor of the glory of Aspern, what he desires deep down is to share it, make it his own and, finally, trade on it.
Once again James reveals his nostalgia for the Romantic period, for the brilliance that bathed men and women whose passions were real; he reveals too his grief for the death of the hero and the absurd imitations that the subsequent society proposes in their place.
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