by Susan Sontag
An immature narrator is some sort of candid narrator; even one who flaunts what is usually hidden. What he is not is a “sincere” narrator, sincerity being one of those ideals that make no sense in the world of candor and provocation. “In literature sincerity leads nowhere … the more artificial we are, the closer we come to frankness. Artificiality allows the artist to approach shameful truths.” As for his celebrated Diary, Gombrowicz says:
Have you ever read a “sincere” diary? The “sincere” diary is the most mendacious diary … And, in the long run, what a bore sincerity is! It is ineffectual.
Then what? My diary had to be sincere, but it could not be sincere. How could I solve the problem? The word, the loose, spoken word, has this consoling particularity: it is close to sincerity, not in what it confesses but in what it claims to be and in what it pursues.
So I had to avoid turning my diary into a confession. I had to show myself “in action,” in my intention of imposing myself on the reader in a certain way, in my desire to create myself with everyone looking on. “This is how I would like to be for you,” and not “This is how I am.”
Still, however fanciful the plot of Ferdydurke, no reader will regard the protagonist and his longings as anything other than a transposition of the author’s own personality and pathology. By making Joey Kowalski (as the Polish name of the protagonist-narrator is rendered in English) a writer—and the author of an unsuccessful, much derided book of stories entitled, yes, Memoirs of a Time of Immaturity—Gombrowicz dares the reader not to think about the man who wrote the novel.
A WRITE WHO REVELS in the fantasy of renouncing his identity and its privileges. A writer who imagines a flight into youth, represented as a kidnapping; a discarding of the destiny expected of an adult, represented as a subtraction from the world in which one is known.
And then the fantasy came true. (Few writers’ lives have so clearly taken the shape of a destiny.) At the age of thirty-five, a few days short of the fateful date of September 1, 1939, Gombrowicz was dropped into unexpected exile, far from Europe, in the “immature” New World. It was as brutal a change in his real life as the imagined turning of a thirty-year-old man into a schoolboy. Stranded, without any means of support, where nothing was expected of him because nothing was known about him, he was offered the divine opportunity to lose himself. In Poland, he was well-born Witold Gombrowicz, a prominent “vanguard” writer who had written a book many (including his friend, the other great Polish writer of the same period, Bruno Schulz) considered a masterpiece. In Argentina, he writes, “I was nothing, so I could do anything.”
It is impossible to imagine Gombrowicz without his twenty-four years in Argentina (much of which was spent in penury), an Argentina he made to suit his own fantasies, his daring, his pride. He left Poland a relatively young man; he returned to Europe (but never to Poland) when he was nearing sixty, and died six years later in the south of France. Separation from Europe was not the making of Gombrowicz as a writer: the man who published Ferdydurke two years earlier was already fully formed as a literary artist. It was, rather, the most providential confirmation of everything his novel knows, and gave direction and bite to the marvelous writings still to come.
The ordeal of emigration—and for Gombrowicz it was an ordeal—sharpened his cultural combativeness, as we know from the Diary. The Diary—in three volumes in English, and anything but a “personal” diary—can be read as a kind of free-form fiction, post-modern avant la lettre; that is, animated by a program of violating decorum similar to that of Ferdydurke. Claims for the staggering genius and intellectual acuity of the author vie with a running account of his insecurities, imperfections, and embarrassments, and a defiant avowal of barbaric, yokel prejudices. Considering himself slighted by, and therefore eager to reject, the lively literary milieu of late-1930s Buenos Aires, and aware that it harbored one indisputably great writer, Gombrowicz declared himself “at opposite poles” from Borges. “He is deeply rooted in literature, I in life. To tell the truth I am anti-literature.”
As if in agreement, shallow agreement, with Gombrowicz’s entirely self-serving quarrel with the idea of literature, many now regard the Diary instead of Ferdydurke as his greatest work.
No one can forget the notorious opening of the Diary:
Monday
Me.
Tuesday
Me.
Wednesday
Me.
Thursday
Me.
Having got that straight, Gombrowicz devoted Friday’s entry to a subtle reflection on some material he had been reading in the Polish press.
Gombrowicz expected to offend with his egocentricity: a writer must continually defend his borders. But a writer is also someone who must abandon borders, and egotism, so Gombrowicz argued, is the precondition of spiritual and intellectual freedom. In the “me … me … me … me” one hears the solitary émigré thumbing his nose at “we … we … we … we.” Gombrowicz never stopped arguing with Polish culture, with its intractable collectivism of spirit (usually called romanticism) and the obsession of its writers with the national martyrdom, the national identity. The relentless intelligence and energy of his observations on cultural and artistic matters, the pertinence of his challenge to Polish pieties, his bravura contentiousness, ended by making him the most influential prose writer of the past half century in his native country.
The Polish sense of being marginal to European culture, and to Western European concern while enduring generations of foreign occupation, had prepared the hapless émigré better than he might have wished to endure being sentenced to many years of near-total isolation as a writer. Courageously, he embarked on the enterprise of making deep, liberating sense out of the unprotectedness of his situation in Argentina. Exile tested his vocation and expanded it. Strengthening his disaffection from nationalist pieties and self-congratulation, it made him a consummate citizen of world literature.
MORE ETHAN SIXTY YEARS after Ferdydurke was written, little remains of the specifically Polish targets of Gombrowicz’s scorn. These have vanished along with the Poland in which he was reared and came of age—destroyed by the multiple blows of war, Nazi occupation, Soviet dominance (which prevented him from ever returning), and the post-1989 ethos of consumerism. Almost as dated is his assumption that adults always claim to be mature:
In our relations with other people we want to be cultivated, superior, mature, so we use the language of maturity and we talk about, for instance, Beauty, Goodness, Truth … But, within our own confidential, intimate reality, we feel nothing but inadequacy, immaturity …
The declaration seems from another world. How unlikely it would be now for whatever embarrassing inadequacies people feel to be covered over with hifalutin absolutes such as Beauty, Goodness, Truth. The European-style ideals of maturity, cultivation, wisdom have given way steadily to American-style celebrations of the Forever Young. The discrediting of literature and other expressions of “high” culture as elitist or anti-life is a staple of the new culture ruled by entertainment values. Indiscretion about one’s unconventional sexual feelings is now a routine, if not mandatory, contribution to public entertainment. Anyone now who would claim to love “the inferior” would argue that it is not inferior at all; that actually it is superior. Hardly any of the cherished opinions against which Gombrowicz contended are still cherished.
Then can Ferdydurke still offend? Still seem outrageous? Exception made for the novel’s acidic misogyny, probably not. Does it still seem extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny … wonderful? Yes.
A zealous administrator of his own legend, Gombrowicz was both telling and not telling the truth when he claimed to have successfully avoided all forms of greatness. But whatever he thought, or wanted us to think he thought, there are certain unavoidable consequences if one has produced a masterpiece, and it eventually comes to be acknowledged as such. In the late 1950s Ferdydurke was finally translated (under auspicious sponsorship) into French, and Gomb
rowicz was, at last, “discovered.” He had wanted nothing more than this success; this triumph over his adversaries and detractors, real and imagined. But the writer who counseled his readers to try to avoid all expressions of themselves, to guard against all their beliefs, and to mistrust their feelings, above all, to stop identifying themselves with what defines them, could hardly fail to insist that he, Gombrowicz, was not that book. Indeed, he has to be inferior to it. “The work, transformed into culture, hovered in the sky, while I remained below.” Like the great backside that hovers high above the protagonist’s halfhearted flight into normality at the end of the novel, Ferdydurke has floated upward to the literary empyrean. Long live its sublime mockery of all attempts to normalize desire … and the reach of great literature.
[2000]
Pedro Páramo
“I CAME TO COMALA because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything …” With the opening sentences of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, as with the beginnings of Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas and Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March, we know we are in the hands of a master storyteller. These sentences, of a bewitching concision and directness that pull the reader into the book, have a burnished, already-told quality, like the beginning of a fairy tale.
But the limpid opening of the book is only its first move. In fact, Pedro Páramo is a far more complex narrative than its beginning suggests. The novel’s premise—a dead mother sending her son out into the world, a son’s quest for his father—mutates into a multi-voiced sojourn in hell. The narrative takes place in two worlds: the Comala of the present, to which Juan Preciado, the “I” of the first sentences, is journeying; and the Comala of the past, the village of his mother’s memories and of Pedro Páramo’s youth. The narrative switches back and forth between first person and third person, present and past. (The great stories are not only told in the past tense, they are about the past.) The Comala of the past is a village of the living. The Comala of the present is inhabited by the dead, and the encounters that Juan Preciado will have when he reaches Comala are with ghosts. Páramo means in Spanish barren plain, wasteland. Not only is the father he seeks dead, but so is everyone else in the village. Being dead, they have nothing to express except their essence.
“In my life there are many silences,” Rulfo once said. “In my writing, too.”
Rulfo has said that he carried Pedro Páramo inside him for many years before he knew how to write it. Rather, he was writing hundreds of pages, then discarding them—he once called the novel an exercise in elimination. “The practice of writing the short stories disciplined me,” he said, “and made me see the need to disappear and to leave my characters the freedom to talk at will, which provoked, it would seem, a lack of structure. Yes, there is a structure in Pedro Páramo, but it is a structure made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time.”
Pedro Páramo is a legendary book by a writer who became a legend, too, in his lifetime. Rulfo was born in 1918 in a village in the state of Jalisco, went to Mexico City when he was fifteen, studied law at the university, and began writing, but not publishing, in the late 1930s. His first stories appeared in magazines in the 1940s, and a collection of stories came out in 1953. It was called El llano en llamas, which has been translated into English under the title The Burning Plain and Other Stories. Pedro Páramo appeared two years later. The two books established him as a voice of unprecedented originality and authority in Mexican literature. Quiet (or taciturn), courteous, fastidious, learned, and utterly without pretensions, Rulfo was a kind of invisible man who earned his living in ways entirely unconnected with literature (for years he was a tire salesman), who married and had children, and who spent most nights of his life reading (“I travel in books”) and listening to music. He also was extremely famous, and revered by his fellow writers. It is rare for a writer to publish his first books when he is already in his mid-forties, even rarer for first books to be immediately acknowledged as masterpieces. And rarer still for such a writer never to publish another book. A novel called La Cordillera was announced as forthcoming by Rulfo’s publisher for many years, starting in the late 1960s—and announced by the author as destroyed, a few years before his death in 1986.
Everyone asked Rulfo why he did not publish another book, as if the point of a writer’s life were to go on writing and publishing. In fact, the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book—that is, a book which will last—and this is what Rulfo did. No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times. García Márquez has said that after he discovered Pedro Páramo (with Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the most important reading of his early writing years), he could recite from memory long passages and eventually knew the whole book by heart, so much did he admire it and want to be saturated by it.
Rulfo’s novel is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century’s books; indeed, it would be hard to overestimate its impact on literature in Spanish in the last forty years. Pedro Páramo is a classic in the truest sense. It is a book that seems, in retrospect, as if it had to be written. It is a book that has profoundly affected the making of literature and continues to resonate in other books. The translation by Margaret Jill Costa, which fulfills the promise I made to Juan Rulfo when we met in Buenos Aires shortly before his death that Pedro Páramo would appear in an accurate and uncut English version, is an important literary event.
[1994]
DQ
HE “SO BURIED HIMSELF in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight to daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his mind.”
Don Quixote, like Madame Bovary, is about the tragedy of reading. But Flaubert’s novel is a piece of realism: Emma’s imagination is corrupted by the kind of books she reads, vulgar tales of romantic satisfaction. With Don Quixote, a hero of excess, the problem is not so much that the books are bad; it is the sheer quantity of his reading. Reading has not merely deformed his imagination; it has kidnapped it. He thinks the world is the inside of a book. (According to Cervantes, everything Don Quixote thought, saw, or imagined followed the pattern of his reading.) Bookishness makes him, in contrast to Emma Bovary, beyond compromise or corruption. It makes him mad; it makes him profound, heroic, genuinely noble.
Not only the hero of the novel but also the narrator is someone besotted by reading. The narrator of Don Quixote reports that he has a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the streets. But whereas the result of Don Quixote’s excessive reading is madness, the result of the narrator’s is authorship.
The first and greatest epic about addiction, Don Quixote is both a denunciation of the establishment of literature and a rhapsodic call to literature. Don Quixote is an inexhaustible book, whose subject is everything (the whole world) and nothing (the inside of someone’s head—that is, madness). Relentless, verbose, self-cannibalizing, reflexive, playful, irresponsible, accretive, self-replicating—Cervantes’s book is the very image of that glorious mise-en-abîme which is literature, and of that fragile delirium which is authorship, its manic expansiveness.
A writer is first of all a reader—a reader gone berserk; a rogue reader; an impertinent reader who claims to be able to do it better. Yet, justly, when the greatest living author composed his definitive fable about the writer’s vocation, he invented an early-twentieth-century writer who had chosen as his most ambitious work to write (parts of) Don Quixote. Once again. Exactly as is (was). For Don Quixote, more than any book ever written, is literature.
[1985]
A Letter to Borges
June 13, 1996
New York
Dear Borges,
> Since your literature was always placed under the sign of eternity, it doesn’t seem too odd to be addressing a letter to you. (Borges, it’s ten years!) If ever a contemporary seemed destined for literary immortality, it was you. You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit. Though you lived among us for a rather long time, you perfected practices of fastidiousness and of detachment that made you an expert mental traveler to other eras as well. You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.
Your modesty was part of the sureness of your presence. You were a discoverer of new joys. A pessimism as profound, as serene, as yours did not need to be indignant. It had, rather, to be inventive—and you were, above all, inventive. The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer—deli cately you added: all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.)