Saturday
Bouvard et Pécuchet II. An unfinished novel that narrates the attempt to write the world. In that sense, this singular volume is tied to some of the most exemplary modern works (Kafka’s Diaries, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities). A current of reading runs underneath: Flaubert read five hundred volumes of different wisdom and specific techniques of useless erudition in order to write a book about a firm with two “copy-clerks” classifying their readings.
Monday 13
Last night with Lucas and Celina: the past. Luis Alonso, Junior, Casco: lost in trying to establish a coherence that could rescue them from the disorder of the world. The years in La Plata were critical for me. Using summary judgments to counteract any nostalgia.
Earlier, in the theater, The Detective by G. Douglas, a very good film, with Sinatra in the role of an “Officer” Marlowe who comes up against corruption. Once again a pure hero, brusque and efficient, lost in a world of traitors. Like all detectives in the genre, he is misogynistic, violent, solitary. In contrast to The Boston Strangler, which I saw on Friday, all of the fetishes here (psychoanalysis, telepathy, schizophrenia) are employed in order to strengthen the American world in which social murderers are mental patients against whom the pure (and religious) nature of liberal values is raised.
Tuesday, January 14
I went down through the city toward the river and sat down on a bench in the sun, in La Costanera, in the middle of an entertaining cour des miracles that is always fresh and surprising with its characters: the fisherman who spends hours watching the river, the woman talking to herself, the young exhibitionist who changes his mesh leggings several times so as to be seen naked from time to time. The river is the final frontier where outcasts and suicidal people come to port.
Wednesday, January 15
Yesterday I ran into G. L. in the Álvarez bookshop. I’d gone there to finish up the classics collection and so be able to spend the rest of the week in peace, without public relations. But Jorge wasn’t there and I found myself with G. L., who nearly drove me to hell all afternoon. We had a coffee and, when I wanted to escape, he came with me all the way to Córdoba and I had to sit down in another bar. Courtesy is a form of masochism. I stopped in the bar so that he wouldn’t plant himself in my house for the whole afternoon. He seems like a lost man who will cling onto any acquaintance he sees in his vicinity and start going on about his readings and projects. As always, his compensatory ideologies, his obsession with himself, quoting from memory, textually, the reviews of his novel. Behind that mesh of wire glimmers a very alert intelligence, which works well in some areas and scrambles in others. Extreme narcissism is visible as the armor over very sensitive hearts. He talks about himself because there’s no one there, to put it one way there isn’t a “himself,” there isn’t an “inside himself,” and everything is flat. A broken surface, everything is lost between fashionable reading and persistent delusions. When I managed to get myself free it was two in the afternoon, poor me, there’s a charitable soul inside me whose quality lies in enduring the monologues of friends who are slightly delusional. In that way, I defend myself from my own madness; for my part, I’m always looking for a place where I can be alone but never find it, and so I wandered around the bars for close to six hours with G.
In a biography of Tolstoy, I find the story I’ve always wanted to write. A couple—he writes a diary and gives it to her to read (a variant could be that she reads it in secret): “Tolstoy gave his wife the tormented and explicit diary of a bachelor to read.” Tolstoy writes: “The thought that she is always there to read over my shoulder restrains me and prevents me from being honest.” She, Sophia, a middle-class girl who aspires to become someone in the world of aristocrats, gets married at a very young age to this attractive, fascinating, and above all dangerous and manipulative Count. When she reads Tolstoy’s diary, she is horrified and never recovers from the “truth” that she reads there: there are clear allusions to Tolstoy’s homosexual experiences and also explicit narrations of how Tolstoy entraps young women of rural origins, his servants or his working staff, overpowering and conquering them like a sexual predator. Sophia is forever marked by these acts and throughout her life she views Tolstoy sometimes as a homosexual, seduced by the men who surround him, and sometimes as a despotic landowner who abuses the young women in his service.
Series E. I think that was what fascinated me about the possibility of writing a diary. Sketching down my life in a notebook for a woman to read. Thus, my first love story left a mark on my entire life. I can say that I wrote this diary for Elena, although she never found out. She asked me for a book I had read, and I immediately thought of becoming a writer for her. What is written for her, he said, are not the works that I’ve published, but rather these notebooks that no one has read except for some girlfriends, who secretly read them to see what I’d been up to.
Some information would be needed (my own experience wouldn’t be enough) to prove the relationship between reading and life; it would be enough to think about Kafka’s diary. It’s one thing to live and another thing to secretly read the private notebooks of one’s own life. In Tolstoy’s case, Anna Karenina began with the enlightenment caused by reading Pushkin’s narration of a party. That chance reading one night, unexpectedly, immediately led him to sit down to write a novel about a woman who follows her desire and abandons her husband and children for a cynical seducer, very similar to the person Tolstoy imagined himself to be.
We could say, following Lévi-Strauss, that society outside of the established circuits can be seen as a “primitive” society and that, as such, it is observed from the outside. This “outside” is what Borges theorizes in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” It is situated at the margin of the central currents, in a no-man’s-land that can only be defined from the outside (by those who are inside it). A quandary of frames, the outlines and subjects are both inside and outside of their country of birth.
The external view. Lévi-Strauss says: “In observing it from outside, we can estimate according to some number of indices and thus determine the degree of its technical development, the volume of its material production, the number of its inhabitants and so, successively, very coldly give it a grade and compare among themselves the grades we have given to different societies.” On one hand, it has to do with the extra-local condition of that culture, which is always compared to another, and also with its asynchrony with the present. A culture that is far from its contemporaries (they say that it’s “behind”), out of sync, in another place. That’s what historians call an “underdeveloped” or “dependent” or “semi-colonial” society. It is defined in relation to another society that appears to be more developed or modern. From this I’ve discovered the importance of distance, always being outside of the context, halfway between the colony and the metropolis: the key is the empty space that separates them. That is where Borges situates his form of reading: reading obliquely, observing two realities at the same time; it is the cross-eyed view (“keep one eye on Europe and one eye on the interior of the country,” as Echeverría wrote). It is seeing double, a metaphorical viewpoint that always compares one present reality to another superior and external one. It is a version of Gödel’s theorem: no closed system can guarantee the certainty of a truth, but must be verified in another system, external and at a distance, and that series is interminable. Reality is verified outside of the system of internal proofs, outside of itself.
Thursday 16
Manuel Puig came over yesterday afternoon, tense, confused, wanting “to please,” to be liked, submitting his books to the impossible test of validation. There will always be someone who doesn’t like what he writes, and that obsesses him and persists more than any recognition or success. He remembers the bad reviews, the gestures of disdain toward his work. In the midst of these complaints, he brightens up when he relates his experiences and his steps upward as though he were an eager, emotional girl. He tells me about Jorge Álvarez’s pla
n to release Heartbreak Tango as a serial novel and his goal to write a detective novel about the world of art and cultural critics, whom he views as assassins murdering the sensitive, countercultural artist. He has decided to take refuge in Italy, to move away from ungrateful Argentina forever.
Later I find myself with Héctor Schmucler, newly returned from France and desiring to start a magazine (model: La Quinzaine); he’s dazzled by Cortázar, whom he frequently saw in Paris, and is fascinated by the “novelties” that are circulating, basically the tide of structuralism (following the wave of Barthes + Tel Quel magazine).
At night The Dirty Dozen, an excellent film by Robert Aldrich, very good control of irony and above all violence, with almost fascist and “adolescent” touches. Twelve men selected among those condemned to death in an American prison undertake a suicide mission: they’re all psychotic and have a strong bond.
“One can only lose what one never had,” Borges. I will use this quotation as an epigraph for my next book.
Artificial Respiration. My experience, today, in the bar: everyone was talking to me as though I were stupid, in a sickly-sweet and faltering tone. I don’t like argots, established and closed-off languages; I speak another tongue. Remember Saussure: “A man who speaks another language can be easily considered incapable of speech.” That can also happen within the same language. The Greek-derived word barbarian seems to have meant “stutterer” and is related to the Latin balbus, and in Russian they call the Germans nemtsy, mutes.
Words suffer a torsion when they say the same thing in different languages: “No inherent relationship binds the sequences of sounds in sister or sœur or hermana to the concept ‘sister,’” says Saussure. In the translation of a novel by Chandler someone replaces the diminutive Little Sister, or hermanita, with Una mosca muerta, meaning two-faced (which synthesizes the image of the protagonist: a simple and yet dangerous girl). This torsion mechanism is what defines Arlt’s language. He writes ugly horse as “equino fulero,” where horse is made Spanish and ugly is Lunfardo.
Friday
I’m excited about the epic that can be written based on real events in the script for Encerrona. Tough and direct men, placed into an extreme situation, are turned into tragic heroes, but I’m working listlessly, not in sync with Daniel (who gets distracted to the point of the Argentine stereotype ridiculously easily) and B. (who has a dramatic but very aestheticized sensibility). You have to tell a story without falling into aestheticism or vulgar demagoguery—which are the two principal threads of Argentine culture.
In this age I have money raining down on me without having to work. Yesterday, Jorge Á. and I agreed on fifty thousand pesos per month and twenty thousand worth of books (that I can take from the bookshop) for my work on the classics series. With Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing I closed on fifty thousand for the Serie Negra, and then there are the thirty thousand from my collaborations in the newspaper (via Andrés and Junior). At the same time, I’m working on the possibility of a magazine with Schmucler, intended to confront the culture imposed by the mass media. Meanwhile, I’m contemplating a great project for a novel based on real events, falsely using the techniques of nonfiction (the tape recorder).
I’m working on the story about the suicide of the father (of a father).
Schmucler comes to see me and we move ahead on the project of the new magazine. Possible team: Del Barco, Aricó, Germán García, José Sazbón, Aníbal Ford, Jorge Rivera…
Saturday
Yesterday The Graduate by M. Nichols, a character out of Salinger, an outcast in a family of millionaires, devoured by the matriarchy and the society of comfort. The myth of the pure adolescent crushed by the social structure, defined by blind rebelliousness (Teddy Boys, Beat Generation, rebels without a cause), habitually flees toward nature (Nick Adams in Hemingway) or commits suicide (Quentin Compson in Faulkner).
Sunday
An unexpected appearance of a highly favorable review of La invasión in La Prensa newspaper. Who knows the reasons why it was published a year after the book was released. As always, it makes me uncomfortable to see articles or read essays that take my writing as their subject; it’s the same feeling as reading a letter that isn’t intended for me and finding dark revelations about myself.
Monday 20
I only work well when I have the whole day free and can concentrate on a single objective. Now I’m toasting two slices of bread to eat with Gruyère cheese and a glass of cold milk.
Tuesday 21
It is strange, but what really constitutes a working atmosphere for me isn’t the tone of the prose that I’m looking for but rather something previous, some events in the lives of writers I admire (Hemingway, Beckett). The confirmation that they too have had doubts and have been on the point of failure, etc. Identifying not with a style, but with an attitude. “Being a writer” precedes the act of writing. For me, those ways of being are more important than the narrative techniques or methods of those authors. In that way, I can “justify” my depersonalization while I write (that is the condition of prose for me, being someone else when I write, or rather, being someone else in order to write). I justify my (slight) schizophrenia in that way; I come apart, but that is the most difficult part, and thus the work is justified (not for its content or for its result). Literature is a directed dream. For me, its condition is leaving the being that I’m imagined to be. The same as in a dream.
Wednesday 22
“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself,” R. Chandler.
Thursday 23
Yesterday, while I was recovering from the enthusiasm of the night before, with J. D., old memories from ’60 and ’61; in those days everyone already saw him as the successful and recognized writer, while I was still trying to learn to suppress description in narrative prose. Now he’s broken, so I keep giving him an advantage, like everyone I knew in my distant youth. A kind of blood pact among brothers; a non-aggression pact.
An exasperation can be found in Chandler, showing the narrator that he exists as an autonomous character (through rather affected touches of the prose), while at the same time he’s there to tell a story that isn’t his own.
A meeting with a weak and mustached puppet who bore down on me when I was trying to cross the street without greeting him. Gestures of surprise and recognition, and he hurries to tell me that he’s bought a “club” in Palermo and says: “I already know things are going well for you.” Meetings that are connected to my notebooks from 1959. It was Jorge S., always with his conceited distance, back in the years at the Mar del Plata high school. Like a flash, that first afternoon in the courtyard of the National school came back to me, with him talking about anti-discipline, and now I see him returning like a ghost.
Friday 24
I’ve started taking amphetamines again, seeking chemical euphoria and a brilliant lucidity that lasts as long as a match flame (during which one can, nevertheless, burn out one’s mind). A risk that I take, certain that I’ll be able to find this artificial blankness whenever I want.
Sunday 26
Yesterday and today with Roberto Jacoby, who proposes a pamphlet dedicated to certain misunderstood symbols: crime, soccer, Peronism, etc. A sort of mimeographed agitprop publication using Roland Barthes’s categories (Mythologies). It could be given out to passers-by on street corners in the city, or “panfleteadas” could be organized after movies ended or after a boxing match in Luna Park.
Monday 27
Series E. I am thinking about the pseudonym and the double as non-corporal forms of suicide. Losing oneself in another identity, splitting in two, letting someone else do (one’s) dirty work. Both adhere to the enigma. In a sense, the evil double manages to become one, and wickedness or shame can be narrated as something personal. Grammatical solution for suicide. (Come back to that.) The issue of the verbal double (the false name), two names, two utterances.
In relation to the problem of colonialism, remember Lévi-Strauss’s analy
sis of primitive societies. Various series of access to the model of civilization. In every society, that model corresponds to an idea accepted at a certain time. In the majority of human societies, the proposed category (the Western world, developed, modern, etc.) lacks sense and is devoid of meaning. The key is that this category (Western civilization, that is, capitalism) is not proposed, but rather imposed (through force).
Tuesday 28
I slept for less than six hours and awoke dead tired, and I’ve been turning over for two hours, unable to wake myself up. I read the newspaper sitting in Plaza Rodríguez Peña and then went to have a café con leche at a bar on Charcas and read a—stupid—article by Mario Benedetti on Cuba, and just now a story by Chandler (“Nevada Gas”), but I’m still sleepy, hopeless. Then I worked on the detective series and got the rights to The Thin Man by Hammett, a turn toward an ironic detective story.
Wednesday 29
3:00 p.m. For the first time in more than two years (I wrote “Mata-Hari 55” in October of ’66) I’ve written a good short story; the story about Pavese captures my relationship with Inés. I still have to adjust the dialogue, but it’s there. As always, I have too many “other problems” to find the time to be happy.
The Diaries of Emilio Renzi Page 14