The Diaries of Emilio Renzi

by Ricardo Piglia

  Thursday 30

  I returned home and finished the Hammett novel. The Thin Man is one of his books that I like the most: a comedy concealed in genre. The girl is a striking character: ironic, intelligent, autonomous, a dangerous companion, and attractive to the hero, who gives up being a solitary man. The detective in love thus becomes a parody of the genre. Then I started another splendid thriller by Raymond Marshall (under the pseudonym of Chase).

  Friday, January 31

  Yesterday I got confirmation from Capelutto, Álvarez’s accountant, of the arrangement for the classics collection: a salary of fifty thousand pesos per month. If I work things out with Tiempo Contemporáneo publishing, I’ll have another fifty thousand for the detective series; I’d like to be able to free myself from Luna and combat his bureaucratic adherence to the calendar. Switching to a maximum of thirty pieces per month, that is, one per day. Four pieces that I write on Tuesday (which I bring to the paper on Wednesday) and two more on Friday (which I bring to the editorial office on Saturday). Then he’ll cover the remaining four (he is slower) to complete the selection. Yesterday, my credit for twenty thousand pesos worth of books started working as well: I bought Pavese’s Racconti (his complete stories published by Einaudi).

  A great variety of readings: Foucault’s The Order of Things (the demon of analogy). Steiner on Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (I like the system of condensing the state of a literature by using two opposing poetics: Hemingway and Faulkner, Arlt and Borges). Attentive reading of Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: an extraordinary new form of autobiography in the personal analysis of Signorelli’s case. The subject of the autobiography splits in two and sees himself captured by invisible waves, as though he were someone else. The temporal distance between the present of the writing and the past of the subject is the basic theme of the genre. Another example is The Words by Sartre.

  I write the outline for “The Glass Box.” I find Genz’s diary by chance and now read it while I’m alone. It is strange that he writes one, I never would have expected it. I’ve found several notes about myself. He carries the notebook with him. The story would start more or less like that and at the end there would be the story of the accident in the tower that I’ve wanted to write for years. I have to build up a relationship between the two.

  I worked on the script for B., moving ahead by myself with the section in the paper (I wrote twenty pieces, the majority unsigned or under a pseudonym). Luna insists on transferring me to the crime news section or “local gossip.” I put together an excellent introduction for the classics series. The first book is Notes from Underground by D., which has never been available in Spanish as an individual book before. I went to the theater a lot and didn’t let any movie that came through here get past me. A very good critical reception of my anthology of Argentine autobiographies, and finally a proposal from Schmucler that I make a new magazine with him that will go out in the kiosks, confronting the cultural sections of the newspapers and magazines. Why do I make these mournful summaries? Who is it that I want to tell to pay close attention to everything I’m working on? I make lists of the things I’ve done as though I wanted to settle some debt, but with whom? Questions in the dusk of a summer day in 1969.

  Monday

  After a slight hesitation I take advantage of the rain to shut myself in and take drugs. I want to write a story about the shades that I see. A vague and sorrowful impression. A lucid and horrible old man. The boy he lets fall. Will I write anything more than that fall? I don’t have the story yet, and I’ll see what tone I end up using. Nothing in two hours. Instead a desire to work on the story about the man reading a diary in secret. Maybe I can connect the two stories?

  Tuesday

  The city changes color as low clouds block out the light. I wrote one page of the story. I still don’t know its “objective.” I’ll see how I can bring the accident into it. Possibilities: it happens to the narrator, he steals the notebook or Reinaldi writes it in the diary.

  It is six in the afternoon, and we could say that I’ve set up the story. They live together. Reinaldi writes a diary, Genz wants to go to the plaza. He lets the boy fall. Reinaldi appears. He has it in his hands, writing versions of the accident in the diary, forcing him to pay. The tone is still missing, I think. I have to find a more realistic connection for Reinaldi’s appearance. Maybe it can be solved in this way: Reinaldi doesn’t show up until much later, but nevertheless he describes real events in the diary. I’ve finished a very schematic draft, developing the internal threads.

  Sunday, February 2

  As always, eagerness, restlessness, fear that I won’t repeat the miracle of yesterday. My romantic passion for literature is clear, two or three days like yesterday would put everything into place.

  Tuesday 4

  A walk with Julia through Retiro, the descent toward the river, the market in Bajo, the rather shady area filled with both bookshops and bars where the city’s distinct Bohemian tribes meet. Moderno, Florida bar, the Di Tella, and Galería del Este. Before that, the world of the French collective (formal, hypocritical, affected) in the Biblioteca de la Alianza Francesa, reading Foucault (the simulacrum). On the way out, I ran into Conrado C. and felt, as with S. and I. before him, the ambiguity of old acquaintances who show me their horror roll (no longer an honor roll): “I’m translating Barthes,” he tells me. “I bought myself an apartment in Palermo,” his façade. “I’m funded by the College,” they tell me respectively. They’re looking for security, they settle themselves in and stare at me, uncomfortable because of “my activity.” I could have been like them if I’d been distracted for an instant and hadn’t been able to set everything aside and pursue a clear, impossible goal. Another thing: it seems difficult to have friends from my own generation.

  Wednesday 5

  For me, to write means “to be financed.”

  A visit from Roberto Jacoby, sickened by populism. Always very wise, intelligent and creative.

  Conversation with Julio:

  “You know what finished off my old man.”

  “No.”

  “He wanted to commit suicide, and it didn’t turn out well for him.”

  Tuesday

  On “sincerity” in literature. “In language, one who speaks is never confused by his words,” C. Lévi-Strauss.

  Back and forth, to and from Tiempo Contemporáneo and Álvarez: I return with ninety-two thousand pesos, magical, as always. I see Jorge Á.’s change in direction, seduced by the rock kids and the underworld of Buenos Aires. Squandering the money from Scott Fitzgerald and also throwing everything he’s got so far out of the window. He goes to Mar del Plata in a taxi with the guys from Mandioca.

  Thursday 13

  “In some sense the mark of the true writer is the impossibility of writing,” Michel de M’Uzan in his article on Freud and artistic creation, Tel Quel No. 19.

  Deleuze: For Proust, to write is to “read the inner book of these unknown signs… There is no logos, there are only hieroglyphs. To think is therefore to interpret, is therefore to translate.”

  Writing. Válery’s condemnation of the novel is a rejection of the vertigo of possible narratives that open before each situation and before each sentence. It is impossible, he says, or rather, it is pointless, to write the sentence “the marquise went out at five” (to begin a novel), an unjustified decision. The marquise (or any other subject, for example, the dog) went out (or any other verb, for example, came in) at five (or any other time, or any other entrance of time into the fiction). The dog came in at three in the afternoon. That sentence has the same value as the other. The novelist must choose one way or another. It is a contingent grouping of replaceable components. The narrator can’t cast aside the vertigo of possibilities because it’s an arbitrary decision, that is, because of a convention that doesn’t belong to the order of fiction. The possible narratives lie at the center of the poetics of the novel. Georges Perec’s potential literature, or the intrigue of the novel in “An
Examination of the Work of H. Quain,” which branches apart and doesn’t set any option aside, or the endless successive novel from Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” or Macedonio Fernández’s novel that is always about to begin, they all deal with this issue. The novel is a combinatorial art form. To write is to make decisions.

  One of the paths toward the renovation of the novel lies in making it visible and saying that it is a novel, a convention that gives itself away. Günter Grass: “Let’s say that it was five in the afternoon.” Or Néstor Sánchez: “On this afternoon in this novel it was raining.” I don’t like this way of making the connection between the words visible as though this were the only possible world. One must never forget that mimesis is what defines fiction. Something of reality always enters a story in such a way that belief will act to resolve the arbitrariness of the choices. We have to believe that one thing happens instead of another for reasons that the narration doesn’t tell but rather shows, that is, makes visible.

  One example of the awareness of conventions is Tristram Shandy by L. Sterne: the form and techniques make themselves visible by way of the violation of norms, and that becomes the content of the book. He plays with novelistic arbitrariness, just like Macedonio Fernández.

  Literature and politics. Culture is seated in repression, but literature is a constant struggle against limitations and against taboo. The novel is situated on the psychological frontier of society, in which the individual is transformed into someone else who isn’t allowed. The term for this activity on the border of censorship is: acquiring a language. It has to do with confronting reality, understood as writing and not as spectacle.

  I go to the theater to see Tony Rome by G. Douglas, with Frank Sinatra. Yet again a solitary and skeptical hero who deciphers all the mysteries in exchange for payment in dollars.

  Friday 14

  Series E. I’m attempting three different registers in these notebooks. Ironic, with the events narrated directly, without elaboration. Introspective, that is, looking at myself as though I were someone else being observed in the past. Conceptual, for some still-unthought thoughts. I don’t write these with the same spirit that I use in the prose I’m going to publish. I have a vague hope that one day I’ll take the time to transcribe these notebooks—the image that arises is that of a person who in the moment of death, as they say, sees the main events of his existence like a movie—but here the point is not to see but rather to read.

  Yesterday Edgardo F. suddenly appeared, a short conversation and light sarcasm to erase his deterioration. Brilliant ex-young people who crowd in a pack to hold out, never apologizing for having chosen (unconsciously, but until the end) a secure life, unconnected to hopes and dreams. For example, I say to him:

  “Maybe I’ll buy myself something.”

  “You want to make sure of your old age.”

  “I’m following your example.”

  Series A. If I analyze yesterday and the dialogue I’ve just transcribed, I will understand certain levels or layers of what I imagine that I am (for others). When E. arrives, I lower my guard, “excited,” thinking that since he has come, I must be generous. In turn, he feels uncomfortable for having taken the first step and attacks me. I, who am not prepared, am left with no response and spend part of the afternoon meditating on a revenge that I’m only able to work out now, when he is no longer here, and then only in my imagination, or rather, in what I write. A clear metaphor for my relationship with the unforeseen, which, nevertheless, is always the same as what I already know.

  I’m not interested in the detective genre; I’m interested in writing stories in the form of an investigation. Likewise, I see the detective as a modern Ulysses lost in a labyrinth (facts, clues, crimes) trying to decipher something through inquiry.

  It is clear that what interests me most in Chandler (or in Ross Macdonald) is the construction of a series of novels in a saga that always has the same character as its protagonist (Philip Marlowe) telling the story. The last in the series, Playback, begins with Marlowe’s marriage (he is now no longer worried by the threat of losing his license). A marriage that can only be understood if one has read The Long Goodbye. At one point, Playback forms part of that novel and allows all of Chandler’s books to be linked together as a long series of investigation that culminates in Marlowe’s retirement. That’s what I would like to do myself: to write a series of books that have “X” as their protagonist or narrator, a saga of diverse themes that always alludes to the life of a single character.

  The story I want to tell. The life of a man in different situations over the course of fifty or sixty years. A series of stories or novels with the same secret protagonist.

  Pavese. I’m not going to complete a conversation in the airport and several allusions in the narration (a woman who is taking photographs; sex in a hotel), and now I can think a bit better about the Italian situation. “Objective facts”: Inés leaves in a taxi (let’s get married, he says to her). Pavese. Conversation. An airport. A journey. A note in Turin. An article (someone who knew Pavese or was with him a few days before his suicide).

  Saturday

  Kafka’s most definitive and Kafkaesque act is his attempt to erase his work: a decision that, for having existed, would have to be felt in what has survived. Proving this hypothesis automatically turns into a Kafkaesque fiction (without an end).

  Sunday, February 16

  Yesterday, another encounter with the admirable film Le Deuxième Souffle by Jean-Pierre Melville: an elegy to honor, the epic of our time. The only “possible” heroes are those who refuse the system (guerrillas or criminals); on the other side are the losers.

  Analyzing the social situation of reading: the conditions of possible meaning are a material space that ultimately decides the significance of the text. That situation is not only social, but also historical. It makes some books legible and others invisible. A key procedure in the relationship between works and their conditions is, for us, translation. That is, access to the foreign series. It would be possible to recreate that space in three key books, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Fictions, and Hopscotch, which, in an elliptical way, tell their own relationships to contemporary culture.

  Monday 17

  All art constructs its technique and form through the wisdom of time and takes its methods from knowledge outside of its sphere (for example, Joyce with psychoanalysis; Borges with mathematics).

  Tuesday 18

  Series E. The protagonist writes in his diary what he is unable to think, what he cannot drive himself to say or to confront; those notes are the opposite of his will. Always out of context, his notes register what he believes he is living through and what he believes he remembers from his childhood. The imaginary scene in which the hero is always present. The diary is like a dream; everything that happens is true, but it happens in such a condensed record, so charged with subtexts, that only the person writing it can understand it. Literature tends toward that direction: its sphere is private writing, which deludes itself with the idea of being written for no one to read. For that reason, Pavese’s suicide is also a theory of or a solution to what he has written in his personal notebooks. Kafka said: only one who writes a diary can understand the diaries that others write. Whereas Pavese says: only one who plays with the idea of suicide can write a convincing diary. The conviction given by the certainty of killing oneself.

  6:00 p.m. I make progress on a possible structure for the story with the diary. I find that I can resolve the connection between novel and essay. That’s what I am looking for. Thinking about the interior of the narration.

  The imaginary guarantees of literature. Society’s question is always: what do you need in order to be able to write? A variety of answers can be read in works, referring directly to the place of writing in society. The basis that guarantees the form in each case is: 1. Erudition 2. Lived experience. 3. Inner demons. 4. Mimesis of reality: “This is how it happened,” the writer says, I recount what was (as if that were po
ssible). He says: “People talk like this,” and then he explains his use of language. It’s like what they say in bullfighting about the courage of the bullfighters. (“It’s taken for granted,” and then all that is discussed is the art employed in the performance), it’s idiotic to show off one’s talent—and even genius—because that is taken for granted, and something that is implied should not be spoken. Only what is shown is analyzed (from the basis that guarantees the form). Inspiration is a name for writers’ ability to forget themselves and pass over to the other side (of language) while writing (the difference between writing and editing). Work on the notion of “support” and value in the economy of literature.

  It’s striking to see how two writers, who refer in their work to the sacred (that is, unverifiable) quality of those guarantees (Sabato, etc.), also establish that exceptional quality (or a subject who defines himself as exceptional) in the time that it takes to write those “masterpieces.” The others, Borges in first place, visibly prove that support (quotations, cultural inheritance received from dead parents). In one case or the other, it is always about negotiating with the specters.