“Eran tantos años de observar cada uno de sus gestos, cada expresión, cada actitud, que Diego acabó por creer que yo sabía algo muy profundo acerca de él (aunque probablemente él mismo no supiera qué) y yo por fingir que en realidad lo sabía” (p. 17).

“Wasabi” (1994) fue la tercera novela de Alan Pauls (Buenos Aires, 1959) y trata sobre un novelista argentino que intenta escribir una novela durante su estadía en una residencia de escritores en Francia. Una frase:

“Pero enseguida toda melancolía desapereció, y una radiante comprobación vino a reemplazarla: la obra literaria de Klossowski, ¿no había tenidosiempre para mí el brillo de una excepción, su carácter frágil, solitario y perecedero?” (p. 27).

“M.F. y otros cuentos” (2005) de Gonzalo Málaga Ortega (Perú, 1968). Un libro de nueve cuentos bien escritos, sobre Lima, el amor y la literatura. Una de las frases que me gustó:

“La plaza a la que se acerca le da al centro de Lima un aspecto de ciudad abierta a todo y a todos los excesos de una capital premoderna y desbordada de mugre pero viva; esencialmente llena de una vida agresiva, medio deshecha y repulsiva hasta llegar a ser casi bella” (p. 64-65).

Mi favorito: “Tres semanas, tres días”. “M.F.” se trata del hallazgo de la novela inédita de Borges.

“Fuga permanente” (2001), cuentos de Gabriela Alemán (Ecuador, 1968). 10 cuentos eruditos. “Prisión de ámbar”, el cuento inicial, se relaciona con “Respiración artificial” de Piglia y en algún momento trata sobre un manuscrito perdido de Nietzsche. Una frase, tomada al azar:

“No hay duda, todos los eventos importantes de la vida se realizan en la oscuridad o por lo menos en una prisión de ámbar. Me paré y fui a buscar otras dos bebidas. Cuando volví había pasado algo allí adentro, su imaginación no se movía más en el vacío. Tomó el vaso y siguió, ¿usted sabe la diferencia que existe entre las creencias y los hechos?” (p. 21).

“La apariencia de las cosas” (1997), cuentos de Pablo Brescia (Argentina, 1968). 28 cuentos experimentales y eruditos. “La novela de Borges” trata sobre el hallazgo de una novela inédita de Borges. Una cita tomada al azar:

“Represento una clase cultural (más bien social) alienada, marginada, en vías de extinción: soy un lector. En estos días, el amor por los libros puede considerarse casi un sacrilegio; siempre hay algo más urgente que hacer” (p. 99-100).

“Bonsái” (2006) es la primera novela (corta) de Alejandro Zambra (Chile, 1975). Se trata de una narración circular, literaria, con frecuencia reiterativa, sobre el proceso de escribir una novela. Por ejemplo, esta cita:

“Se avergüenza, entonces, de Bonsái, su novela improvisada, su novela innecesaria, cuyo protagonista no sabe, ni siquiera que la elección de una maceta es una forma de arte por sí misma, que un bonsái no es un árbol bonsái porque la palabra ya contiene al elemento vivo. Cuidar de un bonsái es como escribir, piensa Julio. Escribir es como cuidar de un bonsái, piensa Julio” (p. 86-87).

“Historia de un hombre” (2008), novela corta de Otto Wilhelm (Guatemala, 1947?). La sencilla historia de un grupo de vagabundos, cada cual con su pasado y su conjunto de anhelos. Una excelente reflexión sobre la vida, que puede servir también como una sutil parodia sobre el mundo intelectual de la periferia, con sus pretensiones grandilocuentes contrastadas con las severas limitaciones en que se desarrolla. Una novela corta, filosófica y real.

Limón Blues es una historia de amor, una crónica política, una reinvindicación étnica-histórica y una novela nacional. Las vidas de Irene y Orlando le sirven a Rossi para proponer una mirada indispensable sobre la historia reciente de la nación Costrarricense, de la región centroamericana y de la cultura afro-trasatlántica, en general.

Aunque anclada sólidamente en Puerto Limón, la historia también se desarrolla y repercute en Cuba, Jamaica, Nueva York y Liberia, con una interesante y sutil referencia a Israel. Además, contiene reflexiones cruciales sobre la relación entre las implicaciones coloniales de España y Gran Bretaña en América. De tal forma, se convierte en una novela que engloba y abarca parte de la historia y las luchas políticas del siglo XX.

Por ejemplo, la siguiente cita, un cuestionamiento polémico que la novela enfrenta de una manera extensa y compleja (favor de no descontextualizar o tomar a la lígera):

“The question is: ¿queremos o no ser ciudadanos costarricenses? Para naturalizarnos nos exigen que dejemos ser como somos y nos pongamos a ser como ellos” (p. 346).

Más allá de sus logros narrativos y estilísticos, los fluídos cambios de focalización, la mirada antropológica intercultural, disfruté mucho de esta novela de Anacristina Rossi.

Following Plato’s Symposium setting, Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory, addresses the issue of the decline of public-speaking in early Imperial Rome by contrasting contemporary practices versus those of the Republic. The discussion, as Shelley A Defense of Poetry for instance, even though it is presented as a critique on “letters”, it is also a critique of society.

Through his characters, which were also at a time his mentors, Tacitus explores the social conditions which have produced the decline in the art of oratory. Messala’s view is nostalgic for the roughness of the early republic time, in which orators sprung in the midst of the struggles between internal parties, rose in controversy, defending or attacking strongly felt causes, in passion, in turmoil, in disagreement, and were not the product of “oratory schools”, in which, it’s implied, the students learning is conducted by men who know how but not of what to speak. He contrasts that “ancient” and now “ideal” republican scenario with the present Imperial scenario in which there is not much room for debate, since the ruling elite seems to be rather in consent about what to do.

In a rather clever stance, Aper claims for a pluralist recreation of ancient times and argues that the past holds a variety of styles, in which no one seems to have held hegemony over the others. In Aper’s argument I find an interesting questioning of how the past is constructed to set one’s claim in the present, of how nostalgia works as an emotion that selects memories according to our desire.

There’s a discussion about how the expectations of the audiences have changed over time, which has to be thought in terms of a tradition that is developing, and an audience that is evolving with it. The guiding premise of this holds that the ancients were rough and unsophisticated and could pretty much be amused by anything. By contrast, modern audiences, which are the result of the ancient ones, expect “new” things when the “old” have not worked, and/or the recurrence of those things which pleased them once already.

Taste, therefore, evolves. The debate then takes a sharp turn. Massala now tries to explain the social conditions that lead to a decline in Oratory, of how history has affected art, of how the political context has affected the elaboration of “texts”. His argument is as conservative as one can find: youth is rather relaxed, parents are not so involved with raising their kids; Education is no longer what it used to, students no longer learn in the “battle field” but in “safe” settings.

The critique seems to land on the superabundant atmosphere of Empire, which reflects on the preference of Asiatic style, in contrast with the old stoic republican manners, which reflected on the preference of Attic Style. I have mentioned that his argument is conservative, mainly because it is nostalgic for the ways of the past that seems to be the driving force of his critique, and not particularly nostalgic for the future.

Schiller, in the other hand, is a nostalgic for a past set in the future. At least, that is how I read On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, an essay in which Schiller contrasts naïve, as ancient, natural, ontologically whole, childish, and sentimental, “modern”, reflective, idealistic, juvenile poets, not as styles that completely antagonize each other but out of which a “new” synthesis can be arrived at.

Contrasting them, though, helps Schiller not only represent the past as natural, wholesome, natural, and expose the present as a time of incompleteness, imbalance and artificiality, but sets him up to claim for a conciliatory future, in which ancient and modern ways will become one. In that way Schiller’s exploration of Homer, Shakespeare and Goethe, in contrast with contemporary texts also helps him construct his social reform argument.

After all, for Schiller, art can restore humanity’s lost wholeness. The poet has a role broader than the text; he is to act also in the context, since he is to become the guardian of nature; either to be nature or to seek lost nature. This is the ambiguous role of Schiller’s idyll, not only as genre but as a time achieved. Somehow, Schiller’s “modern” quest to be “natural”, as the ancients were, resembles Kleist’s comment of trying to enter Eden through the back door. Schiller’s nostalgia is ambivalent because it is a longing of the past in the future, an elaboration of how the modern is less than the ancient because it lacks “originality”.

Tacitus’ nostalgia for the way things used to be would be, for Schiller, sentimental, since it would lead one to be contemplative and, possibly, sad about the current state of affairs, leading away from “life”, but not more than that. Schiller’s nostalgia for the past in the future, however, is dynamic, it leads us back in to “life”, since it can serve to fuel a political movement that seeks to change the imbalanced current state of affairs in order to restore its “original” wholeness.

The risk though is to pursue something that never was. It is of interest to bring out Rousseau’s construction of the state of nature that influenced Schiller so much in this essay, because it is only hypothetical; it was based on a supposition, no more. However tempting it is to think of the past, in contrast with the present, which is always incomplete, as a “cosmos”, as something one can struggle for to bring order to the chaotic now, one can not avoid remembering that it is a possibility, a hypothesis, a retrospective and nostalgic elaboration, and not a certainty.

The present is something alive, in the making, new. Cinthio’s construction of the modern in contrast with the ancient has this rasa; it is an insurgency of the new against the old, a statement that life changes and that we have embrace those changes rather than cling to the old ways of viewing things, just for the sake of it. If it is a nostalgia, it is one for the present, for what is actually happening now, rather than one for the past, as Tacitus, or now for the past in the future, as Schiller.

I think there is no better way to examine Cinthio’s “loose” interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics than through his affirmation of the present as something alive and of tradition as something dynamic, in the making. It is of importance to highlight Cinthio’s awareness of and the importance that he gives to the audience, since however detached some authors and critics alike want to present the “texts” as having emerged in laboratory type of settings, “texts” arose from life, and are set in an specific place and type, with a particular audience in mind.

Cinthio’s concession to the audience, developing an argument for a tragicomedy, saying that a comic ending is also suited for a tragedy, serves as an insurgency against what the ancient said and tradition fixed. But it is Cinthio’s awareness of the non-Aristotelian epic which caused my attention, since it is the novel, the romance, that which I feel (I write feel, since I have found no reason to sustain this) closer to me.

His decision to dedicate time and thought to a genre that had been developing outside of what was considered canonical is a particularly example of an alternative role for a critic: based not exclusively in defending the old –because in it, we have projected an order-, but in holding a critical attitude that is open to the new, whatever it may be, a form, a genre, a style.

Tacitus’ construction of a “thriving” past as a critique on the “decadent” present, Schiller’s projection of a sublimated past in the future or Cinthio’s enthusiastic approach to his own time, place and audience in contrast with what the ancients had legislated, are all ways to define the modern with reference to the past, to their literary tradition and their history.

If I were to choose, I think I already have, I would lean towards Cinthio. In my representation of him, I do not claim for a gratuitous celebration of whatever is trying to pass of as new, but a reflective perspective on the fleeting and evanishing present, on life as it sustains and renews itself.

These two novels, standing in the opposite spectrum of the Modern Era, have many characteristics in common. It is the relationship between these two novels, that which will be briefly explored hereon.

In 1952, ten years before Pale Fire was published, Nabokov was asked to dedicate a series of lectures on Don Quixote at Harvard University; these lectures were later published as Lectures on Don Quixote, a book that Nabokovian scholars should re-examine, since it reveals as much of Cervantes’, as of Nabokov’s, aesthetics of the novel.In it, Nabokov writes: ‘Through the other novelist that we shall read, Don Quixote will, in a way, remain with us all the time (11).’ That statement should serve, as much as Nabokov’s advice to become re-readers, as an axis to any developing critical work on this elusive Russian-American author.

Don Quixote helps us understand the origins of the inconclusive debate about the narrator identity that Pale Fire has provoked. Boyd (114) distinguishes four main positions in the critic’s struggle to define Pale Fire’s ultimate narrator; theories oscillate between the single author –be that Shade, Kinbote or Botkin- and multiple authors –be that Kinbote and Shade, Shade and Hazel, so on-. Over the centuries, Don Quixote’s scholars have had the very same question.

Unable to find a definitive answer in this narrative gap Cervantes, the author, deliberately created in his work, contemporary Latin-American writer Carlos Fuentes asks (95):

“Esta es la última pregunta de Cervantes: ¿quién escribe los libros y quién los lee? ¿Quién es el autor de Don Quijote? ¿Un tal Cervantes, más versado en desdichas que en versos, cuya Galatea ha leído el cura que hace el escrutinio de los libros de Don Quijote? Un tal Saavedra, mencionado por el cautivo con admiración, en razón de los hechos que cumplió y todo por alcanzar la libertad?

Cervantes, como Don Quijote, es leído por los personajes de la novela Quijote, libro sin origen autoral y casi sin destino, agonizante apenas nace, reanimado por los papeles del historiador arábigo Cide Hamete Benengeli, que son vertidos al castellano por un anónimo traductor morisco y que serán objeto de la versión apócrifa de Avellaneda…”

Fuentes mentions a smaller trick, within the larger trick, that Cervantes and Nabokov perform: a referral to their previous fictions. Cervantes mentions Galatea, one of his best know shorter works. Nabokov, in Pale Fire, includes allusions to Lolita (1955) and Pnin (1957). In the rest of the statement, Fuentes is eloquent enough, and yet it lacks the profundity of a previous review done by Borges, who, besides introducing other works of fiction that have played the game, claims (668):

“También es sorprendente saber en el principio del novelo capítulo, que la novela entera ha sido traducida del árabe y que Cervantes adquirió el manuscrito en el mercado de Toledo, y lo hizo traducir por un morisco, a quien alojo mas de mes y medio en su casa, mientras concluía la tarea.

Pensamos en Carlyle, que fingió que el Santor Resrtus era versión parcial de una obra publicada en Alemania por el doctor Diogenes Teufulsroeckh; pensamos en el rabino castellano Moisés de León, que compuso el Zohar o Libro del Esplendor y lo divulgó como obra de un rabino palestino del siglo III. Este juego de extrañas ambigüedades culmina en la segunda parte; los protagonistas han leído la primera, los protagonistas del Quijote son, asimismo, lectores del Quijote”.

Unlike Boyd, for whom this inquiry appears to be central, the game of the narrator’s unreliability is, for Borges, venial and futile. According to Borges, who contributed to the ambiguity by adding Pierre Menard as another possible author, the real poignancy of Don Quixote is the reflection it produces on the reader (669):

“¿Por qué nos inquieta que Don Quijote sea lector del Quijote y Hamlet, espectador de Hamlet? Creo haber dado con la causa: tales inversiones sugieren que si los caracteres de una ficción pueden ser lectores o espectadores, nosotros, sus lectores, o espectadores, podemos ser ficticios”.

Even though he does not mention the possible influence of Don Quixote or Borges or Wittgenstein in Nabokov’s novel, Boyd proposes that Nabokov’s Pale Fire is, also, one that launches the reader into some kind of artistic discovery.

The similarities between Don Quixote and Pale Fire do not end in the unreliability of the narrator. Both works are about or have to do with characters, Don Quixote and Kinbote, who have gone mad, characters that the readers can “mock”, as well as sympathize with. In the Lectures on Don Quixote, Nabokov refers to Don Quixote’s appeal to others in way that resembles Kinbote’s appeal: “as a crazy sane man, or an insane one on the verge of sanity (17)”.

That characterization of Don Quixote reminds us of the words of a “certain ferocious lady” in Pale Fire’s Foreword, which obliquely describes Kinbote’s state of mind: ” ‘You are a remarkably disagreeable persona. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you,’ and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: ‘What’s more, you are insane’ “(25).

Both Don Quixote and Kinbote are learned men, suffering from some sort of scholarly madness: analogously affected by their readings, and their “imaginary” lives. Therefore, both are considered rather amiable or passive lunatics, as Shade’s patient attitude towards Kinbote evidence or the various attempts that Don Quixote’s friends do to bring him home without harm.

The relationship between Pale Fire’s main characters, Kinbote and Shade, is also a “contrapuntual contrast”, Nabokov’s term referring to the Don Quixote and Sancho pair. Both Don Quixote and Kinbote try to pull their “side-kicks” into their game: Kinbote tries to convince Shade to write a poem about “his” epic, and Don Quixote tries to convince Sancho to see the world in the way that he does.

Don Quijote de la Mancha and Pale Fire are both concoctions of techniques and genders. Both are novels based on “languages games”, games pertinent to the language they were written on; the opening words of Don Quixote are a taken from Spanish ballads, as the title of Pale Fire is taken from a line of Shakespeare, continuing previous word-plays.

In that sense, Cervantes and Nabokov are authors that expand the legacy of their tradition, constituting their works of fiction as an open field of dialogue, consent and dissent, with previous works of the Spanish and English canons, respectably. Although Cervantes charges specifically against the Chivalry gender and Nabokov seems to have a broader aim, Don Quixote and Pale Fire parody the “purple prose” of their times.

As it has been explored, in the “game” of World Fiction, Spanish Don Quixote has a definitive relationship with English Pale Fire. Lyotard has claimed that: “Each language partner, when a ‘move’ pertaining to him is made, undergoes a ‘displacement,’ an alteration of some kind that not only affects him in his capacity as addressee but also as sender (16)”. Nabokov’s move, presenting the novel in a new form, seems as an appropriate response to Cervantes’ challenge.

Works cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Emece, 1974
Boyd, Brian. Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. New Jersey: Princeton, 1999.
Fuentes, Carlos. Cervantes o la critica a la lectura. Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1976.
Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Don Quixote. London: Weindenfeld & Nicolson, 1983.

Various symbols of this failure can be observed throughout the novel, beginning from the main character’s name: Oedipa, as an extension or play of the man that was able to decipher the Sphinx’s riddle, which might parallel the solution of the enigma (man’s entropy) to America’s culture.

The Tristero “message-carrying” system, which carries the narrative, can be seen in this light, since as Hilfer points out, “is seeking to undermine official systems of communication”. The muted horn. The similarity between the order of houses in Suburbia and a radio’s circuit card, convey a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning.In a way, all readers duplicate Oedipa’s quest as she tries to execute Pierce Inverarity’s will (which is…?, one is left to wander). As Hilfer notes: “The basic question of this text, foregrounded as a text by such devices as the antirealistic character names, is whether its protagonist can correctly interpret the text which she confronts, that is, a fictional world made up of what looks like signs but may not be (148)”.

It does not take long for the reader to share Oedipa’s concern, since he is expecting it to be: “…it’s all a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot (31)”. But, like a postmodern work, the plot in The Crying of Lot 49 is self-referred, since it involves the plot of language.

The Russian Formalist conceived literature as an especial “organization” of language. According to Barthes, Semiology’s aim is to take “any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least a system of signification (9)”.

Therefore, literature can be considered a system, some sort of structural conspiracy against individual. Barthes defines language (langue) as such: “it is because a language is a system of contractual values (in part arbitrary, or, more exactly, unmotivated) that it resists the modifications coming from a single individual, and is consequently a social institution (14)”.

Hilfer has noted that the Oedipa’s role and the role of the reader are similar. They both suffer some kind of paranoia: “Hertzberg and McClelland note in an essay on paranoia that ‘The Crying of Lot 49…is a story whose plot is a plot –a fiction with the structure of a paranoid delusion’. The normal way of reading any complex text is to infer links between the signs of the text even when they are not self-evident as in, Jonathan Culler argues, taking contiguity to imply relationship. The reader, in effect, creates textual pattern and meaning (148)”.

A reader takes it for granted that a story, any story, conveys meaning. His search, as the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia has pointed out, is that of an epiphany. As long as there is a sign transmitted, a receiver will attempt to decode the meaning of the message being transmitted. The basic presumption in human communication is that: the message conveys a meaning (even when its meaning is that there is no meaning), we are to decode.

Culture is a codification as well. According to Eco: “all the aspects of a culture can be studied as elements of communication”. Reader and writer alike are surrounded by signs and symbols, conveying all kind of different meaning, of different layers of meaning. There is the constant simile of Nature and book, that writers so often use. At any sign, even one found in a bathroom stall, one could think: “God, hieroglyphics (52)” as Oedipa sighs at the horn the first time she sees it.

In that sense, The Crying of Lot 49 is very similar to Borges’ short story The God’s Script, which tells about Tzinacan, the last Qaholom magician, and his attempt to find and decipher the magical sentence –the one with the ability to ward off the powers of devastation and ruin- God wrote on the first day of creation. Since the magician is imprisoned, he can but recall the days when he was free:

“Throughout the earth there are ancient forms, forms incorruptible and eternal; any one of them could be the symbol I sought. A mountain could be the speech of the god, or a river or the empire or the configuration of the stars. But in the process of the centuries the mountain is levelled and the river will change its course, empires experience mutation and havoc and the configuration of the stars varies.

There is change in the firmament. The mountains and the stars are individuals and individuals perish. I sought something more tenacious, more invulnerable. I thought of the generations of cereals, of grasses, of birds, of men. Perhaps the magic would be written on my face, perhaps I myself was the end of my search… (170)”

Unlike Borges’ The God’s Script, there is no conclusive end to Oedipa’s quest in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. For Hilfer, the very title is a hint of a revelation denied: “On one level, The Crying of Lot 49 is an auctioneer’s calling of the lot number of a collection of stamps which Oedipa believes may provide a crucial clue to Tristero.

But as Mendelson explicates: ‘the word Pentecost derives from the Greek for the “fiftieth”. The crying –the auctioneers calling – of the forty ninth lot is the moment before a Pentecost revelation, the end of the period in which the miracle is in a state of potential, not yet manifest’. Pynchon not only withholds his revelation but implies that it might encode an epiphany of nothingness (151)”.

Pynchon teases his reader all along the narrative. Hints of possible plots appear and banish, leaving the reader uncertain if what he has read will “mean” something later on, if the writer will “tie it all up, bring it all down”, making “sense” of it all in the end. In The Crying of Lot 49, though, the reader is left in the discomforting uncertainty of not knowing “what it all really meant”. And yet, for Borges, that is precisely the aesthetic phenomenon.

In his prose essay, The wall and the Books, Borges writes: “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have not missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon (188)”.

It is the aesthetic phenomenon what one finds all throughout Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

Works cited
Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Direction
Books, 1964.
Hilfer, Tony. American Fiction Since 1940. New York: Longman Publishing, 1992.
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.

“Reading Myself and Others” is a book about the art of writing fiction. The long interview with The Paris Review and the essay “Writing American Fiction” are the best of this collection, and are usually studied with all seriousness. It seems to me that society has a hard time understanding what exactly novelist do. At times, novelists are expected to be critical. But if novelist become too critical, society dislikes it and tries to censor them.

The interviews and essays are full of insightful and hilarious observations about the predicament facing a novelist. For example: “What is the moral of the story? Simply this: that the American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality” (p. 167).Roth had an amazing start as a novelist, but I think that when these interviews were carried out, his best writing was yet to come. His late style probably was a consequence of his ability to analyze fiction, his own work included, with relentless precision. These interviews and essays offer us an insight to the privileged mind of one the best novelist alive, reflection on his craft, the challange of fiction, and the society that breeds it.

Unfortunately, no similar compilation of interviews and essays account for the latter part of Roth’s career, which should include reflection on his outstanding novels, such as “American Pastoral” (1997) or “The Human Stain” (2000). Maybe in the near future…

“I am Charlotte Simmons” serves as an introduction to the complex and competitive college life, and it depicts the daily challenges and problems that confront an average student (sometimes if feels like an “Ivy League” for dummies). Simmons, however, is not your average student but a young beautiful and intelligent student, who is struggling to be the best she can be, and leave her mark in the world.

Wolfe is always a keen observer and a master ironist, but certainly this is not his best novel. Something fails. It might be that it feels like your grandfather talking about today’s student life, trying to sound hip and not patronizing. It might be that Charlotte Simmons is like “Legally Blonde” (2001) without Reese Witherspoon’s spark or like “Good Will Hunting” without Matt Damon’s rage.However, Tom Wolfe almost pulls it off. Don’t get me wrong: “I am Charlotte Simmons” is a great read, but it’s probably the least exciting Wolfe I’ve read.

Tom Wolfe practically invented New Journalism in the 60’s, but lately he has crafted neo-realist novels like “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987), set in New York, and “A Man in Full” (1997), set in Atlanta. My favorite, however, is still the hilarious “The Right Stuff” (1979).

La narración parece fundamentada en la relación significante entre los padres divorciados y el hijo, suspendido entre ambos, suspendido entre el país que vive y el que añora, entre la infancia en la violencia y la madurez en la incertidumbre.

“Historia del llanto” es un discurso intimista acerca de la vida pública, en la cual la memoria de un niño incluye ramalazos de la historia tumultuosa de Argentina, entremezclándose, confundiéndose, creciendo en la cultura del miedo, la represión y la agresión.En América Latina, dicha cultura de la violencia generó toda una gama de novelas. Alan Pauls nos brinda un susurro intimista, personal, en una novela que bien pudo haber sido un fragmento biográfico de una generación que se formó en un cruento enfrentamiento de baja intensidad.

Entre los dispositivos narrativos se encuentran un cantautor de protesta que retorna tras un largo exilio como una manifestación anacrónica pero persistente (acaso como un doble del novelista comprometido), el torturador quien con el paso de los años se vuelto próximo, la transmisión de la caída de Allende o el periódico montonero La causa peronista, toda esa amalgama de elementos nostálgicos que en la prosa fluida de Alan Pauls se trastocan en anclajes significativos y memorables. Por ejemplo:

“¿Qué pasa? ¿Cuándo la dicha es tuya no hay sospecha? ¿Cuándo el dolor es de otro no lo exhumás? ¿Cuándo la dicha es tuya y el dolor de otro entre dicha y dolor no hay relación? Quien dice dolor dice secreto, dice doble vida” (p. 61).

Pauls, Alan. Historia del llanto. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007. p. 128.

Although that year Latin American literary tradition received world wide attention (Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias was the Nobel Laureate and Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was published), Barth’s essay bears especial importance since it provides a turn in the relationship between the literatures of the Americas.

The long debated “The Literature of Exhaustion” first appeared in the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly in 1967. That same month, Barth read –spoke- at Harvard University of some of his self-recorded fictions, part of Lost in the Funhouse, a work in progress at that time, which would appear a year later. David Morrell claims that at that moment, Barth wanted to write “something quite different, he explained: to compose several small pieces, what he called ‘fictions’” (80), after Giles Goat-Boy, a novel that took five years to write, published in 1966, which had left Barth “exhausted”.

Interestingly enough, Borges’s first English translations in book form appeared in 1962 with the titles Labyrinths and Fictions. From October 24, 1967 to April 10, 1968, Borges delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, where Barth had read his work in progress. “The Literature of Exhaustion” provides the aesthetics and the interpretative key with which to read the Borgesian Lost in the Funhouse fictions of John Barth.

In his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”, John Barth parallels the writer’s ability in “exhausted” times with that of the mystics. Quoting Keirkegaard, Barth claims that mystics, at every moment, leap into the infinite and fall back into the finite –therefore Barth constitutes “literature” as a “secular” act of faith.

For Barth, Borges illustrates “how an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work –paradoxically because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation, in the same way that the mystic who transcends finitude is said to be enabled to live, spiritually and physically, in the finite world” (274).

If we read Barth literally, Borges is a “mystical” writer. In this sense, every fiction created by Borges, in an age of ultimacies, is a “literary” leap of faith. “His artistic victory,” Barth wrote about Borges, “is that he confronts an intellectual dead-end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work” (272).

Barth central issue in his essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” is death and continuity, to assent to (literary) life in the face of death (of the novel, of culture, of the author). This essay provides the key to understand his outstanding short story collection “Lost in the Funhouse”.

The fictions gathered in Lost in the Funhouse are themselves a labyrinth, Borges’s favorite image. Barth’s funhouse is not only a labyrinth, but a labyrinth of mirrors. Barth merged two of Borges’s images (labyrinths and mirrors) into one: a funhouse. The funhouse is a maze of reflections.

Works Cited
Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Doubleday, 1968.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Borges: A Reader. Ed. Rodríguez Monegal, E. and Reid, A. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981.
Morrell, David. John Barth: An Introduction. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.

El manifiesto vanguardista presentado como prólogo a la antología de cuentos “Se habla español: voces latinas en USA”, publicada por Alfaguara en el 2000, motiva esta reflexión tardía acerca de la más reciente generación de escritores latinoamericanos.

En la suerte de prólogo que presenta el libro, los compiladores Edmundo Paz Soldán y Alberto Fuguet advierten: “Una antología sobre los Estados Unidos, sí, pero en español. Articulada desde las entrañas mismas del monstruo –Martí dixit-, pero en una USA contemporánea, vista por escritores latinoamericanos (¿qué significa ser latinoamericano?) de la nueva generación (¿qué implica nueva generación?), todo esto escrito, por cierto, en el nuevo idioma del gigante: Spanish (14)”.

Es oportuno que las dos preguntas auto-referenciales incrustadas en el discurso de apertura, se encuentren encerradas entre paréntesis, colocadas de esa manera en un territorio incierto, provisional, tentativo y tentador. Ambas indagaciones (sobre lo latinoamericano y lo nuevo) son precisamente lo que conviente explorar.

Antes de “Se habla español”, fue “País McOndo”, el primer intento de diferenciación de lo nuevo con lo anterior, al parodiar el nombre del poblado imaginario de García Márquez al asemejarlo con el de la corporación norteamericana de comida rápida.

En la presentación de la también antología de cuentos “País McOndo”, Alberto Fuguet y Sergio Gomez declaraban su rechazo a la tendencia de la literatura latinoamericana en voga, la que alguna vez había sido una innovación y que se había convertido ya, para 1996, en un estereotipo: el “sagrado código del realismo magico”, como lo llamaron con desdén, con enojo, con ironía.

El público, y los editores que en buena medida conforman el gusto de ese público, esperaban más de lo mismo, ante lo cual los “nuevos” reaccionan: “No desconocemos lo exótico y variopinto de la cultura y costumbres de nuestros países, pero no es posible aceptar los esencialismos reduccionistas, y creer que aquí todo el mundo anda con sombrero y vive en los árboles (16)”.

Coincidentemente, en similar tono, Gerald Martin había advertido, que la realidad retratada en “Cien años de soledad” podría motivar una apreciación distorcionada de la realidad latinoamericana pues: “(it) raises the question of what those foreign –especially Anglo-Americans- readers saw in the book, and whether ther is not some need for a book on ‘South Americanism’ to match Edward Said’s book on Orientalism (225)”.

Refiriéndose a “Cuentos con Walkman”, un esfuerzo anterior realizado por ellos mismos en Chile y publicado en 1993, en “País McOndo”, Fuguet y Gomez declaraban que lo suyo se trataba de una ruptura, autodenominándose “una nueva generación que es post-todo: post-modernismo, post-yuppie, post-comunismo, post-babyboom, post-capa de ozono. Aquí no hay realismo mágico, hay realismo virtual (12)”.

Sin embargo, omitieron algo que escribieron en la presentación de “Cuentos con Walkman”: “…hablemos de una generación sin nombre. Generación X, como dice el homónimo del canadiense Douglas Coupland. La generación de la interferencia, de la estática, la generación nula. Más que una generación literaria, son –somos- una (de)generación. No por lo decadente sino por la falta de marca registrada…Lo único claro de esta supuesta ‘nueva generación’ es que viene después de las otras (14)”.

En las declaraciones anteriores manifiestan tres rechazos y dos coincidencias que aglutinan a su “generación”, con las cuales comienza el rompimiento y la conciliación con la generación del Boom, entonces establecida.

Los rechazos saltan a la vista: 1) el distanciamiento que toman del tema del “gran tema de la identidad latinoamericana”; 2) la despreocupación acerca de los temas sociales y la desvinculación del compromiso político expresado así: “si hace unos años la disyuntiva del escritor joven estaba entre tomar el lápiz o la carabina, ahora parece que lo más angustiante para escribir es elegir entre Windows 95 o Macintosh (15)”; y 3) el rechazo a seguir retratando la ruralidad, lo “folkrorizante” de latinoamerica.

Esto ejemplifica una postura que proviene de un estrato social urbano clase mediero, parte de la actitud solipsista que asumen: “Los cuentos de McOndo se centran en realidades individuales y privadas. Suponemos que ésta es una de las herencias de la fiebre privatizadora mundial. Nos arriesgamos a señalar esto último como un signo de la literatura joven hispanoamericana, y una entrada para la lectura de este libro (15)”.

Las coincidencias son, de manera similar, fáciles de encontrar. Aunque no se refieren a un hecho histórico específico que los marque, al intentar delimitar la temporalidad que los conforma hacen un señalamiento interesante: “Nos decidimos por una fecha que fuera desde 1959 (que coincide con la siempre recurrida revolución cubana) a 1962 (que en Chile y en otros países, es el año en que llega la televisión). La mayoría, sin embargo, nacieron algún tiempo después (16)”.

“Se habla español” sirve para relanzar “País McOndo” de una manera más mesurada, estudiada y ambiciosa. De entrada, hay cambios. Más autores (algunos repetidos), ya no más España. Aunque las estructuras de los prólogos son similares, el tono de “Se habla español” es más académico, equilibriado, políticamente más correcto.

La indagación de la latinoamericidad, ya no se desdeña como lo hicieran apenas unos años atrás, sino más bien se actualiza al ampliar su espectro: “La idea (mala, según algunos; peculiar para otros) era narrar la diversidad de la experiencia latinoamericana en USA. Eso salimos a buscar (14)”.

Está además una conciliación con el “boom”: que va desde la pregunta (les gusta/han leido/admiran a Faulkner, por lo tanto preguntan, para justificarse) “¿no es Faulkner, por ejemplo, uno de los padres del boom? (14)” [Paz Soldán escribe un conciliador cuento sobre esta relación] hasta la adjudicación del resucitado premio Seix Barral a la novela, que no trata precisamente de un asunto “latinoamericano”, “En busca de Klingsor” de Jorge Volpi, perteneciente a la mexicana generación “crack”, que se presenta como una “sutil fisura”.

El pleito con García Márquez, sin embargo, sigue vivo; aunque habite un tanto el fantasma de Faulkner, apenas lo mencionan, un poco más siquiera que a Cortázar. A Vargas Llosa lo citan, como autoridad, quizá por ser actualmente el más público de los escritores del Boom.

Donoso queda estigmatizado como “grotesco simplista”, aunque líneas antes hayan expresado que el deseo que motivó la antología fue realizar ese viaje hacia el “estereotipo” norteamericano al revés, precisamente lo que hace la novela “Donde van a morir los elefantes”. Carlos Fuentes recibe una de cal (“ha sido uno de los primeros en reconocer la vitalidad de la cultura hispana en Estados Unidos”) y otra de arena (citando a Parini, sobre La frontera de cristal: “las ideas de Fuentes siempre han sido más atractivas que sus escritos”, cosa que se puede decir de los antologadores).

Pero, casi diez años después, ¿qué resultados se obtuvieron después de tanta proclama? ¿Empato la intensión con la obra que luego produjeron estos autores? Lo examinaremos en las próximas entregas…

Trabajos citados

Donoso, José. The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
Fuguet, Alberto y Gomez, Sergio, ed. Cuentos con Walkman. Chile: Editorial Planeta, 1993.
Fuguet, Alberto y Paz Soldan, Edmundo, ed. Se habla español: voces latinas en USA. Estados Unidos: Alfaguara Internacional, 2000.
Martin, Gerald. Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1989.
Volpi, Jorge. “El fin de la conjura.” Letras Libres. Octubre 2000: 56- 60