I
The need to talk and comment on authors and literature in general grows as reading alternates with writing, both actually occurring simultaneously, feeding off each other. Serving as a model and a parameter. One writes the kind of literature one likes to read, whether for the subject matter or the style, but there are also those readings that one enjoys exploring and also criticizing. The pleasure is not only in reading what we like, but in discovering the errors of the same authors that we admire. Because there comes a time in the process of literary learning when each person realizes that there is no disappointment that can make admiration wane, but rather the tacit acceptance that each writer is nothing more than a man who sometimes sees more than other men, that is why he writes, but often also sees less than them.
This, then, is part of writing, just as hate and love form the same framework in narrative and poetry, essays and drama, even and especially in anthropology or the humanistic sciences. I mean that the subject matter of literature is as varied and ambivalent as the resources that writers have at their disposal to develop it. The instruments are nothing more than techniques, and talent is as ephemeral and variable in its behavior as the weakest living being that can be imagined. The moment of writing represents a very strong link in the creative process, a link that nothing can break from now on when it has been achieved with the greatest art. How to capture that moment again, no one is able to say with certainty. There are professional writers, there are writers who write for the market, there are writers who write exclusively for themselves, and in all these variants there are good, bad and mediocre writers. The result is good or bad literature.
A great writer and a great teacher taught me from a very early age that there are only two categories: good or bad literature. It is a matter of time and principles to distinguish between the two in order to learn to write correctly, with skill and with soul. Style is a matter of time and practice, but above all of talent. You can learn to write, and even achieve a certain style that comes to resemble that of many others, but the true distinction is in the first sentence of any story, novel or poem. That intonation that tells us that we know the author, that even allows us to enter into a particular world created by a climate, a music of language, a knowing how to say things that define characters and situations with many or few words, but in a way that penetrates the reader's intellectuality until it gets into his heart. A conceptual poem can move us as much as a prose full of music and emotion. The raw and cold can move our feelings as much as the page of a nostalgic and romantic epic.
Homer's Odyssey, William Faulkner's Absalom, any poem by Alberto Girri, a novel by Eduardo Mallea or Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, to mention some examples that are paradigmatic for me, have in common quality and skill, effectiveness and sincerity, the intense depth of a fruitful search that has found a vein of gold in human emotion, using for this a technique matured with errors and triumphs in each page that has preceded it in time. If we talk about science fiction, for example, it is difficult to create the credible climate that scientific speculation requires, and it does not seem to me a valid resource to saturate the reader with scientific data to explain or excuse the author's ineffectiveness in creating his story. I think that the futuristic setting is just another setting to tell a story of men and women, with everything that they imply, obviously, conflicts, feelings, psyche and interpersonal relationships. DeathAnd life, the mystery of why we are in this world, are always the same themes that have not yet been resolved. That is why I like the literature of Ray Bradbury and James Ballard, even that of Roger Zelazny and Brian Aldiss with their exacerbated imagery that does not rule out poetry. Because language is the only thing that validates an author, in the end. Let us look at Juan Carlos Onetti, for example, where language delves into where the story seems too smooth to be real.
There are philosophical schools that are based on the interaction of man with nature as a fundamental basis, and it is not a conflictual relationship but almost a communion and a complicity. Curiosity for knowledge, unusual characteristics of resistance to certain elements of the environment, a strange and isolated temperament are the main characteristics of a good literary character.
II
It is interesting how knowledge can lead to the feeling of omnipotence. Creating life is a temptation too attractive to be avoided, but the results are always partial, incomplete. And the incomplete in nature is related to monstrosity. The theme of a classic story, such as the multiple variations of the myth of Prometheus, more inspired in reality by Mary Shelley's character, are representative of the concerns that inspired literature in general: the concrete impossibility of going beyond what anatomy shows us. The great theme continually repeated is the search for proof, not only of the existence of life beyond death, but that what was once lived and seen can be experienced again. Recovering the past, childhood as a place where we were better and less guilty.
Knowledge does not always bring greater wisdom, because sometimes it plunges us into isolation, and makes us so skeptical, that recovering sensitivity towards those around us is a job that can become impossible. That is when the author must create situations of place and time, referential facts as evocative and nostalgic elements, not necessarily argumentative, but which invariably lead to emotionality.
Surrounded by people the characters do not know, an aura of strangeness seems to envelop them, heightened by the feeling of guilt that then arises, and they begin to believe that this can manifest itself organically. When it comes to this type of characters, the point of view can be that of only one, but alternating with other simultaneous points of view that enrich the understanding of the plot, and the time in which each one takes place is different. Both narratives converge in the same time and situation, as do the clues reluctantly offered throughout the text.
When it comes to fantastic narratives, we are annoyed by excessive descriptions and the usual rhetoric that this type of story can lead to if the rhythm and tone are not controlled. All with the sole purpose of the insinuated mystery achieving its effect in the final revelation.
I think that there is no fantastic story that can withstand the passage of time if it does not have the elemental human factor, that is to say; the unpredictability of the thoughts and hearts of men. An automaton, for example, may not be created out of love or to prolong life, but out of hatred and to hasten the end of the life of someone we once loved, and among the many resources to be used, the first-person voice can lend ambiguity to a narrative that claims to be based on real events, that is, lend an apocryphal tone to a story.
Sometimes a climate, a person one has met, a fact that has impressed us, collaborate to promote the creation of a literary text, and yet none of these factors fully influences or survives as such, not even in its smallest fragments. They mix with the others and metamorphose. A name and certain characteristics of this real person, the urban environment and its overwhelming feeling of failure, the degradation caused by chronic diseases: all of this comes together to merge into the character and the climate, which in turn feed off each other. The result must be an attempt to capture the feelings and frustration that come with the impossibility of really knowing someone, everything that person hides from us and the resentment that it creates in us. The theme of the struggle with an illness, the soul-body dichotomy, although barely outlined, grows with the characters, and requires the author to explain more of their story, perhaps even indirectly, through other characters or found roles.
The psycho and socio-pathological characteristics of the characters, men or women with a certain maladjustment to their environment, may be based in part on a congenital or acquired psychic alteration, which offers a tendency towards violence, or at least a dissociation.
These are the two main things that make them feel the same way about the society in which they live. This back and forth journey of guilt and aggression, of misunderstandings and pain, generates a force that must be released at a certain moment. Of course, the intention is not to create clinical histories or medical reports, but to capture in literature profiles of men and women who move in a particular situation and circumstance.
The great works speak of guilt and responsibility, and one asks the following question: if there is no memory of the criminal act, is there guilt? Memory, then, is the main axis that makes the protagonists play a cruel game but no less true and inevitable than any other factor over which the human being has no control. The mind and time seem to conspire to attack the will and conscience of man, to sink him below the surface, which is nothing more than a fragile appearance of tranquility or well-being. Guilt, then, is another main theme of literature, as a result of meditations on social and personal responsibility, what are the limits of both, those that society imposes and those that one imposes on oneself. The feeling of guilt is innate in human beings, the damage caused, even if it comes from circumstances and not directly from one's own actions, exerts its weight on the conscience. Logic explains, but does not alleviate the weight. Time, alone, has the virtue of alleviating, and even nullifying that feeling. The environment and the settings must have such an intimate relationship, that without them the essential feeling may never be transmitted to the reader.
Another everlasting theme in literature is the association of crime and loneliness. Different beings who feel relegated, sometimes need to subject the other to their own power, and since it was not given the impossibility of creating from nothing beings equal to our own ignominy, we decided to destroy. There is talk of crime and loneliness, of extreme pain and anger. Guilt has no place here, it does not participate, it is only related to the human condition in general and what it is capable of harboring and producing.
The cruel and the twisted, even the morbid, should always be attenuated to constitute good literature. The main thing, I think, is not to resort to effect but to appeal to the reader's emotions: the emotional must emerge from the words, from the phrase, from what is barely said in the right way. To shock without causing physical pain but rather an existential anguish in communion with what the character feels. In this way, he and the reader, and the author and the character, form a triangle of associations that does nothing more than reflect the common origin. Literature, like all art, is then responsible for reflecting it, exalting it, creating, when the writer's merits so achieve, a work that deserves to excite and resist the passage of time. I find it interesting to use a mythological being - and here I speak of myth as a synonym for symbol, as well as in the sense studied by Cesare Pavese in his lucid essay - and confront it with a realistic environment in which it is usually shown. The strange and the fantastic are in keeping with the hostile and at the same time peaceful environment of the countryside or the jungle, as in the stories of Horacio Quiroga, the darkness of the night confronted with the abysmal clarity of the day. Psychological work is essential to give ambiguity to a story, so that the fantastic is not forced or arbitrary. An alternative factor is necessary, then, for an apparently unhinged psyche, which sees strange forms and destructive monsters around it. Death has various forms, it presents itself, for each person, in a different way, even with concrete forms, not just modalities. For a character like this, finally, the fight is a defeat shouted out from the beginning. His derangement progresses along with his physical deterioration and his abandonment of himself, both represented by that last obsession, that of killing the monster that is stripping him of all his belongings, until finally taking his life. The hopeful vision that the author decides to grant him at the end is not a compensation for his suffering or remorse in life, but rather one more element of death, which as we have already said, takes a concrete form, a literary resource that has as its purpose the identification of the reader with something concrete.
Literature, narrative more specifically, will only be effective when there are characters, situations, when a concrete story is told. Many digressions about death can be made, many philosophical theories, but an effective line is more than enough to provoke a shiver in the reader, a tear or even a pinch of sadness. An open, ambiguous ending can allow for various interpretations, but, as Borges says, it does not allow for any other possible ending.
III
The following collection of reviews, comments and notes is an arbitrary selection that arose as a necessityI have the need to speak and say what I think about the authors discussed. The selection and the order in which they are arranged are arbitrary, and follow no criteria other than personal taste and chance, or determinism, in readings. I have often experienced these so-called coincidences, or causalities, where factors as cabalistic as dates were links that united authors and successive readings. Then, more than strangeness or uneasiness, I felt a kind of calm satisfaction, knowing that a certain, and unknown, order was being respected and slowly discovered. It would be interesting for the reader to make his own reading order, his intimate walk, without logic or congruence, other than that of elective affinities, making his own promenade sentimentale, to clarify, finally, that the reason for the title of the book is À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.
Many authors are missing, of course, the great majority of those I have read, especially those who have most influenced me as a writer and reader. But that was not the aim of this book, since that reality, that of talking and commenting on books that were read so long ago, has been accepted as someone accepts that one cannot go back in memory without suffering a bitter failure. What we were when we read them determined their appreciation, and rereading such texts would no longer be the same. If there were time…, I ask myself on many occasions, like someone who sighs in front of the enormity of texts that are yet to be read.
To live or to read, one asks oneself. Art or life. It is not my intention to elucidate this subject, but to put it once again on the written page, and each time that question is asked one is closer to the answer.
To read is to live, I think. Above all, one learns to live when one reads. I am not speaking of practical life, although reading also extends to this plane in countless cases, but of learning to live as human beings who are discovering themselves day by day. Looking in a mirror is a deceptive thing, looking in the mirror of a literary character is, often and almost always, in the hands of a good author, looking at ourselves. How else to explain the tears that flow from us when reading, the lump in our throats and the slow recovery of strength that makes us sit for a long time with the book in our hands, closed on the last written page. A world in which we have been, people we have known and, perhaps, loved more than those next to us. This is the reality of dreams, and the fantasy of reality.
Art is not the ivory tower that practical and skeptical spirits proclaim, it is not the ephemeral entertainment for the summer by the sea. Art is the way in which someone sees the world and transmits it to each of his fellow men in the most faithful way possible, faithful to his vision, of course, faithful to his truth, which is very probably not the truth of many others. But that is the main, perhaps the only and most sublime virtue of art. Creating worlds seen through the particular eyes of a single man or woman, a single world that is added and coexists, that fights and survives, that does not allow the existence of others while the book is open, but that continues to exist in the emotional memory of the reader once that book has been closed.
When a book is opened, a world, whether we like it or not, begins to function. Even closed there it remains, even destroyed, that world has been imagined at some time. It exists in the multiple memories of human beings.
That wonder is called literature, and it is not from God, but from man.
Ilustration: H. B. Lewis
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