Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Cervantes, like the character Don Quixote, is read by other characters of the novel Don Quixote, a book without an original author and, almost, a book without a destiny, a book that agonizes in the act of being born, reanimated by the papers of the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, which are then translated into Spanish by an anonymous Moorish translator and which will be the object of the abject apocryphal version of Avellaneda … The endless circle of reading and writings winds itself anew: Cervantes, author of Borges; Borges, author of Pierre Ménard; Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quixote; Don Quixote, author of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be read and the author knows himself to be written and it is said that he dies on the same date, though not on the same day, as William Shakespeare. It is further stated that perhaps both were the same man. Cervantes’s debts and battles and prisons were fictions that permitted him to disguise himself as Shakespeare and write his plays in England, while the comedian Will Shaksper, the man with a thousand faces, the Elizabethan Lon Chaney, wrote Don Quixote in Spain. This disparity between the real days and the fictitious date of a common death spared world enough and time for Cervantes’s ghost to fly to London in time to die once more in Shakespeare’s body. But perhaps they are not really the same person, since the calendars in England and Spain have never been the same, in 1616 or in 1987.

But then again, if not the same person, maybe they are the same writer, the same author of all the books, a wandering polyglot polygraphist named, according to the whims of the times, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Cide Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Defoe, Goethe, Poe, Dickens, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka, Borges, Pierre Ménard, James Joyce … He is the author of the same open book which, like the autobiography of Ginés de Pasamonte, is not yet finished because our lives are not yet over, “With other words, Mallarmé will one day say the same thought as the rogue of Parapilla: “A book neither begins nor ends; at the most, it feigns to…”

Cervantes wrote the first open novel as if he had read Mallarmé. He proposes, through the critique of reading that seems to start with the hidalgo’s reading of the epics of chivalry and seems to end with the reader’s realization that all reality is multi-leveled, the critique of creation within creation. Don Quixote’s in temporal and, at the same time, immediate quality derives from the nature of its internal poetics: it is a split poem that converts its own genesis into an act of fiction: it is the poetry of poetry (or the fiction of fiction), singing the birth of the poem, narrating the origin of the very fiction we are reading.

Gaston Bachelard has written that all great writers know that the world wants literature to be everything and to be something else: philosophy, politics, science, ethics. Why this demand, asks the French thinker. Because literature is always in direct communication with the origins of the spoken being, at that very core of speech where philosophy, politics, ethics, and science themselves become possible.

But when science, ethics, politics, and philosophy discover their own limitations they appeal to the grace and disgrace of literature to go beyond their insufficiencies. Yet they only discover, along with literature itself, the permanent divorce between words and things: the separation between the representative uses of language and the experience of the being of language.

Literature is the utopian operation that would like to reduce that distance. When it simply disguises the divorce, it is called epic. When it reveals it, it is called novel or poetry. Such is the novel and the poem of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance in his struggle to make words and things coincide. Don Quixote finds out, as we all do in our lives, that things do not belong to all; but words do. Words are like air: they belong to all or to no one. Language is the first and most natural instance of common property. If this is so, then Miguel de Cervantes is only the owner of his words in the same measure that he is not Miguel de Cervantes but all men: like Joyce’s Dedalus, he is the poet, singing the uncreated conscience of his race, mankind. The poet is born after his act, the poem. The poem creates its author, much as it creates its readers. The final description of Cervantes’s critique of reading is this simple, lapidary statement: Don Quixote, written by everybody, read by everybody.

I

When Milan Kundera hears the well-worn critical question “Is the novel dead?” he brings out his literary pistol and shoots out five syllables: De-nis Di-de-rot.

Diderot, born in 1713 and dead in 1784, did many things and did them all well. Editor of the Encyclopedia, theoretician of the theater, founder of modern literary and art criticism, materialist philosopher, and, if that were not enough, mentor to Catherine of Russia, Diderot is, as the Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco has said, unembraceable.

Unembraceable Diderot was (besides? above all?) a novelist and, according to Kundera, the greatest example we have that, far from exhausting its possibilities, the novel has yet to saunter down unexplored or forgotten paths, listen to muffled calls, and fully accomplish its possibilities in the realms of playfulness and criticism, fabulation, humor, creative novelty, and the endless potentialities of the ars combinatoria. This call to novelistic arms — risk, discovery, a growing perception of an endless reality — is there, if one wants to hear it, in the fictions of Denis Diderot.

Kundera’s critical concept of the potential novels contained in the inexhausted novels of the past is part of an aesthetics of reception. How to make the past present? Diderot wrote in the eighteenth century. Why are we capable of reading and understanding him more and more with the passage of time? Why does a writer such as Diderot become more and more present instead of more and more absent? What is the secret of artistic presence? This is my question from and for Diderot on the bicentennial of his death: my question homage.

Boileau, in his Poetics, excludes the novel from his system of genres, and in order to make themselves look respectable, the novelists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries swear eternal fealty to the classics in their prefaces. The novel is born without parents because it makes its debut as a potential fact, unforeseeable and unclassifiable in a world which only wants to recognize itself in the classical, since the classical is, by definition, the recognizable, or, as Hegel put it, classical is that which signifies itself and interprets itself, with no need for mediation.

Given this orphaned background, Diderot sets out, precisely, to write a novel that is nothing but an act of perpetual mediation between the author and the reader, an exchange of insecure signs, a constant rupture of the dramatic unities and of linear narrative. Diderot’s fiction is an emission of uncertain questions: Is this a novel? Are you a reader? Am I a writer?

Jacques le Fataliste, Diderot’s great novel, was published between 1796 and 1798, more than two centuries ago, and posthumously. Yet it is not only one of the great novels of the eighteenth century; it is one of the great novels of the twentieth century: it is vibrantly contemporary. The novel begins as a dialogue between Jacques the servant and his master; but it finally becomes a vast debate between the author and the time of his readers. But the premise of what I am saying is this: Diderot the philosopher is acutely conscious of the demands of classical poetics; the narrative must respect the unities of time, place, and action. Diderot the sociologist is equally aware of the traditional expectations of the reading public of his own time. But Diderot the artist swiftly proceeds to break the unities and to frustrate the expectations. The artist finally triumphs over the rationalist and the statistician.