Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

One of the proofs of Diderot’s genius is that he transformed the heritage of potentiality in the novel into the very subject matter of his open narrative: the novel as an inexhaustible repertory of possibilities. We will be satisfied with nothing less in the present time. Rabelais, Sterne, Cervantes, and Diderot remind us of the forgotten possibilities hidden in the origin of the novel. But they also remind us that a novel is a permanently open and unfinished work. All great novels, in this sense, are potential novels.

First, they are not exhausted by the politics practiced when the novel was written, or by the society in which the novel appeared. These may disappear or change, but the work of art remains.

Second, the novel does not limit itself to the social, political, psychological, and philosophical contexts that inevitably accompany it; rather, it remains permeable to new meanings, new interpretations, and new manners of reception by readers unforeseen by the author. These readers, on reading the novel, approach an unread work: they read it for the first time. And no matter, as Borges says in Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, how much prestige, criticism, or simple enjoyment has accreted to the work. Hearsay will never substitute the experience of reading Don Quixote, for the first time, in the year 2000.

Third, the novel is able to be or do all this because its formal definition is uncertainty and this lack of certainty leads it to look for openings. The novel, if it is a genre at all, is an open genre, and openness means, again in Bakhtinian terms, dialogue, but not only dialogue of characters; it also means dialogue of genres, of languages, of historical times, of civilizations, of unpublished possibilities.

The novel both reflects and creates an unfinished world made by men and women who are also unfinished. Neither the world nor its inhabitants have said their last word. The potential novel is thus the announcement and perhaps even the guaranty of a potential history. Of a potential life. We hope that we are part of an unfinished human presence expressing itself through narrative language. All great novels, of course, say this, but Diderot makes it evident.

I

Great minute, solemn minute. At my feet burns my past; above me, through the fog, shines the indecipherable future. Life of my soul, of my genius, I implore thee: Do not hide! Watch over me at this minute and do not abandon me throughout this year that so seductively announces itself. Be brilliant, full of activity, and totally dedicated to work and tranquillity … Mysterious, impenetrable year of 1834! Look at me. Here I am, kneeling at your feet.

Nikolai Gogol wrote this letter during a night of passage: between December 31, 1833, and January 1, 1834. Its tone indicates a certain pathos whose very invocation of tranquillity for creation disguises its turbulent complexity. We suspect that behind the New Year’s resolution there stands a restless imagination, however simple daily life may be. And it isn’t, in spite of appearances. To be sure, this life lacks sensational incidents: it is memorable only because it is the life of Nikolai Gogol. Little happens in it, especially those things that thicken the plot of human existence; there are no passions, no erotic intimacy with men or with women, no political convictions.

There is family and fatherland, but for Gogol the question is how to leave them behind as soon as possible. There is an admiring friendship for one man only, and he is a generous genius: Alexander Pushkin, founder of modern Russian literature, the incomparable Pushkin, equal only to Dante and Shakespeare. But a Dante and a Shakespeare eccentrically set in the vast, powerful, enigmatic country that “does not give answers” about its future, as Gogol puts it in the famous final passage of Dead Souls:

And where do you fly to, Russia? Answer me!.. She doesn’t answer. The carriage bells break into an enchanted tinkling, the air is torn to shreds and turns into wind; everything on earth flashes past, and, casting worried, sidelong glances, other peoples and nations step out of her way.

If we compare this passage with the less celebrated epistolary excerpt that I quoted earlier, we come (in the letter) upon several constants of the Gogolian imagination and (in the novel) upon the way the writer transcends his own obsessions. In the letter, there is movement up and down, down and up, as in a column of words: “At my feel bums my past; above me … shines the … future … Here I am, kneeling at your feet.” But this movement is also horizontal, as in a fugue: time cannot be deciphered; it develops through time, a hidden time: a succession of masked days: “I implore thee: Do not hide!” Time, almost by definition, flees, disguises itself, shrouds itself in fog; time is an impostor, a disguised being who always refuses to show us its true face.

The response to time conceived in this way can only be that of a pathetic imagination: kneeling, but without giving up the aspiration toward higher things: going from low to high, from the contemplation of the past that burns “at my feet” to the future that shines “above me.” Time is a constant postponement: a perpetually deferred identity. Poised on the threshold of a year that will be decisive for him, Gogol implores the fruits of an enigmatic, displaced time, vertically conceived, and confronts it with the romantic forms of time and literature: flight, displacement, voyage.

In the landscape of the novel, Gogol draws a vast horizon perpendicular to an erect time. This horizontality has a name: Russia. This name has an object that incarnates it: the troika. And this thing, the troika, moves quickly, aiming for the future, the goal, destiny, sowing admiration and terror among all “other peoples and nations.” But this noisy and swift contraption has two characteristics of its own. The first is that it is driven by a crook, an adventurer, and a rogue ( pícaro ), a disguised man whose identity is unknown to anyone: a man, in this sense, whose identity depends on who others decide him to be. His name is Chichikov, an embezzler of uncertain identity who deals in identities far more uncertain than his own, those of dead serfs, which the great Russian con man tries to buy from landowners, to declare them to the authorities as having perished in a catastrophe, and so pocket 40,000 rubles, a profit on an investment of 500 rubles, on the basis of five to ten rubies per dead soul.

A deception; but, above all, a postponement of identity. Time does not deliver us its destiny; neither does the character; and the land certainly doesn’t. Why, then, should the writer do so: deliver unto us his destiny or that of his time, his space, his character? The art of Nikolai Gogol swirls around the problem of identities and identification which is postponed, or deceptive. Gogol raises it to literary form with such force and imagination, with such irony and sense of the fantastic, that he actually reaches but one identity, and that is his own identification with the problem of existence.

Let us bear this final triumph of the writer in mind as we consider the multiple formal aspects of his work. For, as Donald Fanger indicates in his admirable book The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, the Russian author exemplified more radically than anyone else in his century the power of the literary medium, and he did so, precisely, through a fusion of form and content. Both are form, and both are content. To investigate where one ends and the other begins is to discover the very nature of Gogol’s art, an art in which Georg Simmel’s warning, quoted by Fanger, becomes the operating principle and evidence of composition: form and content are relative and subjective areas of thought; what is form in one aspect is content in another.