Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Let me return to the two texts, dissimilar but finally complementary to one another, that I have quoted here. How can we separate in the letter, the vital statistics — the dates, the commonplace of good resolutions for the New Year, Gogol doing what we all do on comparable anniversaries — from the writing; that is, from imagination as applied to time, from the postponement of certitude, from the pathos of a prostrate humiliation, from the evoked expression of desire, and from the expression of a certain unarmed (if not disarming) frankness which, on reflection, we start to understand as false sincerity, a sincerity expressed only to justify sincerity, and thus an insincere sincerity?

What counts is the literary reality of the letter, not the toast to the New Year, and this reality is dynamic, imaginary, and ironic. It responds to the enigma of time with the enigma of man, in the same manner that the invocation of the Russian troika responds to the enigma of a national destiny with one answer only. That answer consists of the irony of the writer who postpones his own destiny and his own identity, in the same way that time and space (the year 1834 and the Russian land) do so, so that all these elements are transformed into the only reality that is truthful, worthy of our attention, or, at the very least, handy: the reality of literature. A fragile reality. Was Gogol’s life less so?

II

Gogol affirms repeatedly that “I have no life outside of literature.” In this, as in so many other things, he is the elder brother to Franz Kafka, who said, “All that is not literature bores me, including conversations about literature.” Kafka writes in his diary: “I hate everything that is not literature.” Gogol foreshadows him: “I have no life outside of literature.”

This attitude, explains Fanger, goes against the grain of the romantic expectation: the creation of a superior art “confers meaning on the person of the creator, confers upon him an exemplary quality,” in relation both to his vision and to his thought, and “stimulates curiosity” about a double transmutation. Conscience and the experience of life become art, and art becomes conscience and experience. Finally, it is the person’s identity that achieves primacy, even if to do so, it must become an artistic identity.

This romantic alchemy is not possible in the case of Gogol. Gogol is the Russian anti-Byron, without Missolonghis or incest, scandal, or duels, or lovers of either sex: no wife, no children. No profound relations with politics, with sex, with society, family, or nation, unless they all serve to reflect an absence and a lie: an exaggeration which in its absence, falsity, or disproportion can evoke the verbal ghosts capable of approximating us to their only reality and their only identity, which is that of a text by Nikolai Gogol.

This radical poetics is essential to understand the artistic and human achievement of Gogol. “We all came out of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” Dostoevsky said, famously though apocryphally. I always wondered how another writer of such extraordinary magnitude could have said this and why we should believe him. Why does The Idiot come out of “The Overcoat”? Why, as Wordsworth said, is the child the father of the man?

Gogol lives his short life — barely forty-two years — as a long illness or, better still, as a fatigue.

In this, too, he resembles Kafka, who in his notes jots down a legend of Prometheus in which “all are finally fed up with this senseless legend. The Gods are tired, the eagles are tired, the wound heals painfully.” This image of a tragic fatigue brings to mind Nietzsche’s affirmation: “Whoever has built a new heaven has found the strength to do so only in his own hell.” Camus sees in Prometheus the great myth of the rebellious intelligence: he is the father of messianism, fraternity, and the refusal of death.

But where Camus may see an intelligent rebellion and Kafka an equally lucid fatigue, Gogol would have found the intelligence of an absence. Camus describes a rebellious and melodramatic intelligence, not tragic, which can never decide that its enemy is right. Kafka embodies a tired intelligence as the root of his own lucidity. Gogol, finally, represents the lucidity of absence. His true biography, Donald Fanger implies, can only be expressed as art, as implication, as absence.

Fanger adds: “He did not come to define himself through being bound in some continuing experiential way to class or politics or place, and if he was a slave to his body, he contrived to be that in the way that could not further his self-knowledge through experience of another.”

Gogol’s reflection on and knowledge of the body is limited to the realms of hypochondria and the functioning (or nonfunctioning) of the digestive system. His sole personal erotic text is perhaps a letter of the year 1837, written as he watches the slow agony of a beautiful Russian youth, Joseph Vielgorsky, in Rome. To be sure, there is nothing to be gained by speculating on the probable impotence or homoeroticism of Gogol. The importance of the circumstance is that for Gogol the other’s body is only attractive in extremis: the body is only desirable in death or the proximity of death.

But this fact, along with the rest of his short life, has no reality except insofar as it translates into literature, and one cannot say that necrophilia is a central erotic factor in Gogol: death, in his work, is also ironical. Akaky Akakyevich, the petty Petersburg bureaucrat, returns as a ghost to frighten and despoil the owners of elegant topcoats. Irony is always a displacement of identity (it is also, at all times, the only possible relation with the present): who are the dead, the list of serfs, or the landlords who sell them to Chichikov: Sobakevich, Plyushkin, Nozdryov?

The author’s manifest intentions perhaps deserve more respect than any psycholiterary speculation: life is indistinguishable from literature: “I live and breathe through my works.” That is why Fanger entitles his book The Creation of Nikolai Gogol. Not the art of Gogol separate from the life of Gogol, but the creation of the work as a reality inseparable from the creation of the man. The measure of Gogol the individual is that of his art. Gogol has no existence outside of his art, and his art is but the projection of the absence of his life. Like Akaky Akakyevich in “The Overcoat,” like Khlestakov in The Inspector, and like Chichikov in Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol is also a character in a text.

I do not think, therefore, that I betray Donald Fanger’s intentions if I dare, in passing, to invert his definition in order to find in Nikolai Gogol the most Gogolian of characters: Gogol created his own life as if it occurred in a Gogol story.

Balzac said that “reality has taken great pains to imitate fiction.” He meant by this something that people in Latin America understand fully: reality constantly surpasses the imagination of its inventors. The Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna has not yet found an imagination that encompasses his grotesque splendor; we have many other contemporary characters who equally surpass the imaginative fever of any contemporary Gogol. The autumns of our patriarchs are, naturally, also winters and springs, as well as dog days of a quietude akin to death.

In 1967, in London, Vargas Llosa and I invited a group of Latin American novelists to contribute to a book that would be titled The Fathers of the Fatherlands. Each of them — Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, José Donoso, Julio Cortázar, Miguel Otero Silva — would write fifty pages on his favorite national tyrant. But it turned out to be impossible to coordinate that many dissimilar wills. The book did not jell, but from this initiative were born The Autumn of the Patriarch, Reasons of State, and I, the Supreme. Surely, in this original idea as well as in its rich, although unforeseen, results, it was not only the model of past reality — Juan Vicente Gómez, Cipriano Castro, Doctor Francia — that permitted the creation of these works, but, perhaps above all, the quality of the imagination of García Márquez, Carpentier, and Roa Bastos. The dictators rest — in peace or in torture, who can know? — but securely in their graves. Their paper reality was not determined by any event in their lives. And yet: can we now imagine those lives without the refraction given us by those novels?