Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Another great writer in the tradition of Gogol and Kafka, Milan Kundera, entitles one of his works The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In Dead Souls, the city fathers ask themselves, about Chichikov: “Who is he, truly?” And they answer: “Although they did not know for sure who Chichikov was, undoubtedly Chichikov was something.” Even as perception displaces itself, a being true to Gogolian form affirms itself: Chichikov is, but who is he? — although he undoubtedly is. Kafka’s land surveyor does not enjoy the benefit of this doubt: K is not the land surveyor engaged by the Castle; therefore, he is not.

Kundera opens and closes anew this painful modern question. His book does not propose the binary opposition memory — forgetting. It says something far graver: “Those who remember me, forget me.” The deceit has become transparent: to forget is the memory of all those we do not wish to identify.

These are some of the fruits of Gogol’s vast narrative, moral, and political influence, as he displaces and postpones our knowledge of self. His question is: Who are you? But he refuses to answer it in a facile way. As in the alleys and byways of the modern city to which he gives a charter of literary citizenship, unity is shattered and “it would seem that a demon had broken up the totality of the universe into pieces and then mixed them up without any order.”

I constantly return to this quote from the “Nevsky Prospekt.” Is it one of the keys to Gogol? Of his cities and his nation, Gogol said: “Moscow is necessary to Russia, but Russia is necessary to Petersburg.” This formula was completed by Dostoevsky when he referred to Petrograd as “the most abstract and intentional of cities.” In these definitions, a labyrinth and its fiction come together: the city on the Neva, invented by Peter the Great so that it could be inhabited by Akaky Akakyevich the melancholy and Rodion Raskolnikov the terrible, is a mystery, but its enigma is fictitious, intentional, and at war with its own abstraction.

In another of his exemplary books of criticism, Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism, Donald Fanger tells us that the appearance of romantic realism and the appearance of the city as the preferred theme and space of that literary and human posture (or imposture) are inseparable. The character of the new urban life, the fate of human traditions set in anti-natural spaces create a world of strangeness, of crime (and punishment), of expectations (great), and of illusions (lost), as well as of bureaucrats (petty) who are killed by the indifference of others and return to unmask their torturers. The romantic novelists of the city — Gogol and Dickens, Balzac and Dostoevsky — need a common technical inventory, says Fanger: the sense of mystery and of atmosphere, the sentiment of the grotesque, of contrast, of the improbable, the sensational, and the dramatic.

I emphasize the masked character of the city, its roulette of identities, as a theme common to the metropolitan novelists. Expatriates of romanticism, the heroes of the city are satanic beings who find, in the urban labyrinth, their privileged abode. For these new protagonists, the city is a human gift which compensates for the expulsion from Paradise. Terra incognita, place of exile, the city “possesses all the astonishment of what is strange in what is familiar.” It receives the devil in exile: the urban demons called Vautrin, in Balzac; Fagin, in Dickens; and Raskolnikov, in Dostoevsky. All of them live most fully in the masked mystery of cities; theirs is the identity of a somber carnival in which we can again hear Balzac’s words: “Humanity has but two forms, the deceiver and the deceived…”

Gogol, who in the city finds perfectly identifiable victims and victimizers — Akaky and the bureaucrats — needs the vast Russian hinterland, the non-city, the village, the imaginary countryside, in order to project onto this economic and political backwardness the urban experience of masked identities. But it is precisely this miserable, provincial, eccentric world that confers its false identity on the displaced city-zens, Khlestakov and Chichikov.

Gogol thus wins two prizes, as it were. For, without sacrificing one bit of his artistic genius, he gives presence to a kind of Russian national cry: Let me recognize myself in my literature. The Russian public awaited Gogol so that Gogol would identify the strangeness of Russia. Or, as Andrei Bely (himself the author of the most extraordinary modern novel of Petersburg) put it, “Gogol opens up the literary techniques that no one had discovered before him, saturating the verbal texture with a shower of popular, colloquial, occupational words which he polishes until they become pearls of language. Here and there, people had spoken like this, but no one had written like this.”

Pushkin complained: research, politics, and philosophy lack a language in Russia; the cosmopolitanism of the upper classes has exhausted itself; one cannot accept, as a substitute, the repressive triad of autocracy, orthodoxy, and nationality as specifically Russian entities. Then Gogol appears and Belinsky proclaims: “You are unique among all.” He was not unfaithful to the truth: Gogol emerges without any competition and fills a capital need. His historical fortune consisted in writing in an era when absence and immobility could be read as a necessary and profound social and cultural commentary. How many novelists of the Hispanic world have not said or thought the same in one moment or another of our lives, when our literary snail’s pace has been quicker than that of our societies: José Revueltas in Mexico was faster than the pace of the deadened Mexican Revolution in the forties; Juan Goytisolo was swifter than Francoism in Spain. But how many, as well, have been able to reestablish the perspective when the velocity of the historical Achilles demonstrated that, notwithstanding, there was a vulnerable heel and the novelist could point to it, as Azuela did in The Underdogs, as Carpentier did in Explosion in a Cathedral, as Cortázar did in Hopscotch —rowdy critiques of the Latin American project of modernity.

IX

I was saying that we Spanish Americans can understand Gogol’s ironic proceedings better than most, because the great Russian writer uses deferral and irony to tell us that nothing is what it seems, and the culture of Hispanic origin is, likewise, permeated by the skeptical irony of Erasmus and his mistrust of appearances, of dogmas, and of physical and moral strictures. Precisely because the Counter-Reformation, in its virulent Spanish version, imposed on us a highly rigid ethical and religious order, our culture recalls Erasmism as a vital lesson. From the beginnings of the sixteenth century to the Council of Trent, Spanish Erasmism promoted the hope of reform within the Roman Catholic Church and of Spanish adaptation to the dynamics of European modernity. These were the three rules offered by the sage of Rotterdam: all truth is double and perhaps multiple; absolute reason is as dangerous as absolute faith; reason also has its madness.

Spanish Erasmism was condemned and banished from the peninsula; yet its subterranean lesson flowered, magnificently, in Cervantes’s Quixote, which is the meeting point of all modern literatures. In it Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert recognize themselves, but also Borges, Cortázar, and García Márquez.

In an extraordinary paper presented in the summer of 1983 to the first conference on comparative literature celebrated in post-Maoist Beijing, Donald Fanger calls upon three figures — Rabelais, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky — to explain the theory of the novel of the great Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s lesson is Gogol’s: it is the lesson of the novel, of its openness, its novelty, and its freedom. Or rather, of its novelty and its freedom as a result of its openness.