Sergio Pitol - The Art of Flight

The totalitarian mentality accepts diversity with difficulty; it is by its nature monological; it allows only one voice, which is emitted by the master and slavishly repeated by his subjects. Until recently, this mindset exalted national values as a supreme cult. The cult of the Nation produced a paralysis of ideas and, when prolonged, an impoverishment of language. The cards, somehow or other, were in plain sight, and the game was clear. But the outlook has changed recently. That same mindset suddenly seemed to grow weary of exalting the “national” and its most visible symbols. It claims to have modernized; it discovers the pleasure of being cosmopolitan. Deep down, it is the same, even if the rhetorical adornments look different. It now encourages contempt for the classical tradition and humanist training. It tolerates only superficial reading. If this trend succeeds, we will have entered the world of robots.

I defend the freedom to find encouragement in the most diverse cultures. But I am convinced that these approaches are only productive where there is a national culture forged slowly by a language and certain specific customs. Where there is little or nothing, subjugation is inevitable, and the only thing that is created is a desert of vulgarity. Those who have never hidden their disdain for the risk that inheres in a living culture, their distrust of imagination and games, may feel satisfied. Vulgarity becomes the norm. I am convinced that not even the lack of readers can banish poetry. Without that conviction, it would be unbearable to continue living.

III

On several occasions I have associated my fate with that of Droctulft. If in certain periods Russian and Polish writers, in others, the English, the Central Europeans, the Latin Americans, Italians, or the Spanish Golden Age, have played a hegemonic role in my education, it has never occurred to me that this might transform me into a writer foreign to my own language. Something of them was possibly incorporated into my literature after passing through different filters to some area of my conscience, not the deepest, not in those secret folds of being where the first experiences of the world or the embers of first loves reside, where the true source of imagination is found. Writing is enriched by reading. Who doubts that! But the act only becomes fruitful if it is able to brush the shadow of a personal experience, a specific stereotype, perhaps a genetic memory. The writer is doomed from the start, even the one who has changed languages, to respond to the signs imprinted on him by culture. “We are all the past,” I return to Borges, “we are our blood, we are the people we have seen die, we are the books that have made us better, we are gratefully the others.” And that confidence in what we are prevents us from distorting those situations; it would seem ridiculous to us if someone sat down at his worktable with the awareness of being a Colombian, Brazilian, or Mexican writer. That is already assumed and deep down doesn’t even matter, because the very instant he begins to write the only thing he must know, what really counts, is that language is his homeland. And keeping that in mind, the rest are trifles.

Xalapa, November 1995

8 Translated by James E. Irby

A feeling of disaster is haunting the world. The novel records it and, in doing so, is resplendent. The more rotten it smells in Denmark — and today Denmark seems to be a large part of the universe — the more indispensable the novel becomes. Ultima Thule: a reflection of an indomitable impulse to survive, of the preservation of form over chaos, sacrifice over apathy, spirit over unformed matter — the novel is that and more. Fueled by extreme tensions, witness to violent upheavals, nourished at times by caviar and quail and other times by carrion, it reappears on the international stage today with enviable health. It blooms with a fullness that roses would envy. Behold it: protean, generous, bold, ubiquitous, skeptical, cheeky, and unmanageable. Each crisis of society causes it to regenerate. When necessary, it sheds its skin. It grows with adversity. It is experiencing today one of its greatest moments, and, as a result, there are probably those among us who are beginning to predict its next extinction. Perhaps they have already chosen its coffin and burial place. This prophecy is part of the customs of our century. Each time the novel is reinvigorated, someone announces its death knell. The truth is no one can defeat it.

Ortega y Gasset announced its death, as did Breton. Paul Valéry alluded to it in passing with a phrase that became instantly famous. André Breton reproduces a comment by Valéry that refers to his refusal to write one because he is incapable of anything as banal as “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” Is it possible that the author of The Graveyard by the Sea might have, out of politeness, uttered this sentence just to please Breton — who scorned this literary genre — that is, by chance, just to move the conversation along and thus avoid a lull? Or, perhaps at that moment, Valéry was thinking of some of the novelists fashionable at the time, Paul Morand or André Maurois, for example, in whose pages one might always see a marquise leave her home at five o’clock to take tea at the Ritz, perhaps a few minutes late? God only knows!

The truth is, “The Marquise went out at five o’clock” is an ideal incipit for stimulating the affectation of a certain type of reader who rejoices at hearing about marquises, princesses and baronesses, as well as the Cinderellas who, after enduring every imaginable hardship and humiliation, end up marrying marquis, princes, or barons. The absence of her ladyship’s name in itself instills a degree of confidence; it takes for granted that the novel is about the marquise, or one of the marquises, from the neighborhood. Perhaps reading about the Marquise de La Rochefoucauld or the Marquise de Varennes would have intimidated the reader a bit, but a simple marquise inspires confidence; there is something comforting in her concise, almost homespun simplicity, an aroma of hot chocolate and freshly baked cinnamon buns.

It is also possible that Valéry, distracted by other interests or busied by other subjects and other times, did not recognize that the novel was no longer what it once was, and that far from Morand, Maurois, and Montherlant, who had their own appeal, new writers in France and, above all, in other latitudes were determined to transform narrative language and were beginning their novels in a very different way:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.

There is an explicit coarseness present in this paragraph. Its reading does not produce a delightful chill heralding the appearance of a marquise on the street. Instead of a lady dressed by Molyneux or Schiaparelli, frantic to arrive promptly for an engagement, which could well change her life, with the handsome son of an Italian banker, or to go to her jeweler’s shop to have him adjust the setting to one of her famous emerald stud earrings, or to the office of a seedy pawnbroker to hock them then and there, we find ourselves in the presence of a fat man, a few pedestrian barber utensils, and an untied yellow gown that establish a pronounced oxymoron, that is still very funny, with the liturgical Latin: “ Introibo ad altare Dei. ”

Let’s consider the beginning of another novel: