Enrique Vila-Matas - A Brief History of Portable Literature

Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Odradek wasn’t exactly erotic. It showed itself in a hotel mirror in Prague, giving the writer a considerable fright: “Looking in a mirror that suddenly reflects me, I find myself truly resembling my father. Am I going to be my father? Does this mean my whole life has been a fantasy lived in another person’s name? Are we nothing more than our ancestors, and never ourselves?”

He spent the day he wrote this in a state of constant unease; for a Shandy, nothing is worse than the insolent irruption of an Odradek, above all if the Odradek shows up intending to make a nuisance of itself. There were clearly also kind and timid Odradeks, but these tended to be boring. In general, Odradeks were somber, pathetic, trouble-making objects or creatures who took pleasure in frightening their hosts or victims.

That day, Gómez de la Serna had a fright like never before, but he was able to take courage and keep a sense of humor about him, and ended up giving his father’s ghost the boot; he smashed every mirror in his Prague room.

But what were the portables doing in Prague if they had planned neither conference, nor manifesto, nor terrorist act, and had no plans for another party, or anything at all? I’ve already said that, in my opinion, the portables traveled for the mere pleasure of it, and so they could tell each other stories; but the fact is that their journey — like any novel or poem — was in constant danger of not making sense, and perhaps this was what most appealed to them about the trip.

Speaking of risks, I ought to point out that they proliferated in Prague. Very quickly, the Shandies had the unforgettable impression that at certain hours of the night or at dawn, mysterious voices not belonging to their Odradeks began to regularly whisper hushed and mysterious advice. At times, a light tremor, impossible to explain, passed through the old walls of the Jewish quarter, letting out noises that would course through the brickwork, coming out from the drainpipes. If anyone had bothered to look in that labyrinth of the Odradeks, they would have found bouquets of wilted myrtle: bridal bouquets, swept along in the unclean water, in which also hid the quiet, barely perceptible play of gestures and postures of those golems that were attached to the dangerous Odradeks.

“Dangerous, yes,” Marcel Duchamp says to me on the Portbou café terrace. “So I encourage you to tread carefully with this champagne cork, apparently so well-balanced in its disingenuous equilibrium on that curtain rail: this cork also comes with a golem.”

This memory is always evoked for me in the present tense. Suddenly I’m about to ask Duchamp what exactly he means by dangerous, but he’s vanished. I look everywhere for him, including in Walter Benjamin’s final resting place. Nothing but thin air. Will Duchamp turn out to be my Odradek? I thought to carry on talking about Odradeks, but now I see that the most prudent thing would be to end this chapter. Yes, perhaps it is the most advisable thing for me. After all, my history has to be a brief one, or none at all.

Even I have availed myself in one chapter or another of this book of the writing procedure Blaise Cendrars used in his famed Anthologie nègre ( An African Saga ). Cendrars’s sister Miriam showed him this procedure in her refined homage to gossip, Inédits secrets .

Miriam Cendrars says the Anthologie nègre ’s creative process began in Prague during the course of a pleasant spring afternoon. Gustav Meyrink — a little unsettled since leaving Vienna because he’d yet to run into a single portable in the neighborhood — leaned out the window of his house and once more contemplated the street where he’d been born: that serpentine and lugubrious passageway at the end of which stood a Jewish cemetery, nowadays all but gone.

He stood with his elbow on the sill, thinking about what his life resembled. (Nothing, because this wasn’t life. If it were, it would resemble those winters from his childhood when everything artificial won out: the brightness of lights, the closed bedrooms, the exasperation. .) Suddenly, Meyrink went back to contemplating the street: the lower ground-floor shops with their lights turned on all day, overshadowed by balconied, dirty stucco facades with their volutes and heraldic emblems. Then he saw himself converted into a camera with its shutter open — passive, meticulous — and he couldn’t help but think of his friends the portables, whom, for an instant, he feared he’d never see again.

This posture, so reminiscent of Berta Bocado on her balcony across from the Cabaret Voltaire, brought him luck, perhaps because it was, deep down, an intrinsically Shandy posture. Suddenly, he caught the image of a man shaving in the window across the passageway and realized right away it was Blaise Cendrars, lodged at Mrs. Pernath’s guesthouse. By way of a salute, joyful Meyrink did the first few steps of an African dance, until Cendrars noticed him and, mixing some dirt in with his shaving cream, soaped his face black. Meyrink then rattled an ebony totem and Cendrars — even more euphoric than his neighbor — did some off-the-cuff drumming. For an instant, the serpentine street in Prague’s Jewish quarter became the savage echo of a Congolese suburb.

It didn’t take them long to connect with the mulatta Rita Malú, the Cuban actress who’d installed herself in the guesthouse on the corner and who, at that moment, was leaning out her window observing a strange passerby; this person showed a clear inclination for blackness (wearing a black hat, a black suit, a black tie, black glasses, and black shoes) and was calling out her name. In the midst of these cries, resounding in the sunken hollow of the street, the actress noticed, in the reflection of a Bohemian cut crystal, Cendrars and Meyrink exchanging dark symbols. So she whistled out a habanera, which the two Shandies immediately registered, as, of course, did the strange passerby, who, taking off his glasses and hat, revealed himself to be black Virgil.

Recognizing one another, they all brandished their respective black hats as night fell, and, in the newly inaugurated darkness, a distant echo of tam-tams could be heard from the savage tribes of future Shandies. From the solitude of their remote African cabins, they would soon see their ancient legends become portable, thanks to the Anthologie nègre , which Blaise Cendrars conceived the very same instant as that triumphal hat dance.

It was nothing less than an apocryphal anthology, as Cendrars’s idea was to develop a book that pretended to be based on a compilation of popular African stories, when these legends were in fact a highly personal interpretation of the stories the Shandies told when they reunited in Prague.

Knowing Cendrars, the idea wasn’t that surprising. Given his habit of not listening when people told him stories, he instead plucked out two or three random words, using them to construct open fictions in his mind (tales very different from the ones he actually was told).

Thus, the famed Anthologie nègre was born, published two years later in Paris as “a compilation of short but very vivid entries (twenty-seven), which enabled the author, for the first time in Europe, to reproduce a set of stories that missionaries and explorers had transmitted orally among us.”

When it was published by the Au Sans Pareil Press in Paris, in 1927, all the French critics fell for it, greeting the work as “the first chance the lay public ever had to learn about popular African literature,” when in fact what the lay public read was an African literature fabricated by Cendrars, who was able to salvage words from his portable friends’ stories. The fraud went so unnoticed, the deceit was so all encompassing, that there was even a translation into Spanish by none other than Manuel Azaña.