Enrique Vila-Matas - A Brief History of Portable Literature

“Otherwise, I’ve also managed to find out that Tristan Tzara has begun writing a brief history of portable literature: a kind of literature that, by his reckoning, is characterized by having no system to impose, only an art of living. In a sense, it’s more life than literature. For Tzara, his book contains the only literary construction possible; it is a transcription made by someone unconvinced by the authenticity of History and the metaphorical historicity of the Novel. Employing greater originality than most novels, the book will offer sketches of the Shandy customs and life. Tzara’s aim is to cultivate the imaginary portrait (a form of literary fantasia concealing a reflection in its capriciousness), to endeavor in the imaginary portrait’s ornamentation.

“You also ought to know that Berta Bocado — moved by a sudden ambitiousness — is attempting to construct a total book: a book of books encompassing all others, an object whose virtues the years will never diminish. As ever, Bocado is being very absentminded, seeing as her book will be anything but portable.

“In fact, we’re all making things. More than artists — which has a hollow, pompous ring to it — we are artisans, people who make things. An air of happy creativity pervades the rooms at the International Sanatorium. We barely see each other, since, being artisans, we take refuge in our individuality; but occasionally a polar wind blows through, bringing us all together in the central courtyard, where we smile in our thick overcoats and exchange complicit glances. A word will occasionally break the silence, and we feel ourselves straighten up like spears scaling the lofty heights and we inundate the shadows. Victory is not ours, but we fight on — silence against silence — because we know heaven never scorns ambition.

“So go the days. The occasional furtive courtyard exchange gives me an idea of how things are going with the others; this is how I found out, for example, that Scott Fitzgerald has completed a novel about a person named Gatsby, a man confronting his past as he moves inexorably into nothingness.

“George Antheil is working on his Ballet Mécanique , a Shandy musical par excellence. At the same time, he has turned painter and draughtsman of the miniscule: of the thousand hairs in a braid or the iridescence of a coupling, for example. He sleeps in the same room as William Carlos Williams, who, less like an American every day, entertains himself trying to solve all the arcane mysteries, with recourse to a frame made of asymmetric, revolving, concentric discs, subdivided according to the Latin words on them.

“His ex-lover, Georgia O’Keeffe, is still scheming away. She says she has been going around the theatres of an invisible city, that her imagination — voracious as gravity — is the epicenter of her convulsive passions and aversions.

“Gombrowicz is writing his first book, some nonsense to do with a ballerina: seemingly an extraordinarily brief book, that is incoherent, absurd, and, in its own way, magnificent.

“Your beloved Duchamp is drafting an essay on miniaturization as a means of fantasy. The text seems to have been conceived as a continuation of something Goethe began writing, called ‘The New Melusine’ (which is part of Wilhelm Meister ), about a man who falls in love with someone — in reality a tiny woman, who has temporarily been made normal size, and who, without knowing it, is carrying a box containing the kingdom that she’s the princess of. In Goethe’s story the world itself is reduced to a collectible item, an object in the most literal sense. For Duchamp — like the box in Goethe’s tale — a book is a fragment of the world, but it is also a small world in itself, a miniaturization of the world inhabited by the reader.

“All, as you can tell, have embarked on sharp, frenetic, desperate, portable projects — all, that is, except for Beta Bocado. Even Savinio (always the lead exponent of occasional slothfulness, that highly portable trait) has been working tirelessly and is immersed in a project as Shandean as it is unfathomable. So fed up has he become with encyclopedias that he’s making his own, for his own personal use. I personally think it’s a good thing; I mean, take Schopenhauer: he was so fed up with the histories of philosophy that he ended up inventing his own, for his own personal use.

“It seems increasingly clear to me that we, the portables, were placed on earth to express the most secret and recondite depths of our nature. This is what sets us apart from our tepid contemporaries. And I believe us to be profoundly linked to the spirit of the age, with the latent problems plaguing it and defining its tone and character. We are always dual in appearance, because of just how much we simultaneously embody the old and the new. The future that so profoundly concerns us, we are also rooted in. We have two speeds, two faces, two ways of interpreting things. We are a part of transition and flux. Versed in a new style, our language is voluble, zany, and cryptic. As cryptic as this postcard, which is nearing its end: a postcard that, at heart, claims to do no more than inform you of our great creative fever and our constant bid to exalt a love of brief literary creations; a postcard lauding free and unobstructed language and denouncing any book that makes universal or pretentious claims.

“I spoke to you about ‘the most secret and recondite depths of our nature.’ These corrosive secret depths are mentioned by Rimbaud in the following memorable verses: HYDRE INTIME, sans gueules, / Qui mine et desole . This is what afflicted him and is so disturbing to us, poorly adapted to madness as we are.

“To finish, decipher this, my dear racing car: life here in the International Sanatorium is like a murder sweet as snow, that is, cold venom covering desolate icy expanses on white nights of venerable silk.

“Yours, with more to follow, from he who idles, twirls, and dwindles upon farewell’s futile brink.”*

* For the reader intrigued about to how such a long text could fit on a postcard, I’d like to make clear that Aleister Crowley’s handwriting was very, very tiny, and he succeeded in fitting all these words onto the back of a photograph of Prague, thereby fulfilling that longstanding Shandean ambition of attaining microscopic script. But the most notable thing about the postcard is that HYDRE INTIME — the portable society’s secret name — appeared for the first time in writing. This greatly alarmed Picabia who immediately suspected that if there really were a traitor, it was by no means Céline, but rather Crowley himself.

Francis Picabia shouldn’t have been so alarmed by Crowley’s postcard. In fact the traitor’s text wasn’t as dangerous as it might have seemed. Properly considered, it at most betrayed something that was not overly worrying. Many of the Shandies had, at the International Sanatorium, already realized that the portable ensemble would have to disappear sooner or later; this was a fact of life and, in fact, something very much to be desired, as the conspiracy would become the stunning celebration of something appearing and disappearing with the arrogant velocity of the lightning bolt of insolence.

Duchamp, receiving a letter from Picabia at the Sanatorium informing him of the traitor’s existence, tried to make him see as much. He wrote back saying that Crowley’s postcard was a rousing document, a capricious text, no less, a living, breathing embodiment of Shandyism.

Indeed, the postcard displayed a sublime concern for maintaining an industrious attitude among the Shandies, and this was profoundly portable: aside from the odd period of extraordinary laziness, the portables were always keeping busy, always trying to put in more work that speculated frequently on their lives as tireless artists. A large number of the texts they produced ended up featuring curious sections with recipes for how to work: the ideal conditions, the timing, the utensils. The massive correspondence they kept up among themselves — both oral and written — was always