Carlos Fuentes - Terra Nostra

Twelve o’clock did not toll in the church towers of Paris; but the snow ceased, and the following day a cold sun shone.

When, during January 1969, in Prague, in Wenceslas Square, a Czech student took his own life by fire to protest the Russian occupation of his country, I had the feeling that this horror did not belong to Czech history. There was no precedent for this act; it came from a terrible elsewhere.

Not the world war, not the concentration camps, not the Stalinist terror, but the burning corpse of Jan Palach filled me with a sense of the apocalypse.

A scholarly definition occurred to me: an act is moral if it can serve as an example for everyone; but how can one imitate a boy who immolated himself? Did not that act project us beyond Europe and the moral experience of Europe?

For weeks after his death, the streets of Czech cities were filled with excited demonstrators. One slogan inspired them: “Jan Palach is the Jan Hus of today.”

In fact, Jan Palach, an adolescent, bore no resemblance to Jan Hus, one of the great intellectuals of the fifteenth century. Hus did not want to die. Rather, this was the only course open to him if he wanted to remain faithful to himself and his beliefs. The example of Hus, burned as a heretic, is difficult but not impossible to follow. To imitate the other Jan is inconceivable.

Nevertheless, there is incontestably something in common between these two deaths: fire. The Czech people, petrified in the terrible moment of January 1969, saw the history of their country as if in fast motion: like the passage between two flames, the one that burned the body of Jan Hus and the one that burned the body of Palach. With the first, their country appeared on the scene of Europe; with the second, it disappeared from it.

2

The Second World War — the Hitlerite delirium — must have provoked an apocalyptic feeling in certain Germans. Thomas Mann transformed that moment into a watchtower from which he could take in all of German history in a glance.

Doctor Faustus (1947) is not only a novel about a composer called Adrian Leverkühn, but equally a reflection of four centuries of German music. Adrian is not only a composer, but the composer who terminates the history of music (indeed, his greatest composition is called Apocalypse ). Moreover, he is not only the final composer (author of the Apocalypse); he is also Faust.

Just as a Czech, overwhelmed by the death of Palach, couldn’t but think of the death of Jan Hus, a German, confronted by this apocalyptic moment, eyes fixed on the diabolism of his country, thought of the contract the devil made with that mythic character who incarnated the German spirit. The entire history of his country surged before his eyes as the adventure of one sole character; of one sole Faust.

3

The year when the flame passed from the body of Jan Hus to the body of Jan Palach, a few hundred meters from Wenceslas Square, in my studio in Prague I was writing Life Is Elsewhere. Suddenly, through the character of Jaromil (an authentic poet, and a police informer), I thought I saw the entire history of poetry, to the degree that — in certain pages of the novel — the face of my hero disappeared behind those of Rimbaud and of Mayakovsky, and his death is confused with those of Lermontov and of Shelley.

I experienced the Stalinism of the 1950s as a time when “the poet reigned alongside the executioner” (Life Is Elsewhere). And when poetry identifies itself with terror, then one is taking part in the apocalypse of poetry. Lit by this apocalyptic explosion, the past (of a nation, a civilization, an art, a region) appears suddenly telescoped: Jaromil is confused with Rimbaud; Jan Palach with Hus.

Several years after Palach’s death, I came to France, and everyone asked me what I thought of communism, of Marxism, of the revolution. Nothing interested me less than this sort of question. I had before my eyes that flame which traversed five centuries, and I thought of Thomas Mann. I thought of the art of the novel, which, alone of all the arts, is capable of becoming that privileged place where humanity’s distant past can converse with its present. To arrange this rendezvous seemed to me one of the three or four great tasks, one of the three or four great possibilities available to the future of the novel.

And today I think of Carlos Fuentes: in his Terra Nostra (1975), this new possibility of the novel has been realized in a far more radical fashion than anyone could have imagined.

4

Serenus Zietblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus, set himself the task of writing his souvenirs of his friend Adrian Leverkühn at the end of the Second World War. From time to time, he interrupts his narrative to comment on contemporary events. It is precisely these passages which rang flat and falsely to my ears when, recently, I reread Mann’s novel. We know, alas, that the last war, presented by Mann as the final apocalypse, which also held the promise of the resurrection of the West, was nothing more than an episode. It was one phase of a much longer process and was followed by no resurrection.

I deduced that, from the watchtower of the novel, one can see the past but not the future and that it is very difficult to find the right spot to set up a watchtower.

If Fuentes has known how to find that spot — that incontestable locus of the apocalypse — it is thanks to great artistic ruse (or wisdom): he did not search in real history but in myth. The watchtower from which he views history is called the year 1999, the end of the millennium. His description of the apocalypse will thus not be contradicted by the reality of the real year 1999, because Fuentes is talking about a mythic date, not a real one.

It is not the political predictions of the author which are at the root of Terra Nostra but something more profound. “Historic time is stretched so taut that it is hard to see how it will not snap,” Cioran writes. This “tension of historic time” (of that time which today hurtles on, accumulating events, approaching a paroxysm), and the personal experience Fuentes has of this tension, is, it seems to me, the hidden source, the subterranean force, of the unbelievable, apocalyptic dream which is Terra Nostra.

5

Carlos Fuentes has several times compared the contemporary Latin American novel to that of Central Europe.

Latin America and Central Europe are in effect two border areas of the West: two parts of the world where the West (Westernness) has become problematic; two parts of the world where the survival of the West is not a theoretical question but forms part of the most concrete reality.

Beginning in 1914, Central Europe lives obsessed with the end of things: Karl Kraus writes The Last Days of Mankind; Robert Musil composes The Man without Qualities, where a society constructs its future at a time when it has none; Hermann Broch, in The Sleepwalkers, studies the gradual decline of Western values; Jaroslav Hašek describes a world where liberty survives only under the mask of idiocy; Franz Kafka imagines a world where history is already forgotten and where life takes place in a present bereft of memory.

The causes of this “obsession of the end” are not hard to understand. The collapse of an empire, traditionally understood as a model of Europe (“little Europe”), appeared as foreshadowing a more general collapse, which, of course, took place quickly enough: Hitler, Stalin, and, finally, the real start of the end of Central Europe, most of which was included for an unforeseeably long time in Russia’s civilization. Too bad if, at the same time, the discordant noise of progress assaults our ears: “Every advance brings the end closer and such happy catchwords as ‘farther’ and ‘forward’ make us hear the lascivious voice of death encouraging us to hurry” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting).