This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

N — Novel

What can the novel say that cannot be said in any other manner? This is the very radical question asked by Hermann Broch. It is answered, specifically, by a constellation of novelists so extensive and so diverse that together they offer a newer, broader, and even more literal notion of the dream of Weltliteratur, the world literature that Goethe envisioned. If, as French critic and novelist Roger Caillois said, the first half of the nineteenth century belonged to European literature, then the second half belonged to the Russians, while the first half of the twentieth century belonged to the North Americans, and the second half to the Latin Americans. Then, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we can speak of a universal novel that encompasses Günter Grass, Juan Goytisolo, and José Saramago in Europe; Susan Sontag, William Styron, and Philip Roth in North America; Gabriel García Márquez, Nélida Piñón, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Latin America; Kenzaburo Oe in Japan; Anita Desai in India; Naguib Mahfouz and Tahar Ben-Jeleum in North Africa; and Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, and Athol Fugard in South Africa. Nigeria alone, from the “heart of darkness” of the shortsighted Eurocentric conceptions, has three great narrators: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, and Ben Okri.

What is it that unifies these great novelists beyond their respective nationalities? Two things that are essential to the novel. . and society. Imagination and language. They answer the question of what distinguishes the novel from journalistic, scientific, political, economic, and even philosophical inquiry. They give verbal reality to that part of the world that is unwritten. And they all share the urgent fear of all authors of literature: if I don’t put this word down on paper, nobody else will. If I don’t utter this word, the world will fall into silence (or gossip and fury). And a word unwritten or unspoken condemns us all to die mute and discontent. Only that which is spoken is sacred; unspoken, unsacred. By saying something, the novel makes visible the invisible aspect of our reality. And it does so in a manner that is entirely unforeseeable by the realistic or psychological canons of the past. To the full (plenipotentiary) manner of Bakhtin, the novelist employs fiction like an arena in which characters appear along with language, codes of conduct, the most remote historical moments, and multiple genres, causing artificial walls to crumble, endlessly broadening the territory of human presence in history. The novel ultimately reappropriates the very thing that it is not: science, journalism, philosophy. .

For this reason the novel is much more than a reflection of reality; it creates a new reality, one that did not exist before (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, Stephen Dedalus) but without which we could not imagine reality as we know it. As such, the novel creates a new kind of time for readers. The past is rescued from the museums, and the future becomes an unattainable ideological promise. In the novel, the past becomes memory and the future, desire. Yet both occur in the now, in the present time of the reader who, by reading, remembers and desires. Today, Don Quixote will go out to fight the windmills that are giants. Today, Emma Bovary will enter the pharmacy of the apothecary Homais. Today, Leopold Bloom will live through a single June day in the city of Dublin. William Faulkner put it best when he said that time was not a continuation, it was an instant: “There was no yesterday and no tomorrow, it all is this moment.”

In this light, the reflection of the past appears as the prophecy of the narrative of the future. The novelist, far more punctual than the historian, always tells us that the past has not yet ended, that the past must be invented at every hour of the day if we don’t want the present to slip from our grasp. The novel expresses all the things that history either did not mention, did not remember, or suddenly stopped imagining. One example of this is found in Argentina — the Latin American country with the briefest history but the greatest writers. According to an old joke, the Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, and the Argentinians from the boats. Precisely because it is a young country, with relatively recent waves of immigration, Argentina has had to invent a history for itself, a history beyond its own, a verbal history that responds to the lonely, desperate cry of all the world’s cultures: please, verbalize me.

Borges, of course, is the most fully developed example of this “other” historicity that compensates for the lack of Mayan ruins and Incan belvederes. In the face of Argentina’s two horizons— the Pampa and the Atlantic — Borges responds with the total space of “The Aleph,” the total time of “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” and the total book in “The Library of Babel,” not to mention the uncomfortable mnemotechnics of “Funes, the Memorious.”

History as absence. Nothing else inspires quite so much fear. But nothing provokes a more intense response than the creative imagination. The Argentine writer Héctor Libertella offers the ironic response to such a dilemma. Throw a bottle into the sea. Inside the bottle is the only proof that Magellan circumnavigated the earth: Pigafetta’s diary. History is a bottle thrown into the sea. The novel is the manuscript found inside the bottle. The remote past meets the most immediate present when, oppressed by an abominable dictatorship, an entire nation disappears, to be preserved only in novels, such as those by Luisa Valenzuela of Argentina or Ariel Dorfman of Chile. Where, then, do the marvelous historical inventions of Tomás Eloy Martínez (The Perón Novel and Santa Evita) occur? In Argentina’s necrophiliac political past? Or in an immediate future in which the author’s humor enables the past to become the present — that is, presentable— and, more than anything, legible?

I would like to believe that this mode of fictionalization fills a need felt by the modern (or postmodern, if you wish) world. After all, modernity is a limitless proposition, perpetually unfinished. What has changed, perhaps, is the perception expressed by Jean Baudrillard that “the future has arrived, everything has arrived, everything is here.” This is what I mean when I speak of a new geography for the novel, a geography in which the present state of literature dwells and that cannot be understood — in England, let’s say — unless one is aware of the English-language novels written by authors with multiracial and multicultural faces, who belong to the old periphery of the British Empire — i.e., the Empire Writes Back.

V. S. Naipaul, an Indian from Trinidad; Breyten Breitenbach, a Dutch Boer from South Africa; but also Marie-Claire Blais, of francophone Canada, and Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian as well though via Sri Lanka. The British archipelago includes other internal and external islands: Alasdair Gray’s Scotland, Bruce Chatwin’s Wales, or Edna O’Brien’s Ireland, all the way to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Japan. There would be no North American novel to broaden the diversity of culture, race, and gender without the African American Toni Morrison, the Cuban American Cristina García, the Mexican American Sandra Cisneros, the Native American Louise Erdrich, or the Chinese American Amy Tan. They are all modern Scheherazades: each night as they tell their tales, they stave off our deaths one more day. .

Jean-François Lyotard tells us that the Western tradition has exhausted what he calls “the meta-narrative of liberation.” But doesn’t that mean, then, that the end of those “meta-narratives” of the modern Enlightenment signals the multiplication of the “multi-narratives” that have emerged out of a polycultural and multiracial universe that transcends the exclusive domain of Western modernity?

Perhaps Western modernity’s “incredulity toward meta-narratives” is being displaced by the credibility being gained by the polynarratives that speak on behalf of the multiple efforts for human liberation, new desires, new moral demands, and new territories of human presence throughout the world.

This “activation of differences,” as Lyotard calls it, is simply another way of saying that despite the realities of globalization, our post — Cold War world (and, if Bush Jr. gets his way, a world of white-hot peace) is not moving toward one illusory and perhaps very damaging unity but rather toward a greater, healthier, though often more contentious differentiation of its peoples. I say this as a Latin American. For much of our independent existence, we were absorbed by a nationalistic preoccupation with identity — from Sarmiento to Martínez Estrada in Argentina, from González Prada to Mariátegui in Peru, from Hostos in Puerto Rico to Rodó in Uruguay, from Fernando Ortiz to Lezama Lima in Cuba, from Henríquez Ureña in Santo Domingo to Picón Salas in Venezuela, from Reyes to Paz in Mexico, Montalvo in Ecuador, and Cardoza Aragón in Guatemala. And this did, in fact, help give us exactly that: an identity. No Mexican has any doubt as to whether he is a Mexican, no Brazilian doubts he is a Brazilian, no Argentinian doubts he is Argentinian. This reward, however, comes with a new demand: that of moving from identity to diversity. Moral, political, religious, sexual diversity. Without respect for the diversity that is based upon identity, liberty cannot exist in Latin America.

I offer the example that is closest to me, the Indo-Afro-Latin American example, to support the argument that sees the novel as a factor in cultural diversification and multiplicity in the twentieth century. We enter the world that Max Weber heralded as “a polytheism of values.” Everything — communications, economics, science, and technology but also ethnic demands, revived nationalism, the return of tribes and their idols, the coexistence between exponential progress, and the resurrection of all that we thought was dead. Variety and not monotony, diversity rather than uniformity, conflict rather than tranquility will define the culture of our century.

The novel is a reintroduction of the human being in history. In the greatest of novels, the subject is introduced to his destiny, and his destiny is the sum of his experience: fatal and free. In our time, however, the novel is a kind of calling card that represents the cultures that, far from having been drowned by the tides of globalism, have dared to affirm their existence more emphatically than ever. Negative in the terms we are all familiar with (xenophobia, aggressive nationalism, cruel primitivism, the perversion of human rights in the name of tradition, or the oppression by the father, the macho, the clan), idiosyncrasy is positive when it affirms values that are in danger of being forgotten or eliminated and that, in and of themselves, are bulwarks against the worst tribalistic instincts.

There is no novel without history. But the novel, by introducing us to history, also allows us to search the nonhistorical path so that we may contemplate history in a clearer light, so that we may be authentically historical. To become so immersed in history that we lose our way in its labyrinths, unable to find our way out, is to become a victim of history.

Insertion of the historical being into history. Insertion of one civilization into others. This will require a keen conscience on the part of our own tradition if our goal is to extend a welcoming hand to the traditions of others. What unites all tradition if not the need for building a new creation upon it?

This is the question that new Mexican novelists like Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, and Pedro Ángel Palou resolve so brilliantly.

All novels, like all works of art, are composed simultaneously of both isolated and continuous instants. The instant is the epiphany that, with luck, every novel captures and liberates. As Joyce puts it in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, they are delicate, fugitive moments, “lightnings of intuition” that strike “in the midst of common lives.”

But they also strike us in the middle of a continuous historical event, so continuous that it has neither beginning nor ending, neither theological origin nor happy ending nor apocalyptic finale, just a declaration of the interminable multiplication of meaning that opposes the consoling unity of one single, orthodox reading of the world. “History and happiness rarely coincide,” wrote Nietzsche. The novel is proof of this, and in Latin America we gain the novel of mindful warning when we lose the discourse of hope.

New novel: I speak of a still tentative but perhaps necessary step, from identity to “alternity”; from reduction to enlargement; from expulsion to inclusion; from paralysis to movement; from unity to difference; from noncontradiction to perpetual contradiction; from oblivion to memory; from the inert past to the living past; from faith in progress to criticism of the future.

These are the rhythms, the meanings of newness in narrative. . perhaps. But only with them, with all the works that liberate them, can we attain the magnificent potential for creating images that José Lezama Lima bestowed upon the “imaginary eras.” Because if a culture is not able to create an imagination, the result will be historically indecipherable, adds the author of Paradiso.

The novelty of the novel tells us that humanity does not live in an icy abstraction of the separate, but in the warm pulse of an infernal variety that tells us: we have yet to be. We are in the process of becoming.

That voice questions us, arriving from far away but also from very deep within us. It is the voice of our own humanity revealed in the forgotten boundaries of the conscience. And it hails from multiple times and distant spaces. But it creates — with us, for us — a space where we can gather together and share our stories with one another.

Imagination and language, memory and desire — they are not only the living matter of the novel but the meeting place for our unfinished humanity as well. Literature teaches us that the greatest values of all are those that we share with others. We Latin American novelists share Italo Calvino’s sentiments when he declares that literature is a model of values, capable of proposing stages of language, vision, imagination, and correlation of events. We see ourselves in William Gass when he shows us that the body and the soul of a novel are its language and imagination, not its good intentions: the conscience that the novel alters, not the conscience that the novel comforts. We identify with our great friend Milan Kundera when he reminds us that the novel is a perpetual redefinition of the human being as problem.

All of this implies that the novel must formulate itself as a constant conflict of all that has yet to be revealed, as a remembrance of all that has been forgotten, the voice of silence and wings of desire of all that has been overcome by injustice, indifference, prejudice, ignorance, hatred, and fear.

To achieve this, we must look at ourselves and the world around us as unfinished projects, permanently incomplete personalities, voices that have not yet uttered their last word. To achieve this, we must tirelessly articulate a tradition and uphold the possibility that we are men and women who not only exist in history but make history. As Kundera suggests, a world in the midst of rapid transformation invites us constantly to redefine ourselves as problematic, perhaps even enigmatic beings, never as the bearers of dogmatic answers or conclusive realities. Isn’t this what best describes the novel? Politics can be dogmatic. The novel can only be enigmatic.

The novel earns the right to criticize the world by proving, firstly, its ability to criticize itself. The novel’s criticism of the novel is what reveals the labor that goes into this art as well as the social dimension of the work. James Joyce in Ulysses and Julio Cortázar in Rayuela (Hopscotch) are prime examples of what I am trying to say: the novel as a criticism of itself and the manner in which it unfolds. But this is the legacy of Cervantes and the novelists of La Mancha.

The novel proposes the possibility of a verbal vision of reality that is no less real than history itself. The novel always heralds a new world, an imminent world. Because the novelist knows that after the terrible, dogmatic violence of the twentieth century, history has become a possibility; never again can it be a certainty. We think we know the world. Now, we must imagine it.