Touchstones: Essays In Literature, Art And Politics

Seed of Dreams

The house in Ladislao Cabrera Street in Cochabamba, where I spent my earliest years, had three patios. It was single-storey and very big, at least in my recollection of that period, which my memory preserves as an innocent and happy time. What for many people is a stereotype — the paradise of childhood — was for me a reality, although doubtless since that time this reality has been embellished by distance and nostalgia.

In this Eden, the main focus is the house with the solid front door that opened onto a hallway with a concave roof which sent back an echo of people’s voices. This led to the first, square patio, with its tall trees that were good for rerunning Tarzan movies, around which the bedrooms were laid out. The last year that we lived there, one of those rooms housed the Peruvian Consulate, which, for economic reasons, my grandfather moved from a building close to the Plaza de Armas to the family home. At the end of that patio there was a pillared terrace, protected from the sun by an awning, where my grandfather would nod off in a rocking chair. To hear him snoring, his mouth an open invitation to flies, made my cousins and me fall about laughing. From there, one entered the dining room that was always busy and noisy on a Sunday when the vast family tribe all appeared to savour the spicy dishes and that dessert prepared by grandmother Carmen and Mamaé that was everyone’s favourite: pumpkin fritters.

Then there was a small corridor, with the bathroom on the right, that linked the first to the second patio, where the kitchen, a pantry and the servants’ rooms were located. At the far end were wooden railings with a squeaky little door through which one could glimpse the third patio, which must have once been a garden with vegetables and fruit. But then it was just open ground: it was used as a corral and sometimes as a zoo, because on one occasion it housed a goat and at another time a monkey, both species brought by my grandfather from the country estate in Saipina, around Santa Cruz, where he had been sent from Arequipa by the Saíd family to start up cotton cultivation. And there was also a talkative parrot which imitated me and screamed ‘granmaaaaaa’ all day long. The laundry room was there, and lines with sheets and tablecloths and clothes billowing in the breeze that the washerwoman came to wash and iron every week. The gardener, Saturnino, was a very old Indian who carried me on his shoulders; the day the Llosa family returned to Peru, he came to the train station to see us off. I remember him, holding on to my grandmother Carmen, sobbing.

There were many people living there: grandfather Pedro and grandmother Carmen, Mamaé, my mother and I, uncle Juan and aunt Laura and their two daughters, my cousins Nancy and Gladys, uncle Lucho and aunt Olga. Their first daughter, Wanda, was born in the house one memorable afternoon when, caught up in the general excitement, I climbed a tree in the first patio to spy on what was happening. I could not have understood much because it was only later, in Piura and in 1946, that I learned how babies came into the world and how their fathers made them. Uncle Jorge also lived there until he married aunt Gaby, as did uncle Pedro, who turned up in Cochabamba to spend the holidays, because he was studying medicine in Chile. There were at least three employees in the second patio, together with two intermediate figures of uncertain status: Joaquín, an orphan boy that grandpa had found in Saipina, and Orlando, a boy who had been abandoned by a cook in the house who had disappeared without trace. Grandma Carmen ended up grafting them onto the family.

My cousin Nancy was a year younger than me, and cousin Gladys was two years younger. They were magnificent playmates, involved in all the adventures that I invented, which were usually inspired by the films that we saw in the Roxy Cinema and the Acha Theatre on Saturday matinées or Sunday morning screenings. The serials were wonderful — three chapters per performance, with the serials lasting for several weeks — but the film that touched us, and made us cry, laugh and, above all, dream, and that we went back to see several times (it convinced me that I should become a bullfighter), was Blood and Sand with Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell and Rita Hayworth.

There were infinite sources of fun in Cochabamba. There were outings to Cala-Cala and to Tupuraya where aunt Gaby’s family had a country house, and open-air concerts in the Plaza on Sundays at midday, after eleven o’clock mass, and the reddish meat pasties served up in a restaurant in the arcades. There were circuses that came around the time of the independence anniversary celebrations, the tightrope walkers, trapeze artists and animal tamers who made our pulses race and the wonderful clowns who made us roar with laughter. (My first platonic love was a trapeze artist in a pink leotard.) There were the exciting and very wet Carnivals — my cousins and I threw balloons full of water from the rooftops at the passers-by below — in which during the day we saw our aunts and uncles and their friends involved in intense water fights with shells, balloons, big buckets and hosepipes, and, at night, we saw them set off for the celebrations in fancy dress and wearing masks. There was Holy Week, with its mysterious processions and the visit to different churches, to pray at the Stations of the Cross. And, above all, there was Christmas, the coming of Baby Jesus (Father Christmas did not yet exist), with the presents, on the night of 24 December. The preparations for the New Year’s Eve party were long and very detailed, and these rituals stirred our imagination. With us under their feet, grandma and Mamaé sowed wheat seeds in little containers that decorated the crib. The crib figures, the shepherds, wise men, Roman soldiers, apostles, sheep, donkeys, Virgin Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus, were kept in a trunk inlaid with metal that was only opened once a year. The most important thing for me and for my cousins was to write the letter to the Son of God, asking him for the presents that he placed at the foot of our beds on Christmas Eve. Before we learned how to write, we dictated our letter to uncle Pedro and signed it with a cross. As the date approached, our nervousness, curiosity and anticipation reached indescribable extremes. On the night of 24 December, no one, not our grandparents or my mother, or uncles Juan and Lala had to encourage us to jump into bed straight after dinner. Would he come? Had he got our cards? Would he bring everything we had asked for?

I remember having asked for some pilot’s glasses, like the ones worn by Bill Barnes, some boots identical to those of the hero of a serial about explorers, skittles, Meccano pieces, but, as soon as I learned to read, I always asked for books, long lists of books that I would first select when I came out of school in a bookshop in General Acha Street, where every week we bought the magazines for the whole family: Para Tí and Leoplán for grandma, Mamaé, my mother and my aunts, and, for me and my cousins, El Peneca and Billiken (the first was Chilean and the second was Argentine).

I learned to read when I was five — in 1941 it would have been — in my first year at primary school in the Colegio de La Salle. My classmates were a year older than me, but my mother was anxious to get me into school since my pranks were driving her mad. Our teacher was Brother Justiniano, a slim, angelic little man, with white, closely cropped hair. He made us sing the letters, one after another, and then, holding hands in circles, we had to identify and spell out the syllables of each word, copy them and memorise them. From coloured spelling books with little animal illustrations, we moved to a little book of sacred history and finally onto cartoons, poems and stories. I am sure that on that Christmas in 1941, Baby Jesus placed on my bed a pile of adventure stories, from Pinocchio to Little Red Riding Hood, from the Wizard of Oz to Snow White, from Sleeping Beauty to Mandrake the Magician.

Although I cried in my first days at school — my mother had to take me to the door, holding my hand — I soon got used to La Salle and made many friends. Grandma and Mamaé so indulged me (I was a fatherless child and that made me the most spoiled grandchild and nephew in the family) that I once invited twenty classmates — Cuéllar, Tejada, Román, Orozco, Ballivián, Gumucio, Zapata — for tea at home so that we could act out some epic films in the three patios. And grandma and Mamaé prepared coffee with milk and toast and butter for everyone.

It was exactly ten blocks from the house in Ladislao Cabrera to La Salle, and I think that from my second year at primary school my mother let me go to school on my own, although I usually made the walk with a schoolmate from the neighbourhood. We went through the arcade in the Plaza, past the photographic studio of Mr Zapata, the father of my great friend Mario Zapata, whom I shared a desk with, a journalist who was murdered twenty or thirty years later in Cala-Cala. This ten-block trip, four times a day — schoolchildren had lunch at home in those days — was an expedition full of discoveries. It was, of course, obligatory to look at the bookshop windows and the posters outside the cinemas on the way. The most amazing thing that could happen to us was to come across the imposing figure of the Bishop in the middle of the street. He seemed an Olympian, semi-divine figure to us, wrapped in his purple habit, with his white beard and a big gleaming ring. With religious earnestness and a touch of fear, we would kneel to kiss his hand and to receive the few kind words that his strong Italian accent bestowed on us.

That bishop gave me and a number of my classmates our first communion when we were in the third or fourth year of primary school. It was a memorable day, preceded by many weeks of preparation that we received every afternoon in the school chapel, extra classes on religion given by the headmaster, the bald, square-jawed Brother Agustín. They were splendid classes, with stories taken from the Gospels and from the lives of the saints, miraculous, heroic, exotic and surprising stories, in which purity and faith always overcame the most terrible odds, with happy endings, when the heavens opened to receive with a choir of angels the martyred Christians who had been ripped apart in pagan coliseums by wild beasts, or who had been executed for refusing to betray the Lord, or the repentant sinners, so desperate to atone for their infamous deeds that, like the Duke of Normandy, also called Robert the Devil, they would live on all fours, like dogs, to seek the Virgin’s forgiveness. Brother Agustín told them with eloquence and passion, accompanied by large gestures, like a consummate narrator, and they stayed in our memory, sparking like fireworks. As the day approached, there were various rituals to perform: go and try on the suit, buy the white shoes, have a photograph taken in Mr Zapata’s studios, under arc lights. We took communion in a chapel adorned with fresh flowers, overflowing with the families of the communicants, and then there was a breakfast of hot chocolate and cakes served to the throng in the school patio. And then another party, this time a family one, in Ladislao Cabrera, with lots of presents for the hero of the day.

The great adventure of that period was the trip I made with my mother, my grandma and Mamaé in 1940 to attend the Eucharistic Congress in Arequipa, the homeland that remained alive in the innumerable stories and nostalgic memories of the family. We stayed at the house of uncle Eduardo, a kindly bachelor, who was a judge. His cook Inocencia prepared red-hot soups brimming with monstrous crustaceans, whose red shells and moving claws fascinated me. I remember that journey as a great expedition: the train from Cochabamba to La Paz, the steep streets of the Bolivian capital, the small boat that crossed Lake Titicaca in the night, arriving in Puno at dawn. And then on the train again until we reached the White City. There were so many things that I knew about, but only by hearsay: the square-hewn stone houses; the Misti and the volcanoes; the house where I was born, that was pointed out to me, on the Boulevard Parra; the frozen cheese and the pastries from the Ibérica. The prayers and chants of the crowds at the Eucharistic Congress frightened me, but what terrified me most was the voice of the orator, a very important man with a bow-tie who stabbed the air with his finger: Víctor Andrés Belaunde. By the time we returned to Cochabamba, I already felt grown-up.

These first ten years of my life were intense, full of many exciting events, very dear friends and kindly adults who were easy to win over through jokes and sweet-talking. My greatest desire was, of course, that my oldest and favourite uncle — uncle Lucho, who looked like a film actor and who had all the women swooning over him — would take me to one of the two swimming pools in Cochabamba — the Beverley and the Urioste — where I learned to swim (almost at the same time as learning to read). It was the sport that I enjoyed most as a child, and the one I was least bad at. To be as good a swimmer as Tarzan sometimes competed with my desire to be a bullfighter (although, after some Bill Barnes adventures, I shifted allegiance and wanted to become a pilot). The first bullfight I saw in my life was around that time, when I went with my uncle one Sunday afternoon to the small bullring in the upper part of the city. I also went to my first play in Cochabamba: not a school production, but a drama with grown-up people that my grandparents and my mother took me to see one evening, from a box in the Acha Theatre. My only memory of the work is that, at a certain moment, to everyone’s consternation, a man gave a woman a loud slap.

However, even though I had a good time in the real world during those years in Bolivia, I had an even better time in the other, the invented world, the one I read about in the stories in El Peneca and Billiken and in the adventure stories that I devoured with gluttony. At that time, we children read fictions rather than seeing them: the drawings in the comics had not yet taken over from the written stories. Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and their friends were not as popular as they would later become, or, at least, they were not for me or, I think, for my friends in Cochabamba. El Peneca and Billiken had stories that we had to co-invent, using our imagination to the limit, from the information given in the words. These stories and mini-novels were turning us into readers, while the cartoons, with their few words suspended in white clouds above the heads of the characters like skinny Olive and muscle-bound Popeye, or Puss in Boots, where the cartoonist had already visualised the fiction for us, exonerated us of a great deal of mental effort, and, instead of readers, they were forming spectators, more passive consumers of the imaginary world. Mine was probably the last generation of child readers for whom the need for a fictive life would be assuaged primarily through reading; those that came later would satisfy this thirst not so much with words as with images, firstly the images of cartoons, then the images of cinema and lastly the images of television. I do not deplore this; I am merely pointing it out, and registering my joy at having been born at the right time, so that I would acquire the vice of reading. This is a vice that does not go unpunished, as Valéry pointed out: we pay dearly for it, in fact, through feeling dissatisfied with and mistrustful of life as it is, for it can never scale the heights and plummet to the depths that we invent, spurred on by our desires.

In any event, the fictions of my Bolivian childhood are more vivid in my memory than flesh-and-blood people. Memory is decisive proof. Although the recollections of my friends and adventures are very much alive, the landscapes and characters of the literary illusion are even more alive, they still sparkle in my memory. The woods of Genevieve of Brabant and those of Ivanhoe, full of knights with lances and armour, mounted on graceful white horses with flowing manes. The African jungle where Tarzan meets Jane (who talks to him in every imaginable language, without him understanding her), presents her to Chita and swings her on lianas through the undergrowth, saving her from crocodiles and cannibals. The burning mountains of the Mission of San Juan de Capistrano, where the crack of the avenging whip of Zorro resounds. The seas of Sandokan and his partner Yanes, and of the terrible pirates who fought with scimitars and daggers with complicated shapes, like the wavy-bladed kris, into whose depths the Nautilus of Captain Nemo slides silently and fantastically. The currents of air that propel the balloon of Phileas Fogg on his journey round the world, just in time to win the bet. And the icy and violent steppes, with the brave and blinded courier of the Tsar galloping on his horse.

It was not in Bolivia, however, but later, in Piura, that I experienced my first literary passion: Alexandre Dumas. The immortal three musketeers, who were four — D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis — dazzled me for ever. My final years of primary school and my first years of secondary school were lived in the shadow of Dumas, whose series of novels — The Count of Monte Cristo, The Queen’s Necklace, Memories of a Doctor, the musketeers book, Twenty Years After and the Vicomte Bragelonne and so many others — filled those years with heroic gestures and romantic tenderness, bathed in bright and spectacular colour. But in Cochabamba I had a taste of what was in store for me in two books by Miguel de Zevaco, Nostradamus and The Son of Nostradamus, which I managed to borrow from a young friend of my mother called Julia Urquidid who — such are life’s surprises — I would end up marrying ten years later. Although, if I had to mention just one of these fictional heroes that stands out from the rest in my memory of my earliest readings, it would be William, the boy invented by Richmal Crompton. The Just William books had red covers, and each told a different story of a boy who was about my age, who, like me, had an unquenchable thirst for adventures and also a grandpa who was both an accomplice and a friend, despite the age difference.

Grandfather Pablo wrote poems that he sometimes recited to family gatherings, and he had a number of poetry books in an old glass-fronted bookcase. He was very proud of his father, my great grandfather, Don Belisario Llosa Rivera, a poet and a writer, and he kept a novel of his (Sor María, that had won a prize in a competition organised in 1886 by the Ateneo in Lima), which he gave me. It disappeared in all the moves and journeys that my maternal family (in effect, the only family I had) made after 1945, when a relative of ours, José Luis de Bustamante, was elected President of Peru, and he nominated my grandfather Prefect of Piura. My mother and grandparents were delighted that I was such a keen reader, and they encouraged me to learn poems by heart and recite them in front of the family. Grandma and Mamaé read poems by José Santos Chocano and Juan de Dios Peza and novels by Xavier de Montépin — The Mad Women’s Doctor and Paris-Lyon-Mediterranean — and a novel by Vargas Vila (‘the only presentable novel by him’, they said), Aura or the Violets, that had many ellipses and that I flicked through. My mother had on her bedside table an edition with a blue cover dotted with little golden stars of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda that she had forbidden me to read. This was the first maudit book that I read in my life, nervously, in hiding, with that particular delight that danger brings. Two lines from the first poem (‘My rough labourer’s body tunnels into you/And makes the child leap up from the depths of the earth’) really intrigued me, but I intuited that it would be imprudent to ask the grown-ups to decipher them for me.

There is no doubt that my vocation as a writer began to gestate there, in that house on Ladislao Cabrera, in the shade of these readings and as a natural derivation of the hypnotic happiness that I felt as I lived all those adventures through the miracle of reading. That life was not the same life of school, my friends, the family and Cochabamba but, although it was intangible, it was no less real, that is, no less felt, enjoyed or suffered than the other life. And it was also much more diverse and intense than the life of daily routines. To be able to travel, by simply concentrating on the letters in a book, to the depths of the ocean, to the stratosphere, to Africa, England, Belgium or the seas of Malaysia, and to travel back from the twentieth century to the France of Richelieu and Mazarin, and, with each character of fiction, to be able to change skin, face, name, love, fate, to become in this way so many different people while staying myself, was a miracle that revolutionised my life and put me from that time on completely under the spell of fiction. I would never tire of repeating this magic, with the fascination and enthusiasm of my early years, until it became the central concern of my existence.

Every writer is firstly a reader and to be a writer is also a different way of continuing to read. I discovered the intimate relationship between reading and writing in those years because — and I’m also sure of this — the first things that I wrote, or, better, I scribbled, were changes to, or extensions of, the adventures I was reading, either because I was sad that they had come to an end or because I would have liked them to have turned out differently to the ways decided by their authors. These corrections and additions were, as I understand them, precocious manifestations of the vocation that would produce, years later, all the stories, novels, essays and plays that I have written. And I do not feel in the least uncomfortable, quite the reverse, to recognise that in my vocation and in my fictions, I am a flagrant literary parasite.

Everything I have invented as a writer has its roots in lived experience. It was something that I saw, heard, but also read, that my memory retained with a singular and mysterious stubbornness, that formed certain images which, sooner or later, and for reasons that I also find very difficult to fathom, became a stimulus for fantasy, a starting point for a complete imaginary construction. I would not have written Time of the Hero if I had not spent two years as a cadet at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, where the action of the novel takes place, nor would I have invented the stories about Fushía and Aquilino, Lalita and the Jungle Woman, the missionary nuns of Santa María de Nieva and the unfortunate Aguaruna head man Jum, without the trip to the Upper Marañón that I went on in 1958 with the Mexican anthropologist Juan Comas, organised by the University of San Marcos and the Summer Linguistic Institute. That journey gave me material for The Green House, as did the solitary brothel, in the middle of the sands of Piura, that was the focus of my schoolmates’ fantasy and desires in the Salesian college where I was enrolled as soon as we settled in that northern city in Peru after leaving Cochabamba.

In Piura I also lived or experienced in some way the events that, turned into memories, became the raw material for most of the stories in my first book, The Cubs: the attempt at a school strike, the fist-fights in the dry river bed, the abuses of the estate owners on their lands, where they still ruled as tyrants. The world of nostalgia and youthful memories that my grandparents and Mamaé retreated into as their long lives neared the century gave me the theme and characters of The Young Lady from Tacna. I found the story of Pichulita Cuéllar, by contrast, in a newspaper I was reading in Lima, on the bus from Miraflores to the city centre. The hired scribe I invented in Kathie and the Hippopotamus, who exaggerates and sugar-coats the travel journal through ‘the yellow Orient and black Africa’ written by a woman from Lima who had discovered her literary vocation somewhat late in life, was based on my life, in the first instance, when I was doing piecework in a Paris garret for a woman with an inventive imagination and deficient syntax.

But just as much as my lived experience, what I have read — which is another, sometimes more noble and sumptuous, way of living — has also had a decisive influence on the gestation of all my stories, although, in this case, I hesitate when it comes to giving specific authors and titles. I am sure that Sartre’s ideas on committed writing, which in the fifties and early sixties I believed in blindly, had a great deal of influence on the critical intentions and ethical preoccupations of my first novels, and that the epic style and romantic mythology of André Malraux, whom I read with great passion during my university years, left its traces in my first stories along with my idols of those years, the US novelists Hemingway, Dos Passos, Caldwell, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald and younger writers like Truman Capote and Paul Bowles. But the greatest influence was, had to be, that of the supreme teacher of so many novelists of my generation (and also of the generations that immediately preceded and followed mine) throughout the world: William Faulkner. Without the wonderment that I felt when I discovered the richness of shades, allusions, perspectives, harmonies and ambiguities of his prose, and the absolutely original way in which he organised his stories, I would never have dared to rearrange ‘real’ narrative chronology in my own work, or to present an episode from different points of view and levels of reality, as I did in Time of the Hero, Conversation in the Cathedral and in the rest of my novels, nor would I have written a book like The Green House, in which the words are as visible, and sometimes more visible, a presence as the characters themselves — a landscape for the story — and in which the construction — the perspectives, the flow of time and the changing narrators — is all of labyrinthine complexity. For it was thanks to the Yoknapatawpha saga that I discovered the prime importance of form in fiction and the infinite possibilities offered by point of view and the construction of time in a story.

‘Influence’ is a dangerous word, and, when applied to the writing of literature, it is also a contradictory term. There are influences that stifle originality and others that allow writers to discover their own voices. In any event, it is very likely that the most fertile literary influences are those that are not very evident to us, that we are not very conscious of. For that reason, although I know which authors captivated me and opened up to me the world of dreams, and which writers taught me about writing and the structure of fiction, I would not venture to say that these are the writers — and I would add to that list, of course, Flaubert, Melville, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc, Thomas Mann and many others — to whom I owe the greatest debt, let alone specifying exactly what this debt might be.

The only thing that I am absolutely certain about is that it was in these early childhood years, spent in that large house on Ladislao Cabrera Street in Cochabamba, in the heart of my extensive, almost biblical, family presided over by my grandparents, when I started reading my first stories, in books and children’s magazines that Baby Jesus brought me for Christmas or which I bought with my pocket money, that I first became interested in writing fiction, something that has shaped my life from then on. And in some discreet and distant way, these early stories still kindle my dreams.

London, 24 June 1997

A Twenty-First-Century Novel

In the first place, Don Quixote de la Mancha, the immortal novel by Cervantes, offers us an image: the image of an hidalgo in his fifties, crammed into anachronistic armour, as scrawny as his horse, accompanied by a coarse, podgy, peasant riding on a donkey, who acts as his squire, travelling the plains of La Mancha, frozen in winter and baking hot in summer, in search of adventures. He is spurred on by a mad plan: to revive the time long since past (and which, furthermore, never existed) of the knights errant, who travelled the world helping the weak, righting wrongs, and offering justice to ordinary men and women that they would not otherwise receive. He draws inspiration for all this from his readings of romances of chivalry, which he takes as true stories, as truthful as the most meticulous history book. This ideal is impossible to achieve because everything in the reality that Don Quixote lives in gives the lie to it: there are no longer knights errant, and no one professes the ideas or respects the values that they adhered to. Similarly, war is no longer a matter of individual challenges, in which two knights resolve disputes in a precise ritual. Now, as Don Quixote himself sadly laments in his speech on arms and letters, war is not decided by swords and lances, that is by the courage and skills of an individual, but by the thunder of cannons and gunpowder, an artillery that, through its noisy slaughter, has blown apart the codes of individual honour and the deeds of heroes like the mythic figures of Amadis of Gaul, Tirant Lo Blanc and Tristan de Leonis.

Does this mean that Don Quixote de la Mancha is an old-fashioned book, and that Alonso Quijano’s madness stems from a desperate nostalgia for a world now lost, from a visceral rejection of modernity and progress? This would be the case if the world that Don Quixote longs for and tries to revive had ever been part of history. For in truth, this world only ever existed in the imagination, in the legends and utopias fashioned by human beings in order to escape, to some extent, from the insecurity and brutality of their lives, and to find refuge in a society of order, honour and principles, of men who would seek justice and redemption for them, and offer redress for the violence and sufferings that made up the true lives of men and women in the Middle Ages.

The chivalric literature that makes Don Quixote lose his mind — this is an expression that must be taken metaphorically rather than literally — is not ‘realist’, because the delirious exploits of its champions do not reflect a lived reality. But it is a genuine, imaginative response to this reality, full of hopes and desires, which above all else rejects a very real world which was totally opposite to this ceremonious and elegant order of things, to this representation in which justice always triumphed and crime and wickedness was punished. It was in the real world, full of anxieties and despair, that people avidly read the romances of chivalry (or listened to them being read aloud in taverns and town squares).

So the dream that turns Alonso Quijano into Don Quixote de La Mancha is not an attempt to revive a past, but something much more ambitious: it is an attempt to make the myth a reality, to transform fiction into living history. In the course of the novel this endeavour, that seems purely and simply absurd to everyone around Alonso Quijano, especially to his friends and acquaintances in his unnamed village — Nicolás the barber, the housekeeper and his niece, Bachelor Sansón Carrasco — gradually begins to infiltrate reality, one might say because of the fanatical conviction with which the Knight of the Sorry Face imposes it on his surroundings, without being in the slightest bit daunted by the kicks and blows and misfortunes that rain on him from all sides because of it. In his splendid analysis of the novel, Martín de Riquer insists that from the beginning to the end of his long journey, Don Quixote does not change — he repeats himself time and again, without ever wavering in his certainty that it is the sorcerers who change reality so that he seems to be mistaken when he attacks windmills, skins of red wine, goats or pilgrims, thinking them to be giants or enemies.¹³ That analysis is doubtless correct. But although Don Quixote does not change, bound up as he is in his rigid, chivalric view of the world, what does change are his surroundings, the people around him, and reality itself which, as if contaminated by his powerful logic, becomes gradually less and less realistic until — as in a Borges story — it becomes a fiction. This is one of the subtlest, and also one of the most modern, aspects of Cervantes’s great novel.

Fiction and Life

The major theme of Don Quixote de La Mancha is fiction, its raison d’être, and the ways in which, as it seeps into life, it shapes and transforms this life. Thus what seems to many modern readers to be the quintessential ‘Borgesian’ theme — one that we find in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ — is, in fact, a Cervantes theme that, several centuries later, Borges would take up, giving it his own personal seal.

Fiction is a central issue in the novel because the hidalgo from La Mancha who is the main protagonist has been ‘driven crazy’ — and we must also see his madness as an allegory or a symbol rather than as a clinical diagnosis — by the fantasies in the romances of chivalry. And, since he believes that the world is as it is described in the romances of Amadis and Palmerin, he goes out into the world in search of adventures, which become parodies, suffering and causing minor catastrophes along the way. He does not learn any lessons in reality from these bad experiences. With the unshakeable faith of the fanatic, he blames evil sorcerers for the fact that his deeds always unravel and become farcical. In the end, he gets his way. Fiction contaminates life and reality gradually bends to the eccentricities and fantasies of Don Quixote. Even Sancho Panza, who in the opening chapters is presented as a supremely earthy, materialistic and pragmatic being, has in the second part also succumbed to the enchantments of fantasy and, when he is made governor of the island of Barataria, he cheerfully adapts to a world of deceit and illusion. His language, which is direct and popular at the beginning of the story, becomes refined in the second part, and there are passages where he sounds as mannered in speech as his own master.

Is it not through fiction that poor Basilio attempts to win back the beautiful Quiteria, preventing her marriage to rich Camacho, and having her marry him instead (I, 19–21)? Basilio ‘commits suicide’ as the wedding is about to take place, driving a sword into his body and bathing himself in blood. And, in his death throes, he asks Quiteria whether, before he dies, she will give him her hand because, if not, he will die without making his confession. As soon as she does so, Basilio revives, revealing that his suicide was a piece of theatre and that the blood spilled had been hidden in a hollow tube. The fiction is effective, however, and, with the help of Don Quixote, it becomes a reality, because Basilio and Quiteria marry.

Don Quixote’s friends in the village, who are so hostile to literary romances that they make an Inquisition bonfire of his library, resort to fiction with the pretext of curing Don Quixote of his madness: they devise and enact scenes to return the Knight of the Sorry Face to sanity and the real world. But, in fact, they achieve the opposite: the fiction begins to devour reality. Bachelor Sansón Carrasco disguises himself twice as a knight errant, the first time with the pseudonym of the Knight of the Mirrors, the second, three months later in Barcelona, when he appears as the Knight of the White Moon. On the first occasion, the deception is counterproductive because it is Don Quixote who gets his way; the second time, however, he achieves his goal, defeats Don Quixote and makes him promise to give up arms for a year and return to his village. With this, the story moves towards its end.

This ending is a rather depressing and forced anticlimax, and perhaps for that reason Cervantes finished it off so quickly, in a few pages. For there is something untoward, even unreal, in the fact that Don Alonso Quijano relinquishes his ‘madness’ and returns to reality when that reality around him has been so largely transformed into fiction. The grieving Sancho Panza (the reality man) reveals as much when he pleads with his master, on his deathbed, not to die, exhorting him to get up so that they can go into the countryside dressed as shepherds and act out, in real life, the pastoral fiction that is Don Quixote’s final fantasy (II, 74).

This process of fictionalisation of reality reaches its climax with the appearance of the mysterious, unnamed Duke and Duchess who, from chapter 31 of the second part, accelerate and multiply the transformation of daily life into theatrical and fictional fantasies. Like so many other characters, the Duke and Duchess have read the first part of the novel, and when they come across Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are as bewitched by the novel as Don Quixote is by romances of chivalry. And then they arrange things in such a way that in their castle life becomes fiction, and everything in it reproduces the unreality that Don Quixote is living in. For many chapters, fiction takes over from life, turning it into fantasy, a dream become reality, literature lived as life itself. The Duke and Duchess do this for their own egotistical, even despotic reasons, so that they can amuse themselves at the expense of the madman and his squire; at least, that is what they think. What happens is that the game begins to take them over and absorb them to such an extent that, later on, when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza leave for Zaragoza, they do not accept this and send out their servants and soldiers to scour the vicinity until they find them and bring them back to the castle where they have staged the fabulous funeral ceremony and purported resurrection of Altisidora. In the world of the Duke and Duchess, Don Quixote is no longer an eccentric: he is quite at home because everything around him is a fiction, from the island of Barataria where Sancho Panza finally lives out his dream of becoming a governor, to the airborne flight on the back on the artificial horse, Clavileño, the air from large bellows creating the winds through which the great man of La Mancha gallops amid clouds of illusion.

Like the Duke and Duchess, another powerful figure in the novel, Don Antonio Moreno, who offers Don Quixote lodging in Barcelona and entertains him, also puts on shows that make reality unreal. For example, he has in his house an enchanted bronze head that replies to questions, since it knows people’s pasts and their futures. The narrator explains that this is an ‘artifice’ because the so-called fortune teller is a hollow machine with enough room inside to fit a student, who answers the questions. Is this not living a fiction, turning life into a theatrical performance, just as Don Quixote does, although here done with malice, and not with his naïveté?

During his stay in Barcelona, when his host Don Antonio Moreno is taking Don Quixote around the city (with his name in large letters on a sign stuck to his back), a Castilian comes up to the Ingenious Hidalgo and says: ‘You’re a madman…but you have the ability to turn everyone who has anything to do with you mad and stupid just like you’ (II, 62).¹⁴ Don Quixote’s madness — his hunger for unreality — is contagious, and he has given those around him his appetite for fiction.

This explains the blossoming tales, the dense thicket of stories and novels that comprise Don Quixote de La Mancha. It is not just the evasive Cide Hamete Benengeli, the other narrator of the novel, who boasts that he is the mere transcriber and translator of the novel (although he is also, in fact, the editor, and takes notes and offers commentary), who reveals this passion for the fantasy life of literature, incorporating into the main story of Don Quixote and Sancho adventitious stories such as ‘The man who was recklessly curious’ and the tale of Cardenio and Dorotea. The characters also share this narrative propensity or vice which leads them, like the beautiful Morisca, or the Knight of the Green Coat, or Princess Micomicona, to tell true or invented stories, which create, through the course of the novel, a landscape of words and imagination that becomes superimposed over, and at time blots out completely, the other world, that natural landscape that seems so unreal, so bound up in commonplace forms and conventional rhetoric. Don Quixote de La Mancha is a novel about fiction in which the life of the imagination is everywhere, in the character’s actions, in the words they utter and in the very air that they breathe.

A Novel of Free Men

Just as it is a novel about fiction, so Don Quixote is a song of freedom. We should pause a minute to reflect on that very famous statement that Don Quixote makes to Sancho Panza: ‘Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts bestowed by heaven on man; no treasures that the earth contains and the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, men can and should risk their lives and, in contrast, captivity is the worst evil that can befall them’ (II, 58).

Behind this sentence, and the fictional character that utters it, we find the shadow of Miguel de Cervantes himself, who knew very well what he was talking about. The five years that he spent in captivity by the Moors in Algeria and the three times that he was imprisoned in Spain for debts and for being found guilty of discrepancies in tax accounts when he was a tax inspector in Andalucía for the Navy, must have intensified his desire for freedom and his horror at any restrictions on freedom. This background lends authenticity and power to Don Quixote’s statement and gives a particular libertarian bias to the story of the Ingenious Hidalgo.

What idea of freedom is this? The same idea that, from the eighteenth century, the so-called liberals would formulate in Europe: that freedom is the sovereignty of the individual to decide his or her life without pressure or conditions, in accordance solely with their intelligence and their wishes. That is what, several centuries later, Isaiah Berlin would term ‘negative freedom’, to be free from interference and coercion when thinking, expressing oneself and acting. What is at the heart of this idea of freedom is a profound mistrust of authority, of the excesses that power, all power, can perpetrate.

Let us not forget that Don Quixote delivers this passionate eulogy to freedom just as he has left the estate of the anonymous Duke and Duchess, where he has been regally treated by the exuberant lord of the castle, the very incarnation of power. But in the midst of all the flattery and attention that he received, the Ingenious Hidalgo felt that his freedom was imperceptibly being threatened and constrained: ‘I could not enjoy such luxuries [the gifts and attention lavished on him] with the same freedom as if they had been my own’ (II, 58). This declaration implies that the foundation of freedom is private property, and that true pleasure is only complete when the people experiencing the pleasure do not feel that they cannot take any initiative, that their freedom to think and act are being curtailed. Because, ‘the obligation to repay the benefits and favours received is a bond that prevents the spirit from campaigning freely. Happy is he to whom heaven has given a crust of bread and who is under no obligation to thank anyone for it except heaven itself.’ What could be clearer? Freedom is individual and requires a minimum level of prosperity to be real. Because people who are poor and depend on gifts or charity to survive, can never be totally free. It is true that there was a time long since past, as Don Quixote recalls to the terrified goatherds in his speech on the Golden Age (I, 11), in which virtue and goodness held sway in the world, and that in this age of paradise, before private property, ‘men living in such times did not know those words, “yours” and “mine”’, and ‘all things were held in common’. But then history changed, and ‘our detestable times’ arrived in which, for security and justice to prevail, ‘the order of knights errant was founded to defend maidens, protect widows and succour orphans and the needy’.

Don Quixote does not believe that justice, social order and progress emanate from authority, but rather that they are the work of individuals who, like his models, the knights errant, and he himself, shoulder the task of making the world they live in less unjust, freer and more prosperous. That is the knight errant: an individual who, dedicated to a life of generosity, heads out on the highways to seek redress for all the evils on the planet. Authority, when it appears, hinders rather than aids this task.

Where is the authority in the Spain that Don Quixote travels around on his three sallies? We have to step out of the novel to know that the King of Spain who is alluded to on several occasions is Philip III, because within the fiction, except for a very few, fleeting appearances, such as the appearance of the governor of Barcelona when Don Quixote visits that city, the authorities are conspicuous by their absence. And the institutions that embody authority, like the Holy Brotherhood, which enforces law in the countryside, and which is alluded to on Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s journeys, are mentioned as something distant, dark and threatening.

Don Quixote has not the slightest qualm in standing up to authority and defying the laws when they go against his own conception of justice and freedom. On his first sally he confronts a rich man, Juan Haldudo, from Quintanar, who is whipping one of his servants for losing some sheep, something that, in keeping with the barbarous customs of the time, he was quite entitled to do. But the man from La Mancha considers this entitlement intolerable and he rescues the boy, thus righting what he considers to be a wrong (although, as soon as he leaves, Juan Haldudo, despite his promises to the contrary, starts beating Andrés again, leaving him half dead) (I, 4). The novel is full of episodes like this, where his individualistic and freedom-based view of justice leads the bold hidalgo to defy the established powers, laws and customs in the name of what for him is a superior moral imperative.

The adventure where Don Quixote takes his libertarian principles to almost suicidal lengths — demonstrating that his idea of freedom anticipates by some two centuries certain aspects of anarchist thinking — is one of the most famous in the novel. It is when he frees twelve criminals, including the sinister Ginés de Pasamonte, the future Master Pedro, despite the fact that the Ingenious Hidalgo is perfectly aware, from their own words, that they are all criminals, condemned to the king’s galleys (I, 22). The reasons he gives for his open defiance of authority — that it is not right that honourable men should be the executioners of other men — scarcely masks, in its vagueness, the real motivation for his behaviour which, in this regard, is utterly coherent throughout the novel. This motivation is his overwhelming love of freedom which, if he has to choose, he even places above the law, and his profound scepticism towards authority that, for him, offers no guarantee of what he calls, rather ambiguously, ‘distributive justice’, an expression that seems to imply a desire for equality, that sometimes counterbalances his libertarian ideals.

In this episode, as if to dispel even the slightest doubt as to how unbridled and free his thinking really is, he praises the office of the pimp: it is seen as an office for intelligent people, one that is very necessary in a well-ordered society. He is angry to hear that an old man has been sent to the galleys for this because, in his opinion, a pimp should have been sent there, not to row but to lead and to command. Anyone daring to rebel in such an open fashion against the political and moral correctness of the time was a unique kind of madman who, and not just when he spoke about romances of chivalry, said and did things that questioned the very roots of the society that he lived in.

The Homelands of Don Quixote

What image of Spain emerges from the pages of Cervantes’s novel? That of a vast and diverse world, without geographical borders, made up of an archipelago of communities, villages and towns, which the characters call their ‘homelands’. This is very similar to the way in which empires and kingdoms are described in romances of chivalry, even though Cervantes was supposedly ridiculing the genre in Don Quixote. (Instead, he paid them a magnificent homage, and one of his great literary achievements was to bring them up to date, preserving, through playfulness and humour, everything that could survive from the chivalric romances, and incorporating all of this into the social and artistic values of the seventeenth century, a very different period to the time when the romances had first appeared.)

On his three sallies, Don Quixote travels round La Mancha and parts of Aragon and Catalonia, but, since there are so many diverse characters and references to places and things throughout the novel, Spain appears to be much larger, united in its geographical and cultural diversity, with vague borders that seem to be defined not in terms of territories and administrative districts, but rather in terms of religious boundaries. Spain ends in those vague, specifically marine, boundaries where the dominions of the Moors, the religious enemies, begin. But while Spain provides the context, the varied and inescapable limits that encompass the relatively small area that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza move around in, what is described, with great vividness and warmth, is the ‘homeland’, that concrete, human space, bounded by memory, a landscape, certain people, certain habits and customs that men and women retain in their memory as their patrimony, as the thing that best defines them. The characters of the novel travel the world, we might say, with their towns and villages on their backs. They turn up with these credentials, their ‘homelands’, and everyone can remember, with irrepressible nostalgia, these small communities where they have left loved ones, friends, family, houses and animals. When at the end of the third journey, after so many adventures, Sancho Panza catches sight of his village, he falls to his knees, visibly moved, and exclaims, ‘open your eyes, my longed-for village, and see your son Sancho Panza returning’ (II, 72).

Because, with the passage of time, this idea of the homeland would gradually disintegrate and begin to meld instead with the concept of the nation (which does not appear until the nineteenth century), we should point out that the ‘homelands’ in Don Quixote have nothing to do with, indeed they sit uncomfortably with, this abstract, general, schematic and essentially political concept of the nation. This nation is at the root of all nationalisms, a collectivist ideology that purports to define individuals through their belonging to a human conglomerate marked out as different to others by certain characteristics such as race, language and religion. This concept is poles apart from the impassioned individualism shown by Don Quixote and those who accompany him in Cervantes’s novel, a world in which ‘patriotism’ is a generous and positive feeling, of love of the land and one’s own people, an adherence to memory and the family past, and not a way of setting oneself apart, becoming exclusive and erecting barriers against ‘others’. Don Quixote’s Spain does not have borders, and it is a diverse, multicoloured world, made up of innumerable homelands, which opens up to the outside world and merges with it, and opens its doors to people who come from other parts, so long as they come in peace and can overcome the hurdle (which was insurmountable in the Counter-Reformation mentality of the period) of religion (that is, by converting to Christianity).

A Modern Book

Don Quixote’s modernity can be found in the rebellious quest for justice that leads the main character to take on, as his personal responsibility, the task of changing the world for the better even when, as he attempts to put this into practice, he makes mistakes, comes up against insuperable obstacles and is beaten, ill-treated and turned into an object of derision. But it is also a contemporary novel because, in his account of Don Quixote’s exploits, Cervantes revolutionised the narrative forms of his time and laid the foundations for the modern novel. Even if they do not know it, contemporary novelists who play with form, distort time, mix up different points of view and experiment with language, are all indebted to Cervantes.

The revolution in form that is Don Quixote has been studied and analysed from every possible standpoint, and yet, as happens with these exemplary masterpieces, it is an inexhaustible source because, like Hamlet or The Divine Comedy or the Iliad and Odyssey, it evolves with the passage of time and recreates itself in accordance with the aesthetic values of each different culture, becoming in this way a real Ali Baba’s cave, whose treasures are never-ending.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the narrative form of Don Quixote is the way in which Cervantes dealt with the problem of the narrator, the basic problem that any novelist must first resolve: who is going to tell the story? The answer that Cervantes gave to this question brought a subtlety and complexity to the genre which modern novelists still benefit from, and which was the equivalent in its day to the impact in our times of Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, or, in the Latin American field, of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Cortázar’s Hopscotch.

Who is telling the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Two narrators: the mysterious Cide Hamete Benengeli, whom we never read directly because his original manuscript is in Arabic, and an anonymous narrator, who sometimes speaks in the first person but most frequently in the third person of omniscient narrators, who, supposedly, translates Cide Hamete Benengeli’s manuscript into Spanish and, at the same time, adapts, edits and comments on it. This is a Chinese box structure; the story that we are reading is contained in another, earlier and much larger structure that we can only guess at. The existence of these two narrators introduces into the story an ambiguity and a sense of uncertainty about this ‘other story’, Cide Hamete Benengeli’s account, which lends a subtle relativism to the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a subjective aura that is a key component of the autonomy, sovereignty and originality of the work.

But these two narrators, and the delicate dialectic between them, are not the only ones in this novel of compulsive storytellers and narrators: many characters take over from them, as we have seen, recounting their own misfortunes, or the misfortunes of others, in episodes that comprise a number of smaller Chinese boxes nestling within this vast world of fiction full of individual fictions that we call Don Quixote de La Mancha.

Using what was a commonplace in romances of chivalry (many of them were supposedly manuscripts discovered in exotic and strange places), Cervantes used Cide Hamete Benengeli as a device to introduce ambiguity and playfulness as central elements of the narrative structure. And he also introduced important innovations into another fundamental aspect of narrative form: narrative time.

Time in Don Quixote

Like the narrator, time is also in every novel an artifice, an invention, something constructed to meet the needs of the plot, and never a mere reproduction or reflection of ‘real’ time.

In Don Quixote, various times are masterfully woven together, giving the novel its sense of being an independent, self-sufficient world, which makes it so persuasive a narrative. On the one hand there is the time in which the characters of the story move around, which comprises roughly six months since the three sallies that Don Quixote makes last firstly for three days, then a couple of months and lastly four months. We must then add the intervals between the journeys (the second is one month) which Don Quixote spends in his village, and the final days leading up to his death, a total of seven or eight months.

But there are also episodes that greatly extend the time-frame of the novel, back into the past and forward into the future. Many of the events that we hear about throughout the story have already happened before the story began, and we learn about them through the accounts of people who took part in or witnessed these events, and see the final outcome of many of them in the ‘present time’ of the novel.

The most notable and surprising aspect of narrative time, however, is that many characters in the second part of Don Quixote, like the Duke and Duchess, have read the first part. Thus we are made aware that another reality exists, other times, outside the novel, the fiction, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exist as characters in a book, and where some readers are inside and others ‘outside’ the story, as is our case as present-day readers. This little ploy, which must be seen as something much more daring than a simple literary conjuring trick, has far-reaching effects with regard to the structure of the novel. It expands and multiplies the time of the fiction, which is now enclosed — another Chinese box — in a wider world in which Don Quixote, Sancho and other characters have already lived, been turned into heroes of a book and affected the readers of this ‘other’ reality, which is not exactly the reality that we are reading, and which contains this reality; just as with Chinese boxes, the larger contains the smaller, and the smaller contains another box, in a process that could, in theory, be infinite.

It is an amusing and also an unsettling game, which allows the story to be enriched by events such as those planned by the Duke and Duchess (who know, through the book they have read, of Don Quixote’s obsessions and odd behaviour). And it also illustrates the complex relationship between fiction and life, the way in which life produces fictions and how they, in turn, affect life, enlivening it, changing it, adding to it colour, adventure, emotions, passions and surprises.

The relationship between fiction and life, a recurrent theme in classical and modern literature, is explored in Cervantes’s novel in a way that anticipated the great literary adventures of the twentieth century, in which the best novelists would be tempted to investigate the enchantments of narrative form: language, time, characters, point of view and the function of the narrator.

In addition to these and many other reasons, the lasting appeal of Don Quixote is also due to the elegance and power of its style, one of the pinnacles of writing in the Spanish language. We need to speak perhaps not of one but of many styles in which the novel is written. There are two that are clearly distinguishable, corresponding to the two sides of reality that the story develops: the ‘real’ and the ‘fictitious’. In the intercalated stories, the language is much more pompous and rhetorical than in the main story, in which Don Quixote, Sancho, the priest, the barber and the other people in the village talk in a much more natural and simple way. In the added stories the narrator uses a more affected — a more literary — language, through which he achieves a distancing effect, one of unreality. Similar differences can be detected in the language used by the characters, according to the social status, level of education and occupation of the speakers. Even the popular sectors speak very differently: simple villagers are very clear, while galley slaves or city thugs use slang, like the galley slaves whose criminal slang is completely incomprehensible to Don Quixote. He himself does not use just one form of expression. Since Don Quixote, according to the narrator, only exaggerated or began raving when he talked about issues of chivalric romance, he can talk about other issues quite precisely, objectively, sensibly and intelligently. But when the topic of chivalric romance arises, he becomes an unstoppable fount of literary matters, erudite allusions, literary references and delirious fantasies. Sancho Panza’s language is equally variable. As we have seen, he changes his way of speaking during the course of the novel, starting out with a spicy, lively turn of phrase, punctuated by refrains and sayings that express a whole heritage of popular wisdom, and ending with a convoluted, elaborate style that he has picked up from his master, which can be seen as a humorous parody of the parody that is Don Quixote’s language. Cervantes rather than Sansón Carrasco should have been dubbed the Knight of the Mirrors, because Don Quixote de la Mancha is a veritable labyrinth of mirrors where everything, the characters, the artistic form, the plot, the styles, split in two and multiply, in images that express all the infinite subtlety and diversity of human life.

That is why the two of them are immortal, and why four hundred years after they were first brought into the world by Cervantes, they continue to ride on, relentlessly, without losing heart. Through La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia, Europe, America and the whole world. And there they are still, in the rain, the roaring thunder, the burning sun, where the stars shine in the great silence of the polar night, or in the desert, or in the jungle thickets, arguing, observing and having different interpretations of everything that they encounter or hear, but, despite this disagreement, needing each other more and more, indissolubly linked in that strange alliance that is between dreaming and waking, reality and the ideal, life and death, spirit and flesh, fiction and life. They are two unmistakable figures in literary history, the one long and lofty like a Gothic arch, the other stout and short, two attitudes, two ambitions, two ways of seeing. But in the distance, in our memories as readers of their fictional epic journeys, they join together and meld with each other and become ‘a single shadow’, like the couple in the poem by José Asunción Silva, that depicts our human existence in all its contradictory and fascinating truth.

Madrid, September 2004

Heart of Darkness

The Roots of Humankind

I. The Congo of Leopold II

On a plane journey, the historian Adam Hochschild found a quotation from Mark Twain in which the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn asserted that the regime imposed in the Free State of the Congo between 1885 and 1906 by Leopold II, the King of the Belgians who died in 1909, had exterminated between five and eight million of the native inhabitants. Disconcerted, and with his curiosity aroused, he began an investigation that, many years later, would culminate in King Leopold’s Ghost, an outstanding document on the cruelty and greed that drove the European colonial adventure in Africa. The information contained in the book and the conclusions that it reaches greatly enrich our reading of Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, which was set in that country just at the time when the Belgian Company of Leopold II — who must rate alongside Hitler and Stalin as one of the bloodiest political criminals of the twentieth century — was perpetrating the worst of its insanities.

Leopold II was an obscenity of a human being; but he was also cultured, intelligent and creative. He planned his Congolese operation as a great economic and political enterprise designed to make him both a monarch and a very powerful businessman, with a fortune and an industrial and commercial network so vast that he would be in a position to influence political life and development in the rest of the world. His Central African colony, the Congo, which was the size of half of western Europe, was his personal property until 1906, when pressure from various governments, and from public opinion that had been alerted to his monstrous crimes, forced him to cede the territory to the Belgian state. It was also an astute public relations exercise. He invested considerable sums in bribing journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, military men, lobbyists and church officials across three continents to put in place a massive smokescreen that would make the world believe that his Congolese adventure had the humanitarian and Christian aim of saving the Congolese from the Arab slave traders who raided their villages. With his sponsorship, lectures and congresses were organised that attracted intellectuals — mercenaries without scruples, both naive and stupid — and many priests to discuss the most practical means of taking civilisation and the Gospels to the cannibals in Africa. For a number of years, this Goebbels-style propaganda was effective. Leopold II was decorated, praised by religious groups and the press, and was considered a redeemer of black Africans.

Behind this imposture the reality was different. Millions of Congolese were subjected to iniquitous exploitation in order to fulfil the quotas on rubber, ivory and resin extraction that the Company imposed on villages, families and individuals. The Company had a military organisation and abused the workers to such an extent that, in comparison, the former Arab slave traders must have seemed like angels. They worked with no fixed hours and without payment, terrified at the constant threat of mutilation and death. The physical and mental punishments became sadistically refined: anyone not reaching their quota had a hand or a foot cut off. Dilatory villages were sacked and burned in punitive expeditions that kept the population cowed and thus curbed runaways and attempts at rebellion. To keep families completely submissive, the Company (it was just one company, hidden behind a dense thicket of different enterprises) kept in their custody either the mother or one of the children. As it had few overheads — it did not pay wages and its only real expense was arming uniformed bandits to keep order — its profits were fabulous. As he had set out to be, Leopold II became one of the richest men in the world.

Adam Hochschild calculates, persuasively, that the Congolese population was reduced by half in the twenty-one years that the outrages of Leopold II continued. When the Free State of the Congo passed to the Belgian state in 1906, even though many crimes were still being committed and the merciless exploitation of the native population was maintained, conditions did improve quite considerably. Had that system continued, it is in the realms of possibility that these people might have been completely wiped out.

Hochschild’s study demonstrates that, while the crimes and tortures inflicted on the native population were grotesquely horrendous, the greatest damage done to them was the destruction of their institutions, their kinship systems, their customs and their most fundamental dignity. It is not surprising that when, some sixty years later, Belgium gave independence to the Congo in 1960, the ex-colony, in which no local professional infrastructure had been created by the colonising power in almost a century of exploitation, plunged into chaos and civil war. And finally it fell into the hands of General Mobutu, an insane satrap, a worthy successor of Leopold II in his voracity for wealth.

There are not only criminals and victims in King Leopold’s Ghost. There are also, fortunately for humankind, people who offer some redemption, like the black American pastors George Washington Williams and William Sheppard who, when they discovered the true nature of the farcical regime, took immediate steps to denounce to the world the terrible reality of Central Africa. But the two people who, showing extraordinary bravery and perseverance, were mainly responsible for mobilising international public opinion against Leopold II’s butchery in the Congo, were an Irishman, Roger Casement, and a Belgian, Morel. Both deserve the honours of a great novel. The former (who in later years would first be knighted and later executed in Great Britain for participating in a rebellion for the independence of Ireland) was, for a period, the British vice-consul in the Congo. He inundated the Foreign Office with lapidary reports on what was happening there. At the same time, in the customs house in Antwerp, an enquiring and fair-minded official, Morel, began studying, with increasing suspicion, the shipments that were leaving for the Congo and those that were returning from there. What a strange trade it was. What was sent to the Congo was in the main rifles, munitions, whips, machetes and trinkets of no commercial value. From there, by contrast, came valuable cargoes of rubber, ivory and resin. Could one take seriously the propaganda that, thanks to Leopold II, a free trade zone had been created in the heart of Africa that would bring progress and freedom to all Africans?

Morel was not only a fair-minded and perceptive man. He was also an extraordinary communicator. When he discovered the sinister truth, he made it known to his compatriots, skilfully circumventing the barriers erected to keep out the truth of what was happening in the Congo, which were kept in place by intimidation, bribes and censorship. His analyses and articles on the exploitation suffered by the Congolese, and the resulting social and economic depredation, gradually gained an audience and helped to form an association that Hochschild considers to be the first important movement for human rights in the twentieth century. Thanks to the Association for the Reform of the Congo that Morel and Casement founded, Leopold was no longer seen as some mythic civilising force, but rather in his true colours as a genocidal leader. However, by one of those mysteries that should be deciphered one day, what every reasonably well-informed person knew about Leopold II and his grim Congolese adventure when he died in 1909 has now disappeared from public memory. Now no one remembers him as he really was. In his own country he has become an anodyne, inoffensive mummy, who appears in history books, has a number of statues and his own museum, but there is nothing to remind us that he alone caused more suffering in Africa than all the natural tragedies and the wars and revolutions of that unfortunate continent.

II. Konrad Korzeniowski in the Congo

In 1890, the merchant captain Konrad Korzeniowski, Polish by birth and a British national since 1888, could not find a post senior enough for his qualifications in England, and signed a contract in Brussels with one of the branches of the Company of Leopold II, the Société Anonyme Belge that traded in the upper Congo, to serve as a captain on one of the company’s steamboats which navigated the great African river between Kinshasa and Stanley Falls. He was employed by Captain Albert Thys, an executive director of the firm and a close associate of Leopold II, to take command of the Florida, whose previous captain, Freisleben, had been killed by local people.

The future Joseph Conrad took the train to Bordeaux and embarked for Africa on the Ville de Maceio, with the idea of remaining in his new post for three years. He disembarked in Boma at the mouth of the river Congo and from there he travelled the forty miles to Matadi on a small boat, arriving on 13 June 1890. Here he met the open-minded Irishman Roger Casement, with whom he lived for a couple of weeks. He would later write in his diary that of all the people he met in the Congo, Casement was the person he most admired. Through Casement he would doubtless have received detailed information about other horrors taking place there, alongside those that were immediately apparent. From Matadi he left on foot for Kinshasa, accompanied by thirty native bearers with whom he shared adventures and setbacks very similar to those experienced by Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness, as he covered the two hundred miles that separated the camp from the Central Station.

In Kinshasa, Conrad was informed by the directors of the Company that instead of boarding the Florida, the boat that he had been asked to captain, but which was being repaired, he would serve as second-in-command on another steamer, the Roi des Belges, under the command of its Swedish captain, Ludwig Koch. The boat’s mission was to go upriver to the camp at Stanley Falls, to pick up an agent of the Company, Georges Antoine Klein, who was seriously ill. Like Kurtz in the novel, Klein died on the return journey to Kinshasa, and Captain Ludwig Koch also fell ill on the journey, so Conrad ended up in charge of the Roi des Belges. Troubled by diarrhoea, disgusted and disillusioned by his Congolese experience, Conrad did not stay the three years in Africa that he had intended, but instead returned to Europe on 4 December 1890. His journey through the hell created by Leopold II therefore lasted just over six months.

He wrote Heart of Darkness nine years later, describing quite faithfully through the character of Marlow, whom it would not be unjust to call his alter ego in the novel, the different stages and developments in his own Congolese adventure. In the original manuscript, there is a sardonic reference to Leopold II (‘a third-rate king’), some geographical references, as well as the authentic names of the Company’s factories and stations along the banks of the river Congo that were later taken out or changed in the novel. Heart of Darkness was published in instalments in February, March and April 1899, in the London review Blackwood’s Magazine, and three years later in a book — Youth: A Narrative; And Two Other Stories — that included two further stories.

III. Heart of Darkness

Conrad would not have been able to write this story without the six months that he spent in the Congo that was being devastated by the Company of Leopold II. But although this experience was the primary material for the novel, which can be read, among many possible readings, as an exorcism of colonialism and racism, Heart of Darkness transcends these historical and social circumstances and becomes an exploration of the roots of humankind, those inner recesses of our being which harbour a desire for destructive irrationality that progress and civilisation might manage to assuage but never eradicate completely. Few stories have managed to express in such a synthetic and captivating manner this evil that resides in the individual and in society. Because the tragedy that Kurtz personifies has to do with both historical and economic institutions corrupted by greed, and also that deep-seated attraction to the ‘fall’, the moral corruption of the human spirit, which Christian religion calls original sin and psychoanalysis calls the death wish.

The novel is much more subtle and hard to pin down than the contradictory interpretations that have been made of it: the struggle between civilisation and barbarism, the return to the magic world of the rituals and sacrifices of primitive man, the fragile layer that separates modernity from savagery. In the first place, it is without doubt, and despite the strong criticism launched against it by the African writer Chinua Achebe who condemned it for being prejudiced and ‘bloody racist’,¹⁵ a trenchant critique of Western civilisation’s inability to transcend cruel and uncivilised human nature, like that shown by the white men that the Company has installed in the heart of Africa to exploit the native peoples, to strip bare their forests and their land, and to exterminate the elephant population in search of precious ivory. These individuals represent a worse form of barbarism (since it is deliberate and self-interested) than that shown by the barbarians, the cannibals and pagans, who have made Kurtz a mini-god.

Kurtz, who is in theory the central character in this story, is a pure mystery, a hidden piece of information, an absence rather than a presence, a myth that his fleeting appearance at the end of the novel does not manage to replace with a concrete being. At one point he was intellectually and morally far superior to the bunch of greedy mediocrities that were his colleagues in the Company, according to the stories that Marlow hears as he travels up the river towards the remote station where Kurtz is based, or after his death. Superior because he was then a man of ideas — a journalist, a musician, a politician — convinced, judging by the report that he prepared for the ‘International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’, that, in doing what it was doing — collecting ivory for export to Europe — European capitalism was undertaking a civilising mission, a kind of commercial and moral crusade of such importance that it justified the worst excesses committed in its name. But this is the myth. When we see Kurtz in the flesh, he is a shadow of himself, a mad, delirious, dying man with no trace remaining of the ambitious project that had seemingly captivated him at the beginning of his African adventure, a human ruin in which Marlow cannot glimpse a single one of those supposedly extraordinary ideas that had previously engrossed him. The only definite things we manage to learn about him are that he has plundered more ivory than any other company employee and that — in this he is different and superior to other white men — he has managed to communicate with the native inhabitants, to seduce them, to bewitch those savages that his colleagues are content merely to exploit, and, in a way, to become one of them: a little king to whom they express complete devotion and who rules over them as a primitive despot.

This dialectic between civilisation and barbarism is a central theme in Heart of Darkness. For any except the most blinkered reader it is clear that the novel does not argue that barbarism is equated with Africa and civilisation with Europe. There is an explicit, cynical barbarism that the Company embodies. The only reason for the Company’s presence in jungles and rivers is to pillage them, exploiting to this end, with limitless cruelty, the labour of cannibals who are enslaved, repressed and killed without any scruples, in the same way that herds of elephants are butchered for the white gold, the coveted ivory. Kurtz’s madness is the most extreme form of this barbarism that the Company (presented as a demonic abstraction) took with it to the African heart of darkness.

Madness, moreover, is not the exclusive domain of Kurtz, but rather a state of mind or illness that seems to take hold of Europeans as soon as they set foot on African soil, as the Company doctor hints to Marlow when he examines him, measures his head and speaks to him about ‘the mental changes’ that take place in people out there. Marlow confirms this as soon as he reaches the mouth of the great river and sees a French warship absurdly bombarding, not a concrete military target, but rather the jungle, the African continent, as if the soldiers had taken leave of their senses. Many of the whites that he meets on his journey show signs of imbalance, from the impassive, manic accountant and the elated pilgrims to the nomadic, garrulous Russian dressed as a harlequin. The boundary between lucidity and madness is shattered in the savage, feverish note that appears at the bottom of Kurtz’s report to the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. How much time has passed between the report and this exhortation — ‘Exterminate all the brutes’ — we do not know. What we do know is that between these texts came the reality of Africa, and that this was enough for Kurtz’s mind (or his soul) to swing from reason to madness (or from Good to Evil). When he scribbled this command to exterminate, Kurtz was doubtless already putting it into practice, and around his cabin were heads swaying on stakes.

This tale offers, to say the least, a very pessimistic vision of the European civilisation represented by the ‘spectral city’ or the ‘white sepulchre’ where the Company has its main office, at whose doors visitors are greeted by women knitting. These women, as the critics have pointed out, bear a suspicious likeness to the Fates in Virgil or Dante, who guard the gates of the underworld. If this civilisation exists then it has, like the god Janus, two faces: one for Europe and the other for Africa, where there is a resurgence of all the violence and cruelty in human relationships that we thought had been abolished in the old continent. In the best of cases, civilisation appears as a very thin film below which the old demons are crouched, waiting for the opportune moment to reappear and suffocate precariously civilised men in ceremonies of pure instinct and irrationality, like the ones presided over by Kurtz in his absurd kingdom.

The extreme complexity of the story is very well emphasised by the intricate structure of the narration, by the overlaid narrators, scenes and times that alternate in the tale. Communicating vessels and Chinese boxes are the techniques used to build this highly functional, subtle narrative. The river Thames and the great African river (the Congo, although it is never given a name) are the two locations woven by the story. Two rivers, two continents, two cultures, two historical times, between which the main character-narrator, Captain Charlie Marlow, moves as he recounts his old African adventure to four friends one night in London by the river. But, in this binary reality, in which there are two women associated with Kurtz — the ‘barbarous and proud’ black woman and his delicate white fiancée — there are also two narrators, since Marlow tells his story within the narration of another narrator-character (who speaks of a ‘we’ as if he were one of the friends listening to Marlow), this anonymous and furtive presence whose function is to blur the story, dissolving it in a mist of subjectivity. Or better, in a mist of subjectivities, which intersect and draw apart, to create the rarefied atmosphere in which the story takes place. An atmosphere that is at times confused and at times nightmarish, in which time thickens, seems to stop and then jumps, in syncopated fashion, to another moment, leaving intervening gaps, silences and inferences. This atmosphere, which is one of the book’s greatest triumphs, is achieved through the powerful presence of a dense prose, which is at times grandiloquent and torrential, full of mysterious images and magical-religious resonance. One might say that it is impregnated with the abundance of vegetation and the steam of the jungle. The English critic F. R. Leavis deplored what he called the ‘adjectival insistence’ in the prose,¹⁶ something that for me is one of the essential attributes of this style as it seeks to de-rationalise and dissolve the story into a climate of complete ambiguity, into the rhythm and flow of dream-like reality. This atmosphere reproduces Marlow’s state of mind, for what he sees in his African journey to the posts and factories of the Company leaves him perplexed, confused, horrified, in a crescendo of excess that makes Kurtz’s story, the absolute horror, quite believable. If it were told in a more measured and circumspect style, then that inordinate story would seem simply incredible.

This African experience changed the personality of Marlow as it changed Conrad’s personality. It also changed his vision of the world, or at least of Europe. When he returns to the ‘spectral city’ with Kurtz’s packet of letters and the portrait, he contemplates at a distance and with contempt these people who are ‘hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.’¹⁷ Why this aversion to these people, ‘that trespassed on my thoughts’, these ‘intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew’? What, through his journey, he has learned about life and humankind has left him without innocence and without spontaneity, deeply critical and mistrustful of his fellow men. (‘Before the Congo, I was merely an animal’, Conrad confessed.¹⁸)

Marlow, who had hated lying before his journey to Africa, does not think twice about lying on his return, when he tells Kurtz’s betrothed that the last words he uttered were her name, when in reality he exclaimed: ‘The horror, the horror’. Was it a merciful lie, to console a woman who was suffering? Yes, that as well. But above all else, it was the acceptance that there are truths so intolerable in life that they justify lies. That is to say fictions; that is to say literature.

Madrid, October 2001

Death in Venice

The Call to the Abyss

Despite its brevity, Death in Venice tells a story that is as complex and deep as any that Thomas Mann would develop more extensively in his vast novels. And he achieves this so economically and with such stylistic perfection that this short novel deserves to figure alongside masterworks of the genre like Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. All three are beautifully crafted, tell a fascinating story and, above all, set up an almost infinite number of associations, symbols and echoes in the mind of the reader.

After reading and rereading it on numerous occasions, we are left with the unsettling feeling that the text is still withholding a mystery even from the most attentive reader. Something murky and violent, almost abject, which can be found in the protagonist and which is also a common experience of humankind: a secret yearning that suddenly reappears, frightening us, because we thought that it had been banished once and for all from our midst through the work of culture, faith and public morals, or simply as a result of our need to live together in society.

How can we define this subterranean presence which works of art usually reveal involuntarily, indirectly, a will-o’-the-wisp that suddenly appears without the author’s permission? Freud called it the death wish, Sade desire in freedom and Bataille, evil. It is the quest for the integral sovereignty of the individual that predates the conventions and rules that every society — some more, some less — imposes in order to make coexistence possible and prevent society from falling apart and reverting to barbarism. The core of any definition of civilisation is that individual desires and passion must be reined in so that private desires, stimulated by imagination, do not endanger social organisation. This is a clear and healthy idea whose benefit for the human race cannot be denied rationally because it has enhanced life and kept at a distance, usually at a great distance, the precarious and harsh primordial lives that preceded the horde and the cannibal clan. But life is not formed just by reason but also by passions. The angel that lives within men and women has never been able entirely to defeat the devil that also lives within, even when it seems that advanced societies have managed to do so. The story of Gustav von Aschenbach shows us that even these fine examples of healthy citizens, whose intelligence and moral discipline seem to have tamed all the destructive forces of personality, can succumb at any moment to the temptation of the abyss.

Reason, order and virtue ensure the progress of human society but they rarely suffice to make individuals happy, for instincts, that are kept in check in the name of social good, are always on the lookout, waiting for an opportunity to come out and demand of life both intensity and excess that, as a last resort, lead to destruction and death. Sex is the privileged domain where these transgressive demons lurk, in the recesses of our personality, and in some circumstances it is impossible to keep them at bay because they are also part of human reality. What is more, even though their presence always implies a risk for the individual and a threat of dissolution and violence for society, to exile them completely would impoverish life, depriving it of euphoria and elation — fiesta and adventure — which are also integral to life. These are the thorny issues that Death in Venice illuminates with its twilight tones.

Gustav von Aschenbach has reached the threshold of old age as an admirable citizen. His books have made him a celebrity but he accepts this fame without vanity, concentrating on his intellectual work, almost completely immersed in the world of ideas and principles, shorn of all material temptation. Since he lost his wife, he has become an austere and solitary man. He does not have a social life and rarely travels. In the holidays he retreats into his books in a small house in the country outside Munich. The text states that ‘he did not like pleasure’. This all seems to imply that this famous artist is confined within the world of the spirit, having quelled, through culture and reason, his passions, which are the agents of vice and chaos that lurk in the dark recesses of the human mind. He is a ‘virtuoso’ in the two meanings of the word: he is a creator of beautiful and original forms and he has purified his life through a strict ritual of discipline and continence.

But one day, suddenly, this organised existence begins to crumble thanks to his imagination, this corrosive force that the French very accurately call ‘the mad woman of the house’. A furtive glimpse of a stranger in the Munich cemetery awakens in Von Aschenbach a desire to travel, and peoples his imagination with exotic images. He dreams of a ferocious, primitive, barbarous world, one completely opposed to his world of a super civilised man, imbued with a ‘classic’ spirit. Without really understanding why, he gives in to impulse and goes first to an Adriatic island and later to Venice. There, on the night of his arrival, he sees the Polish boy Tadzio who will turn his life upside down, destroying in a few days the rational and ethical order that has sustained it. He does not touch him or even speak to him; it is also quite possible that the faint smiles that Von Aschenbach thinks he detects are fantasies of his imagination. The whole drama develops away from prying eyes, in the heart of the writer and, of course, in those murky instincts that he thought he had tamed, and which, in the sticky and foul-smelling Venetian summer, are revived by the tender beauty of the adolescent. He comes to realise that his body is not merely the receptacle of refined and generous ideas so admired by his readers, but also harbours a beast on heat, greedy and egotistical.

To say that the writer falls in love with or is engulfed by desire for the beautiful boy would not be enough. Something happens to him that is much deeper: it changes his view on life and on men and women, on culture and on art. Suddenly ideas are relegated, displaced by sensations and feelings, and the body takes on an overwhelming reality that the spirit must serve rather than restrain. Sensuality and instincts take on a new moral significance, not as aspects of animality that human beings must repress to ensure civilisation, but as sources of a ‘divine madness’ that transforms the individual into a god. Life is no longer ‘form’, and spills out in passionate disorder.

Gustav von Aschenbach experiences the delights and the sufferings of a love-passion, albeit alone, without sharing it with the person who is the cause of these emotions. At first, realising the danger that he is running, he tries to run away. But then he changes and plunges into the adventure that will bring him first to a state of abjection and then to death. The former sober intellectual, now disgusted by his old age and ugliness, goes to the pitiful lengths of putting on make-up and dyeing his hair like a fop. Instead of his former Apollonian dreams, his nights are full of savage visions, where barbarous men indulge in orgies in which violence, concupiscence and idolatry triumph over ‘the profound resistance of his spirit’. Gustav von Aschenbach then experiences ‘the bestial degradation of his fall’.¹⁹ Who is corrupting who? Tadzio leaves Venice at the end of the story, as innocent and immaculate as at the beginning, while von Aschenbach has been reduced to a moral and physical wreck. The beauty of the boy is the mere stimulus that starts up the destructive mechanism, the desire that von Aschenbach’s imagination so inflames that it ends up consuming him.

The plague that kills him is symbolic in more than one sense. On the one hand it represents the irrational forces of sex and fantasy, the libertinage that the writer succumbs to. Freed from all restraint, these forces would make social life impossible because they would turn it into a jungle of hungry beasts. On the other hand, the plague represents the primitive world, an exotic reality in which, unlike the narrator’s world of the spirit and civilised Europe, life is instinctual rather than based on ideas, where man can still live in a state of nature. The ‘Asian cholera’ that comes to ravage the jewel of culture and the intellect that is Venice comes from the remote parts of the planet ‘among whose bamboo thickets the tiger crouches’,²⁰ and to some degree the havoc that it wreaks prefigures the defeat of civilisation by the forces of barbarism.

This part of the story is open to different readings. The plague represents, for some, the political and social decomposition of Europe that was emerging from the joyful excesses of the belle époque and was about to self-destruct. This is the ‘social’ interpretation of the epidemic that infiltrates the lakeside city in an imperceptible manner and engulfs it, like the poison of lust in the immaculate spirit of the moralist. In this reading, the epidemic represents the price of degeneration, madness and ruin that must be paid by those who give in to the call of pleasure and submit their intelligence to the irrational dictates of passion.

The man writing this is, without a doubt, another moralist, like von Aschenbach before his fall. Like his character — and it is well known that both Gustav Mahler and the author of Death in Venice himself acted as models for von Aschenbach — Thomas Mann also had an instinctual fear of pleasure, that region of experience that blots out rationality, where all ideas are shipwrecked. Here are two romantics disguised as classical writers, two men for whom the passion of the senses, the euphoria of sex, is a supreme moment of pleasure that men and women must experience, albeit conscious of the fact that it will plunge them into decline and death. These licentious puritans do not have a trace of the joyful, ludic eighteenth-century view of sex as a world of play and entertainment, in perfect harmony with life’s other demands. The demands of the body and the spirit were two realms that the eighteenth century merged and which, in the nineteenth century, the century of romanticism, would become incompatible.

A symbol is, of itself, ambiguous and contradictory; it is always open to interpretations that vary according to the reader and the time of reading. Despite the fact that it is less than eighty years since Death in Venice was written, many of its allegories and symbols are now unclear to us because our age has emptied them of any content or made them irreconcilable. The rigid bourgeois morality that pervades the world of Thomas Mann and gives the fate of von Aschenbach a tragic air appears today, in our permissive society, a picturesque anomaly, just like the Asian plague, with its medieval resonance, which modern-day chemistry would soon defeat. Why is it necessary to punish so cruelly the poor artist whose only sin is to discover late in the day — and, what is more, only in the imagination — the pleasure of the flesh?

And yet, even from our perspective of readers living in a time when our tolerance in sexual matters has made excess appear conventional and boring, the drama of this solitary fifty-year-old, so timid and so wise, who has fallen desperately in love with the Polish boy and who sacrifices himself in the flames of this passion, affects us and moves us deeply. Because, in the interstices of this story there is an abyss that can be glimpsed and which we immediately identify in ourselves and in the society in which we live. An abyss teeming with violence, desires and horrific, fevered ghosts, which we normally are not aware of except through privileged experiences which occasionally reveal it, reminding us that, however much we might try to consign it to the shadows and wipe it from our memory, it is an integral part of human nature and remains, with its monsters and seductive sirens, as a permanent challenge to the habits and customs of civilisation.

At a certain point in his internal drama, von Aschenbach attempts to sublimate his passion through myth. He moves it to the world of culture and transforms himself into Socrates, talking to Phaedrus about beauty and love on the banks of the Ilisos. This is a clever move by the author to cleanse to some extent the noxious vapours emanating from the pleasurable hell in which von Aschenbach finds himself, giving them a philosophical dimension, making them less carnal, broadening the scope of the story by providing a cultural context. Also, it is not gratuitous. Von Aschenbach was a living ‘classic’, and it is quite natural for his consciousness to search within the world of culture for precedents and references to what is happening to him. But the abyss that has opened up beneath his feet, and which the writer plunges into without any sense of remorse, is not a site of pure ideas or the spirit. It is the site of the body, which he had regulated and disdained and which now is reclaiming its rights, freeing itself and vanquishing the spirit that had held it captive.

This demand has a beginning but no end: awoken by any stimulus — the beauty of Tadzio, for example — free to grow and become immersed in daily life in search of a satisfaction that the fantasy that fuels it makes ever more unattainable, sexual desire, that source of pleasure, can also be a deadly plague for the city. For that reason, life in the city imposes limits and morality on sexual desire, religion and culture looks to tame it and confine it. In the final weeks of his life, Gustav von Aschenbach — and with him the readers of this beautiful parable — discovers that these attempts at control are always relative because, as happens to him, the desire to recover a total sovereignty, which has been stifled by individuals for the benefit of social existence, re-emerges from time to time, demanding that life should not just be reason, peace and discipline but also madness, violence and chaos. In the depths of this exemplary citizen, von Aschenbach, there lurked a painted savage, looking for the right moment to come into the light and take revenge.

Lima, September 1988

Mrs Dalloway

The Intense and Sumptuous Life of Banality

Mrs Dalloway recounts a normal day in the London life of Clarissa Dalloway, a dull upper-middle-class lady married to a Conservative MP, and the mother of an adolescent daughter. The story begins one sunny morning in June 1923, as Clarissa is walking through the centre of the city and ends that same evening when the guests at a party given at the Dalloways’ house are beginning to leave. Although during the day one tragic event occurs — the suicide of a young man who had returned from the war with his mind unbalanced — what is significant about the story is not this episode, or the myriad small events and memories that make up the story as a whole, but the fact that all this is narrated from inside the mind of one of the characters, that subtle and impalpable reality where life becomes impression, enjoyment, suffering, memory. The novel appeared in 1925 and was the first of the three great novels — the others are To the Lighthouse and The Waves — in which Virginia Woolf would revolutionise the narrative art of her time, creating a language capable of persuasively imitating human subjectivity, the meanderings and elusive rhythms of consciousness. Her achievement is no less than that of Proust and Joyce: she complements and enriches their work through her particular feminine sensibility. I know how debatable it is to apply the adjective feminine to a work of literature, and I accept that in innumerable cases the use of such a term is somewhat arbitrary. But for books like La Princesse de Clèves or for authors like Colette or Virginia Woolf, it seems absolutely appropriate. In Mrs Dalloway, reality has been reinvented from a perspective that mainly, but not completely, expresses the point of view and condition of a woman. And for that reason, it is the feminine experiences of the story that are most vivid in the reader’s memory, that seem to us essentially true, like the example of the formidable old woman, Clarissa’s aunt Miss Helen Parry, who at eightysomething years old, in the hubbub of the party, only remembers the wild and splendid orchids of her youth in Burma, which she picked and reproduced in watercolours.

On some occasions, in masterpieces that mark a new development in narrative form, the form overshadows the characters and the plot to such an extent that life seems to become frozen and disappear from the novel, consumed by the technique, by the words and order or disorder of the narration. This is what occurs, at times, in Joyce’s Ulysses, and what takes Finnegans Wake to the bounds of illegibility. None of this happens in Mrs Dalloway (although in To the Lighthouse and, above all, The Waves it is on the brink of happening). The balance between the form and content of the tale is perfect, and readers never feel that they are witnessing what this book is as well, a daring experiment; only that they are witnessing the delicate and uncertain network of events that happen to a handful of human beings on a hot summer’s day in the streets, parks and houses of central London. Life is always there, on each line, in each syllable of the book, brimming with grace and refinement, prodigious and incommensurable, rich and diverse in all its aspects. ‘Beauty was everywhere’ is a sentence that springs to the befuddled mind of Septimus Warren Smith, who was to be driven by fear and grief to kill himself. And it is true; in Mrs Dalloway the real world has been remade and perfected to such a degree by the deicidal genius of its creator, that everything in it is beautiful, including what in our unstable objective reality we hold to be dirty and ugly.

To reach this sovereign state, a novel must free itself from real reality, convince the reader that it is a different reality, with its own laws, time, myths and other characteristics that are proper to it and to it alone. What gives a novel its originality — marks its difference from the real world — is the added element that the fantasy and art of the writer provide when he or she transforms objective and historical experience into fiction. The added element is never just a plot, a style, a temporal order, a point of view; it is always a complex combination of factors that affects the form and content and the characters of a story, and which gives it its autonomous existence. Only failed fictions reproduce reality: successful fictions abolish and transfigure reality.

The miraculous originality of Mrs Dalloway lies in the ways in which life is embellished, the secret beauty of every object and every circumstance being thrown into relief. Just as old Miss Parry has abolished from her memory everything except the orchids and some images of gorges and coolies, so the world of fiction has segregated from the real world sex, misery and ugliness and has metamorphosed everything that is in any way a reminder of them into conventional feelings, unimportant allusions or aesthetic pleasure. At the same time it has intensified the presence of ordinary, banal or intangible things, arraying them in unexpected sumptuousness and imbuing them with a hitherto unheard-of prominence, life and dignity. This ‘poetic’ transformation of the world — for once this epithet is justified — is radical and yet is not immediately perceptible, for, if it were so, it would give the impression of being a fake book, a forced distortion of real life, and Mrs Dalloway, by contrast, as with all persuasive fictions — these lies so well made that they pass as truths — seems to submerge us fully in the most authentic of human experience. But it is clear that the fraudulent reconstruction of reality in the novel, reducing it to the most refined, pure aesthetic sensibility, could not be more radical or complete. Why is this sleight of hand not immediately apparent? Because of the rigorous coherence with which the unreality of the novel is described — or, rather, invented — that world in which all the characters without exception have a marvellous ability to detect what is extraordinary in the mundane, what is eternal in the ephemeral and what is glorious in mediocrity, the way Virginia Woolf herself could do. For the characters of this fiction — of every fiction — have been fashioned in the image and likeness of their creator.

But is it the characters of the novel that have these exceptional attributes, or rather just the character who narrates and dictates them, and often speaks through their mouths? I am referring to the narrator — and here we should talk about a female narrator — of the story. The narrator is always the central character in a fiction. Invisible or present, singular or multiple, embodied in the first or second or third person, omniscient god or implied witness in the novel, the narrator is the first and most important character that a novelist must invent in order to make the tale convincing. This elusive, ubiquitous narrator of Mrs Dalloway is Virginia Woolf’s great achievement in this book, the reason for the story’s magic and irresistible power of persuasion.

The narrator of the novel is always located in the private world of the characters, never in the outside world. What is narrated to us comes through filters, diluted and refined by the sensibility of those people. The fluid consciousnesses of Mrs Dalloway, Richard, her husband, Peter Walsh, Elizabeth, Doris Kilman, the tormented Septimus and Rezia, his Italian wife, offer the perspectives from which that hot summer’s morning is constructed, in the streets of London, with the din of horns and engines, and its green and scented parks. The objective world dissolves into these consciousnesses before it reaches the reader and is deformed and reformed according to the state of mind of each character; memories and impressions are added, which become blended with dreams and fantasies. In this way, the reader of Mrs Dalloway is never provided with an objective reality, but only with the different subjective versions that the characters weave out of this reality. This immaterial substance, as slippery as quicksilver, and yet, essentially human — life transformed into memory, feeling, sensation, desire, impulse — is the prism through which the narrator of Mrs Dalloway reveals the world and tells the story. This is what creates, from the opening lines, the extraordinary atmosphere of the novel: that of a suspended, subtle reality, suffused with the same evasive quality as light, scents and the tender and furtive images of memory.

This immaterial, evanescent climate that the characters inhabit gives the reader of Mrs Dalloway the impression of being faced with a totally strange world, despite the fact that what happens in the novel could not be more trivial or anodyne. Many years after the book was published, a French writer, Nathalie Sarraute, attempted to describe in a series of fictions what she called human ‘tropisms’, those pulses or instinctive movements that precede action and thought itself and establish a slender umbilical cord between rational beings, animals and plants. Her novels, which were interesting, but which were never more than audacious experiments, had the virtue, for me, of enriching retrospectively my reading of this novel of Virginia Woolf. Now that I have reread it, I am quite clear that in Mrs Dalloway she managed to describe this mysterious and recondite first stirring of life, the ‘tropisms’ that Nathalie Sarraute, with less success, would seek to explore some decades later.

This withdrawal into the subjective is one characteristic of the narrator; another is the ability to disappear into the consciousnesses of the characters, to become one with them. This is an exceptionally discreet and figurative narrator, who avoids being noticed and who often jumps — but always taking the utmost care not to reveal herself — from one interior consciousness to another. When it exists, the distance between the narrator and the character is minimal, and constantly disappears as the narrator disappears and is replaced by the character: the narration then becomes a monologue. These changes occur constantly, sometimes on several occasions in one page, and despite this, we hardly notice them, such is the skill with which the narrator carries out these transformations, disappearances and reappearances.

The beautifully fashioned narrative employs both an indirect libre style and interior monologue. The indirect libre style, invented by Flaubert, consists of narrating through an impersonal and omniscient narrator — from a grammatical third person — who is placed very close to the character, so close that on occasion the narrator seems to become confused with the character, abolished by the character. The interior monologue, perfected by Joyce, is the narration through a narrator-character — who narrates from the first person. The person who tells the story of Mrs Dalloway is at times an impersonal narrator, very close to the characters, who recounts to us their thoughts, actions and perceptions, imitating their voice, their accent, their reserve, taking on their sympathies and phobias, and at times it is the characters themselves, whose monologues cast out the omniscient narrator from the narration.

These ‘changes’ of narrator occur innumerable times in the novel, but are only noticeable on a few occasions. On many other occasions it is impossible to determine whether the narrator is the omniscient narrator or the characters themselves, since the narration seems to take place in a liminal space between the two, or seems to be both at once, an impossible point of view in which the first and third persons would not be contradictory but would form a single grammatical person. This formal flourish is particularly effective in the episodes relating to young Septimus Warren Smith, whose mental disintegration we witness from very close up, or we share from within the unfathomable depths of his insecurity and panic.

Septimus Warren Smith is a dramatic person in a novel where all the other characters have conventional and predictable lives, so decrepit and boring that only the revitalising, transforming power of the prose of Virginia Woolf can fill them with enchantment and mystery. The presence of this poor boy who went as a volunteer to the war and returned decorated and apparently unharmed, though wounded in spirit, is disquieting as well as piteous. Because it allows us to glimpse the fact that, despite the many pages that seek to bedeck it in beauty and loftiness, not everything is attractive, agreeable, easy or civilised in the world of Clarissa Dalloway and her friends. There also exists, albeit far from them, cruelty, grief, incomprehension and stupidity, without which the madness and suicide of Septimus would be inconceivable. All this is kept at a distance through rituals and good breeding, through money and good fortune, but at times it tracks them, on the other side of the walls they have erected to remain blind and happy, with its keen sense of smell. Clarissa has premonitions of it. For that reason she shudders in the presence of the imposing figure of Sir William Bradshaw, the psychiatrist, for she sees him, she does not know why, as a danger. She is not wrong: the story makes it very clear that if young Warren Smith was unhinged by war, it is the science of psychiatrists that makes him hurl himself into the abyss.

I read somewhere that a celebrated Japanese calligrapher was in the habit of staining his writing with a blob of ink. ‘Without this contrast, the perfection of my work would not be given its due,’ he explained. Without this small trace of raw reality that is the story of Septimus Warren Smith, the world into which Clarissa Dalloway was born, and which she helped so much to create, would not seem so unpolluted and spiritual, so golden and so artistic.

Fuengirola, 13 July 1989

Nadja

Nadja as Fiction

Surrealism, and André Breton in particular, had a very low opinion of the novel: it was a pedestrian, bourgeois genre, too subordinate to the real world, society, history, rationality and common sense for it be able to express, like poetry — the preferred genre of the movement — the everyday-marvellous, to laugh at logical order or to delve into the mysterious recesses of dream and the world of the subconscious. In the Surrealist Manifesto, description — which is inseparable from narrative — is ridiculed as an impossible aspiration and a vulgar pursuit. No Surrealist worthy of the name could have written a text beginning, as novels are wont to begin, with sentences as banal as the one detested by Valéry: ‘La marquise sortit à cinq heures’.²¹

The novels that Breton tolerated and even praised were those hermaphrodite books which fell between story and poetry, between real reality and a visionary, fantastic order, like Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris, or the novels of Julien Gracq. His sympathy for the English Gothic novel or for Henry Miller’s Tropics always underlined the eccentric, unconsciously rebellious or unruly nature of these works, and their marginality with respect to the form and content of what is usually considered to be the terrain of the novel.

However, the passage of time has altered the strict ideas that still separated the different genres when the Surrealists exploded on to the scene in the 1920s, and today, more than a century after Breton’s birth, anyone trying to establish a border between poetry and the novel would find themselves in some difficulty. After Roland Barthes has proclaimed the death of the author, Foucault has discovered that man does not exist and Derrida and the deconstructionists have established that not even life exists, at least in literature, for literature, this dizzying torrent of words, is an autonomous and formal reality, in which texts refer to other texts and overlap with, replace, modify and clarify or obscure each other without any relation to life as lived and to flesh-and-blood bipeds — who, in these circumstances, would dare to keep poetry and the novel as two sovereign entities as André Breton and his friends once did?

With all the respect in the world for a poet and a movement that I discovered as an adolescent — thanks to a surrealist poet, César Moro — that I read with fervour and which has surely been an influence on my formation as a writer (although at first glance it would not appear so), I would have to say that I think that the passage of time has deconstructed surrealism both historically and culturally in the sense that would have upset André Breton the most. That is to say that it has become a quintessentially literary movement whose verbal stridency, provocative spectacles, word play, defence of magic and unreason, pursuit of verbal automatism and contempt for the ‘literary’, now appear undramatic, domesticated and non-belligerent, without the slightest power to transform customs, morality or history, quaint displays by a group of artists and poets whose chief merit lay in their ability to stir up trouble in the intellectual field, shaking it out of its academic inertia and introducing new forms, new techniques and new themes — a different use of word and image — in the visual arts and in literature.

Today Breton’s ideas seem closer to poetry than to philosophy, and what we admire in them, apart from their casuistic intricacy and luxuriant verbosity, is the moral attitude that underpins them, that coherence between speech, writing and action that Breton demanded in his followers with the same severity and fanaticism that he applied to himself. This coherence is doubtless admirable; the same cannot be said of the intransigence shown to those who did not subscribe to the changing orthodoxy of the movement and were excommunicated as traitors or as sacrilegious or were struck down as Pharisees.

All this agitation and violence, the dictates and the cutting remarks, have remained in the past. What is there left? For me, apart from a rich collection of anecdotes, a storm in a glass of water, a beautiful utopia, never achieved and unachievable — to change life and to enthrone total human freedom through the subtle weapons of poetry — there are some beautiful poems — the best of them the ‘Ode à Charles Fourier’ — an anthology of black humour, a very partisan but absorbing essay dedicated to Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, and, above all, a delicate, highly original novel about love: Nadja.

Although definitions often confuse more than they illuminate, I will define the novel provisionally as that branch of fiction that sets out to construct, with imagination and words, a fictitious reality, a world apart that, although taking inspiration from reality and the real world, does not reflect them, but rather supplants and denies them. The originality of every fiction lies — although this might seem a tautology — in its being fictive, that is to say, in not resembling the world in which we live, but rather in freeing itself from this world and showing us a world that does not exist and, precisely because it does not exist, it is something we dream about and desire.

If that is a fiction, then Nadja is the best illustration there can be. The story that it tells is not of this world, even though it pretends to be so, as happens in all good novels whose powers of persuasion always have us taking as objective truth what is mere illusion, and even though the world that it describes — yes, that it describes, although in every novel description is synonymous with invention — seems, through a number of very precise references, to be Paris in the twenties, with a handful of streets, squares, statues, parks, woods and cafés recreated as a backdrop to the action and even illustrated with beautiful photographs.

The story could not be simpler. The narrator, who tells the story as a protagonist within it, casually meets in a café the female character Nadja, a strange, dreamy woman who seems to inhabit a private world of fantasy and dread, on the border between reason and madness, who from the first moment captivates him completely. An intimate relationship grows up between them that we might describe as sentimental rather than erotic or sexual, on the basis of planned or casual (the narrator would like us to call them magical) meetings which, in the few months that they last — from October to December 1926 — open for the narrator the doors to a mysterious and unpredictable world of great spiritual richness, not governed by physical laws or rational schema, but rather by those obscure, fascinating and indefinable forces that we allude to — that the narrator alludes to frequently — when we speak of the marvellous, of magic, or of poetry. The relationship ends as strangely as it began, and the last we hear about Nadja is that she is in a mental asylum, because she is considered mad, something that embitters and exasperates the narrator who hates psychiatry and asylums and who sees what society calls madness — at least in the case of Nadja — as an extreme form of rebellion, a heroic way of exercising freedom.

This is, of course, a profoundly romantic story due to its poetic nature, its extreme antisocial individualism and its tragic ending, and one could also consider the mention of Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet in the first pages of the novel as an auspicious, premonitory indication of what will happen later. What distinguishes Nadja from those extreme stories of impossible love and couples torn apart by an implacable Fate that the romantic sensibility favoured, is not the plot but rather Breton’s elegant, coruscating prose, with its labyrinthine pace and its unusual metaphors, and still more the originality of his structure, the daring way in which he organises his chronology and the different planes of reality from which the story is narrated.

Of course it is important to point out that that the main character in the story — the hero, in romantic terminology — is not the eponymous Nadja but the person who evokes her and tells her story, that overwhelming presence who is never away from the reader’s eyes or mind for one second: the narrator. Visible or invisible, a witness or a protagonist who narrates from inside the narrative, or an all-powerful God the Father at whose commands the action develops, the narrator is always the most important character in any fiction and is always an invention, a fiction, even in those mendacious cases like Nadja, where the author of the novel declares that he is hiding under the skin of the narrator. This is never possible. Between the author and narrator of a novel there is always the unbridgeable gap that separates objective reality from fantasy, words from deeds and the mortal being of flesh and blood from the verbal simulacrum.

Whether they know it or not, whether they do it deliberately or through simple intuition, authors of novels always invent the narrator, even though they might add their own name or include episodes of their biography. The narrator invented by Breton to tell the story of Nadja, whom he passed off as himself, has clear romantic affiliations in his monumental self-worship, that narcissism that drives him all the time that he is narrating to display himself in the centre of the action, to refract himself through the action, and the action through himself, so that the story of Nadja is, in truth, the story of Nadja filtered through the narrator, reflected in the distorting mirror of his exquisite personality. The narrator of Nadja, like the narrator of Les Misérables or The Three Musketeers, reveals himself as he reveals the story. It is not, therefore, surprising that from these first pages, he confesses his scant interest in Flaubert who, we remember, was opposed to narrative subjectivity and demanded that the novel had the semblance of impersonality, that is to say that it pretended to be a self-sufficient story (in reality told by invisible narrators).

Nadja is the complete opposite: an almost invisible story told by an overpowering subjectivity, which is shamelessly visible. In the story many things happen, of course, but what is really important is not what can be summarised concretely: the actions of the heroine, the rare coincidences that bring the couple together or separate them, their cryptic conversations, of which we are only given snippets, or the references to places, books, paintings, writers or painters that the astute narrator uses to frame the action. What is important is an other reality, different to the reality that offers a setting for what takes place in the novel, which begins to emerge in a subtle manner, somewhat awry, in certain allusions in the conversations, in Nadja’s drawings that are full of symbols and allegories that are difficult to interpret, and in the sudden premonitions or intuitions of the narrator who, in this way, manages to make us share his certainty that real life, genuine reality is hidden beneath the reality that we live consciously, hidden from us by routine, stupidity, conformity and everything that he undervalues or despises — rationality, social order, public institutions — and that only certain free people, who are outside what Rubén Darío called the ‘thick, municipal common herd’ can have access to. The fascination that Nadja exerts over him, and that he transmits to us, is due precisely to the fact that she appears to be a visitor in our world, someone who comes from (and has not entirely left) another reality, unknown and invisible, that can only be glimpsed in premonitions by people of exceptional sensibility like the narrator, and can only be described through association or metaphor, approximating to notions like the Marvellous and the Fantastic.

This invisible reality, this life of pure poetry, without prose, where is it to be found? What is it like? Does it exist outside the mind or is it pure fantasy? In the prosaic reality of us common mortals (the phrase is from Montaigne), which Surrealism desperately wanted to transform through the magic wand of poetry, Freud had discovered the world of the unconscious and had described the subtle ways in which the phantoms sheltering there influenced behaviour, caused or resolved conflicts and meddled in people’s lives. The discovery of this other dimension of human life influenced, as is well known, in a decisive (but not pious) way the theories and practices of Surrealism, and there is no doubt that without this precedent Nadja (which contains an ambiguous sentence that criticises but also shows respect for psychoanalysis) could not have been written, at least in the way that it was written. But a Freudian reading would give us a truncated, caricaturist version of the novel. For it is not the traumas that brought the heroine to the edge of madness — which a psychiatric reading of Nadja would focus on — that are of interest in her story, but rather the elated justification that the narrator makes for this borderline space, a domain that he considers a superior form of life, an existential realm where human life is more full and more free.

It is, of course, a fiction. A beautiful and seductive fiction that exists only — but this only must be understood as a universe of riches to beguile our sensitivity and fantasy — within the bewitching life of dreams and illusions that are the reality of fiction, that lie that we fashion and in which we believe in order better to endure our real lives.

Borges often said, ‘I am eaten up by literature’. There is nothing pejorative in this remark when Borges makes it. Because what he most loved in life — and perhaps one could say that the only thing that he loved and knew deeply — was literature. But Breton would have considered it an insult if someone had said of Nadja what is now very obvious to us, that it is ‘a book eaten up by literature’. Literature for Breton meant artifice, pose, empty gestures of content, frivolous vanity, conformity to the established order. But what is certain is that while literature can be all those things, it can also be, in outstanding cases like his, daring, novelty, rebellion, an exploration of the most remote recesses of the spirit and an enrichment of real life through fantasy and writing.

This is the operation that Nadja carries out on the real world that it purports to narrate: it transforms it into another world, by bathing it in beautiful poetry. The Paris of its pages is not the boisterous and carefree European city, the capital of artistic avant-gardes, of literary quarrels and inter-war political violence. In the book, thanks to its bewitching rhetoric and its theatrical trappings, its narrative strategy of silences and temporal leaps, of veiled allusions, puzzles, false trails and sudden poetic flourishes, its striking incidents — the terrible spectacle of Les Détraquées, the wonderful story about the amnesiac man — and its constant references to books and paintings that suffuse the story with its own special radiance, Paris has become a fantastic city, where the marvellous is an almost tangible reality and where everything seems to comply in docile fashion to those secret magic laws that only the diviners detect and the poets intuit, and which the narrator superimposes like a cartographer over the real city.

At the end of the story the Hôtel des Grands Hommes, the statue of Etienne Dolet, the coal-yards, the Port de Saint-Denis, the Boulevard theatres, the flea market, the bookshops, the cafés, the shops and the parks have become transformed into landmarks and monuments of a precious, buried world that is eminently subjective, and has mysterious correlations and assonances with people’s lives, a perfect frame within which there can emerge a character so detached from everyday life, so removed from what is called common sense, like Nadja, the woman who enchants the narrator and who orders him at one point in the story: ‘Tu écriras un roman sur moi’ (‘You will write a novel about me’).

The spell was so strong that Breton obeyed and did not limit himself to describing the Nadja that existed, the fleeting Nadja of flesh and blood. In order to tell the story persuasively, he used his fantasy more than his memory, he invented more than he recorded and, like all good novelists, he took every liberty with time, space and words, writing, ‘sans ordre préétabli, et selon le caprice de l’heure qui laisse surnager ce qui surnage’ (‘without any pre-established order, following the whim of the moment which allows things to float on the surface as they will’).²²

London, November 1996

La Condition humaine

The Hero, the Buffoon and History

When in November 1996 the French government decided to move the remains of André Malraux to the Pantheon, there was a very harsh critical reaction against his work in the United States and Europe, in contrast to the many events organised in his honour by President Jacques Chirac and his supporters. A critical revision that, in some cases, amounted to a literary lynching. See, for example, the ferocious article in the New York Times — that barometer of political correctness in the Anglo-Saxon world — by a critic as respectable as Simon Leys. If we were to believe him and other critics, then Malraux was an overrated writer, a mediocre novelist and a wordy and boastful essayist with a declamatory style, whose delirious historical and philosophical declarations in his essays were mere verbal fireworks, the conjuring tricks of a charlatan.

I do not agree with this unjust and prejudiced view of Malraux’s work. It is true, he did have a certain propensity to excessive wordiness — a congenital vice of the French literary tradition — and at times, in his essays on art, he could strain after rhetorical effect and fall into tricky obscurity (like many of his colleagues). But there are charlatans and charlatans. Malraux was one to the highest possible degree of rhetorical splendour, brimming over with such intelligence and culture that in his case the vice of wordiness often became a virtue. Even when the tumultuous prose that he wrote said nothing, as is the case in some pages of Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence), there was so much beauty in that tangled emptiness of words that it was enchanting. But if as a critic he was sometimes rhetorical, as a novelist he was a model of efficiency and precision. Among his novels is one of the most admirable works of the twentieth century, La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate, 1933).

As soon as I had read it, charging through it in one night, and then got to know something about the author through a book by Pierre de Boisdeffre, I knew that his was the life that I would have liked to have led. I continued to think this in the sixties in France, when as a journalist I covered the actions, polemics and speeches of the Minister of Culture of the Fifth Republic. I feel the same every time I read his autobiographical accounts, or the biographies that, following the work of Jean Lacouture, have appeared in recent years with new facts about his life, that was as abundant and dramatic as those of the great adventurers of his novels.

I am also a literary fetishist, and I really like to find out everything there is to know about the writers I admire: what they did and did not do, what friends and enemies attributed to them and what they themselves invented for posterity. I am, therefore, overwhelmed by the extraordinary number of public revelations, betrayals, accusations and scandals that are now adding to the already very rich mythology surrounding André Malraux. For here was a man that was not only a great writer, but someone who managed, in his seventy-five years (1901–76), to be present, often in a starring role, at the great events of his century — the Chinese revolution, the anti-colonial struggles in Asia, the antifascist movement in Europe, the war in Spain, the resistance against the Nazis, decolonisation and the reform of France under De Gaulle — and to leave a distinct mark on his time.

He was a Communist travelling companion and a fervent nationalist; a publisher of clandestine pornography; a speculator on the Stock Exchange, where he became rich and later bankrupt in a few months (squandering all his wife’s money); a raider of the statues of the temple of Banteai-Srei, in Cambodia, for which he was sentenced to three years in prison (his precocious literary fame gained him a reprieve); an anti-colonialist conspirator in Saigon; a driving force behind avant-garde literary magazines and a promoter of German Expressionism, Cubism and all the artistic and poetic experiments of the twenties and thirties; one of the first critics and theoreticians of cinema; a participant in and witness to the revolutionary strikes in Canton in 1925; an organiser and member of an expedition (on a toy motorbike) to Arabia in search of the treasure of the Queen of Saba; a committed intellectual and a towering figure in all the congresses and organisations of European antifascist artists and writers; the organiser of the Spain Squadron (that would later be called the André Malraux Squadron) for the defence of the Republic during the Spanish Civil War; a hero of the French resistance and colonel of the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade; a political supporter and minister in all the governments of General De Gaulle who, from the time of their first meeting in August 1945, inspired an almost religious devotion in him.

This life is as intense and diverse as it is contradictory, and can be interpreted in many conflicting ways. What there is no doubt about is that his life offers that very rare alliance of thought and action, and at the highest level, because while he participated with such brio in the great events and disasters of his age, he was a man endowed with an exceptional lucidity and creative drive that allowed him to keep an intelligent distance from lived experience and transform it into critical reflection and vigorous fictions. A handful of writers who were his contemporaries were, like Malraux, completely involved in living history: Orwell, Koestler, T. E. Lawrence. These three writers wrote admirable essays on the tragic reality that they were living; but none of them captured it in fiction with the talent of Malraux. All his novels are excellent, although L’Espoir (Days of Hope) is too long and Les Conquérants (The Conquerors), La Voie royale (The Royal Way) and Le Temps du mépris (An Age of Oppression) are too short. Man’s Fate is a masterpiece, worthy to be quoted alongside the work of Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, Thomas Mann or Kafka, as one of the most dazzling creations of our time. I say this with the certainty of one who has read it at least a half a dozen times, feeling, each time, the agonised shudder of the terrorist Chen before he plunges his knife into his sleeping victim, and moved to tears by Katow’s magnificent gesture, when he gives his cyanide pill to two young Chinese, condemned, like him, by the torturers of Kuomintang, to be burned alive. Everything in this novel is perfect: the epic story, spiced with romantic interludes; the contrast between personal adventure and ideological debates; the opposing psychologies and cultures of the characters and the foolish actions of Baron Clappique that give a touch of excess and absurdity — or, we might say, unpredictability and freedom — to a life that otherwise could have seemed excessively logical; but above all, the effectiveness of the syncopated, pared-down prose, which forces readers to use their imagination at all times to fill the spaces that are scarcely outlined in the dialogues and the descriptions.

Man’s Fate is based on a real revolution that took place in 1927 in Shanghai, led by the Chinese Communist Party and its allies, the Kuomintang, against the Men of War, as the military autocrats who governed deeply divided China were called, a China in which the Western powers had managed to establish colonial enclaves, by force or corruption. An envoy of Mao, Chou-En-Lai, on whom the character of Kyo is partly based, led this revolution. But, unlike Kyo, Chou-En-Lai was not killed when, after defeating the military government, the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-Chek turned against their Communist allies and, as the novel describes, savagely repressed them; he managed to escape and rejoin Mao, accompanying him on the Long March and remaining his deputy for the rest of his life.

Malraux was not in Shanghai during the time of the events that he narrates (or rather, invents); but he was in Canton during the insurrectionary strikes of 1925, and was a friend and collaborator (it has never been established to what degree), of Borodin, the envoy sent by the Comintern (in other words, by Stalin) to advise the Communist movement in China. This doubtless helped him to convey that sense of a ‘lived’ experience in the novel when he memorably describes the attacks and the street fighting. From an ideological point of view, Man’s Fate is unambiguously pro-Communist. It is not Stalinist, however, but rather Trotskyist, since the story explicitly condemns the orders from Moscow, imposed on the Chinese Communists by the Comintern bureaucrats, to hand over their arms to Chiang Kai-Chek instead of hiding them and defending themselves when their Kuomintang allies turn against them. Let us not forget that these episodes take place in China, while in the Soviet Union the great debate between Stalinists and Trotskyists about permanent revolution or Communism in one country was intensifying (even though the extermination of Trotskyists had already begun).

But an ideological or merely political reading would miss the main point: that the world which the novel creates in such detail owes more to the imagination and the convulsive force of the tale than to the historical episodes that it uses as its raw material.

It is not so much a novel as a classical tragedy grafted onto modern life. A group of men (and a single woman, May, who in the essentially misogynist world of Malraux is barely a sketch, only slightly more clearly defined than Valérie and the courtesans who form part of the background) from different parts of the world face up to a superior enemy in order to, in Kyo’s words, ‘give back dignity’ to those that they are fighting for: the wretched, the defeated, the exploited, the rural and industrial slaves. In this struggle, in which they are defeated and perish, Kyo, Chen and Katow reach a higher moral plane, achieve a greatness that expresses ‘the human condition’ in its most exemplary form.

Life is not like this, and, of course, revolutions are not made up of noble and despicable actions distributed in rectilinear fashion between the combatants of each side. To find such schematic political and ethical concerns in any of the fictions produced by socialist realism would be profoundly tedious. The fact that Man’s Fate convinces us of its truth means that Malraux was capable, like all great creators, of pulling the wool over our eyes, masking his views with the irresistible appearance of reality.

The truth is that flesh-and-blood revolutions are not so clear cut in our own world of greys and shifting tones, nor do revolutionaries shine forth so pure, coherent, brave and self-sacrificing as in the turbulent pages of the novel. Why, then, do we find them so hypnotic? Why are we surprised and why do we suffer when Katow, that silent adventurer, accepts a terrible death as the price of his generous action, or why are we blown apart, with Chen, beneath the car that Chiang Kai-Chek was not travelling in? Why, if these characters are fabrications? Because they embody a universal ideal, the supreme aspiration to perfection and the absolute that resides in every human heart. But, more than this, because the skill of the narrator is so consummate that he manages to persuade us of the intimate truth of these secular angels, of these saints that he has brought down from heaven and turned into common mortals, heroes who appear to be just like any one of us.

The novel is superbly concise. The bare descriptions often emerge from the dialogues and reflections of the characters, rapid sketches that are sufficient to create the depressing urban landscape: teeming Shanghai, bristling with wire fences, swept by the smoke of the factories and the rain, where hunger, promiscuity and the worst cruelties coexist with generosity, fraternity and heroism. Concise, sharp, the style never says too much, always too little. Every episode is like the tip of an iceberg; but they radiate such intensity that the reader’s imagination can reconstruct the totality of the action from this sparse description without difficulty, the place where it occurs as well as the state of mind and secret motivations of the protagonists. This synthetic method gives the novel a great density and an epic breadth. The street action sequences, like the capture of the police post by Chen and his men at the beginning, and the fall of the trench where Katow and the Communists have taken refuge at the end, are small, tense, masterly descriptions that keep the reader in suspense. These and other episodes in Man’s Fate are visually cinematographic, something which Dos Passos also managed to achieve in his best tales in those same years.

An excess of intelligence is often fatal in a novel because it can work against the persuasive power of the fiction. But in Malraux’s novels, intelligence is an atmosphere, it is everywhere, in the narrator and all the characters: the wise Gisors is no less lucid than the policeman Konig, and even the Belgian Hemmelrich, who is presented as a fundamentally mediocre person, reflects on his failures and frustrations with a dazzling mental clarity. Intelligence does not get in the way of verisimilitude in Man’s Fate (by contrast it undermines realism in all Sartre’s novels) because in the novel intelligence is a universal attribute of the living. This is one of the main characteristics of the ‘added element’ in the novel, which gives it sovereignty, its own life that is different to real life.

The great character of the book is not Kyo, as the narrator would have it, as he carefully stresses the discipline, team spirit and submission to leadership of this perfect militant. It is Chen, the anarchist, the individualist, who changes from being an activist to being a terrorist, a superior state, in his view, because by killing and dying he can accelerate history which, for the party revolutionary, is made up of slow collective movements in which the individual counts for little or nothing. In the character of Chen we find a sketch of what over the years would become Malraux’s ideology: the hero who, thanks to his lucidity, force of will and daring, can prevail over the ‘laws’ of history. The fact that he fails — Malraux’s characters are always defeated — is the price that he pays for the eventual triumph of the cause.

As well as being brave, tragic and intelligent, Malraux’s characters are usually cultured: appreciative of beauty, well versed in art and philosophy, enthusiastic about exotic cultures. In Man’s Fate, the emblematic figure in this respect is old Gisors; but Clappique is made of the same stuff, for behind his bragging exhibitionism, there is a subtle man with an exquisite taste for aesthetic objects. Baron Clappique is an irruption of fantasy, absurdity, freedom and humour in this grave, logical, lugubrious and violent world of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. He is there to lighten, with a blast of irresponsibility and madness, that rarefied hell of suffering and cruelty. He also reminds us, contrary to what Kyo, Chen and Katow think, that life is made up not just of reason and collective values, but also of madness, instinct and individual passions that contradict and sometimes destroy these values.

Malraux’s creative impetus was not confined to his novels. It also suffuses his essays and autobiographical works, some of which — like the Anti-Mémoires or Les Chênes qu’on abat (Felled Oaks: Conversations with De Gaulle) — have such an overwhelming persuasive force, due to the bewitching nature of the prose, the fascination of his stories and rounded way in which the characters are described, that they do not seem to be accounts of events and people from real life but rather the fantasies of a conjurer, adept at the art of persuasion. I set out to read the last of these books, which narrates a conversation with De Gaulle at Colombey-les-deux-Églises on 11 December 1969, feeling rather hostile: it was political hagiography, a genre I detest, and I was sure that it would mythify and embellish nationalism, which is just as obtuse in France as it is in any other country. However, despite my firm decision, taken in advance, to detest the book completely, this dialogue between two monuments, who speak as only people in great books speak, with unremitting coherence and brilliance, broke down my defences, engrossed me in its delirious egotism and made me believe, as I read, the prophetic nonsense with which these two brilliant interlocutors consoled themselves: that, without De Gaulle, Europe would break up and that France, in the hands of the mediocre politicians that had come after him, would also go into decline. It seduced me, not convinced me, and now I try to explain it by saying that Felled Oaks is a magnificent, detestable book.

There is no one like a great writer to make us see mirages. Malraux could do this not only when he wrote, but also when he talked. This was another of his original gifts, one which, I believe, had no precursors or successors. Oratory is a minor art, superficial, full of mere sonorous and visual effects, usually devoid of thought, performed by and for garrulous people. But Malraux was an outstanding orator, as one can see from his Oraisons funèbres (Funerary Orations), capable of endowing a speech with a host of fresh and stimulating ideas, and clothing it with images of great rhetorical beauty. Some of these texts, like those that he read in the Pantheon over the coffin of the French resistance hero, Jean Moulin, and over the coffin of Le Corbusier, in the courtyard of the Louvre, are beautiful literary pieces, and those of us who heard him declaim them, with his thunderous voice, the necessary dramatic pauses and his visionary gaze, will never forget the spectacle (I heard them at a great distance, in the press pack, but I still went into a cold sweat and was very moved).

Malraux was like that throughout his life: a spectacle, that he himself prepared, directed and performed, with great skill and with due attention to the smallest detail. He knew that he was intelligent and brilliant and, despite this, he did not become an idiot. He was also very courageous; he did not fear death, and, because of that, even though death stalked him on many occasions, he was able to embark on all those risky undertakings that marked his existence. But he was also, thankfully, rather histrionic and narcissistic, a high-flying exhibitionist (a Baron Clappique), and that made him human, brought him down from those heights that his intelligence — that had so amazed Gide — had taken him to, down to our level, the level of simple mortals. Most of the writers I admire would have failed the Pantheon test; or their presence there, in that monument to official memory, would have seemed intolerable, an insult to their memory. How could a Flaubert, a Baudelaire, a Rimbaud have entered the Pantheon? But Malraux is not out of place there, nor do his works or his image become impoverished among those marbles. Because one of the innumerable facets of this symphonic man was that he loved showiness and theatricality, triumphal arches, flags, hymns, those symbols invented to cover over the existential void and feed our human vanity.

London, March 1999

Tropic of Cancer

The Happy Nihilist

I remember very clearly how I read Tropic of Cancer for the first time, thirty years ago: very quickly, overexcited, in the course of just one night. A Spanish friend had got hold of a French version of this maudit book about which so many stories were circulating in Lima, and when he saw how anxious I was to read it, he lent it to me for a few hours. It was a strange experience, completely different to what I had imagined, because the book was not scandalous, as was being said, because of its erotic scenes, but rather because of its vulgarity and its cheerful nihilism. It reminded me of Céline, in whose novels swearwords and filth also become poetry, and Breton’s Nadja, because, in Nadja and in Tropic of Cancer, the most everyday reality suddenly becomes transformed into dream-like images and unsettling nightmares.

The book impressed me, but I don’t think that I liked it. I had then — and I still have — a prejudice that novels should tell stories that begin and end, that they had an obligation to oppose the chaos of life with an artificial, tidy and persuasive order. Tropic of Cancer — like all Miller’s subsequent books — is chaos in pure form, effervescent anarchy, a great, romantic, coarse, firework display, from which the reader emerges somewhat nauseous, disturbed and rather more pessimistic about human existence than before the show. The risk with this type of loose, formless literature is that it can become just clever showmanship, and Henry Miller, like another of his maudit contemporaries, Jean Genet, often fell into this trap. But Tropic of Cancer, his first novel, fortunately avoided this danger. It is, without doubt, the best book that he wrote, one of the great literary creations of the inter-war period, and within the œuvre of Miller, the work that is closest to being a masterpiece.

I have reread it now with real pleasure. Time and the bad habits of our era have diminished its violence and what seemed to be its rhetorical daring; we now know that farts and gonorrhoea can also be aesthetic. But time has not impoverished the sorcery of his prose or lessened its impact. On the contrary, it has added to it both serenity and a sort of maturity. When it appeared in 1934, in a semi-clandestine edition, in linguistic exile, a victim of prohibitions and edifying attacks, what was praised or disparaged in the book was its iconoclasm, the insolence with which, in its sentences, the worst, most offensive, words displaced those considered as being in good taste, as well as its obsession with eschatology. Today this aspect of the novel shocks very few readers, since modern literature has adopted these elements that Miller introduced with Tropic of Cancer, to such an extent that in many ways they have become a platitude, like talking about the geometry of passions in the eighteenth century, or reviling the bourgeoisie in the Romantic era, or becoming historically committed at the time of existentialism. Rude words lost their rudeness some time ago, and sex and its ceremonies have been popularised to the point of tedium. All this has its downside, of course, but one of the clear advantages is that now we can finally judge if Henry Miller, as well as being an explosive writer and an erotic novelist, was also a genuine artist.

He was, without any doubt. He was a genuine creator, with his own world and vision of humanity and literature that clearly singled him out from other writers of his generation. He represented, in our time, like Céline or Genet, that satanic tradition of iconoclasts, of very different temperaments, for whom writing has throughout history signified defying the conventions of the age, spoiling the party of social harmony, bringing out into the light all the brutishness and filth that society — sometimes with good reason, at other times for no good reason — insists on repressing. This is one of the important functions of literature: to remind men and women that however firm the ground that they walk on appears to be, and however brightly the city that they live in shines, there are demons lurking everywhere that, at any moment, can cause a violent upheaval.

Cataclysm, apocalypse, are words that come immediately to mind when talking about Tropic of Cancer, despite the fact that in its pages the only blood spilled is in a few drunken brawls and the only war is the (always belligerent) fornication of its characters. But a premonition of imminent catastrophe haunts its pages, the intuition that everything that is being narrated is about to disappear in a holocaust. This intuition causes the novel’s picturesque and promiscuous characters to live in such a dissolute frenzy. Theirs is a world that is ending, that is disintegrating morally and socially in a hysterical spree, waiting for the arrival of the plague and death, as in the terrifying fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch. In historical terms, all this is rigorously accurate. Miller wrote the novel in Paris between 1931 and 1933, at a time leading up to the great conflagration that would sweep through Europe some years later. These were years of bonanza and partying, of happy thoughtlessness and splendid creativity. All the aesthetic vanguard movements flourished, and the Surrealists enchanted modern-minded people with their poetic imagination and their ‘provocation spectacles’. Paris was the capital of the artistic world and of human happiness.

In Tropic of Cancer we see the flip side of this story. Its world is Parisian, but it is light years away from that society of winners and prosperous optimists: it is made up of pariahs, pseudo-painters, pseudo-writers, drop-outs and parasites who live on the margins of the city, not participating in the feast, fighting over the scraps. Expatriates who have lost the intimate link with their country of origin — the United States, Russia — who have not taken root in Paris and live in a kind of cultural limbo. Its geographical reference points are brothels, bars, run-down hotels, sordid rooms, dreadful restaurants, and the parks, squares and streets that attract tramps. In order to survive in this difficult country, everything goes: from a mind-numbing job — correcting proofs in a newspaper — to scrounging, pimping or conning. Many use vague ideas about art to justify themselves — I have to write the important novel, to paint redemptive pictures, etc. — but in fact the only seriousness the group displays is their lack of seriousness, their promiscuity, their passive indifference and their slow disintegration.

This is a world — or rather an underworld — that I got to know at the end of the fifties, and I am sure that it was not very different to the one Miller frequented — and which inspired Tropic of Cancer — twenty years earlier. I was horrified by the slow, useless death of that bohemian Paris and I only got in touch with it out of necessity, when there was no other alternative. For that reason, I really can appreciate the feat of transforming this milieu into literature, of transforming these people, these rituals and all this asphyxiating mediocrity, into the dramatic and heroic characters that appear in the novel. But what is perhaps most noteworthy is that in this milieu, that was eaten away by inertia and defeatism, it was possible to conceive and complete a creative project as ambitious as Tropic of Cancer. (The book was rewritten three times and reduced by a third in its final version.)

Because the book is a creation rather than a testimony, its documentary value is indisputable, but what has been added by Miller’s fantasy and obsessions is more important than the historical material, and it is what gives Tropic of Cancer its literary status. What is autobiographical in the book is a semblance rather than a reality, a narrative strategy to give an appearance of trustworthiness to what is a fiction. This inevitably happens in a novel, whatever the intention of the author. Perhaps Miller wanted to put himself into his story, to offer himself as a spectacle, in a great exhibitionist display of total nakedness. But the result was identical to that of a novelist who carefully retreats from his or her narrative world and tries to depersonalise it as much as possible. The ‘Henry’ of Tropic of Cancer is an invention who gains our sympathy or dislike through actions and attitudes that unfold in an autonomous way, from within the confines of the fiction: in order to believe in him — to see him, feel him and, above all, hear him — it is not necessary to compare him to the living model that supposedly inspired the creation. Between the author and the narrator of a novel there is always a distance; the author always creates a narrator, be it an invisible narrator, or one who is involved in the story, be it an all-powerful god who is not open to appeal and who knows everything, or someone who lives as a character among the other characters and has as limited and subjective a vision as that of any of his fictitious fellow humans. The narrator is, in every case, the first person that is imagined by that distiller of fantasies that we call a novelist.

The narrator-character of Tropic of Cancer is the great creation of the novel, the supreme achievement of Miller as a novelist. This obscene narcissist ‘Henry’, who despises the world, caring only for his phallus and his guts, has, above all, an unmistakable tone, a Rabelaisian vitality for changing crudeness and dirt into art, for spiritualising, with his great poetic voice, physiological functions, pettiness and squalor, for giving aesthetic dignity to vulgarity. What is most remarkable is not the freedom and naturalness with which he describes sex or fantasises about it, reaching extremes of explicitness that have no precedent in modern literature, but rather his moral attitude. Or would it be more precise, perhaps, to talk about his amorality? I don’t think so. Because, although the behaviour of the narrator and his opinions defy established morality — or rather, established moralities — it would be unjust to argue that he is indifferent to this issue. His way of acting and thinking is coherent: his contempt for conventions is a response to a deep conviction, a certain vision of man, society and culture which, albeit in a somewhat confused way, is clearly shown throughout the novel.

One could define it as the morality of a romantic anarchist rebelling against modern, industrialised society, which he sees as a threat to individual sovereignty. The imprecations against ‘progress’ and the automatisation of humanity — what, in a subsequent book, Miller would call the ‘air-conditioned nightmare’ — are not very different to those hurled by Louis-Ferdinand Céline in those same years, in books similarly full of insults against the inhumanity of modern life, or Ezra Pound, for whom ‘mercantile’ society meant the end of civilisation. Céline and Pound — like Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach — believed that industrial society was synonymous with decadence, a deviation from certain exemplary standards that the West had achieved at certain moments in the past (Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance). This reactionary glorification of the past would throw them into the arms of fascism. This did not happen to Miller because he does not make his frontal assault on modern society in the name of an ideal, extinct or invented civilisation, but rather in the name of the individual, whose rights, whims, dreams and instincts are, for Miller, inalienable and precious values. These values, for him, are close to extinction, and they must be celebrated as loudly as possible before they are flattened by the implacable steam-rolling force of modernity.

His posture is no less utopian than that of other maudit writers who waged war against much-hated progress, but it is more sympathetic and, in the end, more defensible than that of those who became Nazis thinking that they were defending civilisation or tradition. Miller’s furious individualism kept him safe from that danger. No form of social organisation and, above all, of collective life is tolerable to this rebel who has left his job, his family, and all types of responsibility because they represented for him different forms of slavery. He has chosen to be a pariah and a drop-out because, leading this kind of existence — despite the inconveniences and the hunger he suffers — is the best way of preserving his freedom.

It is this conviction — that living the life almost of a beggar, with no obligations and with no respect for any of the established social conventions, is freer and more authentic than being caught up in the horrid swarm of alienated citizens — that makes ‘Henry’, the incurable pessimist about human destiny, a humorous person who enjoys life and is, in a certain way, happy. This unusual mixture is one of the character’s most original and attractive features, and the greatest delight in the novel, since it makes the atmosphere of frustration, amorality, abandon and filth in which the story takes place seem tolerable, pleasant and even seductive.

Although to talk of ‘story’ in relation to Tropic of Cancer is not quite exact. It would be better to talk of scenes, pictures, episodes, disconnected and without a precise chronology, brought together only by the presence of the narrator, who is such an overwhelming egotistical force that the other characters are reduced to blurred extras. But this disconnected form is not gratuitous: it corresponds to the narrator’s character, it reflects his incorrigible anarchy, his allergic reaction to any type of organisation or order, the supreme arbitrariness that he confuses with freedom. In Tropic of Cancer, Miller achieved the difficult balance between the disorder of spontaneity and pure intuition and the minimal rational and ordered control that any fiction requires for it to be persuasive (because although fiction deals more with instincts and passions than with ideas, it must always appeal first to the intelligence of its readers before appealing to their emotions). In later books this was not the case, and for that reason many of them, despite containing memorable episodes and flashes of brilliant writing, are tedious, too amorphous to engage the reader. In this novel, however, the reader is captivated from the first sentence, and the spell does not break until the end, with the blissful scene by the Seine.

It is a fine book, and its somewhat naïve philosophy touches us. Of course no civilisation can sustain such intransigent and extreme individualism, unless it is prepared to go back to the days when men held clubs and grunted. But, even so, we still feel nostalgia as we read this summons to total irresponsibility, to the great disorder of life and sex that preceded society, rules, prohibitions, the law…

Lima, August 1988

Seven Gothic Tales

The Tales of the Baroness

Baroness Karen Blixen de Rungstedlund, who signed her books with the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, must have been an extraordinary woman. There is a photo of her, in New York, alongside Marilyn Monroe, when she was just a scrap of a person, consumed by syphilis, and it is not the beautiful actress but the wide, ironic and troubled eyes and the skeletal face of the writer that steals the photo.

She was born in Denmark, in a house on the seashore between Copenhagen and Elsinore, which is today very like her imaginative and surprising personality: an enclave of plants and exotic birds. She is buried there, in the middle of the countryside, under the trees that witnessed her first steps. She was born in 1885, but gave the impression of having been educated a century earlier, the century that began in 1781 and ended with the Second Empire in 1871, that she called the ‘last great age of aristocratic culture’. Almost all her stories take place between those years. She was spiritually a woman of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although, as she confessed in a radio interview towards the end of her life, her friends suspected that she was ‘three thousand years old’. She never set foot in a school; she was educated by astonishing governesses who, at twelve, had her writing essays on Racine’s tragedies and translating Walter Scott into Danish. Her upbringing was polyglot and cosmopolitan; although she was Danish, she wrote most of her work in English.

She began writing stories and tales as a child, but her literary vocation came late; her vocation as an adventurer came precociously early. She inherited both from her father, the very engaging captain Wilhelm Dinesen, who, after a perilous military career, fell in love with the native peoples of North America and went to live among them. The Indians accepted him and baptised him with the name of Boganis, which he put on the cover of his memoirs. He ended up hanging himself when Karen was ten years old. As befitted a baroness, she was married very young to a lazy and sickly cousin, Bror Blixen, and they both went to Africa to plant coffee in Kenya. The marriage did not go well (the mal français that devoured the life of Isak Dinesen was caught from her husband) and ended in divorce. When Bror returned to Europe, she decided to stay in Africa and manage the seven-hundred-acre estate on her own. She did this for a quarter of a century, in a stubborn fight against adversity. Her life on the African continent, which became an integral part of her, and whose people and landscapes were transformed by her irrepressible imagination into a unique vision, is beautifully captured in Out of Africa (first published in 1937 in Europe and 1938 in the United States).

While she was an agricultural pioneer, fighting against plagues and floods and administering her coffee estate, in the first decades of the century, Baroness Rungstedlund had no urgency to write. She merely scribbled in notebooks sketches of what would become some of her future stories. She was more attracted by safaris, expeditions to remote areas, getting to know the tribal peoples, having contact with Nature and with wild animals. The primitive surroundings, however, did not prevent her having a refined cultural life, which she organised herself, through her reading and through her contact with some curious representatives of the culture of Europe who appeared in those parts, like the mythical Englishman Denys Finch-Hatton, an Oxford aesthete and adventurer, with whom Karen Blixen maintained an intense emotional relationship. One can imagine them discussing Euripides or Shakespeare after having spent the day hunting lions. (It is not surprising, for that reason, that the only writer that Hemingway always spoke of with unreserved imagination was Isak Dinesen.) The isolation of that African plantation and the narrow circle of European expatriates that she frequented in Kenya explains to a large degree the kind of culture that so surprises the reader of Isak Dinesen. It is not a culture that reflects its age, but rather ignores it, a deliberate anachronism, something strictly personal and extraneous, a culture dissociated from the great movements and intellectual preoccupations of its time and from the dominant aesthetic values, a very singular re-elaboration of ideas, images, sights, forms and symbols that come from the Nordic past, from family tradition and an eccentric education, full of references to Scandinavian history, English poetry, Mediterranean folklore, African oral literature and the stories and way of narrating of the Arab jongleurs. A formative book in her life was the Arabian Nights, a forest of stories linked by the narrative cunning of Scheherazade, who was the model for Isak Dinesen. Africa allowed her to live, in an almost uncontaminated way, within a capricious culture, outside tradition, created for her own personal use. This culture shapes her world, and helps to explain the originality of the themes, the style, the construction and the philosophy of her stories.

Her vocation as a writer came about after the bankruptcy of her coffee estates. Despite the fact that the price of coffee kept going down, she, with characteristic temerity, carried on with the crop until she was ruined. She did not just lose her estate, but also her Danish inheritance. It was, she recalls, at that time of crisis, when she realised that her African experience was coming inevitably to an end, that she began to write. She wrote at night, fleeing from the anguish and business of the day. In this way, she finished the Seven Gothic Tales, which appeared in New York and in London after being rejected by several publishing houses. She would later publish other collections of stories, some of very high quality like the Winter’s Tales, but her name would always be associated with her first stories published in that collection, which remains one of the most dazzling literary achievements of the twentieth century.

Although she also wrote a novel (the forgettable The Angelic Avengers), Isak Dinesen was, like Maupassant, Poe, Kipling or Borges, essentially a short-story writer. The world she created was the world of the story, with all the resonance of unbridled fantasy and childlike enchantment that this word implies. When one reads her it is impossible not to think of the book of stories par excellence, the Arabian Nights. In her stories — as in the Arabian Nights — the passion most commonly shared by all the characters is, alongside putting on disguises and changing identity, that of listening to and telling stories, evading reality in a mirage of fictions. This tendency reaches its apogee in ‘The Roads Round Pisa’, when the young Agnese della Gherardesca (dressed as a man) interrupts the duel between the old prince and Giovanni to tell the prince a story. This vice for fantasy gives the Seven Gothic Tales, like Scheherazade’s stories, a Chinese box structure, stories that burst out of stories or dissolve into stories, among which the main story, hiding and revealing itself an ambiguous and elusive masked ball, is told.

Whether they take place in Polish abbeys in the eighteenth century, in nineteenth-century Tuscan inns, on a hayloft in Norderney about to be submerged by a deluge or in a burning night on the African coast between Lamu and Zanzibar, among cardinals with sybaritic tastes, opera singers who have lost their voice or storytellers like Mira Jama in ‘The Dreamers’, who had had his nose and ears cut off, Isak Dinesen’s stories are always deceptive, full of secret and elusive elements. Of course it is difficult to know where they begin, and what the real story is — among all the entwined stories that the enthralled reader meanders through — that the author wishes to tell. This main story gradually emerges, obliquely, as if by chance, against the backcloth of a profusion of adventures that sometimes remain disparate or on other occasions, as in the disconcerting ending of ‘The Dreamers’, become fused into a single, coherent narration.

Artificial, brilliant, unexpected, bewitching, almost always beginning better than they end, the stories of Isak Dinesen are, above all else, extravagant. Nonsense, absurdity, grotesque or improbable details always break into the narrative, on occasion destroying the dramatic intensity or the delicacy of a scene. This tendency was much stronger than she was, an untameable habit, in much the same way that others might be drawn to laughter or to melodrama. One must always expect the unexpected in the tales of Isak Dinesen. She saw the essence of fiction as being its lack of verisimilitude. In ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’, the perverse and delicious Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag says as much to the Cardinal as they are speaking surrounded by the waters that will doubtless swallow them up, when she expounds her theory that God prefers masks to the truth since he knows that ‘truth is for tailors and shoemakers’.²³ For Isak Dinesen, the truth of fiction was the lie, an explicit lie, so well constructed, so exotic and precious, so excessive and attractive, that it was preferable to truth. What the prince of the Church argues in this story — ‘be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic’²⁴ — could well be the definition of the art of Isak Dinesen. In this definition, however, we would need to specify our notion of the fantastic, a concept that, because of its excess and extravagance, cannot neatly be included in our conception of reality. We would need to exclude the supernatural variant of the fantastic because, in these stories, although a dead person — the privateer Morten de Coninck in ‘The Supper at Elsinore’ — comes from hell in order to dine with his two sisters, the fantastic, despite its excesses, always has its roots in the real world, as in the theatre or in the circus.

The past attracted Isak Dinesen because of the memory of her childhood, the education she received and her aristocratic sensibility, but also because the past is unverifiable; by situating her stories one or two centuries in the past, she could give free rein to the anti-realist passion that drove her, to her love of the grotesque and of arbitrariness, without feeling coerced by the present. What is curious is that the work of this author, who had such a free and eccentric imagination, who just before her death boasted to Daniel Gilles that she had not the ‘slightest interest in social questions or in Freudian psychology’ and whose only ambition was to ‘invent beautiful stories’, should appear in the thirties, when narrative in the West revolved maniacally around realist descriptions: political problems, social issues, psychological studies, local sketches. For that reason André Breton considered that the novel suffered from a kind of realist curse and expelled it from literature. There were exceptions to this narrative realism, writers who barred themselves from this dominant tendency. One of these writers was Valle Inclán; another, Isak Dinesen. In both, the tale becomes a dream, madness, delirium, mystery, a game, poetry.

The seven Gothic tales of the book are all admirable; but ‘The Monkey’ is the one that best expresses her playful, refined, exquisitely wrought world, with its twisted sensuousness and unbridled fantasy. It is difficult to sum up this delightful jewel of a story in a few words. In a few pages, very different stories are told that are subtly interrelated. One of these is the intense struggle between two formidable women, the elegant Prioress of Closter Seven and the young, wild Athena, whom the Prioress wants her nephew to marry, employing to this end both licit and illicit methods, such as love philtres, deceit and rape. But the indomitable Prioress meets a will as inflexible as her own in the young giant Athena, who has been brought up wild in the woods of Hopballehus, who does not have the slightest qualm in knocking out two of the gallant Boris’s teeth with a punch and wrestling with him, almost to the death, when the young man, encouraged by his aunt, tries to seduce her.

We will never know which of the two women wins in this contest because this story is abruptly interrupted just at the point where the reader is about to find out, by another story that, until then, had been stealthily sliding along, like a snake, underneath the earlier tale: the relationship between the Prioress of Closter Seven and a monkey, which had been given to her by her cousin, Admiral von Schreckenstein, on his return from Zanzibar, to which she was very attached. The violent appearance of the monkey — it comes into the Prioress’s room by breaking her window, gripped by a fever that can only be sexual — when the Superior of the convent is about to spring her trap by forcing Athena to accept Boris as her husband, is one of the greatest moments of storytelling in the whole of literature. It is a hiatus, a sleight of hand, as brilliant as the carriage journey through the streets of Rouen that Emma and Léon take in Madame Bovary. We guess at what happens inside that carriage, but the narrator never tells us: he insinuates it, lets us guess, fuelling the imagination of the reader with his loquacious silence. A similar hidden fact structures this intense moment in ‘The Monkey’. The clever description of the episode is full of superfluous detail and is silent about the essential point — the guilty relationship between the monkey and the Prioress — and, for that reason, this unspeakable relationship resonates and takes shape in the silence with as much or more force as the incredible scene witnessed by the terrified gaze of Athena and Boris. At the end of the tale, the sated monkey jumps onto a pedestal supporting the marble bust of the philosopher Immanuel Kant: this is quintessential Isak Dinesen, an example of her delirious craft.

Entertainment, amusement, diversion: many modern writers would be annoyed if they were reminded that these are also the responsibility of literature. When the Seven Gothic Tales appeared, fashion demanded that a writer should be the critical conscience of society or explore the possibilities of language. Commitment and experimentation are very respectable, of course, but when a fiction is boring, nothing can save it. Isak Dinesen’s stories are sometimes flawed, sometimes too precious, but never boring. In this she was also an anachronism: for her, telling a tale was a form of enchantment, and boredom had to be avoided by any means — suspense, terrifying revelations, extraordinary events, sensationalist details, unlikely apparitions. Fantasy can suddenly submerge a story in a sea of other stories or else causes it to take a more unlikely direction. The reason for all these juggling acts is to surprise the reader, and this she never fails to do. Her tales take place in an imprecise realm, which is not the objective world, but nor is it the world of the fantastic. As happens also in Julio Cortázar’s best stories, her reality draws from both these worlds and is different to each of them.

One of the constants features of her world is the changing identity of characters, who hide behind different names or sexes, and who often lead simultaneously two or more parallel lives. In this world of ontological instability, only objects and the natural world remain the same. Thus, for example, the Renaissance Cardinal in ‘The Deluge at Nordeney’ turns out at the end of the story to be the valet Kasparson, who killed his master and took his place. But the apotheosis of this switching of identities is Pellegrina Leoni, nicknamed Lucifera or Donna Quixotta de La Mancha, whose story appears among myriad of other stories in ‘The Dreamers’. An opera singer who lost her voice through shock in a fire at La Scala in Milan during a performance of Don Giovanni, she has her admirers believe that she is dead. She is helped in her plan by her admirer and her shadow, the fabulously rich Jew Marcus Coroza, who follows her throughout the world, forbidden to speak to her or be seen by her, but always on hand to help her escape should an emergency arise. Pellegrina changes name, personality, lovers, countries — Switzerland, Rome, France — and profession — prostitute, artisan, revolutionary, aristocrat guarding the memory of General Zumalacárregui — and dies, finally, in an Alpine monastery, in a snowstorm, surrounded by four abandoned lovers who knew her at different times and in different guises, and only now discover her peripatetic identity thanks to Marcus Coroza. The Chinese box — stories within stories — is a technique used with admirable skill in this tale to piece together, like a jigsaw puzzle, through accounts that at first seem to have nothing in common, the fragmented and multiple existence of Pellegrina Leoni, will-o’-the-wisp, perpetual actress, made — like all Isak Dinesen’s characters — not of flesh and blood but of dream, fantasy, grace and humour.

Isak Dinesen’s language, like her culture and the topics she deals with, does not correspond to the models of the time; it is also a case apart, an inspired anomaly. When Seven Gothic Tales was published, its language disconcerted Anglo-Saxon critics with its slightly old-fashioned elegance, its exquisite, irreverent nature, its word play and sudden displays of erudition and its divorce from the English language spoken on the streets. But it was also disconcerting because of its humour, the delicate, cheerful, irony with which these tales refer to indescribable cruelty, vileness and savagery as if they were trivial, everyday occurrences. Isak Dinesen’s humour is the great shock absorber of all the excesses of her world — be they human or spiritual — the ingredient that humanises the inhuman and gives a kindly appearance to what, without it, would cause repugnance or panic. There is nothing like reading her to prove the adage that anything can be told as long as one knows how to tell it.

Literature, as she conceived it, was something that writers of her time found horrifying: an escape from real life, an entertaining game. Today things have changed, and readers understand her better. By making literature a journey into the imaginary, the fragile Baroness de Rungstedlund was not evading any moral responsibility. On the contrary, she helped — by being distracting, bewitching and amusing — to placate that need that in human beings is as old as eating and clothing themselves: the hunger for unreality.

Paris, April 1999

L’Étranger

The Outsider Must Die

Along with L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), L’Étranger (The Outsider) is Camus’s best book. It seems that the project was born in August 1937, albeit in a very vague way, when Camus was convalescing in a clinic in the Alps from one of the many relapses that he suffered following his attack of tuberculosis in 1930. In his Cahiers (Notebooks) he points out that he finished the novel in 1940. (But it was only published in 1942, by Gallimard, thanks to the support of André Malraux, who had been one of the literary models of the young Camus.)

The time and circumstances in which The Outsider was conceived are significant. The icy pessimism that pervades the references to society and the human condition in the story clearly stems in great part from the illness that weakened his fragile body over decades, and the anguished climate in Europe at the end of the inter-war years and at the outbreak of the Second World War.

The book was interpreted as a metaphor of the injustice of the world and of life, a literary illustration of that ‘absurd sensibility’ that Camus had described in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), an essay that appeared shortly after the novel. It was Sartre who best linked both texts, in a brilliant commentary on The Outsider. Meursault was seen as the incarnation of a man hurled into a senseless existence, the victim of social mechanisms that beneath the disguise of big words — The Law, Justice — were simply unjustifiable and irrational. Like the anonymous heroes of Kafka, Meursault personified the pathetic situation of the individual whose fate depends on forces that are uncontrollable as well as unintelligible and arbitrary.

But soon after there emerged a ‘positive’ interpretation of the novel: Meursault was seen as the prototype of authentic man, free from conventions, incapable of deception or self-deception, whom society condemns because he cannot tell lies or fake what he does not feel. Camus himself supported this reading of the character, writing in a prologue to a US edition of the novel:

The hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game…he refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearance, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened…So one wouldn’t be wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth.²⁵

This is a perfectly valid interpretation — although, as we shall see, it is incomplete — and it has come to occupy almost canonical status in studies on Camus. The Outsider thus becomes a denunciation of the tyranny of conventions and of the lies on which social life is based. A martyr to the truth, Meursault goes to prison, is sentenced and presumably guillotined for his ontological inability to disguise his feelings and do what other men do: play a part. It is impossible for Meursault, for example, to pretend to feel more grief than he actually feels and to say the things that, in these circumstances, one expects a son to say. Nor can he — despite the fact that his life depends on it — pretend in court to feel remorse for the death that he has caused. This is what he is punished for, not his crime.

The critic who has developed this argument most convincingly is Robert Champigny in his book on the novel entitled Sur un héros païen (Gallimard, 1959). In it he states that Meursault is condemned because he rejects ‘theatrical society’, which he defines as a society not made up of natural beings but rather one in which hypocrisy holds sway. With his ‘pagan’ — that is, non-romantic, non-Christian — behaviour, Meursault is a living challenge to the ‘collective myth’. His probable death by guillotine is, therefore, that of a free man, a heroic and edifying act.

This view of the novel seems to me partial and insufficient. There is no doubt that the way in which Meursault’s trial is conducted is ethically and legally scandalous, a parody of justice, because what is condemned is not the killing of an Arab, but the antisocial behaviour of the accused, the way in which his psychology and morality is at variance with the norms of society. Meursault’s behaviour shows us the inadequacies and defects of the administration of justice and allows us glimpses of the dirty world of journalism.

But to go from there to condemn the society that condemns him as being ‘theatrical’ and based on a ‘collective myth’ is really taking things too far. Modern society is no more theatrical than any other; all societies, without any possible exception, were, are, and will be theatrical, although the show that they put on will be different in each case. There can be no society, no form of coexistence, without a consensus that everyone in that society should respect certain forms or rituals. Without this agreement, there would be no ‘society’ but rather a jungle of completely free bipeds, where only the strongest would survive. With his behaviour, Meursault is also playing a role: that of a free individual in the extreme, who is indifferent to entrenched forms of sociability. The problem that the novel poses to us is rather: is Meursault’s behaviour preferable to those that sit in judgement on him?

This is debatable. Despite what the author has implied, the novel draws no conclusion on this issue: it is left to the readers to decide.

The ‘collective myth’ is a tacit pact that allows individuals to live in a community. This has a price that men and women — whether they know it or not — must pay: they must relinquish absolute sovereignty, cut out certain desires, impulses and fantasies that could endanger others. The tragedy that Meursault symbolises is that of an individual whose freedom has been impaired to make life in society possible. It is this, the fierce, irrepressible individualism of Camus’s character, that moves us and awakens our inchoate solidarity: in the depths of us all there is a nostalgic slave, a prisoner who would like to be as spontaneous, frank and antisocial as him.

But, at the same time, it is necessary to recognise that society is not wrong to identify Meursault as an enemy, as someone who would break up the community if his example were to become widespread.

His story is a painful but unequivocal demonstration of the need for ‘theatre’, for fiction, or, to put it more crudely, for lies in human relationships. Fake feelings guarantee social coexistence, for however empty and forced they might seem from an individual perspective, they are both substantive and necessary from a communitarian point of view. These fictitious feelings are conventions that cement the collective pact, like words, those sonorous conventions without which human communication would not be possible. If men were, like Meursault, pure instinct, not only would the institution of the family disappear, but also society in general, and men would end up killing each other in the same banal and absurd way that Meursault kills the Arab on the beach.

One of the great merits of The Outsider is the economy of the prose. When the book appeared, it was said that it emulated Hemingway’s purity and brevity. But the Frenchman’s language is much more premeditated and intellectual than the American’s. It is so clear and precise that it does not seem written but spoken or, better still, heard. The absolute way in which the style is stripped of all adornments and self-indulgence is what contributes decisively to the verisimilitude of this implausible story. And here the characteristics of the writing and those of the character become intertwined: Meursault, too, is, transparent, direct and elemental.

What is most terrifying about him is his indifference to others. The great ideas or causes or issues — love, religion, justice, death, freedom — leave him cold, as does the suffering of others. The beating that his neighbour Raymond Sintes inflicts on his Arab lover does not provoke any feelings of sympathy; quite the opposite, he is prepared to offer him an alibi for the police. He does not do this out of affection or friendship but, one could say, out of mere negligence. By contrast, small details or certain daily episodes interest him, like the traumatic relationship between old Salmadano and his dog, and he gives his attention and even his sympathy to this. But the things that really move him have nothing to do with men and women, but rather with nature or with certain human landscapes that he has stripped of humanity and turned into sensorial realities: the hustle and bustle of his neighbourhood, the smells of summer, the beaches of burning sands.

He is an outsider in a radical sense, because he communicates better with things than with human beings. And, in order to maintain a relationship with humans, he must animalise them or objectify them. This is how he gets on so well with Marie, whose clothes, sandals and body strike a chord in him. The young woman does not awaken feelings in him, something durable; at best she awakens a string of desires. He is only interested in what is instinctive and animalistic in her. Meursault’s world is not pagan, it is dehumanised.

What is curious is that, despite being antisocial, Meursault is not a rebel, because he has no concept of nonconformity. What he does is not tied to a principle or a belief that might lead him to defy the established order: that is just the way he is. He refuses the social pact, transgresses the rituals and forms that underpin collective life, in a natural way and without even any awareness of what he is doing (at least, until he is condemned). For those that are judging him, his passivity and lack of interest are clearly more serious than his crime. If he had ideas or values to justify his acts and behaviour, then perhaps the judges would have been more lenient. They could have contemplated the possibility of re-educating him, of persuading him to accept the norms of society. But, as he is, Meursault is incorrigible and cannot be reclaimed for society. Faced with him, all the limitations, excesses and absurdities that comprise the ‘collective myth’ or social pact are thrown into relief — everything that is false and absurd in communal life from the standpoint of an isolated individual of any description, not only someone as anomalous as Meursault.

When the attorney states that Meursault has nothing to do with ‘a society whose laws he is unaware of’, he is absolutely right. Obviously, from where the judge is sitting, Meursault is a kind of monster. But his case also reveals the monstrous, limiting aspects of society, since all societies, however open, always put obstacles and punishments in the way of the absolute freedom that each individual, deep down, aspires to.

Within the existential pessimism of The Outsider, however, there burns, albeit weakly, a flame of hope. There is a moment not of resignation but of lucidity that occurs in the beautiful final paragraph. Here, Meursault shakes off his anger towards the chaplain who had tried to domesticate him by offering to pray for him, and embraces, with serene confidence, his destiny as a man open to ‘the tender indifference of the world’.

Camus’s pessimism is not defeatist; on the contrary, it is a call to action or, more precisely, to rebellion. The reader leaves the pages of the novel probably with feelings for Meursault, but certainly convinced that the world is badly made and should change.

The novel does not conclude either explicitly or implicitly that since things are the way they are we should resign ourselves to accept a world organised by fanatics like the judge or pettifogging histrionic lawyers. We feel repugnance for both these characters. And we even find the chaplain disagreeable due to his inflexibility and lack of tact. With his disturbing behaviour, Meursault shows the precariousness and dubious morality of the conventions and rituals of society. His discordant attitude reveals the hypocrisy, lies, errors and injustices that social life entails. And at the same time it shows how the demands of living in a community lead to the mutilation or — to quote Freud, the great discoverer and explorer of the concept — the repression of individual sovereignty and certain instincts and desires.

Although the influence of Kafka is very apparent and although the philosophical novel or novel of ideas which were fashionable during the vogue of existentialism have now fallen into disrepute, The Outsider is still being read and discussed today, a time that is very different to the one in which Camus wrote. For this to be the case, there must be a more compelling reason than the fact that it is impeccably structured and beautifully written.

Like living beings, novels grow, and often age and die. Those that survive change skin and being, like snakes, or caterpillars that turn into butterflies. These novels say different things to new generations, very often things that the author had never thought of expressing. For readers today, above all in a Europe that is so much more prosperous, confident and hedonistic than the fearful, stunned and cataclysmic Europe in which The Outsider was first published, the solitary protagonist of this fiction can be appealing as an epicure, as a man at ease with his body and proud of his senses, who embraces his desires and elemental appetites without shame or pathos, as a natural right. The one seemingly lasting legacy of the revolution of May 1968 — that movement of idealistic, generous and confused young people at odds with their time and their society — is that human desires are now emerging from the hiding places where they had been confined by society, and are beginning to acquire acceptability.

In this new society that seems to be dawning, where desires have more freedom, Meursault would also have been punished for having killed a man. But no one would have condemned him to the guillotine, that obsolete museum piece, and, above all, no one would have been shocked by his visceral lack of interest in his fellow human beings or his rampant egotism. Should we feel pleased at this? Is it progress that the Meursault dreamed up by Camus half a century ago should appear to prefigure a contemporary attitude towards life? There is no doubt that Western civilisation has torn down many barriers and is now much freer and less repressive, with respect to sex, to the status of women, and to attitudes in general, than the society that (perhaps) cut off Meursault’s head. But at the same time we cannot say that the freedom that has been won in different spheres has led to a marked increase in the quality of life, to an enrichment of culture for all or, at least, for the great majority. Quite the reverse, it would seem that in so many cases these barely won freedoms have been turned into forms of behaviour that cheapen and trivialise them, and into new forms of conformity by their fortunate beneficiaries.

The Outsider, like other good novels, was ahead of its time, anticipating the depressing image of a man who is not enhanced morally or culturally by the freedom that he enjoys. Instead this freedom has stripped him of spirituality, solidarity, enthusiasm and ambition, making him passive, unadventurous and instinctive, to an almost animalistic degree. I don’t believe in the death penalty and I would not have condemned him to the scaffold, but if his head were chopped off by the guillotine, I would not shed a tear for him.

London, 5 June 1988

The Old Man and the Sea

Redemption through Courage

The story of The Old Man and the Sea seems very simple: after eighty-four days without any success, an old fisherman manages to catch a giant fish after a titanic struggle of two and a half days. He ties it to his skiff, but loses it the next day, in a no less heroic combat, to the jaws of the voracious sharks of the Caribbean. This is a classic motif in Hemingway’s fictions: a man is caught up in a fight to the finish with an implacable adversary, after which, no matter whether he wins or loses, he achieves a greater sense of pride and dignity, becomes a better human being. But in none of his earlier novels and stories does this recurrent theme find as perfect an expression as in this tale, written in Cuba in 1951, with a limpid style, an impeccable structure and with a wealth of allusions and meanings to rival his best novels. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1953 and also the Nobel Prize in 1954.

The apparent clarity of The Old Man and the Sea is deceptive, like certain biblical parables or Arthurian legends that, beneath their simplicity, contain complex religious and ethical allegories, historical references and psychological subtleties. As well as being a beautiful and moving fiction, this tale is also a representation of the human condition, according to Hemingway’s vision. And, to some extent, it was also a resurrection for its author. It was written after one of the biggest failures of his literary career, Across the River and into the Trees, a novel full of stereotypes and rhetorical flourishes which seems to be written by a mediocre imitator of The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta), and which the critics, above all in the United States, reviewed with ferocity, some of them, as respectable as Edmund Wilson, seeing in that novel the signs of the writer’s irremediable decline. This cruel premonition was close to the mark, because the truth is that Hemingway had entered a period of waning creativity and output, ever more crippled by illness and alcohol, and with little energy for life. The Old Man and the Sea was the swansong of a great writer in decline and, thanks to this proud tale, he became again a great writer by producing what in the course of time — Faulkner saw this — would become, despite its brevity, the most enduring of all his books. Many of the works he wrote, which in their time seemed as if they would have a lasting effect, like For Whom the Bell Tolls and even the brilliant The Sun Also Rises, have lost their freshness and vigour and now seem dated, out of touch with current sensibilities, that reject their elemental macho philosophy and their often superficial picturesque nature. But, like a number of his stories, The Old Man and the Sea has survived the ravages of time without a wrinkle, and preserves intact its artistic seduction and its powerful symbolism as a modern myth.

It is impossible not to read the odyssey of the lone Santiago, battling against the gigantic fish and the merciless sharks along the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba, as a projection of the fight that Hemingway himself had begun to wage against the enemies that had already taken up residence within him. These enemies would first attack his mind and later his body, and would cause him, in 1961, impotent and having lost his memory and spirit, to blow his brains out with one of the guns that he so loved, and which had taken the lives of so many animals.

But what gives the adventure of the Cuban fisherman in those tropical waters its extraordinary breadth is that, by osmosis, the reader recognises in the struggle of old Santiago against the silent enemies that will end up defeating him, a description of something more constant and universal: that life is a permanent challenge, and that by facing up to this challenge with the bravery and dignity of the fisherman in the story, men and women can achieve a moral greatness, a justification for their existence, even though they might be defeated. This is the reason why when Santiago returns, exhausted and with bloody hands, to the little fishing village where he lives (Cojímar, although that name is not mentioned in the text) carrying the useless skeleton of the big fish eaten by the sharks, he seems to us to be someone who, through his recent experience, has gained enormously in moral stature, surpassing himself and transcending the physical and mental limitations of ordinary mortals. His story is sad but not pessimistic. Quite the contrary, he shows that there is always hope, that, even with the worst tribulations and setbacks, a man’s behaviour can change defeat into victory and give meaning to his life. The day after his return, Santiago is more worthy of respect than he had been before setting sail, and that is what makes the child Manolín cry: his admiration for the resolute old man, even more than the affection and devotion that he feels for the man who taught him how to fish. This is the meaning of the famous phrase that Santiago utters to himself in the middle of the ocean and which has become the watchword of Hemingway’s view of life: ‘A man can be destroyed but never defeated.’ Not all men, of course: only those — the heroes of his fictions: bullfighters, hunters, smugglers, adventurers of every hue — who, like the fisherman, are endowed with the emblematic virtue of the Hemingway hero: courage.

Now, courage is not always an admirable attribute, for it can be used irresponsibly or stupidly, like the lunatics for whom using violence or exposing themselves to violence is a way of feeling manly, that is, superior to their victims, whom they can flatten with their fists or wipe out with a bullet. This contemptible version of courage, a product of the most retrograde macho tradition, was not completely foreign to Hemingway, and it appears at times in his tales, above all in his accounts of hunting in Africa and his peculiar conception of the art of bullfighting. But, in its other aspect, courage is not found in exhibitionism and physical display, it is a discreet, stoical way of confronting adversity, without giving up or falling into self pity, like Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, who endures in a quietly elegant way the physical tragedy that deprives him of love and sex, or like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls when faced by imminent death. Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea belongs to this noble lineage of brave men. He is a very humble man, very poor — he lives in a wretched shack and uses newspapers for bedding — and the butt of the village’s jokes. And he is also alone: he lost his wife many years earlier, and his only company since then has been his memories of the lions that he saw walking along the beaches in Africa at night from deck of the tramp steamer where he worked, some American baseball players like Joe DiMaggio, and Manolín the boy who used to go fishing with him and who now, due to family pressure, has to help another fisherman. For him, fishing is not as it was for Hemingway and many of his characters, a sport, a pastime, a way to win prizes or of proving themselves by facing up to the challenges of the deep, but a vital necessity, a job which — through great hardship and effort — keeps him from dying of hunger. This context makes Santiago’s struggle with the giant marlin extraordinarily human, as does the modesty and naturalness with which the old fisherman carries out his heroic deed: without boasting, without feeling a hero, like a man who is simply carrying out his duty.

There are many versions as to the origins of this story. According to Norberto Fuentes, who has made a detailed study of all the years that Hemingway spent in Cuba,²⁶ Gregorio Fuentes, who was for many years the skipper of Hemingway’s boat, El Pilar, claimed to have given him the material for the story. Both would have witnessed a struggle similar to this that took place at the end of the forties, off the port of Cabañas, between a great fish and an old fisherman from Majorca. However, Fuentes also remarks that, according to some fishermen, Carlos Gutiérrez, Hemingway’s first skipper, was the model for the story, while others attribute it to a local fisherman, Anselmo Hernández. But in his biography of Hemingway, Charles Baker points out that the central part of the story — the fight between the old fisherman and a great fish — had already been sketched out in April 1936, in an article published by Hemingway in Esquire magazine. Whatever the true origins of the story, whether it was completely invented or recreated from some living testimony, it is clearly the case that the central theme of the tale had been in search of its author ever since he began to write his first stories, because it distils, like an essence purified of all extraneous contamination, the vision of the world that he had been fashioning throughout his work. And doubtless for that reason he wrote it with all his very considerable stylistic control and technical mastery. For the context of the story, Hemingway used his experience: his passion for fishing and his long acquaintance with the village and fishermen of Cojímar: the factory, the Perico bar, La Terraza, where the neighbours drink and talk. The text is permeated with Hemingway’s affection for, and identification with, the marine landscape and the men and women of the sea on the island of Cuba. The Old Man and the Sea pays them a great homage.

There is a turning point in the novel, a real qualitative leap, which turns Santiago’s adventure, first with the fish and later with the sharks, into a symbol of the Darwinian struggle for survival, of the human condition, forced to kill in order to survive, and of the unexpected reserves of valour and resistance that human beings possess, which can be summoned when their honour is at stake. This chivalric concept of honour — respect for oneself, blind observance of a self-imposed moral code — is what finally makes the fisherman Santiago commit himself, as he does in his fight with the fish, to a struggle that, at an indefinable moment, is no longer just one more episode in his daily struggle to earn a living, and becomes instead an ordeal, a test in which the dignity and pride of the old man are being measured. And he is very conscious of this ethical and metaphysical dimension to the struggle — during his long soliloquy he exclaims, ‘But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.’ At this point in the tale, the story is no longer just recounting the adventure of a fisherman with a biblical name, it is recounting the whole adventure of humankind, summed up in that odyssey without witnesses or prizes, where cruelty and valour, need and injustice, and force and inventiveness are intertwined, along with the mysterious design that maps out the fate of each individual.

For this remarkable transformation in the story to occur — the shift from the particular to a universal archetype — there has been a gradual build-up of emotions and sensations, of hints and allusions that gradually extend the horizons of the tale to a point of complete universality. It manages this shift through the skill with which the story is written and constructed. The omniscient narrator narrates from very close to the protagonist but often lets him take over the account, disappearing behind the thoughts, exclamations and monologues through which Santiago distracts himself from monotony or anguish as he waits for the invisible fish that is dragging his boat along to get tired and come up to the surface so that he can kill it. The narrator is always completely persuasive, both when he describes objectively what is happening from a point removed, or when he allows Santiago to relieve him of this task. He achieves this persuasive power through the coherence and simplicity of his language that seems — only seems, of course — to be that of a man as simple and intellectually limited as the old fisherman, and through displaying a prodigious knowledge of all the secrets of navigation and fishing in the waters of the Gulf, something that fits the personality of Santiago like a glove. This knowledge explains the prodigious skill that Santiago displays in his struggle with the fish that, in this story, represents brute force that is defeated by the seafaring ingenuity and art of the old man.

These technical details help to reinforce the realist effect of a story which is in fact more symbolic or mythical than realist, as do the few but effective images that are used to map concisely the life and character of Santiago: those lions on the African beaches, those games of baseball that brighten up his life and the extraordinary legend of the striker DiMaggio (who, like him, was the son of a fisherman). Apart from being very believable, all of this shows the narrowness and primitiveness of the fisherman’s life, which makes his achievement all the more remarkable and praiseworthy. For the person who, in The Old Man and the Sea, represents man at his best, in one of those exceptional circumstances in which, through his will and moral conscience, he manages to rise above his condition and rub shoulders with the mythological heroes and gods, is a wretched, barely literate old man who is treated as a joke by the village because of his age and lack of money. In a highly favourable review soon after the book was published, Faulkner stated that in this novel, Hemingway had ‘discovered God’.²⁷ That is possible but, of course, unverifiable. But he also stated that the main theme of the story was ‘compassion’, and here he hit the mark. In this moving story, sentimentality is conspicuous by its absence; everything takes place with Spartan sobriety on Santiago’s small boat and in the ocean depths. And yet, from the first to the last line of the tale, a warmth and delicacy permeates everything that happens, reaching a climax in the final moments when, on the point of collapse through grief and exhaustion, old Santiago, stumbling and falling, drags the mast of his boat towards his shack through the sleeping village. What the reader feels in this moment is difficult to describe, as is always the case with the mysterious messages that great works convey. Perhaps, ‘mercy’, ‘compassion’, ‘humanity’, are the words that come closest to this feeling.

Paris, February 2000

Lolita

Lolita Thirty Years On

Lolita made Nabokov rich and famous, but the scandal surrounding its publication created a misunderstanding that is still with us today. Now that the beautiful nymphet is approaching, horror of horrors, forty, it is time to locate her where she belongs, as one of the most subtle and complex literary creations of our time. That does not mean, of course, that it is not also a provocative book.

But the fact that the first readers of the novel could only see the provocative parts and not its subtlety — something that is now apparent to any average reader — shows us how difficult it is for the true worth of a really original book to be appreciated. Four US publishing houses rejected the manuscript of Lolita before Nabokov gave it to Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press, a Parisian publisher that brought out books in English and had become famous for being subjected to numerous court appearances and book seizures for pornography and indecency. (Its catalogue was a bizarre mixture of cheap pornography and genuine artists like Henry Miller, William Burroughs and J. P. Donleavy). The novel appeared in 1955, and one year later it was banned by the French Ministry of the Interior. By then it had already circulated widely — Graham Greene started up a polemic by declaring it the best book of the year — and it had gained an aura of being a maudit novel. It never really managed to escape from this maudit label, and to some extent it deserves it, but not in the way we usually understand the term. But it was only after 1958, when the US edition appeared, alongside dozens of others throughout the world, that the book made an impact that spread much further than the numbers of its readers. In a short space of time a new term, a ‘Lolita’, appeared for a new concept: the child-woman, emancipated without realising it, an unconscious symbol of the revolution taking place in contemporary society. To some extent Lolita is one of the milestones, and one of the causes, of the age of sexual tolerance, the flouting of taboos by young people in the United States and in Western Europe, which would reach its apogee in the sixties. The nymphet was not born with Nabokov’s character. It existed, without doubt, in the dreams of perverts and in the blind and tremulous anxieties of innocent girls, and a changing moral climate was beginning to give it credence. But, thanks to the novel, it took on a distinct form, shook off its nervous clandestine existence and gained the keys of the city.

What is extraordinary is that it is a novel by Nabokov that provoked such turmoil, affecting the behaviour of millions of people, and becoming part of modern mythology. Because it is difficult to imagine among the writers of this century anyone less interested in popular and contemporary issues — even in reality itself, a word that, he wrote, meant nothing if it were not placed between inverted commas — than the author of Lolita. Born in 1899, in Saint Petersburg, into a Russian aristocratic family — his paternal grandfather had been the Justice Minister of two Tsars and his father a liberal politician who had been assassinated by monarchist extremists in Berlin — Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov had received a refined education that made him a polyglot. He had two English nannies, a Swiss governess and a French tutor, and he studied in Cambridge before going into exile in Germany following the October Revolution. Although his most daring book, Pale Fire, came out in 1962, by the time Lolita appeared he had published most of his work. It was a vast, but little-known, body of work: novels, poems, plays, critical essays, a biography of Nikolai Gogol, translations into and out of Russian. It had been written firstly in Russian, then in French and finally in English. Its author lived in Germany, then in France, before finally opting for the United States, where he earned a living as a university professor and pursued, in the summers, his second great love: entomology, in particular, lepidopterology. He published several scientific articles and was, it seems, the first descriptor of three butterflies: Neonympha maniola nabokov, Echinargus nabokov and Cyclargus nabokov.

This work, which, thanks to the success of Lolita, would be revived in multiple re-editions and translations, is ‘literary’ to a degree that only one other contemporary of Nabokov — Jorge Luis Borges — would manage to achieve. By ‘literary’ I mean entirely constructed out of pre-existing literatures and possessing an exquisite intellectual and verbal refinement. Lolita has all these hallmarks. But in addition, and this was the great novelty within Nabokov’s work as a whole, it is a novel in which the almost demonic complexity of its craftsmanship is garbed in an apparently simple and attractively brilliant story: the seduction of a young girl of twelve years seven months — Dolores Haze, Dolly, Lo or Lolita — by her stepfather, an obsessive forty-year-old Swiss man known only by a pseudonym, Humbert Humbert, and the passage of their love through the length and breadth of the United States.

A great work of literature always provokes conflicting readings; it is a Pandora’s box in which each reader discovers different meanings, nuances and even stories. Lolita has bewitched the most superficial readers at the same time as it has seduced, through its torrent of ideas and allusions and the delicacy of its style, the most demanding of readers who approach each book with the insolent challenge that a young man once made to Cocteau: Étonnez-moi! (Surprise me!)

In its most explicit version, the novel is Humbert Humbert’s written confession to the judges that are going to try him for murder, of his predilection for precocious girls, that began with his childhood in Europe and reached its climax and satisfaction in Ramsdale, a remote small town in New England. There, with the cynical intention of having easier access to her daughter Lolita, H.H. marries a relatively well-off widow, Mrs Charlotte Becher Haze. Chance, in the form of a car, facilitates Humbert Humbert’s plans, knocking over his wife and placing the young orphan literally and legally in his hands. The semi-incestuous relationship lasts for a couple of years, until Lolita runs away with a playwright and scriptwriter, Clare Quilty, whom Humbert Humbert kills after a tortuous search for the couple. This is the crime for which he is going to be tried when he begins to write the manuscript that, within the lying tradition of Cide Hamete Benengeli, he calls Lolita.

Humbert Humbert tells the story with the pauses, suspense, false leads, ironies and ambiguities of a narrator skilled in the art of keeping the curiosity of the reader constantly aroused. His story is scandalous, but not pornographic or even erotic. There is not the slightest pleasure taken in the description of sexual activities — a sine qua non of pornography — nor is there a hedonistic vision that could justify the excesses of the narrator-character in the name of pleasure. Humbert Humbert is not a libertine or a sensualist: he is scarcely even an obsessive. His story is scandalous, above all, because he feels it and presents it as such, because he keeps talking about his ‘madness’ and his ‘monstrosity’ (these are his words). It is the protagonist’s account of himself that gives his adventure its sense of being unhealthy and morally unacceptable, rather than the age of his victim who, after all, is only a year younger than Shakespeare’s Juliet. And what further aggravates his offence and deprives him of the reader’s sympathy is his unpleasantness and arrogance, the contempt that he seems to feel for all men and women, including those beautiful, semi-pubescent, little creatures that so inflame his desires.

Perhaps even more than the seduction of the young nymph by a cunning man, the most provocative aspect of the novel is the way it reduces all of humanity to laughable puppets. Humbert Humbert’s monologue constantly mocks institutions, professions and everyday routines, from psychoanalysis — one of Nabokov’s pet hates — to education and the family. When filtered through his corrosive pen, all the characters become stupid, pretentious, ridiculous, predictable and boring. It has been said that the novel is, above all, a ferocious critique of middle-class America, a satire of its tasteless motels, its naïve rituals and inconsistent values, a literary abomination that Henry Miller termed the ‘air-conditioned nightmare’. Professor Harry Levin has also argued that Lolita was a metaphor that refers to the feelings of a European who, after having fallen madly in love with the United States, is brutally disappointed by that country’s lack of maturity.

I am not sure that Nabokov invented this story with symbolic intentions. My impression is that within him, as in Borges, there was a sceptic who was scornful of modernity and of life, and who observed both with irony and distance, from a refuge of ideas, books and fantasies, where both writers could remain protected, removed from the world through their prodigious inventive games that diluted reality into a labyrinth of words and phosphorescent images. For both writers, who were so similar in the way they understood culture and approached the task of writing, the distinguished art they created was not a criticism of the existing world but a way of disembodying life, dissolving it into a gleaming mirage of abstractions.

And for anyone who wishes to go beyond the main plot of the novel, and consider its mysteries, try to solve its puzzles, work out its allusions and recognise the parodies and pastiches of its style, Lolita can be read as a baroque and subtle substitute for existence. This is a challenge that the reader can accept or reject. In any event, a purely anecdotal reading is very enjoyable in itself. But anyone who is prepared to read it differently discovers that Lolita is a bottomless well of literary references and linguistic juggling tricks, which form a tight network and are, perhaps, the real story that Nabokov wanted to tell. A story as intricate as that of his novel The Defence (which appeared in Russian in 1930), whose hero is a mad chess player who invents a new defensive game, or that of Pale Fire, a fiction that adopts the appearance of a critical edition of a poem and whose hieroglyphic story emerges, seemingly at variance with the narrator, through the interplay of the verses of the poem and the notes and commentary of its editor.

The search for the hidden treasures of Lolita has given rise to many books and university theses in which the humour and playful spirit with which both Nabokov and Borges transformed their (real or fictitious) erudition into art is almost always sadly lacking.

The linguistic acrobatics of the novel are very difficult to translate. Some, like the quotations in French in the original, just lie there, mischievous and rude. One example of many: the strange hendecasyllable that Humbert Humbert recites when he is preparing to kill the man who snatched Lolita away from him. To what and to whom does this refer: Réveillez-vous Laqueue, il est temps de mourir? Is it an actual literary quotation, or one made up, like so many in the book? Why does the narrator call Clare Quilty Laqueue? Or is he inflicting the name on himself? In an interesting book, Keys to Lolita, Professor Carl L. Proffer has solved the enigma. It is, quite simply, a convoluted obscenity. La queue, a tail, is French slang for a phallus; to die means to ejaculate. So the verse is an allegory that condenses, with its classic rhythm, a premonition of the crime that Humbert Humbert is about to commit, and his reason for the murder (the fact that the phallic Clare Quilty has possessed Lolita).

Sometimes the allusions or premonitions are simple digressions, for Humbert Humbert’s solipsistic amusement, that do not affect the development of the story. But on other occasions they have a meaning that alters the story in significant ways. This is true, for example, of all the bits of information and references regarding the most disturbing character of all, who is not Lolita or the narrator, but the furtive playwright who is fond of the Marquis de Sade, the libertine, drunk, drug-addicted and, according to his own confession, semi-impotent Clare Quilty. His appearance disrupts the novel, sending the story in a hitherto unforeseeable direction, introducing a Dostoevskian theme: that of the double. It is thanks to him that we suspect that the whole story might be a mere schizophrenic invention by Humbert Humbert, who, the reader has been told, has spent several periods in mental asylums. As well as stealing Lolita away and dying, the function of Clare Quilty seems to be to place an alarming question mark over the credibility of the (assumed) narrator.

Who is this strange subject? Before materialising in the reality of the fiction, when he takes Lolita away from the hospital at Elphis-tone, he has already been infiltrating the text as a result of Humbert Humbert’s persecution mania. There is a car that appears and disappears, like a will-o’-the-wisp, a hazy outline, lost in the distance, on a hill, after a game of tennis with the child-woman, and myriad signs that only the meticulous and ever-alert neurosis of the narrator can decipher. And later, when, on the trail of the fugitives, Humbert Humbert begins his extraordinary recapitulation of his travels across the United States — an exercise of sympathetic magic that attempts to revive the two years of happiness lived with Lolita, repeating their journey and the hotels they had stayed in — he discovers at every stage disconcerting traces and messages from Clare Quilty. They reveal an almost omniscient knowledge of the life, culture and obsessions of the narrator and a sort of subliminal complicity between the two. But are we talking about two people? What they have in common far outweighs what separates them. They are more or less the same age and they share the same desires for young girls in general, and Lolita Haze in particular, as well as both being writers (albeit with different degrees of success). But the most remarkable symbiosis can be found in the magic tricks that they perform at a distance, in which Lolita is merely a pretext, the elegant and secret communication that turns life into literature, revolutionising topography and the urban landscape with the magic wand of language, through the invention of small towns and accidents that trigger literary associations and surnames that generate poetic associations according to a very strict code that only they are capable of employing.

The culminating moment in the novel is not Humbert Humbert’s first night of love — that is kept to a minimum and is almost a hidden detail — but the delayed and choreographed killing of Clare Quilty. In this extraordinarily intense, virtuoso description, which is a mixture of humour, drama, strange details and enigmatic allusions, every certainty that we had built around the fictive reality of those pages begins to teeter, suddenly riddled by doubt. What is happening here? Are we witnessing the conversation between the killer and his victim or rather the nightmarish doubling of the narrator? It is a possibility that is implied in the text: that, at the end of this process of psychic and moral disintegration, defeated by nostalgia and remorse, Humbert Humbert breaks, stricto sensu, into two halves, the lucid and recriminatory consciousness that observed and judged his own actions, and his defeated, abject body, the seat of that passion that he surrendered to without, however, surrendering to pleasure and indulgence. Is it not himself, that part that he detests about himself, that Humbert Humbert kills in this phantasmagoric scene, in which the novel, in a dialectical leap, seems to desert the conventional realism of its previous setting in favour of the fantastic?

In all Nabokov’s novels — but, above all, in Pale Fire — the structure is so clever and subtle that it ends up carrying everything else before it. In Lolita this intelligence and deftness of construction are also strong enough to deplete the story of life and liberty. But in this novel, the content stands up for itself and resists the assault of the form, because what it talks about is deeply rooted in the most important of human experiences: desire, fantasy obeying instinct. And his characters manage to live provisionally without becoming, as in other novels — or like Borges’s characters — the shadows of a superior intellect.

Yes, thirty years on, Dolores Haze, Dolly, Lo, Lolita, is still fresh, ambiguous, prohibited, tempting, moistening the lips and quickening the pulse of men who, like Humbert Humbert, love with their head and dream with their heart.

London, January 1987

The Tin Drum

The Drumroll

I read The Tin Drum for the first time, in English, in the sixties, in a neighbourhood in the suburbs of London where I lived among quiet shopkeepers who turned off the lights in their houses at ten at night. In this state of limbo tranquillity, Grass’s novel was an exciting adventure, whose pages reminded me, as soon as I plunged into them, that life was also disorder, uproar, guffaws, absurdity.

I have reread it now in very different conditions, at a time when, in an unpremeditated and accidental way, I have found myself caught up in a whirlwind of political activities, at a particularly difficult moment in my country’s history. In between a debate and a street rally, after a demoralising meeting where the world was changed by words, and nothing happened, or at the end of dangerous days, when stones were hurled and shots were fired. In these circumstances as well, the Rabelaisian odyssey of Oskar Matzerath with his drum and glass-shattering voice was a compensation and a refuge. Life was also this: fantasy, words, animated dreams, literature.

When The Tin Drum came out in Germany in 1959, its immediate success was attributed to different reasons. George Steiner wrote that, for the first time since the lethal experience of Nazism, a German writer dared face up, resolutely and clearly, to the sinister past of his country and submit it to an implacable critical dissection. It was also said that this novel, with its uninhibited, frenetic language, sparkling with invention, dialect and barbarisms, revived a vitality and a freedom that German language had lost after twenty years of totalitarian contamination.

Both explanations are probably correct. But from our current perspective, as the novel approaches the age at which, figuratively, its extraordinary protagonist begins to write — thirty years old — another reason appears as fundamental for understanding the impact that the book has continued to make on its readers: its enormous ambition, the voracity with which it looks to swallow up the world, history past and present, the most disparate experiences of the human zoo, and transmute them into literature. This colossal appetite to tell everything, to embrace the whole of life in a fiction, which can be found in all the major achievements of the genre and which, above all, defined the writing of literature in the century of the novel, the nineteenth century, can be found only infrequently in our age, which is full of temperate, timid novelists for whom the idea of writing with the ambition of Balzac or Stendhal seems naïve: don’t movies do all that, and much better?

No, they do not do it better; they do it differently. Even in the century of the great cinematographic narratives, the novel can be a deicide, can propose such a minute and vast reconstruction of reality that it seems to compete with the Creator, breaking up and re-forming — correcting — what He created. In an emotional essay, Grass names Alfred Döblin as his master and model. Döblin, somewhat belatedly, is beginning to be recognised as the great writer that indeed he was. And without doubt Berlin Alexanderplatz has some of the tumultuous, fresh effervescence that makes The Tin Drum such a lively fresco of human history. But there is no doubt that the creative ambition of the disciple in this case far excelled that of the master, and that to find affiliations we must look to the best examples of the genre, where novelists, in the grip of an exaggerated and naïve frenzy, did not hesitate in opposing the real world with an imaginary world in which this real world is both captured and negated, summarised and abjured like an exorcism.

Poetry is intense; the novel is extensive. The number, the quantity, is an integral part of its quality because every fiction takes place and develops in time, it is time being made and remade under the gaze of the reader. In all the masterpieces of the genre, this quantitative factor — to be abundant, to multiply and to endure — is always present: generally a great novel is also a big novel. The Tin Drum belongs to this illustrious genealogy, as a world that is large and complex, brimming with diversity and contrasts, is erected in front of our eyes as readers, to the beat of a drum. But despite its vividness and sheer size, the novel never appears as a chaotic, dispersed world, without a centre (as occurs in Berlin Alexanderplatz or in the Dos Passos trilogy, U.S.A.), because the perspective from which the fictive world is seen and represented gives consistency and coherence to its baroque disorder. This perspective is that of the protagonist and narrator Oskar Matzerath, one of the most fertile inventions of modern narrative. He supplies an original point of view that suffuses everything he describes with originality and irony — thus separating the fictive reality from its historical model — as well as embodying, in his impossible nature, in his anomalous condition, between fantasy and reality, a metaphor for the novel itself: a sovereign world apart in which, however, the concrete world is refracted in essence; a lie in whose folds a profound truth can be seen.

But the truths that a novel makes visible are rarely as simple as those formulated by mathematics or as unilateral as those of certain ideologies. They are usually, like most human experiences, relative; they form imprecise entities in which the rule and its exception, or the thesis and antithesis are inseparable or have a similar moral weight. If there is a symbolic message embedded in the convulsive historic moments that Oskar Matzerath narrates, what might that be? That his decision, at three years old, not to grow any more, is a rejection of the world that he would have to be part of as a normal person, and that this decision, to judge by the horrors and absurdity of this world, is clearly a wise one. His smallness confers on him a kind of extraterritoriality, minimising him against the excesses and responsibilities of other citizens. His insignificant stature offers Oskar a marginal and thus privileged perspective from which to see and judge everything happening around him: that of the innocent. This moral condition becomes in the novel a physical attribute: Oskar, who is not involved in what is happening around him, is clothed with invisible armour that allows him to travel unscathed through the most risky places and situations, as becomes clear in one of the key moments in the novel: the siege of the Polish Post Office at Danzig. There, in the midst of the machine guns and the butchery, the little narrator observes, makes ironic comments and tells the story with the quiet assurance of one who knows that he is safe.

This unique perspective gives Oskar’s testimony its very original tone, which is a mixture, like an exotic blend of mysterious fragrances, of strangeness and tenderness, patriotic irreverence and tremulous delicacy, outlandishness, ferocity and jokes. Like the impossible combination of Oskar’s two intellectual totems — Goethe and Rasputin — his voice is an anomaly, a device that stamps on the world that it describes — or rather that it invents — its own very personal seal.

And yet, despite his evident artificiality, his existence as a metaphor, the little midget that beats his drum and tells the apocalyptic story of a Europe bled white and torn apart by totalitarian stupidity and war, does not have a nihilistic animosity towards life. Quite the reverse. What is surprising is that while his narration offers a relentless critique of his contemporaries, it expresses at the same time a warm sympathy for this world, which is clearly the only thing of importance to him. From his monstrous and defenceless smallness, Oskar Matzerath manages, in the worst moments, to transmit to us a natural and uncomplicated love for the good and entertaining things that the world also offers: play, love, friendship, food, adventure, music. Perhaps because of his size, Oskar has a much greater sensitivity to elemental things, to what is closer to the earth and to human clay. From down there, where he is confined, he discovers — like that night when, hidden under the family table, he observes the hesitant, adulterous movements of his parents’ legs and feet — that in its most direct and simple, in its most earthy and coarse forms, life contains tremendous possibilities and is full of poetry. In this metaphorical novel, all this is wonderfully represented in a recurrent image in Oskar’s memory: the warm encampment offered by his grandmother Ana Kolaiczek’s four skirts when she squats down, which gives to those that seek shelter there an almost magical feeling of safety and contentment. The simplest and most rudimentary of acts, when passed through Oskar’s Rabelaisian voice, can transubstantiate into pleasure.

A Rabelaisian voice? Yes, in its jocundity and its vulgarity, its quick-wittedness and its limitless freedom. Also, in the disorder and exaggeration of its fantasy and the intellectualism that lies beneath the cloak of vulgarity. When we read in translation, however good it may be (as in the case of the book I am reading), something of the texture and the flavour of the original is always lost. But in the case of The Tin Drum, the almost convulsive force of the account, the big, torrential voice of the narrator, breaks through the barriers of language and reaches us with overwhelming force. It has the vitality of the popular but, like El Buscón, it has almost as many ideas as images, and a complex structure organises this apparently chaotic monologue. Although the point of view is stubbornly individual, the collective is always present, the everyday and the historic, small, insignificant episodes of work or home life or major events — war, invasion, pillage, the reconstruction of Germany — albeit metabolised through the deforming prism of the narrator. All the values usually writ large, like patriotism, heroism or unselfishness with respect to a feeling or a cause, when filtered through Oskar, break and shatter like the way his voice shatters glass, and then appear as the senseless whims of a society bent on its own destruction. But, curiously, although we feel that this society is doomed, it is still, as it slides towards ruin, lively and human, full of people and things — landscapes above all — that we can empathise with. This is, without doubt, the greatest achievement of the novel: to make us feel, from the perspective of the humble people that are almost always the main protagonists, that life, in the midst of horror and alienation, is worth living.

Unlike the great stylistic versatility of the novel, which is full of verve and inventiveness, the structure is very simple. Locked up in a sanatorium, Oskar narrates episodes that refer to a near or an immediate past, with occasional flights to the remote past (like the amusing synthesis of the different invasions and dynasties in the history of Danzig). The story moves continually from present to past and vice versa, as Oskar remembers or fantasises, and this technique sometimes becomes rather mechanical. But there is another shift that takes place, that is less obvious: the narrator sometimes talks in the first person and at other times in the third person, as if the little dwarf with the drum were someone else. What is the reason for this schizophrenic doubling of the narrator, whom we see at times, in the course of a single sentence, approach us with the open intimacy of one speaking from the ‘I’ perspective and then retreat into the shadow of someone who is spoken or narrated by another person? In this novel, which is full of allegories and metaphors, it would not be wise to see the changing identity of the narrator as a mere stylistic flourish. It is clearly another symbol that represents the inevitable doubling or duplication that Oskar suffers (that all novelists suffer?) when he is, simultaneously, both narrator and narrated, the person who writes and invents and the subject of his own invention. Oskar’s condition, split in two in this way, being and not being who he is in what he narrates, is a perfect representation of the novel: a genre that is and is not life, that expresses the world by turning it into something different, that tells the truth by lying.

Baroque, expressionist, committed, ambitious, The Tin Drum is also the novel of a city. Danzig rivals Oskar Matzerath as the protagonist of the book. The setting is described in both clear and elusive terms because, like a living being, it is continually changing, fashioning and refashioning itself in space and in time. The almost tangible presence of Danzig, where most of the story takes place, helps to give the novel its materiality, its palpable sense of living and breathing, despite the extravagance and even deliriousness of many of its episodes.

What city is this? Is the Danzig of the novel a true city that Grass has transposed like a historical document, or is it another product of his vibrant imagination, something as original and arbitrary as the little man whose voice shatters glass? The answer is not simple, for in novels — in good novels — as in life, things tend to be ambiguous and contradictory. Grass’s Danzig is a centaur-city with its hooves buried in the mud of history and with its torso floating among the mists of poetry.

There is a mysterious link between the novel and the city, a relationship that does not exist in the case of theatre and poetry. Unlike these genres, which flourish in all cultures and in rural civilisations before the rise of the city, the novel is an urban plant which seemingly can only germinate and propagate in streets and neighbourhoods, in commerce and in offices, among the crowded, variegated, diverse throng of the city. Lukács and Goldmann attribute this link to the bourgeoisie, the social class in which the novel had found not only its natural audience, but also its source of inspiration, its primary resource, its mythology and its values: for is not the bourgeois century the century, par excellence, of the novel? However, this class-based interpretation of the genre does not take into account the illustrious precursors we find in medieval and Renaissance fiction — the romances of chivalry, the pastoral novel, the picaresque novel — where the genre has a popular audience (the illiterate ‘common people’ listened, spellbound, to the deeds of the likes of Amadis and Palmerín which were narrated in the markets and squares), as well as, in some instances, a courtly and aristocratic audience. The novel is urban in a comprehensive, totalising, sense: it embraces and expresses equally all the classes that together comprise urban society. The key word here is perhaps ‘society’. However solitary and introverted they might be, characters in novels always need the backcloth of society in order to be believable and persuasive; if this multiple presence is not insinuated and does not operate in some way in the novel, then it becomes abstract and unreal (which is not the same as ‘fantastic’: the nightmares imagined by Kafka, even though they have few characters, are always firmly rooted in the social world). And there is nothing that symbolises the idea of society better than the city, the space of many people, a shared world, a gregarious reality by definition. That this should be the chosen ground of the novel is thus coherent with the novel’s main aim, which is to simulate the life of the individual in a social context.

The city of Danzig in The Tin Drum has the immaterial consistency of dreams and, at times, the solidity of an artefact or of geography; it is a mobile entity whose past is embedded in the present, a hybrid and a fantasy, whose borders are uncertain and figurative. It is a city through which different races, languages and nations have passed or where they have coexisted, leaving rough deposits; which has changed flags and colonists in step with the raging wars of our age. A city which, by the time the narrator begins to remember his story, bears little relation to these memories: it was formerly German and called Danzig and is now Polish and called Gdansk; it was old and its ancient stones bore witness to its long history; now, reconstructed out of its devastation, it seems to have disowned the past. The setting for the novel, in its imprecision and its constant changes, could not be more fictional. One might see it as a work of pure imagination and not something capriciously sculpted by a history that has lost its bearings.

Straddling reality and fantasy, the city of Danzig in the novel pulses with buried tenderness and is shrouded in melancholy like a light winter mist. This perhaps is the secret of its charm. Describing its streets and its port full of inhospitable docks and large barges, its operatic Municipal Theatre or its Marine Museum — where Heriberto Truczinski dies trying to make love to a figurehead — Oskar Matzerath’s ironic and belligerent tone melts like ice before a flame, and he speaks with delicacy and nostalgic empathy. His nuanced, lingering descriptions of places and things make the city human and give it, in certain episodes, a theatrical life of its own. At the same time it is pure poetry: a labyrinth of streets or ruined waste ground, or squalid, unconnected emotions that are part of the ebb and flow of memory, brought to life by the changing moods of the narrator. Flexible and voluble, the city of the novel, like the central character and his adventures, is also an enchanted space, which, through the strength of language and delirium, illuminates the hidden face of real history.

Barranco, 28 September 1987

Deep Rivers

Fantasy and Magic

In 1958, José María Arguedas published Deep Rivers, his best novel. Although it was deeply rooted in personal experience — the journeys through the mountains with his father, who was a lawyer, the periods of solitude when his father was travelling, the time he spent at the religious Miguel Grau School in Abancay, his memories of the Indian communes in Viseca, where he lived happily after escaping from his stepmother’s house, and his memories of the large estates in Apurímac that he later visited — it is more than an autobiographical novel. It is a story so skilfully reworked that it has depersonalised the author’s memories and offers instead a sovereign narrative world, which is what the best fictions always achieve. The book is seductive because of its elegant style, its delicate sensibility and the range of emotions with which it recreates the world of the Andes. Although the novel includes the different social groups in the sierra, at its heart are the cruel and innocent ceremonies of puberty and the early steps that a boy must take into the adult world, which is made up of rigid hierarchies and imbued with violence and racism.

The protagonist of the novel is a boy torn between two hostile worlds. The child of white parents, brought up by Indians and then returned to the world of the whites, Ernesto the narrator is a misfit, a solitary figure and also someone in a privileged position to evoke the tragic opposition between these worlds. At the beginning of the novel, in the shadow of the stone walls in Cuzco where the Indian and the Spanish worlds meet in harsh alliance, as they do in Ernesto (and in José María Arguedas), the boy’s fate is sealed. He will not change, and throughout the story he is disturbed by the thousand and one forms of subtle or not so subtle conflict between two races and two cultures in the Andes. Subjectively identified with the Indians who brought him up and who, for him, represent a paradise lost, and yet far removed from them because of his social position that objectively places him among the whites in Abancay, whose views on the Indian population are anathema to him, the world around him poses an impossible dilemma for Ernesto. One has to live, of course, and since Ernesto cannot escape his predicament, he finds ways to make it bearable. He has two weapons at his disposal: the first is to take refuge in an inner world, in fantasy. The second is a desperate desire to communicate with the world outside of men and women: with nature. For this pariah child, with no roots in society, always in exile, the world is not rational but essentially absurd. That is why he displays a fatalistic irrationality and idealises plants, objects and animals, attributing to them not just human but also divine properties: he makes them sacred.

Every magical-religious vision — like that of Ernesto — is irrational, not scientific, because it presupposes the existence of a secret order within the natural and human order, outside rational and intelligent understanding. Such a world can be very refined, but it will always be primitive if we accept the premise that the transition from the primitive and tribal world to the beginning of modern culture is based, precisely, on the advent of rationality.

In Deep Rivers, as in all of Arguedas’s work, there is a desire for a primitive, sociable world: the ‘tribe’ that Karl Popper talks about in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a collective not yet split up into individuals, magically immersed in nature, strongly united by a solidarity that stems from a shared faith in the same gods, in rituals and ceremonies practiced in common. This is contrasted to a caricature of the modern world in which individuals — like Ernesto in this novel — find themselves abandoned and alienated because they have lost the umbilical chord that binds them to society and are at the mercy of hostile forces that at every moment threaten to destroy them.

The magical-religious world depicted in the novel might be irrational and primitive, but it is very persuasive. This speaks well of the creative talent of Arguedas and not necessarily, as ideological critics would have us believe, of his skill as an ethnographer and folklore specialist. He doubtless had these skills when he worked as a researcher, but, fortunately, when he came to write novels, he did so with enough freedom to escape the rigid limitations that any ‘scientific knowledge’ of the Andes would impose. As a novelist and short-story writer, Arguedas built a world which was based on his ‘scientific’ knowledge of the Quechua world and on his own personal demons — his frustrations and desires, his suffering, emotions, passions, dreams and resentments — as well as on the flight of his fantasy. For that reason his Andean world is different to that of other novelists who wrote about the Andes and its traditional cultures, and is also very different to the historical and sociological reality of the Quechuan people. To read Arguedas’s narratives as an ethno-historical manual, or through the rigid prism of political ideology, is to miss what is new about it: the creation of an imaginary world which has transformed into myth a heterogeneous material made up of personal memories, nostalgia and disappointments along with historical and social realities and a good dose of invention, and has transcended its ‘model’ — its space, its time and its sources — to live the autonomous life of those fictions that can persuade all types of readers of their uncertain truths, whose magic, made up of words and dreams, can help them identify and put up with their own particular truths.

Ernesto is also resistant to what other people believe and adore: his faith is not their faith, his God is not their God. Within this Christian world in which he is immersed, the solitary child establishes a personal religion, a surreptitious cult, a personal divinity. That is why he is so hostile to the ministers of the opposing faith: the head of his boarding school, a priest, the ‘saint’ of Abancay, is presented as the incarnation of human duplicity and injustice. A wave of fury breaks over the novel when this character appears. The masochistic speech that he delivers to the Indians in Patibamba and his unctuous and lying sermon to placate the women in revolt verge on caricature. Not even the local caciques who exploit the Indians or the soldiers that repress them are as harshly depicted in Deep Rivers as the priest who makes victims become resigned to their lot and opposes rebellion with dogma. This is understandable: the site of the novel, as we have said, is interior reality, where the religious element can exercise its subtle powers. Local caciques only appear fleetingly, although the problem of feudalism in the Andes is frequently referred to and is represented allegorically in the town of Abancay.

From his inner refuge, Ernesto participates in the struggle between the Indians and their masters. Two fundamental episodes in the novel refer to this age-old war: the uprising of the market women and the spread of the plague. These are the two moments of greatest intensity that send a current of energy throughout the book. The lava that flows from these volcanic craters seems to engulf the narrator, turning the timid retiring child into another person: in these episodes nostalgia is overcome by passion. For when the market women rebel and the citizens of Abancay take to their houses in terror, Ernesto is out on the street, happy and excited, singing alongside them in Quechua. It is curious how a novel that is so focused on the inner world, that draws so strongly on the contemplation of nature and on the unhappy loneliness of a child, can suddenly express an intolerable violence. Arguedas was not too bothered by the technical aspects of the novel, which is sometimes weak in its construction, but his intuition guided him to make the best use of his materials. These incidents of violence are structurally successful. From the first time that I read Deep Rivers I still remember the impact that these episodes had, lighting up the story like a fire: the image of the young girl in the plague-ridden town, with her ‘tiny sex covered with enormous, white, insect-bitten swellings’²⁸, or the lice that cover the heads and the bodies of those dying from the plague.

In the end, are we talking about a tormented conscience? A child beset by impossible contradictions that isolate him from others and imprison him in past realities kept alive by memory? A predominance of the natural order over the social order? A magical-religious world that owes as much to the personal fantasies and obsessions of the author as it does to Quechuan culture? People have read the novel as a sort of distorted testimony, and have accused it of being politically immature or else have tried to impose their own interpretations and read it as an explicit and orthodox description of the struggle of the peasantry against feudalism and exploitation in the Andes. Arguedas himself did this, in his final years, at a time of increasing public demonstrations of political correctness: he added to the confusion by declaring to the First Meeting of Peruvian Writers, in Arequipa, that the entrance of the plague-ridden Indians from Patibamba into the city of Abancay was a literary premonition of the peasant uprisings headed by Hugo Blanco, years later. But these a posteriori readings of the author are quite unnecessary: we are dealing with a novel, not an illustration of social struggles in the Peruvian sierra; a fiction that encompasses much more than the social problems of a historical moment, although these problems are not avoided. They are dealt with in that veiled, mythologised manner in which literature reflects the world. It is perfectly valid to ask any writer dealing with the Andes that they should pay heed to the injustices in the region, but not proscribe how they should do this. All the horror of the Andean region is contained in Deep Rivers, it is a given reality, without which Ernesto’s troubled state would be incomprehensible. The particular tragedy of this child is an indirect but unequivocal testimony of that horror; it is one of its innumerable products. In his confusion, in his loneliness, in his fear, in his naïve embrace of plants and insects, in his constant retreat into the past, the imaginary, magical world, we see the roots of this evil. Literature bears witness to social and economic reality in this way, by refraction and through metaphor, registering the repercussions of historical events and great social problems on an individual and mythic level. This is the way that literary testimony remains alive and does not turn into the dead hand of ideology.

London, 17 August 1995

Neruda at a Hundred

When I was still a boy in short trousers, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I spent the first ten years of my life, my mother had on her bedside table an edition of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, that had a blue cover with a stream of golden stars on it, which she read and reread. I had barely begun to read and, attracted by my mother’s devotion to these pages, I tried to read them as well. She had forbidden me to do so, explaining that these were not poems for children. This ban made the verses extraordinarily attractive, making them seem rather disturbing. I read them secretly, without understanding them, excited, and intuiting that behind some of the mysterious exclamations (‘My rough labourer’s body tunnels into you/And makes the child leap up from the depths of the earth’, ‘Ah, the roses of the pubis!’) there lay a world that was all about sin.

Neruda was the first poet whose poems I learned by heart: I would recite them in my adolescent years to the girls I fell in love with. He was the poet I most imitated when I began to scribble down verses, the epic and revolutionary poet that accompanied my years at university, and my political involvement in the group Cahuide during the sinister years of the Odría dictatorship. In the clandestine meetings of my cell, we would sometimes interrupt our readings of Lenin’s What is to be Done and Mariátegui’s Seven Essays to recite, in a state of trance, pages from the Canto General and Spain in My Heart. Later, when I became a more discerning reader than as a young man, very critical of propaganda poetry, Neruda continued to be one of my favourite writers — I even preferred him to the great César Vallejo, another icon of my youth — no longer as the writer of Canto General, but rather the Neruda of Residence on Earth, a book that I have reread many times, as I have done with a very small number of other poets, like Góngora, Baudelaire and Rubén Darío. Some of the poems in that collection — ‘The Widow’s Tango’, ‘The Single Gentleman’ — still send a shiver down my spine and give me that sense of wonderful unease and shock that only the best literature can produce. In all aspects of artistic creation, genius is an inexplicable anomaly in our world of reason, but in poetry it is more than that: it is a strange, almost inhuman gift, something that has to be described with those much abused adjectives: transcendent, miraculous, divine.

I met Pablo Neruda in Paris in the sixties, in the house of Jorge Edwards. I still remember how excited I felt to be face to face with the very man who had written that poetry that was like an ocean of different seas and infinite species of animals and vegetables, unfathomably deep and enormously rich. I was struck dumb. I finally managed to blurt out a few admiring remarks. He received the praise with the naturalness of royalty and declared that it was a good night for us to eat the sausages that the Edwards had prepared for us. He was fat, friendly, gossipy, greedy (‘Mathilde, get over to that dish right now and save me the best bits’), a good conversationalist, and he made an enormous effort to break the ice and make me feel at ease, as I sat there, overwhelmed by his imposing presence.

Although we ended up becoming quite good friends, I think that he was the only writer that I could never treat as an equal. When I was with him, despite the fact that he was always very warm and generous towards me, I always ended up feeling both intimidated and reverential. The man intrigued me and fascinated me almost as much as his poetry. His pose was anti-intellectual, contemptuous of the theories and complicated interpretations of critics. When someone floated an abstract, general topic, inviting a discussion about ideas — something that Octavio Paz shone at — Neruda’s face fell and he immediately made sure that the conversation became trite and prosaic. He made a great effort to show that he was simple, direct and completely down to earth, a world away from bookish writers who preferred texts to life and who could say, like Borges, ‘I have read a lot and lived only a little.’ He wanted to make everyone believe that he had lived a lot and read very little, because he rarely mentioned literature in conversation. Even when he showed, with great pride, the first editions and the marvellous manuscripts that he’d collected in his splendid library, he avoided making any comments about literary value and instead focused on the purely material aspect of these precious objects filled with words. His anti-intellectualism was a pose, of course, because without reading a great deal and assimilating and reflecting on the best literature, he would not have been able to revolutionise poetic language in Spanish the way he did, or have written such diverse and essential poetry. He seemed to think that the worst risk a poet could run was to become confined in a world of abstractions and ideas, as if this might take away the vitality of the word, remove poetry from the public arena and condemn it to obscurity.

What was not a pose was his love of things, objects that could be felt, seen, smelt and eventually eaten and drunk. All of Neruda’s houses, but in particular the house at Isla Negra, were creations that were as powerful and personal as his best poems. He collected everything, from figureheads to little matchstick ships in bottles, from butterflies to marine shells, from handicrafts to very early editions, and in his houses one felt enveloped by an atmosphere of fantasy and immense sensuality. He had an infallible eye when it came to detecting unusual and exceptional things, and when he liked something, he became like a capricious, difficult child who would not stop until he got what he wanted. I remember a marvellous letter that he wrote to Jorge Edwards, asking him to go to London and buy him a pair of drums that he had seen in a shop when he’d been passing through that capital city. Life was unliveable, he said, without a drum. In the mornings in Isla Negra, he sounded a trumpet, put on his naval beret and raised the flag on the mast that he had on the beach: the emblem was a fish.

Watching him eat was a wonderful spectacle. That time that I met him, in Paris, I interviewed him for the Radio-Television channel. I asked him to read a poem from ‘Residence of Earth’ which I love: ‘The Young Monarch’. He agreed, but when he found the page he exclaimed, in surprise: ‘Ah, but this is a prose poem.’ I felt a dagger to my heart: how could he have forgotten one of the most perfect compositions ever to come from the pen of a poet? After the interview, he wanted to go and eat Middle Eastern food. In a Moroccan restaurant in the rue de L’Harpe, he gave the fork back and asked for a second spoon. He ate with great concentration and happiness, brandishing a spoon in each hand like an alchemist mixing his vials, about to create the definitive potion. Watching Neruda eat, one realised that life was worth living, that happiness was possible and that its secret was sizzling in a frying pan.

The fact that he became so famous and so successful throughout the entire world, and could live so comfortably, stirred up envy, resentment and hatred that pursued him everywhere, and, on occasion, made his life impossible. I remember once in London indignantly showing him a newspaper from Lima, which contained an attack on me. He looked at me as if I was a child who still believed that storks brought babies. ‘I have chests full of cuttings like that,’ he said. ‘I think that at some time or other I’ve been accused of everything disgusting under the sun.’ But when this happened, he knew how to defend himself, and, at some points in his life, his poems were full of insults and ferocious diatribes against his enemies. But curiously, I cannot remember him ever saying anything bad about anyone, and only very rarely indulging in that favourite sport among writers which is to take fellow writers apart. One night, in Isla Negra, after an enormous meal, through half opened, tortoise eyes he looked at me and said that he had sent five signed copies of his latest book to five young Chilean poets. ‘And not one of them wrote back to me,’ he complained sadly.

This was in the last years of his life, at a time when he wanted everyone to like him because he had forgotten all the old enmities and grudges and was making peace with everyone. Although he remained loyal to the Communist Party and, out of this loyalty, had at certain moments sung the praises of Stalin and defended dogmatic positions, in his old age he began to be more critical of what had happened in the communist world and he became more tolerant and open. His poetry was no longer belligerent or resentful, and became serene, joyful and understanding, celebrating the things and the people of this world.

There is no other poetic work in the Spanish language as exuberant and as vast as that of Neruda, a poetry that has touched so many different worlds and stimulated so many different writing talents. The only comparable case that I know in other languages is the work of Victor Hugo. Like the œuvre of the great French Romantic, Neruda’s work was uneven: it could be intense, surprising and strikingly original, but also facile and conventional. But there is no doubt that his work will last and will continue to bewitch future generations as it has bewitched our generation.

There was something childlike about him, with his obsessions and desires that he expressed without any trace of hypocrisy, with the healthy enthusiasm of a naughty boy. Behind his good-natured appearance, there was a man who was a keen observer of reality and also someone who, in exceptional circumstances, in a small group, after a well-lubricated meal, could suddenly reveal a heart-rending intimacy. And it was then that we could see, behind the Olympian figure, celebrated the world over, the small boy from the province of Parral, full of enthusiasm and amazement at the wonders of the world, this boy that he never stopped being.

Madrid, June 2004

How I Lost My Fear of Flying

There are certain naïve people who believe that a fear of flying is, or can be explained by, a fear of death. They are wrong: fear of flying is fear of flying, not of death, a fear as particular and specific as a fear of spiders, or of the void, or of cats, three common examples among the thousands that make up the panoply of human fears. Fear of flying wells up suddenly, when people not lacking in imagination and sensitivity realise that they are thirty thousand feet in the air, travelling through clouds at eight hundred miles an hour, and ask, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And begin to tremble.

It happened to me, after many years getting on and off aircraft as often as I change my shirts. I continued getting on these airborne missiles, but for a long time, I was sweating buckets on every flight, especially when we hit turbulence. My friend Saso, a most delightful air hostess who feels safer above the clouds than on terra firma, and who guffawed at my panic in the air, tried to cure me with the aid of statistics. She proved to me what everyone knows. That to travel by plane is infinitely safer than travelling by car, boat, train and even by bicycle or on skates, because every year many more people have accidents using those forms of transport. And even that going on foot, on a gentle and innocuous walk, is, statistically speaking, more dangerous than going in a plane. But, in my case, abstract statistics are incapable of stirring emotions or dispelling terror, so that even though rationally I was convinced by the figures that ploughing through the skies inside a plane is safer than sleeping in my own bed, I continued to have a terrible time on every flight.

My late friend, the Uruguayan novelist Carlos Martínez Moreno, who once travelled by plane with me, spent the whole flight clutching an edition of Madame Bovary, worn and tattered from so much handling, that he did not read, but stroked continually. It was an amulet that guaranteed him a peaceful and safe flight. He’d taken this book on his first flight and it would later accompany him on all other flights, because intuition, fantasy or madness told him that it was this novelistic talisman and not the smooth running of the engines or the skill of the pilots that kept the planes he travelled in free of all harm and mishap. But Martínez Moreno’s remedy did not work for me, because of my strong scepticism of any form of witchcraft (especially its modern variants), or simply because I have yet to come across the spell that might convince me and convert me to the faith of witchcraft.

A Puerto Rican friend, a wealthy widow who travels the world, revealed to me that she had cured her fear of flying through whisky. She’d always take a good supply with her on board, hidden in a small bag, and at the second or third sip, the ship could turn somersaults or be tossed about by the wind and she’d be giggling and happy, impervious to everything. I tried to apply her formula, but it did not work for me. I am very allergic to alcohol, and gulps of whisky, far from taking away my fear of flying, just increased it, and gave me headaches, shivers and nausea on top. I would probably have needed to become a hardened alcoholic, seeing little green men, to achieve the indifference to flying that my Puerto Rican friend managed with a few sips of alcohol. The cure would have been more damaging than the illness.

At the other extreme to my Puerto Rican friend, some puritans argue that fear of flying is a result of heavy meals and an immoderate ingestion of spirits (wine and alcohol) on the journey. And for my serenity in the air, they recommended that I should abstain from eating and drinking wine on flights, and just drink large, and, for them, sedating, glasses of water. It didn’t work. Quite the reverse, these forced diets made me very miserable, and added to my fear the demoralising torture of hunger and constant peeing.

Seconal, sanax and all those other pills invented to cure wakefulness and abolish insomnia, are no use to me either. There are marvellous people (they merit both my admiration and my envy) who become immediately somnolent on a plane and who sleep peacefully through the whole flight, lulled by the buzzing of the reactors. And others who, in order to reach that same state, stuff themselves with pills, which daze and anaesthetise them. But sleeping pills gave me palpitations or the most dreadful nightmares in which I saw myself sweating with terror inside a plane. So the relative, artificial sleep induced by medicaments did not take my fear away, but rather displaced it onto an oneiric and subconscious plane, and, as another side effect, turned me into a depressed zombie by the end of the flight.

The solution came in a most unexpected way, on a flight between Buenos Aires and Madrid which, by chance, was commemorating the first flight between those cities (by an Iberian Airline Douglas DC4) on 22 September 1946. I bought at Ezeiza airport a copy of a short novel by Alejo Carpentier that I had not read: The Kingdom of This World. Nothing had prepared me for the surprise. From the first lines of the story, which recreates the hallucinating life of Henri Christophe and the building of the famous Citadel in Haiti, this superbly written and even better constructed narration in which, as in all literary masterpieces, nothing could be added or taken away, absorbed me body and soul and took away my surroundings, transporting me, for the ten hours or so of the flight, away from the frozen starry night into a prodigious epic account of Haiti in the previous century, where the most ferocious violence intermingled with the most fevered imagination, and everyday and trivial events blurred into miracles and legends. I read the final lines when the plane touched down in Barajas; the book had lasted the flight, and had taken away my fear for the entire journey.

It is a remedy that, from that time on, has never failed me, so long as I choose for each flight a masterpiece whose spell is both total and lasts for exactly the time that I am defying the law of gravity. Of course, it is not easy to choose the right work, in terms of quality and length, for each trip. But with practice I have developed a sort of instinct to choose the right novel or story (poetry, plays or essays are not as strong antidotes against the fear of flying). I have also discovered that it is not necessary to have new works, for rereading can be just as effective provided the work in question can cast a spell that is as new and refreshing on third or fourth reading as it was the first time. Here is a list (as a token of my appreciation) of these reliable friends who in my recent, successful, attempts to emulate Icarus, helped me to conquer my fear of flying: Bartleby and Benito Cereno by Melville; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James; ‘The Pursuer’ by Cortázar; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by R. L. Stevenson; The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway; ‘The Monkey’ by Isak Dinesen; Pedro Páramo by Rulfo; Complete Works and Other Stories by Monterroso; ‘A Rose for Emily’ and ‘The Bear’ by Faulkner and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Fortunately for me, the literary chemist store has limitless reserves of these medicines, so I still have plenty of plane journeys (and good reading) ahead.

Washington DC, 23 October 1999

Literature and Life

It happens quite often, in book fairs or bookshops, that a man will come up to me with a book of mine in his hand and ask me for an autograph, saying, ‘It’s for my wife or my young daughter, or my sister, or my mother; she or they are great readers and they love literature.’ And I immediately ask: ‘And what about you, don’t you like to read?’ The answer is almost inevitably: ‘Yes, of course I like reading, but I’m very busy, you know.’ Yes, I do know, because I’ve heard this dozens of times: that man, and thousands like him, have so many important things to do, so many obligations and responsibilities in their lives that they cannot waste their precious time spending hours on end absorbed in a novel, a book of poetry or a literary essay. According to this widespread conception, literature is a dispensable activity, a pastime, no doubt lofty and useful for the cultivation of feelings and manners, an adornment for people that have plenty of time for recreation and that has to be fitted in between sports, cinema, and games of bridge or chess. But it is something that can be sacrificed without a second thought when it comes to prioritising what is really important in life.

It is true that literature has increasingly become a female activity: in bookshops or lectures or readings by writers, and, of course, in university departments and faculties in the humanities, women quite obviously outnumber men. The explanation that has been given for this fact is that, among the middle classes, women read more because they work fewer hours than men, and also that many women tend to consider that time spent on fantasy and illusion is more justifiable than do men. I am somewhat sceptical of interpretations that divide men and women into fixed categories, which attribute collective virtues and shortcomings to each of the sexes, so I don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to these explanations. But it is true that, in general, readers of literature are on the decline and that most of these remaining readers are women. This is true almost everywhere. In Spain, a recent survey organised by the General Society of Spanish Authors came up with the alarming statistic that half of the population has never read a book. The survey also revealed that, of the minority that do read, the number of women who admit to reading is 6.2 % higher than the number of men, and the tendency is for this gap to increase. I am sure that these differences apply to many other countries, including my own. And I am happy for those women, of course, but I am sorry for the men and for the millions of people who could read, but have decided not to do so. Not only because they do not know the pleasure they are missing, but, from a less hedonistic perspective, because I am convinced that a society without literature, or in which literature has been relegated, like certain unmentionable vices, to the margins of social life, and has become something like a sectarian cult, is a society condemned to become spiritually barbarous and even to endanger its freedom.

I would like to argue against the idea of literature as a luxury pastime and in favour of the view that it is one of the most enriching activities of the mind, an indispensable activity for the formation of citizens in a modern, democratic society, a society of free individuals, and, for that reason, it should be instilled in children from an early age by their families and be taught as a basic discipline throughout the education system. We already know that the opposite is true, that literature is shrinking and even disappearing from the school curriculum.

We live in an era of knowledge specialisation, due to the prodigious development of science and technology, and the fragmentation of knowledge into innumerable paths and compartments, a cultural trend that will only be accentuated in years to come. Of course, specialisation brings great benefits, offering much more detailed research and experimentation; it is the engine of progress. But it also has a negative effect: it elides all those common denominators of culture through which men and women coexist, communicate and feel a sense of solidarity. Specialisation leads to a lack of social communication, to the division of people into cultural ghettoes of technicians and specialists. They share a language, codes and information that are increasingly specialised and specific, which limits them in a way that the old proverb has warned us against: they can’t see the wood for the trees. And knowing that the wood exists is what binds a society together, and prevents it from collapsing into a myriad of solipsistic parts. And solipsism — in nations or in individuals — produces paranoia and delirium, these disfigurements of reality that can cause hatred, wars and genocide. In our day and age, science and technology are increasingly divorced from broader culture, precisely because of the infinite complexity of its knowledge and the speed of its evolution, which has led to specialisation and the use of hermetic language.

Literature, by contrast, is, has been, and will continue to be for as long as it exists, one of the common denominators of human existence, through which human beings recognise themselves and talk to each other, no matter how different their professions or their plans for life, their geographical location, their individual circumstances or the historical moment that they are living in. Those of us who read Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dante or Tolstoy understand each other and feel part of the same species because, in the works that these writers created, we learn what we share as human beings, what is common to all of us beneath the wide range of differences that separate us. And there is no better defence against the stupidity of prejudice, racism, xenophobia, religious or political sectarianism or autarkic nationalism than this invariable truth that appears in all great literature: that men and women from across the world are equal, and that it is unjust that they are subject to discrimination, repression and exploitation. Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of our shared heritage, and to prize these differences as a demonstration of our diverse creativity. Reading good literature is enjoyable, of course; but we also learn, in that direct and intense way that we experience life through fictions, what and how we are, our human integrity, our actions and dreams and fantasies, alone or in the dense web of relations that link us to others, in our public persona and in the intimacy of our consciousness, that complex sum of contradictory truths — in the words of Isaiah Berlin — that make up the human condition. Not even other branches of the humanities — like philosophy, psychology, sociology, history or the arts — have managed to preserve this integrating and secular vision. For they too have succumbed to the irresistible pressure of the cancerous division and subdivision of knowledge, isolating themselves in increasingly segmented and technical areas of expertise, whose ideas and terminology are beyond the scope of ordinary men and women. This can never happen to literature, even though some critics and theoreticians try to turn it into a science, because fiction does not exist to investigate a particular area of existence. It exists to enrich life through the imagination, all of life, this life that cannot be dismembered, broken up, or reduced to schema or formulas, without disappearing. This is what Marcel Proust meant when he said: ‘True life, life at last clarified and brought to light, the only life, furthermore, that is fully lived, is literature.’ He was not exaggerating, influenced by his love of his own vocation. He merely wished to say that, thanks to literature, we understand and live life better and understanding and living life better means living and sharing it with others.

The fraternal link that literature forges between human beings, forcing them to speak to each other and making them realise that they have a common origin, that they form part of the same spiritual lineage, transcends the barriers of time. Literature takes us back to the past and links us to those who, in past times, plotted, enjoyed and dreamed through these texts that they have bequeathed us, texts that now give us enjoyment and fuel our dreams. This feeling of belonging to the community of human beings through time and space is the greatest achievement of culture, and nothing contributes more to its renewal with each generation than literature.

Borges always got annoyed when he was asked: ‘What is the use of literature?’ He thought it a stupid question and would reply: ‘Nobody thinks of asking what is the use of the song of a canary or the crimson glow of a sunset!’ Indeed, if these beautiful things exist and, thanks to them, life, albeit for a moment, is less ugly and less sad, isn’t it rather small-minded to seek practical justifications? However, unlike birdsong or the spectacle of the sun sinking on the horizon, a poem or a novel are not simply there, fashioned by chance or by Nature. They are a human creation and it is thus valid to ask how and why they came about, and what they have given to humanity, to understand why literature, that is as old as writing itself, has lasted for so long. They were born, as formless ghosts, in the intimacy of a consciousness, the combination of the unconscious and a writer’s sensibility and feelings. Poets and narrators then grapple with language to give these formless ghosts body, movement, rhythm, harmony and life. This is an artificial life, fashioned by language and the imagination, which has coexisted with the other, the real life, from time immemorial, and men and women seek out this imagined life — some frequently and others only sporadically — because the life that they have is not enough for them, is not able to give them everything that they want. Literature does not begin to exist when it emerges as the work of a single individual, it only really exists when it is adopted by others, and becomes part of social life, when it becomes, through reading, a shared experience.

One of its first beneficial effects occurs at the level of language. A community without a written literature expresses itself with less precision, with less nuance and clarity than another community whose principal mode of communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected through literary texts. A humanity without readers, which has not been contaminated by literature, would be like a community of stammerers and aphasiacs, beset by tremendous problems of communication because of its coarse and rudimentary language. The same is true for individuals, of course. People who do not read, or read little or just read rubbish, might talk a great deal, but will say very little because they have a very limited and insufficient repertoire of words with which to express themselves. This is not just a verbal limitation; it is also an intellectual and imaginative limitation. It reveals a poverty of thought and knowledge, because the ideas and concepts through which we apprehend existing reality and the secrets of our condition do not exist outside the words through which our consciousness recognises and defines them. We learn to speak correctly, with depth, precision and subtlety, from good literature and only from good literature. No other discipline or branch of the arts can supersede literature when it comes to crafting the language through which people communicate. The knowledge transmitted to us by scientific manuals or technical reports is fundamental; but these do not teach us how to use words or express ourselves correctly. Quite the reverse, they are often very badly and confusedly written because their authors, who are often indisputably eminent in their field, are uneducated in literature and do not know how to use language to communicate the conceptual treasures that they possess. To speak well, to have at one’s disposal a rich and varied language, to find the right expression for each idea and emotion that one wishes to express, means that one is better prepared to think, teach, learn and communicate, and also to fantasise, dream and feel. In a surreptitious way, words reverberate in all aspects of life, even those that seem far removed from language. And as language evolved, thanks to literature, achieving a high level of refinement and nuance, then it also increased the possibilities for human pleasure. With respect to love, it sublimated desires and conferred on the sexual act the status of artistic creation. Without literature there would be no eroticism. Love and pleasure would be impoverished, they would lack delicacy and refinement, and would not achieve that same intensity that literary fantasy can encourage. It is not far-fetched to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Góngora and Baudelaire feel greater love and pleasure than an illiterate couple who have become doltish by watching too much television. In a non-literary world, love and pleasure would be indistinguishable from animal desires, the crude satisfaction of basic instincts: copulating and drinking.

Nor are the audiovisual media in a position to supplant literature when it comes to teaching human beings to make assured and subtle use of the infinite riches of language. On the contrary, audiovisual media naturally tend to give words secondary importance in contrast to images, which is their primordial language, and to limit language to the spoken word, often with a bare minimum of dialogue, rather than the written word. Because if there are too many words, on the small or the large screen, or coming out of loudspeakers, the effect is always soporific. To say that a film or a television programme is ‘literary’ is an elegant way of calling it boring. And that is why literary programmes on the radio or television rarely reach a wide audience: to my knowledge, the only exception to this rule is Bernard Pivot’s programme Apostrophes in France. This leads me to think as well, though I have my doubts, that not only is literature indispensable for a complete knowledge and command of language, but that the fate of literature is indissolubly linked to the fate of the book, that industrial product that many now declare to be obsolete.

One of these people is a man to whom we all owe so much in terms of developments in communication: Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Mr Gates was in Madrid a few months ago and he visited the Royal Spanish Academy, which has embarked on what I hope will become a fruitful collaboration with Microsoft. Among other things, Bill Gates assured the members of the Academy that he would personally guarantee that the letter ‘ñ‘ would never disappear from computer programmes. This was greeted with a sigh of relief by those four hundred million of us Spanish-speakers across five continents, for whom the loss of that letter in cyberspace would have created problems of Babel-like proportions. Now, immediately after this kind concession to the Spanish language, before he had even left the Royal Academy, Bill Gates declared in a press conference that he had to achieve his greatest goal before he died. And what might that be? To put an end to paper, and, thus, to books themselves which, in his view, are obstinately anachronistic. Mr Gates explained that computer screens can successfully replace paper in every function imaginable and that, as well as being lighter, being more portable and taking up less space than paper, reading information on a screen instead of in magazines and books has the ecological advantage of ending the destruction of forests, a cataclysm that has been caused by the paper industry. People would continue to read, of course, he explained, but on screen, and because of this there would be more chlorophyll in the atmosphere.

I was not present — I got the story from the press — but if I had been there I would have booed Mr Gates for declaring, quite shamelessly, that he was looking to put me, and so many of my colleagues, who write books, out of a job. Can the screen replace the book in every case, as the creator of Microsoft argues? I am not so sure. I state this in full knowledge that there is a major revolution taking place in the fields of communication and information which has lead to the development of new technologies like the Internet, which is an invaluable help to my own work. But to go from there to admit that the screen can replace paper when it comes to reading literature, is a step too far for me. I simply cannot conceive how any non-pragmatic and non-functional act of reading, that is not looking for information or some useful piece of instantly communicable knowledge, can derive from a computer screen the same feeling of intimacy, the same concentration and the same spiritual isolation that can be achieved by reading a book. This, perhaps, is a prejudice of mine, stemming from a lack of practice and from a lifetime of equating reading literature with reading books. Although I very happily surf the Internet looking for world news, I would never use it to read the poems of Góngora, a novel by Onetti or an essay by Octavio Paz, because I am sure that the effect would never be the same. I am convinced, though I can’t prove it, that with the disappearance of the book, literature would suffer a severe, perhaps even mortal blow. The name would not disappear, of course; but it would probably be used to describe a type of text so far removed from what we understand as literature as soap operas are to the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare.

There is another reason to give literature an important place in the life of nations. Without it, the critical mind, which is an engine of political change and the best champion of liberty that we have, would go into irremediable decline. Because all good literature asks radical questions of the world we live in. Every great literary text, often without the writer’s intention, has a tendency towards sedition.

Literature has nothing to say to those people who are satisfied with their lot, who are content with life as it is. Literature offers sustenance to rebellious and non-conformist spirits and a refuge to those who have too much or too little in life; it wards off unhappiness and any feelings of lack or want. To ride alongside scrawny Rocinante and his scatterbrained owner across the plains of La Mancha, to sail the seas with Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale, to swallow arsenic with Madame Bovary or turn into an insect with Gregory Samsa is a clever way that we have invented to make up for the wrongs and impositions of this unjust life that forces us always to be the same, when we want to be many people, as many as it would take to assuage the burning desires that possess us.

Literature can only pacify momentarily this dissatisfaction with life, but, in this miraculous interval, in this provisional suspension of life afforded by literary illusion — which seems to transport us out of chronology and history and turn us into citizens of a timeless, immortal country — we do become these others. We become more intense, richer, more complex, happier, more lucid, than in the constrained routine of our real life. When, once the book is closed and the literary fiction is abandoned, we return to real life and compare it to the splendid place that we have just left, what a disappointment it is. We are faced with the awful truth: that the fantasy life of the novel is better — more beautiful and more diverse, more comprehensible and more perfect — than the life we lead when we are awake, a life that is weighed down by the limitations and obligations of our existence. In this sense, good literature is always — unintentionally — seditious and rebellious: a challenge to what exists. How could we not feel cheated, after reading War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past, having to return to this world with its inconsequential pettiness, its rules and prohibitions that lie in wait for us and, at every turn, look to spoil our illusions. Even more, perhaps, than the need to maintain the continuity of culture and to enrich language, the main contribution of literature to human progress is to remind us (without intending to in the main) that the world is badly made, that those who argue the contrary — for example the powers that be — are lying, and that the world could be better, closer to the worlds that our imagination and our language are able to create.

A democratic and free society needs responsible and critical citizens, who are conscious of the need to scrutinise continually the world in which we live, and to try — although this is always a chimera — to make it more like the world that we would like to live in. Out of this stubborn desire to achieve this impossible dream — to marry reality with desire — civilisation was born and has developed, and through it we have defeated many — not all, of course — of the demons that once assailed us. And there is no better way of fostering dissatisfaction with life than good literature. And there is no better way of forming critical and independent citizens, who are difficult to manipulate, who are quick-witted and always questioning, than reading good books.

Now, to call literature seditious because the best fictions develop in their readers a clear sense of the imperfections of the real world does not mean, of course — as Churches and governments seem to think it means when they impose censorship — that literary texts immediately cause social upheaval or accelerate revolutions. Here we are entering a slippery, subjective terrain, and we need to move carefully. The socio-political effects of a poem, a play or a novel cannot be verified because they are not experienced collectively, but rather individually, which means that they vary enormously from person to person. That is why it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish precise rules. Also, if it is clear that a book has had an effect on society, it might have little to do with its aesthetic quality. For example, a mediocre novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe, seems to have played a very important role in raising awareness in the United States about the horrors of slavery. But just because these effects are difficult to identify does not mean that they do not exist. Rather that they can be found indirectly, in so many ways, in the behaviour of people whose personalities have been shaped, in part, by books.

Good literature both temporarily assuages our human cravings and increases them: by developing a non-conformist, critical spirit towards life, we become more susceptible to unhappiness. To live dissatisfied, at war with existence, is to be constantly looking for trouble, to condemn oneself, like Colonel Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude, to fight battles knowing that they will all be lost. That is probably true. But it is also the case that without rebellion against the mediocrity and squalor of life, we humans would still be living in a primitive state, history would have stagnated, the individual would not have been born, science and technology would not have advanced, human rights would not be recognised, nor would freedom exist, because all of this came about through acts of rebellion against life, which was seen to be insufficient and intolerable. Literature has been fundamental in fostering an attitude that scorns life as it is and seeks, with the madness of Alonso Quijano, whose insanity, we should not forget, came about through reading novels of chivalry, to make the dream, the impossible, a reality.

Let us attempt a fantastic historical reconstruction and imagine a world without literature, a humanity that has not read poems or novels. In this agraphic world, with its miniscule lexicon in which grunts and ape-like gestures would probably prevail over words, there would be no adjectives based on literary creations: Quixotic, Kafkaesque, Pantagruelian, rocambolesque, Orwellian, sadistic and masochistic, among others. There would be madmen, victims of paranoia and persecution complexes and people with colossal and excessive appetites and bipeds who enjoy suffering and inflicting pain, of course. But we would not have learned to see behind this excessive behaviour, which is in conflict with supposed normality, essential aspects of the human condition, that is, of ourselves, that only the creative talent of Cervantes, Kafka, Rabelais, de Sade or Sacher-Masoch can show us. When Don Quixote appeared, the earliest readers made fun of this extravagant dreamer, just like the other characters in the novel. Now we know that the determination of the Knight of the Sorry Countenance to see giants where there are windmills, and to do all the crazy things he does, is the highest form of generosity, a way of protesting against the misery of this world and attempting to change it. The very notions of the ideal and of idealism, which are so imbued with a positive moral value, would not be what they are — clear and respected values — had they not been embodied in that fictional character that Cervantes’s genius made so persuasive. And the same could be said of that small and pragmatic female Quixote, Emma Bovary — bovarism would not exist, of course — who also fought passionately to live that wonderful life of passion and luxury that she knew through novels, and who burned herself in that fire like a butterfly who flies too close to a flame.

Like those of Cervantes and Flaubert, the inventions of all great literary creators both break down the walls of our realist prison and transport us into realms of fantasy, and also open our eyes to hidden and secret aspects of our condition and equip us to explore and better to understand the depths of human behaviour. When we say ‘Borgesian’, we immediately move out of routine and rational reality into a fantastic, rigorous and elegant mental construction, almost always labyrinthine, full of literary references and allusions. This singular world is not strange to us, however, because we recognise in it hidden desires and intimate truths about ourselves that only became apparent thanks to the literary creation of a Jorge Luis Borges. The adjective Kafkaesque comes straight to mind, like the flash gun of one of those old tripod cameras, every time we feel threatened, as defenceless individuals, by those oppressive and destructive institutions that have caused so much pain, abuse and injustice in the modern world: authoritarian regimes, vertical parties, intolerant Churches and stifling bureaucracies. Without the novels and short stories of this tormented Jew from Prague who wrote in German and was ever watchful, we would not have been able to understand so clearly that feeling of defencelessness and impotence that isolated individuals or persecuted and discriminated minorities experience when faced with all-embracing powers that can annihilate them and wipe them out, without their executioners ever having to show their faces.

The adjective ‘Orwellian’, a first cousin of ‘Kafkaesque’, alludes to the oppressive anguish and the sensation of extreme absurdity generated by the totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century, the most refined, cruel and absolute dictatorships in history, given their control over the actions, thoughts and even dreams of members of society. In his most famous novels, Animal Farm and 1984, George Orwell described in cold and nightmarish tones a humanity under the control of Big Brother, an absolute master who through an efficient combination of terror and modern technology, has eliminated liberty, spontaneity and equality — in this world, some are ‘more equal than others’ — and has turned society into automatons. Not only behaviour is controlled by the dictates of power; the language, as well, ‘Newspeak’, has been cleansed of all individualism, subjectivity and inventiveness, and has become a string of platitudes and clichés that endorse the individual’s slavery to the system. It is true that the sinister prophecy of 1984 did not come about in reality and that, as happened with fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, Communism disappeared in the USSR and began to lose its grip in China and in the present-day anachronistic societies of Cuba and North Korea. But the term ‘Orwellian’ is still current, a reminder of one of the most devastating political and cultural regimes in the history of civilisation, that the novels of George Orwell helped us to understand in all its complexity.

So the unreality and the lies of literature are also a precious way of understanding the most profound truths of human reality. These truths are not always flattering; sometimes the reflection of ourselves that appears in the mirror of novels and poems is monstrous. That happens when we read the horrific sexual butchery imagined by the Divine Marquis or the gloomy lacerations and the sacrifices that people the maudit books of a Sacher-Masoch or a Bataille. Sometimes the spectacle is so offensive that it is irresistible. And yet the worst thing about these pages is not the fevered description of blood, humiliation and abject tortures and convulsions. It is the realisation that this violence and excess is not alien to us, but is the very stuff of humanity. These monsters thirsting for transgressive, excessive behaviour live deep within us, and from the shadows where they live, they wait for an appropriate moment to appear, to impose their rule of unfettered desire which destroys rationality, community and perhaps even existence. It is literature, not science, that has been the first to explore the depths of human behaviour and discover its terrifying destructive and self-destructive potential. So a world without literature would be blind in part to these terrible depths where the reasons for unusual behaviour can frequently be found. Such a world would be unjust towards individuals who are different, in the same way that not long ago people thought that those who were dumb or who stammered were possessed by the devil. It might even continue the practices of certain Amazon tribes that subscribed to the notion of physical perfection to such a horrifying degree that they used to drown newborn children with physical defects.

Uncivilised, barbarous, devoid of sensitivity and clumsy in speech, ignorant and instinctual, without passion or eroticism, this world without literature in the nightmare that I am describing would mainly be characterised by conformism and a general submissiveness to the established order. It would also be in this sense an animal world. Basic instincts would decide the daily routines in a life determined by the struggle for survival, fear of the unknown and the satisfaction of physical needs. There would be no place for the spirit. And in the stifling monotony of life, a pessimistic feeling would always be casting its shadow: that human life is what it is supposed to be and will always be, without any possibility for change.

When one imagines a world like this, there is a tendency to identify it immediately with primitive peoples, with small magical-religious communities that live on the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania and Africa. But the truth is that the extraordinary development of audiovisual media in recent times allows us to imagine a possible scenario in a mediated future: a very modern society, bristling with computers, screens and speakers, and without books, or, rather, where books — literature — would have become what alchemy was in the age of physics: an anachronistic curiosity, kept alive in the catacombs of a media society by a neurotic minority. I fear that this cybernetic world, despite its prosperity and power, its high standard of living and scientific achievements, would be profoundly uncivilised, lethargic and lacking in spirit, a resigned, robotic world that would have abdicated its freedom.

Of course it is highly improbable that this terrifying prospect could ever become a reality. History is not written in advance, there is no predetermined fate that has decided for us what we are going to be. It depends entirely on us as to whether this macabre utopia takes shape or fades away. If we want to prevent literature — this source that powers our imagination and our sense of dissatisfaction, that refines our sensibilities and teaches us to speak with elegance and precision, that makes us free and gives us richer and more intense lives — from disappearing or being relegated to the attic alongside the things we no longer use, then we must act. We have to read good books and to encourage and teach those that follow us — in families and in lecture halls, in the media and in all aspects of our lives — that reading is absolutely essential, for reading pervades and enriches all aspects of our lives.

Lima, 3 April 2001