The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol
to Stendhal, Proust, Woolf. How about that!
Despite the complex interests that revolve around the book, the sophisticated marketing mechanisms, the cutthroat competitiveness in the market, there continues to exist a readership receptive to the form, demanding readers whose palate would not tolerate such grisly stories or the lachrymose flavor of the feuilleton, a public that fell in love with literature during adolescence, and contracted even earlier, in childhood, the addiction to traveling through time and space through books. Within that audience can be found a tiny group that is truly a supergroup, that of writers, or the adolescents and young people who will become writers in a near future. For them, reading is one of the greatest pleasures life has afforded them, but also the best school any of those striplings attended before publishing, in a cultural supplement, in a very modest magazine, or on a supremely elegant plaquette, the poems, short stories, or essays with which they’ll make their debut into the world of letters. First readings are critical to the fate of a would-be writer. And he, years later, will discover the importance that those long hours held when he was obligated to forego thousands of celebrations to be alone with Anna Karenina, The Charterhouse of Parma, Madame Bovary, Great Expectations, only to arrive later to Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, To the Lighthouse, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Pedro Páramo, where one more or less signs on.
Thanks to these readings and those yet to come, the future writer will be able to conceive of a plot as distant from reality as that of The Magician of Vienna, to do everything possible to exacerbate its garishness, its vulgar extravagance, to transform its language into a palimpsest of ignorance and wisdom, inanity and exquisiteness, until achieving an absurdly refined book, a cult novel, a snack for the happy few, like those of César Aira and Mario Bellatin.
I do not know the training of today’s young people. I imagine it to be very different from the writers of my generation owing to the visual and electronic revolution. I amused myself recently glancing at the several volumes of magnificent interviews published by the Paris Review. They are interviews with great poets and novelists from different countries and languages. They were published during three decades beginning in the fifties. Most of these authors would today be between 80 and 100 years old, or more, if they were alive. Almost all contributed to the transformation of twentieth-century literature. They speak insistently about their reading, especially those of their formative period, and all, without exception, were early, insatiable, omnivorous readers and, by the same token, refer passionately to the old masters, from the Hellenic legacy and the classics of their language to the indispensable figures of world literature. Cervantes is almost always present in their statements. William Faulkner read Don Quixote tirelessly, at least once a year. Other frequently mentioned names are: Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Poe, Melville, Conrad, Dickens, and Sterne. All of the interviewees claim to have read with special interest those works that arose during the periods of greatest splendor in the literature of their country. My generation was nourished by the Spanish classics, which are also ours, and those of other literatures, from their origins to the nineteenth century and later, with the great literary expression that came to us immediately after the Second World War: Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Svevo, Gadda, Pavese, Vittorini, Malraux, Sartre, Camus, and the Spanish-Americans Borges, Onetti and the early Carpentier.
THE TRUE READING, REREADING. No one reads in the same way. It embarrasses me to state such a banality, but I will not retreat: diverse cultural formation, specialization, traditions, academic trends, and, above all, personal temperament can determine the different impressions that a book has on different readers. I just read The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty, an exceptional storyteller from the Southern United States. I read and reread her with close attention; things seem very simple in her narratives, they’re the trifles of daily life or horrible moments that seem anodyne; her characters are eccentric and at the same time very modest, as are their surroundings. One might think they’d be desperate in the tiny space they inhabit, but it’s possible they haven’t even noticed there’s another world outside their town. They are authentically “odd”—provincial, yes, but hers is not a costumbrista literature. They in no way behave like a herd. Another noteworthy Southern writer, Katherine Anne Porter, once pointed out that Eudora Welty’s characters are haunted figures who, for good or for bad, are surrounded by an aura of magic. This seems to me a perfect definition. Within her pages those minute human monsters never appear as caricatures, but rather are drawn with normalcy and dignity.
I have commented on the virtues of this gentlewoman to my writer friends on several occasions; they know little about her, she doesn’t interest them; they say they have read one story or another that they barely remember. They are certain when, on the defensive, they immediately affirm that she lacks the greatness of William Faulkner, her celebrated contemporary and fellow Southerner, whose plots and language have been compared so many times to the stories and language of the Bible. Miss Welty’s books are far from being that; what’s more, they are its reverse: a parade of diminutive, loveable, tragico-grotesque presences who move like frantic marionettes in a minor city buried in an amusing and at the same time cruel dream of Mississippi, Georgia, or Alabama during the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century. The readers of this author are not legion. For the chosen—and almost everywhere I have lived I have found a few of them—to read her, to talk about her, to remember characters or details from one of her stories is equivalent to a perfect gift. Those readers as a rule are vitally related to the literary craft, they are curious, intuitive, civilized, they are dispersed around the globe, locked equally in ivory towers, palatial mansions, or austere rooms for rent. The mere mention by an enthusiast of the name of one of those cult idols—Bruno Schulz, Schwob, Raymond Roussel,8 or Firbank—is sufficient for their readers to appear. To some it is an inexplicable enigma that their friends, writers such as they, sensitized by the study and daily practice of literature, fail to share their fervor for these exceptional figures, and instead worship authors who are triumphant only because of the whims of the period or because of a specific marketing campaign.
Literary history provides disconcerting phenomena, one of which is the fall of celebrity, the sunset of certain gods—not the authors of bestsellers; that would be normal, their products are destined to that. I am referring to those writers who for decades represented the wisdom and morality of the century; any one of their scarcely uttered sentences would create jurisprudence in the eternal universe. One such was Giovanni Papini. He was, for many decades, a god in the Spanish-speaking world. Today he is tolerated nowhere, much less in Italy; the mere mention of his name is distasteful, as if one were referring to a venereal disease. Borges, on the other hand, considered him a master and tenaciously defended until the end of his life the “originality” of the now disgraced author; moreover, he declared that the Florentine’s muddled prose had influenced his own. One finds himself before two irreconcilable poles: the petulant ostentation of Papini and the precise transparency of the Argentine. It is difficult to comprehend, yet at the same time I admire his fidelity.
It is natural that over time every writer should acknowledge belonging to a certain literary family. Once kinship is established it is difficult to escape; it would be so if it were for ideological or religious reasons, but not aesthetic ones. During adolescence, when every reader is still a wellspring of generosity, one may read with enjoyment, with enthusiasm, and even copy in an intimate notebook entire paragraphs from a book that, when reread years later, when his taste has been refined, he discovers with surprise, with scandal, even with horror, that it was all an unpardonable mistake. To admire as a masterpiece such a revolting load of tosh! To consider as a fountain of life that clumsy language that doubtlessly had been stillborn? How disgraceful!
In certain circumstances the beheading of a literary great is permitted by readers who venerated him just a few years before, not only in his country and in his language, but throughout the whole world, which never ceases to be another oddity. During my adolescence, Aldous Huxley was a leading international figure; Point Counter Point and, above all, the prophetic Brave New World were read with passion. The mere name Huxley came to mean the most rigorous aesthetic exactitude. He was also a paladin of freedom, although his sermonizing possessed such hubris that he seemed a character from the Counter-Reformation who imposed democracy. He caused us even to doubt the literary virtues of Charles Dickens, whom he treated with outright