Of course, you could also look at things another way and see, for example, that we wouldn’t be anything without imitation or other similar activities, which means that repetition isn’t quite the beast it’s made out to be: “I say, too, that when a painter wishes to gain fame with his art, he attempts to imitate the works of the great masters he knows, and this same rule applies to all other crafts and professions that serve to enrich the nation” (Don Quixote, chapter XXV).
Put another way: in and of itself, repetition is far from being a harmful thing. Where would we be without it? And, while we’re on the subject, where does that deep-rooted belief come from, so dear to all self-deprecating authors, that repeating yourself is the slippery slope to ruin? I can’t understand where this notion comes from, when really there isn’t a soul on the planet who doesn’t repeat himself. You need look no further than Stanley Kubrick, who was consistently praised for switching genres, styles, and themes. People were always saying how much he changed from movie to movie, but if you look carefully at the work of this great director you’ll be amazed to discover that, really, it’s all built around the same closed circle of obsessive repetitions.
The fear of repeating oneself. This morning, still half asleep, I was filled by that same panic — and I’ve only been writing this diary for three days! . . . I can only say that women have an admirable ability to rise above such problems, which I suspect have been thought up by envious types with the intention of paralyzing the most creative minds.
Women seem better able to quash all those absurd concerns that haunt and devastate us poor men; we are always more foolish and tormented than our female counterparts, who seem to have a sixth sense that allows them to simplify problems intelligently. I’m thinking, for example, of Hebe Uhart, the Argentinian writer. Asked whether she worried about repeating herself she said no, not at all, because she always wrote about journeys and no two journeys were ever the same; she always discovered something new on her trips, and the particular circumstances of each one obliged her to write different things. . . .
Isak Dinesen, to give another example, was equally quick to solve this problem: “The fear of repeating yourself is offset by the joy of knowing that you’re making your way forward in the company of stories from the past.” Dinesen saw the wisdom in building out of the past. In I’ve Been Here Before, the writers Jordi Balló and Xavier Pérez talk about the pleasure of repetition, which shouldn’t prevent creators from making new or unforeseen discoveries. They also write about how the cultural sector has for years depended on the fallacy that novelty is all that matters, a publishing myth that has been embraced by the public and taken to ludicrous extremes, precisely because the cult now aims to conceal the original sources of its stories: “When it comes to fiction that repeats itself, on the other hand, we acknowledge that a connection with the past is essential to its narrative. And it is this awareness that leads these fictions into experimental territory, because they try to be original not by harking back to their own ‘pilot episode,’ but by exploiting the potential of that initial experiment to open out into new universes.”
&
As evening fell, and I sat thinking about what Sánchez had said yesterday about his novel full of tiresome twaddle and ponderous digressions, I recalled a day, about three months ago, when I sat down at a table on the terrace of the Baltimore, very close to a group of graying forty-somethings with a bohemian, almost vagrant look about them — it was hard to know exactly which of these two groups they belonged to, although in the end one suspected the former: some very second-rate bohemians — and whom I’d never seen before. Having exhausted, successively and at the tops of their voices, the subjects of women, soft drugs, and soccer, they ended up telling long-winded stories about dogs.
And who should be sitting with these café conversationalists, the most sparkling and vocal among them, but a nephew of Sánchez, about whom I knew nothing, mainly because he didn’t live locally, or at least I’d never seen him around. And I would have remembered seeing him, because his physique — his powerful broad shoulders — stood out a mile. You really couldn’t miss him.
Listening to their doggy anecdotes — through strained ears, because their tone became suddenly hushed and secretive as if they were trying to prevent me from eavesdropping on their barbarous tales — I ended up hearing — sometimes only partially, sometimes perfectly clearly — the quite incredible story of an author’s dog. Someone asked which author they were talking about, and the nephew replied:
“Sánchez. Sánchez’s dog.”
This declaration was followed by a foul stream of calculated insults all directed at his uncle, to whom he referred several times as “the family idiot.”
It was immediately clear to me from his extreme aggression that the nephew was highly dependent on the supposed glory of his famous relative. In fact, to say he was highly dependent would be an understatement. For the entire time I spent observing him, he never stopped mocking Sánchez or describing alleged acts of stupidity on his part, above all tearing into his literary style with vile jibes and cruel send-ups, showing no mercy to either the slighted uncle or his dog.
It was clear that the nephew had let his uncontrollable vanity run away with him, for he boasted nonstop about his own talent, as if he truly believed it was far superior to Sánchez’s. And yet, every now and then, he would come out with something that revealed him to be a great powder keg of envy.
“To think that I’ve given up on reams of poems and novellas, which, had I published them, would have been read and loved by future generations. . . .”
Future generations!
What a way to talk, and yet nothing suggested he was anything but deadly serious. According to this nephew, successful writers — he was incapable of making any other kind of value judgment — owed their success to their having adapted better than others to the market, to the book industry. It made no difference if they were talented, or even brimming with genius: all successful authors, by the mere fact of having secured a readership, were nobodies. The truly, seriously good ones were a handful of marginal and marginalized authors, a few unknown types existing entirely outside the system. To count yourself among these heroes you had to have been lauded by one specific critic from Benimagrell, whose name I hadn’t heard of, just as the town, Benimagrell, didn’t ring any bells either. Nonetheless, on my return home I was able to look it up online and confirm that the town does indeed exist, somewhere in the Alicante region, although I found no reference to any critic hailing from there, at least not one with even minimal standing.
To be honest — because the last thing I’d do here is deceive myself — that day it also occurred to me that I might actually agree with some of the things the antagonistic nephew was saying if it weren’t for the disproportionately angry way in which he said them. He reminded me of “Rameau’s nephew,” the character through whom, whether intentionally or not, Diderot foresaw a time when there would be no ethical distinctions between great men and those who ridiculed them. Again, to be honest, I must say that, putting aside for a moment his surly tone and foul mouth, I began to see that the nephew had his appeal, a rare kind of wit, especially when it came to his most vicious lines. I hate to admit it, because that monster really was a monster, but he clearly had the makings of a writer. . . .
I pretended that I needed something from the bar so that, on my return, I could get a better view of his face and the rest of him, hitherto out of eyeshot.
I ordered a Cherry Coke (a now-forgotten variety of Coca-Cola), and, as I should have known, they neither had it nor knew what I was talking about.
“Right,” I said, “well, in that case I think I’ll forget it.”
I made my way back to my table, but not without snatching a head-on glance at the monster, and what I saw was a puffed-up giant with a ghastly beard, which looked — perhaps to rival those wastes-of-space beside him — as if swallows had nested in it. .
. .
It’s strange, but yesterday, when I bumped into Sánchez standing outside La Súbita, I didn’t recall either his nephew or the critic from Benimagrell. Today, on the other hand, I haven’t stopped thinking about the broad-shouldered giant, because I’ve begun to associate my meeting with Sánchez yesterday with my chance encounter, about three months ago now, with that antagonistic nephew whom I haven’t laid eyes on since. And I’ve noticed that these two sequences together form a very slight novelistic plot: as if, all of a sudden, certain autobiographical incidents had decided to piece together for me a single story, and one with literary overtones to boot; as if certain chapters of my daily life were colluding and crying out to be told, and, what’s more, demanding to be turned into fragments of a novel.
But this is a diary! I shout out these words to no one and tell myself in passing that nobody can make another person write a novel, least of all me, who so loves his short stories. And besides, what I’m writing here is strictly a diary, this is a diary, I don’t even know why I need to remind myself of that. I am experiencing literature as a secret, private activity. This is a daily exercise that allows me to try my hand at writing — preliminary literary scraps with my sights set on the future — while saving me from losing all hope in the depths I’ve been left in by my financial and professional ruin.
This is a diary, it’s a diary, a diary! It’s also a secret vindication of the “writing of literature.” I don’t really approve of everyday life conspiring to lend a novelistic tone to my writings, although I should really thank it for providing me with some writing material. Without it, I might very well have none. But no. Try as I might, I can’t look favorably on this meddling on the part of everyday life, especially while this awkward tension between novel and diary persists, entirely unnecessarily.
5
Yesterday, I wrote about works of fiction trying to be original not by harking back to their “pilot episode,” but by exploiting the potential of that initial experiment to open out onto new universes. And now I’m wondering if, basing myself on the potential of an original like Walter’s Problem, I could set about repeating the book that Sánchez claims to have more or less forgotten.
First, I would have to work long and hard as a beginner and not stray from that path, but, later, I could take up that challenge, even, perhaps, in this very diary. After all, these pages are what led me onto the theme of repetition, a theme that I see now as being more relevant to myself than I thought.
A second phase of my life as a beginner could be spent rewriting Walter’s Problem. Why not? If I can reach that point with plenty of writing practice behind me, I might even go so far as to modify any parts of the original that I felt needed changing. For example, when repeating the book, I would probably, at the very least, do away with Sánchez’s most irritatingly unreadable paragraphs, the confusing ones written when he was boozed.
[Whoroscope 5]
A little early-evening prose. There’s barely enough daylight left to read my horoscope: “The Mercury-Sun conjunction for Aries indicates that it doesn’t matter what you do; but remember that, ultimately, what you do only exists so you can discover what you really want to do.”
Is this really a daily horoscope? Horoscopes, in my experience, usually aren’t written in those terms. Today’s predictions for the other signs are perfectly normal and not in the least philosophical, which means she’s treated Aries quite differently from the others. It really is as if she were writing it knowing that I’d be reading it. Even if she weren’t, I can’t help interpreting today’s message. She seems to be saying that everything I’ve been doing in this diary will lead me to discover what I really want to do. It’s as if what she really meant is: “The Mercury-Sun conjunction for Aries indicates that only the book matters, but that, ultimately, the book is there only to lead you on in your search for the book.”
And that’s not the end of it either, because if that is what she meant — and I know it’s improbable, but I like to think it’s true — then I would make a further modification so that it reads: “The Mercury-Sun conjunction for Aries indicates that your free repetition of Walter’s Problem could end up becoming the search for your own book.”
Given that this possibility has just occurred to me, I won’t write it off. If that search began and, as would be only logical, continued, then Peggy’s supposed “horoscopal” suggestion would be ushering in the shade of the great Macedonio Fernández, the writer who devoted years of his life to The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, a book that didn’t get beyond the project stage, because he never actually began the story, and the preamble was a series of searches described in multiple prologues. Macedonio was a kind of literary Marcel Duchamp. Just as the latter played chess in a bar in Cadaqués, Macedonio Fernández played guitar around a campfire; strumming was his distinguishing feature, the hallmark of his prose going nowhere.
The Museum of Eterna’s Novel is the unfinished book par excellence, but it never pretends to have been left incomplete. It’s incomplete because that is its very nature. If it had also been a “posthumous” book, it would have been closer to the kind of text I might one day attempt to write: a book that would appear to have been interrupted, but that would, in fact, be perfectly complete.
The other day, I read that a museum in New York was putting on an exhibition of unfinished works. It included pieces by Turner, none of which had been shown during the artist’s lifetime: these were sketches for other paintings, but without the harbors, the ships, and the mythological references. There was also a Rubens battle scene, in which the upper half of the canvas had been painted with great virtuosity, while the lower half was only sketched in, revealing the skeleton of what was to be, like the Pompidou Museum in Paris, which, instead of a traditional façade, reveals the actual internal structure of the building, pure and simple. Entirely unwittingly, Rubens was appearing in that exhibition in ultramodern form — almost as part of the contemporary avant-garde — because he was giving us a comment on his own work, showing us a battlefield and how to paint it.
The person writing the article commented that contemporary art doesn’t offer us finished works, but only inconclusive ones for the viewer to complete in his or her imagination. This exhibition of unfinished works, he went on, actually described the way we look at art now, when the works themselves aren’t enough and we, the viewers, need a space, a fissure, a crack in order to complete them.
That fissure or crack has, I think, something of the secret sign about it. I remember one of Walter Benjamin’s aphorisms in Short Shadows: “Every piece of knowledge contains a dash of nonsense, just as in ancient carpet patterns or ornamental friezes it is always possible to find somewhere or other a minute deviation from the regular pattern. In other words, what really matters is not the progression from one piece of knowledge to the next, but the leap or crack inherent in any one piece of knowledge.” That crack allows us to add details of our own to the unfinished masterpiece. Today, without those cracks opening up paths and setting our imaginations working — which is the hallmark of the incomplete artwork — we would probably be unable to take a step or possibly, even, to breathe.
&
Perhaps the thing I remember best about my neighbor’s novel is that it purported to be the memoirs of the ventriloquist Walter, memoirs subtly interspersed with certain elements: a sunshade from Java, a barber from Seville, the city of Lisbon, a thwarted love affair. . . . Those memoirs, if I remember correctly, centered on Walter’s main problem, a very grave one for a person in his profession, namely, that he had only one voice, the voice that writers so yearn to find, but which, for him, for obvious reasons, was highly problematic. However, he finally overcame this by splitting into as many voices as there are stories or slices of life contained in the memoirs.
That is what I remember best about Walter’s Problem, which I intend to reread over the next few days. At that time, on that first reading, I didn’t get beyond the
first half of the book, although I did glance at the final chapter — something I often do when I don’t want to finish a book, but do want to know how it ends — and I discovered that the ventriloquist fled from Lisbon and, after traveling through various countries, threw himself into a canal in which there was a kind of whirlpool that went deep down into the Earth’s core, and, just when it seemed that our man was completely lost in that endless darkness, the whirlpool whisked him back up to the surface again and deposited him in a strange, remote region of the world, where, far from feeling disoriented, he began to work as a storyteller in the historic heart of that source of all stories: the fortunate land of ancient Arabia.
Basically — or so I felt on the day that I flicked through that final chapter — the book was a journey back to the origins of the story, to its oral past.
6
What wouldn’t I give, debutant that I am, stooped over this rectangle of wood, to have that one voice which, for the ventriloquist, represents such a tremendous occupational problem?
Nothing. I wouldn’t give anything, because I don’t even see it as a problem that concerns me. Because I’m not a ventriloquist, nor am I a proper writer; just an apprentice diarist who paces about his study deliberating over what form that insect, the dark parasite of repetition, might take, constantly sapping the leaves of their lush green, eating away at the written page, and hiding itself among life’s many twists and turns.
Mac's Problem Page 3
