The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And that’s one of the many video clips—that a programmed and automated search engine locates in the wrinkles of the web and downloads on their screens—that The Young Man and The Young Woman have selected from abundant archival material taken from late-night TV shows. Shows always recorded at seven or eight in the morning, in cold studios with minimal, abstract scenography, seemingly assembled from random junk. Programs with names like Ex-Libris, Loose Pages, or The Library of Alexandria. Programs always hosted by pale men (and every so often by an ex-model with intellectual pretensions who considers herself the muse of a generation, of a generation as brief as it was small) who look like they’ve been granted one last chance in front of the cameras; men and women cognizant of the fact that, if they don’t attract too much attention and read and repeat the books’ jacket copy with a modicum of care, that opportunity might last for decades.

  From all those hours and hours recorded in a variety of formats—from celluloid, to video, and even to digitalization for mobile phones and tablets—The Young Man and The Young Woman have selected a handful of what The Writer tended to refer to as “my minimal maxims,” which he repeated again and again throughout his books. So, a curious effect. An audio-visual effect. A kind of slippery passageway between fiction and nonfiction. Like someone who sounds—simultaneously, a twofer, a special offer—like the ventriloquist dummy of a ventriloquist. And The Young Man and The Young Woman are going to toy with it, splicing together similar sentences from different periods (like that timeless and constant and strange addiction to quoting Faulkner, a writer he almost never read), establishing an idea with The Writer looking young and more or less successful and finishing it off with The Writer looking older and more remote and, then, showing that same sentence, almost verbatim, appearing in the mouth and the role of one of his characters. There, The Writer, enthusiastic and upbeat and assisted, perhaps, by a chemical stimulus. There again, The Writer already revealing an aspect that seems to anticipate what the newspapers would call, with catastrophe-sized typography (The Writer’s Mad Sister cut out those headlines and framed them, and they’re already starting to assume that faded, yellowish hue), his “particular acceleration and molecular volatilization.” The one and the other—the same yet different—saying exactly the same thing. The Writer as a, yes, particular writer, made and unmade of particles.

  At first, this kind of credible video credo that they’re putting together produces a kind of dizziness in The Young Man and The Young Woman. And then—when they find another instance of The Writer repeating the same thing as always—an idiotic laugh. As if they’d inhaled some kind of strange gas, while—always careful that The Writer’s Mad Sister isn’t nearby—they finish his sentences in loud voices, almost word for word. Many of them completely absurd and childish in their immodesty and, to tell the truth, difficult to frame and fairly damaging, far removed from the context in which they were uttered. Listening to and watching a good portion of those statements, The Young Man wears an ugh-face and The Young Woman wears an agh-face. Faces that people tend to wear when dealing with the discomfort produced by someone else’s enthusiasm in those who have never experienced such enthusiasm. It’s clear that The Young Man and The Young Woman have never felt anything like that. The feeling that—at least at various different moments—The Writer felt about the craft of reading first and writing later and then reading again. And The Young Man and The Young Woman are dying to feel it and live hoping to experience it just once, at least once. And for The Young Man, that total mutual lack is a moment of rare communion and synchronicity with The Young Woman. A moment that, paradoxically, he wishes would stretch on for hours, forever. To be the same in their ignorance and lack of feeling. But it’s a wish that doesn’t last long. Nobody wants to be less than and no lasting love can be built on the foundation of a lack. And The Young Man also feels like a bit of a traitor. Laughing at The Writer behind his back while looking at his rewound and fast-forwarded and freeze-framed image. It’s like laughing at a God while standing before his image. But, hey, The Young Man and The Young Woman, sinful worshipers, don’t want to deny or sweep under the rug all those things that The Writer said in the past and that they keep hearing in the present. The idea—projecting into the future—is not to protect and polish the memory and image of The now-invisible Writer. The idea is to present them without sleight of hand. Without editing them. So, The Young Man and The Young Woman have tried to find the most recurrent “minimal maxims.” And, only in secret, do they celebrate that, over the years, more time elapsed between one and the next of The Writer’s books and, as a result, there have been fewer interviews about and with The Writer and fewer statements that, near the end, after having written something he called “a more than six-hundred-page manual of funerary etiquette disguised as fiction,” were almost monosyllabic or eloquently cryptic, things like “The dead have certain obligations. Could one of them be to remember us?” or “When they die, the dead forget us so we remember them better,” or “It’s not true, the thing about death and solitude, about death as the final and definitive act: we all die together, and death drags along the living and kills them little by little and so the living go on dying, almost without realizing it until it’s too late.” And The Young Man and The Young Woman have even developed a system for ranking themes and quotes that, piously, might be considered obsessions or, if you like, convenient calling cards.

  To wit:

  * The aforementioned thing about the dock, about the boat that used to arrive full of passengers/stories that he just had to describe and, now, the thing about the boat that no longer comes, the one about the boat lost in the fog or sunk among the sharks, and—renting a small boat that rocked too much in the treacherous currents and putting on the uncomfortable and complicated scuba suit—about the laborious and asphyxiating deep-sea scuba dive, searching for broken storylines and loose ideas and bringing them up to the surface to see what might be made or unmade of them.

  * The thing about his logical irrealism being the flipside of everyone else’s magical realism: “If magical realism is realism with irreal details, then logical irrealism is its twin opposite: irreality with realistic details . . . And yet, is there anything as irreal as so-called realism? Those stories and novels with dramatic pacing and a perfectly calculated and managed sequence of events. Like Madame Bovary. Or the neat structure and the precise pacing of most detective novels. But reality isn’t like that. Reality is undisciplined and unpredictable. Real reality is authentically irreal . . . There is more realism and verisimilitude in a single day of the free and fluid and conscious drifting of Clarissa Dalloway than in the entire prolix and well-measured life and death of Anna Karenina. So, with so many writers who say they are committed to reality, I opt to present myself as a writer fundamentally committed to irreality. Ah, the committed writers . . . Those who say they write to contribute to the understanding of reality, those who insist that they write to help people, to guide them as if they were a lighthouse . . . The signers of the Mephistophelian pact who have sold their artistic soul for the immediate advantages and benefits of describing things as they are never realizing that this forces them to limit themselves to a handful of supposedly universal things suitable for every audience and reader . . . The enlightened to enlighten . . . Never realizing that literature is the most shadowy and solipsistic and egoistic and bourgeoisie activity that exists. It requires calm and comfort and solitude and, of course, every man for himself. Let the readers NOT come near me. The practice of literature isn’t an NGO, my little friends. And, if it is, it’s a self-help NGO. Of helping yourself. And if that works for someone, great. If not, then sorry not sorry: better to dedicate yourself to doctoring without borders, ethical legal practice, volunteer dentistry . . . Literature doesn’t serve reality. That’s why it’s fiction . . . But let’s get back to the idea of realism. To that whole fallacy of literature as reality’s faithful mirror . . . A lie, impossible. Reality doesn’t function like it does in supposedly realist
books, it doesn’t respect such dramatic pacing, neat sequences of events, one after another in perfect and functional formation . . . In fact, every time I decide to submerge myself in those great nineteenth-century trilogies or quartets or quintets or sextets or septets, what I do is subvert that false realism—like that of those paintings whose only objective is, vainly, to resemble a photograph as closely as possible—by reading the various volumes out of order. That way, paradoxically, they’re revealed to be far truer: as if, like in life, you met someone when you were forty years old and shortly thereafter, trustingly, they told you about their childhood; or a while after someone’s death we, as if at random, ran into that dead person’s first love. So, pleased to meet you and pleased to meet you again.”

  * A statement by Kurt Vonnegut about how writers are “specialized cells in the social organism” and “like canaries in coal mines, they anticipate the lack of oxygen.” Another by John Cheever about how “literature is the only consciousness we possess.” Another by Francis Scott Fitzgerald about how “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” To which, smiling, The Writer adds: “I have a hundred opposing ideas here inside, at the same time. Does this make me a genius or just ingenious? Am I exceptionally gifted or exceptionally dull? Or do I have both conditions, opposites, at work inside me simultaneously? That could explain everything.”

  * A scene from a theater performance in a story from his first book, in which a young actor and a young actress recite lines like “The drug, which was all the rage and was called Cat, produced the strange effect of accelerating your body and mind while making you feel that everything around you was growing thicker, denser. You were like a pogo-punk infiltrating Swan Lake and, arms and legs outstretched, moving around on pointed toes, nights became long as days.”

  * The one about the theory of the glacier as the counterpart to Hemmingway’s theory of the iceberg (“That there is a great deal below the water but, also, a great deal above the water, right?”)

  * The innumerable references to The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (and the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as “the radiation of my childhood and responsible for my referential mania”), to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (in particular the scene in which HAL 9000 “erases his memory while singing, terrified, ‘Daisy Bell’”), to that electric and ghostly and bony line from Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna.”

  * The thing about “my surprise at how, all the time, less of what’s written outside the country is read inside it and that it’s only read when that foreign writer is published by a small local publisher and thus ‘discovered’ by some local critic or academic, no matter that the book has already been circulating there for years. As if foreign writing is only worthy of consideration after being appropriated and nationalized. And, sometimes, there are even discussions that establish absurd connections and comparisons—convinced to the point of fanaticism, insisting on impossible chronological influences of something written there on something written here—with some national writer, more a sect writer than a cult writer. Someone, generally, already conveniently and comfortably dead, and hence possible to manipulate. Someone who, no doubt, neither read nor knew of that generally far-superior foreign writer.”

  * A remark about young editors “who carry on lives very similar to those of writers in the 20s, from party to party; while today’s mature writers are more like editors in the 20s, like Maxwell Perkins—home to work and work to home, making as little noise as possible.”

  * A response in a Paris Review interview (that venue where writers convince themselves a posteriori of everything about which, a priori and during, they have no clue, working in the dark, the madness of art, etcetera) of Harold Brodkey, where they ask him what his “literary ideal” is and he says: “Ideals are for greeting cards. I am trying to change consciousness, change language in such a way that the modes of behavior I am opposed to become unpopular, absurd, unlikely.” And then The Writer adds: “Brodkey is an interesting case, a case to be studied, an example to admire but not to follow in what he does with “the madness of art” and with what happens when you’re devoured by your own style beyond all possible digestion.”

  * And William Gaddis’s answer, in the same magazine, when asked about the supposed “difficulty” of his work: “Well, as I’ve tried to make clear, if the work weren’t difficult I’d die of boredom.”

  * A memory of “the first book where I felt I was reading someone who was also writing—and whose characters were narrating and narrating themselves, literally and literarily vampirized—was Dracula by Bram Stoker: a novel that is, also, a writing machine. [. . .] I wrote a story about that novel, about reading that novel, and that story is the most autobiographical I’ve written. Another book that made an early and similar impression on me was Jack London’s Martin Eden. Or, above all and more than any other, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Books with protagonists who are writers and, also, heroes. Other people’s autobiographical novels that for me, subsequently, became autobiographical, because suddenly they were a fundamental part of my life and of the books I’d one day write. Yes, the discovery that someone else’s existence can contain and narrate our own.”

  * “The most frightening and exciting moment of my life as a reader? Many. But maybe the one I remember best is reaching the final pages of the last volume of In Search of Lost Time and, after an unexpected, infrequent paragraph break, reading as the narrator/author Marcel confesses, almost uncomfortable yet proud: ‘I had something to write. But my task was longer than his, my words had to reach more than a single person. My task was long.’ And, of course, what Proust is referring to is precisely that, what we’re reading when he tells us he was aspiring to something else. All of history—not of writing but of writers—in one line, in one brief line.”

  * More: “Or that other moment, in The Ambassadors by Henry James. That ‘Live all you can . . . Live, live!’ (book five, chapter II) with which, in France, the traveler and messenger on a supposed rescue mission, the mature yet not so experienced Lambert Strether, suddenly feels that he understands everything. And that now he’ll never be able to go back to who he was, and yet he doesn’t have much life left to try to become someone else. As advice, we must agree, it’s not much deeper or wiser than what we tend to find inside a fortune cookie. But in the middle of a Henry James novel, one of his last novels, that almost desperate order and demand, acquires another kind of weight and resonance. To put it another way: it’s one of those moments in which literature, the act itself of making literature, reveals things that life does not and will never be able to make sense of on its own. Hence the importance and existence of literature. Good fiction—if we know how to take advantage of it—is an instruction manual for our own nonfiction . . . and while we are on the subject, in The Ambassadors: I agree with those who insist that the ‘little nameless object’ manufactured in Woollett, Massachusetts, and to which Strether refers without ever identifying it with precision, is not a chamber pot, or shoe polish, or clothespins, or a small alarm clock. No. The small nameless object is a toothpick manufactured by a one Charles Forester, who soon, as the novel indicates, had a monopoly in America on the product in question. But let’s change the subject: because nothing causes me more pain than talking about teeth, about my tumultuous odontological history.”