The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  Another turn of the screw, indeed. Again, the Henry James strategy (to keep ascending once the zenith of your body of work is attained, by tackling a revision and rewrite and explanation of what you’ve already written, which is, as such, forever improvable) tempted him for a few minutes, maybe fifty-nine minutes: the attraction of functioning as a medium for his own body of work, of asking the ghost of that person he’d been and still was in his books if it was there. To demand that it knock three times and … But then he remembered that for Henry James, his most justified and necessary whim of a totalizing New York Edition, had signified for him the gravestone-memorial of a definitive publishing failure: almost nobody had been interested in subscribing or buying it. And the American died in England, deliriously raving and believing himself Napoleon Bonaparte (“Tell a dream …”) and admired by some, who called him “The Master,” but read by few. And he had to wait for the academics to bring him back to life and raise him up onto the altar of dead immortal classics. (He liked to imagine on his sleepless nights that somewhere and sometime one of those hostage exchanges from spy movies took place, on a foggy bridge outside time and space. He liked to imagine that the United States handed over Henry James to help the decadent European novel enter the twentieth century. And that, after a while, the Old World would offer up Vladimir Nabokov, who came fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, to revolutionize the concept of the Great American Novel.) But he was so/very far from being Henry James. And he no longer had publishers at his disposal converted to his faith and who would be tempted by the idea of a beatifying Sad Songs Edition or, at least, consider it a viable way to launder the sinful dark money of some narco-investor with cultured pretensions. So, already from the start and with only the capital of the dead from his life, he’d neither followed his example in the end nor paid attention to James in the beginning. James, whom he’d always liked so much more than the unbearable and unreliable Hemingway when it came to advice that always corresponded to his actions. James, who postulated that thing about “To write is a solitary life … Because it is practiced alone and if one is a sufficiently good writer one must confront immortality or its absence every day.” James, who on one occasion had referred to the art of interacting with ghosts: “If you don’t believe in them, don’t bother them,” he’d said. And he had also recommended, when it came to structuring fictions of any kind of real sustenance, to never forget that all of life was “inclusion and confusion,” while the secret of art ran through “discrimination and selection.” And to leave something untold or unrevealed. To leave out the poems of Jeffrey Aspern, to not reveal the sex of the, for once, first-person narrator of The Sacred Fount, to not specify what the extraordinary or catastrophic fact is that John Marcher intuits in “The Beast in the Jungle” or what the unexpected greatness is that Dencombe discovers in his book only at the end of his life in “The Middle Years,” to not specify what “the little nameless object” is in The Ambassadors, and to not entirely certify the existence of the living dead in The Turn of the Screw.

  And he’d done just the opposite.

  He’d revealed everything.

  He’d bothered and included and confused the ghosts (his ghosts, the ghosts to whom he belonged) only to discover, too late, that he believed in them but they didn’t believe in him: that his ghosts discriminated against and didn’t choose him; that they weren’t even interested enough to appear and give him a slight and half-hearted fright.

  IKEA had reproached him for it, shaking his head and pointing at him with an accusatory finger: “You shouldn’t make fun of certain things, man. The thing with your parents, for example … If you turn it into a joke, the joke stops being funny after you tell it two or three times. Whereas, if you keep taking it seriously, with tears in your eyes and a trembling voice, it’ll hold up forever … It’s like an ace up your sleeve, like a hobbyhorse … I can’t say I envy your books, but, oh, what I would’ve given for some desaparecidos parents … The most traumatic thing that happened to me in that sense was that, one time when I was in Mexico, a drug addict stole my rental car in Cancun. Outside a shopping mall. I wasn’t even inside it, I’d left it in the parking lot; but that traumatic experience was enough for me to erect Tremors of the Eagle, my great, more or less autobiographical, narco-novel, soon to be adapted for the big screen, starring Sean Penn in the lead role as moi.”

  He, on the other hand, did nothing with his parents beyond one story, deemed “irreverent” by many. And they had nothing more to do with him apart from remembering his first book (while new incarnations and variations of the same thing appeared, but with a furrowed and militant brow and a stern and committed gesture) as one of the highlights of, again, “a cynical and corrupt decade that had no respect for anything.” And the years and the books passed as if they were different rooms in a haunted house he couldn’t get out of and now almost nobody (his dwindling readers among them) dared enter.

  But after his frustrated and absurd attempt to transform himself into an avenger and Armageddonic particle ghost at a Swiss accelerator, he drew strength from somewhere. And he broke a window and made his escape.

  And he found a way to write another book, the one that’d been his last book.

  A book whose subject was, then, something far more revolting than the subject of his first book.

  An uncomfortable and polemic subject.

  A subject—the only one he had left—that’d become the most unsettling and transgressive of all.

  A subject that was, yes, delicate.

  The book was about reading and writing.

  About the increasingly dreadful and depraved modalities of reading and writing.

  Was there anything more perverse in a world where everyone went around plugged into something, typing brief texts, shout-singing in public, ears covered by XL headphones, scrolling through live-action photographs more than instantaneous than Polaroids and completely and absolutely unnecessary (an affront to when photographs were a big event and planned out and, before that, to those photographs where nobody smiled because being photographed was a solemn affair and, besides, it turned out to be quite difficult to hold a smile throughout the many minutes the plate had to be exposed)?

  No.

  The book traced the indispensable constants that determined how someone, he, would’ve once had and maintained the idea—the fixed idea, the unwavering and immoveable idea—of being a writer. Of how a writer was made/unmade and how a piece of writing was unmade/made.

  A book that was all the books that book could possibly be.

  At the same time, all together now: the idea of the possible book, the book while it’s being written, the book finished, the book just published and read by others as something new, the book that you return to after a time to find some paragraph that might come to detonate the idea for another possible book.

  How had he described and written it? Ah, yes: “A book that thinks like a writer in the act of thinking up a book, what he’s thinking about when he happens to think of a book, when that book happens to him, and about what happens with that book” and “A book that would be an open book, though not consequently clear and figurative, but cloudy and abstract. A book like one of Edward Hopper’s clean and well-lit rooms, but with a Jackson Pollock waiting to come out of the closet.”

  Something like that and of that style.

  An extreme specimen with no return from what somebody had defined as poioumenon: a making of in search of that which, supposedly, could and should be made.

  The story prior to the story that’s yet to come.

  A reading before writing what, in the beginning, was going to be read: the portrait of a man standing amid reefs, sharp like fangs, making desperate and titanic gestures to ships that sank without knowing they were sinking and aboard which nobody was reading on the deck anymore, because they were too busy sending crying-face emoticons while he, also in the engine room, doubling himself, wondered how nobody had come up with an emoticon whose face symbolized the end of
the voyage and of the world.

  The book analyzed the parameters of the literary vocation as a singular and inescapable destiny: a plan A without a plan B.

  A plan X.

  And its sentences were long and full of subordinate and oh so insubordinate clauses.

  And it had parentheses (many).

  And that exotic rarity of the semicolon.

  And its paragraphs were as wide and compact as walls, offering no blank spaces where you could catch your breath.

  And, let’s admit it, it was varnished with a not-so-thin layer of rancor and spite and envy, qualities inherent to all writers.

  And, yes, on more than one occasion, he wondered why at a certain point he hadn’t stopped reading to write down certain things. Why he hadn’t occupied himself with light and funny and fun matters (he remembered that his friends laughed at him a lot, at things he said, things that occurred to him in the moment, without overthinking it) far away from all that literary solemnity.

  And, if he were unable to escape literature, why then had he never paused on noir fiction and on Charles Bukowski and John Fante and on Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. On youthful writers. On that spirit that made young people love you and sent you leaping from generation to generation, like a kind of relaxed and easygoing guru for all those who only wanted to be distracted from the fact that they didn’t have a girlfriend and did have acne.

  And to keep them company.

  And to understand them.

  And to have produced noble yet simple texts, with hard but sensitive characters, mischievous and kindly rogues, always on the road. High-speed books for uncomplicated highways. Perhaps something with walking dead or with teenagers lost in dystopic landscapes controlled by despotic adults who might or might not be their parents.

  But no: he knew that, in his case, all of that would’ve been impossible. Because before long he would’ve swerved down side roads, more difficult to maneuver. And nothing is more hazardous than the vertigo produced by traveling with a genius in the passenger seat. Somebody we know to be far more expert behind the wheel, but who, nevertheless, refuses to help and only enjoys blinding oncoming drivers by flipping on his high beams. High beams like those of Barry Hannah and J. P. Donleavy and William S. Burroughs and Tom Drury. More favorites; all included in a “writing workshop” he once “taught” to an ever-diminishing number of attendees, all with the unmistakable aspect of, yes, needing urgent repairs or, better, of needing to be taken, along with their faded pages, to the closest chop shop and junkyard where he could deliver the coup de grâce and head off on the lam.

  And no, obviously, of course: the writing workshop hadn’t gone well, nothing had been fixed and no vocation kick-started. He had to admit it: his wasn’t a particularly didactic mindset, apart from not being particularly flexible and exceedingly sardonic. But you couldn’t fault him for it. It wasn’t a crime, like selling magical cures or shares in a nonexistent company. Teaching—and attending a writing workshop—was like believing in something. And, as tends to happen in any temple, the faithful believe more than the priest. It was a comfortable rite and, possibly, the only teaching role where doing it poorly had no grave consequence (as could happen with instructors of airplane pilots or of heart surgeons, for example) and didn’t even diminish anybody’s chance of success. Because one could write really badly and still earn a lot of money and get really famous. A mystery far more unsettling than the multiplication of fish and bread and maneuvers (linked to sudden inspiration or the rediscovery of dead authors) like immaculate conceptions and more or less justified literary resurrections.

  Even still, when he had the spirit, he’d tried to impart something, to preach fragments of the good news to his students. His thing, basically, had been to put in practice what Nabokov proposed in his famous introduction to his course at Cornell regarding “good readers and good writers,” certain that none of his students would happen across the original. And so, he greeted them with a promising “My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures,” then he recited from memory—as if it were his own—that “Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf!, wolf!, came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf!, wolf!, and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow, because he lied too often, was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

  “Literature is an invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead. Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying, little wooly woodland fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around a camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor. There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.”

  Then he sighed, was silent for a few seconds—looking out at that landscape of yawning mouths and half-closed eyes—and proceeded to rip apart his contemporaries to the joy of the class, always thirsty for blood and one-liners to tweet and so much happier to hear about what someone dislikes than what someone likes. His students were badly written wolves and bad readers. And when one of them would howl that classic of literary criticism/online comment in virtual bookstores (“I didn’t identify with any of the characters” or “None of the main characters seems real to me”), he half-closed his eyes and responded that “They seem implausible to you, but nevertheless they are written, ergo they exist: as far as identifying with them, let’s see if I can find some book about someone who goes to a writing workshop because they have nothing better to do with their life.”

  After all of that, his book had been, also, the occasion for his last grand promotional tour, financed by the enthusiasm of his publisher who believed in him more than he believed in himself or who, perhaps, had lost a bet with a competitor and was now paying his tremendous punishment: having to promote against the wind and tide and tsunami—oneiric terminology come to think of it—his black-sheep and sleeper author.

  He’d been to some strange countries for the first time. In one, he’d been accused of being a narco-trafficker by two psychotic immigration officials and rescued at the last minute by the pilot of his plane who, providentially, had read one of his books, and refused to turn him over to the authorities; and that made him wonder, though he was very grateful, whether or not he felt at all calm knowing that an admirer of his was at the helm of that hunk of steel and sound; and so, ungrateful, he spent the whole trip remembering that madman who not long before had crashed with a planeful of passengers into a wall of the Alps.

  He’d verified again that, everywhere, the nutritional and non-Darwinian pyramid of writers was constructed, always, with the same blueprint: many very bad writers, some very good writers, a few excellent writers, and—this had nothing to do with the survival of the most talented—too many really bad writers were considered excellent by some critic, easily seduced by schemes of connections, patronage, awards, and self-promotion.

  He’d traveled across the ocean, returning to his homeland where journalists of the cultural variety asked him (always with malice, familiar with his extraterres
trial situation of uncomfortable cosmic singularity and anti-gravitational space curve in whatever critical-academic canon there was in his now nonexistent country of origin) what, did he think, was or would be the place he occupied within the literature of his generation. A question that he invariably answered by citing the exceedingly spaced-out words of Doctor Heywood R. Floyd. The man (the B-actor William Sylvester, there elevated to the highest heights, with that oh so Hugh Hefner air, so similar to many of his parents’ friends) who communicates top-secret instructions to the crew of the Discovery One when it’s already too late or too early in 2001: A Space Odyssey. But before that—being interrogated by the Russian scientist Andrei Smyslov about the mysterious and supposedly epidemic incidents that took place and were covered up by the American government on the base at the Clavius lunar crater—Floyd responds with words he took and used whenever people came at him about his exact location within the national literary-planetary system: “I’m sorry, but, er, I’m really not at liberty to discuss this.”