THE SAD SPLENDOUR OF
LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE
© Farouk
Asvat
♦ PABLO NERUDA
♦ CARLOS FUENTES
♦ GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
"Every Latin American writer goes around dragging a heavy
body, the body of his people, of his past, of his national history," Pablo Neruda once said.
It is a statement pertinent to our own
situation, for the wonder, scope and sadness of Latin American literature
reflects so much of our own anguish and quest.
From Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias' fantasy-filled The Mulatta And Mister Fly,
who, lusting after fabulous riches, bargains with the corn demon, appears at
mass with his fly unbuttoned, mortgages his soul, sacrificing his wife to marry
the beautiful, bisexual Mulatta, mysterious as the moon; through Brazilian
Jorge Amado's
cinnamon-coloured, clovesmelling Gabriela, indifferent to political
intrigues and materialism; to Cuban Alejo Carpentier's Explosion In A Cathedral; and Mario
Vargas Llosa's deceptively
light-hearted, haunting portrait, Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter, that
transforms the vagaries of youth into a daring, multilayered novel about love
and art beneath the drizzle and mists of Lima; to Mexican poet Octavio Paz's task of making delicate and exact literal
statements of consciousness; and Argentine Jorge Luis Borges' metaphysical teasers of mathematical style,
in a new world where objects assume shapes to please the beholder - and his
unforgettable exercises in the art of astonishment; to Brazilian Julio Cortázar's
bedazzling Hopscotch which undermines conventional notions of time,
place and character; and Chilean José
Donoso's hallucinatory
observations in Obscene Bird Of Night; to Guillermo Cabrera Infante's history of Cuba from Columbus to Castro in Three
Trapped Tigers, where memory splits the images, and works the
magnifications, producing prose pratfalls, cross-cuttings of parody, and boozy
interior monologues; through to Brazil's
Márcio Souza's bawdy epic tale of The Emperor Of The
Amazon, an exuberant latterday conquistador, who becomes a revolutionary
leader in the shadows of a diamond-studded opera house, voyaging with his three
mistresses into the heart of the rubber kingdom - Latin American literature has
an extraordinary vitality.
Out of the turmoils of South America have
come works of art which challenge the imagination, showing us new relationships
between psychic drives and social reality, attempting to create a cultural
identity, with everything to write about, giving voice to all that has been
silenced by four centuries of history: an epic surge encompassing a phenomenal
array of social and historical perspectives.
The genre is filled with Márquez's
problem that "Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination,"
in spite of Neruda's caution: "God help me from inventing when I
sing."
Caught in the tension of illusory realism,
because the realism of these novels is illusory, inaugurating realism by
casting doubt on reality, using this illusory realism which is extremely real,
because it takes place in the mind, Latin American literature is a reality not
of paper, but one that lives within the writers (and the readers), nourishing a
source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty.
Faced with provincialism, political
suppression and foreign influences that threatened to drown out their own
voices, Pablo Neruda from Chile, Carlos Fuentes from Mexico and Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia have nevertheless come
out with magic, fiction with a new dimension; a fabulous diversity inspiring a
flowering of unconventional expression.
By using their magnificent ability to
combine images and words in a fantastic realm, and their active involvement in
the social consciousness of their people, they have created a world of apparent
wonder firmly established in the realities of their lives.
And here we thank the couriers of culture,
Nathaniel Tarn and Gregory Rabassa, among others, who by deciphering the
Hispanic writers' verbal gymnastics, have given life to us in a foreign
literature and culture, by transforming the translations themselves into works
of art.
[§] PABLO NERUDA
"I have never
thought of my life as divided between poetry and politics," Pablo Neruda
once said. "I have never been in
with those in power and have always felt that my vocation and my duty was to
serve the Chilean people in my actions and with my poetry. I have lived singing and defending
them."
Neruda regarded
poetry not as an elite pursuit but as a statement of human solidarity addressed
to the ordinary people.
A prolific writer,
with more than 40 anthologies to his credit, Neruda had the "protean
ability to be always in the vanguard of change," periodically shedding his
poetic skin to assume new forms.
From the vitality of
his youthful love poetry, to the dislocation and isolation expressed in poems
written during his years as consul in the East, to the odes that pay homage to
the people and objects of daily living, to the nature poems of the birds and
stones of Chile - in subject, form, tone, language and imagery, Neruda's poems
contain astonishing riches, bound by a coherent vision of man and the universe,
a socialist vision of unalienated man, working towards justice on earth.
Neruda put eyes and
tongues into every inanimate object, breaking the wall of silence around
crystal, wood and stone, desiring a poetry that would strive after a knowledge
without antecedents. Neruda's
sensibility to nature is unique, but he encompassed a political consciousness
which made him the poet laureate of the masses, a public poet who addressed
himself to the community not simply as an individual but as their voice; giving
substance to his prophecy, providing the key to his deciphering of the
universe, enabling him to stand up, and assume a prophetic role.
Twenty Love Poems
And A Song Of Despair is familiar to South Americans the way proverbs and
popular songs are. Espousing the
vitality of his youthful love, they are poems of discovery, an adolescent's
confrontation of woman and the universe.
The women merge into nature, metamorphosed into earth or mist, with the
poet as interrogator and explorer:
Every day you play
with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you
arrive in the flower and the water.
…
Who writes your name in letters of smoke
among the stars of the south?
Serving as a diplomat
in Rangoon, cut off from spoken Spanish, and lonely to the point of
desperation, he transformed his isolation into poetry as Residence On Earth. Here his dialogue was with a dying universe,
where men and objects became opaque and unresponsive. Neruda would later consider them aberrant,
but Julio Cortázar has defended them eloquently; and in fact they are probably nearer
the mood of our age than anything he wrote since, for he suggests that man, a
recent invention, is destined to disappear; and whatever laws exist in the
universe, they are not human ones. Yet
even as he fails to envisage anything grander than a futile individual
existence, he repudiates his trivial destiny:
I do not want to
be the inheritor of so many misfortunes.
I do not want to
continue as a root and as a tomb,
as a solitary tunnel,
as a cellar full of corpses,
stiff with cold,
dying with pain.
There is then a kind
of resurrection in his poetry. In Spain
as consul, Neruda found himself in a community of poets who had a sense of
relationship with the people: Rafael Alberti (whose home was later destroyed by
Fascists), and Federico García Lorca (who was assassinated soon after the
outbreak of the Civil War):
And one morning
all that was burning,
one morning the
bonfires
leapt out of the
earth
devouring human
beings -
and from then on
fire,
gunpowder from then
on,
and from then on
blood.
Bandits with planes
and Moors,
bandits with
finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black
friars spattering blessings
came through the sky
to kill children
and the blood of
children ran through the streets
without fuss, like
children‘s blood.
Jackals that the
jackals would despise,
stones that the dry
thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the
vipers would abominate!
Face to face with you
I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one
wave
of pride and knives!
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house
burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of
Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead
child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime
bullets are born
which will one day
find
the bull's eye of
your hearts.
And you will ask: why
doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great
volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the
blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the
streets.
Come and see the
blood
in the streets!
With Spain In My
Heart Neruda discovered the power of "great speech," for the
poems are unmistakably addressed to an audience Neruda both addresses and
accuses.
This sense of a
public became more specific as he began to conceive the Chilean epic that would
become the Canto General. During
the twelve years of its composition Neruda began regarding his poetry not as an
elite pursuit, but as a statement of human solidarity addressed to the ordinary
people. In the supreme voice of the Canto
General, Pablo Neruda unfolds the secret patterns of nature and history,
revealing the true story of the Americas, explaining their geography, and the
oppression by conquerors and dictators.
He began to read his
poetry at trade union meetings and political rallies. Threatened with arrest under Videla for his
famous "I accuse" speech, Neruda went into hiding, sheltered by
workers and country people, sharing the homes of the people for whom his poetry
was intended. This contributed to the
final form of the Canto General, in which, without resorting to the
language of daily life, he uses the heightened form of speech used in oratory,
ceremony and invective. Throughout
Neruda is the mediator, he who hears the voice of nature and history, he who
deciphers the enigma of stones, rivers and forests.
This addressing of
nature and history, to penetrate their occult significance, recurs in each
section of Canto General, but nowhere more powerfully than in The
Heights Of Macchu Picchu, a poem of epic proportions, tracing the history of
South America and evoking the grandeur of its landscapes. Meditating on the Inca fortress which for
centuries lay hidden in the Andean mountains, and on its vast mysterious
structures, Neruda brings the past to life and makes the stones speak of those who
laboured to build them.
But Canto General
also re-enacts that important moment of genesis when consciousness emerged from
darkness, going back time and again to that step, both in his own life, and to
the remote past when men first separated their destiny from the cycle of
nature, and came to the realization that man and woman are the true gods of
their own destiny.
Using invective and
insult, the curses fall on the exploiters of Chile, on tyrants and dictators,
on "celestial poets," so that these ritual insults, like those of the
ancient warriors, are destined to lead to a reversal of fortune: the dead to be
born again, the exploiters silenced and destroyed.
Neruda then became
increasingly preoccupied with clarity, with the communication of his poetry to
a nonliterary public. Elemental Odes
marks a development towards a poetry intended to be as natural as song, wishing
to suggest an art as close as possible to life.
The odes are a homage to daily living, to ordinary people and objects:
they celebrate bread, wood, tomatoes, weather, clothes, without the horror of
the banal. He wrote of those whose work
involves the handling of primary materials, restoring a sense of the
wholesomeness to work.
Unlike many
contemporary writers whose distrust of language reduces them to silence, Neruda
not only regards the word as a communion vessel with the past but also as the
giver of life:
… the word fills
with meaning,
It remained gravid
and it filled up with lives.
Everything had to do
with birth and sounds -
…
the verb took over
all the power
and blended existence
with essence
in the electricity of
its beauty.
Though Pablo Neruda
viewed poetry as a social act, this by no means limited his range, and a vast
amount of his poetry is autobiographical.
But he has also resorted to the mythical and the fabulous, as in some of
the poems in Extravagario, where he declared that he did not want to
name things, but to "mix them up."
And there was an astonishing revival of love poetry in The Captain's
Verse, a tribute to his second wife, to whom he also addressed One
Hundred Sonnets Of Love.
Neruda's poetry
underwent a further metamorphosis, as he began to write more and more intensely
of nature, the ocean, of his house.
After so many wanderings, the traveller appeared to come to rest, to
come into an almost religious communion with the natural world. He published collections of poems on the
birds of Chile, on its stones, on his house, and drew up an inventory of his
life in poetry. It is as if on a
shrinking planet, Neruda wished to restore a sense of wonder, of the sacredness
of the natural world.
Though he did not
stop writing political and historical poetry, in this too there was a sense of
returning to essences, to his origins, as in Ceremonial Songs.
In Watersong
he again takes stock of his life, speaking of his wanderings, his political
involvement, his personal happiness, and death:
It is time, love,
to break off that sombre rose,
shut up the stars and
bury the ash in the earth;
and, in the rising of
the light, wake with those who awoke
or go on in the
dream, reaching the other shore of the sea which has no other shore.
But Neruda's life and
poetry continued, taking new directions.
He published a musical play, dealing with a Californian folk hero
supposedly of Chilean origin, and wrote a myth poem on the genesis of human
progress.
With Incitement To
Nixonicide And Celebration Of The Chilean Revolution he had recourse to
"the most ancient weapons of poetry" - the song and the broad sheet
which had been used by both classical and romantic poets against the
enemy. In spite of its title, it is one
of the most consciously literary of his collections, rich in references to
Whitman, Quevedo and Zúñiga.
With the election of
Allende to the presidency in 1970, Chile had taken a decisive step towards a
socialism the poet believed in. He was
appointed ambassador to Paris; and received the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1971.
But he was a sick man
now, and returned to Isla Nigra, believing he had earned his retirement to
"winter quarters." He found
himself, instead, in a country on the verge of civil war. "This is a heart-rending moment for
Chile," he declared, "it invades my study and there is no option but
to go on participating in this great struggle." Long experience of Chilean politics made him
singularly aware of the imminence of the tragic confrontation. He went on to describe his homeland as a
"silent Viet Nam without bombs or gunfire." As he lay mortally sick, the army and navy
rebelled, the palace was bombed, and Allende killed. Neruda had lived long enough to see the
results of half a century of struggle liquidated. He died on 23 September 1973; and his funeral
became the first public demonstration against the military government.
The poets thus
established the language for the novelists: without Pablo Neruda, César
Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral and José Martí there would perhaps
be no Latin American novel, or one that would definitely be very different.
Latin America is the
only place where the novel is really alive: a cultural zone where people feel
that things have to be said, and if the writer does not say them, nobody will -
creating a tremendous responsibility for the writer.
Latin American
writers, especially Carlos Fuentes, have revolutionized the concept of linear
time. Their breaking up of time, their
refusal to accept the singular concept of linear time imposed by the West,
coincides profoundly with the Indian religious sense of circular time, time as
a spiral, and also the everyday experience that times coexist.
[§]
CARLOS FUENTES
Carlos Fuentes, a "chameleon" among his Latin American
contemporaries, having eight novels and a collection of short stories to his
credit, is also a distinguished essayist, dramatist, and political pamphleteer.
"We have to
assimilate the enormous weight of our past so we will not forget what gives us
life," he says - a past that was silent, that was dead, that had to be
brought alive through language. Fuentes
sees the Latin American writers' need to atone for four centuries of silence;
and using the history of Mexico, something dreamed and imagined, he has
utilized writing to establish an identity with his country.
He startled Mexico
with Where The Air Is Clear, a caustic analysis of Mexico after the
1910-20 revolution. A biography of
Mexico City, it is a reflection of the many ancient strands of imaginary and
historical life in the city, with its baroque essence, its breakdown of
barriers, its overflow of cultures.
The Death Of
Artemio Cruz is an exploration of one man's odyssey, simultaneously
creating a vivid and haunting kaleidoscope of a country's history -: a novel of
voices, it is about the death of life.
As Artemio Cruz, self-made tycoon of the new Mexico lies dying, memories
struggle thickly to the surface: his youthful allegiance to the Revolution; his
murdered first love; his wife who always hated him; his adored son who died in
the Spanish Civil war; his own ruthless pursuit of wealth and manipulation of
power.
Holy Place
traces the Oedipal meanderings of a young man; while The Hydra Head studies
the nature of power - a recurrent theme with Latin American novelists.
A Change Of Skin
is a book as intricately designed as ceremonial brocade, a fascinating elegy
for a dead world, with that unmistakable authority of creation on the most committed
and personal level. Four people on a
desultory, self-searching pilgrimage from Mexico City to Vera Cruz for Holy
Week, spend a night in Cholula, the former pantheon city of old Mexico and
theatre of an Aztec bloodletting. In the
leisure of the long hot night, they interchange passion and confession,
revealing to themselves and to each other the suppressed truths of many years.
Terra Nostra
is an extraordinary novel that fuses fact and fiction, past and future into one
continuum. Centering on Felipe El Señor
(Philip II of Spain) chronological time and conventional history are abolished
as Felipe builds El Escorial, marries England's Elizabeth Tudor and witnesses
the discovery of the New World.
Entwining the miraculous and the fantastic with the grim and grotesque, Terra
Nostra stands as a work of sustained allegory and imagination that
encapsulates both the ‘New’ World's future and the decay of Spanish glory. Taking place between June 1999 and December
1999, its primary concern is the past, exploring the fatal sin in Philip II's
maniacal search for purity and orthodoxy.
It is "a whacking great affirmation of fiction as the only proper
vehicle for poetry, speculation, prophecy, surmise, heroic optimism and most of
the more worthwhile human preoccupations."
It is also an awesome and cruel look at western civilization.
Distant Relations
is "a ghost story about the ghost of literature:" stretching
imagination and intelligence, it leaves you dreaming its magic landscapes and
interiors. A dazzling display of
literary pyrotechnics, it is richly imaginative and profoundly humane. The ability of Fuentes to fascinate, battle
and provoke, makes him "one of the mandarin magicians of
literature." As the afternoon draws
on at a club in France, the Comte de Branly, old as the century, relates his
experiences to his younger friend.
Dreams, reality and dim recollections are interwoven and suffused with
haunting melodies, magic landscapes and lost childhood scenes. It is an exquisite tale of corruption and
illusion, of the relationship between the ‘Old’ World and the ‘New’.
The short stories in Burnt
Water are set in an imaginary apartment in Mexico City, where Artemio Cruz
lives in splendour in the penthouse, descending (or ascending?) with a cast of
characters, to Aura the witch in the basement.
Presently writing Cristobal
Nonato, a novel that takes place on the five hundredth anniversary of the
‘discovery’ of the ‘New’ world, it is a gloomy projection wondering what Mexico
will be like as Mexicans take stock of being ‘discovered’ by Europeans five
centuries ago. The story is told by an
unborn child, as the city drowns in faeces.
Every word of
Fuentes' novels seem to resound into the past as well as the future: there is a
ghost on every page, with every character.
He has a mythical vision of the Mexican culture, and the Mexico City of
his dreams and nightmares.
Carlos Fuentes says
that as writers "We have the privilege of speech in societies where it is
rare to have that privilege. We speak
for others... " But he equally
warns: "Nothing kills a man as much as having to represent his
country."
[§] GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
"A novelist can
do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it," Gabriel
García Márquez says, as long as there is a literary and political
responsibility behind it.
An unaffiliated
socialist, he is a firm supporter of the Sandanista government, and a close
friend of Cuba. But Márquez is also
"a retailer of wonders," and the Nobel Prize awarded him in 1982
merely confirmed his reshaping of Latin American literature.
Born in the small
declining town of Aracataca in Colombia, his childhood impressions of the heat,
decadence and isolation affected his life and his writings. "Journalism taught me ways of lending my
stories authenticity," Márquez says of his other occupation, insisting
"there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality
resembles the wildest imagination."
His grandmother was the greatest influence on his long
apprenticeship. The tone for One
Hundred Years Of Solitude "was based on the way my grandmother used to
tell her stories." …"She used
to tell me about the most atrocious things without turning a hair, as if it was
something she'd just seen. ... it was
her impassive manner and her wealth of images that made her stories so
credible." But he also says that
one cannot escape from having to "face and write about the political reality
of the country."
So that moral centres
of gravity are located in most of Márquez's works; even though they are
frequently praised for their fantasy and elegiac tone at the expense of their
social realism, because he describes seemingly fantastic events in such minute
detail that it gives them their own reality.
Leaf Storm, a collection of mostly fables, is "a celebration of the
myth-making process." With enormous
gifts of narrative, wit and irony, with exact and subtle prose, Márquez easily
leaps into the comical and exuberant.
Leaf
Storm itself is a hypnotic, mysterious tale, a wonderful story about a
week-long South American rainstorm. And
there is also a delicious fable of a tatty angel who crash-lands in a village
and is kept in a hencoop.
In No
One Writes To The Colonel Márquez evokes the different kinds of despair
which bind the members of a small South American community. There is a dreadful sense of heat and rot in
all these stories, and helpless hopelessness hangs like a cloud over all of
them. Márquez conveys this without
comment and with splendidly few adjectives: character and situation are
revealed by dialogue and small details of action.
In the
title story the Colonel expectantly waits for his war pension: "It was
supposed to come today for sure," he laments. The postman shrugs: "The only thing that
comes for sure is death, Colonel."
And One
Of These Days is a masterpiece of understatement in political revenge.
The
collection is a masterly picture of despair and optimism whose vivid
alternations seem to characterise so much of Latin American life. Márquez has insights and sympathies which he
can project with the intensity of a reflecting mirror in a bright sun. The stories are rich and full of incident and
the dignity of men and women who have little else left.
Innocent
Eréndira is another collection of short stories: in a world of lonely
itinerants and haunting desert landscapes, Márquez once again leaves an
ineffaceable impression of magic, mystery and mastery.
The
Incredible And Sad Tale Of Innocent Eréndira And Her Heartless Grandmother takes
up a theme mentioned in passing in One Hundred Years Of Solitude - the
tale of a young girl who accidentally burns down her grandmother’s house, and
is forced into a life of prostitution and slavery to repay her debt.
One
Hundred Years Of Solitude is an outlandish, exuberant chronicle of a
tragicomically doomed family, that was hailed as an epic and a metaphor for the
isolation and terrible realities of Latin America. This phantasmagorical novel is a modern
parable told without moralizing: its genius lies not only in making us laugh at
the human predicament, but making us laugh in sympathy.
A band
of adventurers establish a town in the heart of the South American jungle,
marking the occasion of the beginning, the world, a great family, of a century
of extraordinary events, and of a quite extraordinary novel.
From the
moment Melquiades the gipsy walks into the jungle settlement of Macondo - the
village-universe of the novel - nothing is ever the same again. Melquiades, an appealing serpent, brings to
this protected Eden knowledge and the tools of discovery. With them the patriarch José Arcadia Buendía
painstakingly re-invents man's seminal discoveries. The only time Ursula, his wife, loses
patience with him is when he re-discovers that the world is round like an
orange.
But José
Arcadia Buendía's primitive laboratory contains the seeds of destruction,
bringing down war, pestilence and other sorrows upon his many descendents. Only Ursula remains uncorrupted, a touchstone
of reality in a world of shifting standards.
In prosperity or decay, Macondo is the centre around which giant events
slowly revolve. Founded in an age of
miracle and innocence, corrupted by civil wars and banana fevers, "the
extraordinary fuses, in all innocence, with the common-place:" small-town
gossip, and the superstitious rites surrounding birth, puberty, marriage and
death go on, while a woman sails to heaven on a laundry sheet, a priest
levitates after drinking hot chocolate, and a baby is born with a pig's tail.
With its
sweeping and chaotic brilliance, often more poetry than prose, it is one vast
musical saga. It is a classic on the
grandest scale: an immensely rich piece of writing, dense as the jungle
foliage, packed with learned allusions, action and humour, full of incidents to
enjoy and philosophies to wonder at. The
dazzling novel is an experience of incomparable richness, and Márquez is a
spellbinder. One emerges from it as if
from a dream, the mind on fire.
Márquez's appetite is as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater
than almost any other writer.
The
Autumn Of The Patriarch is a dreamlike portrayal of the decay and
loneliness of a despot. A fictional
investigation of solitude and its relationship to power, it is an extraordinary
experience: resonant, angry and spellbinding.
It confirms Márquez as a masterweaver of the real and the
conjectured. The novel, more poetry than
prose, is mesmeric, ornate and horrifying, a magnificat to the harsh
Latin American reality. It is also rich,
brilliant, macabre , and funny. It makes
most modern day novelists look anaemic.
In the
presidential palace of an anonymous Latin American country lies the rotting
corpse of a dictator. For as long as his
suffering people can remember, the Patriarch has held them in the grip of his
limitless power and awesome cruelty. He
has been both the creator of myths and the subject of them. Now, as the vultures and the worms feast on
his remains, the process of demythologising begins, the memories of those who
loved him and of those who hated him combining in a rich and complex patchwork
of narrative to provide a memorable portrait of a memorably evil tyrant.
In
Evil Hour has the air of being not just about one specific bad time but
about all times when doubt, secrets, corruption, double-dealing and guilt come
to a head like a boil, and burst in a shower of blood and pus. A masterly book, it is nevertheless
exceptionally fast-moving and rich in wit and humanity. But underlying the marvelous wit, the
inimitable humour and the superbly paced dialogue, there is the author's own
anger, always controlled, but bitterly contemptuous of the political exigencies
which make for injustice and corruption.
Yet alongside the most savage ironies, there are felicities of
description which suggest great warmth and compassion.
The
people of the nameless small town in the nameless South American republic face,
as usual, a dripping, sweaty autumn. The
heat is unbearable, the rain falls in torrents, the mice are eating the church
foundations, the people groan under the yoke of a faraway dictatorship. In this miserable land nothing changes except
governments - and governments change, frequently and bloodily.
In Chronicle
Of A Death Foretold Márquez mixes imagination and fact into a suspenseful
novella of honour and revenge in a Colombian town. Aware that there can be as much suspense in
foreknowledge as in the unknown - one already knows the fate of the victim in
the first sentence - fiction feeds on fact and fact and fate bite back.
A
shadowy, almost anonymous narrator visits the scene of the killing many years
later, and begins an investigation into the past, trying to establish what
happened and why, achieving only provisional answers: but slowly, painfully,
through the mists of half-accurate memories, the equivocations of
the inhabitants and the contradictory recollections of the witnesses a picture
emerges of warnings withheld and paths failing to cross - so leading to the
avoidable, inevitable murder.
A fable
of that madness which only an obscure principle can produce, the book is a tour
de force of moral and emotional complexity.
A mesmerizing and haunting work on the intractability of destiny, it is
also Márquez's most understated, despairing and memorable statement on the
theme of powerlessness yet. What really
fascinates us is the leisurely, almost desultory artistry with which Márquez
extends an incident into an event: turning a simple tale into pure art - its
hesitancy and uncertainties becoming its source of strength.
§
Fiction
is the artifice of transforming old realities into new ones. As writers and artists we have to create
a new reality, not simply mirror a reality.
"I don't think literature can content itself with being either a
mask or a mirror of reality. I think
literature creates reality or it is not literature at all."
Like
Latin American writers we have a double culture, one indigenous, the other
external: both Western, and that brought by the slaves and indentured labourers. We have to learn these cultures, and like
Latin Americans we also have to appropriate writers of other traditions in
order to fill the void.
Like
South Americans we live in a continent where the novel is a recent development,
where many things have been left unsaid.
We have largely an oral culture to fall back on, but without that
tradition there can be no creation. When
we sit down to write, we must feel the whole of our tradition in our bones; it
must be a tradition that extends from Homer to Soyinka; Shakespeare to oral
poetry; from Mishima to Márquez; from Khoi-Khoi paintings to Pablo Picasso;
from warriors to guerillas.
Western
culture often portrays a selective history of its past - constantly projecting
a fashionable present and an unattainable future of its own creation for the
rest of us. And all of Latin America,
Africa and Asia have been fooled by this illusion of progress. Our political life is fragmented, our history
filled with failure, so that all we have is our rich cultural tradition (if we
will only seek it) - and the hope that lives in our hearts. For the time is at hand when we must look at
our own faces, our own past: look into our own reflections, and look at these
masks we have created.
But
unfortunately there is little for us here in Azania to go on; we have no
historians; few records of traditional songs; a written literature that is
nascent, going back less than a century.
And the challenges that confront us are many. And that is the challenge I put before you
today. Myths are a tradition, myths
breathe, and we have to create our own myths based entirely on
the truth, for myths nourish the epics, the tragedies, and even the melodramas.
We have
to decipher the environment, to separate the essential elements of a poetic
synthesis from an environment we know all too well. And we have to learn the craft of writing:
the laborious techniques of moulding words and sentences. "To find probabilities out of real facts
is the work of the journalist and the novelist, and it is also the work of the
prophet."
Writers
are pretty powerful, because people eventually come to believe their writers
more than their politicians; because the function of the true artist has always
been to be the keeper of the truth. It
is a most harrowing task; with a great sense of responsibility.
And
unfortunately "many writers who think of themselves as politically
committed feel obligated to write stories not about what they want, but about
what they think they should want, making for a certain type of calculated
literature that doesn't have anything to do with experience or intuition."
And so
to end, with Márquez, a statement pertinent to all the favourite arguments
bandied about here: "I have a great many reservations about what came in
Latin America to be called ‘committed literature,’ … the novel of social
protest … This is mainly because I think
its limited view of the world and life does not help achieve anything in
political terms. Far from accelerating
any process of raising consciousness, it actually slows it down. Latin Americans expect more from a novel than
an exposé of the oppression and injustice they know all too well. Many of my militant friends who so often feel
the need to dictate to writers what they should or should not write are,
unconsciously perhaps, taking a reactionary stance inasmuch as they are
imposing restrictions on creative freedom.
I believe a novel about love is as valid as any other. When it comes down to it, the writer's duty -
his revolutionary duty if you like - is to write well."
© farouk asvat
composed: 1985 [Johannesburg, south africa
under apartheid]
[] Acknowledgements:
The
Sad Splendour Of Latin American Literature
was initially presented at: the launch of the Writers' Forum, 29 June 1985.
The
Sad Splendour Of Latin American Literature
was serialized in the Sowetan as:
Latin American Writers (Sowetan, Argus, p12, 10.06.1987);
Pablo Neruda, (Sowetan,
Argus, p12, 17.06.1987);
Loss Of The Fruits Of The Struggle [Neruda] (Sowetan, Argus, p27, 24.06.1987);
Fuentes Brings Back The Past Through
Writing (Sowetan, Argus, p?, 01.07.1987);
Márquez Is A Spellbinder, (Sowetan,
Argus, p10, 15.07.1987);
Gabriel García Márquez
(cont.) (Sowetan,
Argus, p12, 22.07.1987].
The
Sad Splendour Of Latin American Literature
was previously published in:
Weapons of Words (kindle, 2016);
Weapons of Words (amazon paperback, p28, 2016).
[§] Books by Farouk Asvat:
● Sadness In The House Of Love (novel)
● The Gathering Of The Storm (novel)
● I Dream In Long Sentences (poetry)
● The Wind Still Sings Sad Songs (poetry)
● A Celebration Of Flames (poetry)
● The Time Of Our Lives (poetry)
● This Masquerade (short stories)
● Bra Frooks … (poetry)*
● The Paanies Are Coming (short
stories)*
● In The House Of Love (novel)*
● Weapons Of Words (comparative
literature & literary criticism)
¨ all my books are now available on amazon: in paperback & kindle
___________________________________________________________________________
[] please check out my blogs @:
weapons of words: https://faroukasvat-viewpoint.blogspot.com
piquante: https://faroukasvat-piquant.blogspot.com
streetwise: https://faroukasvat-lingo.blogspot.com
quran lectures: https://faroukasvat-quran.blogspot.com
biography: https://faroukasvat-bio.blogspot.com
books by farouk asvat: https://faroukasvat-books.blogspot.com
[] please join me on:
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faroukasvat
twitter: https://twitter.com/faroukasvat
___________________________________________________________________________
© farouk asvat. All rights reserved.
Farouk Asvat asserts his moral right to be identified as the
author of this work.
No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means
whatsoever, or transmitted in any form or any means whatsoever, mechanical or
electronic, including recording, printing, photocopying, or via any
computerised means or media, including the internet. This publication shall also not be stored in a
retrieval system. And the writing shall
not be sold, lent, hired, resold or circulated in any form or binding or cover
other than that in which it is published,
without the prior permission of
the author in writing.
Permission to publish or reproduce the
writings in any format can be obtained from the author.
Reproduction of this work without permission,
except for scholarly & nonprofit purposes,
is liable to a payment of 10, 000 ren
men bi or US$ 1,500.
[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]
the NOVEL Sadness In
The House Of Love by Farouk
Asvat
is now available on amazon: in paperback @ $15 & kindle @ only $5
[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]
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