In “Cascais,” the second section of Montevideo by Enrique Vila-Matas—co-translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott—we learn that the protagonist, unnamed, is one to whom things happen.
After I finished the “Paris” section, which the reader has possibly just read, I went three years without writing anything at all, totally adrift. What’s more, no sooner had I stopped writing than things started happening to me—a very strange development. It’s not that things didn’t happen to me before, but the things that started happening once I’d abandoned my desk all had something in common: they met every requirement for being turned into stories, and indeed they demanded it, almost crying out to be told.
When things begin to happen to a writer, one can expect a novel. Lived experience becomes raw material, shaping character and plot. Walking through the streets of Paris, Cascais, Montevideo, or Buenos Aires enables him to take stock of his surroundings, to admire the archways of façades and the grilles of entrances, and, above all, to reflect on his predicaments. Thus, our blocked writer found himself following the advice of another novelist.
you’ll soon realize that the most important thing is not dying for ideas, styles, or theories but rather taking a step back and maintaining a distance between ourselves and the things that happen to us.
The narrator of Montevideo was a different novelist in each section because of the temporal dimension. What he recounted in the “Cascais” section while looking back at the “Paris” section was already separated by time. The writer of the first section was a figure of the past, an older self. The narrator of the second section was situated in the present. The “novelist” of the first was not the “I” of the second. However, they might share some preferences and their relationship was hardly a hostile one. After all, the amazing things happening to the writer of the present would likely find their way into another “I,” the novelist of the future, however much the present novelist sought to put distance between his present self and his past self.
While responding to an interview at a literary event, the present novelist could not shake off the impression that he was faking it, that he was exaggerating his present self.
As I spoke, I deliberately gave a misleading impression of myself, going overboard in my efforts to make everyone think I was the sort of writer to whom extraordinary things happened but who then approached them in writing with a certain distance, a kind of cold impartiality, as if they had nothing to do with him. And I explained how this was a kind of unconscious defense mechanism that all these writers carry with them wherever they go. Such a writer might, I said, be railing furiously at his girlfriend, while she rages back, at which point he abruptly stops and asks: “Do you mind if I write about this?” With the following reaction from her: “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? Are you even genuinely angry?” To which he might respond that yes, he’s livid, but there’s still a part of him that’s taken up with the question of how it all ought to feel, really feel, and even at that very moment he’s wondering how to describe the scene, including his reflections about how it ought to feel, which for him is a matter of great importance.
The “I” of the present was wary of his past writer self because the latter had the propensity to magnify and falsify (fictionalize) events. Thus, the “I” also distrusts his present unreliable novelist self, because he inherited this tendency from his embroidering past self. But writers must live, let themselves go on living, and embrace their literary contrivance if only to feed their fictional machine, which serves to justify their creative practice against the encroaching slop of artificial intelligence. They surrealistically imagine what's behind closed doors, invent and open doors within doors to penetrate the unknown and discover the unknowable.
If a writer is any good, he knows his contribution is now out of his hands. It is read by readers who happen upon the novel. Little by little, he can no longer detect himself in his published books. The novel ceases to be his own, belonging instead to language, tradition, and perhaps later to oblivion.
At the end of Montevideo, after a certain protracted war of attrition (between reader and writer), “Vila-Matas,” the unnamed stand-in for Vila-Matas, might or might not have realized that the novel was finished. His friend, a “French writer,” had the last say:
“Lately you’ve become a writer to whom things really happen. Let’s hope you understand your destiny ... Your destiny—the key to the new door—is in your hands.”
Vila-Matas almost knew perfectly well who had written the last page.
No comments:
Post a Comment