Voyage Along the Horizon (Javier Marías)

The day that witnessed the departure of the Tallahassee—a sailboat with a metal hull, three masts, and a steam engine, classified by Lloyds Register of Shipping as a mixed vessel, property of the Cunard White Star, built by Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in the United States, purchased by Great Britain (where it was newly registered in 1896, though its original name, that of the city where it was baptized, remained the same), capable of reaching a velocity of 11.5 knots, with capacity for seventy passengers, and operating under the command of Ship's Captain Eustace Seebohm, Englishman, and First Officer J. D. Kerrigan, American—there was a great celebration at the port of Marseilles. The ship was fêted and festooned with balloons, confetti, and streamers that dappled the surrounding waters with their dazzling colors. As they boarded the vessel one by one, the passengers were cheered by the onlookers. Finally, at ten in the morning, after all the obligatory ceremonies had finally come to a close, the boat pushed away from the coast with forty-two prominent society figures, fifteen men of science, and an inevitably furious, resentful crew.

—Voyage Along the Horizon by Javier Marías, translated by Kristina Cordero (McSweeney's, 2006)

This is a sophomore effort by Javier Marías, started when he was 19 years old and published two years later, in 1972. I'm still eagerly waiting for when his first book, Los dominios del lobo (1971, Domains of the Wolf), will appear in translation. That's that book, along with La asesina ilustrada (The Enlightened Assassin) by Enrique Vila-Matas, that for Roberto Bolaño, "marks a departure point for our generation."

Voyage Along the Horizon is, by Marías standards, a minor novel that I'm still glad to have read. One gets to see similarities and contrasts with the novelist's late style. In this, the young novelist already displayed a tendency for playful tinkering with plot. I can see why Bolaño, fed up with the imitations of magical realist novels of Boom writers, would prefer a novel by a young Marías. The form, structure, and diction of Voyage Along the Horizon eschewed the magical and folkloric reference; it did not anchor itself on "nationalist" literature. Instead it pays homage to the English adventure novels, openly acknowledging the influences of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

The time of the "novel within the novel" was 1904. A trip to Antarctica was organized by the charismatic and gloomy Captain Kerrigan, who invited men and women of prestige aboard the Tallahassee: writers, artists, and scientists. The idea for this kind of journey must be bold and vain at the time, but it is prophetic too. A similar trip was recently undertaken by "a mix of scientists, academics, students and journalists" to raise awareness about climate change (news link here, provided by a friend).

This journey is a background story framed by the present story where the unnamed narrator learns about a novelist named Victor Arledge who retreated from society and who died abjectly. A guest in the narrator's party mentions that he had with him a certain manuscript of a novel entrusted to him by a late friend. The novel is entitled Voyage Along the Horizon. (In true Marías mannerism, the name of the novelist behind this "inner" novel will not be revealed until well after halfway through the book.) The manuscript recounts the journey of the Tallahassee where Arledge was one of the passengers. Arledge's experiences aboard the ship may or may not have contributed to his mysterious decline in old age.

A young woman who studied the works of Arledge is very interested in the contents of the manuscript, so she asks the literary executor (Mr. Holden Branshaw or Hordern Bragshawe, the narrator "hadn't quite caught" the name) permission to read the novel which, once published, Branshaw (let's assume) strongly believes, would catapult his friend to literary limelight and would pave the way for him to be considered "one of the great novelists of his time". Later on, this assessment will change, and Branshaw will pass a definitively harsh judgement on the novel. The winking self-reference in this book must be one of its enjoyable aspects.

Instead of letting the lady borrow the novel, Mr. Branshaw invites the lady and the narrator to his house where he would read from his friend's story. From this unpublished manuscript of Voyage Along the Horizon, within this novel of the same title, Marías produces other branching stories in the form of letters, confessions, and investigations. The novelist luxuriates in the same storytelling tics and antics that characterize his later books. The safekeeping of secrets, the confession of unpleasant deeds, shady or morally corrupt characters, ever so lengthy digressions—these are all here, surprisingly anticipating the elements swirling in his literary cosmogony. In addition, the scenes in its pages are as unlikely as assembled: kidnapping, duel on a ship, smuggling on the shores of Formosa and Southeast Asia, pirate attack, journey in search of a habitable island.

For a writer who was always concerned with the act and art of storytelling, this novel is a kind of variation of his literary maneuvers. Marías may have hardened in his dense prose style, as in the "difficult" and extremely long Your Face Tomorrow, but his stance as a "secret sharer" and "secret withholder" has always been intact.

"One must learn how to cultivate the art of ambiguity", someone said in the novel. A principle that the novel seems to have taken to heart. The novel resists resolution that would tie up everything neatly together. Readers are instead treated to nontraditional murder and mystery stories, wide open to interpretation, and whose ultimate ending provides only cold comfort.

The book contained an appendix—an interview called "Eight Questions for Javier Marías" where he discussed the novel's style and influences, its metafictional elements and open ending, and the quality of his fiction that predisposes it to translation. Asked what he wanted to tell readers who were mystified by the ending, he answered: "Conclusions and final explanations are often the most irrelevant—and disappointing—parts of a novel. What counts the most—and what we remember the most—is the atmosphere, the style, the path, the journey, and the world in which we have immersed ourselves for a few hours or a few days, while reading a novel or watching a movie. What matters, then, is the journey along the horizon—in other words, the journey that never ends."

The novelist as ghostwriter

Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me by Javier Marías

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A man and a woman are about to commit adultery. Suddenly the woman dies on him. The man cannot report her death and must immediately leave her and her sleeping child behind. From this opening scene, the novelist explores the idea of narrating and storytelling as acts fraught with emotional baggage, of the art of novel-writing as essentially ghostwriting. Later, the man considers revealing his identity to the woman's husband. He feels that unburdening himself can be the only way to save them both. He does not realize that both of them may already be past saving.

I reeled from the unexpected ending of this novel. The novelist's style is just as suspenseful and addictive as his other books. It is in some ways a companion book to his short story Bad Nature, whose narrator appears as a minor character in this novel.

The novelist can be said to act as a ghostwriter for his narrator, V., who was himself a ghostwriter in the novel. All the characters' thoughts and dialogues are filtered through V.'s consciousness, sometimes to the point of second-guessing them, as when he thought, inside quotations (emphases added):

"It's so easy to live in a state of delusion, or to be deceived," I thought, "indeed, it is our natural condition: no one is free of it and it certainly doesn't mean that one is stupid, we should not struggle so hard against it nor should we let it embitter us." That is what [he] had said, although he had added: "And yet, when we do learn the truth, we find it unbearable."

This is a key passage not only to this novel, but to the rest of Javier Marías's major fiction, all using the first person narration. It underscores his sublime ventriloquism and ghostwriting: the narrator thinking aloud his story and imputing words to the other characters. In a recent interview Marías said of his writing style: "I don't play tricks, that’s why I write in the first person." That is a tricky thing to say.

The narrator's profession is yet again a wonderful conceit on the part of the novelist, as it forces the two of them (narrator and novelist) to invent words for someone. As with A Heart So White, this novel luxuriates in the "dangerous" acts of observation and perception. This time, the narrator is actually twice removed from his subject (the politician he is writing a speech for) by having to fill the shoes of his ghostwriter-friend Ruibérriz who acts as his literary agent. He is, in fact, a "ghostwriter of a ghostwriter". Perhaps a fitting occupation for someone who is, all throughout the book, haunted by a ghost.

Marías's novels support the idea of 'faithful' translation and storytelling (novel-writing) as acts of careful and informed interpretations, as vehicles of interpretation themselves. The main characters - as translator, interpreter, ghostwriter - act as intermediaries between two parties trying to seek an understanding. In A Heart So White, between two world leaders; in this book, between a powerful political figure and his subjects. The translating language, the 'target' language, thus becomes a hospitable medium. Reading it in Margaret Jull Costa's expert translation adds a layer of déjà vu to the mix.

The novel-writing then doubles as translation, a way to capture and match ideas and intentions in the original language (thought) and to convey them in another (text/speech). The free first-person narrative style, proceeding in a deliberately digressive and lengthy trajectory of conscious memories and dreams, betrays the writer's intent to sharpen the perception of a reader caught in a swirl of words and ideas. To open communications between the embattled reader and the text.









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Celebrating José Saramago

  

Margaret Jull Costa's profile of José Saramago can be read "online only" at Granta. What caught my eye was her quote of Saramago in an interview, discussing the point where he realized a way to proceed more effectively with his storytelling, the very point of his transition to a "non-punctuated style".

I was already at the twentieth section of the book [Levantado do chão (Raised from the Ground)] and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that’s impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say ‘apparent’ since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.

I underlined "apparent spontaneity ...". It described a realistic style which I find very absorbing, a style in which method is closely tied to content and form. It's the same spontaneous style one can also detect in César Aira and Javier Marías. Spontaneity in these writers can be a result of a desire for "authenticity" (I use this term loosely, as it has many pitfalls).

Margaret Jull Costa analyzed this writing style (which is closer to that of Marías whom she also translated):
 

In reducing punctuation down to commas and full stops, in letting a sentence follow the natural digressions of thought, Saramago cuts himself free from the straitjacket of conventional realistic literature, allowing himself, as narrator, to carry the reader along on the wave of those thought processes, those digressions. [...]

One cannot help but see this egalitarian approach to both punctuation and narration as an expression of Saramago’s declared anarcho-communism and atheism, as cocking a snook at orthodoxy and authority, be it God or Government, and as a way of privileging the spoken voice, the ordinary human voice. [...]

Read more here.




Image sources: Asymptote and The New York Times, from Small Memories; prae.hu

Cross-posted from Bifurcaria bifurcata.

A cosmogony of Javier Marías's major fiction

Poison, Shadow and Farewell is the valedictory volume of Javier Marías's spy novel whose prose style represents a calcification of the novelist's poetic images, lines, phrases, and symbols, all unfolding in the pedantic mind of its narrator in a very very very very very very very slow motion. (Yes, that's seven verys for each chapter.) In the 1,200-page opus Your Face Tomorrow, we find Jacques Deza, recently separated from his wife Luisa in Spain and employed in London as an interpreter and as a kind of behavioral consultant under the tutelage of his boss Bertram Tupra, an enigmatic and strong character of an unidentified national descent - we find Deza afloat in a thick fog of reminiscences and observations, endlessly conversing with people, with his father and with his mentor Peter Wheeler, both old and ailing, involved in some shady adventures with his superior, and finally involved in his own personal battle. What started as a mental bloodbath among spy-wits in the previous two volumes ends as a voluble political treatise on actual physical violence of wars and conflicts: (i) the recent and modern wars between nations and (ii) the intimate personal conflicts between two men.

Despite its obvious quarrel with a straightforward plot, there is an actual linear progression of story that builds from its feverish beginning, to the point of spear and a bloodstain, to dancing and dreaming, and in this volume, to the injection of poison, to the transformation of a person into a shadow-character, and to a final farewell. Here is how Deza's corruption began:

   As I looked and half-looked and saw, a poison was entering me, and when I use that word 'poison', I'm not doing so lightly or purely metaphorically, but because something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus', from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could no longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them.... [124]

The passage of course runs for longer than that, but Jesus, how weird it is for the man to still invoke the etymology of a word when he is strapped helpless and forced to view some graphic images. Beyond the vocabulary lesson, there is an insistence on the part of the narrator to capture the most suitable word to describe the increasingly envenomed state he's entering. Stumbling upon the word "inoculation", as a conscious or unconscious translation of his condition, almost provides a comic relief, almost relegates the process to comedy, black and pitch. Deza's acceptance that he is being 'inoculated' proceeds from a linguistic recognition ("that last term is spot on etymologically") to a validation of that recognition ("it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus', from which it comes") to a final recognition that he is now infected. Awareness of what is happening to him brings with it a certain comfort since he is able to interpret the situation at the level of language at least. His command of language is used as defense mechanism to 'process' images of unspeakable horrors into recognizable shapes, into a semblance of comprehensibility. He detects evil in what he sees and it is being passed on to him.
  
It is innate in humans to try to act rationally in the face of the irrational. And so pedantic Deza continually corrects the charismatic Tupra in their long drawn out conversation that culminates in the video showing. For instance, he corrects Tupra on the correct attribution of a quote (Rimbaud), on the right pronunciation of "Coahuila", and on many other linguistic matters which are seemingly at odds with the issue at hand, the issue of the moral and ethical justifications of the "use of force". Deza's obsession with the precise application of language seems to him the very act that will restore order in the increasing imbalance against peace and good that the latest events are undermining. But what practical and lasting use are one's powers of perception and linguistic skills in the face of an increasingly violent, intolerant world? In the face of bloody wars?

Through the videotaped images of atrocities, the implications of 'careless talk' introduced by the novelist in the first two chapters are now, for Deza, coming closer to home. The book has traced the gradual progression of plot from talk to live action, from language to reality. The flood of poisonous words - consistent in its unchecked spilling - becomes the very material of the novel's movement and resolution. Words betray. Words sink ships. Words are instruments of one's undoing. On the other hand, words warn. Words can be a ticket to salvation. Words console. Words memorialize. For spies, the exchange of words has become both necessary and suspect, a paradoxical situation whose balance a speaker constantly strives for whenever she opens her mouth, whenever she decides with finality to finally communicate, to finally speak out and declare a simple fact.

The plot is thin, and the book thick. The ideas are plentiful. The writing style has crystallized and hardened to such an extent that it almost rivals the exquisite and delicious boredom of Henry James's last three poetic masterpieces (but I will single out the brooding boredom of The Golden Bowl). However much the charismatic Tupra plead for our narrator not to "linger and delay", linger and delay he did, in every significant incident, as if the injunction is just the thing he needed to hear so he can disobey and freely follow his thoughts. The narrative style is that of free thinking, of freezing the frames of action and dwelling in them at leisure, and then to branch out to other frames, to go off tangent in the freedom of space.

* * *

If the major fiction of Javier Marías is likened to a solar system, the sun will have to be yielded to Your Face Tomorrow. The other six books make an elliptic orbit around this massive planet, sucked in by the latter's strong gravitational potential energy. It is the sublime energy of ideas, forcible feelings, and serpentine expressions that hold the inertia of this literary space. Like planets, the novels also have satellites of their own, orbiting around them. Because of the book's random composition, published one after another in the continuum, the novels gradually accumulate a scattered dust of ideas. The reader, in bringing these ideas together as he navigates the fabric of space-time, can sense a set of physical principles related to the constant gestation of the novelist's ideas, to his process of fictive creation that religiously follows the law of imagination. There emerges a literary universe - the Marían cosmogony - answerable to a single-minded desire to talk, to think, to talk more about what has been previously talked about, to think through what has been so far talked about, and to do more talking and thinking as long as one has the luxury of blank pages to do so. To talk and to think being further qualified as deliberate acts of searching for meanings: of translating, interpreting, and to generalize: of reading.

How did the birthing of this universe came about? In 1989, All Souls, Marías's first novel in this spatial configuration, was published in its original Spanish language. The unnamed narrator, a Spanish scholar in Oxford, will continue his story in YFT. Three years after, A Heart So White followed, introducing a character who was in many respects similar to Deza. The book contained an almost inconspicuous reference that winks at previous novel. In the same year, Written Lives was published, a collection of biographical sketches, ostensibly of a different genre, but the subject matter was relevant. The writers in it were some of those the novelist translated and whose works unquestionably contributed to his literary education. Another two years will pass (1994) before Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me came out to sketch entirely new characters and situations and yet with obvious thematic and plot links with the other two (for instance, the death of a woman at the beginning). A short story collection, When I Was Mortal, followed in 1996. The stories shared characters and backgrounds with the previous books and anticipated references in the books to come. Also in 1996, the almost-novella Bad Nature plucked out a previous character, or at least his name, and brought him face to face with cultural prejudice, a central conflict in the novelist's literary space. After that Dark Back of Time (1998) shook things a bit more by playing a game of fact-and-fiction with the first book and using again the same characters, or at least their names. After four years, the three volumes of YFT started to arrive in installments (2002, 2004, 2007), almost completing the writer's elegant train of thought. 

The above figure is an initial attempt - I haven't yet read When I Was Mortal and am just about to start Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me - to tease out the cosmogony of Marías. The books are treated as discrete celestial objects in the same space cluster. The solid lines indicate a sharing of one or more "major" characters in the story; the broken lines show a sharing of stray Shakespearian phrases and images (e.g., "dark back", "tomorrow in the battle think on me") and of minor characters and their names. In the first case, the object directly revolves around a book in a well-defined orbit, having a direct link between them. In the second case the object wobbles in its orbit, having an 'imposed' semantic/philosophical/literary connection with the others. The orbit can be assumed not to be unstable or semi-stable (think Pluto) as to escape from the attraction of thematic gravity.

For sure there is an element of 'chance' in the composition of this cosmogony. It's possible that if there is a rough outline of it, then it is conceived in sequential bursts of creativity and revised along the way. The serial nature of YFT, its unwieldy style, and the tenuous recycling of character's names from other books, indicate that there is only a provisional map of it in the novelist's mind. At any rate, there is an agglomeration of the dust and chaff of novelistic ideas, Shakespearian drama and episodes. Their consolidation into a solid mass begins to form a more expansive core to forge the adamantine style, to calcify into a sun that is YFT.

How can something so boring like YFT be the one at the center of this solar system? Well, it's only boring to some, but I find several sections of it a page-turner, especially in the last volume. The sheer mass and density of YFT sweeps and reins in the dramatis personae of the other books, including some of the philosophical and aesthetic ideas in them. So its magnitude could not help but align the other books into its fictional system. The novel, voluminous and volatile, is powered by a slow-burning energy. At its center, a nuclear furnace of words, long trailing paragraphs, and flaring images, all of which elements are also in the other books but in YFT are blazing with renewable intensity, as if it wants to consume all its energy.

To read (into) these books is a wondrous experience of creative reading. Tracking meanings, codes, and images, attempting to decipher from them the basic principles that govern the planetary orbits. There is too much matter (words) to lose oneself into. The lines of poetry are repeated many times over in a book, and then they freely cross over other books, as if conversing with them. One book to another book. One poem to another. The poetic lines are deliberate devices to stitch together the fabric of one literary cosmos. They ("like snow on shoulders, slipping and docile") are pieces played out like mantras, incantations, amulets. The poems are like novenas offered to dispel the impending loss of continuity of the story. They are "markers", "signifiers", force fields pulling readers back to the thread of the story. Without exception, the titles of the seven books, as translated, are all cribbed from the plays of Shakespeare (with variations only for "All soules", "dark backward and abysm of time", and "evil nature").

The lines from poetry also play out as musical variations. By the end of the novel (YFT, as with A Heart So White), the lines coil around each other in a tightening noose. The snippets (from Shakespeare, Rilke, Eliot) are repeated as in the movements of a symphony, signalling that the novelist is ready to wrap up the story, to elevate it to one final stirring movement, his baton poised to gather all the elements into a tight, constricting unity.

But what is exciting about this solar system thing is not that there are tenuous connections at all, but that the oeuvre formed from the constellation of novels is still expanding in the reader's mind long after the reading.

* * *

NAMES. The names in these books are sacred grounds. It's as if a name has the weight of blood, as stubborn as the rim of bloodstain on the floor. A man's character is his fate. In Marían cosmogony, so is his name. The revelation of names, their withholding, and their numerous bifurcation into aliases, matter as much as the destiny of the characters behind the name. A name is the first level of measurement, the nominal label of a person. One's most basic attribute is inscribed in a name. Anyone's transaction, public or private, is associated with a name. Names are words, too. And the novelist luxuriates in words. So there.

SECRETS. One should keep his mouth shut. But there are exceptions after all. "I suppose there comes a point when one has to tell things, after a lot of time has passed, so that it doesn't seem as if they simply never happened or were just a bad dream ... " [510]

SEMANTICS, HERMENEUTICS, TRANSLATION. Marías's protagonists - Jacques Deza, Juan Ranz, Ruibérriz de Torres, "Javier Marías" - navigate the world through translation. Their professions as translator or interpreter or linguistic scholar or "novelist" are primarily concerned with the decoding of dense languages and images into small understandable components. Otherwise, they become lost in the verbal labyrinth, just like the often-incensed reader. And so the protagonists are prone to self-examination, to self-justification and self-abnegation. Almost always they put under the microscope the very fine (grain-sized) details that they encounter. They describe events and surrounding details with the utmost precision for they are concerned with the transmission of information, with the exploration of workable (and alternative and flawed) translations. They fully recognize the limitations of communication, of the speculative natures of 'excellent' interpretation of one person's future actions, what she's capable of tomorrow, what her face tomorrow will reveal. In their physiological make-up there is a gene desiring to exercise its specialized function. This gene automatically answers to linguistic stimuli and is responsible for a variety of allied functions: to analyze, to make judgements, to philosophize, to interpret, to break words apart, to search for definitions and cultural contexts, to translate, to read.

This indicates that a robust framework for conceptualizing the linguistic/cultural system of YFT, and maybe even of the whole cosmogony, is a theory or philosophy of translation. One such philosophy is explored by the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur in On Translation (Routledge, 2006; trans. Eileen Brennan), a book of essays on the philosophy of translation that distills the work of George Steiner (After Babel) and other translation theorists. Ricoeur's book is a rigorous and concise (72-page) exposition on the ethical justification for the existence of translation.

The work of translation, according to Ricoeur (after Freud), is an act of remembering and of mourning. This is from the first essay called "Translation as challenge and source of happiness". Throughout YFT, readers are treated to Deza's constant allusion to the past, to "the things as they were" before his separation from his wife, a separation which decisively marked his life. In the novel's store of stories, readers are made privy to the reminiscences of Wheeler and Deza's own father. In translating and interpreting, Deza constantly goes back to the sources of language, the etymology, the idiomatic and popular uses of a word or phrase, the puns and the historical-cultural contexts behind words. He remembers and at the same time he mourns, with a sometimes tragic sense of loss, for "what might have been". He mourns for what more faithful meaning could have been substituted to some slippery word or statement. Atmospherically, the novel is so suffused by tones of elegy and melancholy as to be draped in black cloths of mourning.

In delineating the private-public spheres of human relationships, through translation and semantics, Ricoeur highlighted the division between external and internal translations. External translation being the translation from a source to a target language, internal translation being the process of translating "within the same linguistic community", i.e., from Spanish to Spanish, or from English to English.

I would like to show, at least very succinctly, that it is in this same language’s work on itself that underlying reasons for the insuperability of the gap between a supposed perfect universal language and the languages that we term natural, in the sense of non-artificial, are revealed. As I have suggested, it is not the imperfections of natural languages that we would like to do away with, but the very functioning of these languages in their astonishing peculiarities. And it is the work of internal translation that in fact reveals this gap. I come close here to the statement that commands the whole of George Steiner’s book, After Babel. After Babel, ‘to understand is to translate’. This is about much more than a simple internalization of the relationship to the foreign, in accordance with Plato’s adage that thought is a dialogue of the soul with itself – an internalisation that would transform internal translation into a simple appendix to external translation. This is about an original investigation, which lays bare the everyday processes of a living language: these ensure that no universal language can succeed in reconstructing its indefinite diversity. This is really about approaching the mysteries of a language that is full of life, and at the same time, giving an account of the phenomenon of misunderstanding, of misinterpretation which, according to Schleiermacher, gives rise to interpretation, the theory of which hermeneutics wants to develop. The reasons for the gap between perfect language and a language that is full of life are exactly the same as the causes of misinterpretation.

All of which may, or may not, acquit Deza of his insufferable mannerism of trying to find equivalent synonyms to obscure words. Ricoeur here highlighted diversity and vitality ("full of life") implied by the act of translating within the same linguistic tradition. This requires internalization and critical defamiliarization in the source language, maybe the act of attaining fluency in one's native language. I like the part in the above quote where it says that no universal language can successfully reconstruct the staggering diversity ("fullness", let us say) of a living language. I also like the idea behind interpretation arising from a given account of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. For without the discrepancies of sense and meanings in and between languages, without misprision (the willful distortion and misreading of texts, as Harold Bloom would have it) in translation, there is nothing to interpret at all, nothing to speak of, to write about, hence, nothing to read, to argue about, to talk about, to think about.

'THE OTHER'. Compounding the external-internal, private-public spheres of translation and semantics is the perception of that that is other than you or unlike you, which is perhaps the untranslatable, the foreign, the strange, and the alien. The novelist brings these spheres of human relationships and the internal-external into direct engagement with wars and conflicts in history, the past and ongoing history. He interfaces these wars with an individual's private wars and demons (as with Deza's confrontation with C). And this he simultaneously made to bear on an "ancient and modern" conundrum, i.e., a timeless concern of the past, present, and future (tomorrow's unknowable face) - how to tolerate the 'other'.

Bad Nature encapsulates most succinctly the novelist's recurrent theme in his major works. In this short story, the protagonist is witness to the same problem of confronting people unlike one, people who speak a different language and whose values and backgrounds are relatively different from one. The situation is representative of the conflicts that tend to plague the Marías cosmogony. Here's from something I wrote in a previous post:

The book is about a translator/interpreter who worked for Elvis Presley in a movie set in Acapulco, Mexico. In one of their bar hops, one of the guys in Elvis's contingent offended a Mexican gangster. Inevitably, Elvis and his companions became embroiled in an argument with the gangster's group. The translator is the only person who could communicate the insults shuttling back and forth between the two factions. As is usual with Marias, the currents of terror are at first gliding innocently on the surface of the story and then breaks to the surface to take over the story. As I understand it from this story: the bad nature resides in all of us. The gangsters and also Elvis can be bad, as in evil, anytime. The key to world peace is tolerating "the other" but this is impossible because there is always a barrier of communication. Language and the significations of language can get the better of people. If we can not get past our own linguistic (i.e., cultural) prejudices then we are at a permanent state of conflict. Even gestures, like language, can be fatal.

TOLERANCE. In his introduction to Ricoeur's On Translation, Richard Kearney explains the concept of translation in terms of hermeneutics:

Translation can be understood in both a specific and a general sense. In the specific sense - the one in common contemporary usage - it signals the work of translating the meanings of one particular language into another. In the more generic sense, it indicates the every day act of speaking as a way not only of translating oneself to oneself (inner to outer, private to public, unconscious to conscious, etc.) but also and more explicitly of translating oneself to others. As Dominico Jervolino puts it:

To speak is already to translate (even when one is speaking one's own native language or when one is speaking to oneself); further, one has to take into account the plurality of languages, which demand a more exacting encounter with the different Other. One is tempted to say that there is a plurality of languages because we are originally plural. The encounter with the Other cannot be avoided. If one accepts the necessary nature of the encounter, linguistic pluralism appears no longer as a malediction, as the received interpretation of the myth of Babel would have it, but as a condition which requires us to surrender the all-encompassing dream of a perfect language (and of a global translation, so to speak, without residues). The partiality and finitude of individual languages is then viewed not as an insurmountable obstacle but as the very precondition of communication among individuals. 

The key passage from Jervolino that Kearney quoted is the beautiful solution that Ricoeur has arrived at. This is also, in my view, what Marías has been obliquely mapping in his fictional sequence featuring translators as characters. In his book Ricoeur introduced a wonderful term, linguistic hospitality, to describe the appreciation of translation through the acknowledgment of its limitations, the acknowledgement that there is no total (or perfect) translation: "Just as in the act of telling a story, we can translate differently, without hope of filling the gap between equivalence and total adequacy. Linguistic hospitality, then, where the pleasure of dwelling in the other’s language is balanced by the pleasure of receiving the foreign word at home, in one’s own welcoming house." That acknowledgement is a source of mourning for the translator who is not able to fully capture the sense and essence of what one is asked to translate, the inability to find exact equivalents, a one-to-one correspondence between the source text and the translating medium. At the same time (and this really depends on one's orientation, one's readiness), this limitation can be a source of happiness because one has given up. One has finally surrendered from trying to excavate the most faithful cognate, from trying to unearth the statement that would represent utmost fidelity to what is (assumed to be) really meant by the original.

USE OF FORCE. This linguistic surrender, this acceptance of our inadequacy to fully comprehend each other, may be the precondition for building a humane and just society. Maybe. And perhaps it can be a way to skirt around the perceived ethical problems of translation, a way to bridge post-national cultures, prevent incidents of violence and bloodshed, enable tolerance. Maybe. These suppositions may as well be formulated as rhetorical questions (This linguistic surrender ... just society ? Perhaps it can be a way to skirt around ... enable tolerance?). The framing of these positive statements makes them sound insincere. They will bring us neither here nor there.

Faced with a more brazen question, like, Why should one not hurt or kill people?, we seem not to be at a better position. On hearing this question, the value system starts to rebel. Our order-loving sensibilities are offended. Yet in YFT, the novelist forces the reader to confront naive questions like this. To consider the larger implications of using violence in desperate times. The reader may as well listen in rapt attention since these questions, as the poet Wisława Szymborska noted, are "the most pressing" ones. By giving it a proper context and narrative grounding in the novel, that 'innocent' question turned out to be not as naive as it sounds.

At the end of the novel, Deza gives up on his job as translator under Tupra. His unconditional surrender is not just an act of principled defiance; he is giving himself up to embrace his 'other life'. There is now in him an openness to transform and translate his real life into something more real, more concrete, something he can derive an ounce of happiness from. And so the novel arrives at its resolution after a long agonistic telling, a telling permeated with a fever of protracted remembering and sorrowing. At the cost of long stretches of boredom, irritation, and compulsive reading, the protagonist, and maybe the reader too, is harvesting from it the rewards of a reading experience, a sharpened sense of memory and loss. An expectation to face a new task of translation, a new opportunity for hospitality.

Your Face Tomorrow is rendered in English by Margaret Jull Costa, as are all other translated books by Marías, except for Voyage Along the Horizon, translated by Kristina Cordero, and Dark Back of Time and Bad Nature, translated by Esther Allen.

With thanks to Richard (Caravana de recuerdos) for leading a three-part group read (Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3) of this one-of-a-kind novel. For a mapping of Marías's books, see Conversational Reading, Wuthering Expectations, and the review by William Deresiewicz in The Nation. I first read about Ricoeur's ideas in an interview with An Sonjae in Asymptote. "The Century's Decline" by Wisława Szymborska can be viewed here (pdf).

Visiones de Marías

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico is the latest book I've read and I'm still constructing my thoughts about it. It's a bad bad book, and I mean that in the wild wild west sense. I read it ahead of the other books I bought in my recent book-hunting in Manila, a rare opportunity to stock my shelf with goodies. I decided to read it for its sheer brevity in length, a mere 57 pages of Marías-concentrate, in one of the beautifully spare designs of New Directions Pearls. I also bought The Literary Conference by César Aira, a writer I've only started reading this year, an instant favorite with his surreal Ghosts and the lighted landscapes of An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter. My other purchases are Clandestine in Chile by Gabriel García Márquez, Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. I was also very fortunate to come across a used copy of "AN ADVANCED READING COPY FROM UNCORRECTED PROOFS" of The Seventh Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Its final published title would be The Last Samurai (no, not the). The reference is to Akira Kurosawa's celebrated movie. I've started reading a few pages of DeWitt and ... BIG WOW. This is the Fall book selection of Conversational Reading. Oh and I also got the bad bad (I really meant this in a bad way) The Body Artist by Don DeLillo. I only picked it up to go with the DeWitt book for the buy-one-take-one promo in the used book store.

I'm still thinking a lot about the ending of Bad Nature. It is tearing me apart. And the frequent references to "dark back" (as in, Dark Back of Time) had me in stitches. The book is about a translator/interpreter who worked for Elvis Presley in a movie set in Acapulco, Mexico. In one of their bar hops, one of the guys in Elvis's contingent offended a Mexican gangster. Inevitably, Elvis and his companions became embroiled in an argument with the gangster's group. The translator is the only person who could communicate the insults shuttling back and forth between the two factions. As is usual with Marias, the currents of terror are at first gliding innocently on the surface of the story and then breaks to the surface to take over the story. As I understand it from this story: the bad nature resides in all of us. The gangsters and also Elvis can be bad, as in evil, anytime. The key to world peace is tolerating "the other" but this is impossible because there is always a barrier of communication. Language and the significations of language can get the better of people. If we can not get past our own linguistic (i.e., cultural) prejudices then we are at a permanent state of conflict. Even gestures, like language, can be fatal. (The key scene in Bad Nature reminds me of a disturbing story, told as a joke, in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 where a simple handshake between a French scientist and an indigenous tribesman in Borneo, a pat on the shoulder, and an intent look in the eyes were all misconstrued by the native as an act of violence or rape or the eating of soul.)

At the back of the book With Elvis in Mexico (why not use the alternate title alone? Sometimes I'd like to refer to McCarthy's meridional bloodbath as The Evening Redness in the West. In some ways, the Elvis and the Redness books share a theme, but I'm not stretching it.), at the back of this short story (really too short to be called a novella) is a sketch (shown below) by Marías. They have one for each of the authors in the Pearls edition. Below the sketch is the blurb "Admired by Bolaño, Ashbery, Sebald, Pamuk, and Coetzee." In a paperback copy of the earlier published Fever and Spear, the back cover blurb only mentions "Pahmuk [sic], Coetzee, and Sebald." Bolaño is a late addition to the roster of Marías admirers but he was really an avid reader of the Spanish writer from early on.

JAVIER MARÍAS

Javier Marías is already internationally renowned as many of his books were translated in several languages and were awarded prestigious literary prizes (in original and translations). His books also sold already in the millions. Born in 1951, Marías is one of the leading contemporary writers in Spain. He is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, newspaper columnist, and translator. He published his first novel at age 19, finished his degree of Philosophy and Letters at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and taught in Spain, UK (Oxford University) and the United States. Among the writers he translated into Spanish are Conrad, Hardy, Faulkner, Nabokov, Thomas Browne, Sterne, Shakespeare, Yeats, Auden, and Wallace Stevens. At present he reigns as the King of Redonda, an island in the Caribbean.


TRANSLATED BOOKS

Marías is a prolific writer. He has over 30 titles to his name. About a dozen of his books were available in English so far. Everything was translated by Margaret Jull Costa save for Dark Back of Time and Bad Nature (both translated by Esther Allen) and Voyage Along the Horizon (by Kristina Cordero). Some of his nonfiction pieces appeared in The New Republic, Granta, The New York Times, The Believer, and The Threepenny Review.


NOVELS

Voyage Along the Horizon
The Man of Feeling
All Souls
A Heart So White
Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
Your Face Tomorrow [in 3 volumes - Fever and Spear; Dance and Dream; Poison, Shadow and Farewell]


FALSE NOVEL

Dark Back of Time [a "false" sequel to All Souls]


SHORT STORIES

When I Was Mortal [one story "Fewer Scruples" is online at The Barcelona Review]
While the Women Are Sleeping [forthcoming this year, the title story is at the New Yorker]


NONFICTION

Written Lives


SINGLE-STORY BOOKS

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico
Gualta [this story of fantasy can be read online, only if your eyes permit it]
While the Women Are Sleeping


MARÍAS & BOLAÑO

It's not hard to see why the writer is admired by great contemporary writers such as Bolaño and Sebald. He is a great one himself. Bolaño was impressed by Marías's early books, books that have yet to appear in English. He praised Los dominios de lobo (1971) ("The Dominions of the Wolf"), the very first novel Marías wrote at age 18 and published a year later. For Bolaño, this book (along with La asesina ilustrada by Vila-Matas) "marked a point of departure for our generation." In his essay "Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories" Bolaño listed a handful of "highly recommended books and authors", among them Marías’s story collection Mientras ellas duermen (Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 1990). The English translation of this book, While the Women Are Sleeping, is forthcoming from New Directions in November. Bolaño admitted to having been influenced by Marías. He once spoke to the journalist Sergio González Rodríguez whom he consulted in the writing of his final unfinished novel. The critic Marcela Valdes wrote about it in her review in The New Republic: "Listen, Bolaño joked, I'm going to make you [Sergio González Rodríguez] a character in my novel [2666]. I'm going to plagiarize the idea from Javier Marías, who made you a character in La negra espalda del tiempo [sic] [Dark Back of Time]." The plagiarizing of a great writer by another great one is not surprising. The "secret" connectivity in the body of work of Marías is comparable to the expanding universe of the Bolaño oeuvre.

I’m not sure how Marías himself view the Chilean writer’s works. But there's no question that Bolaño belongs to the fandom of Marías. In a 1999 interview for Capital (collected in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview), Héctor Soto and Matías Bravo asked the writer: "Between Latin America and Spanish writers, where is your literary brotherhood?" Bolaño replied at length, the perfect blurb really:

Basically among the Latin Americans—but also among the Spaniards. I don't believe in the separation of Latin American and Spanish writers. We all inhabit the same language. At least I think I cross those frontiers. And in my generation there is a mixed nucleus of writers, Spaniards and Latin Americans, the same way they were mixed in another era of Modernism, possibly the most revolutionary movement in Spanish literature of this century. Because of his strength, I think someone like Javier Marías is forced to influence Latin American literature, and he does. He is a great writer. By the same token, young Spanish writers should be influenced by someone like Rodrigo Rey Rosa or Juan Villoro, two enormous writers. I am extraordinarily blessed by a photograph of all of us together, from this and that side of the Atlantic. Rey Rosa, Villoro, Marías, Vila-Matas, Belén Gopegui, Victoria de Stefano.

Now where is that photograph?


MARÍAS & SEBALD

Max Sebald was known to personally admire the books of Marías. As king of the Island of Redonda, Marías instituted a prize where artists (authors, filmmakers, etc.) were given a title in his kingdom. The winners are selected by current reigning dukes and duchesses. Sebald was given the title "Duke of Vertigo." The other "royal appointments" include, among many others, Francis Ford Coppola (Duke of Megalopolis), Pedro Almodóvar (Duke of Trémula), A. S. Byatt (Duchess of Morpho Eugenia), William Boyd (Duke of Brazzaville), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Duke of Tigres). In his own work in the posthumous Unrecounted, Max also used a picture of Marías's eyes, one of the several pictures of "visions" in his books. He was also known to indorse the works of the Marías. The themes and prose styles of the writers are comparable to some extent. They are two writers whose whose writing projects are conceived with a view to the totality of their works. Their emblematic images persist in their books which often cross-reference each other. Like Sebald, Marías produced "picture books" where the subtexts of images seem to speak to the reader as much as the text itself. The picture books of Marías are essentially the unofficial "Deza trilogy": All Souls, a roman à clef semi-autobiographical novel and a comedy of the High Table; Dark Back of Time, a "false novel" which dissects the previous one; and Your Face Tomorrow, a novel about espionage and betrayal. (See also the Vertigo blog.)

The nonfiction Written Lives, a collection of biographic entries on literary writers, also contains portraits of writers. In this book, Marías literally became a "writer’s writer." Here he sketched some famous and obscure literary lives, in snippets or vignettes, not really in objective fashion, highlighting certain aspects of the writers' personalities, shattering some myths about them, perpetuating others. I think that the vignette form afforded Marías a perfect exercise in the selection of details. Out of so many facets of a writer's life, he has chosen the details that freeze the writer into a striking relief. This high selectivity of details is also comparable to the "nonfictional" novels of Sebald (as in the quartets of eccentric-melancholic personages in The Emigrants and Vertigo and in the moon-like fragments of The Rings of Saturn). It is also interesting to compare Bolaño's "political" creations of unorthodox writers in Nazi Literature in the Americas with Marías's mini-bios of real "political" writers in Written Lives.

Marías Fever

One of the novels that divide my attention these days, mostly for group readings, is Fever and Spear, the first of three volumes of Your Face Tomorrow by the Spanish writer Javier Marías. I was only too happy to start this big read (1200 pages in all, though right now I own only the first 2 volumes). When The Conversational Reading announced a group read, I found the perfect excuse to finally embark on another Marían experience.

This will be my fourth book of Marías, after All Souls and its "false sequel" Dark Back of Time and the charming biographies in Written Lives. I was happy to learn that the first two books were "prequels" to Your Face Tomorrow. That will give me enough context to the reading of this tome. A friend said that another book, A Heart So White, contains a subtle thread of connection to these books. These novels then can be said to form a tetralogy (let's provisionally call this Deza Tetralogy, after the protagonist).