ROMANS

By: Carlos Fuentes
Translated by: Erion Karabolli

What can the novel say that cannot be said in any other way? This is Hermann Broch's fundamental question. Precisely, this is answered by a whole constellation of novelists, extremely extensive and diverse, which gives a new, broader and even more literal meaning to the dream of weltliteratur imagined by Goethe: a world literature. If, according to Roger Caillois, the first half of the XIX, belonged to European literature and the second half to Russian literature, the first half of the century. XX was of North American literature and the second half of Latin American literature, while at the beginning of the century. XXI we can talk about a universal novel, which includes: Günter Grass, Juan Goytisolo and José Saramago in Europe; Susan Sontag, William Styron and Philip Roth in North America; Gabriel García Marquez, Nélida Piñón and Mario Vargas Llosa in Latin America; Kenzaburo Oé in Japan; Anita Desai in India; Naguib Mahfuz and Tahar Ben-Jeloun in North Africa; Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee and Athol Fuggard in South Africa. So much so that only Nigeria, from the "heart of the mists" of blind Eurocentric concepts, has today three great novelists: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri.

What unites these great novelists beyond their nationality? Two essentials for the novel… and for society: Imagination and language. They answer the question that distinguishes the novel from journalistic, scientific, political, economic, and even philosophical information. They give verbal reality to the unwritten part of the world. And they are part of the urgent fear of the literary author: If I don't write this word, no one will write it. If I do not say this word, silence (or noise and anger) will cover the world. And, an unwritten or unspoken word condemns us to die dumb and miserable. The said is blessed, on the contrary, the unsaid is unfortunate. In other words, the novel makes visible the invisible part of reality. And it does so in a way unforeseen by realistic or psychological norms of the past. In the full (powerful) manner of Mikhail Bakhtin, the novelist uses fiction as an arena where not only characters meet, but also languages, codes of conduct, older historical stages, and diversity of genders, breaking down artificial barriers and expanding into sustainably the terrain of human presence in history. The novel ends by reclaiming what it itself is not: science, journalism, philosophy...

Precisely for this reason, the novel not only reflects reality, but creates a new reality, a reality that was not there before (Don Quixote, Madame Bovarí, Stefan Dedalus), but without which we would not be able to conceive it ourselves. the reality. Thus, the novel creates a new time for the readers. The past is exhumed by museums and the future is saved by converts to an unattainable ideological promise. The novel transforms the past into memory and the future into desire. But both happen today, in the present of the reader, who, reading, remembers and wants. Today, Donquixote goes out and fights with windmills that are giants. Today, Ema Bovari enters Homes' pharmacy. Today, Leopold Bloom lives alone on a June day in Dublin. William Faulkner said it better than anyone else: “Do you realize that everything is now? Today will end only tomorrow and tomorrow is ten thousand years since it began.”

In this way, the reflection of the past appears as the prophecy of the narrative of the future. The novelist, more precisely than the historian, always tells us that the past is not finished, that the past has to be fictionalized at every moment so that the present does not escape from our hands. The novel says what history cannot say, because it has forgotten or left to imagine. I am giving a Latin American example, that of Argentina, our country with less history, but with the best writers. An old joke says that we Mexicans come from the Aztecs, while Argentines come from ships. Being a new country, with new immigrants, Argentina has had to invent a story beyond history, an oral history to answer the lonely and desperate cry of cultures: please tell me.

Without a doubt, Borgesi is the best example of this other historical character that makes up for the lack of Mayan ruins and Inca towers. Against the double Argentinian horizon - the Pampas and the Atlantic - Borges responds with the total space of "Aleph", the total time of "The Garden of Crossing Paths" and the total book of "The Library of Babel" - not to mention the total mnemonic of "The Remembrancer". Funes".

Lack of history. Nothing inspires more fear. But also, nothing prompts a more vigorous response than creative imagination. The Argentinian writer Hector Libertella gives us ironic answers to such dilemmas. Throw a bottle into the sea. Inside it is proof that Magellan sailed around the Earth: the diary of Antonio Pigafetta. History is a bottle thrown into the sea. The novel is the manuscript found in the bottle. The distant past joins the closest present when, trampled by a brutal dictatorship, an entire nation disappears and remains only in the Argentine novels of Luisa Valenzuela or the Chilean ones of Ariel Dorfman. So, where do the wonderful historical creations of Tomas Eloy Martinez - The novel about Peron and St. Evita take place? In the necrophilic past of Argentine politics or in the immediate future, where the author's humor makes the past present – ​​and attractive – and, above all, making it readable?

I want to believe that this way of fiction fulfills a pressing need of the modern or postmodern world, as you like. Above all, modernism is a never-ending, eternally fruitless project. Perhaps, what has changed is the perception expressed by Jean Baudrillard that "the future has arrived, everything has arrived, everything is here...". This is what I am referring to when I speak of a new geography of the novel, thanks to which the current state of literature, say, in England, cannot be understood without mentioning the novels written in English by authors from the former periphery of the British Empire - The empire Strikes Back – featuring multiple races and cultures.

Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Hindu from Trinidad; Breyten Breitenbach, Dutch Boer from South Africa; Margaret Atwood from English-speaking Canada; but also Marie-Claire Blais from French-speaking Canada, also Canadian Michael Ondaatjee who came from Sri Lanka. The British Archipelago, including other inner and outer islands: Scotland with Alisdair Gray, Wales with Bruce Chatwin, Ireland with Edna O'Brien and even Japan with Kazuo Ishiguro. To expand the cultural, racial and gender diversity of the novel written in English, the North American novel would be lacking without the African-American Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, without the Cuban-American Cristina Garcia, without the Mexican-American Sandra Cisneros, without the Indian - the American Louise Erdrich or without the Chinese-American Amy Tan: all these modern-day Sheherzades who further our death, every day, telling us a story every night...

Jean-François Lyotard tells us that the Western tradition has run out of what he calls the "metanarrative de la liberation" (overnarrative of liberation). However, does not the end of these "metanarratives" of cultured modernism herald the proliferation of "metanarratives" coming from a polycultural and multiracial universe that spreads the particular rule of Western modernism?

The "distrust of metanarratives" of Western modernism is perhaps being replaced by a belief in polynarratives that speak on behalf of multiple projects of human liberation, new desires, new moral demands, new territories of human presence in the world. .

This "activation of differences," as Lyotard calls it, is simply a way of saying that our post-Cold War (and if the new Bush has his way, hot peace) world, apart from globalizing realities, is not a world that is moving towards a false and perhaps harmful union, but towards a greater and healthier, if often conflict-creating, difference. I say this as a Latin American. The nationalist anxiety about identity that has so dogged us throughout our independence lives, from Sarmientos to Martines Estrada in Argentina, from Gonzales Prada to Mariategi in Peru, from Ostos in Puerto Rico to Rodos in Uruguay, from Fernando Ortiz to Lezama Lima in Cuba, from Henríquez Urenas in Santo Domingo to Picon Salas in Venezuela, from Reis to Paz in Mexico, Montalvo in Ecuador and Cardoza y Aragoni in Guatemala, has served precisely to give us an identity. There is no Mexican who doubts that he is Mexican, nor Brazilian who is Brazilian, nor Argentine who is Argentine. But this reward brings with it another demand: to move from identity to diversity. Of moral, political, religious, sexual diversity. Without respect for identity-based diversity, we cannot have freedom in Latin America.

I am giving the example I have closest to me - that of Indo-Afro-Latin America - to support the argument of the novel as a factor of cultural diversification and multiplication in the 20th century. We enter that world that Max Weber called "value polytheism". Everything, communications, economy, science and technology, but also ethnic demands, revived nationalisms, the return of tribes with their idols, the coexistence of a dizzying progress with the revival of everything we believed dead. Diversity rather than monotony, diversity rather than uniformity, conflict rather than tranquility, are to define the culture of our century.

The novel is a re-entry of the human being into history. In a great novel, the protagonist appears again before his fate, and his fate is the sum of his experience: fatal and free. But in our time, the novel is also a letter of introduction to cultures, which, not only have not been drowned by the waves of globalization, but have dared to stand stronger than ever. Although negative in the sense we all know (xenophobia, aggressive nationalism, wild primitivism, the desecration of human rights in the name of tradition or the oppressive power of the father, the husband, the clan), uniqueness is positive when it protects values ​​at risk oblivion or extinction, which, in themselves, are resistance to the worst primitive impulses.

There is no novel without a story. But the novel, by introducing us to history, also allows us to look for a way out of history, in order to see history clearly and be historical at all. To find ourselves immersed in history, lost in its labyrinths without discerning the exits, means that we are simply victims of history.

The entry of the historical being into history. The introduction of a civilization to other civilizations. This begs a deep awareness of our own tradition in order to lend a hand to the traditions of others. And what else unites the traditions, apart from the fact that the tradition is a foundation to raise another creation on it?

This is the problem that young Mexican novelists such as Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla and Pedro Angel Palou solve brilliantly.

Every novel, like every work of art, consists of both discrete moments and continuous moments. The moment is that simile which, fortunately, every novel keeps locked within it and sets it free. The most fragile and fleeting moments, as Joyce describes them in Portrait of the Teenage Artist, "a surprising spiritual image appeared in the midst of the most ordinary conversations and gestures."

And yet, also appearing in the middle of a historical event so continuous that it admits neither beginning nor end, neither theological origin nor "happy ending", nor apocalyptic end, but a proclamation of fruitless multiplication of meaning and anti-unification consoling of a single orthodox reading of the world. "History and happiness rarely meet together," wrote Nietzsche. The novel is proof of this, and in Latin America we gained the warning novel when we lost the speech of hope.

The new novel: I talk about an even more ambiguous, but perhaps necessary, step from identity to alienation; from reduction to expansion; from exclusion to inclusion; from paralysis to movement; from unity to diversity; from non-contradiction to continuous contradiction; from oblivion to memory; from the inanimate past to the animate past; and from faith in progress to criticism of the future.

These are the rhythms, the meanings of the newness of the narrative… perhaps. Except, with these, with all the works that release these, we must achieve the wonderful power to create those images that Jose Lesama puts on "imaginary ages". After all, if a culture fails to create an imagination, then it has to be historically undecipherable, adds the author of Paradise.

The novelty of the novel tells us that our humanity does not live in the icy abstraction of separation, but in the warm impulse of a terrible diversity that tells us: We are not yet, we are being.

This voice questions us, it reaches us from far away, but also from deep within us. It is the voice of our own humanity emerging from the forgotten fringes of consciousness. It stems from many times and distant spaces. But, together with us and for us, it creates the ground where we will be able to come together and tell stories to each other.

Imagination and language, memory and desire, are not only the living stuff of the novel, but are also the meeting place of our unfinished humanity. Literature teaches us that upper values ​​are shared values. We Latin American novelists share the words of Italo Calvino who asserts that literature is a model of values, capable of proposing different scenarios of language, vision, imagination and reciprocity of events. We find ourselves in William H. Gass, when he makes us understand that the body and soul of a novel is its language and imagination, not its good intentions: the consciousness that the novel confuses you, not the consciousness that the novel soothes you. We fraternize with our great friend Milan Kunderan, when he reminds us that the novel is the eternal redefinition of the human being as a problem.

All this means that the novel must formulate itself as an inconclusive conflict, in which the memory of all that has been forgotten, the voice of silence and the longing for all that has been humiliated by injustice, neglect, have not yet been revealed. , prejudice, ignorance, hatred and fear.

To achieve this, we must see ourselves and the world as unfinished projects, as perpetually incomplete personalities, and as voices that have not had their final say. To achieve this, we must tirelessly enunciate the tradition and support the possibility that we are men and women who do not simply find ourselves in history, but make history. A rapidly transforming world advises, as Kundera says, to constantly redefine ourselves as problematic, perhaps enigmatic beings, but never as bearers of dogmatic answers or closed realities. Isn't this what best defines the novel? Politics can be dogmatic. The novel can only be enigmatic.

The novel has earned the right to criticize the world by showing, in the first place, its ability to criticize itself. It is the criticism of the novel about the novel itself that makes the work of art so much the social dimension of the work. James Joyce in Ulysses and Julio Cortázar in Rayuela are prime examples of what I am trying to say: the novel as a critique of itself and its ways. But this is a legacy of Cervantes and the novelists of Mancha.

The novel offers us the possibility of a verbal imagination as a reality no less real than the story itself. The novel constantly announces a new world: a very close world. Because the novelist knows that, after the terrible dogmatic violence of the 20th century, history has become a possibility, and never a certainty. We believe we know the world. Now, we have to imagine it. /Palimpsest Magazine/