(Anti) Utopian

This weekend, I'm continuing with the essay on Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novels. Writing this essay, I’ve faced the same difficulties with the blank page that I do with poems. Which tells me I’m dealing with a subject close to my own goals or desires for literature. I’m approaching this text as a form of poetry. An essay that tries to act as a poem does, through a similar access to “spirits,” or “echoes,” taken from elsewhere.

In the case of these two authors, I’m discussing poets whose work I admire deeply, whose novels have helped point out possible directions for Latin American letters today, radical propositions in form, and in facing the specter of violence that continues to grow throughout the region. The fourth book within Bolaño’s 2666, for instance, can be interpreted as an effort to confront and lament the horrifying evil behind the still-unsolved murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez. A sign of our current passage through an age inundated with evil.

Bolaño’s work is necessarily darker than Dalton’s, since the former is explicit in his abandonment of any form of utopian solution, political or aesthetic. Not that Bolaño is rejecting the utopian elements of literature but rather, he finds it impossible to do anything but acknowledge the immense weight of terror that surrounds and suffuses our lives today. Dalton’s characters, spanning the Salvadoran avant garde of the late 1950s and early 1960s, still hold true to a belief in political and aesthetic emancipation. Dalton’s prose is ironic, confrontational, bohemian and expansive, at times evoking Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s irreverent games with the Spanish language. And yet, Dalton finished Pobrecito poeta que era yo in Havana in 1973, shortly before he returned to El Salvador to take up arms against the dictatorship.

Driving my essay is the brief friendship that developed between Dalton and Bolaño in San Salvador sometime in the mid-seventies. Dalton was a legendary and respected poet at the time, his work already translated into various languages, well on his way to his current reputation as El Salvador’s most prominent writer. Bolaño was still a kid, fresh from his experiences in Chile’s 1973 coup, where he barely survived being killed as a supporter of Allende. Bolaño’s life-long nomadic exile was just beginning. One imagines Dalton might have discussed the novel he had just finished, in his conversations with the younger poet. One might even assume the friendship unfolded, at least partly, as a literary mentorship.

*

In recent months, the Venezuelan novelist Adriano González León has been writing a column for El Nacional every Thursday. González León was a member of the early 1960s writers & artists collective El Techo de la Ballena, and in 1968 he won the Biblioteca Breve prize in Spain for his now-classic novel País portátil (which juxtaposes postmodern urban guerrillas and the XIX century era of the rural caudillos). In his column yesterday, González León writes about his own fear of the blank page, the difficulty it presents for many writers:


“Siempre, aunque sea tarde, el asunto llega. Esta vez ha sido muy pronto. No hay tema para tantos lectores amigos. Digo amigos porque así lo pregonan los correos electrónicos recibidos. Cierto tipo de público piensa que el escritor siempre debe estar escribiendo.

No sé por qué. Del músico no exigen que esté presente todos los días con el instrumento en la mano. Al pintor no le piden que maneje su pincel, el marcador o el instrumento electrónico para pintar. Al escultor no le exigen que todos los días golpee con su hierro, martillo, compresor o martillo electrónico.

Los escritores parece que hubieran contraído otra obligación. Y no es así. No fue siempre así. Hay escritores de innumerables textos, como Balzac, y han gravitado sobre la historia. Hay escritores con más títulos que Balzac y nadie sabe quiénes son. Pero sobre todo La Ilíada y La Odisea, La Divina Comedia, El Quijote, Crimen y Castigo, La Montaña Mágica, Ulises y Pedro Páramo están siempre allí, dirigiendo el sueño y la imaginación de los hombres.

¿Por qué semejantes exigencias no se hacen a los pintores, músicos, escultores? Y cosa curiosa, son los artistas con mayor dedicación a su trabajo. Pero pareciera que la fórmula, “¿qué estás escribiendo?,” les da a los preguntones una categoría que no tienen, justamente por su indiscreción y su necedad. Tremenda afrenta esa de la página en blanco.

Terrible cuando acosa la pereza. Y tres veces más grave si se trata de que ha cundido el desencanto y la tristeza. Todo el mundo se pregunta “¿Qué le pasaría a Juan Rulfo?” Y me acuerdo que una vez, en un congreso de los usuales, a alguien se le ocurrió la pregunta. Él dijo con su peculiar lentitud y lejanía: “Es que estaba enterrando unos muertos en Luvina.” […]”


(Adriano González León, “Camino y misterio de la escritura,” El Nacional, 27 Abril 2006)