El grito insomne / Carolina Lozada

The Insomniac Scream

On October 25th, 1929, José Antonio Ramos Sucre writes a letter to his brother Lorenzo, in which he confesses himself as an unfortunate being and a condemned spirit as a consequence of being raised in an inconsiderate and despotic manner:

“I was locked up in Carúpano. Father Ramos completely ignored the care one should give a child. He incurred in a stupid severity for trivial reasons. That’s why I feel no affection for him. I would spend days and days without going out to the street and I then was assaulted by bouts of desperation and I would spend hours crying and laughing at the same time. I hate the people who were charged with raising me.”

In the same letter he also speaks about his nervous condition: “My mental imbalance is a terror and only fear has stopped me at the threshold of suicide.” However, a few years later, the poet born in Cumaná will lose his fear of death and cross the threshold. In one of his final letters, written to Dolores Emilia Madriz and dated in Geneva on April 24th, 1930, he expounds: “I don’t how I’m doing. But I assure you that I’m not very scared of death;” later on, just a few days before his first suicide attempt, he announces to the same person:

“I will not resign myself to spending the rest of my life, who knows how many years!, in mental decadence. The entire machine has become disorganized. I’m very scared of losing my will to work. I still shave daily. I barely read. I’m discovering in myself a radical change of character. The day after tomorrow I turn forty and it’s been two years since I’ve written anything.”

On June 9th, 1930 he turns forty and tries to commit suicide a second time. On June 13th he dies.

The possibility of suicide as an exit from his tribulations also seduced Kafka, even though it never materialized. On February 15th, 1914 the Czechoslovakian author made a list of what he had done (and wished for) on the previous day; among other things, he writes: “Yesterday afternoon I got my hair cut, then I wrote a letter to Bl.; then I spent a few minutes with Max (...), then, a desire to kill myself.” With a less breezy tone he had noted on August 15th, 1913: “Torments in bed, at dawn. The only solution I could see was jumping out the window.” The constant idea of suicide isn’t the only presence that binds these two writers, there’s also insomnia, the spirit undermined by a nervous frailty. On several occasions, Kafka writes in his diary about how difficult it is for him to get the restorative sleep he needs. In the years leading up to his end he complains, just like Ramos Sucre, about a great physical and spiritual weakness: “I can’t continue writing. I’ve reached the definitive limit (...) This fate pursues me. Once again I feel cold and soulless; there’s nothing left but the senile love of complete repose.”

Conscious of the “mental proximities” between Ramos Sucre and Kafka, Rubi Guerra fictionalizes an encounter between the two in his novel La tarea del testigo (Caracas: El perro y la rana, 2007 / Lugar Común, 2012). The novelist from Cumaná sets both characters in a European sanatorium where they will establish a cordial camaraderie. At the same time he lets himself introduce characters and situations taken from expressionist cinema, such as the recreation of the persecution of the killer in “M,” the vampire from Düsseldorf, the film by Fritz Lang, and the apparition of the somnambulant Cesare, from “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Through this fictional game, Guerra is able to situate both writers within that spiritual and artistic moment that was created by expressionist angst.

Witnesses during times of war and global terror, Kafka and Ramos Sucre share at a distance the insomniac scream, the uncertainty when facing the tides of their nervous existence. Neither one of them is able to break their fears or insecurities, neither one will recover from his sick body: “the illness forced him to hate his body,” writes Rubi Guerra in La tarea del testigo. In Kafka the enthusiastic and volatile moments of fortitude will deflate: “From today onwards never abandon the diary! Write regularly! Don’t give up!” With his strength overwhelmed, at some point the author of The Process assumes himself as a being “so abandoned by me, by everything.” Pages later he will write: “Dying would be no more than handing over nothing to nothingness.”

“Residue” is the title of Ramos Sucre’s last poem and in that text he will begin the path to renunciation, passing through misty places: “I declined my forehead on the plateau of revelations and terror.” The Latin American poet would survive the European novelist only by a few years, and he never renounced the fatalist feeling that marked his life: “I carry in my spirit the desolation of the landscape.”




{ Carolina Lozada, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 24 May 2014 }

Carolina Lozada: “De la escritura nadie sale ileso” / Gabriel Payares

Carolina Lozada: “No one emerges unscathed from writing”

The name of Carolina Lozada (Valera, 1974) has been present in the circuits of literary promotion in Venezuela for a while now, even if they privilege work produced in Caracas above other important cities and states. Not just for having received a variety of acknowledgements, such as the Premio Municipal de Narrativa “Oswaldo Trejo” (2006), the Premio Nacional de Narrativa Solar (2007), the Premio para Jóvenes Autores de la Policlínica Metropolitana (3rd place in 2011) or the Premio Stefania Mosca in the category of non-fiction (2011), but also for her tenacious and constant oeuvre that, already counting four books of short stories published: Historias de mujeres y ciudades, Memorias de azotea, Los cuentos de Natalia and La culpa es del porno, and one of literary non-fiction: La vida de los mismos, establishes itself in the pursuit of its own imaginaries, equally distant from the mandates of literary fashion and from the exaltation of the local and the provincial. Her participation, moreover, in digital projects like the magazine Las Malas Juntas or the literary review site 500 ejemplares, demonstrates that one doesn’t have to live in the capital to be a part of the country’s literary panorama and, why not, of the continent’s.

Gabriel Payares: In your earlier short story collections previous to La culpa es del porno, one noted an effort to narratively construct women; while on this occasion the majority of your narrators are men who speak in the first person singular: defeated men or ones who have been abandoned by their women, living in situations that seem tragicomic. Are you now trying to place yourself in the shoes of men? What does this change in register obey?

Carolina Lozada: There’s no premeditation or forethought in La culpa es del porno. Without proposing to, the masculine voices began to impose themselves in nearly the entire book. The stories simply came to me and the majority of these were enunciated by male characters and by a few transvestites, as in the story “Libertad Queen,” for example. Regardless of the sexual gender, I’m interested in exploring through fiction the worlds of socially uncomfortable beings. I’m attracted to characters who couldn’t even be categorized as losers because they never had anything to lose. On the other hand, sexual ambiguity also piques my curiosity: to think of a man dressed as a woman in the privacy of his room while on the street or in front of his family he’s an exemplary man, what might pass through his head, this intrigues me. Maybe the transvestite element of that type of subject and of others in a similar vein imposed itself in my narrative voice. No one emerges unscathed from writing.

GP: In these stories the “normal” world, that is apparently under control, is always represented as obeying an aesthetics of the grotesque, the carnivalesque, as if wanting to highlight the ugliness or ridiculousness of the entire world, not just of the protagonist characters.

CL: Order, the correct, extreme neatness all make me suspicious; when I encounter these models of perfection I incite my nose like a dog to sniff out the dark side. I like to check under the carpet to find the miseries we try to hide and when I work on this I do it from the perspective of tragicomedy; human beings are so inhabited by it... I suppose this anxiety translates into an aesthetic that finds its basis in sarcasm, irony, the abject and the grotesque.

GP: Is humor part of a desire for social satire, or could it be more of a mode of resistance for the characters facing the humiliations and adversity they suffer, a means of naturalizing their pathetic nature?

CL: Humor is the weapon of the weak, it’s the ace under the loser’s sleeve, which though it might not make him win the game, it at least allows him to face defeat without having to go to a bridge with a stone tied to his neck. When faced with power’s clamorous discourse, humor functions like the little men stabbing the ferocious and clumsy cyclops. In moments of unbearable pressure, humor serves as an escape. And yes, I like that idea of humor as resistance.

GP: The other big theme of the book seems to be love, which you sometimes catalog as an “…arduous compliance,” a power capable of “... turning us into the most pathetic beings.” Do you locate love in the opposite spectrum of those freeing impulses, such as humor? Is there a struggle between freedom and love?

CL: I don’t think love is the other big theme of the book; on the contrary, I think it’s the great absence, it’s the brutal lack. Precisely, the examples you chose speak of the lack of love for oneself: the characters in La culpa es del porno are desperate beings, beggars for affection, capable of submitting to embarrassing humiliations and deranged manipulations just to receive some attention, not even love, but attention. Now, we could talk about the presence of love from its absence, perhaps desire frustrated by what doesn’t exist, but I’m not interested in narrating conventional love relationships, it bores me to read and write about couples with traditional amorous conflicts (he leaves her, she wants to leave him, etcetera), I prefer to wander around, looking for the freak point in those conflicts. This is the source of the mechanization, fetishism, mania, tragicomedy that some of the characters in this book suffer.

GP: And up to what point can that insistence on the twisted, on the affected be read as a pursuit of originality, of the anecdote that stands out because of its intricacy? Or is it instead a wager for morbidity, for the narrator’s intrusion (and thus the reader’s) in the character’s intimate panorama?

CL: When you set off to tell a story you don’t think of wagers or pursuits. You simply obey that tickling that pushes you to narrate something. When you do it the fixations are brought to the surface, but that’s a matter for the meddlesome Freud or any one of his boys. At the moment I’m interested in narrating from the perspective of the twisted (I like that term), it’s alluring for me to enter that dark room of sordid, pathetic characters. Maybe in the future I’ll want to write stories about paranormal powers, maybe when I’m old I’ll find shelter in alchemy and I’ll end up narrating mystical nonsense. You never know.

GP: And what other projects occupy your interests? What’s next for Carolina Lozada?

CL: I have a little book called El cuarto del loco, in which I try to narrate from the perspective of being locked up, delirium and the absurd. I also continue to work on my Animales domésticos, a book of short stories that I’m constructing with situations and characters that are cornered by the paralyzing omnipotence of power, beings who are submitted to a schizophrenic reality. Those are the alleys I’m passing through at the moment.




{ Gabriel Payares, Prodavinci, 16 October 2013 }

La tarea del testigo / Carolina Lozada

La tarea del testigo


To write about familiar characters that are misunderstood in their time implies an arduous task of searching and reconstruction. An act that involves entering other times, other contexts, other bodies and glances. Rubi Guerra understands it thus and assumes it in this manner in La tarea del testigo (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2007). A novel that narrates the journey towards Geneva, the illness, the transit through European sanatoriums and the final days of a suggested José Antonio Ramos Sucre, whom the author has the reserve of naming only with two initials: J.A. In his narrative, Guerra appeals to a wide repertoire of styles: what we read of the struggles of that voyage, made difficult by insomnia and ailments, is told in letters, in oneiric tales and in descriptions taken from film stories (especially from M, by Fritz Lang, and The Cabinet of Dr. Calgiari, by Robert Wiene).

Winner of the Concurso de Novela Corta Rufino Blanco Fombona (2006), Guerra’s book conjugates the brevity of its 92 pages with the depth of German expressionism, whose worlds distorted by nightmare serve as a context for the story. The oneiric disequilibrium is very useful in the description of this sick and tormented man’s sojourn in foreign lands. In this manner, we can justify the almost supernatural nature of the adventures of the Consul J.A., sometimes alone, at others accompanied by a Czechoslovakian character, Konrad Reisz, one of the patients who share with J.A. his stay in the clinic at Merano. Together they encounter events with a filmic tone, such as acts if espionage and persecutions. The presence of Reisz allows us to glimpse a possible reinvention through another Czech: Kafka.

All these elements let us to appreciate how the author wagers for a technique in which the varied allusions to literature and film enrich the signifying of the text. For this reason, Rubi Guerra’s novel is at once fiction and metafiction. The skilled handling of these resources makes La tarea del testigo [The Task of the Witness] a complex, and at the same time subtle, work written with equal amounts of care, sobriety, precision and looseness. Its highest point is found at the end, when death definitively wins the battle against J.A. There the pages refer to the decisive encounter between narrator (the witness of the title) and narrated man, convalescing in a bed, within the darkness of his June days: “I’m surprised by how his body has shrunk: he disappears into the sheets in a gesture of infinite discretion. I search for something to say –a definitive word that will summon the sense of beauty, of life or anything else– and nothing occurs to me. You open your eyes once more and look at me with serenity, with strangeness, maybe with affection, as though on the other end of a very distant bridge.” (p. 86)

The conversation takes place like a confrontation created in a retrospective manner, from the narrator’s present, when one already knows the destiny of J.A.’s work and what his role was in the political history of his country. That moment represents the vital confession of the bond that exists between the author and what he imagines. These final pages of La tarea del testigo manage to anchor the reader in the middle of that bridge between two times and two distances, between those two voices: the character who is agonizing and the future witness of a distant convalescence.




{ Carolina Lozada, ReLectura, December 2008 }