Poet, Gentleman
We can already hear the echoes within the country and surely beyond its borders of the unexpected death of one of the major poetic voices of our literary history – among those we can count on a single hand, Eugenio Montejo. But also, an oeuvre that expands with unusual celerity, considering that poetry is a slow animal that moves from soul to soul – in new fields and other languages. He dies, then, just as all the roads were opening for him and, this is the important thing, at an hour when we could expect maturity and the extreme purification that would crown his long march through the paths of poetry.
Of course, this sad hour is no time for analyzing his work, now is a time for lamentation, perhaps a prayer – a secular one in my case. But I would like to say something very generic that has to do a great deal with professional deformation, something that might seem scandalous for some. Much of the great Venezuelan philosophy in recent years has been made by poets: [Rafael] Cadenas, [Armando] Rojas Guardia, to cite just two examples. Philosophy in the Socratic sense, which doesn’t use academic and technical rigors, but instead serves for living, for loving and suffering, as well as for dying. Maybe because poetry is an ideal manner, perhaps the most ideal, for expressing the inexpressible, for approaching the great questions that have no answer. Wittgenstein, that jealous custodian of the expressible – so little – affirms in the Tractatus to the surprise of many, that what really matters is music, that sublime form of expressing the inexpressible, unavoidable and decisive human necessity, perennial metaphysics.
I think Eugenio was a poet-philosopher. I think his work contains a fascinating vision of the world. Not just because there’s an immense gravity in everything he sings but also because, conscious of our cognitive limits, he approached the ineffable with a mixture of vehement fascination and critical limitation. I believe he never encountered God – at least in his books – but he pursued his hiding places, fantasized about that citation, imagined his substitution by the gods of the word and beauty, he lived and wrote to make us worthy of his respect and himself worthy of ours. Without ever letting himself be turned into a myth, he peered into the beyond, cosmonaut, suffering soul, reincarnated bird. Poetry always at the limits, in suggestion, in the desire that one must work to make of the cosmos and our ephemeral presence the measure of a call to be a part of divinity. But, along with that conceptual sagacity, his passion for life and that elevated form of it that is language, helped his poetry avoid austerity and sententiousness and become pure music, a dance of words, incessant metaphor, still and magical song. Language had to be set in steel in order to reach such confines. And perhaps that musicality – modest, full of happiness, amazed by how much exists, love and the bird that trills – is one of the reasons for his capacity to reach so many and such diverse sensibilities. A doctoral student told me recently that a concept by Merleau-Ponty, the manner in which the exterior world calls us and which has the structure of dialogue, could be found magnificently in one of the poems of Algunas palabras, “The Trees”: hearing the shriek of a thrush “I realized that in his voice a tree was speaking, / one of so many, / but I don’t know what to do with this sharp, deep sound, / I don’t know in what type of script / I could set it down.” A beautiful and measured pantheism that respects the limits of the best skepticism.
But Eugenio was above all Eugenio. The gentleman who cultivated restraint and friendship, elegance and affective devotion. Perhaps the most beloved of our contemporary artists. And at the same time a man of firm convictions, for whom this country degraded by military boots was a daily torment, the antithesis of that harmonious and transcendent kingdom that was his spiritual dwelling place. For those of us who had the unspeakable fortune of being his friends, we have lost someone, as Montaigne would say, who made us better than what we will be, an excellence that makes demands.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 9 June 2008 }
Showing posts with label Fernando Rodríguez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fernando Rodríguez. Show all posts
9.07.2007
Cardenales, ateos / Fernando Rodríguez
Cardinals, Atheists
In a short wire published in El Nacional we read of an angry attack by the poet Ernesto Cardenal against Daniel Ortega for sabotaging his candidacy to the Nobel Prize in Literature, in revenge for his criticism of the government. For me, this awakens at least two curiosities.
The first is of a political order: the poet’s rupture with the Sandinistas and his harsh judgments of them are well known, and they’ve even been gathered in one volume of his memoirs [La revolución perdida, Madrid, Editorial Trotta, 2004]. That’s not the matter, but rather his devotion for Chávez. Because if Ortega is undoubtedly a political reject responsible for all types of somersaults and who has allied himself with anyone who might be of use to him regardless of their character, which has been quite low in many cases, Chávez is not precisely a revolutionary vestal, in the manner of Che or of Fidel himself. Instead, much of what Cardenal criticizes in Ortega has been carried out to the umpteenth power by our national hero in Venezuela. Every day this government plays a larger role in our red pages and in our rose colored ones devoted to leisure and social ostentation in the newspapers. It’s what we might call a case of political myopia, seeing the detritus nearby but not far off in the distance, an illness that’s quite generalized (as well as its opposite, hypermetropy).
The second matter that surprises me in such a brief news item is of an existential order: I have been a more or less assiduous reader of Cardenal’s poetry and, beyond the political commitment of his work, it contains an evident mystical spirit, in the strict sense of the word. He wasn’t a cloistered monk in vain and among his most beautiful texts are those dedicated to divine love. That St. John of the Cross ended up hand in hand with Che can be odd, but in his view they are two forms of sainthood. The point is that a soul as pure as that of the poet and priest, revolutionary and mystic, becomes so enraged with such a mundane thing as a literary prize, even if it is the Nobel. We already know what true Christians should think about the glory of the world. And it’s good to remember the example of Sartre, a radical atheist, who rejected the coveted laurel so that his work wouldn’t be institutionalized, because he wanted to continue being a ceaseless negativity. Such earthly anger from the Nicaraguan cleric reminds me that Luis Castro Leiva, in his book Insinuaciones deshonestas, exhibits the case of a priest who at the end of the colonial period solicits permission from his superiors to wear a wig, in order to increase the seduction of his faithful and inculcate them with faith. Luis uses this example – and others – to demonstrate how during its death rattles colonial life was already penetrated by the mundanity of the enlightenment spirit. In the case we’re now addressing one has to ask about the claim many have made regarding the mediatization of the Catholic religion, of which one of the greatest examples was that idol for the multitudes, John Paul II.
II
Returning to the case of the athenaeums [cultural centers] and related matters – it’s now being said that the academies are next – the latest issue of Todos adentro puts what will happen in the mouth of Farruco [Francisco Sesto]: in the meantime, the athenaeums can’t be controlled because they are private entities and, moreover, the Vice Minister of Culture recognizes their noble efforts. Now, if they aren’t democratized they won’t be able to count on funding or installations from the State.
Which means Socialism or Death for most of them. Democratize means reform the statutes so that communities can have access to their decisions and the election of their authorities. Of course, the communities that barely pay attention to culture and that usually prefer RCTV or Venevisión or the game of Bolas Criollas end up being hordes of red shirts who each day are more proficient in these types of tasks involving the displacement of anyone who doesn’t wear red, substituting merit with party affiliation, or membership in a Bolivarian circle or a mission or the militias or the armed forces. All of it legal, and above all, perfectly democratic.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 27 August 2007 }
In a short wire published in El Nacional we read of an angry attack by the poet Ernesto Cardenal against Daniel Ortega for sabotaging his candidacy to the Nobel Prize in Literature, in revenge for his criticism of the government. For me, this awakens at least two curiosities.
The first is of a political order: the poet’s rupture with the Sandinistas and his harsh judgments of them are well known, and they’ve even been gathered in one volume of his memoirs [La revolución perdida, Madrid, Editorial Trotta, 2004]. That’s not the matter, but rather his devotion for Chávez. Because if Ortega is undoubtedly a political reject responsible for all types of somersaults and who has allied himself with anyone who might be of use to him regardless of their character, which has been quite low in many cases, Chávez is not precisely a revolutionary vestal, in the manner of Che or of Fidel himself. Instead, much of what Cardenal criticizes in Ortega has been carried out to the umpteenth power by our national hero in Venezuela. Every day this government plays a larger role in our red pages and in our rose colored ones devoted to leisure and social ostentation in the newspapers. It’s what we might call a case of political myopia, seeing the detritus nearby but not far off in the distance, an illness that’s quite generalized (as well as its opposite, hypermetropy).
The second matter that surprises me in such a brief news item is of an existential order: I have been a more or less assiduous reader of Cardenal’s poetry and, beyond the political commitment of his work, it contains an evident mystical spirit, in the strict sense of the word. He wasn’t a cloistered monk in vain and among his most beautiful texts are those dedicated to divine love. That St. John of the Cross ended up hand in hand with Che can be odd, but in his view they are two forms of sainthood. The point is that a soul as pure as that of the poet and priest, revolutionary and mystic, becomes so enraged with such a mundane thing as a literary prize, even if it is the Nobel. We already know what true Christians should think about the glory of the world. And it’s good to remember the example of Sartre, a radical atheist, who rejected the coveted laurel so that his work wouldn’t be institutionalized, because he wanted to continue being a ceaseless negativity. Such earthly anger from the Nicaraguan cleric reminds me that Luis Castro Leiva, in his book Insinuaciones deshonestas, exhibits the case of a priest who at the end of the colonial period solicits permission from his superiors to wear a wig, in order to increase the seduction of his faithful and inculcate them with faith. Luis uses this example – and others – to demonstrate how during its death rattles colonial life was already penetrated by the mundanity of the enlightenment spirit. In the case we’re now addressing one has to ask about the claim many have made regarding the mediatization of the Catholic religion, of which one of the greatest examples was that idol for the multitudes, John Paul II.
II
Returning to the case of the athenaeums [cultural centers] and related matters – it’s now being said that the academies are next – the latest issue of Todos adentro puts what will happen in the mouth of Farruco [Francisco Sesto]: in the meantime, the athenaeums can’t be controlled because they are private entities and, moreover, the Vice Minister of Culture recognizes their noble efforts. Now, if they aren’t democratized they won’t be able to count on funding or installations from the State.
Which means Socialism or Death for most of them. Democratize means reform the statutes so that communities can have access to their decisions and the election of their authorities. Of course, the communities that barely pay attention to culture and that usually prefer RCTV or Venevisión or the game of Bolas Criollas end up being hordes of red shirts who each day are more proficient in these types of tasks involving the displacement of anyone who doesn’t wear red, substituting merit with party affiliation, or membership in a Bolivarian circle or a mission or the militias or the armed forces. All of it legal, and above all, perfectly democratic.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 27 August 2007 }
6.26.2007
Horizontalidad / Fernando Rodríguez
Horizontality
There is something at the heart of the student protests now underway, a characteristic that I haven’t seen highlighted very much, except – imagine that! – in the students’ own discourse. More than anything else, it repeats words such as freedom, civil rights, citizens equality, peace, dialogue, national unification. It is a political discourse and, moreover, a liberal one. Liberal in the best sense of the word, which is political and not economic.
Even among the opposition, a social discourse tended to emerge – poverty, exclusion, confrontation, prostitution of powers… – which, in good measure, wanted to compete, certainly at a disadvantage, with the official discourse, which was much more intense and above all much realer; it’s not the same to give a scholarship than to promise one. This is the source of the governmental chaos when facing this new conceptual horizon that doesn’t fit within their limited understanding.
And this is not something new, many theorists of previous revolutions, the one of the assault on the Winter Palace and the fall of the Berlin Wall, pointed out that Marxism’s great void was specifically its conception of politics, of the State. Althusser went as far as saying that the latter didn’t exist, except in a few adventurous pages of 19th century classics and in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, even with the dictatorship of the proletariat that we now know ended up becoming wretched despotism. Or, in other words, the impossibility of conceiving socialist democracy. It wasn’t in vain that the most ostensible abuses and horrors of its long march were committed on that level which was the preferred target of its multiple antagonists.
What’s been said up to this point doesn’t mean, in any sense, that these young people don’t have a socially-minded, surely very varied thought, from the kids at the Universidad Metropolitana to the leftists in the School of Economics at UCV. But it seems as though it will enter the scene during a second episode. For now that limitation has provided an important virtue: the ample unity of dissimilar groups, all of them humiliated by military boots, arbitrary and discriminatory justice, violence, the robbery of public spaces, by the establishment of first and second class citizens… Something along the lines of privileging above all the inalienable principles that defined the rights of man over two centuries ago.
The notable Spanish philosopher Eugenio Trías, along with a few other diagnosticians of these times, has noticed that power no longer tends to function vertically, by means of coercive imposition, but rather through seduction, through the manipulation of desire. It’s enough to notice how codes – sexual ones, for example – have lost their imposing and punitive character in favor of an obvious opening, excessive for some. (Let’s not get into Foucault and his labyrinthine and brilliant topography of disseminated power, but let’s acknowledge his paternity in many of these topics.) If this is the case, the forms of power that subjugate the individual – and these continue to exist, theocratic and lay fundamentalisms – have a limited future. Now, in such an inversion, from the vertical to the horizontal, from the Marines to Hollywood stars, since the latter seem to penetrate more deeply into the structure of human personality, the strategies of power must change.
Developing countries are not exactly one – despite their founding fathers, flags and other items. Generally separated into a modern and cosmopolitan elite and the large majorities submitted to suffering poverty, this scheme doesn’t seem to easily tend toward universality. It isn’t strange then that this vindication of the individual, this formal equality, this condition of the dignity of the human won’t easily reach those for whom primary necessities are a priority. And the red and blind herd substitutes the individual. One has to look at the whole.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 25 June 2007 }
There is something at the heart of the student protests now underway, a characteristic that I haven’t seen highlighted very much, except – imagine that! – in the students’ own discourse. More than anything else, it repeats words such as freedom, civil rights, citizens equality, peace, dialogue, national unification. It is a political discourse and, moreover, a liberal one. Liberal in the best sense of the word, which is political and not economic.
Even among the opposition, a social discourse tended to emerge – poverty, exclusion, confrontation, prostitution of powers… – which, in good measure, wanted to compete, certainly at a disadvantage, with the official discourse, which was much more intense and above all much realer; it’s not the same to give a scholarship than to promise one. This is the source of the governmental chaos when facing this new conceptual horizon that doesn’t fit within their limited understanding.
And this is not something new, many theorists of previous revolutions, the one of the assault on the Winter Palace and the fall of the Berlin Wall, pointed out that Marxism’s great void was specifically its conception of politics, of the State. Althusser went as far as saying that the latter didn’t exist, except in a few adventurous pages of 19th century classics and in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, even with the dictatorship of the proletariat that we now know ended up becoming wretched despotism. Or, in other words, the impossibility of conceiving socialist democracy. It wasn’t in vain that the most ostensible abuses and horrors of its long march were committed on that level which was the preferred target of its multiple antagonists.
What’s been said up to this point doesn’t mean, in any sense, that these young people don’t have a socially-minded, surely very varied thought, from the kids at the Universidad Metropolitana to the leftists in the School of Economics at UCV. But it seems as though it will enter the scene during a second episode. For now that limitation has provided an important virtue: the ample unity of dissimilar groups, all of them humiliated by military boots, arbitrary and discriminatory justice, violence, the robbery of public spaces, by the establishment of first and second class citizens… Something along the lines of privileging above all the inalienable principles that defined the rights of man over two centuries ago.
The notable Spanish philosopher Eugenio Trías, along with a few other diagnosticians of these times, has noticed that power no longer tends to function vertically, by means of coercive imposition, but rather through seduction, through the manipulation of desire. It’s enough to notice how codes – sexual ones, for example – have lost their imposing and punitive character in favor of an obvious opening, excessive for some. (Let’s not get into Foucault and his labyrinthine and brilliant topography of disseminated power, but let’s acknowledge his paternity in many of these topics.) If this is the case, the forms of power that subjugate the individual – and these continue to exist, theocratic and lay fundamentalisms – have a limited future. Now, in such an inversion, from the vertical to the horizontal, from the Marines to Hollywood stars, since the latter seem to penetrate more deeply into the structure of human personality, the strategies of power must change.
Developing countries are not exactly one – despite their founding fathers, flags and other items. Generally separated into a modern and cosmopolitan elite and the large majorities submitted to suffering poverty, this scheme doesn’t seem to easily tend toward universality. It isn’t strange then that this vindication of the individual, this formal equality, this condition of the dignity of the human won’t easily reach those for whom primary necessities are a priority. And the red and blind herd substitutes the individual. One has to look at the whole.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, Tal Cual, 25 June 2007 }
5.01.2007
Pompeyo, 85 años / Fernando Rodríguez
Pompeyo, 85 Years
Watching the “Aló Ciudadano” episode that dedicated ample time to Pompeyo Márquez for him to recount episodes from his long and intense life, I was impressed, as always, by how his argumentative capacity works, by his brilliant political intelligence – a very peculiar form of intelligence –, his prodigious memory, but more than anything what comes from body and soul: his sanguine vitality, his Whitmanic wood chopper’s head, which looks like a Scandinavian fisherman’s, a boxer in the midst of give and take, a fighting bull and, at the same time, the archetypal grandfather, which is to say, a warehouse of kindness and generosity.
That he has spent seventy uninterrupted years, day by day, engaged in politics from sunrise to sunset is no mean feat. So much that quite often, a large portion of those long decades has been lived in jails and in the most Spartan clandestinity, or as a member of precarious minorities scaling impossible hills, like an untiring Sisyphus. And there he remains – moving his eyes and frowning, where his identity lies, according to Paolo Gasparini who photographed him once – watching and accusingly uncovering this latest military regime disguised as socialism. And those eyes and that life are a terrible mirror for so many opportunists, ignorant people, cynics and other specimens of the civic-military fauna that govern us today.
Not too long ago he told me he was going through many personal economic difficulties. And without insinuating shame or glory, he added: “It’s just that I was too naïve and I never took care of myself, like almost everyone else does.” Blessed naiveté amidst the multitude of millions in which so many danced yesterday and dance today, among his colleagues who take care of public causes. I think he truly never had much time to sit down and think about the healthy protection of his legitimate assets. There were too many tasks to accomplish. Publishing Tribuna Popular with Gustavo Machado, at one point practically the two of them by themselves, joining their two machines together for the wires that arrived from the USSR, which sang the praises of the achievements of Ukranian workers or Romanian farmers.
Or transforming himself into a ghost for a decade in order to lose the trail of Pedro Estrada’s hound dogs, who would have given everything to offer The Jackal [General Marcos Pérez Jiménez] the head of the damn Secretary General of the PCV [Partido Comunista Venezolano] political party. Or escaping with other leaders from the San Carlos prison, a masterpiece of engineering, sagacity, bravery and a capacity for Hollywood action films. Or being in limbo in 1956, while sitting at the twentieth congress of the CP of the USSR, and realizing that the Stalin he had trusted so much had an insatiable thirst for power and blood which led him to the worst political perversions. Or setting out to seek peace for a guerrilla movement that had lost all its senses and which led him into not a few ideological fist fights, even with Fidel Castro. And beginning the path of the MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo] political party and his profound democratic turn just when it seemed he was too old to jump towards the future so dangerously.
But also the left over time– above all in jails – he employed in a task that is no longer common currency: to study, being an illuminated autodidact which has led him to writing more than twenty books, nearly six thousand (sic) articles, and I don’t know how many party, parliamentary and ministerial interventions.
As he says in his autobiographical reflections, he not only aligned himself with books but also with anyone who had anything to teach. Today he continues writing several weekly articles, devouring all the important facts in all the press and the significant books, from a Chinese novel to our vernacular historians or economists. How is he not going to have a wrinkled brow when he hears all the nonsense circulating today among the heights of power!
But finally, carrying so much comes from a sense of duty related to his early, difficult political experiences, and above all from a noble and hyperbolic heart which makes him one of the Venezuelan politicians who has given and received the most affection during this stormy era that is the construction of our modernity. Congratulations, old man.
{ Fernando Rodríguez. TalCual, 30 April 2007 }
Watching the “Aló Ciudadano” episode that dedicated ample time to Pompeyo Márquez for him to recount episodes from his long and intense life, I was impressed, as always, by how his argumentative capacity works, by his brilliant political intelligence – a very peculiar form of intelligence –, his prodigious memory, but more than anything what comes from body and soul: his sanguine vitality, his Whitmanic wood chopper’s head, which looks like a Scandinavian fisherman’s, a boxer in the midst of give and take, a fighting bull and, at the same time, the archetypal grandfather, which is to say, a warehouse of kindness and generosity.
That he has spent seventy uninterrupted years, day by day, engaged in politics from sunrise to sunset is no mean feat. So much that quite often, a large portion of those long decades has been lived in jails and in the most Spartan clandestinity, or as a member of precarious minorities scaling impossible hills, like an untiring Sisyphus. And there he remains – moving his eyes and frowning, where his identity lies, according to Paolo Gasparini who photographed him once – watching and accusingly uncovering this latest military regime disguised as socialism. And those eyes and that life are a terrible mirror for so many opportunists, ignorant people, cynics and other specimens of the civic-military fauna that govern us today.
Not too long ago he told me he was going through many personal economic difficulties. And without insinuating shame or glory, he added: “It’s just that I was too naïve and I never took care of myself, like almost everyone else does.” Blessed naiveté amidst the multitude of millions in which so many danced yesterday and dance today, among his colleagues who take care of public causes. I think he truly never had much time to sit down and think about the healthy protection of his legitimate assets. There were too many tasks to accomplish. Publishing Tribuna Popular with Gustavo Machado, at one point practically the two of them by themselves, joining their two machines together for the wires that arrived from the USSR, which sang the praises of the achievements of Ukranian workers or Romanian farmers.
Or transforming himself into a ghost for a decade in order to lose the trail of Pedro Estrada’s hound dogs, who would have given everything to offer The Jackal [General Marcos Pérez Jiménez] the head of the damn Secretary General of the PCV [Partido Comunista Venezolano] political party. Or escaping with other leaders from the San Carlos prison, a masterpiece of engineering, sagacity, bravery and a capacity for Hollywood action films. Or being in limbo in 1956, while sitting at the twentieth congress of the CP of the USSR, and realizing that the Stalin he had trusted so much had an insatiable thirst for power and blood which led him to the worst political perversions. Or setting out to seek peace for a guerrilla movement that had lost all its senses and which led him into not a few ideological fist fights, even with Fidel Castro. And beginning the path of the MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo] political party and his profound democratic turn just when it seemed he was too old to jump towards the future so dangerously.
But also the left over time– above all in jails – he employed in a task that is no longer common currency: to study, being an illuminated autodidact which has led him to writing more than twenty books, nearly six thousand (sic) articles, and I don’t know how many party, parliamentary and ministerial interventions.
As he says in his autobiographical reflections, he not only aligned himself with books but also with anyone who had anything to teach. Today he continues writing several weekly articles, devouring all the important facts in all the press and the significant books, from a Chinese novel to our vernacular historians or economists. How is he not going to have a wrinkled brow when he hears all the nonsense circulating today among the heights of power!
But finally, carrying so much comes from a sense of duty related to his early, difficult political experiences, and above all from a noble and hyperbolic heart which makes him one of the Venezuelan politicians who has given and received the most affection during this stormy era that is the construction of our modernity. Congratulations, old man.
{ Fernando Rodríguez. TalCual, 30 April 2007 }
4.06.2007
Los Silencios del Gabo / Fernando Rodríguez
Gabo’s Silences
Despite the clamor one shouldn't think there is such unanimity regarding Gabo. There are those who don’t forgive his love for Fidel. Others deride his taste for presidential palaces and similar places beyond his political banners. And ask a few distinguished professors and students of literature about his literary quality and they'll mention a populist tendency of being facile and reiterative, or a narrative will that is endowed but lacking intellectual elaboration, and of course compared to Borges, Lezama or Paz…
As with everything in this life, there is a certain percentage of truth in those assertions that we aren’t going to quantify here. Nor the hyperboles of those who want to make of One Hundred Years of Solitude the birth of the continent’s most essential imaginary, or a similar assertion. What we are aiming for here is a more superficial aspect, almost a mundane chronicle, regarding his recent birthday, which probably hasn't had such a resonant parallel for any other writer here or anywhere else. Remember Borges’s silent and solitary death in Geneva and look at the photographs of the birthday boy with his hat and his Caribbean stock sweating amidst the sun’s glare and the drums of those melancholy and smiling tropics. These could be signs for a literary aesthetic but we aren’t claiming such ambitions. This is a light chronicle, as we've said.
First of all, that artifice of the word is also a man of silences. That’s why people were clamoring for him to continue with his memoirs, because they assume he carries many secrets of the most varied sort since the author has lived an era very prolifically and intensely. Those secrets are what I call silence. In his recent book about the left [Dos izquierdas, Caracas: Ediciones Alfadil, 2005] Petkoff asks himself why, at the apogee of his militant and blatant support for Cuba, García Márquez donated the prize money from the Premio Rómulo Gallegos to the MAS political party when it was in a bitter confrontation against Fidel [1972], and he hopes his friend will one day reveal this curious secret.* That’s what this is about.
Amid this merriment this is the silence: this region’s leftist writer par excellence gives Fidel’s successor a silent smack in the face, just days after the two octogenarians take a long walk together. He sits down in Cartagena at the table belonging to the gentlemen from the Inter American Press Association (SIP) at the exact moment when the clan hated by Chávez is addressing the matter of all communicational matters, the death by firing squad of RCTV. The Venezuelan government tried in vain to play this down, first with a lie – that García Márquez would not accept the SIP’s invitation – and then with a stupid comment along the lines that he ate lunch in the viper’s den because his former bosses were there from when he was happy and undocumented in Caracas…which can only indicate his principles are very fragile and are even those of a lackey. But that’s just the beginning. At a birthday feast with such prominent brains, Clintons and other ex-leaders, noble pens and politicians and star journalists, no one paid any attention at all to Chávez or Chavismo, which was only represented by the cadaver of Velásquez Alvaray and who knows how he ended up at the event.** Moreover, the central discourse was entrusted to none other than Carlos Fuentes, who loses his neat diplomatic manners each time he names our president whom he qualifies with the worst of adjectives, the lightest of which is “crazy.” And forget about the Cubanization of the event, if any of them were there they were well hidden. So, it had a clearly squalid climate.*** Silently like so many other times. The guest of honor preferred to tell a beautiful story about his famous novel.
The truth is that throughout eight years of Bolivarian rule Gabo has not visited Venezuela or named our leader – and it’s evident they’ve begged him to do it. Only once, when the new republic had just begun, did he interview him and he concluded by asking himself if he would end up being a faithful servant of his people or a secular despot. That prolonged silence, so disparaging and clamorous, seems like an answer. Right?
Translator’s notes:
* The Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) is a Social Democratic political party founded by the former guerrilla commander Teodoro Petkoff in 1971. Petkoff now edits the newspaper TalCual.
** Luis Velásquez Alvaray is a former Supreme Court Justice, now in exile. He fled Venezuela after accusing Vice President José Vicente Rangel and other prominent members of the Venezuelan government and Supreme Court of belonging to a secret criminal organization known as La Banda de los Enanos (The Band of Midgets).
*** The Venezuelan government routinely refers to those who dissent as “escuálidos,” or, squalid ones.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 2 April 2007 }
Despite the clamor one shouldn't think there is such unanimity regarding Gabo. There are those who don’t forgive his love for Fidel. Others deride his taste for presidential palaces and similar places beyond his political banners. And ask a few distinguished professors and students of literature about his literary quality and they'll mention a populist tendency of being facile and reiterative, or a narrative will that is endowed but lacking intellectual elaboration, and of course compared to Borges, Lezama or Paz…
As with everything in this life, there is a certain percentage of truth in those assertions that we aren’t going to quantify here. Nor the hyperboles of those who want to make of One Hundred Years of Solitude the birth of the continent’s most essential imaginary, or a similar assertion. What we are aiming for here is a more superficial aspect, almost a mundane chronicle, regarding his recent birthday, which probably hasn't had such a resonant parallel for any other writer here or anywhere else. Remember Borges’s silent and solitary death in Geneva and look at the photographs of the birthday boy with his hat and his Caribbean stock sweating amidst the sun’s glare and the drums of those melancholy and smiling tropics. These could be signs for a literary aesthetic but we aren’t claiming such ambitions. This is a light chronicle, as we've said.
First of all, that artifice of the word is also a man of silences. That’s why people were clamoring for him to continue with his memoirs, because they assume he carries many secrets of the most varied sort since the author has lived an era very prolifically and intensely. Those secrets are what I call silence. In his recent book about the left [Dos izquierdas, Caracas: Ediciones Alfadil, 2005] Petkoff asks himself why, at the apogee of his militant and blatant support for Cuba, García Márquez donated the prize money from the Premio Rómulo Gallegos to the MAS political party when it was in a bitter confrontation against Fidel [1972], and he hopes his friend will one day reveal this curious secret.* That’s what this is about.
Amid this merriment this is the silence: this region’s leftist writer par excellence gives Fidel’s successor a silent smack in the face, just days after the two octogenarians take a long walk together. He sits down in Cartagena at the table belonging to the gentlemen from the Inter American Press Association (SIP) at the exact moment when the clan hated by Chávez is addressing the matter of all communicational matters, the death by firing squad of RCTV. The Venezuelan government tried in vain to play this down, first with a lie – that García Márquez would not accept the SIP’s invitation – and then with a stupid comment along the lines that he ate lunch in the viper’s den because his former bosses were there from when he was happy and undocumented in Caracas…which can only indicate his principles are very fragile and are even those of a lackey. But that’s just the beginning. At a birthday feast with such prominent brains, Clintons and other ex-leaders, noble pens and politicians and star journalists, no one paid any attention at all to Chávez or Chavismo, which was only represented by the cadaver of Velásquez Alvaray and who knows how he ended up at the event.** Moreover, the central discourse was entrusted to none other than Carlos Fuentes, who loses his neat diplomatic manners each time he names our president whom he qualifies with the worst of adjectives, the lightest of which is “crazy.” And forget about the Cubanization of the event, if any of them were there they were well hidden. So, it had a clearly squalid climate.*** Silently like so many other times. The guest of honor preferred to tell a beautiful story about his famous novel.
The truth is that throughout eight years of Bolivarian rule Gabo has not visited Venezuela or named our leader – and it’s evident they’ve begged him to do it. Only once, when the new republic had just begun, did he interview him and he concluded by asking himself if he would end up being a faithful servant of his people or a secular despot. That prolonged silence, so disparaging and clamorous, seems like an answer. Right?
Translator’s notes:
* The Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) is a Social Democratic political party founded by the former guerrilla commander Teodoro Petkoff in 1971. Petkoff now edits the newspaper TalCual.
** Luis Velásquez Alvaray is a former Supreme Court Justice, now in exile. He fled Venezuela after accusing Vice President José Vicente Rangel and other prominent members of the Venezuelan government and Supreme Court of belonging to a secret criminal organization known as La Banda de los Enanos (The Band of Midgets).
*** The Venezuelan government routinely refers to those who dissent as “escuálidos,” or, squalid ones.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 2 April 2007 }
6.13.2006
Fascistas electorales / Fernando Rodríguez
Electoral Fascists
The word "fascist" can be so equivocal that the two sides we have turned the country into can use it against each other with the utmost recurrence and assertion. More than one commentator has pointed out, rightfully so, that one of our greatest and most peremptory political imperatives is to return a minimum of coherence and prudence to our political dictionary, so as to exit the ideological mystification we inhabit.
In a brief and famous text, Umberto Eco has dispatched the question of defining fascism, refusing to provide a precise and closed version of "that field of contradictions," and enumerating a heterodoxal group of symptoms that tend to appear, not necessarily all of them and with the same intensity, among diverse political phenomena.
Without intending more than a small aggregate to such a complex problem, I would venture to say there is a note that always accompanies fascist regimes and which to me seems to luminously typify their sordid essence: the use of irregular violence as a political weapon. From there, violence is the circulatory system of the irrationality and the intolerance that inhabit the heart of the fascist. And on an inevitable slope, this ends up motivating the militant, the fanatic, converting this impulse into physical aggression against the enemy, against anyone who doesn't buy the products of his sick emotiveness, of his ideological perversion. The historical examples of the XX century are the best proof of this: from the black and brown shirts to the Latin American death squads.
The very heights of power innoculate the stimulant of that social pathology. The irritating and sharp word will become the stone and the gunshot of the political assassin. The self-proclaimed altruistic discourse—the nation, Christ, sacrifice, love...—that hides the calculated signals of hate acquires its true face in the induced ire of the thug who attacks the unarmed protest marcher or the thoughtful exponent at a meeting or colloquium, who feels intoxicated by that force that places him above argument and ideas, above civilized discipline or pacifism, above his political rivals. My beast can do more than your good civic manners and your attempt at decency. Your brain is no match for my stick, I'll cut out your tongue and you'll shut up. That is what lies behind all henchmen, in the torture chambers, in the terrorist bomb, in the batallions of men wielding sticks and guns.
We had already said this weeks ago and the events continue to occur.
To all the grotesque distortions which the electoral process has undergone, to its systematic prostitution, manipulating as much as possible the diverse stages of the electoral path, from naming a CNE [Consejo Nacional Electoral] of automatons to ensure there will be no surprises until the achievement of the State's action as merely an electoral emanation, in a Persian market of votes and the exclusion of those who don't wish to participate, condemned as many of them are in the inferno of being named in the Tascón list, aside from all that, now it seems as though we're going to add overwhelming violence against those who want to engage in political campaigning with decidedness and audacity, those who don't respect the geographic and demographic limits established by the autocracy. They tried to prevent Teodoro Petkoff from entering Coche. They tried to sabotage his event at the UCV concert hall. They couldn't stop him. Could it be because the candidate has made the fight against fear one of his central banners?
Now, what is the intent behind these actions, surely directed from some instance of power, so foreign to any type of spontaneity, even—I would say—foreign to the sentiments of everyday Chavistas, who as the polls reveal want to return to a country in peace and coexistence? That we only campaign between Plaza Altamira and Plaza Brión? Or that, on the contrary, we are forced to arm our own brigades against fear? There are already a few injured, should we prepare to count the dead? History says: Don't continue debasing the major exercise of democracy, nations have limits.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 12 June 2006 }
The word "fascist" can be so equivocal that the two sides we have turned the country into can use it against each other with the utmost recurrence and assertion. More than one commentator has pointed out, rightfully so, that one of our greatest and most peremptory political imperatives is to return a minimum of coherence and prudence to our political dictionary, so as to exit the ideological mystification we inhabit.
In a brief and famous text, Umberto Eco has dispatched the question of defining fascism, refusing to provide a precise and closed version of "that field of contradictions," and enumerating a heterodoxal group of symptoms that tend to appear, not necessarily all of them and with the same intensity, among diverse political phenomena.
Without intending more than a small aggregate to such a complex problem, I would venture to say there is a note that always accompanies fascist regimes and which to me seems to luminously typify their sordid essence: the use of irregular violence as a political weapon. From there, violence is the circulatory system of the irrationality and the intolerance that inhabit the heart of the fascist. And on an inevitable slope, this ends up motivating the militant, the fanatic, converting this impulse into physical aggression against the enemy, against anyone who doesn't buy the products of his sick emotiveness, of his ideological perversion. The historical examples of the XX century are the best proof of this: from the black and brown shirts to the Latin American death squads.
The very heights of power innoculate the stimulant of that social pathology. The irritating and sharp word will become the stone and the gunshot of the political assassin. The self-proclaimed altruistic discourse—the nation, Christ, sacrifice, love...—that hides the calculated signals of hate acquires its true face in the induced ire of the thug who attacks the unarmed protest marcher or the thoughtful exponent at a meeting or colloquium, who feels intoxicated by that force that places him above argument and ideas, above civilized discipline or pacifism, above his political rivals. My beast can do more than your good civic manners and your attempt at decency. Your brain is no match for my stick, I'll cut out your tongue and you'll shut up. That is what lies behind all henchmen, in the torture chambers, in the terrorist bomb, in the batallions of men wielding sticks and guns.
We had already said this weeks ago and the events continue to occur.
To all the grotesque distortions which the electoral process has undergone, to its systematic prostitution, manipulating as much as possible the diverse stages of the electoral path, from naming a CNE [Consejo Nacional Electoral] of automatons to ensure there will be no surprises until the achievement of the State's action as merely an electoral emanation, in a Persian market of votes and the exclusion of those who don't wish to participate, condemned as many of them are in the inferno of being named in the Tascón list, aside from all that, now it seems as though we're going to add overwhelming violence against those who want to engage in political campaigning with decidedness and audacity, those who don't respect the geographic and demographic limits established by the autocracy. They tried to prevent Teodoro Petkoff from entering Coche. They tried to sabotage his event at the UCV concert hall. They couldn't stop him. Could it be because the candidate has made the fight against fear one of his central banners?
Now, what is the intent behind these actions, surely directed from some instance of power, so foreign to any type of spontaneity, even—I would say—foreign to the sentiments of everyday Chavistas, who as the polls reveal want to return to a country in peace and coexistence? That we only campaign between Plaza Altamira and Plaza Brión? Or that, on the contrary, we are forced to arm our own brigades against fear? There are already a few injured, should we prepare to count the dead? History says: Don't continue debasing the major exercise of democracy, nations have limits.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 12 June 2006 }
4.10.2006
El Supremo / Fernando Rodríguez
The Supreme One
The latest Papel Literario dedicates its central pages to a fragment from the kilometric interview Fidel Castro, biografía a dos voces, conducted with the eminent leader by Ignacio Ramonet, with an introduction by the genuflecting—undoubtedly, count the adjectives and hyperbole—director of Le Monde Diplomatique.
It is all part of a book to be published soon by Editorial Debate. Surely the book will be talked about, at least around these parts, where we are so fraternally close to the subject in question. So much that one is amazed to read he was the one who was able to revert the unfortunate April 2002 coup via telephone, or that a firing squad refused to shoot against Chávez, something not even Chávez has mentioned, he who is so fond of publicizing the until now imaginary assassination attempts against him. From what we've seen, this interview has already provided much to discuss abroad, because of its curious literary method of answering questions in such an intimate conversation with entire paragraphs taken from earlier speeches by the octogenarian, as a very disconcerted Armando Coll informed us in an editorial note to the interview in Papel Literario.
But I am amazed by the brilliant argumentation Ramonet uses to justify the autocracy Fidel has exercised in Cuba for almost half a century. Ramonet is a master of these palatial matters. Fidel “exercises an absolute authority in his environment…wherever he is one can only hear a single voice: his…
He is the one who makes all the decisions, small or large.” He leads through kindness, then, something we already knew.
But it turns out nothing is more opposed to his angelic and democratic vocation for dialogue: “I discovered in this way an intimate Fidel, almost timid, well-mannered and gentlemanly, who pays attention to each interlocutor…always attentive to others and especially to his collaborators…I never heard him utter a command…he consults and reveals himself as very respectful and formal with the political authorities that direct the Party and the State…” How does one explain such a contradiction between that Franciscan soul and the exercise of absolute power? Here we come to the brilliance I alluded to earlier. He has to govern as he does because “There is no one, since the death of Che Guevara, inside the circle of power in which he moves, with an intellectual caliber close to his.” If only his voice is heard and he has to make decisions it is “because of his crushing personality.” Understood? What fault is it of the giant’s if he is so astonishingly large and those who surround him are so small? Moreover, such a condition is not comfortable because it obviously leads him to the sadness of solitude—something similar to what must happen to the one God, nonpareil. “In this sense he gives the impression of being a solitary man. With no intimate friend, nor an intellectual associate of his caliber.” Perhaps, one wonders, the proximity of Ramonet could mitigate slightly that cruel exclusion, biography in two voices.
Definitely an autocrat, yes, but by necessity, by constitution, by the grace of God. Bravo, bravísimo.
II
“Though the groves of the Tamarit
The dogs of lead have come…”
wrote Federico García Lorca shortly before dying, in his final and dramatic collection—perhaps among the greatest work he produced.
Premonitions of a country already destined for the horror of civil war. These days, in Caracas, such dark signs seem to walk among us they've made me remember those verses.
Death, hatred, fear, corruption. Let us hope they’re not made of lead, let them not be Lorca’s dogs. And may the sleeping and sick soul of the country awaken so as to put an end to this incessant night.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 10 April 2006 }
The latest Papel Literario dedicates its central pages to a fragment from the kilometric interview Fidel Castro, biografía a dos voces, conducted with the eminent leader by Ignacio Ramonet, with an introduction by the genuflecting—undoubtedly, count the adjectives and hyperbole—director of Le Monde Diplomatique.
It is all part of a book to be published soon by Editorial Debate. Surely the book will be talked about, at least around these parts, where we are so fraternally close to the subject in question. So much that one is amazed to read he was the one who was able to revert the unfortunate April 2002 coup via telephone, or that a firing squad refused to shoot against Chávez, something not even Chávez has mentioned, he who is so fond of publicizing the until now imaginary assassination attempts against him. From what we've seen, this interview has already provided much to discuss abroad, because of its curious literary method of answering questions in such an intimate conversation with entire paragraphs taken from earlier speeches by the octogenarian, as a very disconcerted Armando Coll informed us in an editorial note to the interview in Papel Literario.
But I am amazed by the brilliant argumentation Ramonet uses to justify the autocracy Fidel has exercised in Cuba for almost half a century. Ramonet is a master of these palatial matters. Fidel “exercises an absolute authority in his environment…wherever he is one can only hear a single voice: his…
He is the one who makes all the decisions, small or large.” He leads through kindness, then, something we already knew.
But it turns out nothing is more opposed to his angelic and democratic vocation for dialogue: “I discovered in this way an intimate Fidel, almost timid, well-mannered and gentlemanly, who pays attention to each interlocutor…always attentive to others and especially to his collaborators…I never heard him utter a command…he consults and reveals himself as very respectful and formal with the political authorities that direct the Party and the State…” How does one explain such a contradiction between that Franciscan soul and the exercise of absolute power? Here we come to the brilliance I alluded to earlier. He has to govern as he does because “There is no one, since the death of Che Guevara, inside the circle of power in which he moves, with an intellectual caliber close to his.” If only his voice is heard and he has to make decisions it is “because of his crushing personality.” Understood? What fault is it of the giant’s if he is so astonishingly large and those who surround him are so small? Moreover, such a condition is not comfortable because it obviously leads him to the sadness of solitude—something similar to what must happen to the one God, nonpareil. “In this sense he gives the impression of being a solitary man. With no intimate friend, nor an intellectual associate of his caliber.” Perhaps, one wonders, the proximity of Ramonet could mitigate slightly that cruel exclusion, biography in two voices.
Definitely an autocrat, yes, but by necessity, by constitution, by the grace of God. Bravo, bravísimo.
II
“Though the groves of the Tamarit
The dogs of lead have come…”
wrote Federico García Lorca shortly before dying, in his final and dramatic collection—perhaps among the greatest work he produced.
Premonitions of a country already destined for the horror of civil war. These days, in Caracas, such dark signs seem to walk among us they've made me remember those verses.
Death, hatred, fear, corruption. Let us hope they’re not made of lead, let them not be Lorca’s dogs. And may the sleeping and sick soul of the country awaken so as to put an end to this incessant night.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 10 April 2006 }
1.06.2006
Signos / Fernando Rodríguez
Signs
Signs that we have become a degraded country cut into pieces are everywhere. One of the best emblems of this, tangible and visible, are the innumerable red shirts worn by the citizens who have access to missions and other governmental social programs.
Red unequivocably representative of governmental militancy.
The perversion is deep and evident. One can only accede to relief welfare or the cooperatives or the parallel universities or public sector jobs and to quite a few other things if one is aligned with the regime and submits to its rituals and cults. And that alignment must be visible, it can't be in pectore—pity on those who have to uniform themselves out of pure necessity. The missions were invented out of nothing, spoken by the great helmsman himself, in order to avoid a decapitation in the 2004 referendum, in other words, toward electoral, political, sectarian ends. Thus, their hybridization since birth with the functions of the State, which are by nature intended for all Venezuelans, pointing to the missions' aberrantly exclusionary character. Nothing hidden then.
But there is something sinister in that gregarious homogenization, in that civil troop, in that red herd. Something that attempts against today's sensibility which, even within consumption itself, tends toward individuality.
(Let us speak of good individuality, that which revindicates us as unique, thoughtful and critical beings and which doesn't annul our republican and altruistic sentiments.) Something that would seem to lead to the society of masses in its worst acceptation, the politicized.
The one that the previous century lived so intensely and extensively, of the fascist shirts or the uniformed and grey Chinese of other times. Or the same soldiers as always, olive green flocks submitted to the most severe disciplinary codes. Because that homogenization of our corporeity implies the homogeneity of our minds, the single idea, the command and the monochord collective chorus of unthinking acceptance.
And from this leveling of differences another notable sign of the country we live is inferred: the cult of personality. Let's not repeat the matter of the concentration of power and the single and caudillo-like voice that can do and decide everything. Here we wanted to underline that which so diaphanously, we continue with transparency, provides evidence of autocracy: the cult of personality. That fetishizing, humiliating attitude, which is another cession of the I, the renunciation of being our own masters, of our only life and our guaranteed death. Wherever one looks the signs of that illness are beginning to be felt. And let us not focus on that spontaneous cult that is born of the masses and which the demagogue foments.
I am referring to other things, to the Sunday coven [the Aló Presidente! weekly TV program], to the declarative silence of high officials in order to not attenuate the single voice, to the illegible laudatory books, to the public scoldings and mea culpas so that nothing will stain the leader's purity. And also to the induced industry of all types of effigies, from the sticker to the children's doll and the scapulary. But I fear we will move to a larger scale, to public monuments, made directly or indirectly for the glory of el proceso and its high priest. TalCual recently reported the proposal of the mayorship of Caracas to create a contest of works dedicated to Latin American integration, where president Chávez would have his deserved spot, just what we needed.
Like the majority of people, I suppose, I have lamented the atrocious destruction of public works of art, by means of culpable negligence or intentional actions such as the incident with the statue of Columbus. But I think I fear even more what could be built from now on—after all, the demolished works can be rebuilt someday—and that we will soon have absurdity in abundance, catering to military taste and for the glory of el proceso.
Those uniformed in red as in their minds and the altars of a cult are two faces of tribal barbarism.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 7 November 2005 }
Signs that we have become a degraded country cut into pieces are everywhere. One of the best emblems of this, tangible and visible, are the innumerable red shirts worn by the citizens who have access to missions and other governmental social programs.
Red unequivocably representative of governmental militancy.
The perversion is deep and evident. One can only accede to relief welfare or the cooperatives or the parallel universities or public sector jobs and to quite a few other things if one is aligned with the regime and submits to its rituals and cults. And that alignment must be visible, it can't be in pectore—pity on those who have to uniform themselves out of pure necessity. The missions were invented out of nothing, spoken by the great helmsman himself, in order to avoid a decapitation in the 2004 referendum, in other words, toward electoral, political, sectarian ends. Thus, their hybridization since birth with the functions of the State, which are by nature intended for all Venezuelans, pointing to the missions' aberrantly exclusionary character. Nothing hidden then.
But there is something sinister in that gregarious homogenization, in that civil troop, in that red herd. Something that attempts against today's sensibility which, even within consumption itself, tends toward individuality.
(Let us speak of good individuality, that which revindicates us as unique, thoughtful and critical beings and which doesn't annul our republican and altruistic sentiments.) Something that would seem to lead to the society of masses in its worst acceptation, the politicized.
The one that the previous century lived so intensely and extensively, of the fascist shirts or the uniformed and grey Chinese of other times. Or the same soldiers as always, olive green flocks submitted to the most severe disciplinary codes. Because that homogenization of our corporeity implies the homogeneity of our minds, the single idea, the command and the monochord collective chorus of unthinking acceptance.
And from this leveling of differences another notable sign of the country we live is inferred: the cult of personality. Let's not repeat the matter of the concentration of power and the single and caudillo-like voice that can do and decide everything. Here we wanted to underline that which so diaphanously, we continue with transparency, provides evidence of autocracy: the cult of personality. That fetishizing, humiliating attitude, which is another cession of the I, the renunciation of being our own masters, of our only life and our guaranteed death. Wherever one looks the signs of that illness are beginning to be felt. And let us not focus on that spontaneous cult that is born of the masses and which the demagogue foments.
I am referring to other things, to the Sunday coven [the Aló Presidente! weekly TV program], to the declarative silence of high officials in order to not attenuate the single voice, to the illegible laudatory books, to the public scoldings and mea culpas so that nothing will stain the leader's purity. And also to the induced industry of all types of effigies, from the sticker to the children's doll and the scapulary. But I fear we will move to a larger scale, to public monuments, made directly or indirectly for the glory of el proceso and its high priest. TalCual recently reported the proposal of the mayorship of Caracas to create a contest of works dedicated to Latin American integration, where president Chávez would have his deserved spot, just what we needed.
Like the majority of people, I suppose, I have lamented the atrocious destruction of public works of art, by means of culpable negligence or intentional actions such as the incident with the statue of Columbus. But I think I fear even more what could be built from now on—after all, the demolished works can be rebuilt someday—and that we will soon have absurdity in abundance, catering to military taste and for the glory of el proceso.
Those uniformed in red as in their minds and the altars of a cult are two faces of tribal barbarism.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 7 November 2005 }
7.12.2005
El esplendor y la espera / Fernando Rodríguez
The Splendor and the Waiting
Luis Alejandro Rodríguez has made a 35-minute documentary about the poet Armando Rojas Guardia, El esplendor y la espera (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura, 2005), which premièred recently at the Cinemateca and which I've had access to on a DVD my friend, the poet, gave me. I don't know where it might be purchased and I underline this statement because it would be sad if this film were not distributed widely, at least through book stores, video stores and the like (in any case, the CONAC would be able to inform you).
I'll start where we tend to finish, with the "buts."
This biographical document is flawed by certain excesses: an overabundance of illustrative, sometimes strident, obvious or reiterative images; of mannerist interventions with some images and musical overloads at certain moments. Full stop.
But truly, to me the film seems to be thematically and stylistically daring and is full of discoveries that reflect talent and a passionate and complete desire to arrive at the essence of a particularly dramatic figure.
The biographical genre is flourishing in this country, in consonance with the rest of the planet, and not just with films. We can already point to various recent works, in writing and in film. But generally, the vast majority are superficial and apologetic profiles that provide nothing more beyond an occasional glimpse. For example—let's stick to the audiovisual—Globovisión's bureaucratic Biografías, at least the ones I've watched, that seem like pieces for the family genealogical tree, for business advertisements, or for the album of famous ancestral politicians.
These invariably follow the most basic scheme of a few archival images, formal and laudatory interviews and an off-stage voice full of hyperbolic adjectives.
The merit of this documentary is that it's not an exterior and diccionary-like profile. Instead, we have Rojas Guardia present in body and soul, in other words, we're on a clearly biographical plane, amid the waters of life. Rojas Guardia, of course, the poet—an enormous poet, as we already know, our great mystic of the storm—; with his peculiar and profound and dilemma-centered manner of having a dialogue with God; his assumed and ennobled homosexuality; his painful and chronic psychic illness which, as he himself says, is a sharp pain but also a season in the hell from where one can make abysmal contacts with lucidity and eternity's paths; finally, the Armando who doesn't separate his search for that absolute Other of generosity and solidarity from the others who share this mysterious and opaque valley of splendour and waiting, of Pascalian waiting for the ultimate and decisive encounter. This final point, for myself, who have chosen other metaphysical paths, and who expect nothing, is what, among other things, makes him so humanly dear to me.
And beyond the camera that lovingly follows him, that centers and scrutinizes him, that makes him be so much himself, Armando's discourse, not just his poems, is of an inimitable majesty. He doesn't act, he doesn't fear the eye that watches him. With a seriousness that comes in simple, sparse and dense words from his most hidden spiritual dwellings, he recounts for us half a dozen essential scenes from his life that summarize it all: his father and the unforgettable Christmas gift as a child, the birth of his poetry, his first devastating love, his denial of Peter, his reencounter with the poem-prayer, his hospital experience, his fraternal solitude.
This film is not a random element among his prolific body of work. It is an integral part of it and is a necessary piece for so many who not only read him but follow him, a twenty-first century evangelist. I hope they don't shelve it.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 11 July 2005 }
Luis Alejandro Rodríguez has made a 35-minute documentary about the poet Armando Rojas Guardia, El esplendor y la espera (Consejo Nacional de la Cultura, 2005), which premièred recently at the Cinemateca and which I've had access to on a DVD my friend, the poet, gave me. I don't know where it might be purchased and I underline this statement because it would be sad if this film were not distributed widely, at least through book stores, video stores and the like (in any case, the CONAC would be able to inform you).
I'll start where we tend to finish, with the "buts."
This biographical document is flawed by certain excesses: an overabundance of illustrative, sometimes strident, obvious or reiterative images; of mannerist interventions with some images and musical overloads at certain moments. Full stop.
But truly, to me the film seems to be thematically and stylistically daring and is full of discoveries that reflect talent and a passionate and complete desire to arrive at the essence of a particularly dramatic figure.
The biographical genre is flourishing in this country, in consonance with the rest of the planet, and not just with films. We can already point to various recent works, in writing and in film. But generally, the vast majority are superficial and apologetic profiles that provide nothing more beyond an occasional glimpse. For example—let's stick to the audiovisual—Globovisión's bureaucratic Biografías, at least the ones I've watched, that seem like pieces for the family genealogical tree, for business advertisements, or for the album of famous ancestral politicians.
These invariably follow the most basic scheme of a few archival images, formal and laudatory interviews and an off-stage voice full of hyperbolic adjectives.
The merit of this documentary is that it's not an exterior and diccionary-like profile. Instead, we have Rojas Guardia present in body and soul, in other words, we're on a clearly biographical plane, amid the waters of life. Rojas Guardia, of course, the poet—an enormous poet, as we already know, our great mystic of the storm—; with his peculiar and profound and dilemma-centered manner of having a dialogue with God; his assumed and ennobled homosexuality; his painful and chronic psychic illness which, as he himself says, is a sharp pain but also a season in the hell from where one can make abysmal contacts with lucidity and eternity's paths; finally, the Armando who doesn't separate his search for that absolute Other of generosity and solidarity from the others who share this mysterious and opaque valley of splendour and waiting, of Pascalian waiting for the ultimate and decisive encounter. This final point, for myself, who have chosen other metaphysical paths, and who expect nothing, is what, among other things, makes him so humanly dear to me.
And beyond the camera that lovingly follows him, that centers and scrutinizes him, that makes him be so much himself, Armando's discourse, not just his poems, is of an inimitable majesty. He doesn't act, he doesn't fear the eye that watches him. With a seriousness that comes in simple, sparse and dense words from his most hidden spiritual dwellings, he recounts for us half a dozen essential scenes from his life that summarize it all: his father and the unforgettable Christmas gift as a child, the birth of his poetry, his first devastating love, his denial of Peter, his reencounter with the poem-prayer, his hospital experience, his fraternal solitude.
This film is not a random element among his prolific body of work. It is an integral part of it and is a necessary piece for so many who not only read him but follow him, a twenty-first century evangelist. I hope they don't shelve it.
{ Fernando Rodríguez, TalCual, 11 July 2005 }
5.09.2005
Alejandro Rossi: Venezuela me es esencial / Eugenio Montejo, Fernando Rodríguez
Alejandro Rossi: Venezuela is Essential to Me
The noted Mexican—and Venezuelan—philosopher and fiction writer has been in Caracas recently to receive the Doctorado Honoris Causa from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, which honors and is honored by this generous gesture, reflecting one of the highest values of Latin American literature. The author of notable books of essays and short stories, he was recognized in 1999 with Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Literatura y Lingüistica. This is the record of an informal conversation, on a happy and sunny morning, which the philosopher Fernando Rodríguez and the poet Eugenio Montejo sustained with Rossi in Caracas.
Fernando Rodríguez: In an interview you say that your generation worked on small tasks, not on large challenges…and yet the XX century was a century of utopias and titanic endeavors. Who were you referring to and in what way did you mean it?
Alejandro Rossi: I believe I was most likely referring to Latin American philosophers and especially to the Mexican ones. Certainly the task fell upon us to more or less professionalize philosophy amid a precinct where a type of light, dispersed and inconsistent essay writing ruled.
We, in particular those of us who adopted analytical philosophy, concentrated ourselves in the university and there—somewhat like monks, to the margin of politics, journalism and other mundane temptations—we wanted to make philosophical work more technical, to make ourselves from this discipline’s millenarian tradition, to learn languages so that translations would not ensnare us, to travel to the most advanced centers so as to remain current, to gird ourselves to themes susceptible to rigorous treatments. In truth, it was a necessary task and I don’t think we did it all that badly. There you have the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas or magazines such as Dianoia and Crítica, which are several decades old now. In all, we began to plant a philosophical tradition that has continued and should continue. Without going too far, I believe something similar was done in Venezuela.
FR: And yet, somewhere else in your writings it seems as if you were hoping for a grander philosophy, one that’s more ambitious and tied to our Latin American dramas.
AR: I wouldn’t call it a different philosophy. Much less an autochthonic one, something we always detest, those Latin American or Mexican identities. What I suggested during the continent’s dramatic moments is that we should face the political or ethical problems which seemed to be unavoidable and which perhaps did not appear often in the agendas of that foundational philosophy of the mid XX century. But, as you both know, this discipline has amplified its thematic field a great deal and I believe today we are taking up many of those urgent questions.
FR: Seen from the present, doesn’t that ideal of professionalizing the humanities, within the university, which excited us up to just recently, doesn’t it seem a bit disappointing? Specialization, the paper, good academic manners, the relative codification of knowledge… haven’t these isolated universities too much? Here, today, we complain a great deal about the absence of the university’s voice in these torturous years we've lived.
AR: I don’t agree with that underestimation of the university’s humanistic activities in general. This is and will continue to be a very important space for the development of our countries. What happens is that it has its time and its own ways of being efficient. Of course, it’s possible that in specific moments, such as the one you point out in Venezuela, massive and brutal occurrences can silence it or delay it.
FR: Curiously, after your period of a strict custody of meaning, you end up being a celebrated fiction writer…
AR: Yes, and it would be very difficult for me to know exactly why. Of course, I've always had a great love for literature and that could be reason enough. Or language has been for me, for my vital journeys, something very attractive and enigmatic, both philosophically and literarily.
But perhaps there was also a certain weariness toward the philosophical discipline. Or those circumstances, always less gratuitous than one supposes, such as Octavio Paz inviting me to write the column El manual del distraído, which allowed me to play in both fields. The rest must be in the unconscious which, as we know, is very dark.
Eugenio Montejo: In Cartas credenciales you mention a Venezuelan great uncle of yours, the author of a novel which elicited the anger of the church and of his relatives. According to your comments, these relatives would pretend to be deaf when you asked them about that text.
AR: It’s true. I tried to investigate the author and the book with Diego Córdoba, the writer from Cumaná, an old fighter against Gómez who lived in Mexico for many years. I haven’t been able to learn very much nor have I been able to find a copy of this novel, whose title is, I believe, Los desarraigados or something like that. Córdoba described him as a young man who was interested in the literary salons of the time. He told me several anecdotes about him and he vaguely remembered having seen the book. He was my grandfather's, Félix Antonio Guerrero, brother. They were two brothers, one a violinist and the other this man of letters who died young.
The family legend tended to repeat there was a copy of the work in my grandfather’s safe, but after his death, it seems nothing was found there. It must have been an edition with minimal copies made, something easy to be disappeared, especially if the intention was to erase the anticlerical evidence of a family member.
EM: In one of his essays Octavio Paz refers to literary families, which can almost always be made up of people who might or might not belong to an author’s national borders.
AR: As we know, each writer tends to create his own genealogy. Octavio distinguished himself because of his eclecticism. Part of his originality consists of the literary family he knew how to create for himself. One of his early influences was Rafael Alberti, who personally gave him many indications.
In the collection Bajo tu clara sombra (1944), for example, he seems like a poet from the Generation of 1927, but later he opens up, he defines other readings and begins to create different predilections. What Octavio began to read from that point onwards is not the same as what the Spanish poets who were contemporaries of Alberti read. Each writer attempts to define the limits of his affinities and differences, both in works from the past as well as during the time in which his efforts unfold. Besides, the true attempt Paz defines in his maturity is the construction of a tradition, the construction of the tradition of modern poetry, which logically includes the poetry of our language.
EM: In the literary reception of the first Paz in Venezuela, the importance of works such as El arco y la lira and Cuadrivio were noted. I’m pleased by your reiterated predilection for the essay on Darío which is part of Cuadrivio.
AR: El arco y la lira tends to get mentioned less in Mexico, while El laberinto de la soledad, which had a repercussion somewhat after its original publication, has been attended to much more over time. I concur with the importance attributed to El arco y la lira, a work which is magnificently built and has a deep literary perception. Moreover, Paz’s prose is at once clear and tense, often combative, capable of going from general thesis to the intimate and moving detail in a single page. As for the essay on Rubén Darío, it seems like a moment of high flight for Octavio, among his best work. It’s an essay I would say illuminates the history of Spanish poetry in the XX century. That entire book contains undeniable discoveries: the essay on López Velarde, for example, or the one dedicated to Fernando Pessoa, at a time when references to his work were uncommon. This last detail reveals another one of Octavio’s facets: the great introducer he always was, the unsurpassable divulger of other literary universes.
FR: Speaking of Paz, I’d like to ask you a specific curiosity. What did those foundational philosophers see in El laberinto de la soledad, that very beautiful text, but one which seems closer to essay writing and those thoughts on national identity?
AR: I think El laberinto initially had repercussions in small sectors, mainly literary ones. Later, it has continued to grow, as I said already, until becoming a type of indispensable classic. It’s likely it does have connections to those themes but it’s a book full of very rich and current cultural references, a book that’s very valuable because it defies the Mexican nationalist pride and is marvelously well-written. I consider it a living text, full of important suggestions.
EM: José Bianco referred to your work with great enthusiasm. When did you meet him? Borges said he was “the least famous of our great writers.”
AR: Actually, I met him very late. I admired him greatly because of the work he had accomplished in the magazine Sur, because of his texts and because of his savvy editing of the magazine. In 1938 he began the top editing position for the memorable magazine created by Victoria Ocampo and he realized the value of Borges very early on. Soon after taking over the position of editor he gave him the first page. Borges, who was slightly unsure of himself, begins to have his great moment. Not much later, his Pierre Menard, which few people understood at the time, appears in the magazine. In that decade of the 1940s he publishes Ficciones (1943) and that same year he gathers his poetic work. I would say some of the writers from the group around the magazine Sur form part of my own literary family.
For a young writer, to find oneself with Pepe Bianco was a gift from God. He possessed an immense literary wisdom. And he was likewise a great fiction writer. His two short novels, Las ratas and Sombras suele vestir, are unsurpassed. It seemed unfair, then, that when the so called Latin American literary Boom occurred he was not given the place he deserved as a fiction writer and essayist. We saw each other many times in Mexico. Actually, he was with us when the magazine Vuelta was about to appear.
He lived in my house twice. On one occasion I went to dinner with Pepe and with Borges, and afterwards we went out for a walk in Buenos Aires. On another occasion Octavio called me on the phone to tell me he’d received a text from Pepe for the magazine: it was a page he’d sent commenting on El manual del distraído. I was filled with satisfaction that he would write about me.
EM: In your evocation of Juan Nuño you say you shared with him that which is so difficult to share, which is called the common voice.
AR: Juan was my friend for more than thirty years. As I say in that essay, he was “a friendship that deepened over time until becoming an unalterable brotherhood.” Juan began as a Hellenist: there are his books, El pensamiento de Platón and La dialéctica platónica. He was close to García Bacca. Later he went to France, but the classical philosophy always remains at the core. He was interested in Sartre, to whom he dedicated a book, and later in mathematical logic and positivist logic. His essays contain a great deal of thematic variety and are characterized by a prose that combines humor and acidity. But what was essential in him was the freedom and the pleasure of writing.
It’s a shame his books don’t circulate more today. I think, for example, La filosofía de Borges should be republished in Spain with the promotion that exceptional text deserves. I’m certain that new edition would be followed by not a few translations. Actually, two excellent books about Borges were written in Caracas: the other one is Borges, el poeta by Guillermo Sucre. I remember the appearance of that book which caught my attention because of its theme. In a certain way, Sucre noticed ahead of time the importance poetry would have within Borges’s work during his final years.
FR: Borges, Nuño…let me return to the philosophical character I see in your literature…
AR: It’s rarely explicitly that way. Perhaps it’s so in El manual del distraído, where I attempt to turn philosophical motives into vital riddles. But in other cases, more indirectly, I believe I attempt to disarm histories, take the air out of them, deconstruct them—but, please, not in the way Derrida does.
I believe a certain irony or a dose of humor or a distancing always accompanies me, which makes me always search for the cat’s fifth foot, which in the end is what philosophers tend to do. I like to pop balloons. In the end, language is an artifice and a labyrinth. I like to play in its crossroads. Maybe that’s what joins my passion for Borges and Wittgenstein.
FR: You don’t think analytical philosophy, which restricts what can be said a great deal, could open the wide world to a freer and more recreational treatment. One which is joyously skeptical, more colorful and multiform, once it has freed itself from the rigidity of the concept; like Montaigne’s journeys without itinerary or calendar.
AR: Well, I don’t think one can establish a type of causality between analytical philosophy and literature. But it could create the possibility of an opening such as the one you mention. One would have to think about it. Besides, analytical philosophy is not so restrictive or it has ended up not being so. In the text “Cartas credenciales” I try to find a link between my philosophical and literary activities and I think I’ve found it in that temperament, in that feeling of the world which rejects the dogmatic and the totalizing and which attempts to travel through the world searching, with a certain hedonism, for novelty, paradoxes, the unexpected, the opaque. A benevolent skepticism, more or less. Perhaps it relates to what you’re saying, we’ll keep talking about it.
EM: Speak to us about the Venezuela you’ve found on this trip.
AR: Both of you have the word in that respect and you’ve already told me a great deal. But I do want to reiterate that this trip has shown me once more how much this country means to me. I have genetic roots, permanent memories, family and friends in this country. To return to UCV to be honored so fraternally is very moving for me. Both of you, my living friends, were at that ceremony, but so were many ghosts from many seasons.
Regarding the country I see, it produces that happiness of meeting once again. But I also share the sorrow I feel in so many people, the sensation of defeat, of historical disillusion, of that modernizing project which began with such splendor almost half a century ago. But never mind that, we must continue. You can always count on me.
{ Eugenio Montejo, Fernando Rodríguez, Alejandro Rossi, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 7 May 2005 }
The noted Mexican—and Venezuelan—philosopher and fiction writer has been in Caracas recently to receive the Doctorado Honoris Causa from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, which honors and is honored by this generous gesture, reflecting one of the highest values of Latin American literature. The author of notable books of essays and short stories, he was recognized in 1999 with Mexico’s Premio Nacional de Literatura y Lingüistica. This is the record of an informal conversation, on a happy and sunny morning, which the philosopher Fernando Rodríguez and the poet Eugenio Montejo sustained with Rossi in Caracas.
Fernando Rodríguez: In an interview you say that your generation worked on small tasks, not on large challenges…and yet the XX century was a century of utopias and titanic endeavors. Who were you referring to and in what way did you mean it?
Alejandro Rossi: I believe I was most likely referring to Latin American philosophers and especially to the Mexican ones. Certainly the task fell upon us to more or less professionalize philosophy amid a precinct where a type of light, dispersed and inconsistent essay writing ruled.
We, in particular those of us who adopted analytical philosophy, concentrated ourselves in the university and there—somewhat like monks, to the margin of politics, journalism and other mundane temptations—we wanted to make philosophical work more technical, to make ourselves from this discipline’s millenarian tradition, to learn languages so that translations would not ensnare us, to travel to the most advanced centers so as to remain current, to gird ourselves to themes susceptible to rigorous treatments. In truth, it was a necessary task and I don’t think we did it all that badly. There you have the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas or magazines such as Dianoia and Crítica, which are several decades old now. In all, we began to plant a philosophical tradition that has continued and should continue. Without going too far, I believe something similar was done in Venezuela.
FR: And yet, somewhere else in your writings it seems as if you were hoping for a grander philosophy, one that’s more ambitious and tied to our Latin American dramas.
AR: I wouldn’t call it a different philosophy. Much less an autochthonic one, something we always detest, those Latin American or Mexican identities. What I suggested during the continent’s dramatic moments is that we should face the political or ethical problems which seemed to be unavoidable and which perhaps did not appear often in the agendas of that foundational philosophy of the mid XX century. But, as you both know, this discipline has amplified its thematic field a great deal and I believe today we are taking up many of those urgent questions.
FR: Seen from the present, doesn’t that ideal of professionalizing the humanities, within the university, which excited us up to just recently, doesn’t it seem a bit disappointing? Specialization, the paper, good academic manners, the relative codification of knowledge… haven’t these isolated universities too much? Here, today, we complain a great deal about the absence of the university’s voice in these torturous years we've lived.
AR: I don’t agree with that underestimation of the university’s humanistic activities in general. This is and will continue to be a very important space for the development of our countries. What happens is that it has its time and its own ways of being efficient. Of course, it’s possible that in specific moments, such as the one you point out in Venezuela, massive and brutal occurrences can silence it or delay it.
FR: Curiously, after your period of a strict custody of meaning, you end up being a celebrated fiction writer…
AR: Yes, and it would be very difficult for me to know exactly why. Of course, I've always had a great love for literature and that could be reason enough. Or language has been for me, for my vital journeys, something very attractive and enigmatic, both philosophically and literarily.
But perhaps there was also a certain weariness toward the philosophical discipline. Or those circumstances, always less gratuitous than one supposes, such as Octavio Paz inviting me to write the column El manual del distraído, which allowed me to play in both fields. The rest must be in the unconscious which, as we know, is very dark.
Eugenio Montejo: In Cartas credenciales you mention a Venezuelan great uncle of yours, the author of a novel which elicited the anger of the church and of his relatives. According to your comments, these relatives would pretend to be deaf when you asked them about that text.
AR: It’s true. I tried to investigate the author and the book with Diego Córdoba, the writer from Cumaná, an old fighter against Gómez who lived in Mexico for many years. I haven’t been able to learn very much nor have I been able to find a copy of this novel, whose title is, I believe, Los desarraigados or something like that. Córdoba described him as a young man who was interested in the literary salons of the time. He told me several anecdotes about him and he vaguely remembered having seen the book. He was my grandfather's, Félix Antonio Guerrero, brother. They were two brothers, one a violinist and the other this man of letters who died young.
The family legend tended to repeat there was a copy of the work in my grandfather’s safe, but after his death, it seems nothing was found there. It must have been an edition with minimal copies made, something easy to be disappeared, especially if the intention was to erase the anticlerical evidence of a family member.
EM: In one of his essays Octavio Paz refers to literary families, which can almost always be made up of people who might or might not belong to an author’s national borders.
AR: As we know, each writer tends to create his own genealogy. Octavio distinguished himself because of his eclecticism. Part of his originality consists of the literary family he knew how to create for himself. One of his early influences was Rafael Alberti, who personally gave him many indications.
In the collection Bajo tu clara sombra (1944), for example, he seems like a poet from the Generation of 1927, but later he opens up, he defines other readings and begins to create different predilections. What Octavio began to read from that point onwards is not the same as what the Spanish poets who were contemporaries of Alberti read. Each writer attempts to define the limits of his affinities and differences, both in works from the past as well as during the time in which his efforts unfold. Besides, the true attempt Paz defines in his maturity is the construction of a tradition, the construction of the tradition of modern poetry, which logically includes the poetry of our language.
EM: In the literary reception of the first Paz in Venezuela, the importance of works such as El arco y la lira and Cuadrivio were noted. I’m pleased by your reiterated predilection for the essay on Darío which is part of Cuadrivio.
AR: El arco y la lira tends to get mentioned less in Mexico, while El laberinto de la soledad, which had a repercussion somewhat after its original publication, has been attended to much more over time. I concur with the importance attributed to El arco y la lira, a work which is magnificently built and has a deep literary perception. Moreover, Paz’s prose is at once clear and tense, often combative, capable of going from general thesis to the intimate and moving detail in a single page. As for the essay on Rubén Darío, it seems like a moment of high flight for Octavio, among his best work. It’s an essay I would say illuminates the history of Spanish poetry in the XX century. That entire book contains undeniable discoveries: the essay on López Velarde, for example, or the one dedicated to Fernando Pessoa, at a time when references to his work were uncommon. This last detail reveals another one of Octavio’s facets: the great introducer he always was, the unsurpassable divulger of other literary universes.
FR: Speaking of Paz, I’d like to ask you a specific curiosity. What did those foundational philosophers see in El laberinto de la soledad, that very beautiful text, but one which seems closer to essay writing and those thoughts on national identity?
AR: I think El laberinto initially had repercussions in small sectors, mainly literary ones. Later, it has continued to grow, as I said already, until becoming a type of indispensable classic. It’s likely it does have connections to those themes but it’s a book full of very rich and current cultural references, a book that’s very valuable because it defies the Mexican nationalist pride and is marvelously well-written. I consider it a living text, full of important suggestions.
EM: José Bianco referred to your work with great enthusiasm. When did you meet him? Borges said he was “the least famous of our great writers.”
AR: Actually, I met him very late. I admired him greatly because of the work he had accomplished in the magazine Sur, because of his texts and because of his savvy editing of the magazine. In 1938 he began the top editing position for the memorable magazine created by Victoria Ocampo and he realized the value of Borges very early on. Soon after taking over the position of editor he gave him the first page. Borges, who was slightly unsure of himself, begins to have his great moment. Not much later, his Pierre Menard, which few people understood at the time, appears in the magazine. In that decade of the 1940s he publishes Ficciones (1943) and that same year he gathers his poetic work. I would say some of the writers from the group around the magazine Sur form part of my own literary family.
For a young writer, to find oneself with Pepe Bianco was a gift from God. He possessed an immense literary wisdom. And he was likewise a great fiction writer. His two short novels, Las ratas and Sombras suele vestir, are unsurpassed. It seemed unfair, then, that when the so called Latin American literary Boom occurred he was not given the place he deserved as a fiction writer and essayist. We saw each other many times in Mexico. Actually, he was with us when the magazine Vuelta was about to appear.
He lived in my house twice. On one occasion I went to dinner with Pepe and with Borges, and afterwards we went out for a walk in Buenos Aires. On another occasion Octavio called me on the phone to tell me he’d received a text from Pepe for the magazine: it was a page he’d sent commenting on El manual del distraído. I was filled with satisfaction that he would write about me.
EM: In your evocation of Juan Nuño you say you shared with him that which is so difficult to share, which is called the common voice.
AR: Juan was my friend for more than thirty years. As I say in that essay, he was “a friendship that deepened over time until becoming an unalterable brotherhood.” Juan began as a Hellenist: there are his books, El pensamiento de Platón and La dialéctica platónica. He was close to García Bacca. Later he went to France, but the classical philosophy always remains at the core. He was interested in Sartre, to whom he dedicated a book, and later in mathematical logic and positivist logic. His essays contain a great deal of thematic variety and are characterized by a prose that combines humor and acidity. But what was essential in him was the freedom and the pleasure of writing.
It’s a shame his books don’t circulate more today. I think, for example, La filosofía de Borges should be republished in Spain with the promotion that exceptional text deserves. I’m certain that new edition would be followed by not a few translations. Actually, two excellent books about Borges were written in Caracas: the other one is Borges, el poeta by Guillermo Sucre. I remember the appearance of that book which caught my attention because of its theme. In a certain way, Sucre noticed ahead of time the importance poetry would have within Borges’s work during his final years.
FR: Borges, Nuño…let me return to the philosophical character I see in your literature…
AR: It’s rarely explicitly that way. Perhaps it’s so in El manual del distraído, where I attempt to turn philosophical motives into vital riddles. But in other cases, more indirectly, I believe I attempt to disarm histories, take the air out of them, deconstruct them—but, please, not in the way Derrida does.
I believe a certain irony or a dose of humor or a distancing always accompanies me, which makes me always search for the cat’s fifth foot, which in the end is what philosophers tend to do. I like to pop balloons. In the end, language is an artifice and a labyrinth. I like to play in its crossroads. Maybe that’s what joins my passion for Borges and Wittgenstein.
FR: You don’t think analytical philosophy, which restricts what can be said a great deal, could open the wide world to a freer and more recreational treatment. One which is joyously skeptical, more colorful and multiform, once it has freed itself from the rigidity of the concept; like Montaigne’s journeys without itinerary or calendar.
AR: Well, I don’t think one can establish a type of causality between analytical philosophy and literature. But it could create the possibility of an opening such as the one you mention. One would have to think about it. Besides, analytical philosophy is not so restrictive or it has ended up not being so. In the text “Cartas credenciales” I try to find a link between my philosophical and literary activities and I think I’ve found it in that temperament, in that feeling of the world which rejects the dogmatic and the totalizing and which attempts to travel through the world searching, with a certain hedonism, for novelty, paradoxes, the unexpected, the opaque. A benevolent skepticism, more or less. Perhaps it relates to what you’re saying, we’ll keep talking about it.
EM: Speak to us about the Venezuela you’ve found on this trip.
AR: Both of you have the word in that respect and you’ve already told me a great deal. But I do want to reiterate that this trip has shown me once more how much this country means to me. I have genetic roots, permanent memories, family and friends in this country. To return to UCV to be honored so fraternally is very moving for me. Both of you, my living friends, were at that ceremony, but so were many ghosts from many seasons.
Regarding the country I see, it produces that happiness of meeting once again. But I also share the sorrow I feel in so many people, the sensation of defeat, of historical disillusion, of that modernizing project which began with such splendor almost half a century ago. But never mind that, we must continue. You can always count on me.
{ Eugenio Montejo, Fernando Rodríguez, Alejandro Rossi, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 7 May 2005 }
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