La narrativa de Gustavo Valle se sitúa en los lugares abandonados / Humberto Sánchez Amaya

Gustavo Valle’s Fiction Is Situated in Abandoned Places

Álex Kantor is sick of it. He decides to escape the city that’s been the stage for all his failures. He can’t find himself there. He needs to exile himself from his frustrations, including his family.

This is the leitmotiv of Happening, the most recent book by Gustavo Valle which won the XIII Annual Transgenre Contest sponsored by the Sociedad de Amigos de la Cultura Urbana.

“It’s a fantasy everyone has, to slam the door, take off to an unknown place and start over. These are traumatic decisions that many people never make,” expresses the novelist who recently came to Venezuela to present his work at the Kalathos bookstore and the International Book Fair of Carabobo University.

Desperation is the fuel for the protagonist and his only attachment, at the beginning, is the 1976 Range Rover that will take him to a place where he expects to find some peace. He takes the trip at night with darkness as his accomplice, until an involuntary homicide adds other motives to the anguish of the character, who ends up hiding in the Gulf of Cariaco alongside others who are also waiting for redemption.

Caracas is seen from a distance by the author, specifically from Buenos Aires, where he has lived since 2005. He left Venezuela in 1997, for Spain. “I spent a long time over there. In 2003 I returned to Venezuela for a while, until I left again,” he details.

Unlike the protagonist of his book, Valle assures us that his departure from the country doesn’t have anything to do with any particular torment. He only did it, he affirms, to expand his horizons.

“My imaginary universe is situated here in Venezuela, which means that I work with memory a great deal. I write non-fiction about the place where I live and my fiction is based on the zones I’ve abandoned,” notes the novelist, who is already back in Argentina.

Memory can be deceitful, he admits, but that doesn’t bother him. “The writer is an impostor of memories. He’s permanently placing masks on them. That’s his job. When we evoke the past we always corrupt ourselves and transform ourselves. What occurs is reconfigured and becomes a viscous, unreachable matter.”

He indicates that the escape and the journey are themes in all literatures, but that in Venezuela there’s a particularity that is difficult to ignore. “The most recent Venezuelan circumstances speak of a migratory process that grows more immense each day. There are writers who are placing a magnifying glass to this situation. There’s a discussion about concepts such as flight, exile, escape, none of which were on the menu of terms for Venezuelan literature and for daily occurrences,” affirms Valle, who is now concentrating on a novel about sexual initiation.




{ Humberto Sánchez Amaya, El Nacional, 7 November 2014 }

Gustavo Valle, otro viaje interior / Daniel Fermín

Gustavo Valle, Another Inner Journey

                                  [Photo: Mai Albamonte Pizarro]

Gustavo Valle (Caracas, 1967) had his first migratory experience when he was 17 or 18 years old. That passage through the Gulf of Cariaco later served him when he recreated the landscape in Happening, which won the Multi-Genre Prize of the Sociedad de Amigos de la Cultura Urbana in 2013. A road novel about escape, abandonment, guilt.

“I think escape is a topic that interests me, it’s evident in Venezuela today. Literature doesn’t function like an escape but rather an immersion. Escape translates into a type of unknown map. You don’t know quite where you’re going, but in that movement you might find a few clues.”

The new book by the Venezuelan writer is a story in which the protagonist, a frustrated theater actor, flees after a culpable homicide. An escape that leads him to reencounter himself, his own origins. An existential thriller that is also an inner journey. Like the literature Valle himself enjoys reading and making.

“The main character of my novel confronts extreme situations and the way he finds answers is by going on a trip, or actually an escape, to a remote place. I think that during physical displacements a ferocious mechanism for psychic reflection is activated. My characters are in permanent movement precisely because in that movement they find the answers to those questions that unsettle them.”

Valle is a migrant being. He’s been in Buenos Aires for several years now (before that he spent some time in Spain). His fiction is always bringing him back to his origins. Writing in order to return to memory, to the place he left. His first novel, Bajo tierra (2009), was the product —among other things— of an obsession with Caracas; in Happening, there’s also something of that oppressive city, of that space that expels, or frightens, its inhabitants.

“Writing fiction has moved me to establish my scenes in Venezuela and to imagine the country and its people. More than a reencounter with the country I think it’s a way of surprising myself with it, and of exploring and thinking about it. I mean, it’s an exercise of permanently interpolating my own identity.”

That said, Valle doesn’t write for a Venezuelan reader, nor for any other single nationality. He merely writes, with no other intention.

“Writers simply write for their readers, and before that for themselves, since we’re the first and inevitable reader we have. Readers tend to be a mystery for the writer and writing a book for oneself or for someone else is to aim at a moving target. The best thing is to save that ammunition for the writing itself.”

Valle’s literature tends to evoke memories and nostalgias. Remembering is an exercise of construction, as one of the characters in Happening says. Seeing writing as a form of memory, or —maybe— as a means of remaining through art.

“I believe one of the great tasks of literature and art is to work with memory. And especially in our country, where we’re living through an epidemic of amnesia. But memory, once it’s evoked, modifies itself, transfigures itself, and it moves reality towards a terrain where reflection and judgment can be exercised better. When we turn our glance backwards we’re also imagining our past, which is the best way of looking forward. I mean, without a story there’s no future. But I’m not talking about history’s narrative, which is indispensable, but rather the memory that’s conceived by fiction.”

There’s another phrase in Happening that says, to represent is to be oneself not someone else. Valle thinks writing is also a means of unfolding, of putting on a mask that might be transparent. Or not.

“Not just unpacking yourself, which requires a great deal of bravery, but also unpacking others. Even unpacking everything, if possible: prejudice, power, customs, morality. I mean, when we write we always try to open and unpack. Reality tends to present itself to us in only one of its fronts and the task of the writer is to reveal the others. Just like you on a mask, you can also pull out other ones.”




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 21 September 2014 }

Una lección de abismo (sobre Bajo tierra de Gustavo Valle) / Rafael Castillo Zapata

An Abyss Lesson (on Bajo tierra by Gustavo Valle)


1

Implicitly or explicitly, there undoubtedly exists a history of the reactions of the human imaginary when faced with the telluric manifestations that overwhelm it. A history of the experience of the sublime that is, simultaneously, a history of the experience of the sinister. Let us situate Gustavo Valle’s book in this long constellation of imaginary fabrications by which man’s spirit symbolically faces the powerful and prodigious challenge of great earthly phenomena: earthquakes, cataclysms, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, storms, inundations, hurricanes, eclipses, all of which would have, who knows, their corresponding manifestations, as spiritual doubles, in the labyrinths of consciousness and unconsciousness and would demand, they too, works of discursive configuration and sublimation.

The experience of the catastrophic mudslides that took place on the mountain range that separates Caracas from the Caribbean coastline in December of 1999, with its consequence of dead and disappeared and of extreme psychological suffering among the survivors, produced a collective spiritual commotion from which we Venezuelans still haven’t recovered completely. Bajo tierra is, to a certain degree, a way of assuming the charge of this unresolved mourning wagering for the regenerative powers of the fable, recurring to the magical operation, always humanly efficient and effective, that consists of giving a narrative form to that which moves us. We all need, as the novel’s protagonist confesses, a legend where we can take cover, a myth that can serve us as a shelter and allow us to survive and continue moving forward.

At least in part, one could say that Bajo tierra is the satisfaction of this urgent spiritual need. Thus, the novel clearly inscribes itself in the very heart of a demand by the community to which it is destined in the first place: it is a response by the imagination to a radical demand of the most crude and rude reality. A novel that we’ve needed, then. A novel that contributes to remaking the unraveled thread of the collective soul with an exercise of memory that is at once a celebration of the disposition of the imagination to transform a traumatic catastrophe in an adventure of senses.


2

To achieve this, like any good narrator, Valle pulls the tale from the margin of the problem:he doesn’t face the tragedy of those torrential rain falls head on, he doesn’t describe, nor does he lament. Instead, he organizes a fable that allows the evocation of those events in a mythical key. And he chooses the masterful thread of the story of a son who has lost his father under strange circumstances and who, driven by a compulsion he himself doesn’t know how it begins, he takes on the search of his specter through a labyrinthine landscape that allows the narrator to speak about Caracas, the city affected by those terrible disasters of sky and earth, as if it were reflected within an inwards-looking mirror, in the dim depths of a deep lake. An inverted city, then, which the tale invites us to explore through its subterranean entrails, in an unexpected infra-world that seems too close to the ancestral infernos painted by the most ancient myths. Revealing the flip side of a City that has been run over by the abysmal rush of enraged nature, the narrator makes us descend to the depths where the great mysteries of that earth are brewed, the earth that, unsuspected by the incautious citizens, is alive, traversed by ominous, threatening, latent currents under their feet.


3

Well aware of the close tradition that precedes him, Valle invites us to establish crucial correspondences with magnificent books like the Aeneid or A Journey to the Center of the Earth, which reproduce very ancient scenes of relations with the dead and contact with the entrails of the Earth. Like Aeneas, Sebastián C., the protagonist of Bajo tierra, goes in serach of the trail of his dead father and in a precisely sybilline manner, by means of the mediation of memorable characters such as the manager of the disquieting Hotel Teresa or the shaman on the trail of his lost family, he finds himself involved in a strange adventure crossing the entire valley where Caracas lays as if over a gallery of secret catacombs and submerged passages. Like Axel, in Verne’s novel, he will give himself over to a form of initiation rite that will take him through the terrible tests of a spiritual conversion that develops as he passes through the dark of the abyssal depths of the earth (which is another way of referring to the abyssal depths of the soul) and acceding, eventually, after abundant vicissitudes, to the clarity of light facing the sea’s purifying waters.

A search for the father and an adventure of conversion, Bajo tierra is, at its core, a Telemachy. The impulse toward adventure that irrigates it is precisely the impulse of the search that all losses implie; in this case, the loss of the father. Günter Grass said somewhere that loss had infused him with eloquence: “only what is lost demands infinite names passionately;” and that
demand of passionate names, it seems to me, is none other than the demand of the story, the demand of literature. “I had never before felt the need to look for anyone and much less to tell a story,” says Sebastián C., adding: “I think you only feel that need when what you look for, or hope to tell, has disappeared completely.” We only tell tales about what is absent, one would say; and the narrative trigger of Valle’s novel is precisely that, the attempt to recover something lost, the persecution of a ghost in the depths of a subterranean labyrinth.


4

As a journey to the infra-world, Bajo tierra can quickly be associated with the adventure of a descent into the unconscious, as if this could momentarily be considered a place, a place in the soul. This is why the protagonist’s dreams are so important to the tale’s composition: dreams have to do with the exploration of the subsoil of consciousness and communication with the dead, a space of links beyond the mundane, the flow of transitions between reality and fantasy, between life and death. Dreams, moreover, can become a safe conduct for entering into the labyrinth: a ciphered message that secretly orients us through the trails of the depths, as happens most certainly in the adventure of Sebastián C., with the drawings of Nabarima, the shaman’s lost son, where the hieroglyphs of an esoteric map of the world are read. That’s why so many episodes appear in the novel referring to false readings and the misplacements to which writing can lead, as in a type of speculation on itself that the novel allows to develop, in a secret code, amidst the deployment of its imaginary adventure.


5

So, deploying the resources provided to him by a very antique narrative tradition, Valle transforms the traumatic experience of the telluric commotions of a city to which he is linked by powerful ties of affective and imaginary dependence in an adventure novel. A venturesome novel, launched with courage to run all the risks of a narrative adventure, which is always a dangerous journey, an occasion for misplacement.

There is always an impulse toward adventure, toward the temptation of what is to come in every tale. In the so-called adventure tale, and Bajo tierra is undoubtedly one, this tempting impulse has been redoubled, has been converted into a motive, a trigger of stories chained together by the intermittent proposal of promises of things to come. What has yet to come, what will happen, points to the ventured attraction – misadventure or venturesome – of what will be, of what is arriving, of what will come. As Jankélevitch suggests, the adventure is marked by the consciousness of what is to come and, at the same time, let’s put it this way, by the unawareness of what will come: we know that something approaches, that something always occurs to us, has to arrive, but we ignore what it might be. This is where mystery plants its powerful hoof. There is no tale, Barthes said, without enigma: the tale is the proposal of a question that indefinitely postpones its answer. Bajo tierra clearly responds to these imperatives. It is, by all the conventions, an adventure novel, the notebook of a journey of conversion full of episodes that open and close enigmas, suspend them, partially resolve them, announce them, maintain them in the unsettling suspense where we see the hatching of the intrigue without which the tale’s seduction falls and comes apart. “In order for an adventure to exist,” Jankélevitch himself once again says, “it is necessary that a series of episodes or peripeties be engaged throughout the duration” of an experience or of the telling of that experience (since an adventure tale is as venturesome as the adventure itself, the trail of a verbal search). Bajo tierra is rich in episodes and peripeties to the degree that it wagers openly in favor of the model of the adventure book, purely Vernean. But it is precisely there that some of this tale’s worst temptations hide.


6

The natural pulse of the tale is to infinitely suspend its conclusion: once unleashed, it is called to flow unendingly; this is why it’s necessary, precisely, to submit it to an economy. A narrative economy implies, then, a strategy for controlling this spontaneous compulsion to narrate. The narrator is always at risk of gorging himself with his story and resisting its close; this is why if he doesn’t pay attention to his own rapture, he can turn the tale into something sickly, excessive: after postponing the resolution of its enigmas for so long, he makes the tale stagnate and he runs the risk of transforming it from venturesome to boring. These are dangers that, it seems to me, Valle avoids quite well throughout the book. Only at the end does he seem to lose some control over the reins of his vehicle.


7

The tale, we said, has the impulse – inherent in its own dynamics – of postponing its possible end; but its own forces, at a given moment, oblige it to close. The narrator’s breath runs out, the tale itself is conquered by a certain exhaustion: an acceleration, at times brusque, must be printed so as to stop the flow of the tale before the tension is diluted. The chain of peripeties is concentrated, and the zones of distension are shorter each time. The tale wants to advance at the cost of quick and definitive changes; it wants to finally reach that space of resolution, of detention and repose to which it is, after all, destined by the very material contingency of its existence. Bajo tierra is affected by this fatality in the majority of tales: the quick resolution of the suspended enigmas in the final stretch of the race. That’s why so many tales seem to end so suddenly and leave us with a certain bad taste in our mouth; but not because they end bad but because they change the rhythm in a surprising manner and what had been disposed as a dilated play of entertaining episodes abruptly comes to a stop. Perhaps good tales, those that most powerfully move us to cling to the infinite flow of stories, are those that disappoint us in the end, precisely because they come to a close. Bajo tierra could belong to this family of venturesome adventure tales: it pulls together loose threads very quickly, perhaps, towards the end while leaving others untied. These last ones, the untied, are those that leave open the always imminent possibility of starting the thread over again. The tale, after all, has no end.




{ Rafael Castillo Zapata, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 May 2009 }

Un bolero llamado Caracas / Gustavo Valle

A Bolero Named Caracas


Ever since I’ve known her she hasn’t stopped cross-dressing again and again, always submerged in a frantic race toward metamorphosis and thrift store.

If Caracas were to see herself in a mirror she’d laugh. And she’d laugh with a smoker’s laugh, that cavernous but intimate laugh the most beloved sick people have. Facing a (distorting) mirror she’d stretch, she’d shrink, and in those ominous images would identify herself more clearly.

Caracas has grown but I don’t really know in what way, nor in what direction. One doesn’t see many new buildings, nor too many old buildings, the highways are the same, the streets packed with cars are jut as narrow and noisy. But something has grown, something spills over. The temperature, for example, has gone up in every corner. Even on balconies you can feel the blast of that warm air. The winds that entered the valley through Petare no longer blow, they’ve shifted to other corridors. I breathe a lazy air that seems to come from the subsoil, pass through the asphalt and dance with the motors.

Caracas is a pulmonary city. There are visual cities, like Paris; osseous ones, like Rome; intestinal ones, like Calcutta. But Caracas is alveolar and pneumatic. She has the consistency of smoke, and always seems to be immersed in a haze different from smog. That’s why it’s hard to define her, to limit her. Even her busiest avenues seem to lose themselves in a beyond of street vendors and automobile transit. This isn’t a Caribbean version of London – despite the fact that killers of blondes abound. It’s a mental haze, as though that ant-like effect of the scenery always remained in the eyes of whoever visits her. The same thing happens when we see her from afar, from the heights of Mount Ávila. Down there she seems irregular and mottled, settled amid trees, crawling up the nearby cliffs, expanding without order under a tenuous grey cloud.

And she exhibits herself, she disrobes, revealing everything. From the shiny glass buildings to the corners full of trash; from the dressed-up housewives of the East to its most scandalous murders. Shameless, she likes easy compliments, and make-up makes her delirious. She always wears new little dresses. She likes loud colors that will keep her happy, because if one thing is true it’s that Caracas is a happy city. She avoids melancholy at all costs, she flees sadness like the plague and all of us Caraqueños are willing to die (and to kill) before becoming sad.

I thought her rhythm was quick, vibrant, frenetic. I believed no other city was as lost as she was in her crazy, flustered movement, but I was wrong. Her speed is only an illusion, her vertiginous march is barely a simulacrum. She doesn’t move: she sways. A daughter of the Caribbean in the end, her speed is subdued. Her splendid traffic jams slow her down, the minimal resolution of her functionaries put the brakes on her. And it’s just that there’s no hurry – and this makes you desperate. Desperation got confused with speed and all of us Caraqueños convinced ourselves we live in a vibrant city, as if this were synonymous with something good, because Caracas, among other things, likes to compare herself.

At night, she has the face of a woman who’s visited many operation rooms. Like the cabaret stars who’ve invested their years between dance and whiskey, and at an old age regain time by giving themselves over to liposuction or applying enough silicone to their butts.

And Caracas is a city fragmented even in the possibility of its happiness. And if we think of an order, a logical structure we won’t be thinking of Caracas but rather of its dream. A dream that has been asleep for many years, hanging from a hammock at an altitude of one thousand meters.

Everyone tells me: “Don’t go downtown and if you go don’t dress like that, wear some old blue jeans, an old shirt, and no watch because it’ll get stolen, be careful with the esquina caliente,” and things like that. But I love to go downtown. I worked downtown for many years. I always liked downtown, its confusion, its thanatic energy, the periphery of downtown. And it’s just so chaotic that it’s charming to see how impossible it is for people to agree: street vendors, cars, pedestrians, they all mix together in an asphyxiating blend. It’s called downtown but it’s actually an outskirt. It’s a downtown at the margin of everything: of the law, of reason, of the city itself. Or better yet: it’s another city. The most real one of all. Once you’re downtown the rest seems like an incredible invention. The East: Fantasy Island. I love downtown Caracas because it’s so real it scares you. I love downtown because incomprehensible things happen there.

Someone once said Caracas didn’t exist, didn’t have a memory, that because she was continuously changing she never ended up being anything, and that her landscape was a sum of temporary buildings, ruined houses that are rebuilt, businesses that change branches, names, go bankrupt, close their doors and then open under another name with new merchandise. That’s why it’s hard to recognize her, she lives in a carnival of new situations and always takes one mask off to put on another: she dresses up like New York with its knife-like buildings, or wears Bogota’s aristocratic ceramics, or invents the malls of Miami, or lifts up Los Angeles-style asphalt tongues, or crowds herself with street vendors like the markets in Cairo and reproduces Calcutta’s abundant street kids.

Caracas is an emotional city. But it’s not a romantic geography, nor a postcard where two hands clasp each other over a background of renovated streets, nor is it the landscape of urban passion that Robert Doisneau has magnetized onto our pupils. Caracas is emotional because she isn’t able to control herself, and she’s given herself over to the capricious game of her mortal contradictions. Caribbean, but at one thousand meters above sea level; modern and provincial; frenetic and simultaneously slow in a combination that drives people mad; seductive and violent. Like a perplexed and also desperate lover, she ceases to be herself so as to always be another, a little more cowardly and attractive, enchantingly pathetic, and in that transit she vanishes and becomes something strange, even to herself.




* Fragment from the homonymous text published in La paradoja de Ítaca: De ciudades y de viajes (Caracas: Ministerio de la Cultura/Consejo Nacional de la Cultura, 2005).

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{ Gustavo Valle, Los Hermanos Chang, No. 27, Anno 2, November 2008 }