Valeria Luiselli’s narrative hide-and-seek

Full title: Faces in the Crowd

Author: Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 150 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Granta (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

“If you dedicate your life to writing novels, you’re dedicating yourself to folding time.”

(Faces in the Crowd)

Things get complicated in Faces in the Crowd every time it comes to spatial and chronological transgressions. The female narrator meets (or thinks she’s met) the Mexican poet Gilberto Owen on the New York subway. Owen himself meets (or thinks he’s met) Ezra Pound, Federico Garcia Lorca, or Joshua Zvorsky. The latter, a made-up character, is an impersonation of Louis Zukovsky (it takes only a few clues to figure it out). Valeria Luiselli plays expertly the game of who’s who in a style that smacks of Borges. This is a style that doesn’t bring any light to the puzzle represented by the text but, on the contrary, complicates every instance of uncertainty. It all goes crazy, until the reader gives up diagramming connections and accepts to play the game only for the pleasure of it. Of course, tracing the relations between characters is not an impossible task. The aha moments, when you recognize Chekhov’s gun before it gets fired, are everywhere. Hence the pleasure that comes with this novel. But the crux of the matter is this: time and space are relative, fictional chronotops allow intermixing of characters and interweaving of narratives.

Identities and settings are, therefore, crucial, as they provide the foundation of the entire story. Not only is the text split in two, with two narrative voices at two different moments in time going their mildly separate ways (one: a female writer/translator in Mexico City somewhere in the late 2000s; two: Gilberto Owen, decades earlier, strolling the streets of Harlem); it also features a nosy reader who keeps upsetting the progression of the narrative – up to a certain point, when he upsets no more. This intruder is the writer/translator’s husband, who has been peering over her shoulder while she’s been writing this novel that we’re reading. The husband comments every time he finds the occasion, picking on details of the story that involve himself or his wife’s amorous adventures. The role of this intruder is to shift the focus of narration and to highlight the artificial aspect of the fiction. He disagrees with certain episodes, questions others, and appears to be influenced in his actions by what he’s reading in his wife’s novel. Because of this character, a further complication of the narrative occurs. There is the level of the actual novel on the one hand, and the time-zero of narration on the other hand. The latter is still a fiction to us, the actual readers, but it acts as a real-life situation to the fictional reader who intervenes in the story.

Valeria Luiselli. Source: Translatable

You see how things get difficult to follow. Or should I say difficult to explain in a few lines? Faces in the Crowd (with a title taken, at least in its English rendition, from Ezra Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro” – so here’s another complication) needs to be followed closely to be truly enjoyed. It’s not the kind of book you hear about and decide you don’t have to read because you’ve got the plot, so why bother. Its intricate intertextuality and the network of relationships and trajectories make it a game worth playing, an exercise in readerly attention.

It’s quite something to follow the way Luiselli twists events like a well-trained puppeteer, giving them a different connotation or a chance to be seen from a new perspective. I’m all for the following example, a fragment where she imagines Ezra Pound at the very moment when he is struck by the image that will produce “In a Station of the Metro.” Note, this is Gilberto Owen (1904-1952) speaking.

“The first thing I do remember is the face of Ezra Pound in the crowd waiting on the platform for the train. Of course it wasn’t really him. The doors opened and there he was on the platform, leaning against a pillar. We looked each other straight in the eye, as if in recognition, although he couldn’t possibly have heard anything about me, a young Irish-Mexican, neither red haired nor good looking, more bastard than poet. I was transfixed – instead of getting off the train, I let the passengers leave and be replaced by others, identically ugly, overheated and ordinary. Pound didn’t board the train. He was lost among the crowd of faces on the platform, faces like the wet petals of his poem.”

For those who don’t remember Pound’s poem, here it is in its entirety:

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.”

The fragment by Luiselli describes a look from the opposite side of a train platform, seeing Pound as he sees the incoming trains. It calls for some good courage only to go there.

What else. Well, this: unreliable narrator. A trick that can look cheap when handled by certain realist authors, is given a major part to play, and to remarkable effects. The female narrator (I hate the fact that she doesn’t have a name, so I have to keep calling here this) makes no secret of the fact that she’s a liar. She’s faked translations of poems by Owen, pretending they’d been done by Zvorsky (a fictional character himself, so another case of lying); she’s also lied to her husband about her sexual encounters; she’s lying through her teeth every time she has the opportunity. And yet she is the one whose story has to be believed. Everything hinges on the issue of truth: of how hard it is to acquire it, of how complicated the most straightforward form of truth could sometimes be. And guess what? The reader does believe her. We believe the story precisely because we know it’s based on lies, illusions, hallucinatory ideation. We believe the story because we know it’s fiction. That’s the greatest achievement of this little debut novel, the reason it has been so excitedly received by critics. That, of course, plus the author’s talent, her proficient handling of literary references, the intricacies of her architectonics, the tricks she plays on us, readers, when she pulls a stint of citation of which we might not be aware.

It’s sometimes nothing but a game, a game of guessing, a game of reading enjoyments. Best described in a passage like the following, where the female narrator, the metanarrative guarantor of the story, insinuates her condition in the form of a childish game:

“We play at hide-and-seek in this enormous house. It’s a different version of the game. I hide and the others have to find me. Sometimes hours go by. I shut myself up in the closet and write long, long paragraphs about another life, a life which is mine but not mine. Until someone remembers that I’m hiding and they find me.”

It’s this constant search for the characters, for their connections and their functions, that gives the novel that special air of a labyrinth (o, Borges, you again!), of an experiment well played. The others in the fragment just quoted – who could they be. Us, of course, the readers. The story is all about us, like it was in Last Year in Marienbad, a film Luiselli quotes, I think (now I can’t be sure but what the hell), so as to throw yet another allusion at us.

Allusion taken.

Dylan Horrocks and the aesthetic of incompleteness

Full title: Incomplete Works

Author: Dylan Horrocks

Genre: Comic strips
Attributes: 192 pages, paperback
Publisher: Victoria University Press (2014)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

What’s left after an artist has published everything deemed publishable? This is the question that imposes itself in relation to Dylan Horrocks’ collection, Incomplete Works. The volume is an anthology of things scattered about, of morsels almost forgotten. The detail is important because these pieces (not debris, not rubbles, not wasted effort) draw attention to the importance of remainders. The things left behind gain a voice of their own by means of such exercises in remembering.

The mood is often gloomy in the earlier comics. They occupy themselves with the sad figure of a cartoonist away from home (living in London but dreaming always of New Zealand), whose art struggles to take shape and who lives through bouts of almost-depressive writer’s blocks

"When night came the moon hung like a ball of antarctic ice, reminding me of home."

There’s rarely a happy moment in these pieces, dark and inundated by shadows, with characters resembling the author’s physiognomy and with the tools of his trade looming like self-harming weapons:

“The long afternoons wear on; work slows. Inspiration is not forthcoming. Dates and deadlines evaporate. Where does it all go – all the wasted time, the infertile hours? How does a week become a day, an hour… ?”

And to explain, there’s a simple definition to be read, the kind of thing capable of making one turn one’s back to London in order to have one’s eyes facing distant home, lost somewhere in the opposite hemisphere (of the world, of the brain?):

“Nostalgia is simply memory detached from time – moments from the past turned into lazy eternities… […] Trying to catch up… and failing. Only the past is free of that constant queasy sense of time-driven guilt.”

There’s a lot of existentialist angst in these first cartoons, in the vein just exemplified above. Not unlike the tone of voice that comes from any immigrant who’s ever put his ache into words.

The mood is forced on by the sounds of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, with its provoking silences, its obsessive returns upon the central theme, its sense of being on the way of saying more.

Dylan Horrocks. Source: Victoria University Press

Some of Horrocks’ strips read like that. They are multi-themed because they are fragments. They’ve been collected from an unstated portfolio that contains failed projects, minute exercises, topical gigs, miscellaneous jobs. Put together as such, they draw a familiar kind of itinerary, an autobiography in comic strips that needed to be gathered in one place in order to be remembered as a whole.

The scope of the collection is ample. Chronologically, it covers a period of just over a quarter century (26 years, to be more precise, i.e. 1986 to 2012). Generically and thematically, it moves from memoir-style reflections to dream-like formations that tap into the fantastic and the other-worldly, and from contemporary one-page photographic records to sketches of historical events.

The autobiographical pieces stand out for that unique quality ordinary readers look after when reading artists’ memoirs: their access to secrets of the trade, to biographical details. That’s how a piece like “The Last Fox Story” (of 1990) becomes of interest. The longest of the pieces in the collection, it tells, in single-panel drawings, the story of Horrocks’ stay in London and his artistic tribulations. It is a series of sketches, plans, reproductions, and sometimes text-only descriptions of his struggle to make it through.

There’s a description attached in the Notes section at the end of the book, which is worth quoting in full, so as to let clarification materialize out of the author’s own words:

“THE LAST FOX STORY (1990): mostly drawn in ballpoint on memo paper and first published as a 104-page A6 mini-comic, printed on the office photocopier at Waterstone’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London (where I was working at the time). I began writing it for the final issue of Fox Comics (sadly never published), in which contributors were invited to tell stories about their own relationship with comics.”

That describes it pretty well. The piece moves elegantly from crude notations to reflections on home and distance, with the occasional despair that comes to irk an artist who hasn’t been allowed to roam the stratospheres of art:

“I am in London, alone & without much money. I am to become a professional cartoonist, but so far no-one seems able to understand my work.”

Of course, Dylan Horrocks has moved away from that. Or so it seems from the rest of the comic strips, where he exercises confidence and where he takes up vast projects without thinking twice, in spite of the fact that some of them showed slim chances of success to start with. Throughout his career but mostly in the latest years, Horrocks has also shown more than an artist’s interest in comics. He teaches art and he researches art. As it becomes apparent through some of the pieces in the collection, he’s worked on several projects dealing with the history of New Zealand or the history of New Zealand comics. Such is the case of his study of Barry Linton (“To the I-Land”), his references to Eric Resetar, a pioneer of New Zealand comics, or the allusions (comical or serious) to Captain James Cook’s travels of discovery in the eighteenth century, which led to the discovery of what is now New Zealand.

To end with, one must know that Dylan Horrocks is not just a local champion. He has featured on the world scene of his art in various ways. “A Cartoonist’s Diary,” the last piece in the book, was serialized in 2012 on The Comics Journal. His own website appears to be a hit too. He has been a constant presence at conventions and conferences, has contributed to collections, has given public lectures, and has been massively promoting the art that’s been keeping him busy for so long. All this makes the volume so much more interesting, especially to those who are trying their hand at the art of drawing. They will learn from Horrocks, and they will find solace, if needed.

Hats, decapitations, and hippopotamuses

Full title: Down the Rabbit Hole

Author: Juan Pablo Villalobos, translated by Rosalind Harvey

Genre: Novella
Attributes: 74 pages, paperback
Publisher: And Other Stories (2011)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Down the Rabbit Hole exhibits the essential attributes of Narcoliteratura. It has at the centre of the narrative a Mexican gang doing its deeds, armed to their teeth, killing, bribing, intimidating, making a lot of money and focusing almost exclusively on the protection of the immediate family. It is against this background that a young boy by the name of Tochtli (with very few exceptions, the characters have Nahuatl names that signify animal species; Tochtli = rabbit) leads his secluded life. The narrative is told exclusively from his perspective. The proximity of a person so young to violence of that magnitude is likely to upset some readers. Too bad for them, because Villalobos does a great job at giving the narrator a voice that’s innocent in spite of all that lies behind his life. And that voice makes everything interesting and worth reading. Not to mention the complexity of the text itself, a short but incredibly dense novella that exploits the experimental nature of the topic to incredible extents.

Like all young boys, Tochtli goes about getting wise about the world. For that purpose, his father, Yolcaut (= rattlesnake), the head of the gang, also known to the media as The King, has hired a private tutor. So Tochtli learns things. But he doesn’t do so the official way, not like other kids his age who attend proper schools with proper teachers teaching proper disciplines with proper learning outcomes. Mazatzin (=deer), the tutor, turns out to be an infiltrated journalist, but one who’s had the chance to put some seeds into the boy’s mind. His influence, however, is minimal, since the dominant figure is the father, who always speaks to the boy in the language of gangs and who teaches Tocthli almost everything he knows.

Juan Pablo Villalobos. Source: And Other Stories

The two of them play macabre games in which dead bodies and killing techniques are made to sound as innocent and child-like as a game of What’s the Time, Mister Wolf?

“One of the things I’ve learned from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brain they’ll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, although it must be fun to watch. I know all this from a game Yolcaut and I play. It’s a question-and-answer game. One person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.‘One bullet in the heart.’‘Corpse.’‘Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.’‘Alive.’‘Three bullets in the pancreas.’‘Too early to tell.’”

Speaking of things that might upset some readers, this is father and son having quality time together. Tochtli spends his childhood thus, mostly bored by the seclusion that’s the only thing he’s ever known. From his father, he learns how to count and how to account. He learns that the essence of things stands in numbers, whether the number of bullets that can kill a person or the number of killings shown on tv, or the amount of money that can buy someone’s silence, or simply the taking into account of the family’s possessions:

“[O]ur palace has ten rooms: my bedroom, Yolcaut’s bedroom, the hat room, the room Miztli and Chichilkuali use, Yolcault’s business room and five more empty rooms we don’t use.”

From his father, Tocthi also learns a nationalist sense of pride and a macho way of assessing self-worth.

“What I definitely am is macho. For example: I don’t cry all the time because I don’t have a mum. If you don’t have a mum you’re supposed to cry a lot, gallons of tears, two or three gallons a day. But I don’t cry, because people who cry are faggots. When I’m said Yolcaut tells me not to cry, he says:‘Chin up, Tochtli, take it like a man.’”

The entire novella has this tone of accountancy under the sign of maturity about it, the narrative voice recording life as if it were a ledger, with its various tables and categories and classes, their use, their worth, their applicability. Tochtli lists his desires the way he lists the rooms in the palace in which he lives. Whatever it is that he wants, he registers no apparent change in emotional intensity. He wants hats, he wants a samurai sword, he wants a Liberian pigmy hippopotamus, and all his wishes are granted. In what counts as his normality there’s a very short distance between desire and fulfilment. And because of that desire itself doesn’t stand out as anything special. It’s just a thing that exists out there, a list of wants, another list.

In spite of all this, though, Tochtli doesn’t sound like a spoiled child. He catalogues the world this way because this is how the world is to him. He doesn’t throw tantrums, he doesn’t stomp his feet while requesting things, he doesn’t ask for the impossible. What’s more, he’s intelligent and sympathetic. He’s capable of humour and of reason. When he acquires the hippopotamuses he’s been dreaming of (yes, there’s not just one but two, a pair), he calls them Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of Austria. Black humour, as it turns out to be, but humour nonetheless. And for all these things Tochthli sounds likeable, clever, congenial. Clever as the author who wrote him up, and who made this truly brilliant parallel between decapitations, of which the book is full.

Violent zoology: Walton Ford’s watercolours

Full title: Pancha Tantra

Author: Walton Ford. Edited by Bill Buford

Genre: Art
Attributes: 304 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Taschen (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)


Walton Ford’s watercolors aren't meant to be viewed. They're meant to be read. There's a pregnant narrative quality to every single one of these tableaux vivants, where animals partake in a silent show full of arrested action. They are fables and not quite fables. They have the diction of animal tales meant to be read as allegories (as something other than they are). But this fableness of theirs has a problem when it comes to moralitas. You don’t get the this-is-what-happens-if-you-do-that kind of lesson from these watercolours. The message is much more invested than this early-childhood, easy-morality tone.

Taking their inspiration from books researched by Ford (see quotes written across painted surfaces, scientific denominations, various references, research notes), these paintings do the intelligent work usually ascribed to quotations. They are not illustrations, but rather references. They point at events as well as their unexplored possibilities.

But let’s talk about the subject matter. Animals, yes, but what animals?

Trapped animals.

Indeed, a lot of Ford’s creatures are caught in all manner of setups: snares just about to close around their necks, hooves on the point of being severed, the mouth of a snake swallowing a whole flock of birds like a cage about to close forever. This idea of imprisonment leading to death is everywhere: a domestication-in-the-making, the approaching of the hour of becoming-food, deaths by riffles or by fangs. These, as well as their multiple variants. There’s a cow being killed by a jaguar, monkeys eaten by crocodiles, birds swallowing fish larger than their own bodies, a parrot strangled by a macaque, a secretary eating a cobra while at the same time many other cobras are trying to eat her. An entire zoology of violence takes place in Ford’s works. There are killings every step of the way, there are things animals do to other animals, things that are aimed at annihilation.

But there are also the violent acts enabled by civilization, and these are of much more import. One example: Pantherausbruch, a haunting description of a hunt for a panther escaped from a Swiss zoo, with the animal in the foreground, a close-up on its panic, winter fog laced around its mouth; all against the background of an Alpine village, humans carrying torches, their noises lost in the distance but approaching ever so slowly, the killing machine closing on the animal step by step.

Even more striking (already observable in Panterausbruch) is the placement of animals within human environments. Just as the original texts quoted by Ford were records of first-hand witnesses, Ford’s canvases too are interested in putting the animal between quotation marks (symbols of the alphabet, traces of signification, distributions of human power against natural order).

In Le Jardin, a rather faithful rendition of George Catlin’s 19^th-century painting Buffalo Hunt (minus the bull’s posture: disarticulated, near-expired, in Catlin’s version; only tired, still capable of glory, in Ford’s), the animals are placed in a colonial garden. The only spectator to the carnage, a crow perched on top of a stone vase. Given the background, the composition takes on an interesting conceptual quality. It’s within the human frame that the incident unfolding in the centre converts into calamity. As made apparent by a quote from Catlin’s own notes, the event becomes a tragedy only when regarded by the human observer, who forces the establishment of an improbable relationship only for the sake of a story told in anthropocentric terms:

“I rode nearer to the pitiful object as he stood bleeding and trembling before me, and said to him, ‘Now is your time, old fellow, and you better be off.’ Though blind and nearly destroyed, there seemed to be evidently a recognition of a friend in me, as [the buffalo] straightened up, and, trembling with excitement, dashed off at full speed upon the prairie, in a straight line.”

In Ford’s version, the human gaze is replaced by human signs. The garden, with its pointed hedge structures and its vastness bounded by stone fences, does not need the gaze; the human is there in every object. The human, symbolized, with great irony, by the watching crow.

One needs to check the details of these paintings, because a lot of the story lies in these particulars.

Take the example of La Fontaine: a life-and-death battle between a lion and an alligator. Once again, the scene is placed in a distinct human environment. Another garden, another arena. But it’s not only the fountain that makes the human presence apparent. Scattered all over the foreground there are flowers, squashed or simply fallen to the ground; flowers that appear to have been part of a lost bouquet. In other words, flowers picked by a human hand (violence done to vegetation for a presumed aesthetic purpose). And to make things more explicit, there lies, in the lower left corner, a fan. Likely to have been dropped to the ground when the terrible affair between the two animals came centre-stage. Humans vacating a scene of animal violence, but a kind of violence that takes place precisely within the precincts of a human structure. See the stone fence visible in the background, and like a joke, like a terrible irony, a passageway left open – the promise of an escape that won’t take place. This is a case of perverse return upon origins, a circular tale that confuses stages in order to highlight the crux.

But that’s not all. It’s not just any human that’s left traces in the landscape. The fan is a woman’s object. One meant to suggest fragility. The fragility of the female race, their animal-like condition: tamed by the male, reduced to aesthetic fatality, chased out of the social sphere. What was the woman doing here? Here, in this arena where the animals fight their ultimate battle? Must there be a connection? There must. There is. Two tragedies of the same imprisonment, two types of escape.

These are the references made by Walton Ford’s watercolours. He doesn’t stop at the fable stage. His works are not field notes either. No. His paintings are references to the human that once decided to bring the animals into their circle of violence. Panchatantra in the twenty-first century.

Thomas Bernhard, the reluctant prize-winner

Full title: My Prizes. An Accounting

Author: Thomas Bernhard; translated by Carol Brown Janeway

Genre: Non fiction
Attributes: 130 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (2010)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)


Thomas Bernhard was the controversial writer par excellence. Reading him is like finding out that nothing’s worth anything, that death takes all, that life, and especially life in the shadow of the state and its institutions, is an evil that must be rejected, even when it’s singing your praises in the choirs of public glory. The self-explanatory title of this collection of narratives (memoirs would perhaps be a better word to describe them) says it all: the volume takes to task literary prizes in nine stories about awards offered Thomas Bernhard during his life. To be more precise, nine stories about prizes and the scorn with which the recipient took them.
What must be said, if only as a parenthesis, is that the moments illustrated in these brief texts are moments of the last century. The solemnity Bernhard describes in them (and takes good care to ridicule) needs to be regarded with that chronological distance in mind. And it must also be regarded with the mind on the Austro-Hungarian festiveness and its must-do conventions: brass bands, public speeches, bratwursts, pints of cold beer, this and that. Of course, not all of the above is described as such in the volume, but some elements are pretty strongly implied, and to good humorous effect. What we witness with every such event are gatherings designed to consolidate that special kind of place known as Mitteleuropa, which celebrated writers for their compliance with the rules of Central-European provincialism.
Which is precisely what Bernhard despised the most.
But despising the spirit while at the same time accepting its prizes is likely to put one in a delicate situation. Hypocrisy springs to mind. It certainly did cross the minds of Bernhard’s contemporaries, especially the ones who missed no opportunity to cast their criticizing nets into his nonconformist oeuvre.
But Bernhard didn’t deny the allegations. On the contrary, he made them himself. Throughout these pieces Bernhard not only reminisced about events, he also remembered the strange state of acceptance-rejection that accompanied the news of yet another award, of yet another festive requirement:
“I had a constant empty feeling in my stomach whenever there was a question of accepting a prize, and my mind balked every time. But I remained too weak in all the years that prizes came my way to say no. There, I always thought, is a major hole in my character. I despised the people who were giving the prizes but I didn’t strictly refuse the prizes themselves. It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated ceremonies but I took part in them, I hated the prize-givers but I took their money.”
This passage pretty much synthesizes the entire volume. The short texts give off this constant feeling of uneasiness, even when the voice that narrates lists the advantages that came with the prizes generously offered by the Austrian State: money, fame, and the usual incentives.
So why take those prizes? Why refuse them? There’s a schizoid situation, right there: a demand to choose between two extremes. Bernhard, though, knew better than getting lost in some conceptual Manichaeism. He took the all-or-nothing approach and chose the easiest shortcut, so as to avoid idealizing his scorn. Take the money and run was his philosophy, albeit not literally so.
What’s also interesting to note is how Bernhard refused almost programmatically to write himself up as a writer; a choice likely to contain the answer to all the questions regarding his dualistic approach to prize-giving. The narrative voice of his mini-memoirs is not the voice of a writer.
Exclamation mark!
With very few exceptions (two or three if I remember correctly), the person who speaks is not caught up in writer-like activities. He never writes. He never reads. He talks to his editor once only. He doesn’t give speeches outside the prize-giving ceremonies. He doesn’t participate in public readings. What he does is in itself provincial and lame: he spends time with his aunt (the person who appears in every single one of the texts), he purchases, drives, and wrecks a car, he buys a derelict farmhouse and forgets about it, he hires a suit for one of the ceremonies and spends most of the time reflecting on the suit and almost no time on the literary qualities that had brought him the prize in the first place.
These are the actions that define the narrator of these texts. He’s not concerned with any of the life-and-death situations of Bernhard’s literary texts. And this is where the irony of the volume lies. A person who doesn’t act as a writer is given the honors associated with the profession. He takes them like a simple citizen, almost always surprised by the decision, almost always disgusted by the award-giving committees.
It’s significant to note that the only award he did accept with a degree of pride was the Literary Prize of the Federal Chamber of Commerce. The reason he felt good about this one in particular?
“From the beginning I associated this prize not with my activities as a writer but with my activities as an apprentice salesman [the profession Bernhard had before his writing career] and during the ceremony, which had no connection whatever to the city of Salzburg […] the only thing spoken of by the gentlemen of the Federal Chamber of Commerce who had given me the prize was Bernhard the apprentice salesman and never Bernard the writer.”
So yes, Thomas Bernhard did feel the urge to class himself outside of the literary elite. Which explains the contempt in his tone. But one must not understand him as a total misanthrope. It’s not the literary world as a whole that he despised. He speaks highly of minor but honest Austrian and German writers, and brings up the issue of the eccentric viewpoints that attracted public scorn against him and Peter Handke. It’s precisely because he identified himself as part of a group of intellectuals who did literature for the sake of it rather than for the sake of regional recognition, that Bernhard found pleasure in denying his affiliation to the trade of writers:
“I felt tremendously well among the worthy gentlemen of the merchant class and the whole time I spent with these gentlemen I had the impression I didn’t belong to literature, I belonged to the merchants.”
The message is clear. It stands out as an exercise in disparagement. Thomas Bernhard, a man who worked by Mitteleuropäische Zeit, a time of his own: not chronology but simple passing of time; not history but honest routines.

Yuri Herrera from narcosphere to immigrations

Full title: Signs Preceding the End of the World

Author: Yuri Herrera

Genre: Novel
Attributes: 128 pages, hard cover
Publisher: And Other Stories (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

I watched this documentary the other night, called Narco Cultura. It's about this Mexican popular epidemic of cultural products grown around drug cartels and the lives of drug traffickers south of the American border. This taste for outlaws and their adventures has birthed a literary offspring of its own. It's called Narcoliteratura or, even better to an English-tuned ear that’s familiar to the notion of the Latin American Boom, Tragic Realism. It deals with the same topics as the larger Narco Cultura phenomenon: violence, criminal acts, small-town glories based on fear and territorial claims, all forming what might be called a narcosphere, where everything revolves around the handling and using of drugs, plus the implications of such undertakings.

Yuri Herrera's novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World, takes the genre and goes with it to a certain extent. The novel starts in a poor Mexican village where everything seems to be regulated by small cliques debating their turf. In the village there's this young woman, Makina, who has a problem to solve: she needs to cross the border to find her brother. It soon becomes apparent that the operation is easier said than done. She wouldn't stand the slimmest chance of succeeding by herself, so she has to go the 'natural' way, i.e. the way of the criminal factions that run the businesses of her home place. They're up for the task, since they have a whole network in place: men to facilitate the crossing, men to provide accommodation, men to protect her and men to introduce her to other men, who can also introduce her to other men, who can etc. etc.

The network works perfectly but there's one grand obstacle: the lure of the place Makina is going to. Her brother, as it turns out, has settled north of the border. We don’t know exactly where, because none of the places in the novel is called anything recognizable. The search for a brother who doesn’t want to return gives the young woman a bigger problem to deal with and a bunch of thoughts to mess up her mind.

To Yuri Herrera, this novella offers the opportunity to do many things. For instance, to practice the dynamics of a typical narrative scheme: protagonist, antagonist, dispatcher, helpers, destination, denouement. All these plus many other elements of Proppian morphology are identifiable at a mere glance. Textbook Formalism, to put it otherwise. Herrera hasn't made it a hard task for his readers to find these elements and enjoy their familiar feel.

Yuri Herrera. Source: Malinche

Then, at a conceptual level, he's got the chance to explore North-American mestizaje, and especially its tex-mex variety. He does so in a poetic manner that reminds me of Gloria Anzaldúa. Like her, Herrera contracted a passionate leading character who's given this unique opportunity to put her in-betweenness to the test. There's a scene (recognizable, I'm sure, to people in the US-Mexico border area) in which a frustrated cop, the usual patriot-cum-chauvinist who uses authority to express his scorn for 'illegal aliens.' The scene is powerful. It forms what's likely to have been intended as the climax of the novel. The cop has forced a group of Mexicans to kneel in front of him and he mocks one of them who was carrying a volume of poetry. The cop rips a page out of the book and demands that the would-be poet write down something in English. The man is lost for words, humiliated, embarrassed, mortified. And here's where Makina, who speaks well the "Anglo tongue," intervenes and recites a chant of the humiliated immigrant.

“We are to blame for this destruction, we who don’t speak your tongue and don’t know how to keep quiet either. We who didn’t come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take our jobs, who dream of wiping our shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you’d never known, who deliver your dope, who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.”

The words of the barbarian put the cop to silence. A battle is won. A symbolic one, of course, but one all the more important as it is on foreign territory.

Then there's another passage where Herrera gets even more Anzalduesque, exploring the picture of the border people, the Chicanos, speakers of two tongues, makers of two cultures, people of complexity and simplicity all in one bundle. It's the protagonist speaking again:

“More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongues is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift. They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugate latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there.”

All this is said and done against the background of narcoliteratura's own turf. The criminal life of the Mexican as well as American undergrounds loom over all these episodes with the weight of a cloud about to burst and crash everything underneath. But nothing bad really ever happens. The text is peppered with traffickers and pushers and all manner of mischief-makers, but the essence isn't there. Crime is not the major purpose. The novella deals with criminality as a liminal space: a sort of in-between that allows passage of people and destinies, highlighting only as much as it's needed to understand the passage of other things: of cultures and cultural allegiances, of politics and political dirty works; but most importantly, of stories and storytelling.

Sydney Padua and the computer that almost existed

Full title: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer

Author: Sydney Padua

Genre: Graphic novel
Attributes: 320 pages, hard cover
Publisher: Pantheon (2015)

Between 0 and 1: Zero (i.e. borrowed from local library)

The book’s a jaunt through Victorian pretty-much-everything. To be more specific (…ish…): 1. Fashion (a lot of it, to keep the reader well immersed in the ‘spirit of the era’; btw, you’ve got to see the drawings to understand); 2. Technology (the book’s concerned primarily with this, since it’s set out to contemplate a possible alternative reality centered on a technological near-miss: the invention of the computer); 3. Historical facts (tons of them, every page explaining details about the era through copious references to primary sources, citations, encyclopedic blowing up of minute biographical details, etc. etc. etc.); 4. Mores and thereabouts (from literary salons to scientific soirées, a lot is being covered and presented with gusto).

Of course, as they say in Germany, Victorian times call for Victorian measures. Meaning: being so steeped in these times of ours when we take delight in all manner of reenactments, we might as well take pleasure in contemplating some Steampunk vogue (itself a conglomerate of fashion, mores, and all things Victorian). Which makes the Babbage case (see below for clarifications), with the addition of characters such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his crazy plans for the employment of the steam engine, pretty spot-on, since they’re prime material for the exploration of all of the above.

So Charles Babbage. A man who went down in history as the first who had an inkling of what a computer (called by him a “difference engine,” for a better-made philosophical case) might have looked like. Also, on the less fortunate side of his destiny, as one who proposed measures for the replacement of human workers by automated operations and/or machines. It’s said in the book:

“As I outlined in Machinery and Manufactures (6s. bound in cloth), true savings in labor costs arise from de-skilling complex tasks, so they may be done by any easily replaceable ignorant menial!”

In which by the menial is meant (symbolically first, actually later) an apparatus devoid of soul; in other words, a machine.

Good material for the Luddites to exercise their counter-arguments in their revolts. There are pages in the book that capture the protests of the masses, and they must be taken into consideration as well. At least for historical color.

Ada Lovelace, the other name in the title, has a story of her own too. Daughter of Byron (yes, the Byron), she was trained in sciences rather than the poetic reverberations of her father, who seems to have advised her strongly against his own profession. Or that’s what some letter fragments say. So she became a quite astute mathematician, met Babbage, worked with him for a while (some saying she was behind his calculations, as a do-all high priestess of the Difference Engine), but then their relationship broke, Lovelace died at the age of 36 (the same as her father’s! damn destiny!), while Babbage lived on to die a poor, bitter man, with none of his dreams fulfilled.

Sydney Padua. Source: Forbidden Planet

These are the facts. But Sydney Padua builds a parallel story. Of course, her art permits such escapades. And so we see Lovelace and Babbage succeeding in building that proto-computer that never got built in reality. And once they see it working they put it to use. More precisely, they sort out a financial crisis, get to work on manuscript corrections, go nuts about mathematical possibilities, and more, and more. As it’s easy to see, a lot of fictional stuff. Yet isn’t fiction, as they say in Magna Germania, the meat and bone of progress?

But to get back to Lovelace. Padua suggests she was powerless against the Byronic legacy (and she may not be the only one to suggest so); powerless in the sense of unable to avoid the fictional aspect of mathematics, the storytelling inherent in numbers, the narrative lure of formulae and theorems. Ada soliloquizes at some point:

“Nonsense! The most advanced mathematicians accept unquantified symbols in their realm! In any event, I am a historical figure, and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Humanities!”

We appreciate the joke, but that’s exactly the point, madam la comtesse. Being made into a comic character, you’ve been moved away from the fact factory of overly-exact historicism and dropped into the melting pot of fiction.

Sydney Padua, it has to be said, does a very good job at balancing the two.

The book as a whole is a series of complexities. On the one hand, it reads like a straight-up comic book: panels following panels, the narrative organized in a mostly linear way (in the serialized fashion to boot), the drawings telling the story when the words aren’t that capable.
But wait, there’s more. Almost every page has footnotes, containing mostly true facts. In addition, these footnotes have their own notes, at the end of each chapter/installment, which bring about more information, more story, more insight. And just to complete the picture, the book ends with a thick section (almost sixty pages) containing two appendices: one made up of cutouts from primary documents (mostly mid-19^th century newspaper articles and “trivial yet amusing snippets”) and the other one offering a comic’s explanation (with illustrations, of course) of the Difference Engine, its operations, its logics, its many-many cogs and wheels. The first representation, it seems, in a long, long, long, long, long time.

But wait, there’s even more.

A page from the book, outlining the early-childhood destiny of Ada Lovelace.
Source: www.sydneypadua.com

There are special appearances by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Jane Austen, and other Victorian celebrities I’m likely to have forgotten, depicted in their attire and typical gestures; and also some more cameos by Karl Marx and a bunch of Russian-looking revolutionaries (not sure if I spotted Lenin there or if it was just an illusion), who witness the crushing of ideology under the weight of progress. Chronological mismatches don’t matter, of course, because this is a multiverse, where time and space often coincide in the best ways possible, so as to generate an outcome equal to the input of fair judgment plus conceptual match-making.

There’s a meeting between Ada Lovelace and George Eliot I am tempted to draw attention to (and I will), when something I’d like to call “poetics of data” is brought up. The way Lovelace explains to a desperate Eliot that the words she’d thought destroyed by the machine are safe and well confers upon the topic an elegant lure, if tinged here and there with well-intended pretentiousnesses (yes, my plural is well intended too, if slightly odd):

“Despair not! Your words are not destroyed! On the contrary, they are shedding their earthly form! They have become transcendent! They have become… Data! Liberated from the static shell of the material, transliterated to the purely symbological, sublimated into a state entirely new! It can be filed, indexed, converted, replicated, searched, shared, shuffled, linked, remixed, recombined, archived, analyticated… resurrected!”

And to complete the picture in the same avant-la-lettre fashion, here’s what might sound even more familiar to a contemporary (i.e. of 21^st-century descent) reader:

“Imagine… with the eventual integration of Wheatstone’s telegraph, the difference engine will convey, transcribe, analyze, and store forever the deepest thoughts, the most profound conversations of our greatest philosophers!”

Sounds familiar? That’s because Lovelace is endowed by Padua (her favorite of the two characters, you can tell) with this special foresight that enables her to see the computer materialized when it was nothing but a technological dream, and even that a failing one.

So here’s to a multimodal book, where the weighing of historical accuracy takes place not in terms of a contradiction between True and False, but as an exchange of energies between truth and fiction. May the game (not a contest!) be won by both sides!