Where the Stress Falls (14 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
MORE ETHAN SIXTY YEARS
after
Ferdydurke
was written, little remains of the specifically Polish targets of Gombrowicz’s scorn. These have vanished along with the Poland in which he was reared and came of age—destroyed by the multiple blows of war, Nazi occupation, Soviet
dominance (which prevented him from ever returning), and the post-1989 ethos of consumerism. Almost as dated is his assumption that adults always claim to be mature:
after
Ferdydurke
was written, little remains of the specifically Polish targets of Gombrowicz’s scorn. These have vanished along with the Poland in which he was reared and came of age—destroyed by the multiple blows of war, Nazi occupation, Soviet
dominance (which prevented him from ever returning), and the post-1989 ethos of consumerism. Almost as dated is his assumption that adults always claim to be mature:
In our relations with other people we want to be cultivated, superior, mature, so we use the language of maturity and we talk about, for instance, Beauty, Goodness, Truth … But, within our own confidential, intimate reality, we feel nothing but inadequacy, immaturity …
The declaration seems from another world. How unlikely it would be now for whatever embarrassing inadequacies people feel to be covered over with hifalutin absolutes such as Beauty, Goodness, Truth. The European-style ideals of maturity, cultivation, wisdom have given way steadily to American-style celebrations of the Forever Young. The discrediting of literature and other expressions of “high” culture as elitist or anti-life is a staple of the new culture ruled by entertainment values. Indiscretion about one’s unconventional sexual feelings is now a routine, if not mandatory, contribution to public entertainment. Anyone now who would claim to love “the inferior” would argue that it is not inferior at all; that actually it is superior. Hardly any of the cherished opinions against which Gombrowicz contended are still cherished.
Then
can Ferdydurke
still offend? Still seem outrageous? Exception made for the novel’s acidic misogyny, probably not. Does it still seem extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny … wonderful? Yes.
can Ferdydurke
still offend? Still seem outrageous? Exception made for the novel’s acidic misogyny, probably not. Does it still seem extravagant, brilliant, disturbing, brave, funny … wonderful? Yes.
A zealous administrator of his own legend, Gombrowicz was both telling and not telling the truth when he claimed to have successfully avoided all forms of greatness. But whatever he thought, or wanted us to think he thought, there are certain unavoidable consequences if one has produced a masterpiece, and it eventually comes to be acknowledged as such. In the late 1950s
Ferdydurke
was finally translated (under auspicious sponsorship) into French, and Gombrowicz was, at last, “discovered.” He had wanted nothing more than this success; this triumph over his adversaries and detractors, real and imagined. But the writer who counseled his readers to try to avoid all expressions of themselves, to guard against all their beliefs, and to mistrust their feelings, above all, to stop identifying themselves with what defines them,
could hardly fail to insist that he, Gombrowicz, was not
that book
. Indeed, he has to be inferior to it. “The work, transformed into culture, hovered in the sky, while I remained below.” Like the great backside that hovers high above the protagonist’s halfhearted flight into normality at the end of the novel,
Ferdydurke
has floated upward to the literary empyrean. Long live its sublime mockery of all attempts to normalize desire … and the reach of great literature.
Ferdydurke
was finally translated (under auspicious sponsorship) into French, and Gombrowicz was, at last, “discovered.” He had wanted nothing more than this success; this triumph over his adversaries and detractors, real and imagined. But the writer who counseled his readers to try to avoid all expressions of themselves, to guard against all their beliefs, and to mistrust their feelings, above all, to stop identifying themselves with what defines them,
could hardly fail to insist that he, Gombrowicz, was not
that book
. Indeed, he has to be inferior to it. “The work, transformed into culture, hovered in the sky, while I remained below.” Like the great backside that hovers high above the protagonist’s halfhearted flight into normality at the end of the novel,
Ferdydurke
has floated upward to the literary empyrean. Long live its sublime mockery of all attempts to normalize desire … and the reach of great literature.
[2000]
“
I CAME TO COMALA
because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything …” With the opening sentences of Juan Rulfo’s
Pedro Páramo,
as with the beginnings of Kleist’s novella
Michael Kohlhaas
and Joseph Roth’s novel
The Radetzky March,
we know we are in the hands of a master storyteller. These sentences, of a bewitching concision and directness that pull the reader into the book, have a burnished, already-told quality, like the beginning of a fairy tale.
I CAME TO COMALA
because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything …” With the opening sentences of Juan Rulfo’s
Pedro Páramo,
as with the beginnings of Kleist’s novella
Michael Kohlhaas
and Joseph Roth’s novel
The Radetzky March,
we know we are in the hands of a master storyteller. These sentences, of a bewitching concision and directness that pull the reader into the book, have a burnished, already-told quality, like the beginning of a fairy tale.
But the limpid opening of the book is only its first move. In fact,
Pedro Páramo
is a far more complex narrative than its beginning suggests. The novel’s premise—a dead mother sending her son out into the world, a son’s quest for his father—mutates into a multi-voiced sojourn in hell. The narrative takes place in two worlds: the Comala of the present, to which Juan Preciado, the “I” of the first sentences, is journeying; and the Comala of the past, the village of his mother’s memories and of Pedro Páramo’s youth. The narrative switches back and forth between first person and third person, present and past. (The great stories are not only told in the past tense, they are about the past.) The Comala of the past is a village of the living. The Comala of the
present is inhabited by the dead, and the encounters that Juan Preciado will have when he reaches Comala are with ghosts.
Páramo
means in Spanish barren plain, wasteland. Not only is the father he seeks dead, but so is everyone else in the village. Being dead, they have nothing to express except their essence.
Pedro Páramo
is a far more complex narrative than its beginning suggests. The novel’s premise—a dead mother sending her son out into the world, a son’s quest for his father—mutates into a multi-voiced sojourn in hell. The narrative takes place in two worlds: the Comala of the present, to which Juan Preciado, the “I” of the first sentences, is journeying; and the Comala of the past, the village of his mother’s memories and of Pedro Páramo’s youth. The narrative switches back and forth between first person and third person, present and past. (The great stories are not only told in the past tense, they are about the past.) The Comala of the past is a village of the living. The Comala of the
present is inhabited by the dead, and the encounters that Juan Preciado will have when he reaches Comala are with ghosts.
Páramo
means in Spanish barren plain, wasteland. Not only is the father he seeks dead, but so is everyone else in the village. Being dead, they have nothing to express except their essence.
“In my life there are many silences,” Rulfo once said. “In my writing, too.”
Rulfo has said that he carried
Pedro Páramo
inside him for many years before he knew how to write it. Rather, he was writing hundreds of pages, then discarding them—he once called the novel an exercise in elimination. “The practice of writing the short stories disciplined me,” he said, “and made me see the need to disappear and to leave my characters the freedom to talk at will, which provoked, it would seem, a lack of structure. Yes, there is a structure in
Pedro Páramo,
but it is a structure made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time.”
Pedro Páramo
inside him for many years before he knew how to write it. Rather, he was writing hundreds of pages, then discarding them—he once called the novel an exercise in elimination. “The practice of writing the short stories disciplined me,” he said, “and made me see the need to disappear and to leave my characters the freedom to talk at will, which provoked, it would seem, a lack of structure. Yes, there is a structure in
Pedro Páramo,
but it is a structure made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time.”
Pedro Páramo
is a legendary book by a writer who became a legend, too, in his lifetime. Rulfo was born in 1918 in a village in the state of Jalisco, went to Mexico City when he was fifteen, studied law at the university, and began writing, but not publishing, in the late 1930s. His first stories appeared in magazines in the 1940s, and a collection of stories came out in 1953. It was called
El llano en llamas,
which has been translated into English under the title
The Burning Plain and Other Stories. Pedro Páramo
appeared two years later. The two books established him as a voice of unprecedented originality and authority in Mexican literature. Quiet (or taciturn), courteous, fastidious, learned, and utterly without pretensions, Rulfo was a kind of invisible man who earned his living in ways entirely unconnected with literature (for years he was a tire salesman), who married and had children, and who spent most nights of his life reading (“I travel in books”) and listening to music. He also was extremely famous, and revered by his fellow writers. It is rare for a writer to publish his first books when he is already in his mid-forties, even rarer for first books to be immediately acknowledged as masterpieces. And rarer still for such a writer never to publish another book. A novel called
La Cordillera
was announced as forthcoming by Rulfo’s publisher for many years, starting in the late 1960s—
and announced by the author as destroyed, a few years before his death in 1986.
is a legendary book by a writer who became a legend, too, in his lifetime. Rulfo was born in 1918 in a village in the state of Jalisco, went to Mexico City when he was fifteen, studied law at the university, and began writing, but not publishing, in the late 1930s. His first stories appeared in magazines in the 1940s, and a collection of stories came out in 1953. It was called
El llano en llamas,
which has been translated into English under the title
The Burning Plain and Other Stories. Pedro Páramo
appeared two years later. The two books established him as a voice of unprecedented originality and authority in Mexican literature. Quiet (or taciturn), courteous, fastidious, learned, and utterly without pretensions, Rulfo was a kind of invisible man who earned his living in ways entirely unconnected with literature (for years he was a tire salesman), who married and had children, and who spent most nights of his life reading (“I travel in books”) and listening to music. He also was extremely famous, and revered by his fellow writers. It is rare for a writer to publish his first books when he is already in his mid-forties, even rarer for first books to be immediately acknowledged as masterpieces. And rarer still for such a writer never to publish another book. A novel called
La Cordillera
was announced as forthcoming by Rulfo’s publisher for many years, starting in the late 1960s—
and announced by the author as destroyed, a few years before his death in 1986.
Everyone asked Rulfo why he did not publish another book, as if the point of a writer’s life were to go on writing and publishing. In fact, the point of a writer’s life is to produce a great book—that is, a book which will last—and this is what Rulfo did. No book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading many times. García Márquez has said that after he discovered
Pedro Páramo
(with Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
, the most important reading of his early writing years), he could recite from memory long passages and eventually knew the whole book by heart, so much did he admire it and want to be saturated by it.
Pedro Páramo
(with Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
, the most important reading of his early writing years), he could recite from memory long passages and eventually knew the whole book by heart, so much did he admire it and want to be saturated by it.
Rulfo’s novel is not only one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature but one of the most influential of the century’s books; indeed, it would be hard to overestimate its impact on literature in Spanish in the last forty years.
Pedro Páramo
is a classic in the truest sense. It is a book that seems, in retrospect, as if it had to be written. It is a book that has profoundly affected the making of literature and continues to resonate in other books. The translation by Margaret Jill Costa, which fulfills the promise I made to Juan Rulfo when we met in Buenos Aires shortly before his death that
Pedro Páramo
would appear in an accurate and uncut English version, is an important literary event.
Pedro Páramo
is a classic in the truest sense. It is a book that seems, in retrospect, as if it had to be written. It is a book that has profoundly affected the making of literature and continues to resonate in other books. The translation by Margaret Jill Costa, which fulfills the promise I made to Juan Rulfo when we met in Buenos Aires shortly before his death that
Pedro Páramo
would appear in an accurate and uncut English version, is an important literary event.
[1994]
H
E “SO BURIED HIMSELF
in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight to daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his mind.”
E “SO BURIED HIMSELF
in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight to daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his mind.”
Don Quixote,
like
Madame Bovary,
is about the tragedy of reading. But Flaubert’s novel is a piece of realism: Emma’s imagination is corrupted by the kind of books she reads, vulgar tales of romantic satisfaction. With Don Quixote, a hero of excess, the problem is not so much that the books are bad; it is the sheer quantity of his reading. Reading has not merely deformed his imagination; it has kidnapped it. He thinks the world is the inside of a book. (According to Cervantes, everything Don Quixote thought, saw, or imagined followed the pattern of his reading.) Bookishness makes him, in contrast to Emma Bovary, beyond compromise or corruption. It makes him mad; it makes him profound, heroic, genuinely noble.
like
Madame Bovary,
is about the tragedy of reading. But Flaubert’s novel is a piece of realism: Emma’s imagination is corrupted by the kind of books she reads, vulgar tales of romantic satisfaction. With Don Quixote, a hero of excess, the problem is not so much that the books are bad; it is the sheer quantity of his reading. Reading has not merely deformed his imagination; it has kidnapped it. He thinks the world is the inside of a book. (According to Cervantes, everything Don Quixote thought, saw, or imagined followed the pattern of his reading.) Bookishness makes him, in contrast to Emma Bovary, beyond compromise or corruption. It makes him mad; it makes him profound, heroic, genuinely noble.
Not only the hero of the novel but also the narrator is someone besotted by reading. The narrator of
Don Quixote
reports that he has a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the streets. But whereas the result of Don Quixote’s excessive reading is madness, the result of the narrator’s is authorship.
Don Quixote
reports that he has a taste for reading even torn papers lying in the streets. But whereas the result of Don Quixote’s excessive reading is madness, the result of the narrator’s is authorship.
The first and greatest epic about addiction,
Don Quixote
is both a denunciation of the establishment of literature and a rhapsodic call to
literature.
Don Quixote
is an inexhaustible book, whose subject is everything (the whole world) and nothing (the inside of someone’s head—that is, madness). Relentless, verbose, self-cannibalizing, reflexive, playful, irresponsible, accretive, self-replicating—Cervantes’s book is the very image of that glorious
mise-en-abîme
which is literature, and of that fragile delirium which is authorship, its manic expansiveness.
Don Quixote
is both a denunciation of the establishment of literature and a rhapsodic call to
literature.
Don Quixote
is an inexhaustible book, whose subject is everything (the whole world) and nothing (the inside of someone’s head—that is, madness). Relentless, verbose, self-cannibalizing, reflexive, playful, irresponsible, accretive, self-replicating—Cervantes’s book is the very image of that glorious
mise-en-abîme
which is literature, and of that fragile delirium which is authorship, its manic expansiveness.
A writer is first of all a reader—a reader gone berserk; a rogue reader; an impertinent reader who claims to be able to do it
better
. Yet, justly, when the greatest living author composed his definitive fable about the writer’s vocation, he invented an early-twentieth-century writer who had chosen as his most ambitious work to write (parts of)
Don Quixote
. Once again. Exactly as is (was). For
Don Quixote
, more than any book ever written,
is
literature.
better
. Yet, justly, when the greatest living author composed his definitive fable about the writer’s vocation, he invented an early-twentieth-century writer who had chosen as his most ambitious work to write (parts of)
Don Quixote
. Once again. Exactly as is (was). For
Don Quixote
, more than any book ever written,
is
literature.
[1985]
June 13, 1996
New York
New York
Dear Borges,
Since your literature was always placed under the sign of eternity, it doesn’t seem
too
odd to be addressing a letter to you. (Borges, it’s ten years!) If ever a contemporary seemed destined for literary immortality, it was you. You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit. Though you lived among us for a rather long time, you perfected practices of fastidiousness and of detachment that made you an expert mental traveler to other eras as well. You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.
too
odd to be addressing a letter to you. (Borges, it’s ten years!) If ever a contemporary seemed destined for literary immortality, it was you. You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit. Though you lived among us for a rather long time, you perfected practices of fastidiousness and of detachment that made you an expert mental traveler to other eras as well. You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like “the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.” That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.
Your modesty was part of the sureness of your presence. You were a discoverer of new joys. A pessimism as profound, as serene, as yours did not need to be indignant. It had, rather, to be inventive—and you were, above all, inventive. The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer—deli cately you added: all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a
resource
. (You were speaking of your blindness.)
resource
. (You were speaking of your blindness.)
You
have been a great resource, for other writers. In 1982—that is, four years before you died—I said in an interview, “There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.” That is still true. We are still learning from you. We are still imitating you. You gave people new ways of imagining, while proclaiming over and over our indebtedness to the past, above all, to literature. You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.
have been a great resource, for other writers. In 1982—that is, four years before you died—I said in an interview, “There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.” That is still true. We are still learning from you. We are still imitating you. You gave people new ways of imagining, while proclaiming over and over our indebtedness to the past, above all, to literature. You said that we owe literature almost everything we are and what we have been. If books disappear, history will disappear, and human beings will also disappear. I am sure you are right. Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text” on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness—and of the book.
This time around, there will be no need for a great conflagration. The barbarians don’t have to burn the books. The tiger is in the library. Dear Borges, please understand that it gives me no satisfaction to complain. But to whom could such complaints about the fate of books—of reading itself—be better addressed than to you? (Borges, it’s ten years!) All I mean to say is that we miss you.
I
miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.
I
miss you. You continue to make a difference. The era we are entering now, this twenty-first century, will test the soul in new ways. But, you can be sure, some of us are not going to abandon the Great Library. And you will continue to be our patron and our hero.
SUSAN
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