Thank you, Isabel Allende, for the personal story you just told here. Thank you also, and this is private interest, for the advice on how a woman catches a man. So you go and sit opposite him, you ask him for his life story and he thinks you are smart and sexy? It sounds wonderful, but to be honest, to me it is a horrible scenario.
The life stories of most men are so boring that I would think twice before voluntarily playing the role of
listener. Instead of ‘men’ you can and may read ‘women’. Male storytellers are not more boring than female ones.
Because that, of course, is what it is all about. No story is boring in
itself, it is the storyteller who bores. Especially, when you let him have a go with his own
life. He then sucks you into a swamp from which you have to drag yourself by your hair like a Baron von Münchhausen. He won’t help
you. He went down himself.
It is the same with storytellers on paper. Some seem to be aiming for beating reality, a useless, wild shot. When Mallarmé said that you live to end in a book, he did not mean a mer à boire; he was a poet. But size does not necessarily have to do with it. Our Voskuil, who needs many pages, was accused of poor realism, but in saying so one forgets how well he shapes Musils man without qualities in a reality only he knows.
You were, so I imagine, lucky, you had extremely good storytellers at your tables.
Yet, there is another possibility: your advice is for ladies; I am not a lady. To start
with, I lack the patience to let things drift. Daily life draws heavily enough on my energy as it is. You know what I
mean: someone thinks he has to point out exactly what others did, said, meant at that party you didn’t feel
like, mainly because of all that chatter. Terrible also: the report of a television programme you left unwatched with
reason.
At such a moment I feel trapped.
Your argument contains a reassuring admonition. ‘Relax and listen. You don’t have to do
anything.’ You tinge this passivity, at least where reading is concerned, by saying that in best cases an ‘essential truth’ comes from the cooperation between narrator and reader. Now that sounds far more
ambitious. I think of such a cooperation as a sine qua non. There are tons of recreative stories and tons of recreative readers, but who is not good at
recreation, will not read recreatively. He does something with what he reads. He
interprets, reshapes; he is accessory. Even if something doesn’t fascinate him, he will at least wonder why it doesn’t. Because such reading however pleasant is
strenuous, a creative reader becomes selective naturally.
The description of the reader as accessory comes from Julio Cortázar, a narrator who never bores. Cortázar does not take you by the hand, he lets you walk by yourself.
I would like to problemise the subject of this meeting. Not to make things
difficult, actually it is child’s play, it has been said more often,
differently, by others. I would like to state that a story can only be successful if it comes loose from the
narrator, if he too experiences it as something from someone else.
In the final stage of writing I behave as a translator, I deal with my book or story as something autonomous of which the power should be transferred as well as possible. As if it is no longer mine. This attitude of course fits someone who has translated more than that she has written, but I think it is generally advisable.
The reader doesn’t have to know anything about the writing process, unless deliberately used in the story. The result should after all be
autonomous.
I doubt, by the way, whether the link between someone’s early youth and writership is so compelling as you state. To me it sounds a little
fatalistic. A life lasts an entire life. I cannot forget that the big reading for me only started in my
puberty. This reading has later been at least as determining as the stories from the old days at home.
‘Not after whom you’re named, but from who you eat,’ it says in Quichot. It goes for Sancho
Panza, the servant who colours so much after his boss that he takes over his
ideals. When Don Quichot at his deathbed changes his mind regarding his
delusions, Sancho begs him to have some others instead. He can’t live without fiction
anymore.
This boss and his servant are the first complex novel characters in history, therefore the book in which they occur is the first real novel, which at the same time was the first anti-novel. The modern novel did not exist when Cervantes started Quichot. After he had finished it, there was, a hopeful thought for every writer. Cervantes kept changing till long after his childhood years. Cervantes was an old man before he could write Don Quichot.
That I mention a lot of works in Spanish in my story, is not only because you are
here, it fits my own background. Three, four Spanish-writing storytellers have determined my life as a translator and have given me far enough material for
reflection. Also I often end at Rulfo, whom I haven’t translated, the creator leaving things out that are there never the
less.
Sometimes I am afraid that they have formed me too obviously. I was relieved when Toon Tellegen at the presentation of my latest novel Kriblijn linked me to Tsjechov. That is exactly the other way. No writer likes to be identified easily.
My first novel for adults - I have also written for children - made the critics think of certain French writers such as
Ponge, not so much writers that carry you away, but precision workers. One critic called Er was wat met Meneer Maker & Mevrouw Maker a Jip & Janneke, our most famous children’s
book, for adults, too much of a compliment. In the beginning you miss something to hold on to with a
writer; you compare.
Intensive contact with my favourite Spanish language writers has taught me to nourish certain allergies I recognised in their
works. They have an averse to easy effects, the kitsch of finewriting and Schöngeisterei. ‘Keep it short,’ says
Borges. ‘Watch your conscience,’ says Cortázar. ‘Don’t make up,
exaggerate,’ says Márquez. ‘Make it into an unconventional pot,’ says
Cervantes, ‘interrupt yourself every now and then. A story soon babbles.’ I can hear him
moan.
Rulfo says nothing. He is, faithful to his reputation, silent. He is in the realm of ghosts, deeply hidden in his work.
Speaking and writing are two different things, but a certain tension and dramatic power are important to
both. A written text requires invention, but preferably not so much that you
suffocate. Borges, who wrote philosophical mini-thrillers, didn’t care about explicit
depth. He denied that for himself. He aimed at transparency. He quoted a lot and constantly drew parallels between cultures and times in order to expose the too popular concept of
originality. There hardly ever is anything new under the sun.
Shining examples can intimidate, but nobody has to wonder whether he can add his work to the many already
existing. Of course he can. It’s what ever you can get for it, to start with from the
publisher, and as soon as the book is there, from the critics and the readers.
Last year I worked on a book about Erasmus, who lived from 1466 till 1536. He was the he-man of the cultural field in those
days. He lived wherever he felt like and didn’t feel like committing himself to
anything. He turned down professorships, court positions and a cardinal’s hat, and that while he was constantly in need of
money.
An independent spirit, Erasmus. He is the embodiment of someone who doesn’t want to coincide with his time, his
descent, his geographical limitations, not even with something as identity. He looked for a
non-position, as J.M. Coetzee called it in one of his essays in Giving Offense. His only commitment regarded God, or his might-be artistic
conscience, as I prefer to see it, being an atheist.
You put it more simple: writers are always strangers in this world.
Erasmus’ motto of life was: ‘Homines non nascuntur, sed finguntur’; ‘People are not
born, but created.’ In ‘finguntur’ you here ‘fiction’. Etymology once again makes you wonder. ‘Fingere’ is to
create. The writer is a creator.
Erasmus kept developing, something you notice as a reader: the feeling that something is developing right under your very eyes. He profited from the printing invention, twenty-seven years before he was born. It enabled him to spread his range of thoughts faultlessly, in wide circulation.
His revolutionary translation of the New Testament was passed by others; enlightened protests against the fossilised church and the barbarian practices of upbringing and education had been around for some time; humanism had been known in Italy long before he made humanism known in Northern Europe. That he lives on is because of his sublime, witty style, in Lof der Zotheid and in his essayist letters to the great of the earth.
When she heard I was working on a humanist, an expert spontaneously said: ‘You will make it
fiction, won’t you?’ Yes I will. An essayist tries something; he comes to a personal proof while searching and
linking. He does not practise science.
You tell us how you were reprimanded as a journalist because of not being objective
enough.You exaggerated, were subjective, made up what wasn’t there. ‘Why don’t you switch to
literature, where all these defect are virtues?’, and so you did, to the pleasure of millions of readers.
I can imagine such an advice. The mentioned ‘defects’ according to agreement do not come with
journalism. That doesn’t alter the fact that I’m intrigued by Márquez’ stubborn
plea, who sees journalism as a literary genre, a genre based on facts
nevertheless, but even so meeting literary requirements, including the use of imagination and a recognisable own
voice.
Now that genres, at least in the West, are sliding into each other, now that more and more writers mingle
poetry, story, drama, opinion and coverage and every self-esteemed journalist wants to be an essayist, Márquez’ plea becomes more and more
interesting.
Márquez says that what is supernatural in his work can be resolved into truly happened
events; explanation added. His pretension is, beautifully stated, to uncover more reality than which usually satisfies
someone. You can wonder what it means and whether this pretension promises more
truth. ‘Reality’ and ‘truth’ are hated but essential abstracts, constantly subject for debate in
philosophy, art and science. No wonder that a writer goes into it sooner or later.
This brings me back to the giant of literature in Spanish writing, four ages
old, alive and kicking: Cervantes. He made the concept of truth or ‘truly happened’ into the running gag of Quichot. This is going to be
publicity, I translated that book, but I didn’t do it for nothing, I hastily
add. You do not spend five years of your life on something you don’t believe in.
Latin-American literature didn’t exist as yet, unless you count the chronicles of colonisation or the inventories of the indigenous flora, fauna and customs as
such. Cervantes, who tried to get there twice, in Quichot calls your continent ‘the newly discovered world’.
He himself uses the word ‘historia’ for his famous book, ‘story’, ‘chronicle’, ‘history’. ‘Historia’ ever since the middle ages had the connotation of ‘chronicle mingled with fiction’, but it remains
hilarious: the history of an invented reader who in the beginning of the seventeenth century starts to imitate courtly knights of former
times: book figures that is, in order to improve the world.
‘Historia’ would not become the Spanish word for ‘novel’; ‘novela’
did, in Quichot only used for inserted long stories that especially disrupt part I, although they are the most orderly parts of the
book. Those stories are read out, they are supposed to cause red cheeks. The language used has been proven: eyes glow with
excitement, and blood drains from faces for fear.
In contrast to what happens elsewhere in Quichot, here the cliché is not played
with. They are found stories, says the writer, he doesn’t know anything about
it. If Don Quichot isn’t interfering as listener in his own disrupting way, they seem rather respectable compared with the rest. They have a contrived but solid intrigue with lots of joy but even more sorrow and often ink-black
endings. They look like libretto’s for romantic opera’s.
Those ‘novelas’ are not disdained in Quichot. So maybe I shouldn’t do so
either. One of them very much resembles the later Adolphe by Benjamin Constant,
which, would you believe, belongs to the French canon.
Quichot is brought forward as an adventure story, but although the adventures are not devoid of
tension, we do not get the chance to get carried away. They are constantly interrupted for
comment, novel-technical mishaps, comical asides. The language pins more than it seduces and there is no matter of expectations being
confirmed. Quichot is not in the first place an adventure story, but a novel about the adventure of
writing. In my essay volume Cervantes & Co. I have tried to prove
so.
With his hilarious hammering on the true character in an obviously fictitious if not to say impossible context, Cervantes underlines the nonsense of firmness. He does the same with the hilarious dialogues between Don Quichot and Sancho Panza.
Borges loathed the average novel with its sound logic and suffocating image of close relations between human being and environment, human being and circumstances, human being and humanity. No wonder he confessed his admiration for the jumpy, fragmentary Quichot and as a tribute had the book copied by one of his characters.
In the Van der Leeuw-lecture Carlos Fuentes held, the Mexican calls ‘wavering’ the beginning and the basis of the
novel. If we can’t remember who we are, where we come from and what is our place in the
world, the epic can no longer exist and changes into a novel. He calls Quichot the most important Spanish contribution to this ‘drama of modernity’.
A very famous story from both our cultures, goes as follows; you know it: `Once upon a time, long
ago, there was a man who had the task to save the world. He said he was the son of God. The invisible greatness God had created the
world. There were many things in that world that weren’t right, God was
dissatisfied. He put a Son on earth who, with his good example, had to get the people to
repent. At his wits end, God decided, as an act of love, to have his Son crucified and to purify humanity with that
offering. And so occurred, because he was God.’
This is the story that contains quite a dose of moral blackmail. It has been retold or translated innumerable
times. According to many, it is based on a legend, according to some it is an outstanding example of a perverse story, because of that crucifixion which is, as Paulus
said, sheer idiocy to non-believers.
In itself it does not have to be surprising that such a fine but bizarre story is as yet considered true by so
many. Don Quichot said that there is nothing clever in worshipping something that you
know. True faith doesn’t need prove. He thought it an advantage that he had never seen his beloved Dulcinea and that he even doubted her
existence. His love was blind, was faith.
The story about Christ’s experiences on earth went to lead a life of its
own, the best fate a story can meet with, but it is not without danger. In Het Evangelie volgens Marcus Borges has
someone, who reminds others of the Messiah, crucified as a sign of respect.
Let me tell you how it started for me and test your premise that things go like this if you have had a childhood like that.
This is a Dutch story. It has two versions, both just as true or false.
First version: It did not start with stories.
In the house I was raised in, no stories were told. There was hard work and swaying on the waves of post-war prosperity. We were not read to.
But we did sing. My father was a happy man who stayed in love with his wife, my
mother, his entire life. With his untrained tenor he sang at the top of his
voice. He also blew the trumpet, but he was only allowed to perform if it was someone’s
birthday. The first movie I saw, was the life story of his idol Richard Tauber.
Whether my mother was in love, I don’t know. She is less exuberant, she held the wheels of many big
ships, that might be an explanation. Now she is old and silent, but when I was
little, she sang. She sang children’s songs, school songs, psalms and an occasional song from the radio.
Nothing more wonderful than singing parents. At night in bed we children sang with the doors open, until they were closed because my
mother, who was listening at the bottom of the stairs, thought it was getting too late. In a chastened mood I think of the child I was in primary school, putting my heart and soul into
singing, very willingly. The last day before a holiday an entire hour was reserved for
singing; I can’t think of anything I looked forward to more. The first thing I did when my children went to school, was starting a school
choir.
Listening to music and making music, influences the way you undergo
literature. I undergo rhythm, phrasing, timbre, repetition, counterpoint and
development, in short: how the writing is put together. My long-time experience as a translator may have something to do with
this. I’m a incurable close reader. If the style or form of a story is hackneyed or weak of
amorphous, then it doesn’t click between us. A story that doesn’t resound, is just
that, a story, and life has many of those.
My way of writing must have been influenced by it, although I don’t know
how. My editor talks about my tone; if he recognises that, then it’s ok, he
says.
Borges according to himself had no ears for music, but he does resound; he has an unexchangeable style of his own. He is a dramatic minimalist, a Philip Glass.
Yes, but I do not want to deceive myself, the music and style story is a relative one
too. In this case firmness is nonsense also. To begin with, pure musicality would mean finewriting and we were not in for
that. I have always preferred the big conceptual writers from the Spanish Golden
Age, the conceptualists, like Quevedo, to the brilliant culturanists, Góngora.
Shakespeare, from the same period, has both, ideas and brille. That’s why he is so
great.
Cicero said it and Erasmus said it after him: form serves content. Besides, from some Dutch writers I literally can’t remember any
sentence. They have no recognisable tone or style, though can be great builders of myths or
universe. May you ever run into the name W.F. Hermans, he is the one I’m thinking of. In his best novel moments he essays and does resound because an essayist speaks his true
mind.
Second version: It did start with stories.
Of course many stories were told at my home. Sometimes aunts or neighbours came by and then stories flew about. They were about others with whom something was going on, usually they were no good. Full life came in. Those visits were oppressive, I think they were for my parents too, although I’m not sure about that; they didn’t gossip.
The stories my parents told us were about the war. About food that once wasn’t there, which is why we weren’t allowed to go off our food; about the fun you can have in miserable circumstances, maybe especially then; about courage while you are afraid, and, I think now, about longing.
Reading to me, as a child, was pure magic, that never passes by. As long as it lasted there was a world you had never thought possible. Of the few children’s books in our home, the fairytales were the most important ones.
I didn’t swallow it all. In one fairytale there are brothers changing into geese, but I couldn’t quite see my brothers doing that. I needed Kafka’s power of persuasion to believe in such a Verwandlung. Neither did I care much for people coming out of the stomach of a wolf alive. What did appeal to me was the power of Little Red Riding-hood, who was picking flowers all by herself in the woods, while she knew that the wolf was around. Often, alone in our blue berry forest, I felt a mixture of fear, courage and longing. I was Little Red Riding-hood and much more. I could do magic when I was a child.
Prince Charming kept me waiting. Mark Twain had to come round to make him credible. Does he deal with a prince, you’ll wonder. No, but Tom Sawyer, the main character in the book of the same name, is rather poor and common, but to me he was a prince. I had never met such a nice guy, so I raised him to the peerage. We were twelve, thirteen, not little children anymore. I was in love with Tom Sawyer; I do understand Don Quichot.
In my work courage, fear for treason and a certain longing play a part. Death has been disposed of its magic, that’s a change, I didn’t feel it that way as a child. Once, book grief was great, shivering with terror a lust. I’ve lost that innocence.
On Sundays at lunch time my grandfather read from the bible, representing much more than you understood. The adults had it made, I thought. Until it began to bore. ‘If the clock strikes, your face will remain this way,’ my mother used to say if I looked critically. That is the way I learned that a little acting is a blessing to others.
Just like you, I lived in a world of my own when I was a child, full of stories , that’s classical. It is also true that I once handed in a poem instead of a report, for which the teacher gave me a high mark, not deserved, whichever way you look at it. But I also sang a lot and drew more than I did anything else.
It could have been art academy or music conservatory but it became university. Equivocal or even ternate as I was, I took painting and singing lessons which were far too expensive for a student. Books were the daily practice.
If you come from a poor, not intellectual family, knowledge is special. I think I fulfilled my father’s wish by going to university. Noblesse oblige. I didn’t like my study, but you learn a lot as a student, you come across many ideas that urge on re-thinking and thinking by yourself. Without that study I would never have become an essayist.
I like a first person narrator very much, believe me. A story with a first person narrator can be pre-eminently lyrical. Most of the time the first person is talking to someone else, the reader, you for example, you are challenged to a reply, maybe a lyrical reply. And that makes two voices.
More than I love the first person, do I love dialogues. The reader, a plural concept, listens and can choose a side. Not only on stage are there dialogues full of passion, pregnant silences, hilaric misunderstandings; take Cervantes, or Erasmus, who raised dialogue to a genre. With Márquez at regular intervals a small, golden peace of indirect speech breaks through, wonderful.
Sometimes a dialogue extends to a diffuse concert of voices that had to be composed like that and not differently. It looks like a world, you can move in it; a confusing, intense experience. I think of Rulfo, who only worked with voices and didn’t fill anything in. I also think of the great Faulkner, who seems to have influenced a whole generation of Latin-Americans, Márquez and Rulfo above all, who emphasised this wherever possible.
It is said that fear for life is what drives writers. That is a frugal thought. You write to live on, call it fear for death; you write to make more world, call it fear for the limiting reality; you write out of a longing for outlook or insight, call it fear for confusion.
Borges put forward something more proud. A writer, he said with a cabbalistic image, brings in the ABC and changes the chaos of being into an occasional order, a superior game.
You write you away from yourself. Writing is a trick to clear the way for being able to read yourself like someone else. In that way while writing you pull yourself for a moment from the swamp.
Translation: Marloes Siccama-van Loveren.
