The Mad Inventors
The Temple of Iconoclasts is one of the best books of the twentieth century. Its author, Rodolfo Wilcock, is a legendary writer. Born in Buenos Aires in 1919, he died in Lubriani, Italy in 1978, and he was a friend of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. His first books were of poems: Primer libro de poemas y canciones [First Book of Poems and Songs] (1940), Los hermanos días [The Kindred Days] (1942), Paseo sentimental [Romantic Stroll] (1945). At the age of thirty-nine he went to live in Italy and began to write in Italian. Notable works from his Italian period, which was his richest, are the novel El templo etrusco [The Etruscan Temple] (1973), the prose of El estereoscopio de los solitarios [The Stereoscope of the Lonely] (1972), El Caos [The Chaos] (1974), and El libro de los monstruos [The Book of Monsters] (1978), and several volumes of poetry and plays.
His greatest work, however, is the book that has just been reissued by Anagrama. It was first published in 1982. The copy I have in my hands was published in 1999. If one considers the span between the dates of the first and second Spanish editions, it’s frankly disheartening. The Temple of Iconoclasts, which was originally published in Italian in 1972, is without a doubt one of the funniest, most joyful, irreverent, and most corrosive books of the twentieth century. Owing a debt to Borges, Alfonso Reyes, and Marcel Schwob, who in turn owe a debt, in the manner of funhouse mirrors, to the prose of the encyclopedists, The Temple of Iconoclasts is a collection of biographies of mad inventors, adventurers, scientists, and the odd artist. According to the Argentine writer Héctor Bianciotti, the book can be read “as a human comedy in which a bitter rage like Céline’s is disguised in the form of Marx Brothers gags.” I don’t think a bitter rage lurks in Wilcock’s prose, much less a bitter rage like Céline’s. When his characters are bad, they’re bad because they’re so good, and when they’re good they’re oblivious, and then they’re frightening, but only as frightening as the rest of humankind. Wilcock’s prose — methodical, always confident, unassuming even when it deals with lurid or over-the-top subject matter — tends toward understanding and forgiveness, never bitterness. From his humor (because The Temple of the Iconoclasts is essentially a comic novel) no one is safe.
Some of his characters are real historical figures, like Hans Hörbiger, the Austrian scientist who advanced the theory of successive moons and counted Hitler among his disciples. Others might as well be, like André Lebran, who is “remembered, occasionally remembered, or in fact not remembered at all, as the inventor of the pentacycle or the five-wheeled bicycle.” Some are heroic, like the Filipino José Valdes y Prom, telepath and hypnotist. Others are wholly innocent creatures or saints, like Aram Kugiungian, an Armenian immigrant in Canada, who is reincarnated or transmigrated into hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and who always says, when confronted with the evidence, that he feels “nothing unusual, in fact nothing at all, at most a vague sensation of not being alone in the world.” Not to mention Llorenç Riber, the Catalan theater director capable of wearing down not only the most brutal censors but also his occasional audiences by staging an adaptation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Or the Canarian inventor Jesús Pica Planas, father of the revolving grill turned by four turtles or of elastic underwear for dogs in heat or of a photoelectric mouse trap complete with guillotine, to be placed in front of mouseholes. Thirty-five biographies like these make this a festive, laugh-out-loud read, a book by one of the greatest and strangest (in the revolutionary sense of the word) writers of this century, a writer whom no good reader should miss.
Words and Deeds
He was a great writer. A great man. That’s how one must always begin, said a medic from the Red Cross. The bandage before the wound. But it’s suffocating, in a way, this avalanche of praise on the day of his death. So he died in a state of perfect repose, not a single muscle of his face twitching? A statement like that, ridiculous and trivial, adds nothing to a reputation based as much on words as on deeds.
How did Luis Martín-Santos die? Screaming in agony, with the faintest of whimpers? How did Juan Benet die? Lost in a labyrinth, watching the ghosts of Spain file past through a cascade of tears or dandruff or piety? It’s suffocating, this avalanche of praise. Today I read that Arrabal, along with two distinguished friends, considered Cela to be the world’s greatest living writer. I want to think that the pain must be impairing his judgement. What impels or sustains this unanimous accord? The Nobel? Is it Benavente’s hordes, returning on crutches of oblivion? Such unanimity is frankly sickening. All this impromptu literary criticism, all these mediocre professors, all these bureaucrats on the loose.
Not even Cela, who did so many things — some of them, I want to believe, done independently and done well — deserves this. No real writer deserves this. Literature, unlike death, lives out in the open, exposed to the elements, far from the rule of government and law, except for the law of literature which only the best of the best are capable of breaking. And after all, literature doesn’t exist anymore, only the example of it.
Between the old macho and the bewildered knight, between the fleshy Dalí and the lifeless academic, between the champion prize-winner and the man with lofty contempt for all faggots, there is a secret slot for Cela at his best, as one of the great prose stylists, plural, of Spain in the second half of the twentieth century, as a human being happy with his wife Marina, as a man dangerously like us.
Vila-Matas’s Latest Book
Everything about this book is disturbing, beginning with the cover, an August Sander photograph of three young peasants dressed in their Sunday best, all three with hat and cane, gazing proudly at the camera, their pride tinged with a kind of elegance and indifference and aloofness, as if they know something about literature that the rest of us don’t. These peasants, who are as good-looking as they are young, are walking along a dirt road, what appears to be a narrow road, between sown fields or fallow fields, and they’ve turned their faces toward the camera, a pause on the road, a pause that scarcely alters those proud faces, faces sculpted for the abyss and vertigo. And that’s what awaits readers inside of Bartleby & Co. (Anagrama), Vila-Matas’s latest effort, a brief stroll, composed in the form of footnotes, through the abyss and vertigo not only of literature (though at moments that might seem to be the only subject) but of life, of the thin slice of life that each human being is dealt. In that sense this is a defiant book: defiant in its depiction of those who at a certain moment decided to give up writing, and defiant in its forays into territory where the possibility and impossiblity of writing is disputed with the not always infallible weapons of elegance and humor. Once we’ve reached this point it’s necessary, out of courtesy, to ask ourselves an increasingly rhetorical question: Is the book we have before us a novel, a collection of literary or anti-literary offerings, a miscellaneous volume that doesn’t fit any set category, a diary of the life of the writer, an interweaving of newspaper pieces? The answer, the only answer that occurs to me just now, is that it’s something else, something that might be a blend of all the preceding options, and we might have before us a twenty-first-century novel, by which I mean a hybrid novel, a gathering together of the best of fiction and journalism and history and memoir. In a way, it reminds me of another book by Vila-Matas, Para acabar con los números redondos [An End to Round Numbers], published in 1997, a wonderful book, one of the happiest I’ve ever read, which went almost unnoticed when it was clearly the best thing published in Spain that year. The spirit is
the same. The poetic force is the same. Even the levity is similar. But what in Para acabar con los números redonodos was certainty and therefore an accumulation of felicities and clarities, in Bartleby & Co. is the laybrinth of the belated, like the labyrinths of the symbolist painters, and it’s also the fevered search for exits and sometimes the song or honk of the swan, and most of all it’s the courage of a writer who collects and catalogues pocket-size hells or invisible hells, which when viewed from a global perspective are pieces of a larger hell, fragments that say something not only about those writers who at a certain moment in their lives (a moment of clarity or desperation or madness) gave up writing but also about those writers who, like Vila-Matas himself, will never give up writing, and, beyond that, say something about death, and about vain gestures that may not stave off death but that save us (or can save us) nonetheless, and none of this is just about writers, as the reader only realizes toward the end, but actually about readers, about human beings of every ilk, about people who live and one day stop living, about adventurers and the dying, about people who read and people who one day stop reading, and all of it — which put this way could make us think that we’re up against the wall — is presented to us in a book of scarcely 179 pages, a book moderated by the humor and grace of Vila-Matas, a writer who has no equal in the contemporary landscape of the Spanish novel, and whose defiant attitude resembles that of the peasants on the cover in their Sunday best, though Vila-Matas is the furthest thing from a peasant I know, and Vila-Matas works on Sundays.
The Brave Librarian
He started out as a poet. He admired German expressionist literature (he learned French out of obligation and German out of something that might be called love, and he learned it without teachers, on his own, the way one learns all the most important things), but he may never have read Hans Henny Jahnn. In photographs from the 1920s he looks haughty and sad, a young man with few rough edges, someone whose body tended toward plumpness, softness. He cultivated friendships, and he was loyal. His first friends, from Switzerland and Mallorca, lived on in his memory with adolescent fervor or the fervor of innocent adolescent memory. And he was lucky: he got to know Cansinos-Assens and he gained a unique perspective on Spain that he never lost. But he returned to the country of his birth and encountered the possibility of destiny. The destiny of his dreams, in a country shaped by his dreams. In the American vastnesses he dreamed of courage and its shadow, the immaculate loneliness of the brave, days perfectly fitted to the contours of life. And he was lucky again: he met Macedonio Fernández and Ricardo Güiraldes and Xul Solar, who were worth more than most of the Spanish intellectuals he had gotten to know, or so he believed, and he was hardly ever wrong. And yet his sister married a Spanish poet. It was the age of the Argentine Empire, when everything seemed within reach and Buenos Aires could call itself the Chicago of the southern hemisphere without blushing. And the Chicago of the southern hemisphere had its Carl Sandburg (a poet, incidentally, admired by our writer), and his name was Roberto Arlt. Time brought them together and then drove them apart forever, when one of the two plunged into the abyss and the other set off in search of the word. From Arlt’s abyss was born the most demented kind of utopia: a story of sad gunmen that anticipated, like Sábato’s Abaddón, el exterminador [Abaddón, the Exterminator], the horror that much later would hover over the country and the continent. From the search for the word, meanwhile, came patience and a modest certainty of the joys of literature. Boedo and Florida were the names of the groups that grew up around the two men. The first refers to a poor neighborhood, the second to a main street, and today the two names march together toward oblivion. Arlt, Gombrowicz: he might have been friends with them and he wasn’t. This lack of dialogue left a great void that is also a part of our literature. Of course, Arlt died young, after a tumultuous life full of hardships. And he was essentially a writer of prose. Not our man. He was a poet, and a very good one, and he wrote essays, and only when he was well into his thirties did he begin to write fiction. It must be said that the reason he did was because he realized he couldn’t be the greatest poet in the Spanish language. There was Neruda, for whom he never felt much affection, and the shadow of Vallejo, whom he didn’t often read. There was Huidobro, who was a friend and later an enemy of his sad and inevitable Spanish brother-in-law, and Oliverio Girondo, whom he considered to be superficial, and then there was García Lorca, whom he called a professional Andalusian, and Juan Ramón, at whom he laughed, and Cernuda, to whom he paid scarcely any attention. Actually, there was only Neruda. There was Whitman, there was Neruda, and there was the epic. The thing he thought he loved. The thing he loved best. And then he began to write a book in which the epic is simply the flip side of misfortune, in which irony and humor and a few human beings, valiant and adrift, replace the epic. The book is indebted to Retratos reales e imaginarios [Real and Imaginary Portraits], by his friend and teacher Alfonso Reyes, and, through the Mexican writer’s book, to Imaginary Lives, by Schwob, whom they both loved. Many years later, now blind and more celebrated than his teacher, he visited Reyes’s library in Mexico City, officially dubbed the “Alphonsine Chapel” and he couldn’t help imagining how Argentines would react to the indecorous notion of calling Leopoldo Lugones’s house the “Leopoldine Chapel.” This inability to keep quiet, his perpetual readiness to engage, was something he always lost in the company of idiots. He claimed to have read Don Quixote for the first time in English, and said that it had never seemed as good to him since. The caped avengers of Spanish criticism rent their cloaks. And they forgot that the truest words about Don Quixote were written not by Unamuno, or by any of Unamuno’s flock of moth-eaten followers, like the regrettable Ramiro de Maeztu, but by our man. After his book on pirates and other outlaws, he wrote two story collections that are probably the best written in Spanish in the twentieth century. The first appeared in 1941, the second in 1949. From that moment on our literature was forever changed. Then he wrote indisputably superb books of poetry that went unremarked in the midst of his own glory as a teller of fantastic tales and amid his tremendous number of muses, male and female. And yet his poetry has many merits: clarity of language, a response to Whitman unmatched by any other contemporary response, a dialogue and monologue with history, an honest tribute to English verse. And he gives us classes in literature that everyone ignores. And lessons in humor that everyone claims to understand and no one does. At the end of his life he asked for forgiveness and he confessed that he liked to travel. He admired courage and intelligence.
Bomarzo
During the first half of the twentieth century, in Buenos Aires, there lived a generation of writers of the stature of Roberto Arlt, Ernesto Sábato, Julio Cortázar, Adolfo Bioy Casares, José Bianco, Eduardo Mallea, Jorges Luis Borges. Some learned their craft under the tutelage of Macedonio Fernández. As if that weren’t enough, one day Witold Gombrowicz came to Argentina and decided to stay. To this diverse group belonged Manuel Mujica Láinez, at first glance the least professional of them all, in the sense that it’s hard for us to imagine Mujica Láinez as a writer living for the sake of literature and making a living from literature. It’s easier to see him as a man of independent means who devotes his free time, of which he has very little, to writing novels with the sole ambition that they be read by his wide circle of friends. And yet Mujica Láinez was perhaps the most prolific Argentine novelist of his day. Not the most ambitious or the most seminal (roles probably reserved for Cortázar or Sábato), or the closest to
Argentine reality (a role assigned to Arlt, Cortázar, Sábato, or Bioy, depending on the degree of madness), or the most forward-looking in devising literary structures that could make strides into undiscovered territory (like Borges and Cortázar), or the one who forged deepest into the mystery of language (the undisputed realm of Borges, who, it must be remembered, wasn’t just a great prose writer but also a great poet). Mujica Láinez, in this sense, was a modest figure. In fact, when viewed in the company of such exceptional writers and literary giants as Borges, Cortázar, Arlt, Bioy Casares, and Sábato, he seems to shrink and seek quiet refuge in Argentine literature, in provincial literature, but upon even the most cursory reading of his work, this impression turns out to be completely mistaken.
From the beginning, in his first novel, Don Galaz de Buenos Aires (1938), two traits became evident that would prove constant in Mujica Láinez’s life as a writer. On the one hand, there’s his exquisite command of a precise, rich, and dextrous Spanish that manages never to lapse into grandiosity or stiff formality. On the other hand, and this may be what really matters, there’s his cheerful approach to the act of writing. It’s true that he never took huge risks and that, compared to the great Latin American novelists of the twentieth century, his work is in some sense that of a minor writer. But what a wonderful minor writer! Capable of producing, for example, Misteriosa Buenos Aires, or El viaje de los siete demonios [The Voyage of the Seven Demons], or The Wandering Unicorn, or Los viajeros [The Travelers], all of them enjoyable to read, all of them modest (and rather jittery) books, like their author, and enough to assure him a place alongside other minor writers like Mallea or José Bianco.