The Magician of Vienna. Sergio Pitol

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ novels, endeavoring not to repeat methods I had already used. My last six years in Europe were spent in Prague, the most secret, the most inconceivably magical of all known cities. There I jumped headlong, as compensation for the dry world of protocol in which I moved, into parody, ridicule, the grotesque, elements that I had greatly enjoyed in oral form my whole life, but which until then I had refused to integrate into my stories.

      As a tacit or explicit homage to some of my tutelary gods: Nikolai Gogol, H. Bustos Domecq, and Witold Gombrowicz, among others, I wrote El desfile del amor [Love’s Parade], Domar la divina garza [Taming the Divine Heron],¹² and La vida conyugal [Married Life], a trilogy of novels closer to the carnival than any other rite. I have written elsewhere about the experience:

       As the official language I heard and spoke every day became increasingly more rarefied, to compensate, that of my novel became more animated, sarcastic, and waggish. Every scene was a caricature of real life, that is to say a caricature of a caricature. I took refuge in its laxness, in the grotesque…The function of the communicating vessels established between the three novels that make up the Carnival Triptych suddenly seemed clear: it tended to reinforce the grotesque vision that sustained them. Everything that aspired to solemnity, canonization, and self-satisfaction careened suddenly into mockery, vulgarity, and derision. A world of masks and disguises prevailed. Every situation, together as well as separate, exemplifies the three fundamental stages that Bakhtin finds in the carnivalesque farce: crowning, uncrowning, and the final scourging.¹³

      In Xalapa, where I settled in 1993, my last book was born, The Art of Flight,14 a summa of the enthusiasms and desacralizations that, as it unfolds, become subtraction. Classical manuals of music define the fugue as a composition of many voices, written in counterpoint, whose essential elements are variation and canon, that is, the possibility of establishing a form that sways between adventure and order, instinct and mathematics, the gavotte and the mambo. In a technique of chiaroscuro, the distinct texts contemplate each other, enhance and deconstruct at every moment, as the final purpose is a relativization of all instances. Having abolished the worldly environment that for several decades encircled my life, and having hid from my sight the settings and characters that for years suggested the cast that populates my novels, I was obligated to transform myself into an almost unique character, which was at the same time agreeable and unsettling. What was I doing in those pages? As always the appearance of a form resolved in its own way the contradictions inherent in a fugue.

      The stories contained in Infierno de todos, my first book, naïve and clumsy, stiff in their wickedness, susceptible to whatever disqualification that might be ascribed to them, reveal, however, some constants that support what might pompously be designated as my ars poetica. The tone, the plot, the design of the characters are the work of language. My approach to the phenomena is parsimoniously oblique. There is always a mystery that the narrator approaches deliberately, laggardly, without, when all is said and done, managing to reveal the unknown purpose. In the approach to that existing hole in the middle of the story, in the revolutions that the word makes around it, the function of my writing takes place. Writing is to me an act akin to weaving and unraveling many narrative threads that are arduously plaited, where nothing is closed and everything is conjectural; the reader will be the one who tries to clarify them, to solve the mystery posed, to opt for some suggested options: sleep, delirium, wakefulness. Everything else, as always, is words.

      KNOWING NOTHING. When I translated Gombrowicz’s Argentine diary, I found a fragment that interested me a great deal and I almost believed to be my own: “Everything we know about the world is incomplete, is inaccurate. Every day we are presented with new information that nullifies previous knowledge, mutilates or widens it. Because this knowledge is incomplete it is as if we knew nothing.”

      WALTER BENJAMIN ATTENDS THE THEATER IN MOSCOW. The romantic episode included in Benjamin’s Moscow Diary can only be understood as a treatise on despair. In 1924 he met Asja Lācis, a Latvian revolutionary, in Capri, and fell in love from the first moment. According to Gershom Sholem, a close friend of Benjamin, Lacis wielded a decisive influence over him. They met again in Berlin that same year. The next year, Benjamin traveled to Riga to be with her for a few days. In early 1926 he takes another trip, this time to Moscow, where he remains two months. Communication with Asja regrettably deteriorates. To begin with, Asja is maintaining a romantic relationship with Bernhard Reich, a director of German theater living in Moscow. Committed to a sanitarium for nervous disorders, Benjamin sees her little, in bursts, and their encounters in general are unpleasant. On the other hand, he must see Reich continuously; moreover, shortly after his arrival he is obliged to offer him lodging in his own hotel room, because the place where Reich lives is cold and humid and, as a result, injurious to his health. A few days later, as in a Chaplin film, Reich takes possession of the bed, and Benjamin spends his nights seated in a chair. The diary records moments of deep depression owing to Asja’s coldness, to her demands, to her scorn.

      Benjamin had traveled to the Soviet Union in the hope of making a decision he had postponed during the last two years. Should he or should he not join the German Communist Party, or merely remain as a fellow traveler? His arrival to the country of the Soviets coincides with one of the most nebulous periods of history, around the denouement of the fierce battle that had raged for two years between the forces of Trotsky and those of Stalin. The approaching end causes the battle to become more insidious, more implacable. The shockwave is permanent, though beneath the surface; only the facts and bubbles rise to the surface. Benjamin is amazed by the impersonality of the responses. No one appears to have a direct opinion on anything. The responses are always elusive: There are those of the opinion that… It is said that… Some think… In this way personal responsibility disappears. When he speaks and holds personal opinions in front of others, Reich and, especially, Asja reprimand him, they tell him that he has understood nothing, that it is impossible for him to navigate such a setting; in short, he should stop expressing nonsense that could compromise him as well as them. The day of his arrival, Reich invites him to dine at the restaurant of the Union of Writers, where they hear that, in a theater in the city, a work in praise of the whites is being performed, and that at the premiere the police had to disperse a communist demonstration that was protesting such an effrontery. In an entry dated December 14,¹⁵ that is, eight days following his arrival, Benjamin records his opinion on that theatrical piece that seemed to produce so much conflict:

       They were performing Stanislavsky’s production of The Days of the Turbins. The naturalistic style of the sets was remarkably good, the acting without any particular flaws or merits, Bulgakov’s play itself an absolutely revolting provocation. Especially the last act, in which the White Guard “convert” to Bolshevism, is as dramatically insipid as it is intellectually mendacious. The Communist opposition to the production is justified and significant. Whether this final act was added on at the request of the censors, as Reich claims, or whether it was there all along has no bearing whatsoever on the assessment of the play. (The audience was noticeably different from the ones I had seen in the other two theaters. It was as if there were not a single Communist present, not a black or blue tunic in sight.)¹⁶

      During his stay in Moscow, Benjamin allows himself no respite. He pursues his beloved and is permanently spurned, he translates pages of Proust, writes an entry on Goethe for the New Soviet Encyclopedia under preparation, visits museums, attends the theater—especially that of Meyerhold, which fascinates him—pays visits, including one to Joseph Roth, who has traveled there at the expense of an important newspaper in Frankfurt, and buys beautiful wooden pieces to add to his collection of popular toys. The arguments that Roth expounds in opposition to Stalin seem unserious to him, banal anticommunist statements to satisfy the great capital, “[Roth] had come to Russia as an (almost confirmed) Bolshevik and was leaving it a royalist”; the proletariat expression in the literature of the Soviet Union seemed indispensable to him, but the absence of theoretical reflection and the canonization of excessively elemental forms discouraged him. His privileged intelligence becomes lost in the permanent comedy of errors that he lives in the Moscow of disinformation, of half-truths and lies with veneers of doubtful virtue. СКАЧАТЬ