The Concept of Fiction - Juan José Saer

The Concept of Fiction

Juan José Saer

We never know how James Joyce was like. From Gorman to Ellman, his official biographers, the main progress is solely stylistic: the first is told with vehemence, whereas the second assumes an objective and circumspect tone, giving the story an illusion greater than truth. But many sources of the first like the second – comprising interviews and letters – are unreliable, to say the least; we could recall the sentence, ‘the man who saw the man who saw the bear’ – aggravated by the fact that the one by Gorman, which is the more fanciful of the two, the main informant was the bear in person. Apart from the latter, it is obvious that neither the conscientiousness, nor the honesty of the informants could be doubted, and our interests should be oriented towards theoretical questions and methodologies.

Within this order, the much celebrated objectivity of Ellman is overtaken, as we read progressively, by an unpleasant feeling that the biographer is quietly trying to gain access into the aura of the biography, assuming his point of view and infiltrate his subjectivity in a gradual manner. This unpleasantness is transformed into a real discomfort in section 1932-1935, which is chiefly occupied with the most painful episode of Joyce’s life, the mental illness of Lucia. At the edge of objectivity, Ellman, with his emphatic, confused arguments and disregards for the psychiatric and literary aspects of the problem, seems to accept Joyce’s insane claim that only he is able to cure his daughter. Many times, when it comes to mere external events and anecdotes, the biography manages to retain its objectivity, but it just went by the interpretative field with hesitance, and the problem of the object contaminates the methodology. The basic demand of biography, the veracity, its pseudoscientific quality, is nothing but the supposed rhetoric of a literary genre, no less conventional than the three acts of classical tragedy, or the unmasking of the murderer in the last few pages of the detective novel.

The honest rejection of all fictitious elements is not the criteria of truth. Positing that the same concept of truth is uncertain, and that its definition integrates disparate, and even, contradictory elements, is also to posit truth as the univocal objective of the text. And when it comes to the biography or autobiography genre, it is not only the presence of fictitious elements which deserves a thorough discussion.  The same could be said about the genre called – so fashionably today, with certain excessiveness – non-fiction: its specificity is based on the exclusion of all fictitious traces, but this exclusion is not itself a guarantee of truth. Even when the intention is sincere and the facts are narrated with rigorous exactitude – which is not always the case – the obstacles regarding the authenticity of the sources continue to exist, from the criteria of interpretation and the instability of all verbal constructions. Familiar to logic and filling the field of human sciences with debates, these difficulties seem not to worry the happy practitioners of non-fiction. The undeniable advantage of a mundane life like Truman Capote must not make us forget that a proposition, being not fictitious, is not necessarily true.

We could therefore establish that truth is not necessarily contrary to fiction, and when we opposed with the practice of fiction, we are not making a vague proposition of misrepresenting the truth. Regarding the hierarchical dependency between truth and fiction, according to which the first possesses a greater positivity than the second, it is of course, within the area of our interest, a sheer moral fantasy. Even with the highest degree of volition, accepting this hierarchy (to truth, the field of objective reality, and to fiction, the doubtful expression of subjectivity), the basic problem persists, i.e. indeterminacy not caused by subjective fiction, relegated to the realm of the useless and capricious, but from the supposed objective truth and the genres which claims to represent. Since autobiography, biography, and all those classified under non-fiction, the different genres that turned away from fiction, by having decided to represent the supposed objective truth, are those who would supply the proof of their efficacy. This obligation is not easy to fulfil: all that is verifiable in this type of story is generally the anecdote and background, but the credibility of the tale and it status would be threatened whenever the author drifts from the plane of the verifiable.

Fiction, according to its origins, is known to have been emancipated from these chains. But no one should be confused: it is not to write fiction to escape, due to immaturity or irresponsibility, the rigours which the ’truth’ procedure demands, but rather for demonstrating the complex character of the situation, the complex character of the limited process to verification implies an abusive reduction and impoverishment. Making a leap towards the unverifiable, fiction multiplies infinitely the possibilities of the process. By not turning its back from the supposed reality, it is, on the contrary, caught in the turmoil, disdaining the naïve approach of claiming to know beforehand how reality is made. It is not a claudication [claudicación] before this or that ethic of truth, but the search for one that is less rudimentary.

Fiction is, therefore, not a vindication of the false. Even for fictions that incorporate falsities in a deliberate manner – false references and attributions, confusing historical data with the imagined, etc. – the aim is not to confuse the reader but to point out the double character of fiction, which combines, in an unavoidable way, the empirical and the imaginary. This combination –ostentatious only in certain type of fiction until it becomes a determinant aspect of its organisation, as in the case of some of Borges’s short stories or Thomas Bernhard’s novels – is, however, presented in a greater or lesser extent in all works of fiction, from Homer to Beckett. The self-paradox of fiction resides in how, if it uses the false, it is done to increase its credibility. The muddy mass of the empirical and imaginary, which others have the illusion of fractionating a piacere slices of true and false, leaves the author of fiction nothing more than a possibility: of being immersed. Hence, perhaps, in the words of Wolfgang Kayser: ‘It is not enough to feel attracted to this act; we must also have the courage to act.’

However, fiction, and only as fiction, does not require one to believe it as true. This desire is not the capriciousness of the artist, but the first condition of its existence, because only being accepted as such, it will be understood that fiction is not a fictionalised display of this or that ideology, but a specific treatment of the world, inseparable from what is treated. This is the essential point of the whole problem and we must always keep in mind, if we want to avoid the confusion of the genres. Fiction has maintained a distance from the prophets of truth as from the euphoria of the false. Its total identity with the treatment could perhaps be summarised by Goethe who Kayser quoted in his article (Who recounts a novel?) ‘The Novel is a subjective epic in which the author asks permission for his way of treating the universe; the only problem consists in whether there is a way or not, the rest falls into place.’ This description, not from the pen of a militant formalist nor an anachronic avant-garde, is of an equidistant with identical independence from the true and the false.

To clarify these questions, we could take some contemporary writers as examples. We do not want to be modest: we can take Solzhenitsyn as the paradigm of truth. La Verdad-Por-Fin-Proferida [The Truth-Has-Finally-Spoken] transcribes his stories, if there is no doubt about what needs to be said, what is the point of using fiction? What is the point of romanticising something that is already known before one takes the pen? No obligation, if you already knew the truth, and if the sides are taken, to pass through fiction. Employed this way, truth and fiction are mutually relativized: fiction is turned into a dry skeleton, skinned and returned a thousand times to recover with the flesh of different truths that replace each other. These same principles are the foundation of another aesthetic form: Socialist Realism, which the narrative concept of Solzhenitsyn perpetuates. Solzhenitsyn differs from the official literature of Stalinism in terms of his conception of truth, but agrees with the latter within the framework of fiction as the servant of ideology. For his task, no doubt necessary, information and documents would suffice. What we would demand from enterprises such as his is a civilised determination and vigilance in the field of verifiable. His aesthetic incursions and his inclination towards prophecy would be revealed in a quick glance as the most superfluous – in addition to how he keeps a beard to achieve the Dostoyevskian Restoration.

As for Umberto Eco, the housewives of the entire world have understood him without running into any danger: the man is a medievalist, a semiologist, a professor, well-versed in logic, computing and philology. These heavy weapons, at the service of ‘truth’, had frightened things that Eco, as a mercenary who switches side in the middle of the battle, has managed to avoid thanks to his survivor instinct, putting himself at the service of ‘falsehood’. From what this eminent professor says, the executives who read his novels while shuttling between airports will not believe in them because, by their very nature, they all belong to the side of falsehood: the reading is a fugitive pastime that leaves no traces, being tickled superficially when the knowledge of the author is at the service of a futile object constructed with ingenuity thanks to the ars combinatoria. In this sense, and only this, Eco is the direct opposite of Solzhenitsyn: like the grand revelation that Solzhenitsyn proposed, Eco responds that nothing is new under the sun. The ancient and the modern are confused, the detective novel is transplanted into the Middle Ages, which itself is a metaphor of the present, and the story makes sense thanks to an organised conspiracy. (Before Eco, it came to me spontaneously from the spirit of a phrase by Barrés: ‘Rien déforme plus l’histoire d’y chercher un plan concerte’.) His interpretation of the story is shown ostentatiously as something not to believe. The artifice, which impersonates art, is exhibited continuously in a way where no ambiguity persists.

The essential falsity of the fictional genre authorised by Eco is not solely an apologia of falsehood which, by positing that we live in a democratic system, has all the rights, but also a falsification. For example, placing Borges as the librarian in The Name of the Rose (a very Borgesian title), is not solely an homage or an intertextual resource, but also an attempt to affiliate.  But Borges, as was proven by many of his texts, is different from Eco or Solzhenitsyn, for him it is about neither falsehood nor truth, as the opposite that excludes. Rather, it is about the problematic concepts that embody the principle reason of being for fiction. If we were to recognise Ficciones as one of his most important books, it is not in order to exalt the false at the expense of truth, but to suggest that fiction is the most appropriate medium to handle their complex relationship.

Other notorious falsification of Eco is the claim about Proust’s excessive interest in feuilleton. Something obvious stems from it: stressing Proust’s excessive interest in feuilleton is a theatrical gesture by Eco to justify his own novels – just as dubious candidates, in order to win the local election, claim they have the support of the President of the Republic. This observation does not have any theoretical or literary value. The opinion is just as highly inconsequential as the fact, as is known universally, that Proust liked madeleines. Instead, it is noteworthy that Eco has not written about Agatha Christie’s or Somerset Maugham’s passion for feuilleton – but of course, not without reason: to use Proust to testify and exalt feuilleton, it is precisely because he wrote In Search of Lost Time. It is behind this book that Eco seeks shelter, not Proust’s supposed taste for feuilletons. Just by reading a novel of Eco or Somerset Maugham, one would know that these authors like feuilleton. And for one to be convinced that Proust do not like it as much, reading In Search of Lost Time would be more than enough.

My objective is not to judge morally and much less to condemn, but even in the most savage market economy, the customer has the right to know what s/he buys. Including the law, so distracted in other occasions, being intractable regarding the composition of the product. Thus, we cannot ignore the major fictions of our time, and maybe of all time, which present the critical intersection between truth and falsehood, the intimate and decisive tension, extended to neither the comical nor the sombre, as the central order of it all. Sometimes the subject is explicit and sometimes it is the underlying foundation of the structure. The aim of fiction is not to deal with such conflict but to turn it into its material, modelling it after ‘its way’. The affirmation and negation are equally strange, and it has more affinity with the object than the discourse. Books such as Don Quixote, Tristam Shandy, Madame Bovary, and The Castle do not pontificate about the prior reality to its textual concretion, yet they are neither resigned to the function as entertainment nor artifice: even though declared as fictions, they want to be taken literally. This claim could seem illegitimate, even scandalous, for many prophets of truth just as for the nihilists of the false, identical (although with paradoxical results) with the same pragmatism, since it is for not having the conviction of the first that the second, deprived of all affirmative truth, is abandoned, euphoric and false. From this point of view, the demand of fiction could be judged exorbitant, and yet, we all know that it is precisely how by marginalising the verifiable Cervantes, Sterne, Flaubert or Kafka seems to us truly worthy.

It is because of this principal aspect of fiction, and because it is also the intention, its practical resolution, from the singular position of the author between the imperative of objective knowledge and the turbulence of subjectivity, that we can define a comprehensive way for the fiction to be a form of speculative anthropology. Maybe – I dare not affirm – this way of conceiving could neutralise all kinds of reductionism, from the past century, which stubbornly attacks. Understood as such, fiction would not able to ignore, but to assimilate, to incorporate its own essence,  stripping it from the claim of the absolute. But this is a difficult subject that should be left for another time.

(1989)

Translated by Justin Loke (2014)

Roberto Arlt - The Bourgeois Sickness of Communism

Like the Bourgeois Sickness of Communism

Roberto Arlt

Our bourgeoisies are sick from communism. Slowly. But the vaccine takes over. A phenomenon that must be of interest to you. It is clear time has changed, the rents have fallen, and the financial burdens have increased. The bourgeois family is almost always a family with two or three girls who went to the movies. In the film, they learned how to keep losing their virginity. But overall, from the art of giving kisses in different styles these girls unwittingly learn other things. And one day throws the slippers [kick the bucket? Cuban slang?] exclaiming: ‘We are fed up with prejudices!’ And began her life. A life perfectly individualistic. When a slave is freed from his chains he immediately turns to individualism. Anarchism. Believes doing what he wants to be happy. And when tired of doing what was craved begins to examine the reality that surrounds it. To say: “Why this?" "Why that?"As a citizen or a slut asking half dozen times these questions, the Communist vaccine begins to catch on. From the disgust with the present form of capitalist civilization. As if apart from this form of civilization there is nothing more perfect than the Communist, fatally looks towards Russia. They turned so Russian that I noted down here a confession of the secondhand bookseller: The best-selling books are those that deal with Russia.

From Cronicas  Periodisticas, p. 40 (El Aleph, 1999)

Translated by Justin Loke

The Narrative Object - Juan José Saer (An Unofficial Translation)

The Narrative Object

Juan José Saer

Implicitly or explicitly, the notion of object occupies the centre of all philosophy. Implicitly or explicitly (but mostly implicit), the commercial narrative fiction is related to philosophy. Therefore, it is possible to say, implicitly or explicitly, the notion of object occupies the centre of all fictional tales. This constant presence assumes many different forms, but in my opinion what is the most important is how it is related to the mode of being of narrative fiction, and we could even say: to all narratives.  

The verbal transmission of a fact (it does not matter if it has occurred, and if we were to claim it did happen, it does not matter what is the greater or lesser probability that grants us this capacity to know) consists in a series of conventional signs that produce an artificial equivalence of the fact. Whether the transmission is oral or written, it does not matter: anecdote, chronicle, epic, report or novel, the result is always a construction based on two different materials depended on each other, like water requiring two molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen.   These two elements form a series of representation styled by the random signs of language and certain numerical marks provided by the selected genre (anecdote, chronicle, epic, etc.). All stories are constructions, not discourses. In a discourse, it is rather a series of universalities [universales, world or universe] that took place, insofar as the story parades an incessant procession of particular forms [figuraciones] – and whether it has in fact occurred, the particularities remain unchanged. It is argued that, within some philosophical trends, universalities are considered objects – as distinct entities of mere subjectivity – but if this is so, the fact would only reinforce the point of view we have adopted. 

If we take not a novel or an epic, but a simple anecdote as the example, this view would seem clearer. The film director Howard Hawks was waiting for Faulkner at the station, and it was the first time they are meeting, when Faulkner got off the train, Hawks was there: ‘Mr. Faulkner? I am Howard Hawks.’ And Faulkner replied, ‘I know. I saw your name on the cheque.’ The stylization has reduced the situation into a few phrases, excluding most of the inextricable empirical complexity of the encounter, the simultaneous perception of the two men, their respective stream of consciousness, the particular mode of each and both of them within the space-time continuum, etc. (we can continue listing infinitely, as much as we want, but the limitations of language itself would oblige us, in this case, to synthesize). On the other hand, when this short story functions as an anecdote, certain invariants of the ‘anecdote’ genre are present in this short construction: the brevity, the unexpectedly witty reply, and through the form of a particular personality, the dry humour (although it is not always the case in anecdotes; allowing, within the genre, to slide into some subgenres which are irrelevant now), less explicit to the whole scene. The verbal stylization of facts combined with the fixed elements of the genre constitutes the anecdote. However, these invariants in the story, are not universalities [universales], but serve as moulds for the particular elements which are evoked. In fact, for the listeners, although we like the anecdote, we remain uncertain of its exact meaning: we might want to demonstrate the light-heartedness of Faulkner (rather improbable on the other hand despite his truly jovial reply), or perhaps how since he was always short of money, was trying to thank Hawks for the advance payment in a discreet and modest way, but we could also suppose he was alluding to the overly mercenary customs reigning Hollywood, etc., etc. If a discourse presents itself as abstract, unique and intelligible, the story, instead, is a simulacrum of the empirical, what is already presented as a simple anecdote, or view with the prestige of the epic, of the chronicle or of the novel (even though proclaimed as truthful or fictitious) always have the tendency to be constituted as a kind of tender [sensible] construction.  When the false is true, fiction fakes a reality not a discourse, which is a concatenation of universalities [universales], but an object, or as a singular organization of particular qualities. 

What is valid for an anecdote is also valid for a short story, novel or epic. The wrath of Achilles, the web of sugary tales that Dinarzade and her sister weaved to distract the minister, the only song from the harmonica of Mr. Helton, or the agony of Rufian Melancolico, are from the order of particular things, similar to a scene we witness on the street, and the significance, the interpretation according to the point of view we adopted could vary infinitely.

If we take the song of the Sirens as example, in the same way as for the different witnesses of an incident on the street, for different readers the meaning could vary – without making it loses its shine or fascination on the readers, turning the opaque scene, uncertain and contradictory. Styled by the language and organized in the moulds of the ‘epic’ genre (even though perhaps the fine thread we can attribute to some subgenres which are often abundant within the epic), the image of Ulysses tied to the mast of the nave has the factual objectivity configured by the advancement from the outside, and the innumerable witnesses – both listeners and readers – circulating various versions of the meaning. We could conceive the scene as a metaphor of a compulsion stronger than will and duty has obliged the individual who suffers its tyranny to impose physical obstacles in order not to fall into the temptation of yielding to the fascinating danger because of his fear of its destructive forces. By making the decision of being tied to the mast and plugging his ears, Ulysses wants to be protected from the sorcerer’s song – this would remind us of the alcoholic who locked up the drinks or the gambler who demands the officials from the Ministry of Interior to bar him from entering the casinos. According to Suetonio, for the sophists of Rhodes island, the content of the song of the Sirens, the same as the name Achilles adopted when hidden amongst the women, were all pointless questions which (due to the impossibility of obtaining a precise answer) should be left to students to discuss during rhetoric class. For Adorno and Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the scene is an unconscious description of the alienating division of labour because while the leader (Ulysses) weighs, according to his class logic, the threat of a tragic end, if captured by the Sirens, but for the the oarsmen, the anonymous masses – insensitive and indifferent to the song, or even worse, without a tragic importance if they were to fall victims to the destructive influence – they must keep rowing. For Kafka, the song of the Sirens is without doubt dangerous, but much less dangerous than their silence: 

But they have a weapon more terrible than their song: their silence. Although it has never happened, maybe it is imaginable that someone was saved from the song, but of the silence certainly not. 

This shocking Kafkaesque variant seems to interpret the myth of the Sirens as a transcendental metonymical form, and also relate why the work of Kafka, with his systematic application of incertitude, with regards to the meaning, could be the clearest example of structural narration with an opaque autonomy of the object, not the conceptual transparency of the discourse.  The indeterminacy of sense in story of first magnitude is comparable to the universe.  The multiple readings, which I have just described in the example, give the narrative object an indefinite number of possible interpretations as it occurs within the different systems that attempted to explain the world: the hermeneutic attempt is always speculative, and we can take this word in more than one sense. 

The longevity of certain stories which permits them to traverse centuries and cultures: who is not saddened by the fate of Palinuro until today, who has not observed still, with endless wonder, the manoeuvres of Buscón, who does not daydreamed of being bandied through the sertao by the incessant procession of the ghostly and rough heroes of Guimaraes Rosa. Tearing apart the transparency and pragmatism of language, these lumps of verbs, thick and atypical, in its own way, putting aside the universal concepts, organized as unique concretions formed by particular elements that continue to exist indefinitely as such. The constant flow of speech jammed in this bloom denser than the utilitarian abstraction, and if the nominalists consider the universals as flatus vocis, without a higher existence than the tone of voice that utters in the instant of utterance, the narrative object instead lives in the eternal present of the story with the gross substance of particular things.

It is obvious that the notion of the object is also related to the problem of representation, i.e. whether if the particular that appears represented in the story exist outside of it and came before it, or if it exist only superficially in the literal sense of word, as a textual surface that, insofar as resulting in a series of verbal combinations, constitutes not more than an appearance, suspected on the other hand that it could also inspire us, if similar thing exists, the extraverbal reality. The answer to this dilemma in this sense or another, like how it has demonstrated interminable discussions throughout the century, seems to constitute a simple opinion: Reality-Came-Before-the-Text giving the impression of being the essence like the First Cause with regards to the appearance of the world. However, what stays clear in this debate is the existence of the narrative text, which, because of these discussions precisely, has further affirmed its autonomy. 

The whole world knows that, according to Flaubert, he was Madame Bovary, but fewer are aware that he had also said ‘a Madame Bovary in each little town of France’. This contradictory declaration encapsulates terms of dilemma proving that even for Flaubert himself the problem remains unclear. By saying that he was Madame Bovary, Flaubert signifies that the transposition of his romantic ideas into a feminine character would eliminate from the text the fickleness of documentation, giving it rather a virtual character. But with the declaration that opposes the aim to exalt the representation of his middle-term (the heroine), it thereby gives rise to the categories employed much later by various critics – with Georg Lukacs amongst them – to describe the character types of realist novels of the 19^th century. The ‘Madame’ of the title leads us into thinking that, despite his intimate projection in the character of Emma, Flaubert also had the intention of introducing in  his novels elements of satire and moral criticism of society, because it is evident that Madame is ironic, and came to signify so more or less. Hence, this book shows what is hidden in reality under the respectable title of Madame of many French towns, and the scandal that promoted the appearance of the novel suggests how his aims were achieved. 

From how the problem is approached from different angles, all of the above seem to suggest it has always clearly resulted in considering narrative as an autonomous object, an end in itself whose sole reality as object we would extract the whole meaning. The particular forms which constitute – by being solely particular – the empirical sequence raise more than just clear definitions or enigmas, and more questions than affirmative concepts.

While it is a verbal object, the story is also a mental object living in the memory and imagination of the receiver free from verbal condition. For imaginary recollection, the mental existence is no less problematic than the recollection of what we call the real. But we can say how in a certain sense it is much more verifiable than the latter, because, if it is a text, we can use it as often as we need for verification. But this difference is not only puerile but also illusionary, and superfluous and pretentious that the narrative, insofar as an object, could give us more assurance of reality than the non-verbal objects from what we called the ‘world’, mostly because the opposite seems less likely. 

In the beginning, we have affirmed that all narratives, fiction or not, are constituted by a series of particular forms framed by a variable number of conventional elements belonging to different generes, just as in the anecdote of Faulkner. For others, insofar as it is art, all narratives tend be divided naturally by the invariants of the construction and the genre. By its distance, ostensible or not, with these marks, each narrative is a singular being, and the individuation (singularity) is produced thanks to the proliferation in the interior of the particular elements detrimental to the invariants of construction and genre. In a reverse case, these invariants impoverish the texture of particular forms (someday we should write the history of the evolution of details in realist fiction, through the path opened by Mimesis, the seminar work of Erich Auerbach) and transformed the story into a type of industrial product. The novels of Chandler, during his time, with his inclusion of new particular forms, is remote from the detective genre – although conserving some of the invariants, such series of murders, puzzle that is only resolved at the end, etc. The result was the thriller that, in turn, after sometime was converted into a genre more rigid than the old detective novel – similar, with its repetitive mode, like the industrial objects, all identical to each other, in order to meet the demand of the market, delivered from the same pack. The tyranny of the genre alienates both the reader and the novelist, but all the more for the latter who is obliged to please the market demand of the production circuit, annihilating his conscious of free creation.  

Inversely, we can give examples of certain narratives that started off with the same constructive elements, with its abundant inclusion of particular forms, obtaining the status of an object that is unique to the work of art, of narrative object that is sufficient to itself and which, inside the limits that were imposed by the principles of sovereign construction, its own world, a cosmic truth within the other. If we were to consider comparatively three novels from the 20^th century written in  the span of a decade, from 1954, 1955 and 1964 respectively, with the same language and from the same continent, Farewells by Juan Carlos Onetti, Pedro Páramo by Juan Ruflo, and The Silencer  by Antonio Di Benedetto, what is immediately evident is that, from the same point of departure, and principles of construction, each have reached  extreme singularity of distinction (and to say again, it does not matter if the object that represent exists outside our subjectivity or is a pure mental object).

The principle of construction that divides these three stories is the first-person narrative, the invariant element of many other. And amongst these precise examples, each has fallen into a different mode. The structuralist generality contains much of the specific story as the skeleton of Clodia Lesbia, being desirable and cruel, fanned by each night of passion and the suffering of Catulo. The living material of the three novels constitutes an immediate refutation of these generalisations. In Farewells, the narrator is external to the facts, in way it suffers from what we would call the poverty of empiricism that resorts to imagination and, as a consequence, in certain parts we are told about what did not occur but only imagined by the narrator, etc. In Pedro Páramo, the first person of the story goes crumbling towards fragments of second and third person, each time it recurs in more fluid, elliptic, and fragmentary manner; and as for The Silencer, the narrator tells us the story indifferently, of what has happened outside, pacing out what has been revealed to us. But it seems to realise the scope by narrating in an ambiguous and non-affirmative way – which is perhaps the dementia of truth stretched by his approach.

These three distinct texts, which began with a common procedure, could be described as a story told in first person, where the possibility of the narrator’s own knowledge is ambiguous, contradictory, and limited, thus producing, as deployed, its conditions of singularity – although to be recognised as stories, it must be produced under certain invariants of the genre, and in this case, the genre of ‘novel’. Besides the obvious (but necessary) stylistic individuality, many other factors of differentiation would intervene each of the texts, even though we have found three texts, particularly in relation to representation, some coincidences that reflect the preoccupation of the epoch, such as the possibilities of narrative form, the number of difference is greater than those which resemble. The concurrences result in a general semantic indeterminacy of the stories which debunks the only certainty that Sartre was vehemently opposed to: the ubiquity abused by the omnipresent narrator, the empirical modesty of the story told in the first person. Deliberately proposed or not, it hardly matters if we were to admit that the meaning of the story is in the story itself. For these three novels, the empirical modesty of the first person presents very little assurance of veracity, unlike the omniscience of the third.   

This indeterminacy of meaning, however, would not tarnish the relevance, nor reduce its efficacy to nothing. On the contrary, the confused images, unfinished narratives, its enigmatic allusions, the sudden transitions, the constantly disrupted linearity of the events, or, on the contrary, misleading regularity engendered by a logic that escapes us, the world shattered, the singular existence of its resulting characters, confront our actual human experience, as much more plausible than the many discourses, allegedly rational, political, economical, scientific, religious, philosophical which deals mysteriously with the oppression, and attributed its authority (of course, to those who are supported by it)  the advantage of certainty.  

Refusing to deal with the general, emancipated, thanks to its own logic, by the supposedly ineluctable external imperatives, the ideological, moral, religious obligations that are estranged from its essence, separated as far as possible by the stifling rules and conditions imposed by the repetitive routine of the genre, these narratives, rooted in the murky and swampy waters of the particular, have acquired the unique and non-reproducible taste. Gaining the same autonomy as the rest of the objects in the world, with some of them, larger, more patient, and more fearless, it is not only limited to reflecting the world: it includes (and also believes) staying there where – besides the postulation of an supposedly authoritarian universe endowed with this or that unequivocal sense – there was really nothing. 

Translated by Justin Loke

29. 04 .2014

THE FATE OF ULYSSES IN SPANISH - JUAN JOSÉ SAER (an unofficial translation)

THE FATE OF ULYSSES IN SPANISH

 JUAN JOSÉ SAER


 One afternoon in 1967, the author of this article was present at the following scene: Borges, who had traveled to Santa Fe to talk about Joyce, was chatting animatedly in a cafe with a small group of young writers who had come to interview him before the conference. All of a sudden, he remembered that in the forties he had been invited to join a committee that wanted to translate Ulysses collectively. Borges said the committee met weekly to discuss the preliminaries of this monumental task that the best anglicistas of Buenos Aires planned to undertake. But one day, after almost a year of weekly discussion, one of the commission members arrived brandishing a huge book and shouted, "a translation of Ulysses, just published". Borges, laughed heartily at this incident, and even though he had never read it (and probably neither the original) he concluded: "And the translation was very bad." Then one of the young writers who were listening said, "Maybe, but if so, then Señor Salas Subirat is the greatest writer in Spanish language."

This response suggests the position towards translation within the literary circle of young Argentine writers during the fifties and sixties. The 815 pages book was published in 1945 by the publish house Santiago Rueda de Buenos Aires, which also published the Portrait of the Artist translated by Alfonso Donated (read Damaso Alonso). The catalog of the publisher also includes many other big names like Faulkner, Dos Passos, Svevo, Proust, Nietzsche - not to mention the complete works of Freud in 18 volumes translated by Ortega y Gasset. In the late fifties, these books circulated widely among those who were interested in literary, philosophical and cultural issues of the twentieth century, and were truly the indispensable books of any good library.

 Ulysses by J. Salas Subirat (an inaccurate initial that gave the name a mysterious connotation) appear all the time in conversations, scattered amongst their endless spoken discoveries that were unclarified: anyone with enthusiasm towards narrative, between 18 and 30 year old, in Santa Fe, Paraná, Rosario and Buenos Aires, knew them by heart and could quoted line by line. Many writers of the generation from the fifties-sixties learned most of their narrative techniques and acquired their resources from this translation. The reason is very simple: the turbulent river of Joycean prose, to be translated into Spanish by a man from Buenos Aires, dragging with it the living matter of speech, that no other author - perhaps apart from Roberto Arlt - had been able to use with such ingenuity, accuracy and freedom. The lesson from this study is clear: the language of every day was the source of energy that fertilized the most universal of literature.

Despite being the first, one might not be granted the merit of the feat based on its intrinsic value; however this act is sure to expose one to the two faces of danger that usually belong to the two sides of the same coin: biased criticism and pillaging. Such is the fate (that a few, with reluctance, are beginning to amend some time ago) of the extraordinary work of Salas Subirat. It is unacceptable that the person who attempted a second translation of Ulysses into Spanish claims to be unaware that the former exists; and this seems to have been the attitude of Professor Valverde, who pays a (justifiable) compliment in the 46 pages of his preface to the version reproduced by Damaso Alonso, but does not say a word about Subirat Salas's translation. Comparing the two versions it is clear that the sole reason for this decision lies in Valverde's obsession of not wanting to resemble the previous translation. No serious translator of Ulysses can ignore any longer the first and second translation (this is the honest approach adopted by the authors of the third, Francisco García Tortosa and María Luisa Venegas), and such awareness implies that these translations will always serve as necessary references. However, when Valverde's version appeared with a kind of contemptuous righteousness, it seems to imply that the second translation finally arrived to repair the unspeakable ineptness of the first. On the internet, the natural homeland of the absurd, amongst various aberrations relating to the first version of Ulysses, also mentioned the epitome of the subject matter, the product of a vulgar commercial transaction: the massacre by a man called Chamorro ​​in 1996, who corrected "up to 50 %" of Subirat Salas's version, accusing it of failing, amongst other things, "on the colloquialism of Buenos Aires spoken by the locals" as if an Englishman from London has pretentiously translated the bulk of colloquialisms and slangs from Dublin in the original by Joyce, into the language of Oxford. From this act of piracy, fifty-one years after the book first appeared in Buenos Aires, one cannot help but observed that "it is in some ways a repetition of the translation of Salas".

 A work by the writer Eduardo Lago compares the three authentic translations (the act of Chamorro's vandalism  is wisely discarded) without giving any one of three a perfect and final score - moreover, it would be rash to judge any of the translation that appears excellent. Impartial and meticulous, comparing different passages of text, Lago noticed in the three versions what could already be observed in the first two: the authors had resolved with relative success the difficulties encountered . The purpose of a translation is not to display the erudition of the author, or knowledge of the original language (which are certainly necessary but not primary conditions to undertake the work) but to incorporate a living text to the targeted language. In each epoch, just like in each linguistic field, it is evident that new translations of classic texts are required, but this does not demand a denigration of the former.

 Jose Salas Subirat, neither Catalan nor Chilean (like how certain literary journalism claimed to disclose, with the usual vagueness, more than once) was born in Buenos Aires on November 23, 1900 and died in Florida , a local town, on May 29, 1975. He is buried in the cemetery of Olives. He was self-taught and worked, amongst other things, as an insurance agent, and wrote for his job a book titled Life Insurance: Theory and Practice. Information Analysis was published in 1944 - a year before he completed the translation of Ulysses. In the fifties, he published self-help books like The Struggle for Success and The Secret of Concentration, and an open letter about existentialism that James Wheel included in his catalog. However, he has also written social novels and articles in anarchist and socialist press of the thirties, and a book of poems Signaler.

Published in the supplement " Babelia " of El Pais (12 -Jun- 04)
http://elpais.com/diario/2004/06/12/babelia/1086997822_850215.html

Translated by Justin Loke (1- Apr -2014)

saying 'I am Singaporean' relates neither a racial nor national identity, it denotes a certain class. Singapore is a class concept like its airlines. The language is artificial like the smiles of the stewardesses.

Random Thoughts

The final insult, the late humiliation one could receive from the son, the uncle from his nephew who despise him for his financial situation when he has finally spoken about the loan. It does not matter if the son or the nephew is polite, whether if the son or nephew is willing to help. But to give him the opportunity to feel sympathy if not to say condescending things would be enough. But the fact is that he has not spoken. The nephew or the son remembers photos they have taken together. Photos of him when he was a young man and he is a baby, when he is a young boy and he is in his late twenties. The wedding, his wedding, the banquet hall (should I give the name?) of another four couples all marrying on the same day. No, they aren't friends, or related, it was an auspicious date, an auspicious day they said. Perhaps they all went to the same fortune teller. But it was a wedding nonetheless. To hear about his financial problem, or anyone of them (from that side of the family). I would say poverty, but financial issues plague them since, perhaps when their father started working in the bank, as a young man, and died leaving a cup of undrank hot Milo on the table, unmedically, he was told it was the phlegm in the lung, choked on a phlegm, he was told in the morning, he was told again, when his mother recounts, repeats the incident at different intervals of his life a la Robbe-Grillet, with different details. It is not just the difference in each repetition, but also the difference in the state of mind of the listener, accorded by age, mood et. al. that the story the kitchen, the night he slept as an adolescent and the man who is supposed to drink the cup of milo went to the hospital instead. He was not told which hospital, but he is sure that the it was the same hospital his wife passed away about twenty years later. I wanted to write the hospital that took her life. But doctors should not worry that this would be another accusation of them overcharging or another act of negligence, how I sympathise how mundane they live although some drama series portray otherwise, doctors can believe I am like many other jealous of you, of your salary, but doctors this is not even about you.  This medical idiot who told me, when she was relapsing, that she was reacting to my presence. Motherfucker, with Hong Kong accent English told me as calmly, as if to tell me I interrupted his break, he had to take a long walk from his desk to the ward to respond to my call. So the son of this man who left a cup of Milo unfinished, one of the many sons, had two kids and a flat with so many statues of Buddha. I have lesser interest in the religion than the class position, the cultural position, or more generally the cultural position it signifies. He was the man that did the drawing of the Goddess of Mercy that I erased a few lines and added mine so that it will look as if I am the one who did the drawing, to add to the realism, and as a matter of fact, I still feel no shame, about this for I am sure it was an act of indolence, of being lazy to draw than the lack of ability to, he was one of my drawing teacher, I did not how to contextualised it as appropriateion, I laughed at him when he was turning bald, or rather losing hair, thinning hair, now this is happening to me. I remember his sister telling me the two times he was robbed, he was the best looking and trendiest amongst her brothers. I remember he was the one who told me babies cry at birth because, according to the Buddhist teaching, they know they are born to suffer. But it is not as if he is dead now, it is just a belated reflection and memory of a person after hearing about what happened few days ago.

Saw a man, not Singaporean, paid for curry puffs at old chang kee this afternoon with coins from a fat wallet filled with other things than dollar notes (the cashier was a little impatient as it took him a while to dig out he coins with one finger). He added chili sauce to curry puffs. Another overreacting script about foreigners and curry and our identity? Thought about 19th century, of years that seem to have nothing to do with us, 1848 1870... Of Asia. Old chang kee is now 1.40 per puff. Read ignorant comments about race and how precious vehicles with flashlights are. Heard channel news asia news reader with educated accent addressing an injured or dead worker from Bangladesh as gentleman. I didn't know we are so polite. Read someone stupid but fortunate to say time-to-leave -the -country, as for the rest, think of the time to wake up for work tomorrow. 

Since last week, the daily encounter with digging and construction sites, neon colours reflective stripes, and helmuts, looking into the hole they dug on the road, breeding mosquitoes, I told a taxi-driver it is money they are digging for those who signed contracts for develpoment. I did not say corrupt. Since last week, I thought of a picture, a painting of them gathering around the hole looking down pensively at the hole, all of them are thinkers not workers anymore. Facing away from the viewers since they are mostly faceless.

Idle hands, for a fist, a middle finger from a hand that refuses work and forget the money home. 

I thought about friends near the area. I thought of friends now with expensive holiday overseas. I though about people who went overseas for low paying jobs, not an expat in HongKong or Shanghai. I recall now the myth of them being really rich when they reach their hometown after a few years. Long queue at the remittance, so old shopping mall permits them gathering outside, a woman intimate with two man, not because they are sharing an umbrella but the wait, three-person in bed, slippers and shirts not how a designer  friend defines cut, I wish to think like a self-gratifying Nietzchean with a general disdain towards humanity.

Another group behind the truck