Touchstones: Essays in Literature, Art and Politics by Mario Vargas Llosa
This unique perspective gives Oskar’s testimony its very original tone, which is a mixture, like an exotic blend of mysterious fragrances, of strangeness and tenderness, patriotic irreverence and tremulous delicacy, outlandishness, ferocity and jokes. Like the impossible combination of Oskar’s two intellectual totems – Goethe and Rasputin – his voice is an anomaly, a device that stamps on the world that it describes – or rather that it invents – its own very personal seal.
And yet, despite his evident artificiality, his existence as a metaphor, the little midget that beats his drum and tells the apocalyptic story of a Europe bled white and torn apart by totalitarian stupidity and war, does not have a nihilistic animosity towards life. Quite the reverse. What is surprising is that while his narration offers a relentless critique of his contemporaries, it expresses at the same time a warm sympathy for this world, which is clearly the only thing of importance to him. From his monstrous and defenceless smallness, Oskar Matzerath manages, in the worst moments, to transmit to us a natural and uncomplicated love for the good and entertaining things that the world also offers: play, love, friendship, food, adventure, music. Perhaps because of his size, Oskar has a much greater sensitivity to elemental things, to what is closer to the earth and to human clay. From down there, where he is confined, he discovers – like that night when, hidden under the family table, he observes the hesitant, adulterous movements of his parents’ legs and feet – that in its most direct and simple, in its most earthy and coarse forms, life contains tremendous possibilities and is full of poetry. In this metaphorical novel, all this is wonderfully represented in a recurrent image in Oskar’s memory: the warm encampment offered by his grandmother Ana Kolaiczek’s four skirts when she squats down, which gives to those that seek shelter there an almost magical feeling of safety and contentment. The simplest and most rudimentary of acts, when passed through Oskar’s Rabelaisian voice, can transubstantiate into pleasure.
A Rabelaisian voice? Yes, in its jocundity and its vulgarity, its quick-wittedness and its limitless freedom. Also, in the disorder and exaggeration of its fantasy and the intellectualism that lies beneath the cloak of vulgarity. When we read in translation, however good it may be (as in the case of the book I am reading), something of the texture and the flavour of the original is always lost. But in the case of The Tin Drum, the almost convulsive force of the account, the big, torrential voice of the narrator, breaks through the barriers of language and reaches us with overwhelming force. It has the vitality of the popular but, like El Buscón, it has almost as many ideas as images, and a complex structure organises this apparently chaotic monologue. Although the point of view is stubbornly individual, the collective is always present, the everyday and the historic, small, insignificant episodes of work or home life or major events – war, invasion, pillage, the reconstruction of Germany – albeit metabolised through the deforming prism of the narrator. All the values usually writ large, like patriotism, heroism or unselfishness with respect to a feeling or a cause, when filtered through Oskar, break and shatter like the way his voice shatters glass, and then appear as the senseless whims of a society bent on its own destruction. But, curiously, although we feel that this society is doomed, it is still, as it slides towards ruin, lively and human, full of people and things – landscapes above all – that we can empathise with. This is, without doubt, the greatest achievement of the novel: to make us feel, from the perspective of the humble people that are almost always the main protagonists, that life, in the midst of horror and alienation, is worth living.
Unlike the great stylistic versatility of the novel, which is full of verve and inventiveness, the structure is very simple. Locked up in a sanatorium, Oskar narrates episodes that refer to a near or an immediate past, with occasional flights to the remote past (like the amusing synthesis of the different invasions and dynasties in the history of Danzig). The story moves continually from present to past and vice versa, as Oskar remembers or fantasises, and this technique sometimes becomes rather mechanical. But there is another shift that takes place, that is less obvious: the narrator sometimes talks in the first person and at other times in the third person, as if the little dwarf with the drum were someone else. What is the reason for this schizophrenic doubling of the narrator, whom we see at times, in the course of a single sentence, approach us with the open intimacy of one speaking from the ‘I’ perspective and then retreat into the shadow of someone who is spoken or narrated by another person? In this novel, which is full of allegories and metaphors, it would not be wise to see the changing identity of the narrator as a mere stylistic flourish. It is clearly another symbol that represents the inevitable doubling or duplication that Oskar suffers (that all novelists suffer?) when he is, simultaneously, both narrator and narrated, the person who writes and invents and the subject of his own invention. Oskar’s condition, split in two in this way, being and not being who he is in what he narrates, is a perfect representation of the novel: a genre that is and is not life, that expresses the world by turning it into something different, that tells the truth by lying.
Baroque, expressionist, committed, ambitious, The Tin Drum is also the novel of a city. Danzig rivals Oskar Matzerath as the protagonist of the book. The setting is described in both clear and elusive terms because, like a living being, it is continually changing, fashioning and refashioning itself in space and in time. The almost tangible presence of Danzig, where most of the story takes place, helps to give the novel its materiality, its palpable sense of living and breathing, despite the extravagance and even deliriousness of many of its episodes.
What city is this? Is the Danzig of the novel a true city that Grass has transposed like a historical document, or is it another product of his vibrant imagination, something as original and arbitrary as the little man whose voice shatters glass? The answer is not simple, for in novels – in good novels – as in life, things tend to be ambiguous and contradictory. Grass’s Danzig is a centaur-city with its hooves buried in the mud of history and with its torso floating among the mists of poetry.
There is a mysterious link between the novel and the city, a relationship that does not exist in the case of theatre and poetry. Unlike these genres, which flourish in all cultures and in rural civilisations before the rise of the city, the novel is an urban plant which seemingly can only germinate and propagate in streets and neighbourhoods, in commerce and in offices, among the crowded, variegated, diverse throng of the city. Lukács and Goldmann attribute this link to the bourgeoisie, the social class in which the novel had found not only its natural audience, but also its source of inspiration, its primary resource, its mythology and its values: for is not the bourgeois century the century, par excellence, of the novel? However, this class-based interpretation of the genre does not take into account the illustrious precursors we find in medieval and Renaissance fiction – the romances of chivalry, the pastoral novel, the picaresque novel – where the genre has a popular audience (the illiterate ‘common people’ listened, spellbound, to the deeds of the likes of Amadis and Palmerín which were narrated in the markets and squares), as well as, in some instances, a courtly and aristocratic audience. The novel is urban in a comprehensive, totalising, sense: it embraces and expresses equally all the classes that together comprise urban society. The key word here is perhaps ‘society’. However solitary and introverted they might be, characters in novels always need the backcloth of society in order to be believable and persuasive; if this multiple presence is not insinuated and does not operate in some way in the novel, then it becomes abstract and unreal (which is not the same as ‘fantastic’: the nightmares imagined by Kafka, even though they have few characters, are always firmly rooted in the social world). And there is nothing that symbolises the idea of society better than the city, the space of many people, a shared world, a gregarious reality by definition. That this should be the chosen ground of the novel is thus coherent with the novel’s main aim, which is to simulate the life of the individual in a social
The city of Danzig in The Tin Drum has the immaterial consistency of dreams and, at times, the solidity of an artefact or of geography; it is a mobile entity whose past is embedded in the present, a hybrid and a fantasy, whose borders are uncertain and figurative. It is a city through which different races, languages and nations have passed or where they have coexisted, leaving rough deposits; which has changed flags and colonists in step with the raging wars of our age. A city which, by the time the narrator begins to remember his story, bears little relation to these memories: it was formerly German and called Danzig and is now Polish and called Gdansk; it was old and its ancient stones bore witness to its long history; now, reconstructed out of its devastation, it seems to have disowned the past. The setting for the novel, in its imprecision and its constant changes, could not be more fictional. One might see it as a work of pure imagination and not something capriciously sculpted by a history that has lost its bearings.
Straddling reality and fantasy, the city of Danzig in the novel pulses with buried tenderness and is shrouded in melancholy like a light winter mist. This perhaps is the secret of its charm. Describing its streets and its port full of inhospitable docks and large barges, its operatic Municipal Theatre or its Marine Museum – where Heriberto Truczinski dies trying to make love to a figurehead – Oskar Matzerath’s ironic and belligerent tone melts like ice before a flame, and he speaks with delicacy and nostalgic empathy. His nuanced, lingering descriptions of places and things make the city human and give it, in certain episodes, a theatrical life of its own. At the same time it is pure poetry: a labyrinth of streets or ruined waste ground, or squalid, unconnected emotions that are part of the ebb and flow of memory, brought to life by the changing moods of the narrator. Flexible and voluble, the city of the novel, like the central character and his adventures, is also an enchanted space, which, through the strength of language and delirium, illuminates the hidden face of real history.
Barranco, 28 September 1987
Deep Rivers
Fantasy and Magic
In 1958, José María Arguedas published Deep Rivers, his best novel. Although it was deeply rooted in personal experience – the journeys through the mountains with his father, who was a lawyer, the periods of solitude when his father was travelling, the time he spent at the religious Miguel Grau School in Abancay, his memories of the Indian communes in Viseca, where he lived happily after escaping from his stepmother’s house, and his memories of the large estates in Apurímac that he later visited – it is more than an autobiographical novel. It is a story so skilfully reworked that it has depersonalised the author’s memories and offers instead a sovereign narrative world, which is what the best fictions always achieve. The book is seductive because of its elegant style, its delicate sensibility and the range of emotions with which it recreates the world of the Andes. Although the novel includes the different social groups in the sierra, at its heart are the cruel and innocent ceremonies of puberty and the early steps that a boy must take into the adult world, which is made up of rigid hierarchies and imbued with violence and racism.
The protagonist of the novel is a boy torn between two hostile worlds. The child of white parents, brought up by Indians and then returned to the world of the whites, Ernesto the narrator is a misfit, a solitary figure and also someone in a privileged position to evoke the tragic opposition between these worlds. At the beginning of the novel, in the shadow of the stone walls in Cuzco where the Indian and the Spanish worlds meet in harsh alliance, as they do in Ernesto (and in José María Arguedas), the boy’s fate is sealed. He will not change, and throughout the story he is disturbed by the thousand and one forms of subtle or not so subtle conflict between two races and two cultures in the Andes. Subjectively identified with the Indians who brought him up and who, for him, represent a paradise lost, and yet far removed from them because of his social position that objectively places him among the whites in Abancay, whose views on the Indian population are anathema to him, the world around him poses an impossible dilemma for Ernesto. One has to live, of course, and since Ernesto cannot escape his predicament, he finds ways to make it bearable. He has two weapons at his disposal: the first is to take refuge in an inner world, in fantasy. The second is a desperate desire to communicate with the world outside of men and women: with nature. For this pariah child, with no roots in society, always in exile, the world is not rational but essentially absurd. That is why he displays a fatalistic irrationality and idealises plants, objects and animals, attributing to them not just human but also divine properties: he makes them sacred.
Every magical-religious vision – like that of Ernesto – is irrational, not scientific, because it presupposes the existence of a secret order within the natural and human order, outside rational and intelligent understanding. Such a world can be very refined, but it will always be primitive if we accept the premise that the transition from the primitive and tribal world to the beginning of modern culture is based, precisely, on the advent of rationality.
In Deep Rivers, as in all of Arguedas’s work, there is a desire for a primitive, sociable world: the ‘tribe’ that Karl Popper talks about in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a collective not yet split up into individuals, magically immersed in nature, strongly united by a solidarity that stems from a shared faith in the same gods, in rituals and ceremonies practiced in common. This is contrasted to a caricature of the modern world in which individuals – like Ernesto in this novel – find themselves abandoned and alienated because they have lost the umbilical chord that binds them to society and are at the mercy of hostile forces that at every moment threaten to destroy them.
The magical-religious world depicted in the novel might be irrational and primitive, but it is very persuasive. This speaks well of the creative talent of Arguedas and not necessarily, as ideological critics would have us believe, of his skill as an ethnographer and folklore specialist. He doubtless had these skills when he worked as a researcher, but, fortunately, when he came to write novels, he did so with enough freedom to escape the rigid limitations that any ‘scientific knowledge’ of the Andes would impose. As a novelist and short-story writer, Arguedas built a world which was based on his ‘scientific’ knowledge of the Quechua world and on his own personal demons – his frustrations and desires, his suffering, emotions, passions, dreams and resentments – as well as on the flight of his fantasy. For that reason his Andean world is different to that of other novelists who wrote about the Andes and its traditional cultures, and is also very different to the historical and sociological reality of the Quechuan people. To read Arguedas’s narratives as an ethno-historical manual, or through the rigid prism of political ideology, is to miss what is new about it: the creation of an imaginary world which has transformed into myth a heterogeneous material made up of personal memories, nostalgia and disappointments along with historical and social realities and a good dose of invention, and has transcended its ‘model’ – its space, its time and its sources – to live the autonomous life of those fictions that can persuade all types of readers of their uncertain truths, whose magic, made up of words and dreams, can help them identify and put up with their own particular truths.
Ernesto is also resistant to what other people believe and adore: his faith is not their faith, his God is not their God. Within this Christian world in which he is immersed, the solitary child establishes a personal religion, a surreptitious cult, a personal divinity. That is why he is so hostile to the ministers of the opposing faith: the head of his boarding school, a priest, the ‘saint’ of Abancay, is presented as the incarnation of human duplicity and injustice. A wave of fury breaks over the novel when this character appears. The masochistic speech that he delivers to the Indians in Patibamba and his unctuous and lying sermon to placate the women in revolt verge on caricature. Not even the local caciques who exploit the Indians or the soldiers that repress them are as harshly depicted in Deep Rivers as the priest who makes victims become resigned to their lot and
From his inner refuge, Ernesto participates in the struggle between the Indians and their masters. Two fundamental episodes in the novel refer to this age-old war: the uprising of the market women and the spread of the plague. These are the two moments of greatest intensity that send a current of energy throughout the book. The lava that flows from these volcanic craters seems to engulf the narrator, turning the timid retiring child into another person: in these episodes nostalgia is overcome by passion. For when the market women rebel and the citizens of Abancay take to their houses in terror, Ernesto is out on the street, happy and excited, singing alongside them in Quechua. It is curious how a novel that is so focused on the inner world, that draws so strongly on the contemplation of nature and on the unhappy loneliness of a child, can suddenly express an intolerable violence. Arguedas was not too bothered by the technical aspects of the novel, which is sometimes weak in its construction, but his intuition guided him to make the best use of his materials. These incidents of violence are structurally successful. From the first time that I read Deep Rivers I still remember the impact that these episodes had, lighting up the story like a fire: the image of the young girl in the plague-ridden town, with her ‘tiny sex covered with enormous, white, insect-bitten swellings’28, or the lice that cover the heads and the bodies of those dying from the plague.