They say that Denis Diderot—while enduring imprisonment at Vincennes or risking his neck before the King’s censors—took the trouble to visit workshops and foundries to understand the inner workings of a spring before allowing a single word to enter his temple of reason. For him and D’Alembert, knowledge was an architecture, where every entry had to be raisonné: passed through the fire of judgment and the sieve of the intellect.
In a display of horror vacui, the literary website Árbol Invertido has opted for a different path: converting—with a suspicious cheerfulness—Cuban literature “after 1959” into a bin where everything fits, from the genius to the columnist who mistakes an ideological tantrum for catharsis, or the artist who confuses a Facebook post with an essay. Far from any taxonomic ambition, hierarchy has been banished here so that clutter may reign. In this contrivance of doggerel, absences are irrelevant—we already know Ireneo Funes was an Argentine invention, not a Cuban one—as they have dug a sort of bibliographic mass grave where excellence is smothered under the weight of the irrelevant and the nonsensical.
Let us place a magnifying glass over some of these specimens of the aristocracy of the spirit assaulted by the bureaucracy of the superfluous:
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Abel Prieto Jiménez: Included as a “writer and politician.” How delicate! It’s like including the executioner in a dictionary of physiology because he knows exactly where the axe falls. A commissar of silence disguised as a novelist under the same roof as some of his victims.
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Aitana Alberti: Whose greatest literary feat seems to be presiding over a Chair and carrying an illustrious surname. In this archive, biographical nepotism outscores meter.
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Adalberto Hechavarría Alonso: Defined by being a “member of the Asociación Hermanos Saíz.” Heavens above! As if a state-issued membership card were a literary device or a successful metaphor.
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Alberto Edel Morales Fuentes: A “functionary for many years.” We are witnessing the apotheosis of grey; office-style elevated to literary canon.
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Freddy Camilo Morffe Fuentes: Of whom they can only say has a “presence in regional anthologies.” It is the literary equivalent of receiving a gold star for attendance in primary school.
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Juventina Soler Palomino: Tagged as “active in literary life.” Active? Does she perform gymnastics with her verses? Is this an athletic category or a literary one?
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Josefina de Cepeda (1907-?): A chronological enigma worthy of a 1940s radio soap opera. That question mark at the end of her life is the perfect cliffhanger for a mystery plot, but an embarrassment for an archive claiming to be serious.
But the most scandalous part is the arithmetic of the absurd. In this Dictionary, proportions defy the most basic common sense; they are woven from the same thread as the Emperor’s new clothes. Consider this comic hyperbole: they present José Soler Puig as if he were our insular Joyce, the “renovator of the novelistic structure.” A Joyce of the tenements, I suppose. To attribute such avant-garde depth to the author of Bertillón 166 is a joke that can only be explained by the compilers’ lack of reading.
Similarly, one encounters a certain Francisco Soria Sebazco, whose literary glory consists of being “linked to community cultural projects.” Lord, save us from sociology! Here, the quality of a verse is measured by neighborhood activism. It is literature as social service; Parnassus turned into a local town hall meeting. While some classics (Arenas, for instance) are dismissed with barely a couple of lines, other names dropped from the sky enjoy double or triple the informational space. Long live the democracy of nothingness!
If in the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, D’Alembert attempted to trace the tree of human knowledge, these amanuenses only manage to prune the dignity of authors. The design of these “entries” results in an authentic dryness, the stuff of a customs inventory. Something akin to “born, wrote, left.” What audacity! They have achieved a dictionary written by an immigration statistician. The vital struggles of a writer are reduced here to passport stamps. Aseptic entries drafted by a border official in a hurry. If the Encyclopédie was the triumph of the Enlightenment—forgive me this absurd comparison—this index is the blackout of criticism. And for its greatest achievement: a witty surrender of taste.
Image: Frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1764), designed by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost.
