To Italo Svevo, for his essay El diletantismo
Being a dilettante must be genetic, it comes with you, who knows where from. It is an attitude that I have always tried to maintain, to let it grow like the roses I enjoyed in the botanical garden in Atlanta; or the bubbling cornmeal casserole with crab meat that I ate near Bahía Honda, on the north coast of Pinar del Río; like the hours I spent looking at Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings in the Prado or listening to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor (Resurrection).
As a follower of Epicurus, I enjoy what I am. Dilettantism, dilettantism, and their cousins—which I will discuss later—encourage biting into a mango, dunking a cupcake, licking a gelato fior di latte… They also, incidentally, qualify reading, especially poetry. Reading poetry implies being a dilettante.
Dilettantism—those of us who delight in things—brings human beings closer together, far above ideologies and politics, eras and languages… Between the communist (sic) Nicolás Guillén and the Catholic (sic) José Lezama Lima—for example—there is a curious dilettante analogy. They were lovers of the senses, connoisseurs of Rabelais, cheese, paella, Quevedo, and Góngora… Despite being so far apart, they always delighted in their own way, in their own poetry, like genuine gourmets.
I am not intimidated by pejorative uses. I think they splash around under the bellicose suspicion that they despise words because they are cultured but arid people, lacking in artistic sensitivity, as is the case with poetry among well-known historians and intellectuals, university professors, and builders of barren canons. I have always regretted that admirable intellectuals such as José Ortega y Gasset or Jorge Mañach—to name but a few who are still alive—have lacked a taste for poetry, hence the mockery of the former by Borges and the elegant but devastating controversy in the magazine Bohemia between Lezama and the latter.
Joan Corominas’ Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana (Critical Etymological Dictionary of the Spanish Language) reminds me that diletante comes from the Italian dilettante, the present participle of dilettare (“to delight”), which in turn derives from the Latin delectare (“to enchant, to please”). The term was used in the 19th century to refer to someone who delighted in the arts—especially music—without practicing them professionally. My arguments are growing… The dilettante encompasses a variety of specimens; it does not imply that one is a professional. Nor does it distinguish between geniuses and normal people like me.
I am a lover of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, of suspense as tension in the face of enigmas, with doses of black humor and photographic mastery, but it would be egotistical nonsense to consider myself a film critic. Different points of view, whether cultural or specialized, do influence how things are received, but there is always a peculiar form of delight, as can easily be inferred from my taste for Hitchcock or for listening to Frank Sinatra singing “My Way,” which leads me to hum another certainty: “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again, too few to mention…” Perhaps because dilettantes are always proud of having tried to live our own way: “I did it my way.”
I must be—perhaps in front of my own magic mirror—a kind of enlightened curio; not one of those “ear players” who presume to know more than they really do, one of those petulant members of the Culta Latiniparla. I have almost always tried to act like a free spirit, unbound by academic rigidity or professional utilitarianism. I suppose my agnosticism has been enriched by my dilettantism, but for that very reason I do not exclude other ontological paths. Respect for diversity has been key to my considering myself a legitimate dilettante.
Conversing in this way is more entertaining, it forms a basis, a freer beginning, and therefore potentially more enjoyable. It is true that I look with disdain—ironic mockery—at so many beliefs, affiliations, authors, and politicians who lack nuance and flexibility, but I suppose this is an act of selfishness. I think it damages my status as a dilettante.
What I endured in Castro’s communist Cuba did not cure me of my horror. I am still frightened by fanatics, people I know or read about, true swindlers of pleasure, and not only aesthetic pleasure.
Furthermore, readers of In Search of Lost Time know that ambivalence can be a requirement for certain types of dilettantes, such as Charles Swann. Doubt accompanies me, pluralizing my perceptions. I always fluctuate when I evaluate a poem for the first time. If it has prompted me to jump off some metaphorical springboard or display linguistic sagacity, I begin to enjoy ambivalences, associations with myself, references that qualify my pleasure. I start from a resistance that must be transformed into curiosity about the unknown, as happens when we encounter an exotic ritual. There is something alchemical about my dilettantism as a reader of poetry, recreated in my doubting of canons, authorities, publicity, and multiculturalism. I suggest that when a poem fails to move me because it lacks some insight—even cunning—in its plot or language, the best thing my archetypal dilettante can do is—with the utmost respect—look for another author or poem.
Decisive—as I promised to avoid misunderstandings—is that I distinguish the dilettante from the flâneur and the outsider. I would say they are my first cousins. I say that we grew up together in areas somewhat marginal to the norm, to the established order. We grew up with similar readings and similar attitudes.
On my first trip to Paris, I wandered aimlessly, perhaps because I had read Baudelaire. I could feel like a flâneur. The spectacle I had longed for since Havana—since the Frenchification that began before Modernism in the 19th century—gave me the fascinating pleasure of becoming a dilettante wandering through the Latin Quarter, along the Left Bank. My appointment with Severo Sarduy in the early afternoon, when we went to lunch at the Café Napoléon, near Éditions du Seuil where he worked, interrupted the flâneur, as I now had a fixed address to go to. I remember that between Tel Queland his closeness to Roland Barthes and François Wahl, after gossip about the Cuban, we also talked about flâner, perhaps relating it—as I do today—to dandyism and attitudes that resist being utilitarian. Here it is worth recommending the insightful book Barbey d’Aurevilly, dandy among dandies, by Alfredo Triff, published by Ed. Casa Vacía last year.
I also know the outsider well, from when I broke with the regime in Cuba. I honored its meaning in English, literally “the one who is outside.” Back then, in those years before my exile in Mexico, I neither fit into nor wanted to fit into that system. I was honored to feel like a rebel, an outcast, on the periphery. But I had not ceased to be a dilettante in the arts, nor did I sometimes feel like a flâneur, someone who wandered aimlessly, not only through Paris but through existential survival. Today I feel like an outsider to so many things that I use “things” to avoid problems.
My uses and risks reinforce the meliorative use of the three terms, embodying a mixture, a way of inhabiting the world, of looking and, whenever I can, delighting in it. I think they go beyond being a writer or that the dilettante, the flâneur, or the outsider can predominate… I read that Juan Carlos Onetti was a dilettante of introspection, a narrator who constructs fictional worlds like Pessoa, but from melancholy… Would it be too bold to say that the brilliant poet Emily Dickinson was a dilettante of introspection and free verse, a thoughtful and independent flâneuse in the garden she tended so carefully at her home in Amherst, an outsider to the norms then prevailing in English-language poetry?
The praise of the dilettante has only just begun!
Image: Evaristo Baschenis, Still Life with Musical Instruments (circa 1670).
Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti di Bergamo.
