You have forgotten Beckett’s lesson; you are still preoccupied with “telling the story.”
You have forgotten Infante’s lesson: destroy all reputation of the subject; that is, of the subject-language. The contradiction that cries out its agony exists only for that one.
You have forgotten Borges’ lesson: invention surpasses mere anecdote, even if the anecdote were the origin of the text.
You have forgotten Piñera’s lesson: narrate a character born from the mind of Franz Kafka, narrate a construction. Adhering to indefiniteness and Artaud: absurdity is the reality of a surreal cut in the pieces of time, etc. Denying the canonization of the work, hence its self-destructive pathos. The sick prescribed by the playful: the playful determined by the sadistic. The urgency of responding to the problem with the parody of the problem. Which entails, not its solution, but its apology. A eulogy of pain would not be enough, nor would mimesis. Simulation traffics—illustrious—precepts of a reality it represents; to narrate is to theater.
You have forgotten Cortázar’s lesson (The Shōgun): the cameraman can also be the character who disintegrates in the reader.
You forget things you didn’t learn, or that weren’t meant for you.
Writer who reaps awards, serves on juries, collects promising young people (mirrors of your own style) and (still) fossilizes bad narrative as “The Rule of the Art of Narrative.”
This is coming from your most loyal reader, who is betrayed by your cordial books… typographicum mendum: “cordial.”
[…]
(1) Of the purpose. To refer to, to contrast (succinctly) the oblique aesthetics of “some” post-Beckettian narrative against (over) the regency of a formative machinery, nationalistic and harsh in nature.
Or, in other words, of “certain” (pedagogical?) material that dominated the volume Los desafíos de la ficción: técnicas narrativas (compilation), Casa Editora Abril, Havana, Cuba. 2001. A book that in later editions “decided” to relax its content, although it was still governed by precepts that had expired. Those of a narrative precept that favored the linear and predictable over any avant-garde or “strange” perspective. Thus, the “Onelio Jorge Cardoso Training Center for Writers” —under the aegis of López Sacha, Heras León, and other mediocre ideologues; and to attest to their teachings— promoted those it considered the young narrators of Cuban stardom. All “promising” figures, and all indoctrinated by the same aesthetic. Provincialism to power. A didactic approach that excluded, above all, the art of non-narration (sic), implicit in the multi-diagonal writings of Beckett, Lispector, and Guimarães Rosa; writers who were ignored by those who still insisted on “telling the story,” strictly under the discretion and models of the boom narrative. Of course, most of those who graduated from Cardoso’s classrooms—and when the collapse of the system became more than unquestionable—emigrated and devoted themselves to writing articles and stories against the political system under which they had been trained. Authors who, despite having “become” rebels (a predictable metamorphosis), seemed to have extirpated the painful and hollow teachings of that pedagogy; stuck (still) in the art of telling the story, when what modernity demanded was to “tell the narration” and from a counter-language.
Therefore, “counter-narrators,” along with any other unpredictable or unclassifiable writer, were included in those days on the list of authors unwanted by the Foundation. Writers who were “misguided” or unequivocally suspicious—not only for the State in its controlling fiction of the subject—but also for Criticism as an institution, in its governing role; in its teaching of “how to write in Cuba.” A variant of ideological massacre (sic) and no less autocratic, with the implementation of a writing philosophy that authorized what was literary and what should be reviled from the mausoleum.
Under that label, orthodoxy (still divided between officialists and originists) dictated how and under what stylistic patterns the text could be approached. Soon the schemes became clichés, an art of mud. No longer a hijacking of narrative, but a failed teaching that arrogated to itself (and still does) in the name of a canon—narrower than canon—and with a “golden rule” included, the right to “assist,” exclude, and include, in pursuit of an absolute of writing; theoretically justified, though obsolete. The irrefutable proof of that dogma was the result of competitions and publications; its culmination, the national book fair, as indicated by the ‘successful’ radio and television interviews.
Thus, before that volume was finally published, a sort of vademecum of “correct narrative” was printed and attached to book purchases, indicating which volumes and authors to read. In none of them—I am referring strictly to those early years—did Beckett, Jünger, Broch, Cabrera Infante, Calvert Casey, Montenegro, or Piñera appear; nor did recent authors such as RSM, who had already published Escrituras (a hybrid facsimile, on the very borders of any genre).
I remember, I still remember. Any writer who did not conform aesthetically to the guidelines of the Centro-Onelio was labeled—through indifference and silence—an outcast, or worse, a specter of “our” literature, as Padilla or Cabrera Infante had been in their day, despite never having been officials of an “administrative” culture (let’s not forget that GCI and HP were once the “darling children” of the ruling party) or having gone into exile in London because, besides, there was no London, only guaraperas and broken shoes.
Image: Cover of the book Los desafíos de la ficción: técnicas narrativas (compilation), Casa Editora Abril, Havana, Cuba. 2001.
