Quevedo showed us that paradoxes are mischief. His Buscón now intrigues us after reading Collage Montaigne, where Pablo de Cuba Soria unfurls the sails of his essays, recently published by Editorial Casa Vacía.
A volume that winks at us from its pages with a rare purpose: to be an extravagance—from the medieval Latin extravagans, extravagantis—that is, to wander, to be outside, to roam around, through humanistic culture.
Texts off the beaten track, out of the ordinary, off the beaten path, in fact, they are still scholarly, if you will, academic—an adjective that is only pejorative for mediocre self-taught people and lazy university students—with which they create a sensational paradox, rare to find in essays in this third decade of the 21st century.
The fact is that, above all, Pablo de Cuba Soria has literary talent, with poetry as the bow of his volume; a grace that is not exclusive to his doctorate in Hispanic Studies from Texas A&M University (TAMU)—he also graduated from the School of Letters at the University of Havana—which gives Collage Montaigne—as is the case with so many relevant poets-essayists—a peculiar amenity, determined by the pleasant paradox between wisdom and insight.
In Avant-Dire—a sort of preface—the author knows how to invite us to leaf through the book, drawing on the similarity it offers with similar compilations of poems or stories without a unifying theme. The Sibyl of Cumae warns us from the first paragraph that the collection is guided by a prophetic madness. And he is not only referring to the order of the essays but to each essay itself, to the motivational axis from which they spring. Precariousness is—in context—not a false modesty that often conceals so much petulance, but the certainty that it is a matter of fleeing from closures, borders of any kind, philosophical or aesthetic, political or social.
There he accepts and recalls the “aeolian” paradox that characterizes artistic creations, especially those that are usually called literary, whose edges we fortunately know to be diffuse, blurred, even murky. They are only clear when comfort forces us to turn the page, to jump to another open field, as Pablo de Cuba Soria does in certain essays collected here with apparent exegetical disdain.
Disdain, however, that does not fail to feel proud—why not?—that they are the happy result of a quarter of a century of work. From such satisfaction, he tells us that he put the book together “as one puts together a library: by affinities and accidents. Without pursuing a single thesis, the essays that make up these pages are carried along by a perhaps musical movement—sometimes erratic resonances—between voices and ideas, between readings and writings.” Such a musical structure suggests another curious paradox: that which often serves as a ritornello in popular melodies, as a refrain to give the argument its cadence.
For this reason, he confesses to being “Curator of myself. Binder of my prose, I bring these texts together knowing that they may not reach a center.” And indeed, one can verify how the montage attempts and almost always succeeds in escaping hierarchies, dancing along the choppy edges of the waves that each author, work, or theme has provoked. This freedom sounds like his best confession, while also serving as mischievous advice not to fall into confusion, into the dictates of Artificial Intelligence, into objectives typical of literary stories, dictionaries, and biographies.
But mischief has other twists and turns close to the ironies that Michel de Montaigne used to try out—to test—in the spirals of his tower-library. One of the most enjoyable, to be savored with knowing smiles, is found when Pablo de Cuba Soria suggests establishing links rather than hierarchies. Harold Bloom would have liked the joke. Do relationships between works or between authors not always respond to a canon, whether or not critics admit it?
Armed with the analytical tools he learned from Harold Bloom, among other critics, this poet knows how to charm us so that we can discuss his point of view and enjoy the certainties he places on the guardrails—he says “edges”—of his ideas. His intelligence prevents him from making categorical statements, risking his prestige with excessive praise or devastating insults.
Collage Montaigne has achieved a center—although his skepticism doubts it—when it does not slip into caricature. Meliorative and pejorative exaggerations are conspicuous by their absence in this book. This is a bias that is not common in any era, where neurological and exogenous reasons tend to fill our mouths with exclamation marks. Among the achievements that the volume spreads is moderation. Except for the occasional generous text, common sense is not carried away by enthusiasm and fanaticism. This does not exclude—as it should not—fully justified exaggerations when writing about Proust and Roger Martin du Gard, Gertrude Stein and Cioran, among others…
The pleasure we experience when reading poems by César Vallejo or René Char; when we contemplate Niagara Falls from the Canadian side or Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory at MoMA; here are some notes to be read as prose poems and paragraphs within certain essays, which, when evaluated within the context of current Cuban literature, produce a taste—mutatis mutandis—of remarkable stylistic quality and existential depth.
This collage—isn’t it just one?—is presented to us in four counterpoints or movements: First movement: the music of thought; Second movement: architecture of ruin; Third movement: the cabinet of the self; Fourth movement: the infinite library. With one warning: the author urges us to cheat him, not to follow his advice to read each essay at random. To structure a line that is not necessarily random but rather by each counterpoint. Hence—perhaps—the best suggestion is to jump around, although from each movement. At least without looking for intricate and causal explanations—as he says—for an order in the texts that barely maintains the cadence of his intellectual breathing, fortunately changeable, not at all hieratic or monotonous.
The book breathes in its oxygen without the ideological bacteria of modernity, while adopting—quite naturally—the form of a written flyer, of course, in French paragraph style. In reality, it is a poem—on the penultimate page—that gives us the parable: “When crossing the Lethe, souls must drink the water of oblivion to be reincarnated. Books are our device (the deck of cards that Hides Mind) to smuggle memory to the other shore. But Hermes, the conductor of souls, knows that the infinite library is also a way of forgetting, of burying life under layers of ink.” A parable—so that there are no misunderstandings—that does not hide behind any author or reference. It is Pablo de Cuba Soria himself who confesses to us his raison d’être, his vocation, and his cipher.
Through these layers, his inveterate and unbridled bibliophilia was revealed, his insatiable collection of dissimilar readings, the Ariadne of this Collage that we saw appear, grow, and take shape… In this sense—especially in the Fourth Movement—we see a nod to Jorge Luis Borges. Close to the brilliant Argentine author’s love of languages and writing, we find the final epigraph, the last veil of the volume: the quote from Edmond Jabès that says, “Everything that happens must happen in order to be written.”
The best mischief—I mean paradox—that Collage Montaigne leaves us with is a strange joy. Its heterogeneity stimulates other dialogues. As it is “an invitation to keep walking,” it shows that reading it has been a good way to go on an excursion to the Dordogne, to ascend—to isolate oneself, to reflect—to Michel de Montaigne’s tower.
Collage—from the French coller—means “to stick,” to bring together fragments, different materials. This dissimilar grouping of writings allows us to repeat what Pablo de Cuba Soria says about Roland Barthes. Both summon us “to their playful abysses.”
