The Fear of Europe
Since then, when I am in Europe, those dark alleyways give rise to strange feelings of foreboding. If perchance I find myself walking along one, I extinguish a part of my fear by evoking a hidden nexus of cultivated citizens who pass through Paris ineluctably, a nexus I know to exist: European citizens, discreetly devoted to the preservation of meaning.
The last century began with this question: "What should we do?" And the present one with another: "What have we done?" For this century, I believe, we should, at long last, invent a constructive and stimulating historic vertigo.
I dream of a spiritual insurrection, a rebirth.
And yet I sense an attraction to the apocalypse. Might it somehow pertain to the proclivity, on the part of American cinema, for special effects, for the destruction of the sets?
In this age of monsters and catastrophes, which wants for even the least bit of beauty, it is important to recall our enduring reliance on the memory of those beautiful biblical apocalypses. I don't know what we would do without them, what we would do if they were not part or our imaginary.
The idea of a common language in Europe forms part of our imaginary as well.
The language of Europe-Umberto Eco says-is translation.
I dream of a Hollywood apocalypse that anticipates a spiritual insurrection, a rebirth, a flourishing, the realization of a truly vertiginous linguistic utopia.
2
I was born in Barcelona, a city where one of my distant relations, a tram conductor-a cousin of my grandfather-ran over and killed the great architect, Gaudl.
It isn't lost on me that my birthplace and my homicidal pedigree leave no room for doubt: I am a European writer. A writer who is conscious, I would add, in the words of Koestler, that art in Europe is in its death-throes, because it cannot live without truth, and it is now years since its truth became lethal.
The fact is, the stories generated by the better part of the European narrative teach nothing but tricks for postponing death, for distracting it, for deferring the moment, so fraught with fear, when we will be forced to face up to that truth that we will be unable to bear.
Without going far, this is what happens in many of the tales contained in the anthology the reader now holds in his hands: they may be distinct in style, distinct in the inquietudes they harbor, but at their core, almost all share something in common, something inevitable: the characteristic, vitiated air of a Europe where everything appears soulless and interred for decades, since the time when, on the continent, consent was given to those first unforgiveable, grave errors,
and the rise of totalitarianisms was permitted.
It may be I have written this under the influence of the grievous present day. The sun has remained changelessly, ceaselessly at its zenith, and yet, it has stayed hidden the whole time behind tatters that seem to have hung in the air for centuries; tatters made up of a kind of dust as fine as the excess pollen that overlays the earth, an earth I have clearly observed disintegrating with horrifying but lethal indolence.
This may have influenced my mood, but I believe I would have written the same, lethal indolence or no, inasmuch as I never cease to be a writer from Barcelona, of a deeply homicidal European pedigree, disposed to taking long nocturnal strolls, always wracked with acute feelings of fear; a writer still confounded by the intimation that, a hundred years ago, Europe took a wrong road; a writer who seeks words in order to reign in a paralyzing kind of horror that drives him to an endless vertigo, from which he only manages to escape when he sets off, devoting himself to walking and thinking, in order to return home thereafter and close dramatic circles, and sit at his desk and, through the ever-frustrated conjuration of his terrors, try to control the fear that reappears relentlessly, tormenting him at every turn.
Paralyzing horror, I have said. This is an impression so heavy with truth, it can only be expressed comfortably in the context of a literary work, for nowhere else would accommodate a declaration that makes mention of this immobilizing fear and at the same time speaks of Europe with the purpose of telling us that the continent has already passed a number of decades sheathed in its death shroud. For these are not the sort of truths you can air to your friends on Saturday night without their thinking that you've drunk too much. Nor are they truths you can say aloud-for example, during an interview with the press-without blinking. Or in an article about international politics. It sounds too literary, to say Europe is sheathed in its death shroud ...
Or does it sound too true?
All this has done nothing more than show me that every day, with increasing certainty, there remains an important role for writing to play, a role related to truths that find their most fitting expression in the terrain of the literary and, paradoxical though it may seem, their most concrete expression in fiction. Because, while many confuse reality with what is stated on the nightly news-Nabokov already said that reality is highly overrated-I have the sense that literary fiction today is the best, if not the only, path to take to approach the truth.
In fact there is a deeply strange episode in the history of the epic genre, a chapter that has y t to be written and will include all those from Cervantes and Sterne up to Kafka and Bolano-who fought with titanic effort against every form of falsification and imposture; a fight the paradoxical slant of which is evident, as those who waged battle in this way lived sunk to their necks in the world of artifice and fiction. Be that as it was, it is from that tension that the greatest pages of contemporary literature have emerged.
3
Now then: how do I manage, when I am talking in front of my Saturday friends, or when I speak or write for the press on the theme of fragile Europe? Naturally, by telling them things I do not remotely believe, because, for me, they pull back in an alarming way from the fundamental truth.
Quite clearly, in order to say what I do not believe, I employ the least literary language possible. I say, for example, that I still have faith in the European Union and that I will therefore vote in its parliamentary elections. The part about faith is a falsehood; that I will vote is true.
I plan on voting because, when all is said and done, what I do in my everyday life always turns its back on the truths that I only dispense when I write fiction; in other words, independent of my awareness that the pure, hard fact of Europe in its death-shroud is the fundamental truth, I will go on supporting the almost universal desire to re-unite and will continue to show up at the ballot boxes of my tumultuous Europe as though nothing were happening, always bearing in mind that it is necessary both to feel the weight of memory and to try to escape that memory of the horror, even if only for the sake of something resembling a future and the possibility of establishing another horizon.
I will go on voting, that is to say, always moved by the vague, desperate daydream of a belief that we might still leave the ruins behind and invent a future.
But at the same time -let us not deceive ourselves - I will continue to dream of a kind of Hollywood apocalypse preceding the instauration of a linguistic utopia of true vertigo: the idea of a common language of Europe, which, as Eco noted, will be called translation.
In that linguistic utopia I find the necessary equilibrium between the fundamental truth that my literature expresses unequivocally and the falsehoods I go scattering around outside its limits, trying not to be seen, contemptuously, as a person "excessively literaturized."
4
The roadmap through that chimera in which I have found the necessary equilibrium between the fundamental truth and the "deliteraturized" is sketched out, in a certain way, by Camille de Toledo in his book Le hêtre et le bouleau: Essai sur fa tristesse europeene (The Beech and the Birch: An Essay on European Sorrow), translated into Spanish by Juan Asis. Here we are told that the current identity crisis of the European Union, as well as its habitual tensions, may be related to a neglect of language and, intoning a paean to translation, to the art of intermediation; in other words, he insists that we "understand European citizenship by becoming translators, exerting ourselves to pass over from one context to another, from one grammar to another, and from one culture to another."
Camille de Toledo's utopia transports us to a 2040 where there will function an ingenious translator-society. The situation he describes will be as follows: after one or two generations, children born in Europe have learned to speak our language-remember: this language, according to Eco, is translation-and numerous bodies of work have been translated or retranslated in their entirety. The public willingness to promote a culture of translation has revived an enthusiasm for knowledge, for understanding, for the humanities. Children from the more recent migrations feel recognized, because school speaks to them about their languages, about what their adopted languages take away from their childhoods, from memory. Translation courses generate abundant vocations. Indeed, the myth of Babel is interpreted again, reread, retranslated ... We laugh at misunderstandings, are moved by contretemps, we play around at the interstices. And we see, throughout Europe, increasingly active translators' organizations that also bid for politics to be reconceived in their image: a politics beyond languages and beyond nations. When a future constitution is written, the discussions center on the meaning of the word "freedom" in Hungarian, of the word "fraternity" in Turkish. Solidarities are born across frontiers, and the voices of the speakers can once again be heard without headphones. Legibility returns, but endowed this time with a poetics-the expressiveness, the emotion, of the person who knows how to translate on his own. We dream of shedding the archaic skin of nationhood. Relying on the parliament, we impose our will upon the national executive governments. Newspapers speak
of a "translators' revolution."
It is a Babel in reverse, where everyone can truly understand one another. It is the triumph of a common language in Europe: translation.
5
Yesterday I went back to the alleyway that I had never come across before. And I noted again the frozen, glacial gust. At some point, I thought, someone will certainly end up asking me for a light, or will try to assault me, or will make me believe they are going to shoot me, and finally will shoot me and kill me.
Behind lowered blinds I seemed to hear a voice that said the alleyway did not appear on any map. I imagined running across pimps, small-time conmen, exceptionally lascivious hookers, vagabonds who smiled at me ominously.
The sordid climate of the alleyway did not keep me from meditating, though my thinking, it is true, showed itself increasingly incapable of escaping the sordid climate created by what I was imagining about that very place.
I was coming to understand that we are afraid.
It is the fear of Europe.
Since we have forbidden ourselves from imagining heaven on earth, we prefer to expel any utopia from our world. And thus, ferocious vigilantes that we are, we control every possibility that the idea of heaven might meddle in our lives. We prefer to be possessed by the nightmare of the shady alleyway, the frozen gust that keeps us subject to the idea of disgrace.
But yesterday was lucky. I was pushing on through that darkness when I was assaulted by an intimate insurrection, a rebellion arising from my weariness of so much skepticism. With a measure of astonishment, I saw all at once, as if it was taking place right there before me, the re-foundation of Europe through the multiple identities and spoken languages of our extraordinary common patrimony. I kept on walking, almost incredulous. I will never forget that, in that moment, the alleyway seemed to admit-in all the languages-the first voices of the day.
ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH
BY ADRIAN WEST
Kể từ đó, khi tôi ở Âu Châu, những lối đi âm u của nó tiếp tục làm dâng trào trong tôi những cảm nghĩ kỳ quặc về điềm gở. Và cứ mỗi lần ngẫu nhiên đi những bước đi một mình, chẳng có ma nào quanh quất, là tôi bèn dập tắt một phần nỗi sợ của tôi, bằng cách viện ra – theo kiểu gọi hồn người chết - và người chết ở đây là cả 1 bộ sậu ẩn giấu, những công dân Âu Châu có học, có văn hóa, thận trọng dâng hiến, đóng góp vào cái việc gìn giữ, bảo tồn cái ý, cái nghĩa.
Thế kỷ vừa qua bắt đầu bằng câu hỏi: Chúng ta nên làm cái trò gì?
Và thế kỷ hiện nay, là 1 câu hỏi khác: Chúng ta đã làm được cái giống gì?
Với thế kỷ hiện nay này, nói cho cùng, chúng ta nên phát minh ra một cú toát mồ hôi, 1 cú choáng, mang tính xây dựng, lịch sử.
Tôi mơ một cú nổi dậy tinh thần, 1 tái sinh.
Tuy nhiên, tôi cảm thấy sự quyến rũ, nài nỉ của… tận thế.
Toward the end of the winter of 1924, on the enormous, towering rock where the concept of eternal recurrence first came to Nietzsche, the Russian writer Andrei Bely suffered a nervous breakdown as he experienced the irremediably ascending lavas of the superconscious. On the same day, at the same time, a short distance away, the musician Edgar Varese fell from his horse when, parodying Apollinaire, he pretended to set off for war.
For me these two scenes seem to be the pillars on which the history of portable literature is built: a history European in its origins and as light as the "desk-case" Paul Morand carried with him on luxury trains as he traveled the whole of an illuminated, nocturnal Europe. This moveable desk was the inspiration for Marcel Duchamp's Boite-en-valise, indisputably the most brilliant bid to exalt portability in art. Duchamp's box-in-a-suitcase-which contained miniature reproductions of each his works-soon became an "anagram" for portable literature and the symbol by which the first Shandies* would come to be recognized.
Months later and with a minor alteration to the boite-en-valise (a hairclip now serving as its clasp), this "anagram" would be rearranged by Jacques Rigaut, who tried to represent, as he put it, the apotheosis of "featherweights" in the history of literature. His drawing was widely praised-perhaps for its markedly unorthodox character-and it prompted an extraordinary avalanche of new and daring corruptions of the Duchampian anagram, very clear evidence of the unremittingly transgressive impulse characterizing the first writers incorporated into the Shandy secret society.
Around the same time-and because of a widespread fear among those first Shandies that the box-in-a-suitcase might fall into the hands of any old charlatan-Walter Benjamin came up with a remarkably successful design for the joyous book-weighing machine that bears his name and allows us to judge, to this day, with unerring precision, which literary works are insupportable, and therefore-though they may try to disguise the fact-untransportable.
It's no coincidence that much of the originality of what was written by the inventor of the Benjamin machine can be attributed to his microscopic attention to detail (along with his unflagging command of philosophical theories). "It was the small things that he was most drawn to," his close friend Gershom Scholem wrote. Walter Benjamin had a fondness for old toys, postage stamps, photographic postcards, and those imitations of real winter landscapes contained within a glass globe where it snows when shaken. Walter Benjamin's own handwriting was almost microscopic. His never-achieved ambition was to fit a hundred lines onto a Single sheet of paper. Scholem says that the first time he visited Benjamin in Paris, his friend dragged him along to the Musee de Cluny to show him, in an exhibition of ritual Jewish objects, two grains of wheat upon which some kindred spirit had written out the entirety of the Shema Yisrael.
Walter Benjamin and Marcel Duchamp were kindred spirits. Both were vagrants, always on the move, exiled from the world of art, and, at the same time, collectors weighed down by many things-that is, by passions. Both knew that to miniaturize is to make portable, and for a vagrant and an exile, that is the best way of owning things.
But to miniaturize is also to conceal. Duchamp, for example, always felt drawn to extremely small things that cried out to be deciphered: insignia, manuscripts, symbols. For him, to miniaturize also meant to make "useless": "What is reduced finds itself in a sense liberated from meaning. Its smallness is, at one and the same time, a totality and a fragment. The love of small things is a childish emotion."
As childish as the perspective of Kafka who, as is well known, engaged in a struggle to the death to enter into paternal society, but would only have done so on the condition he could carry on being the irresponsible child he was.
The portable writers always behaved like irresponsible children. From the outset, they established staying single as an essential requirement for entering into the Shandy secret society or, at least, acting as though one were. That is, functioning in the manner of a "bachelor machine" in the sense Marcel Duchamp intended soon after learning-through Edgar Varese no less-of Andrei Bely's nervous breakdown: "At that moment, I don't know why, I ceased listening to Varese and began to think one shouldn't weigh life down excessively, with too many tasks, with what we call a wife, children, a house in the country, a car, etc. Happily, I came to understand this very early on. For a long time, I have lived as a bachelor much more easily than if I'd had to tackle all of life's normal difficulties. When it comes down to it, this is key."
That Duchamp should come to understand all of this just as Varese was telling him of Bely's nervous breakdown on the enormous, towering rock of eternal recurrence is still strange. One inevitably wonders what link there might be between Bely's frayed nerves and the Duchampian resolve to remain single at all costs, daydreaming like all irresponsible children. It's hard-practically impossible-to know. Most likely there isn't any link at all, and the image of a celibate person (impossible, gratuitous, outrageous) simply occurred to Duchamp all of a sudden, unaccompanied by any explicable memory or conscious association. That's to say, a portable artist, or what amounts to the same thing, someone easy to carry around, wherever one goes.
Whatever happened, the one clear thing is that Varese's fall, Bely's breakdown, and the unexpected emergence of a celibate, gratuitous, outrageous artist in Duchamp's field of vision were the pillars on which the Shandy secret society was based.
Two other essential requirements for being a member of this society (apart from the demand for high-grade madness) were established: along with the fact one's work mustn't weigh very much and should easily fit into a suitcase, the other essential condition was that of functioning in the manner of a "bachelor machine."
Though not essential, certain other typically Shandy-esque characteristics were also advisable: an innovative bent, an extreme sexuality, a disinterest in grand statements, a tireless nomadism, a fraught coexistence with doppelgangers, a sympathy for negritude, and the cultivation of the art of insolence.
In insolence, there is a swiftness of action, a proud spontaneity that smashes the old mechanisms, triumphing speedily over a powerful but sluggish enemy. From the outset, the Shan dies decided that what they really wanted was for the portable conspiracy to become the stunning celebration of what appears and disappears with the arrogant velocity of the lightning bolt of insolence. Therefore, the portable conspiracy-whose principle characteristic was that of conspiring for the sake of conspiring-should be short-lived. Three years after Varese's fall and Bely's breakdown-on the day of the Gongora tribute in Seville in 1927 to be precise-the Satanist Aleister Crowley, with a deliberately histrionic flourish, dissolved the secret society.
Many years after Crowley set the Shandy eagle free, I find myself in a position to reveal that the portable society exists beyond the distant horizons of its members' imagination. It was a nexus, a secret society altogether unprecedented in the history of art.
These pages will discuss those people who risked something-if not their lives, then at least their sanity-in order to create works in which the threat of the charging bull, horns lowered, was ever present. We will become acquainted with those people who paved the way for the debunking today of all those who, as Hermann Broch put it, "weren't necessarily bad writers, but were criminals."
We will meet those who paved the way for this novel about the most joyful, voluble, zany secret society that ever existed, a society of writers who seemed practically Turkish to judge by all the coffee and tobacco they got through, a society of gratuitous and outrageous heroes in the lost battle of life, lovers of writing when it becomes the most enjoyable experience possible, and also the most radical.
* Shandy, in the dialect of certain ridings of Yorkshire (where Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, lived for much of his life), can mean joyful as well as voluble or zany.
Bài Preface quá thần sầu. Sót dế quá,
tính không mua, nhưng lỡ ghé răng cắn vào
khúc dạo đầu 1 phát, là nhả không ra, hà
hà.
Nỗi Sợ Của Âu Châu. The Fear of Europe
Xứ Âu, Trời Âu đếch có ngôn ngữ, và
giả như nó có, thì là dịch ngữ - ngôn
ngữ mắc dịch - và đây là ý của Eco: The language
of Europe is translation.
Chỉ nội hai câu phán đó, là đủ làm
khổ GCC rồi!
Có hai bài viết của Vila-Matas GCC sẽ đi liền,
là bài Tựa tập truyện ngắn hay nhất Âu Châu
2015, và bài Bạt cho cuốn Văn Chương Bỏ Túi, của
ông.
Vila-Matas, Portrait
Ma Cà Rồng Iêu
Trong "Hồi Ức Phịa", "Invented Memories", trích đoạn:
Tớ nhớ là bữa đó, Valéry đến thăm, vào 1 buổi chiều, ở nhà, và đề nghị đi dạo. Trong lúc tớ đang thay đồ, ông ta ngồi vô bàn, lấy 1 tờ giấy trắng ra, và viết:
Truyện,
Ngày xưa có một nhà văn,.... viết
Story,
Once upon a time, there was a writer... who wrote.
-Valéry
par Enrique Vila-Matas
LE RÊVE AMÉRICAIN
l'enfance est un rêve qui s'ignore
Pendant
des années et des années, le plus récurrent
de mes rêves me transportait dans l'immense cour de l'enntresol
de la rue Rosellon de Barcelone où, enfant, je jouais seul
au football quand, après la lonngue journée scolaire,
je retournais chez mes parents et, histoire de m'occuper avant le
dîner, j'inventais des matchs. La cour était entourée
d'immeubles gris, tristes constructions caractéristiques
de l'époque, ces dures années de la sinistre Espagne
d'après-guerre. Dans mon imagination, j'étais les vingt-deux
joueurs à la fois, si bien qu'une partie de moi-même-
composée de onze joueurs - passait son temps à attaquer
comme si elle était le Brésil au Mondial de Suède,
tandis que l'autre attendait, tapie, la contre-attaque. Je n'avais
pas de préférence et chaque équipe - chaque partie
de moi - pouvait gagner indistinctement; tout dépendait du
génie dont chacune faisait preuve. Aidé par mon génie
d'enfant, j'inventais des coups de rêve, des coups qui faisaient
se dresser le stade imaginaire constitué, il est vrai, uniquement
par les spectateurs sporadiques des maisons voisines qui, de temps
en temps, montraient leur tête, observant sûrement avec
tristesse ce qui devait leur sembler un enfant terriblement seul jouant
avec un pauvre ballon de chiffon.
Dans mon rêve récurrent, tout était
toujours pareil (je jouais au football seul, la cour était
la même, la désolation générale d'après-guerre
aussi). Une seule chose changeait: dans mon rêve, les immeubles
qui m'entouraient étaient de splendides gratte-ciel de
Quand il devint très clair pour moi que le
rêve me signalait que je souhaitais vivre à
Un jour, alors que j'avais déjà 41
ans, on m'invita à prononcer une conférence à
Comme j'étais fatigué, je décidai
d'attendre le lendemain, me couchai et ne tardai pas à m'endormir.
Je rêvai alors que j'étais un enfant de Barcelone
jouant au football dans une cour de
Il m'a toujours semblé que j'avais dû
aller à
Traduit de l'espagnol par André Gabastou
Le Magazine Littéraire, số Tháng Bẩy
& Tám, 2006: Le Désir
*
Tờ báo này, mới đây đổi mới,
bỏ mấy mục, trong có Sổ Đọc, tiếc quá. Gấu mê
nhất mục này. Bài trên đây mà chẳng
tuyệt cú mèo sao? Đọc, Gấu cứ nghĩ đến thằng cu Gấu
Bắc Kỳ mắt lé, lần đầu ghé bến Cảng Sài Gòn,
năm di cư 1954, cùng lúc, cảnh Gấu chạy theo BHD, ở cổng
trường Đại Học Khoa Học Sài Gòn... mỗi đứa chúng
ta, đều sẽ có một ngày, phải từ biệt BHD của mình:
pour chacun d'entre
nous, arrive le jour où il doit se séparer de Genius.
Ui chao tuổi thơ là giấc mộng đếch biết là
giấc mộng! Tuyệt!
Giấc Mơ BHD
Tuổi thơ là một cơn mộng không biết
là cơn mộng.
Trong nhiều năm nhiều năm, một giấc mơ trở đi trở
lại hoài trong đầu tôi, giấc mơ này đưa tôi
tới một cái sân lớn của con phố Rosellon, thành
phố Barcelone, ở đó, đứa trẻ là tôi chơi đá
banh một mình sau ngày học dài, trở về nhà,
và trong khi chờ cơm, tôi bịa ra những trận banh. Cái
sân đó, bao bọc chung quanh là những nhà
cửa xám xịt, buồn thỉu buồn thiu, nét đặc biệt của thời
kỳ đó, những năm dài cực nhọc tại Tây Ban Nha thời
hậu chiến. Trong trí tưởng tượng của tôi, tôi là
cả hai muơi hai cầu thủ cùng một lúc, một phần thân
thể của tôi - gồm mười một cầu thủ - nhập vai tấn công, cứ
như thể nó là Brésil tại Cúp Thế Giới ở Thụy
Điển, trong khi phần còn lại, lo phản công. Tôi quên
không tưởng tượng ra trọng tài, và mỗi một đội như
thế - mỗi một phần của cơ thể của tôi như thế đó – có
thể thắng, hay bại, tuỳ thuộc vào thiên tài mà
mỗi đội phô ra, Được hỗ trợ bởi thiên tài tuổi thơ,
tôi bịa ra những cú mơ mộng thần sầu, làm dựng tóc
gáy cầu trường tưởng tượng, mà những khán giả của nó,
là những cư dân ở trong những căn nhà xám xịt
xỉn xìn xin, thỉnh thoảng họ còn thò đầu ra khỏi cửa
sổ, chăm chú theo dõi một cách buồn bã, thằng
nhỏ khốn khổ khốn nạn, một mình chơi với quả banh tồi tàn kết
bằng rơm.
Trong giấc mơ trở đi trở lại đó, mọi chuyện
y như nhau, tôi chơi đá banh một mình, cái
sân vẫn cái sân, vẫn cái cảnh hoang tàn
sau chiến tranh. Có một thay đổi: trong giấc mơ của tôi,
những nhà cửa bao quanh tôi, là những ngôi
nhà chọc trời ở Nữu Ước, và điều này cho tôi
cảm tưởng, mình là trung tâm của thế giới, và
lạ lùng thay, tuyệt vời thay, thần sầu thay, đại gia thay [cái
này thì thuổng me-xừ TL], tôi cảm thấy thật là
hạnh phúc, vô cùng hạnh phúc. Một thứ cảm
giác thanh thản, viên mãn, tuyệt vời, siêu
nhiên, như chưa từng có trên cõi đời này.
Ui chao, mơ mãi như thế, thì cũng
có ngày tỉnh ra, ngộ ra được rằng, giá mà
có ngày được đặt trên lên Nữu Ước, thì
còn gì thú cho bằng, nhỉ!
Cứ nghĩ đến cái ngày mình tới
Nữu Ước, giữa những tòa nhà chọc trời, giữa cuộc
sống thực, cuộc đời thực, và đồng thời, giữa giấc đại mộng,
thì cái cảm giác lúc đó mới ‘đại
gia’ làm sao!
Một ngày, khi đó 41 tuổi, tôi
được mời tới Nữu Ước để đọc diễn văn tại một cuộc họp. Tắc xi đưa
tôi đến một khách sạn, và trong căn phòng
tại Mã Nhật Tân, sau khi lấy đồ đạc ra khỏi va li, tôi
bèn đi ra cửa sổ ngắm thành phố. Xung quanh tôi
là những tòa nhà chọc trời tuyệt vời. Tôi
điện thoại cho mấy vị giáo sư mời tôi, và hai
bên ấn định sẽ gặp gỡ vào ngày hôm sau. Xong
xuôi, tôi lại mò ra cửa sổ. Mình đang ở giữa
giấc mơ của mình, tôi bảo tôi như vậy. Nhưng tôi
nhận ra, mọi chuyện vưỡn vậy, vưỡn thế, vưỡn như cẩn, chẳng có
gì khác xẩy ra. Tôi đang ở trong giấc mơ của tôi,
và giấc mơ là thực. Nhưng, chỉ có
vậy. Chấm hết! Trong một khoảnh khắc tuyệt vời tôi thả mình
vào trong không gian, vào trong khung cảnh, vào
trong bức tranh, cố cảm thấy rằng là mình đang sướng mê
tơi, nhưng vưỡn chẳng có gì xẩy ra, chẳng có gì
đặc biệt xuất hiện. Tôi nhoài ra bên ngoài cửa
sổ, nhìn thật gần những tòa nhà chọc trời của khu
Thấm mệt, tôi tự nhủ thầm, thôi để ngày
mai, biết đâu phép lạ xẩy ra. Tôi lên
giường, và chẳng mấy chốc đi vào giấc ngủ. Tôi
nằm mơ mình là đứa trẻ ngày nào ở Barcelone,
chơi đá banh tại một cái sân ở Nữu Ước. Tôi
phải nói ngay tút xuỵt, đó là giấc mơ
đẹp nhất trong đời tôi, hoàn hảo, tràn đầy, viên
mãn, ấn tượng nhất. Và tôi khám phá
ra rằng, ma thuật, huyền thuật, hay thiên tài của giấc
mơ, thì không phải là Nữu Ước. Huyền thuật, hay thiên
tài của giấc mơ chính là cái cơ sự, luôn
luôn là một đứa trẻ chơi đá banh một mình,
và kệ mẹ cho trí tưởng tượng bay bổng bát ngát
chin phương trời mười phương đất, dẫn dắt nó. Và tôi
nhớ ra rằng thì là Giorgio Agamben đã từng giải thích,
với mỗi một thằng cu Gấu ở trong chúng ta, sẽ xẩy ra một cái
ngày, mà vào ngày đó, Bông Hồng
Đen từ bỏ nó.
“Y hệt như là, bất thình lình,
trong đêm khuya, do tiếng động của một băng con nít
đi qua cửa sổ của căn phòng của bạn, và bạn cảm thấy,
chẳng hiểu tại ra làm sao, vì nguyên cớ nào,
vị nữ thần, người nữ muôn đời của bạn, từ bỏ bạn”.
Và nàng nói, “Bây giờ
H. hết lãng mạn rồi!”
Hình như, luôn luôn là,
đối với Gấu tôi, khi đến cõi đời này, là
để tìm kiếm trong giây lát, vị nữ thần của riêng
Gấu tôi, vị nữ thần của một đứa con nít, một thằng bé
nhà quê Bắc Kỳ, thằng bé đó chơi trò
chơi phù thuỷ thứ thiệt của giấc mơ.
Sách & Báo Mới
An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short history of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of "portable literature." In this rollicking, intellectually playful book, the society's members include writers
and artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Witold Gombrowicz, Federico Garcia Lorca, Man Ray, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The Shandies meet in apartments, hotels, and cafes allover Europe to discuss what great literature really is: brief, not too serious, penetrating the depths of the mysterious. We witness the Shandies having a dven t ur-e s in stationary submarines, underground caverns, African backwaters, and the cultural capitals of Europe.
"Vila-Matas's touch is light and whimsical, while his allusions encompass a gallery of world literature."
-Time Out New York
"Arguably Spain's most significant contemporary literary figure."
-Joanna Kavenna, The New Yorker
Enrique Vila-Matas (b. 1948) was raised in Barcelona. The author of Bartleby & Co. and Never Any End to Paris, he has won the Rómulo Gallegos, the Prix Medicis, the Gregor von Rezzori International Prize, and most recently the Formentor Award (awarded to Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett).
PROLOGUE
Toward the end of the winter of 1924, on the enormous, towering rock where the concept of eternal recurrence first came to Nietzsche, the Russian writer Andrei Bely suffered a nervous breakdown as he experienced the irremediably ascending lavas of the superconscious. On the same day, at the same time, a short distance away, the musician Edgar Varese fell from his horse when, parodying Apollinaire, he pretended to set off for war.
For me these two scenes seem to be the pillars on which the history of portable literature is built: a history European in its origins and as light as the "desk-case" Paul Morand carried with him on luxury trains as he traveled the whole of an illuminated, nocturnal Europe. This moveable desk was the inspiration for Marcel Duchamp's Boite-en-valise, indisputably the most brilliant bid to exalt portability in art. Duchamp's box-in-a-suitcase-which contained miniature reproductions of each his works-soon became an "anagram" for portable literature and the symbol by which the first Shandies* would come to be recognized.
Months later and with a minor alteration to the boite-en-valise (a hairclip now serving as its clasp), this "anagram" would be rearranged by Jacques Rigaut, who tried to represent, as he put it, the apotheosis of "featherweights" in the history of literature. His drawing was widely praised-perhaps for its markedly unorthodox character-and it prompted an extraordinary avalanche of new and daring corruptions of the Duchampian anagram, very clear evidence of the unremittingly transgressive impulse characterizing the first writers incorporated into the Shandy secret society.
Around the same time-and because of a widespread fear among those first Shandies that the box-in-a-suitcase might fall into the hands of any old charlatan-Walter Benjamin came up with a remarkably successful design for the joyous book-weighing machine that bears his name and allows us to judge, to this day, with unerring precision, which literary works are insupportable, and therefore-though they may try to disguise the fact-untransportable.
It's no coincidence that much of the originality of what was written by the inventor of the Benjamin machine can be attributed to his microscopic attention to detail (along with his unflagging command of philosophical theories). "It was the small things that he was most drawn to," his close friend Gershom Scholem wrote. Walter Benjamin had a fondness for old toys, postage stamps, photographic postcards, and those imitations of real winter landscapes contained within a glass globe where it snows when shaken. Walter Benjamin's own handwriting was almost microscopic. His never-achieved ambition was to fit a hundred lines onto a Single sheet of paper. Scholem says that the first time he visited Benjamin in Paris, his friend dragged him along to the Musee de Cluny to show him, in an exhibition of ritual Jewish objects, two grains of wheat upon which some kindred spirit had written out the entirety of the Shema Yisrael.
Walter Benjamin and Marcel Duchamp were kindred spirits. Both were vagrants, always on the move, exiled from the world of art, and, at the same time, collectors weighed down by many things-that is, by passions. Both knew that to miniaturize is to make portable, and for a vagrant and an exile, that is the best way of owning things.
But to miniaturize is also to conceal. Duchamp, for example, always felt drawn to extremely small things that cried out to be deciphered: insignia, manuscripts, symbols. For him, to miniaturize also meant to make "useless": "What is reduced finds itself in a sense liberated from meaning. Its smallness is, at one and the same time, a totality and a fragment. The love of small things is a childish emotion."
As childish as the perspective of Kafka who, as is well known, engaged in a struggle to the death to enter into paternal society, but would only have done so on the condition he could carry on being the irresponsible child he was.
The portable writers always behaved like irresponsible children. From the outset, they established staying single as an essential requirement for entering into the Shandy secret society or, at least, acting as though one were. That is, functioning in the manner of a "bachelor machine" in the sense Marcel Duchamp intended soon after learning-through Edgar Varese no less-of Andrei Bely's nervous breakdown: "At that moment, I don't know why, I ceased listening to Varese and began to think one shouldn't weigh life down excessively, with too many tasks, with what we call a wife, children, a house in the country, a car, etc. Happily, I came to understand this very early on. For a long time, I have lived as a bachelor much more easily than if I'd had to tackle all of life's normal difficulties. When it comes down to it, this is key."
That Duchamp should come to understand all of this just as Varese was telling him of Bely's nervous breakdown on the enormous, towering rock of eternal recurrence is still strange. One inevitably wonders what link there might be between Bely's frayed nerves and the Duchampian resolve to remain single at all costs, daydreaming like all irresponsible children. It's hard-practically impossible-to know. Most likely there isn't any link at all, and the image of a celibate person (impossible, gratuitous, outrageous) simply occurred to Duchamp all of a sudden, unaccompanied by any explicable memory or conscious association. That's to say, a portable artist, or what amounts to the same thing, someone easy to carry around, wherever one goes.
Whatever happened, the one clear thing is that Varese's fall, Bely's breakdown, and the unexpected emergence of a celibate, gratuitous, outrageous artist in Duchamp's field of vision were the pillars on which the Shandy secret society was based.
Two other essential requirements for being a member of this society (apart from the demand for high-grade madness) were established: along with the fact one's work mustn't weigh very much and should easily fit into a suitcase, the other essential condition was that of functioning in the manner of a "bachelor machine."
Though not essential, certain other typically Shandy-esque characteristics were also advisable: an innovative bent, an extreme sexuality, a disinterest in grand statements, a tireless nomadism, a fraught coexistence with doppelgangers, a sympathy for negritude, and the cultivation of the art of insolence.
In insolence, there is a swiftness of action, a proud spontaneity that smashes the old mechanisms, triumphing speedily over a powerful but sluggish enemy. From the outset, the Shan dies decided that what they really wanted was for the portable conspiracy to become the stunning celebration of what appears and disappears with the arrogant velocity of the lightning bolt of insolence. Therefore, the portable conspiracy-whose principle characteristic was that of conspiring for the sake of conspiring-should be short-lived. Three years after Varese's fall and Bely's breakdown-on the day of the Gongora tribute in Seville in 1927 to be precise-the Satanist Aleister Crowley, with a deliberately histrionic flourish, dissolved the secret society.
Many years after Crowley set the Shandy eagle free, I find myself in a position to reveal that the portable society exists beyond the distant horizons of its members' imagination. It was a nexus, a secret society altogether unprecedented in the history of art.
These pages will discuss those people who risked something-if not their lives, then at least their sanity-in order to create works in which the threat of the charging bull, horns lowered, was ever present. We will become acquainted with those people who paved the way for the debunking today of all those who, as Hermann Broch put it, "weren't necessarily bad writers, but were criminals."
We will meet those who paved the way for this novel about the most joyful, voluble, zany secret society that ever existed, a society of writers who seemed practically Turkish to judge by all the coffee and tobacco they got through, a society of gratuitous and outrageous heroes in the lost battle of life, lovers of writing when it becomes the most enjoyable experience possible, and also the most radical.
* Shandy, in the dialect of certain ridings of Yorkshire (where Laurence Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, lived for much of his life), can mean joyful as well as voluble or zany.
Note: Gấu biết “tay này” qua mục Sổ Tay trên tờ Văn Học Tẩy,
và sau đó, cứ đinh ninh 1 cách ngu đần, là bắt
buộc phải đọc xừ luỷ bằng tiếng Tẩy.
Bữa nay, bớt ngu đi 1 tí, bèn vô tiệm Indigo, gõ
1 phát, ra ba cuốn, available, bèn quơ hết.
Trước mắt, theo chân ông, đi 1 đường vinh danh văn chương
bỏ túi, bằng chính câu Vila-Matas dùng làm
đề từ cho cuốn sách mỏng dính của ông:
Vĩnh cửu ư? No big deal. Vũ trụ chỉ hiện hữu, trên tờ giấy.
“The infinite, my dear friend, is no big deal – it’s a matter of writing
– the universe exists only on paper”
-Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste
Những bài viết ngắn. Trong 1 bài, thì cứ coi như bưu
thiếp Noel, của PXA, từ hoả ngục đỏ, red purgatory, gửi về [Postcard from
Crowley]. Chàng chôm 1 câu, của Borges:
But somehow every attempt always failed: there was a traitor in the group!
Một cách nào đó, mọi toan tính của lũ Ngụy
đều hỏng cẳng: Có 1 tên phản thùng ở trong nhóm.
Nhưng đâu chỉ PXA?
Đệ tử PXA, bảnh hơn xừ luỷ, ngang hàng Graham Greene:
Không chỉ viết văn, mà còn ẵm giải thưởng Pu Lít
Giơ, với cuốn Tên Phản Thùng!
GG suốt đời mê Nobel, bị 1 ông Hàn thề độc, tao còn
đây, mày đừng hòng!
