To write without offending anyone is an oxymoron. Montaigne is Pascal’s best adversary. Aron is Sartre’s. Writing is an underground controversy. In 1918, the Germans wrote books about revenge. The French, however, wrote books about peace. It is easy to imagine which were better. The politically correct is the gangrene of art in this century. A French cartoonist said: “What is good for caricature isn’t necessarily good for democracy.” Let each person decide which master to obey.
Our era reads poorly because it reads through identity. Wagnerians see Wagner as God. Anti-Wagnerians see him as a Nazi. The problem is Wagner is not only God, or only a Nazi, but rather both things at once. If you eliminate an artist’s ambiguity, you destroy him.
Novels against racism or misogyny do not exist. There are only novels that adopt the language of the enemy and those that construct a language outside subjugation. But sometimes killer and victim speak the same language. For me, before I write, everything is destruction, all words sound outdated, words fall apart “on the tongue like rotten mushrooms.” Outside writing, words are lobotomized. But upon writing, language is remade, reconfigured, reborn. To write a novel is to write a story of shame. Writing is always so paradoxical, because you write shame but need to lose your modesty. To write is to be a pariah. I am never as afraid to look at myself as when I write.
You can always strike a pose: make counterfeit books, affiliate yourself cynically with a rival ideology, act like a progressive and be on the right, pretend to be a good or bad mother, be modern when you detest modernity, etc. What you cannot do is lie in language; the words we choose do not lie; there, the whole truth leaps out.
To write is to extract yourself from life. But to write, you have to live. I now realize to what extent you first must throw yourself into life and forget writing in order to throw yourself into writing afterward and forget life. Writing is above all a temporal operation, like music. Writing is more than living, it is to live twice. Or writing is less than life, the two have a mirrored, oblique, distorted relationship. Thus, sometimes a text makes us cry. But the merit of the feeling is not literary, the merit belongs entirely to life. And vice versa.
There is a compulsory reconversion in literature: an inquisition. It is rewriting itself in children’s literature, and it is writing itself in history, a revanchism by which an instrumentalization of minorities operates. They locate Marguerite Duras as an oppressed woman when she wasn’t, when she said she wasn’t a feminist and didn’t believe in labels, just like Yourcenar. Still, Duras was a crucial woman in her time. They change George Sand’s name to her feminine birth name, Amantine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, but George Sand decided to belong to the third sex, as Flaubert called it, neither a man nor only a woman. To do that goes against the author’s will. Afro-descendent translators are sought to translate Afro-descendent authors, non-binary translators to translate the non-binary. This reduction of human beings to their genital, biological, or sexual condition, to their gender identity or the color of their skin, belongs to fascism. Such a reduction is a classification that people fled from, horrified, in the twentieth century and that today, we, as collaborators, are taking up again in art. It is impossible to empty language of violence.
I wrote a novel about the twenty-first century and I failed. I destroyed it, though the wreckage remains. The new characters sleep, almost sitting, the ones lying down are dead, there is smoke, gutted hares hang from the fireplace. For a novel to belong to its time, it must not be of its time, above all. To find writing, sometimes it is necessary not to write, not to know the plot, the character, the storyline, or the conflict. Not to write but rather to search for literature’s desire; the search for that desire is already a literary procedure. The language made out of that unique desire does not exist before or after, it was not created. As Vladimir Mayakovsky said: “I already have the novel, now I just have to write it.”
Literary prizes should not be given to writers for their public political commitments, for their pronouncements in defense of human rights. What’s public is a ploy. Beauvoir and Sartre threw Bianca Bienenfeld, their young Jewish lover and sexual toy, into the mouth of the Nazis. Neruda, communist and fighter, let Malva Marina, his daughter with hydrocephalus, the one he called “The Seven-Pound Monster,” die of hunger. Malraux, the French hero, called his hated daughter Florence “The Object.” “An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime,” says Degas. “When I begin to write, the world becomes my enemy,” says Kertész.
When the journalists, moderators, and editors at every literary festival and event in different countries emphasize the fact that we are “women writers + born in the 1970s + Latin American,” what they seek is to alienate us. They gather us under a single catchphrase, a profession, a condition, a quota: the combo of being women, belonging to the same generation, and being Latina. This can seem like a politics of support, visibility, inclusion, and justice in the face of centuries of erasure of women in every area, and at first it might have been that. Today I believe that this omnipresent and totalizing discourse goes against the valuation of language, a work, a universe of fiction. Writers’ only condition, whatever their generation, culture, or era, is that of being unique and irreducible.
Strangely, every day I am conscious of being a writer. I feel it when I read, when I listen to music, when I do an interview or drive through the cornfields and vineyards. Except when I write. When I write I am not a writer, I don’t know what I am, but not a writer.
I have always been obsessed by the fact that words exist. The very disturbing correlative between living and speaking, writing and reading. That we might hear and say words from someone who lived a thousand years ago, who just died, who is embalmed. How can it be that the word twilight exists and that, at the same time, twilight exists. How can it be that the word nightmare exists, and in effect the word resembles having a nightmare, so Borgesian, all of it, varying across languages. When I write, I never have the impression that I am writing, or of being surrounded by words, or of operating with something that already exists. To say: “I love you to the end of my days” means something in life; it means absolutely nothing if I write it as such in a novel. Like a tree or an armchair are neither a tree nor an armchair on a stage, but what are they, that is the work. The same thing happens with writing, you have to start from zero, resuscitate words, give them CPR. I think that to write a novel is to dig tunnels to flee, that physical deterioration with blows to the head and sand in the lungs, that hallucinatory state from not sleeping, and at the same time, that thirst to reach the end of the tunnel. Language is a system of canals, a railroad system, these are hidden passages. Thus, all alienation from language is a form, indeed the great form of slavery. Every time I write I feel I’m about to fly to an embassy, or escape hidden in a big box for musical instruments.
Zelda Fitzgerald dies burned in a psychiatric hospital, and her texts are lost.
Clarice Lispector falls asleep with a lit cigarette, and they almost amputate her writing hand.
Ingeborg Bachman dies from an apartment fire due to a half-extinguished cigarette and leaves her work incomplete.
About characters:
You need to have equal respect for the victim and the killer.
You don’t need to take a stance for or against; that would be bad praxis. Like a couples therapist, transferring feelings onto one of the two.
We never know everything about the characters.
Characters are capable of doing things outside the morals and conscience they possess.
A character who kills should not be reduced to being a criminal.
A person who is a victim of violence should not be reduced to being a victim.
You have to think characters against themselves, contemplating doubt and mystery.
To reduce characters’ contradictions is not only impossible, but also antiliterary.
The great difference between a writer and a working writer (or a professional writer) is that professional writers control their work. They put themselves at the service of demand. The novel should not be too short, but also not very long, it should conform to a genre, it shouldn’t have too much dialogue, it should be Latin American, but not completely. Those writers inspect their writing from the top of a control tower and with their literary agents on the phone. Whereas nonprofessional writers can’t control their hearts, they have to make the books that they have to make, up to the final consequences. They have to write what they have to write. Even if the book isn’t in their interest, even if it destroys their stature as an author, even if it’s not what is expected from them, even if they are warned that as a result they won’t receive many prizes or opportunities for translation. And even if they are canceled, above all. Literature’s mission is not to separate the hangman from his victim or to judge who should be sentenced to death, but rather to transgress. A little like people who work with explosive material: they never know when the grenade is finally going to go wrong and explode, ripping their hand to pieces.
Writing is never autobiographical, even if all the facts exist, even if literature is a privileged form of memory, even more than life. Kertész says his composition is abstract, made of signs. Arnold Schoenberg’s language is atonal, this is as true as his deportation.
An editor at a large Spanish publishing house, after he’d had too much to drink, admitted to me that they try to sell “feminine” writing and women authors “with character” quickly, before the market loses interest. Maybe his confession was aided by the alcohol, I don’t know. Afterward, he added that we still had a while, so we should enjoy it. For a new translation of one of my books, my editor announced that she would look for the ideal woman translator. I asked her what she meant by “the ideal woman translator.” She answered: “A bold woman like the character and the author.” I remarked that I am not only a woman while I write, and neither is the character only a woman, and much less bold. In that case, I proposed she look for a woman translator, but with a personality disorder. The best thing that can happen to artists is to assume their contradictions, their double face, their double morality. “I say that I am anti-bourgeois but I risk nothing and accumulate power.” “I make films promoting Justice but I am violent with my female partners.” “I’m a feminist but treat women brutally.” “I’m a humanist but antisemitism doesn’t seem that bad to me.” And so they all go, one by one.
When they gather us together at a Literary Festival under the exclusive title of “Latin American Writers,” I wonder why we don’t form “European Literary Panels” at our international festivals. It would also be more interesting to come up with other criteria to gather writers. The exercise of offering organizers what they most like about us—the very “Latin” topics of dictatorships, guerrillas, or drugs—for the better-known festivals is tiring and repetitive. To defend “good causes,” to represent the profession well. All the same, if you want to be a writer, better to dispense with all that.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ariana Harwicz
Ariana Harwicz (Buenos Aires, 1977) has published the novels Matate, amor (2012; Die, My Love, 2019), La débil mental (2014; Feebleminded, 2020), Precoz (2015; Tender, 2022), and Degenerado (2019; Degenerate); and the nonfiction books Tan intertextual que te desmayás (2013, with Sol Pérez; So Intertextual You’ll Faint), Desertar (2020, with Mikaël Gómez Guthart; Desertion), and El ruido de una época (2023; The Noise of an Epoch), from which “Indoctrinated Writing” was taken. She has lived in France since 2007.
Janet Hendrickson
Janet Hendrickson, assistant professor of Liberal Studies at New York University, published an experimental translation of Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language by Sebastián de Covarrubias (2019), which turned his 1611 dictionary into a series of prose poems.