Salman Rushdie will publish next year Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, his testimony about the attempted murder of which he was a victim in August 2022, when he was stabbed again and again by a fanatic of Islamic law whose last name matches the abominable impulse. of his spirit: Hadi Matar. Rushdie lost the sight in one eye, the feeling in certain fingers and the handful of confidence he had scratched after surviving, more or less intact and moving from lair to lair for more than thirty years, the condemnation of an ayatollah whose spiritual scaffolding was so solid that a two kilo book was enough to collapse it. “This was a book he needed to write,” Rushdie said. “It’s a way of taking responsibility for what happened and responding to violence with art.” With this book, Rushdie joins the increasingly abundant list of writers who choose to tell their tragedies in the form of testimony, an inclination that speaks of a certain disdain for the skills and devices of fiction to process the world of reality. experience.
This inclination is not strange in writers whose artistic range is usually limited to the strictest and crudest exposition of life, like Knausgård. But in a writer whose work predominates fiction (Rushdie is especially appreciated for his novels: The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh), the choice of the testimonial genre over fiction to deal with his ordeals is assumed. as a declaration of principles and almost as a surrender: in fiction, with its games of artifice and its verbal demands, experience is falsified, while in testimony there is room for pure facts and precise emotions, the genuine current of life. . From the bonanza of testimonies of this kind (it is worth mentioning The Oblivion that We Will Be, If This Is a Man, The World of Yesterday, Paris Was a Party, Goodbye to All That and Reflections of a Native Son) a law of proportion: the vaster and more horrific the tragedy, the more appropriate the testimony and the less fiction.
The preference for testimony has surpassed the sad guild of fiction writers and has become the primary and best-selling way of ruminating on reality, so that in bookstores there is no room for another volume on the drama of having lost to the father, the fiancée or the parrot. Although it has all the air of a fashion, the editorial habit originates above all in a misunderstanding or, at least, in an assumption that breaks down as soon as it is examined: the most transparent truth and emotion are in the facts and, Therefore, the testimony, being faithful and in accordance with the facts and feelings, is truer and more valuable (in an era in which morals are searched even in the stillness of the stones and in which a certain watered-down stoicism has been become fashionable, the value of a book is proportional to its number of teachings and truth is confused with value).
For fiction, the truth is not (or rather is not intuited) in the naked exposition of the facts, but in their transformation (perhaps Kafka’s transformation is an unconscious allusion to the struggle to convert existence into literary matter) . The mechanism of fiction is almost always indirect and resorts to the projection of metaphor, to the illuminations of excess and dislocation, to doubling: from there emanate the characters (the alter egos, the other selves), the alterations of the environment. and the time and the protagonists, the strangeness of the plot and the mental current, the composition and flow of the sentences. This mechanism of imagination supposes, contrary to the testimony, that the adulteration of facts is more beneficial for the truth and for meditation (fiction is a contemplative habit), since by subjecting them to a new sun and foreign figures, Other truths begin to emerge from their plain faces that could not have arisen in their natural and genuine and apparently truer environment, where they barely had the right to aspire to the surface and to breathe the short breath of the drowned.
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The result is such an extreme approach to the truth that one begins to notice its substance of ambiguity, its inexact blood: when the facts of life enter the field of fiction and are surrounded by an alternate reality, they go beyond the solid state. who pretended in the first inklings of the experience to the trembling state of unstable and fertile little piles of earth, which accumulate with skill to sustain the dramatic or comic effect and which from now on will breathe in constant change, at the mercy of the many winds. , in an environment where everything is twisting, detouring and turning around. In the spasms of fiction, a dilation of nature and experience occurs where the truth is not relative, but amphibious, deep and difficult.
In April 1989, JM Coetzee faced a tragedy: his son, Nicolas, had died at the age of 22 after falling from a balcony in Johannesburg. It could have been an accident or a suicide or even a murder: Coetzee would have to learn to live, in the rotundity of death, provided with ambivalent and mobile causes. Shortly thereafter, Coetzee began writing a novel whose fictional apparatus, as David Attwell recounts in JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2015), “would transmute the son back to life on the page.”
Coetzee, however, did not choose as his work materials either his son, Johannesburg, or himself in the role of the grieving father: the story of The Master of Petersburg (1994) takes place in Petersburg, in the middle of the century. XIX, between Fyodor Dostoevsky and his stepson, Pavel, who died after falling from a shooting tower in circumstances that in the novel as in life will remain unclear. In the projection of tragedy, in that satellite distancing in which experience rebounds and multiplies, wonderful and highly contradictory discoveries occur about guilt, paternity, radicalism, mourning, memory and permanence that would never have flourished in the platform of testimony.
Coetzee turns to fiction, not as a device of denunciation (he does not seek to demand clarity about the causes of his son’s death), but as an instrument to give order to the gallery of chaos of mourning, to probe his habits and to compose with his bitter interior a beautiful and radiant object (it is worth remembering that Primo Levi, after If This Is a Man, also used fiction in The Truce to address his experience after the Second War). Coetzee’s commitment to the difficult and painful memory of his son was so great and so serious that, in his work as a writer, he strove to find the best mold to honor it, synthesizing it, expanding it and revealing its enormous weight and ancient stature; testimony seemed, at first, to be discarded as a minor form of story and catharsis. To transmute the son back to life on the page: reinventing death is a vital act.
Books of testimony, then, lose the virtues of fiction by clinging to the prejudice that truth and emotion reside on the surface of the facts and also to the other prejudice that only the scrupulous presentation of the facts leads to the consummation of the crime. duel. So it is impossible, according to you, respected secondary columnist, to write without the detours of fiction about the dramas of life and also make the truth ambiguous? The respected secondary columnist allows himself to speculate: it is possible to stick to the facts and conquer ambiguity, but the bulk of testimony books do not even touch upon it because neither their truth nor their framework of reality are at risk. These are, I suspect, the ethics and aesthetics of a writer: without play, there is no mourning.
In The Facts (1988), Philip Roth seeks to tell “without disguise” five episodes of his life (two of them of intense mental stress), but his intentions of fidelity and attachment to circumstances are constantly wavering due to the paroxysms of meditation and above all for the ambiguity that the two letters that open and close the book give them.
In the first, Roth asks Zuckerman, the imaginary protagonist of nine of his novels, to advise him on the advisability of publishing these memoirs, which have forced him to carefully separate the additions of invention from the events of his life in order to return to original experiences (in the composition of a novel, all reinvention partly implies expulsion from the place of origin: creation is a form of exodus). In this process, similar to a poetic involution, Roth, or the character that Roth transforms into when remembering Roth’s life, becomes filled with apprehensions, suspicious of the illumination that can be gained by the scrutiny of mere facts, and discovers that Memory is also, like fiction, an elaboration with its deformation devices, so that fidelity is an entelechy: “Memories of the past are not memories of the facts, but memories of your imagination of the facts.” In the second letter, Zuckerman (and through Zuckerman his wife, Maria) responds with a list of challenges about the accuracy of the story, about the strange rectilinear logic imposed on curved events, and about the disadvantages of molding such crude material. “The only person with the ability to comment on his life is his imagination,” he says of Roth. With the two letters, the autobiographical truth is transmuted into a strip of grayness and approaches, despite its own desires, the borders of fiction.
Coetzee’s three memoirs belong to the same lineage, compiled in Scenes from a Provincial Life, whose most intrepid volume is the third, Summer (2009), in which Coetzee imagines himself dead. With the examination of his notes and with a series of interviews with figures in his biographical circle, among them several women who almost loved him, Coetzee destroys himself, rehabilitates himself, and mocks the effigy of him. In Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute (1983), the biographical incursion consists of a dispute in the form of a dialogue between the facts and the consciousness of those facts. Biographical truth runs even more risks in the work of a Colombian that the literary establishment believes it has already understood and deciphered: Fernando Vallejo. In his first five books, collected under The River of Time (1999), the autobiographical story, arbitrary but more or less chronological, occurs in the midst of the hesitation and tumult of memory, the humorous deformations of hyperbole, the fury that It is a lag of the sadness and gallop of prose that is a derivative of love. In The River of Time, the past is not only a memory that resumes on the page with its original intensities, but a way of clinging to life, like a plant in the pauses of the asphalt, despite the fact that the mirror insists in returning the image of a dead person.
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2023-10-18 02:14:40
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