CITY AND WRITING: THE LUMINOUS FLESH OF GIANTS
Raúl Flores Iriarte
In White noise, one of Don De Lillo′s novels, the population of an entire city flees from the safety of their homes and the coziness of their lounge chairs due to the menace of toxic wastes. They head for the open countryside, carrying along what little could be saved from their little american lives. The asphalted driveways become a mess of entangled cars and shouting drivers and wrecks.
However, they suddenly find that sundowns have become startlingly beautiful, thanks to the side effects of the very same toxic wastes they had been running from.
It was the same De Lillo who wrote in Libra: “The pain always present, the chaos of redaction. The fields of small symbols didn′t make sense.”
The writing becoming then an entangled web of ideas, of associations. Crashing down, building themselves up, as if tiny houses they were. Some claim that literature is like a river, but in a certain way, I reckon fiction is more of a thriving city than a huge volume of water being displaced from one point to another. The writer finds himself in the place of an architect, a demi-god. The finder of plots, the knitter of themes. Stories lining up together side by side, surrounded by walls as persons sitting on living rooms. Waiting there just to be discovered by the patient beholder. It may sound lunatic, and so be it.
Plots lining up as driveways. They can lead you in or out.
I happen to live in a city that is as part of fiction as you may call it. Magic realism was the term coined. In Havana City, shrouded by intense heat and particularly no winter at all, you may find whatever you will in the scorched streets and colonial houses and bleak five-storey buildings, and I′m not talking about cheap touristic brochures, but real paperback fiction.
The sea plays an important part in the creation of the city. Any important metropolitan spot finds itself near the water. The center of life, the fountain of creation. Comes to mind the metaphor of writing as a river.
The steady flow of literature, renewing all the time. Heraclitus and such stuff. The cuban writer Virgilio Pi?era wrote about The curse of the sea surrounding all four sides regarding Havana City, where all directions leads to the foamy salty rocks that end up at open sea, and a lot of my fictions in particular take place in that humid site.
The sea as source of all misteries.
Havana becomes a different place at nighttime. Creedence Clearwater Revival once said in one of their songs that nighttime is the right time. I like to write after dusk, when all that scorching heat has passed away, and I like my characters to move around in that dark nocturnal city. Walk around in the streets, listen to the music, stroll to the seawall and wonder what lies beyond.
I′m not the only one in my generation to do so. We the ones who started writing in the beginning of the century find the metropolis an engaging place. And by saying this I′m not only constricted to the place Havana as means of metropolis, but just to the prospect of a city. This is to be understood as an abstract term that could be read as any place in the whole wide world. In any other country, any other continent. We like to write from the place Cuba, but we′d sometimes tend to invent ourselves a surrogate place that has the same street names as the ones on which we live and the same referents, but could be mixed up with referents from any other place. So it works as the construction of a fictional city, the invention of a disfunctional utopia. No strings attached, no national anthems, no nothing. Just words lining up as sentences. You may call it prose.
The chaos of redaction. Trying to make sense out of the fields of small symbols.
And that extends not only to our selection of themes or background of stories, but I think that it leads up also to our mode of writing. Personal computers are a way of technology that could not be dreamed up in past centuries, and I′m not saying that we writers of the 21th century are writing better stuff than past writers (I tend to think the opposite from time to time) but the process of writing through these digital features has sped up considerably. No more scribbled drafts in paper, striving with a pen, but instead strive mightily on the depths of a hard drive. Words rush out from the brain and get laid down on the screen at the speed of thought. No more jotted down notes, just cut, copy and paste. And print it yourself. All ready and beautifully done. Of course, I can quote the likes of Franz Kafka when he said in one of his letters to Felicia: “You will pardon me if I don′t write to you on the typing machine, but it′s just that I have so much to tell you, and typing isn′t fast enough.” You can take your pick, but I, in my place, take the development that a modern city conveys and the technology that is associated with it.
I say this always centered in the aspects of my country, where the possession of a personal computer or a laptop is very hard if you don′t live in a major city. But I know excellent writers from my own generation who write whole novels and short stories and poetry alone with the strength of their bare hands and a piece of paper and they have nothing to envy from a whole bunch of mediocre writers who possess PCs and don′t know how to write even if their lives were at stake. I only think that those excellent writers who lack the technology would write considerably faster if they had the appropiate tools, and their experiences would also be improved if they lived in major cities, instead of country towns. Of course, I′m only speaking from my experience in my own country.
I also want to establish that there′s nothing wrong for me when living and writing in a country town. I can think of the wonderful Coetzee′s novels that take place in the deserts of South Africa or the ones from Doris Lessing,
My fiction in particular lends many of its trends from movies and popular songs. The access to these kinds of information also comes through the way of bootlegging through personal computers. You can find that situation in Havana very often. Almost like reading, movies are the windows to other cultures, other ways of thinking. An image is worth a thousand words. The writing becomes, when under the influence, cinematic, like seeing a film. I can oppose that kind of writing to what was concocted in Cuba in the 90s, where a kind of criptical writing was developed, with many intertextualities in the text. A literature written to be read only by other writers; and the audience got lost in it.
I can sense a reincorporation of the story nowadays in what it′s being written, and by this I mean the plot. It′s just not buried in the text to be discovered piece by piece and slowly reconstructed, but plainly found there. I think we′re writing now to be read by the public, and I don′t mean by this that we′re making concessions, but just another type of writing that the one that was done through the last decade of the past century in Cuba.
In one of my short stories, The luminous flesh of giants, I talk about a girl who is blind to all but the scale of infrared. It is a science fiction story and the girls sees whole cities as a trembling series of reds and blues and greens pulsating through skyscrapers, shopping malls, houses and buildings where people live in. That is how I could envision the cities of the future, maybe the whole planet Earth. Pulsating green and red and blue. The luminous flesh of a luminous giant.
Paul Auster is one of the greatest metropolis writer I′ve ever encountered. All of the novels I have read from him refer in one way or another to the city. And I think that that is a constant in all of us. Even in Coetzee′s countryside novels there is the presence of the city by the means of the absence of it. One exception I could think of of a mainstream writer is the multi-seller Stephen King, who in all of his Maine novels refer to small villages or fantasy worlds, but it is most frequently treated from the point of view of the estrangement of an individual isolated in those places, the lack of the metropolitan space.
The absence of the living quarters.
The dynamics.
In my third novel to come, Nebraska, I refer to this kind of estrangement, to this delusional construction of a fiction in the likes of a fictional Havana (representing the status of the metropolitan space; as I said before, any other country, or continent will do) where the hero travels from Havana to another place to meet the heroine and, due to an unspecified incident, they find themselves in an isolated world where the only survivors may or may not be them. So they travel and travel, seeking for signs of life in deserted planes of other realities. Empty cities and estranged places is all they can find as they set sail across the sea from one place to another. They stick to the name Nebraska as referent of a place where they would like to travel. A place where there may be other survivors, though they′ll never get there. Thanks to a hole somewhere along the plot, they find themselves transported to the nowadays Cuba, the present world as we know it. The city appears again to them in another form, this time for real, and so they long for the fictional places they have left behind.
Once again, the luminous flesh of giants.
Other writers from my generation invent themselves their own cities, their own Havanas. For example, Arnaldo Mu?oz Viquillón recreates in many of his novels a baroque place where magic realism meets dirty fiction. Jorge Enrique Lage in his most recent Carbone 14: a cult novel builds the kind of fiction that sends the city of Havana to another level of reality. We meet again the pattern of the city seen as a metaphor of somewhere else, a parabole, a trampoline for escaping the curse of the sea surrounding all four sides.
Daniel Díaz Mantilla in his Return to Utopia writes about a tired traveler who returns to his place of birth, the city of Thule, but we only get flashback glimpses of the far off metropolis, a place never to be reached by the hero; he makes his way through forests and mountains and shacks and crystal clear fountains, while dreaming of his impossible return. One more time, the lack of a place to reside. The longing for inhabited spaces.
Alberto Garrandés is something of a rara avis in the literary field of Cuba. He has devoted three of his novels to Havana, and so to quote him; “My experience comes up from the idea that the city —my city, Havana— converts into something which is beyond the temporal-spatial context. At this point, I see clearly that the city is like a Havana-state-of-mind (the city exists, but I do not need to describe it or name it), and, on the other hand, my characters look like my Havana… And when I say “my Havana”, I would need to underline certain words, certain colors, certain forms.”
I could quote and name many other cuban writers who fit the scale but that would be the theme of another conference. Let′s just say that the term City is ever present as multilayered tracks on the same song. Metropolitan landscape and atmosphere appear not as mere purposes but just as a result of the nature of our writing. The fine menagerie that fed cuban intellectuals like Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima comes into view in the streets of Havana.
All the heat and light that dazzles the eye and numbs the mind pass away at nighttime to reveal a world of darkness that lures creativity with creepy and appealing characters.
Not only in Cuba, but in the whole wide world.
