Escribir es algo horrendo pero hermoso

POR EL PAIS.COM
La germano-rumana Herta Müller, premio Nobel de Literatura 2009, habla sobre su obra en la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid
JAVIER RODRÍGUEZ MARCOS -

"Herta, le contaré una cosa de mi madre. Ella pensaba que los extranjeros la entendía leyéndole los labios". "La comprendo. Por eso yo llevo siempre los labios tan rojos". Así, con una broma sobre la necesidad de la traducción simultánea, empezó esta tarde en la Biblioteca Nacional el coloquio entre el periodista y escritor Juan Cruz y la ganadora del último premio Nobel de Literatura, la rumana de lengua alemana Herta Müller. La escritora acaba de publicar en España la novela Todo lo que tengo lo llevo conmigo (editada por Siruela en castellano y por Bromera en catalán en las versiones de Rosa Pilar Blanco y Joan Fontcuberta i Gel respectivamente) y a las siete de la tarde había llenado ya el salón de actos, desafiando al calor, a la huelga de metro y, sobre todo, al fútbol, un deporte del que Müller dice no entender nada.


BNE
(Biblioteca Nacional de España)

A FONDO
Sede: Madrid (España) Directivo: Milagros del Corral Beltrán (Directora)
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La noticia en otros webs
webs en español
en otros idiomas
Todo lo que tengo lo llevo conmigo recupera la memoria de los 100.000 rumanos de origen alemán deportados en 1945 a los campos de trabajo de la Unión Soviética. Murieron 10.000, pero entre los supervivientes estaba la propia madre de Herta Müller (Nitzkydorf, 1953) y el poeta Oskar Pastior, con el que la novelista comenzó a escribir esa misma novela hasta que la muerte de Pastior detuvo el proyecto en 30 páginas de las que ella tuvo que seguir tirando en solitario.

Soledad fue, de hecho, la primera palabra invocada por Juan Cruz para hablar de la obra narrativa de Müller (editada en español por la citada Siruela y Punto de Lectura en bolsillo). "Cuando uno no se adapta a un régimen dictatorial termina abocado a la soledad porque se convierte en un problema para los que sí se adaptan. Hay preguntas como "¿de dónde venidos?" que resultan triviales en una situación normal pero que en una dictadura son terribles", respondió la autora de La bestia del corazón, que recordó que, más allá de la política, ella conocía el sentimiento de soledad -"aunque no conociera la palabra"- desde que le tocó cuidar sola de las vacas de su familia. Fue en una comunidad germanófona muy endogámica pero cuya cerrazón terminó siendo un anticipo de la dictadura de Ceaucescu: "También la ciudad era pueblerina: todo el mundo observaba, espiaba, prohibía".

Müller, que se negó a hablar de la dictadura como de una metáfora, aunque fuera de una metáfora del mal, recordó que la Securitate era una organización criminal que llegó a reclutar a sus miembros entre los niños de los orfanatos, llenos durante años en virtud de la política de natalidad del régimen comunista (cinco hijos por mujer) y de la estricta prohibición del aborto: "Los niños eran sometidos a una educación monstruosa para sacar de ellos el personal adecuado, funcionarios capaces de actuar sin mala conciencia".

Miedo fue otra de las palabras que Juan Cruz puso sobre la mesa. Y ésta fue la respuesta de su interlocutora: "No vivo con miedo, convivo con las huellas del miedo".

¿Escribir sirve para conjurarlo? Para Herta Müller, lectora ferviente de Klemperer, Semprún y Thomas Bernhard, la escritura no garantiza nada pero siempre hay cosas que ella "no sabía que el lenguaje sabía". Sólo las descubrió cuando se puso a escribir, algo que está lejos de ser una actividad placentera: "A mí no me gusta escribir", dijo rotunda. "Es un trabajo mísero que te hace enfermar de los nervios. Escribo para terminar de escribir. Cuando tengo un libro entre manos escribo día y noche para llegar al final. Escribir es algo horrendo pero hermoso. Siempre que termino una novela digo que no voy a escribir más. Llevó 30 años así".

Simpósio em Berlim debate recepção da obra de Walter Benjamin na Europa e América Latina

FROM DW

Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Especialistas europeus e latino-americanos reúnem-se na capital alemã para discutir de que forma o discurso de Walter Benjamin é tratado de formas distintas nos dois continentes.

Embora Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) seja conhecido dos dois lados do Atlântico como crítico literário, filósofo, ensaísta, filólogo, teórico da Era Moderna e da revolução midiática do século 20, a leitura dos textos do pensador na América Latina distingue-se daquela existente na Europa.

Entre os latino-americanos, percebe-se um interesse mais acentuado pelas intenções políticas e pela crítica à mídia exercida por Benjamin, acreditam os organizadores de um simpósio que se realiza nesta terça-feira (29/06), no Instituto Ibero-Americano de Berlim.

Na contramão do sistema

"O recorte que marca uma distinção muito clara entre a recepção latino-americana e a europeia da obra do autor", acredita o argentino Miguel Vedda, professor de Literatura Alemã da Universidade de Buenos Aires, "é que, ao contrário do que ocorre na Alemanha e em boa parte da Europa, Benjamin é importante na América Latina também por suas contribuições para uma concepção materialista da história e da cultura".

É por isso, observa Vedda à Deutsche Welle, que seu nome "se tornou um referencial obrigatório para diferentes movimentos sociais na América Latina, que se apoiam em sua crítica do progresso ou em sua proposta de escrever a história a partir do ponto de vista dos oprimidos", possibilitando modos de lidar com a política e formas de conceber a prática intelectual "que caminham na contramão de formas institucionais já cristalizadas".

Figura simbólica

Vedda, que é organizador, entre outros, de várias obras relacionadas ao legado de Benjamin, como Observações Urbanas – Benjamin e as novas cidades, fala no simpósio em Berlim não apenas sobre a ligação do pensador com os movimentos sociais latino-americanos, mas também com "a figura do intelectual" no continente.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Márcio Seligmann-Silva"Benjamin via a história como um palco onde aquilo a que chamamos de progresso é revelado como sendo um acumular de catástrofes. Esta visada dramática, e ao mesmo tempo radicalmente crítica, atrai os intelectuais latino-americanos, que convivem em sociedades marcadas pela desigualdade e por tremendos conflitos sociais", analisa em entrevista à Deutsche Welle o pesquisador brasileiro Márcio Seligmann-Silva, professor da Universidade de Campinas, autor e organizador de vários volumes sobre a obra de Benjamin.

Na América Latina, diz Seligmann-Silva, "Benjamin é reverenciado intelectualmente, mas também cultuado como uma figura simbólica, que encarna a luta por um mundo não só melhor, mas radicalmente outro".

Para o teórico brasileiro, é inegável que na América Latina haja um predomínio da "leitura política" da obra de Benjamin, ou seja, de suas posições revolucionárias. Vale lembrar, contudo, que Benjamin nunca se filiou a partidos, tendo sido, inclusive, um grande crítico da política como instituição.

Anarquismo melancólico de esquerda

Em Benjamin, com também "em outra figura próxima a ele como foi Sigfried Kracauer", assinala Vedda, encontra-se uma concepção do intelectual provocadora e muito atual: aquele que se posiciona entre as frentes, fiel aos compromissos com os problemas sociais de seu tempo, mas se negando "a sacrificar seu intelecto, a subordiná-lo aos ditames de um partido ou de uma organização", resume o teórico argentino.

"Na verdade, a consciência crítica radical de Benjamin sempre o empurrava para uma espécie de anarquismo de esquerda melancólico", analisa Seligmann-Silva. "É esta também, em boa parte, a coloração política de intelectuais na América Latina descontentes com a 'grande política' e fascinados com o frescor e a radicalidade das ideias de Benjamin", observa o pesquisador.

A própria vida trágica do pensador, lembra Seligmann-Silva, desperta empatia entre esta intelectualidade latino-americana. Benjamin se suicidou na fronteira entre a França e a Espanha, quando tentava fugir da perseguição do regime nazista.

Memória dos vencidos

Além da exibição do documentário Quién mató a Walter Benjamin, uma coprodução entre Espanha, Holanda e Alemanha de 2005, dirigida por David Mauas, o simpósio propõe vários debates, entre eles, uma mesa redonda sobre a importância do discurso de Benjamin para as discussões sobre o espaço urbano, temática bastante recorrente na América Latina, um continente caracterizado pelo alto número de metrópoles.

Além da ligação do autor com a política, o espaço urbano e a mídia, o seminário em Berlim trata também da questão da memória, conceito relevante na obra do judeu alemão Benjamin.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Benjamin no exílio, em 1937Para ele, "a memória deveria ser revalorizada como meio de nos relacionarmos com o passado. O registro da memória é mais aberto, voltado para os vencidos, aceita os testemunhos e as imagens (e não só a escrita burocrática) e não se apega a uma pseudo-imparcialidade", comenta Seligmann-Silva.

Sociedades pós-ditadura

Na América Latina, lembra o teórico brasileiro, "os discursos da memória têm ocupado um espaço importante nas sociedades pós-ditadura. Memoriais são construídos, testemunhos são publicados e toda uma política e prática jurídica se articulam em torno desta memória do mal. A obra de Benjamin – com seu teor salvacionista – tem auxiliado na construção desta cultura da memória, que é também uma luta contra o esquecimento e a perpetuação da injustiça".

No mais, diz Seligamnn-Silva, em um século de catástrofes "com o genocídio armênio, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, os gulags de Kolima, as ditaduras sangrentas que marcaram a América Latina, o massacre dos Tutsis e tantos outros genocídios, novas modalidades de se relacionar com os mortos e com o passado precisavam ser desenvolvidas".

Talvez exatamente aí – nessa intenção de voltar o olhar para o passado e tentar reescrevê-lo a partir do testemunho, à margem da escrita oficial – possa estar o ponto de interseção entre a recepção do legado benjaminiano na Europa e na América Latina. "A obra de Benjamin continua a servir na confecção destas novas paisagens da memória, infelizmente ainda muito tingidas de sangue", como resume Seligmann-Silva.

Autora: Soraia Vilela

Revisão: Rodrigo Rimon

You're never too old to start writing

FROM
Robert McCrum The Observer

Walt Whitman remains a fine riposte to all the 'best writer under 40' lists

When, at the age of 36, the poet first self-published the collection for which he would become famous, it received just two reviews, both written by himself under a pseudonym, but otherwise fell stillborn from the press.

Only now is Walt Whitman generally recognised as the artist who invented American poetry and gave his people an authentic lyric voice with Leaves of Grass as surely as Mark Twain created American fiction with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The mystery of Walt Whitman, explored in the latest New York Review of Books, goes deeper still. Until Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman was heroically unpromising – a carpenter, a schoolteacher, a printer and journalist, and the author of a "temperance" novel. In the words of one critic, until well into his 30s, "Whitman was a non-poet in every way, with no mark of special talent or temperament".

In the absence of an explanation for Whitman's creative leap forward – was it, perhaps, the fruit of his service in the civil war as a hospital orderly working in terrible battlefield conditions? – most biographers have retired, baffled. Even Whitman's champion, the sage of Boston, RW Emerson, seems to have understood that this extraordinary new voice had undergone a mysterious and secret gestation. "I salute you at the beginning of a great career," wrote Emerson, acknowledging Leaves of Grass, "which yet must have a long foreground somewhere."

There are so many approaches to the mystery of creativity. For the New Yorker, which has just published another top 20 list of "most promising novelists", it has become slick, modish and briskly packaged for the impatient consumer. "Under 40" is its dominant criterion, pioneered by Granta as long ago as 1983. Inevitably, there have been some unconvincing copycat lists. Leaving aside the taxonomic difficulties of cramming the next generation into a straitjacket, there are larger issues here.

"Under 40" recognises the truth that this column has addressed before: most successful writers have made their mark before their fourth decade. Tolstoy? 35 (War and Peace). Dickens? 38 (David Copperfield) Fitzgerald? 29 (The Great Gatsby). Naipaul? 29 (A House for Mr Biswas).

But the ruthless cut-off of 40 does not address the complex trajectory of creative growth: for every novelist or poet who explodes skywards with a first or second book, there are many who only achieve mastery as they reach the shady side of the slope. The onset of middle age, or the approach of oblivion, is perhaps as sharp a spur to literary effort as the intoxicating self-belief of youth.

Daniel Defoe completed Robinson Crusoe just before his 60th birthday, after a turbulent life as a journalist. Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn aged 49. Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov in his mid-40s. Closer to home, Mary Wesley launched The Camomile Lawn at 70. Karl Marlantes, author of Matterhorn, this year's American literary sensation, a Vietnam novel of astonishing power and insight, worked on his manuscript for 33 years and finally saw it published in his 60s. He now enjoys rather more recognition than the Oxford poet Craig Raine, who has just published his first novel, Heartbreak, aged 65.

The artistic provenance of these late bloomers will be as complex as Whitman's, but I think Dr Raine's title gives a clue to one common thread: these books are invariably love stories, in the broadest sense, inspired by a person or a memory – in Twain's case, of the Mississippi – for whom the writer calls up one final surge of creative energy.

On the very short list of timeless themes, "love" must come near the top. Books with "love" in the title are often winners. Experience, plus maturity, mixed with love, can sometimes achieve the most astonishing results. There can be something poignant, even elegiac, about such novels. Huckleberry Finn is hilarious, but its closing pages might move you to tears. "If I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book," writes Twain, "I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't agoing to no more." That's the true voice of the over 40s. I wonder which literary magazine will first have the nerve to publish a list of the top 20 grown-up novels?

Borges on Pleasure Island

FROM NYTIMES

Essay

By RIVKA GALCHEN

Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical proof with the emotionally profound wit of Dostoyevsky. Or: He courts paradox so primrosely, describing his Dupin-like detective character as having “reckless perspicacity” and the light in his infinite Library of Babel as being “insufficient, and unceasing.” But see, such worship is pale.

But Borges did have some mortal qualities. He lived most of his life with his mother. He loved detective and adventure novels. (His first story in English was published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.) Though he started to go blind in his 30s, he never learned to read Braille. And in his later years he made some unappealing political remarks about being happy that, following the military overthrow of the Perón government, “gentlemen” were again running the country. (Perón, to be fair, had “promoted” Borges from head of the National Library to head of poultry inspection.) Such remarks are perhaps why he never won the Nobel.

But perhaps Borges’s most glorious and provocative “fault” was that he lived to be 86 and never wrote a novel. “It is a laborious madness, and an impoverishing one,” he wrote, in the introduction to a 1941 collection of his short stories, “the madness of composing vast books. . . . The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.”

He certainly did read vast books, however. For us Borges may be the ur-writer, but he thought of himself primarily as a reader; writing was just among the most intensely engaged ways of reading. In his essay “Literary Pleasure,” reprinted in ON WRITING (Penguin Classics, $15), one of three new Borges anthologies appearing this month under the general editorship of Suzanne Jill Levine, he says of his youthful reading — “the greatest literary joys I have experienced” — that he “believed everything, even errata and poor illustrations.” Reading was faith; writing a call-and-response form of prayer. To love a text: isn’t that just to find oneself helplessly casting about for something to say in return?

Which brings us back to worship. If serial rereading is one way to define worship, then one of Borges’s most revered gods was Robert Louis Stevenson. This even though in Borges’s time, Stevenson’s work was basically considered kid stuff. The first seven editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature do not deign to include Stevenson, though he finally surfaces in the eighth edition, published in 2006. Borges not only commented on books that didn’t exist. He read books — pulpy and arcane alike — that few others bothered to see.

The Stevenson book Borges revisited most often was “The Wrecker,” a relatively obscure novel that Stevenson wrote with his stepson. Published in 1892, “The Wrecker” is a story of high seas adventure, high stakes speculation and high interest loans; it’s part mystery novel, part adventure novel, part mock Künstlerroman. The title refers to the practice of auctioning off the remains of wrecked ships along with any recoverable cargo, which is, yes, an irresistibly resonant metaphor for neglected books.

On the surface, “The Wrecker” could hardly resemble a Borges story less. At 500 pages, and full of incident, “The Wrecker” has the feel of a 27-course Victorian feast, served on a table crowded with doilies and finger bowls and odd utensils whose functions we can’t even imagine; Borges’s stories are more like truffle oil. Stevenson can barely go a page without mentioning bankruptcy, smuggling or sea captains; Borges, though he writes of bar fights and criminals, more often mentions Zeno’s paradox and the “Annals” of Tacitus. In the false dichotomy of the sword versus the pen, Stevenson is red and Borges black.

The main character in “The Wrecker,” Loudon Dodd, is a wealthy, untalented, unglamorous and highly likable young American man who cares nothing for his unearned money and longs for the life of an artist. Dodd goes to Paris to become a sculptor, fails at that, abruptly loses all his money, becomes involved in a series of wild business adventures through his charismatic friend Pinkerton, and eventually finds himself entangled in a maritime adventure involving opium trading, bunk stocks, debt and deception. All this adventure, it is almost explicitly said, eventually makes of him a kind of artist, or at least his life a kind of work of art, if a very pulpy one.

So why did Borges read and reread “The Wrecker”? What was it that he believed every detail of? And how was his own writing a way of reading Stevenson’s sacredly profane text? Borges’s readerly attention re-invents Stevenson, just as his writerly attention created those vast unwritten books that Borges chose not to write, but just to imagine and comment on.

Dodd and the other characters often marvel at how their lives have become as full of surprise and drama as a dime novel, and this is, basically, a happy thing. It’s as if to say that here, finally, are circumstances that do justice to the scope and scale of my emotions. It’s the idea of the objective correlative, done extra boyishly. In “The Wrecker,” the hyperbolized material world measures up to the outsize passions of the heart.

Think of it this way: there is a vast unwritten book that the heart reacts to, that it races and skips in response to, that it believes in. But it’s the heart’s belief in that vast unwritten book that brought the book into existence; what appears to be exclusively a response (the heart responding to the book) is, in fact, also a conjuring (the heart inventing the book to which it so desperately wishes to respond).

In his work, Borges achieves a related effect, by different means. Stories like “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and “The Book of Sand” refer to epic plots, but it’s the ideas and erudition, more than the action, that are colossal. Time, eternity, infinity and dreams — these are the only subjects commensurate to the passions of this quiet man who lived in Buenos Aires and in Geneva, though mostly in the vast nutshell of his own mind.

In “The False Problem of Ugolino,” an essay on Dante not included in “On Writing,” Borges quotes from an essay by Stevenson that makes the rather Borgesian claim that a book’s characters are only a string of words. “Blasphemous as this sounds to us,” Borges comments, “Achilles and Peer Gynt, Robinson Crusoe and Don Quixote, may be reduced to it.” Borges then adds: “The powerful men who ruled the earth, as well: Alexander is one string of words, Attila another.” The great deeds of the past may become no more than words, and no more than words are necessary to summon a power as grand and enduring even as Quixote or Achilles.

Among the vast books that do not really exist, and that Borges has commented on, are the innumerable pages of the future. Borges’s work answers the unanswerable weight of his reading, the boyish and the arcane at once. The pages of both what he wrote and what he only traced the shadows of present us with their own wavering interrogations; we are happy and afraid to be lost amid our insufficient and unceasing responses. Borges created his precursors, even Stevenson. We still do not know how to create Borges.



Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel “Atmospheric Disturbances.”

Le Roman infanticide : Dostoïevski, Faulkner, Camus

FROM LE MONDE
de Philippe Forest


"Ce dont on ne peut parler, il faut l'écrire" : c'est sur cet axiome que l'écrivain Philippe Forest, auteur de L'Enfant éternel (Gallimard, 1997), établit ce qu'il nomme une "poétique du deuil", sorte de témoignage impossible, sans cesse coupable de trahir la disparition qu'il porte et néanmoins continuellement appelé à poursuivre le rappel mélancolique des disparus. Dans ce magnifique essai, l'auteur fait entendre la voix de trois "nécromanciers", Dostoïevski, Faulkner et Camus, rappelant que, chez tous trois, l'expérience de la douleur fut à l'origine de l'œuvre. Le 16 mai 1878, Dostoïevski perdit son fils, Alexeï, âgé de trois ans, puis écrivit Les Frères Karamazov. Le 16 janvier 1931, quelques jours après sa naissance, est mort le premier-né de Faulkner, "et l'on dit que c'est de ce chagrin que sortit Lumière d'août". Si Camus, pour sa part, ne connut pas un tel malheur, "il fut lui-même cet enfant donné pour mort dont le fantôme fait retour dans chacun de ses récits". A travers chacun des romanciers, c'est aussi un autoportrait oblique que livre Forest, dont toute l'oeuvre littéraire creuse cette énigme du deuil.

Le monde selon Zweig

FROM LE FIGARO

Pourquoi l'écrivain autrichien séduit-il toujours autant ? Dominique Bona cherche à percer le mystère de ce succès.

Il y a un mystère Zweig, affirme la romancière et biographe Dominique Bona: «J'ai écrit ce livre pour tenter de le percer.» Et quels mystères - le pluriel s'impose. Comment comprendre que plus de soixante-dix ans après sa mort, l'auteur de Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme continue encore de séduire? Qu'est-ce qui pousse ce modèle de l'intellectuel «Vieille Europe», né en 1881, à attirer les jeunes lecteurs d'aujourd'hui? Pourquoi ses romans touchent-ils aussi fortement ? Sans doute faut-il aller chercher les clés du côté du destin hors du commun d'un homme qui a toujours préféré la discrétion et les silences, une extravagante pudeur. Heureusement, Zweig a beaucoup correspondu et beaucoup écrit (le grand public connaît peut-être moins ses biographies et ses essais consacrés à Balzac, ­Dickens, Dostoïevski, Stendhal, ­Tolstoï, Nietzsche, Freud, Marie-Antoinette…). Il y a, aussi, en filigrane mais de manière accentuée chez l'écrivain cette boulimie de vouloir saisir le monde par tous les bouts - «Le démon de la curiosité ronge Stefan Zweig», souligne ­Dominique Bona.

Confusion des sentiments
On perçoit également une impression d'urgence qui l'a toujours habité, lui-même donnait cette explication dans son autobiographie:«Le sentiment du provisoire dominait mystérieusement ma vie.» Est-ce pour cette raison que la plupart de ses textes sont d'une rare concision - et pourtant tout y est décrit profondément, en quelques traits:les émotions et les personnages, le feu intérieur et le rythme accéléré de la vie, la confusion des sentiments et les douleurs contenues, les grands tourments et les petites lueurs. Par quelle magie son style d'une apparente simplicité opère-t-il ? Bona évoque une voix:«Cette voix, c'est d'abord une écriture sobre, élégante et fluide, qui a l'air de couler de source.»

La biographie tente de percer bien d'autres mystères d'une vie extraordinairement riche - et d'une fin tragique un jour de février 1942 -, elle est aussi fascinante qu'une nouvelle de Stefan Zweig. Et celles et ceux qui se passionnent pour l'auteur du Joueur d'échecs trouveront là une nouvelle occasion de l'aimer davantage.

Stefan Zweig de Dominique Bona, Grasset, 464 p,20,90 €.

Drunk writers were better sober, says psychiatrist

FROM INDEPENDENT

By John von Radowitz


The idea that drugs and alcohol can fuel creativity is a myth, it was claimed yesterday.


While many artists and writers were famous for substance abuse, most produced their greatest works while not intoxicated, according to the psychiatrist Dr Iain Smith. In fact alcohol and drugs were more likely to stifle creativity, he claimed.

Dr Smith, an addiction expert from Gartnavel Royal Hospital in Glasgow, said: "The reason why this myth is so powerful is the allure of the substances, and the fact that many artists need drugs to cope with their emotions. Artists are, in general, more emotional people."

The American writers Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway were addicted to alcohol, said Dr Smith, speaking at a Royal College of Psychiatrists meeting in Edinburgh. The poets Coleridge and Keats took opiates, as did the writers Proust and Edgar Allan Poe, while the painter Vincent van Gogh drank the potent spirit absinthe, he added.

The American writers F Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill and William Faulkner all received the Nobel Prize for Literature and all were alcoholics, said Dr Smith.

"The idea that drugs and alcohol give artists unique insights and powerful experiences is an illusion," he said. "When you try and capture the experiences [triggered by drugs or alcohol] they are often nonsense. These drugs often wipe your memory, so it's hard to remember how you were in that state of mind."

Inside the Box

FROM NY TIMES
By CHRIS SUELLENTROP

Video games have created what must be the biggest generation gap since rock ’n’ roll. Sure, a generational rift of sorts emerged when the World Wide Web showed up near the end of the last century, but in the case of the Web, the older cohort admired and tried to emulate the younger crowd, rather than looking down on them with befuddlement or disdain. With games, a more traditional “Get off my lawn” panic has reared its head.

Enlarge This Image
Illustration by Lasse Skarbovik
EXTRA LIVES
Why Video Games Matter
By Tom Bissell
218 pp. Pantheon Books. $22.95
Multimedia

Take Roger Ebert, one of the most outspoken voices on the fogy side of this divide. In April, Ebert enraged a good portion of the Internet with a post titled “Video Games Can Never Be Art” on his Chicago Sun-Times blog. (To which one games blogger offered the rejoinder “Art Can Never Be Video Games.”) Acknowledging that “never” is a “long, long time,” Ebert wrote, “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

Ebert was restating a claim he made five years ago that “no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers.” And he’s right about that, for now. But I would happily accept a wager, and I imagine Tom Bissell would, too. Almost 30 years ago, Martin Amis wrote a book called “Invasion of the Space Invaders,” now out of print, about the dawn of the arcade era of video games — which Bissell nods at in the very first sentence of his new book, “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.” A mere blink of an eye later, video games (at least the kind Bissell is interested in) have evolved into ambitious works of narrative fiction. They are not yet, granted, what we would regard as literary fiction, but that’s one reason Bissell wrote this book. (Of early game designers he writes, “These men’s minds were typically scattered with the detritus of Tolkien, ‘Star Wars,’ Dungeons and Dragons, ‘Dune’— and that was if they had any taste.”)

Bissell was born in 1974, which puts him on the cusp of gaming’s generational divide. That transitional position affords him a perspective not unlike — if you’ll indulge the grandiose analogy — that of Tocqueville or McLuhan, figures who stood on the bridges of two great ages, welcoming the horizon while also mourning what the world was leaving behind. Bissell sees video games with open eyes. His book is about the profoundly ambivalent experience of playing them — close readings (close playings?) mostly of big-budget action and science fiction titles for consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation. These are the games most likely to draw a disparaging remark from a United States senator or a newspaper film critic. “Extra Lives” is a celebration of why they matter, but it is also a jeremiad about “why they do not matter more.”

Bissel, a contributing editor at Har­per’s Magazine who teaches fiction writing at Portland State University, cops to spending more than 200 hours playing one game, some 80 hours another. “The pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar,” he writes. “Today, the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games.” He says this despite encountering “appalling” dialogue, despite hearing actors give line readings of “autistic miscalculation,” despite despairing over the sense that gamers and game designers have embraced “an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization.”

Despite all this, the interactive nature of video games enables moments that Bissell calls “as gripping as any fiction I have come across.” In particular, he is smitten with Grand Theft Auto IV, a game he sometimes regards as “the most colossal creative achievement of the last 25 years” (while at other times regarding it as “misguided and a failure”). A scene in that game, in which the protagonist — controlled by the player — must dispose of two dead men by driving them across a fictional New York City with their bodies in the trunk of his car, illustrates how video games are “an engine of a far more intimate process of implication” than other works of fiction, Bissell writes. Inter­activity “turns narrative into an active experience, which film is simply unable to do in the same way. And it is moments like this that remind me why I love video games and what they give me that nothing else can.”

If photographs are “experience captured,” in Susan Sontag’s phrase, then video games are experience created. The medium can be so engaging, so addictive — Bissell compares playing games to his time using cocaine — that many game makers get away with fiction that makes Stephenie Meyer “look like Ibsen.” A novel or a movie that is poorly written is relatively easy to abandon. Well-designed games that feature bad writing “do not have this problem,” Bissell notes. “Or rather, their problem is not having this problem.”

Roger Ebert and those who agree with him are unlikely to have their minds changed by a book. You can understand video games as a medium of communication, or as an emerging art form, only by playing them. (Ebert’s most recent judgment was rendered after watching online videos of certain games, which is something like judging movies by listening to them.) But Bissell has written the finest account yet of what it feels like to be a ­video game player at “this glorious, frustrating time,” a rare moment when humanity encounters, as he writes, “a form of storytelling that is, in many ways, completely unprecedented.”


Chris Suellentrop is an editor at The Times Magazine.

The Notebook by José Saramago

FROM THE TELEGRAPH
Tom Payne hails the bloggings of a Nobel Prize-winning author, José Saramago, collected in The Notebook

By Tom Payne

Not everybody likes winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beckett thought it a catastrophe; Doris Lessing made it clear that she could have done without it; when the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won it, Seamus Heaney said: “Poor Wislawa!” These days it seems almost unwriterly to win the most honourable prize a writer can win. Harold Pinter seemed all too chuffed. But why not? It tends to be a lifetime achievement award.

The Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who died last week, received it in 1998 for the work of two prolific decades. Not even the Nobel Prize was going to stop him. Like Pinter, he welcomed it. He tended not to show off without self-deprecation, but in his last published work, The Notebook, he let slip, thrice, that he was pleased to have won the prize.


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Austria alleges 'economic warfare' after Krugman commentsGood for him. Saramago was a politically committed writer, and was able to use his global fame to plead cases dear to him. Or, as he put it in The Notebook: “It is true that I am better known as a writer, but there are also some people who… believe what I say as a common citizen is of interest to them.” And for a year, until last August, he wrote a blog.

Intellectuals in their ninth decade are allowed to write blogs, although, given that Saramago often wrote page-length paragraphs, he was never likely to do Twitter.

He blogged in a ruminative, refined way. As he conceded: “I don’t include links, I don’t have a direct dialogue with my readers, I don’t interact with the rest of the blogosphere.” It was the soapbox for a hugely informed, often indignant Communist who hated the oppression of women, cruelty in all its forms, the Roman Catholic church, George W Bush, and don’t get him started on Silvio Berlusconi. Loves include his wife, the family (his own, and the institution), his Portuguese water dog and other writers, living and dead, to whom he pays generous tribute.

It should be said that these pages aren’t always fascinating. Saramago updated his blog almost every day, and even the greatest writer will struggle to find something new to add at that rate. Fans of his novels will want to know, first, that he’s less apt to hit you with experimental punctuation, except when he’s giving you a peek at some fiction; and they will be sad to reflect that he stopped the blog to write more fiction. Without the blog, could there have been another novel?

Still, this book will appeal to Saramago’s band of regular readers. (And it’s a loyal, big and growing band, especially when you include Brazil.) The translation, by Amanda Hopkinson and Daniel Hahn, reads well, but has barely any notes, so that key characters go unintroduced. I couldn’t help thinking that if you already knew this much about Portuguese literature, then you are Portuguese, or Brazilian.

So is there a point to this book? Yes – it is a plea for civilised discourse, humane values and, for all Saramago’s anger at injustice, deceit, populism and Berlusconi, he is innately optimistic; or at least, he wants to be positive, and holds out a hope that people will do the right thing. He is strict on Obama, for example, but doesn’t rule out that he might make progress on health care reform. (He got that one right, and lived to see it.)

When he can’t be upbeat, he recognises that he should dry up on certain subjects, or urges that we “return to philosophy”. Somewhere in that, there’s the suggestion that reading urbane blogs, and allegorical novels, by the widely mourned Nobel Prize-winning author, would be a start to setting the world back on course. The world is poorer without Saramago, but these notes are a testament to his energy; and his homages to the young will now read as a passing on of the torch.

The Notebook

by José Saramago,
tr by Amanda Hopkinson and
Daniel Hahn
276pp, Verso, £12.99

Simone Weil, la insatisfecha

FROM ELPAIS.COM
PATRICIA DE SOUZA
Un rostro de mujer sorprendente el de Simone Weil, luminoso, y al mismo tiempo bañado en una cierta oscuridad, un cuerpo de hierro y al mismo tiempo vulnerable, que se apaga muy pronto, a los treinta y cuatro años, sin dejar brillar todo el oro que ella creía llevar dentro. Una escritura fragmentada que arranca trozos de rotunda belleza a la reflexión, con un aliento poético que pocas escritoras han podido lograr. En este libro de ensayos, reunidos por Emilia Bea, La conciencia del dolor y de la belleza, la intención es acercarla a sus lectores para comprender aspectos fundamentales de su obra que son de innegable actualidad. Uno de ellos es que Weil nos plantea en términos modernos (por más que exista en ella una lectura helenista, clásica, de la condición humana) el problema de la libertad. Como Simone de Beauvoir, una de las cosas que más obsesionan a Weil es comprender con un sentido revelador y moral, que lleva de la comprensión a la acción (atenta y no pasiva), e involucra al otro como un valor humano inalienable. Esa vocación por la alteridad hace de ella una mística de la entrega y la convierte en el chivo expiatorio de sus escritos. Su vida es casi un acto de sacrificio, un fuego que la consume lentamente bajo la combustión de su inconformismo y su irreverencia. Weil pone en tela de juicio los conceptos modernos de civilización (el "desarraigo") y los ve como una herida que resulta de la violencia ejercida por la colonización contra aquellos que la historia no ha tomado en cuenta: las voces de esos oprimidos arrancados a su pasado, que no han tenido el tiempo de integrarse al presente; o la historia dominante de las religiones que han excluido a otras (la cátara). Pero lo más importante, y lo que resalta a mi modo de ver una parte de estos ensayos, es la vigencia de la crítica social y política de sus escritos (hay que distinguir los escritos filosóficos de sus fragmentos puramente especulativos), sus críticas a Marx y a su "misticismo burgués" que hizo que creyese ciegamente en la idea de progreso, ignorando el abismo que se crea entre las fuerzas productivas y los valores humanos en contra de toda vida espiritual. La dignidad del ser humano es el pensamiento y la capacidad intelectual, perderlos es perder esa relación con la belleza del mundo como un bien supremo, sembrando dolor y desesperanza. El pensar es para Weil un ejercicio de trascendencia que estará siempre en contra de ese orden social y jerárquico que divide el mundo entre dominantes y dominados, pese a estar unidos por un mismo destino: la muerte. Su sentido de la irreverencia y su obsesión crítica no cesaron de activar en ella una sed de verdad y de trascendencia (su experiencia como obrera es una de ellas) que terminó, creo yo, en una paradoja: aspirar a ese Bien supremo como conocimiento absoluto inspirado en Dios, con un pensamiento limitado y humano (a veces pagano) que, pese a la incertidumbre, siguió empujando con todas sus fuerzas, hasta salir al mundo y dejarnos varios tesoros. Una doctrina filosófica que solo podemos comprender si intuimos desde el inicio la columna vertebral que sostiene su pensamiento: la insatisfacción.

Simone Weil. La conciencia del dolor y de la belleza
Edición de Emilia Bea
Trotta. Madrid, 2010

Los límites de la razón

FROM ELPAIS.COM
CRÍTICA: PENSAMIENTO

CHANTAL MAILLARD
Tanto Wittgenstein como Patanjali desvelan la capacidad de la conciencia para descubrir su funcionamiento y también sus limitaciones

Wittgenstein
Volumen I y II.
Estudio introductorio de Isidoro Reguera.
Gredos. Biblioteca de Grandes Pensadores.
Madrid. 2009.

Patanjali. Spinoza
Óscar Pujol / Atilano Domínguez.
Pre-Textos Indika.
Valencia, 2009.

Contra el arte y otras imposturas. Rasa: el placer estético en la tradición india. Diarios indios.
Chantal Maillard.
Pre-Textos, 2009.


No habéis pensado alguna vez que estamos siendo presa de nuestras palabras, que la realidad es más amplia que el mundo que hemos creado con ellas y que, como en Dark City, el paraíso que anhelamos no es finalmente más que un cartel de propaganda pegado al muro que nos separa del vacío estelar?

Creemos ver el mundo, pero lo que vemos no es sino el marco de la ventana por la que lo miramos, afirma Wittgenstein
Entre las frases que me acompañaron desde muy joven, hay una de Wittgenstein que dice lo siguiente (cito de memoria): creemos ver el mundo, pero lo que vemos no es sino el marco de la ventana por la que lo miramos. La gran cuestión de la filosofía occidental, la que ha dividido a unos y otros, está resumida en aquella frase. Empirismo versus idealismo; o las cosas existen y la mente es apta para conocerlas tal cual son, o lo que existe es la conciencia (sus ideas: sus "visiones") y el mundo es su representación. Entre ambos extremos, todas las variantes posibles. Pero hasta el positivismo lógico no se centraron los filósofos en la estructura del lenguaje. A Wittgenstein, próximo en su juventud al Círculo de Viena, no le bastó analizar su estructura lógica; fue un poco más lejos: "Los límites de mi lenguaje significan los límites de mi mundo", escribía en su Tractatus (5.6), y "yo soy mi mundo" (5.63), por lo que "yo" no es otra cosa que mi lenguaje.

Pegada a la puerta de mi armario, a la frase de Wittgenstein pronto vino a hacerle compañía otra, que provenía de una tradición muy distinta y que afirmaba (dicho mal y pronto) que el mundo (samsara) no se diferencia del vacío (nirvana) ni el vacío se diferencia del mundo. Con ello, Nagarjuna le daba otra vuelta de tuerca al ya de por sí finísimo análisis de la mente llevado a cabo por el budismo mahayana. Venía a decir, con ello, simplificando mucho, que entre pensar el mundo fenoménico y pensar el logro de la calma mental no hay diferencia si ambas cosas son pensamientos. En efecto, si lo que se pretende (y en esto todos los sistemas indios, ortodoxos tanto como heterodoxos, estaban de acuerdo) es alcanzar un estado de conciencia que trascienda la dualidad, nombrarlo no es el camino adecuado.

El error fundamental del ser humano, para la gran mayoría de los sistemas indios, es su identificación con los procesos mentales. Así es también para Wittgenstein, y es por lo que me gusta aventurar este intempestivo paralelismo. Entre los respectivos sistemas de proposiciones que conforman las Investigaciones filosóficas de Wittgenstein y los Yogasutras de Patanjali media una distancia cultural y geográfica que los convierte en universos aparentemente inconmensurables; no obstante, son dos métodos de aproximación al conocimiento de la mente que desvelan tanto la capacidad de la conciencia para descubrir su funcionamiento como sus límites. Ambos proponen un trabajo arduo de observación y de desidentificación de la conciencia para con los procesos de pensamiento. Mientras los Yogasutras se presentan como guía hacia la detención del proceso mental (descripción de obstáculos, alteraciones mentales y modo de eliminarlos), Wittgenstein se preocupa de desestructurar las viejas creencias y mostrar que no hay salida, ningún metalenguaje desde el que considerar los juegos de lenguaje. ¿Fue, el último filósofo, más oriental que sus coetáneos?

No estoy hablando de un tema que le competa sólo a la filosofía. Nos concierne a todos. Nuestro mundo: nuestro lenguaje. Presos en el logos. Sus límites, los del pensar, infranqueables. Moverse en el filo tiene un precio: el vértigo. Y una recompensa: descubrir la farsa, la ilusión, tan sólo para volver a internarse, más lúcidos (des-ilusionados), aunque quizá más tristes. El logro: reírse.

Livro recria o início doido de Brasília

POR FOLHA DE SAO PAULO
"Cidade Livre", de João Almino, narra em tom de epopeia construção no ermo goiano

RONALDO COSTA COUTO


"Cidade Livre" impressiona. O escritor João Almino liberta-se da diplomacia, arregaça as mangas e usa história e imaginação para contar o Brasil real suando, vibrando, sofrendo e sonhando na extenuante e impressionante epopeia de fazer tudo no nada do ermo goiano.
Hoje Núcleo Bandeirante, cidade-satélite de Brasília, a pioneiríssima Cidade Livre foi esteio da construção da capital no governo Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961).
Quinto título do autor sobre o universo brasiliense, "Cidade Livre" é bem idealizado e bem escrito. Quase dá para ver o vaivém dos fundadores. Apressados, aproveitadores, idealistas, políticos, barnabés, comerciantes de quase tudo.
Com sorte, descobrir o irrequieto presidente JK e o enérgico engenheiro-chefe Israel Pinheiro, de terno e gravata, surradas xicarazinhas esmaltadas na mão, tomando café de coador de pano com os candangos.

NIEMEYER BEBERICA
E o musculoso gigante carioca Bernardo Sayão, jeitão de menino, pioneiro e herói, ídolo da candangada, inspiração das mulheres dali e de outras lonjuras.
Sempre animadíssimo, camisa e calça largas, pisando forte com suas botas comando nas ruas de terra, de muita poeira vermelha ou barro.
Comandando, motivando, orientando a todos, distribuindo alegria, confiança e esperança.
Ou então, na noite alta, de céu deslumbrante, o jovem arquiteto Oscar Niemeyer à mesa do tosco Olga's Bar, bebericando com amigos, fumando cigarrilhas, olhando a gente humilde com ternura imensa e respeito máximo.
Quem sabe até tocando seu esperto cavaquinho ou cantando com Tom Jobim e Vinicius de Moraes, hóspedes de Juscelino no Catetinho, palácio de tábuas, onde compuseram a bela Sinfonia da Alvorada.
Indispensável e saudoso Olga's Bar, referência do doido princípio naquele cafundó. Bares, pensões, hotéis, cabarés. Todos construídos de madeira, boa parte de propósitos múltiplos.
Aspas para João Almino: "Papai me contou que um dos negócios mais lucrativos da Cidade Livre era o dos bordéis, onde nos fins de semana e nas horas livres os operários gastavam o dinheiro ganho com as excessivas horas de trabalho".

HISTÓRIA VIVA
"Cidade Livre" reafirma João Almino como romancista de Brasília, mas ele é bem mais.
O mestre Moacyr Scliar tem razão: "Entre os melhores autores de nosso país. O Brasil está resumido em suas páginas".
Ficção envolvente sobre história viva.
O leitor, progressivamente seduzido, acaba tragado pela engenhosa armadilha urdida pelo pseudocronista da capital, descobriu a escritora e professora de literatura da USP Walnice Nogueira Galvão. Ela sabe das coisas.

RONALDO COSTA COUTO é escritor e economista, autor de "Brasília Kubitschek de Oliveira" (Record)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CIDADE LIVRE

AUTOR João Almino
EDITORA Record
QUANTO R$ 39,90 (240 págs.)
AVALIAÇÃO ótimo

Saramago,um talento que lembrava Shakespeare

Por "O Estado de S. Paulo"

Em entrevista ao 'Estado', o crítico americano Harold Bloom relata sua admiração pelo autor português, a quem atribui uma extraordinária versatilidade para o drama e para a comédia


Em 2003, o crítico literário norte-americano Harold Bloom reforçou a fama de provocador ao afirmar que Saramago era, em sua opinião, o mais talentoso escritor vivo daquele momento. O único a ombreá-lo seria o também americano Philip Roth. Era o início de uma amizade intensa, marcada tanto por afagos desse quilate como por troca de farpas, especialmente quando suas opiniões discordavam em relação à política internacional.


Ernesto Rodrigues - 24/11/2008Saramago morreu em sua casa, aos 87 anosVeja também:

Corpo do escritor chega a Lisboa no sábado

Mundo ficou 'ainda mais burro', diz Meirelles

Um comunista a favor da democracia

A trajetória literária de José Saramago

"Ele era um homem inigualável", comentou Bloom ao Estado, de sua casa, em Nova York, em entrevista realizada ontem, por telefone. "A literatura vai sentir muito sua falta." Para o crítico, o escritor português aproximava-se de Shakespeare por conta de sua versatilidade, trafegando com inteligência do drama à comédia. E, a partir da união de Saramago com a espanhola Pilar, Bloom - que organizou um livro sobre o ficcionista - identificou traços mais visíveis da paixão na prosa do ganhador do Nobel. "Houve maior exaltação do amor heterossexual", disse ele, na entrevista a seguir.

Qual é o principal legado de José Saramago, em sua opinião?

Eu o conheci há dez anos, quando estivemos juntos na Universidade de Coimbra e iniciamos uma troca de correspondência. Naquela época, eu já escrevera alguns ensaios entusiasmados sobre sua obra e o considerava um homem notável. Claro que houve o controverso período da ditadura de Antonio Salazar, quando ele foi acusado de se manter distante dos horrores daquele momento político. Na verdade, isso não me interessa - prefiro vê-lo como o escritor que deixou ao menos oito romances de grande qualidade. Trata-se de um feito raro. Em meu país, creio que Philip Roth tem, por enquanto, duas obras incomparáveis, assim como outros nomes talentosos: Thomas Pynchon também tem dois livros memoráveis, enquanto Don DeLillo e Cormac McCarthy despontam com apenas um cada. Volto a dizer, isso é notável. Saramago também era autor de textos bem-humorados, ao contrário do que atacavam seus críticos.

Qual seu livro preferido entre os escritos por Saramago?

Talvez O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, que traz uma prosa saborosa, divertida até. Eu o reli há alguns anos e notei um frescor preservado. Para mim, Saramago tanto escrevia comédias deliciosas como romances tenebrosos e melancólicos. Mas ainda estou convencido de que seu melhor romance continua sendo O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo: corajoso, polêmico contra o cristianismo em particular mas contra as religiões em geral. Há poucos livros que conseguem tratar Cristo e o catolicismo sem se sujeitar a um respeito obrigatório. Aqui, Saramago conseguiu, assim como D. H. Lawrence e, em menor grau, Norman Mailer. Creio que, entre os premiados com o Nobel de literatura nos últimos anos, ele foi quem realmente mereceu.

O curioso é que, apesar de sua veemente posição política (ele se descrevia como um "comunista hormonal"), Saramago não foi um autor de uma obra abertamente política, não?

Sim, de fato, ele preferia a alegoria, entendida muita vezes como uma espécie de cegueira. Ele era político como cidadão e, em muitos casos, um polêmico político. Lembro-me de quando ele certa vez estava na Polônia (em 2002) e criticou a ocupação israelense dos territórios palestinos, comparando-a com o campo de extermínio nazista de Auschwitz. Claro que isso gerou uma polêmica muito grande, creio que ele foi até impedido de entrar em Israel. Escrevi sobre esse assunto desagradável na época e, meses depois, quando nos reencontramos, tivemos conversas não muito amistosas sobre o assunto. Infelizmente, quando falava de política, Saramago assumia, às vezes, o estereótipo stalinista de sempre.

Comenta-se que a mudança do escritor para a ilha de Lanzarote foi determinante em sua prosa. O senhor concorda?

Acredito que sim, pois ele se tornou um homem iluminado ao se mudar para as Canárias. Saramago foi infeliz em seu primeiro casamento, assunto do qual pouco conversamos. Mas reencontrou a felicidade com Pilar, uma mulher mais jovem, bonita, interessada em seu trabalho. Isso influenciou seu trabalho. Como em A História do Cerco de Lisboa em outros romances, houve maior exaltação do amor heterossexual. Lembro-me de poucos livros do século 20 e mesmo do início do século 21 que trataram a paixão de forma tão charmosa. Outro romance que me surpreendeu foi As Intermitências da Morte, cujos personagens têm sua rotina modificada tanto pela Morte, que entra em greve, como por um violoncelista que gosta da Suíte Nº 6 para Violoncelo de Bach. Trata-se de uma memorável forma de se utilizar a imaginação.

"Por trás de cada limpeza étnica há um poeta"

FROM UOL.COM.BR

Francesc Arroyo
Em Barcelona (Espanha) "Há uma poesia que atua como fundamento das pátrias e sem a qual não poderíamos entender o ódio", afirma o pensador Slavoj Zizek (nascido em Lubliana, Eslovênia, em 1949). Por isso, propõe: "Precisamos controlar a poesia, atrás de cada limpeza étnica há um poeta".

Na segunda-feira (14) ele deu uma conferência em Barcelona na qual refletiu, como em seu último livro, "Sobre a Violência", sobre o mal, as perspectivas do capitalismo, o naufrágio dos projetos coletivos depois do desaparecimento do mundo soviético.

Embora ele se reconheça como esquerdista, afirma que fala "sem nostalgia" porque "o socialismo de Estado tinha de morrer; na realidade, quando se certificou sua morte estava morto havia anos, sem o saber". E o explica com uma imagem tirada dos filmes de Tom e Jerry: "O gato corre, a terra se acaba e ele continua correndo no ar. Até que olha para baixo e vê o que faz no vazio. E cai exatamente por ter olhado".

Ele se confessa pessimista em longo prazo. "O futuro da democracia é Berlusconi", afirma, mordaz. "Um governante que constrói um Estado cada vez mais autoritário e que distrai as pessoas de vez em quando com escândalos, como quando o acusam de ser impotente e ele se oferece para demonstrar diante de qualquer tribunal que não é. Como pretendia fazê-lo?". Berlusconi, sugere Zizek, se encontra na metade do caminho entre Ubu Rei e Grouxo Marx, mas, "de modo inteligente" indica o futuro de um capitalismo "autoritário". Como na China.

"Não é nada seguro que o desenvolvimento do capitalismo ponha em ação os desejos da democracia. O capitalismo asiático funciona sem democracia e não tem problemas."

A queda do Muro de Berlim afundou o socialismo de Estado, certo tipo de sociedades autoritárias, mas acabou por liquidar o resto da esquerda europeia. "A social-democracia ria pensando que desaparecia um adversário." Grave erro. Porque o que resta agora são "partidos de direita, de centro-direita e de centro-esquerda", todos eles dedicados a "administrar o capitalismo, a torná-lo eficiente". E o rechaço a essas posições só se aprecia em "forças fundamentalistas, nacionalistas e anti-imigrantes". "Zapatero na Espanha, Obama nos EUA, supostos governantes de esquerda obrigados a tranquilizar os mercados."

Os governos de esquerda têm todos a mesma evolução: provocam no início certo entusiasmo, a convicção de que algo mudará; o capitalismo lhes permite legalizar o aborto, os casamentos homossexuais, nunca as regras do mercado. A solução para isso só pode vir, defende o filósofo com entusiasmo, "da esquerda radical, caso contrário a centro-esquerda terá de acabar pactuando com os fundamentalistas".

No presente, o que domina é a pós-ideologia, a pós-política. Há 20 anos, quando Francis Fukuyama anunciou o fim da história, foi considerado equivocado. "Mas ele venceu. Não há um só parlamentar na Europa que pense em outros termos do que o parlamentarismo liberal", conta Zizek, que não faz muito tempo se encontrou com Fukuyama e soube por este que já não crê em sua tese sobre o fim da história.

Apareceram elementos que modificam tudo, ele disse: "A biogenética e a crise ecológica". A biogenética permitirá em médio prazo atuar sobre os indivíduos, e isso "não se pode deixar nas mãos do mercado". Mas cuidado, porque se alguém vê uma luz no fim do túnel provavelmente é outro trem que viaja em direção contrária.

Enquanto isso, o que resta aos filósofos é explicar e explicar. E afastar-se do liberalismo eurocentrista. Zizek, que muitas vezes parte de anedotas, romances e filmes para deixar claro a que se refere, conta que Terry Eagleton lhe contou que o historiador Osborne foi dar uma conferência para operários e começou dizendo que o que ia lhes dizer devia ser relativizado, que era seu ponto de vista, que ele não sabia mais que seus ouvintes. E um dos assistentes retrucou: "Então vá embora, você é pago por saber mais que nós e para nos contar".

O filósofo deve transmitir conhecimentos aos demais, convidá-los a pensar o presente de forma crítica. Começando pelo uso da linguagem contaminada de violência até em seus termos aparentemente mais pacíficos. Por exemplo, "tolerância". Zizek convida a revisar os discursos de Martin Luther King ou do feminismo contemporâneo: "Não há pedidos de tolerância. King não pretendia que os brancos tolerassem os negros, nem as feministas querem ser toleradas. Reclamam igualdade, questionam o que existe", o que é algo muito diferente.

E indica a ironia de que sua intervenção ocorra em um centro de arte (Santa Mónica, em Barcelona), e não na universidade. "É cada vez mais frequente." Zizek termina sua entrevista convidando o jornalista a utilizar suas palavras: "Manipule-me orwellianamente, está autorizado. Surpreenda-me mostrando o que eu disse". Está feito.

"El mal y el bien existen"

FROM EL PAIS

ENTREVISTA
Entrevista con el sociólogo Alain Touraine
FRANCESCO ARROYO

Alain Touraine lo tiene claro: "El mal y el bien existen. El bien es lo que permite al hombre vivir de manera humana. Eso significa ser respetado, no ser humillado, ser reconocido como igual en derechos al margen de si uno es un campesino peruano o un premio Nobel de Física". La afirmación le lleva a proponer objetivos sociales: "Hay que reconstruir una sociedad en la que las instituciones tengan la capacidad de crear espacios de reflexión. Un hombre es su trabajo, su familia, pero debe tener distancia respecto a eso. Y esa distancia puede desaparecer si tengo que trabajar como un animal, si se destruye mi conciencia porque me tratan como un animal". Más allá de los últimos relativismos de moda, Touraine sostiene: "Es bueno un acto que defiende mi capacidad de actuar de manera reflexiva. No por mi estatus social, sino como individuo portador de un sujeto universal".

Es la tesis de su último libro, La mirada social (Paidós), sobre el que hace varios días impartió un seminario y una conferencia en Barcelona, invitado por el Institut d'Estudis Catalans. El mundo ha cambiado mucho en las últimas décadas, dice el reciente premio Príncipe de Asturias de Comunicación y Humanidades, galardón que comparte con Zygmunt Baugman. Las viejas palabras ya no sirven para entender el presente. "El mundo cambia incluso geográficamente", explica. "No sabemos si Europa, dentro de 50 años, será un continente atrasado o avanzado, porque no tenemos crecimiento, mientras que el resto del mundo sí lo tiene: África y China incluso muy fuerte. Se necesita que los intelectuales den un primer mapa, lleno de errores, pero que indique lo que ocurre. Eso supone que quieran hacerlo, lo que implica resistir a la búsqueda de la celebridad, del dinero. De venderse a empresas de publicidad, por ejemplo. Y no es tan fácil. Hay que tomarse muy en serio la responsabilidad de los intelectuales. Pero estos tienen que pensar los cambios: los tecnológicos, la destrucción de los grandes regímenes totalitarios. Procesos de transformación muy profundas que afectan a la vida cotidiana de la gente".

En cierto sentido, afirma, el mundo vive hoy "desorientado". "Cuando hablamos de la realidad social empleamos palabras que ya no entendemos. Si digo 'democracia', cualquiera entiende que es lo contrario de autoritarismo. Pero nadie sabe lo que significa democracia. Ni siquiera ciudad. No es lo mismo una de 30 millones, Tokio, que Barcelona o París. Son categorías diferentes. Nadie sabe de qué sirve la escuela, la cárcel, qué es la familia. No hay respuestas aceptadas para eso. Hay que reinventar las categorías básicas para comprender la realidad".

Y entre esas categorías, Touraine recupera la de sujeto. El sujeto es el ser humano dueño de sus actos. Así lo explica: "En el pensamiento moderno llega un momento en el que no se puede evitar el actor. Hay un sistema con su lógica interna, por ejemplo el capitalismo, que se dirige hacia una crisis definitiva inevitable. La globalización de la economía es mucho más que su internacionalización. Deja el mundo económico fuera del alcance de cualquier actor. La crisis de 2008 tiene una lógica perversa: hay un sector financiero que se desinteresa totalmente de las inversiones y la economía, y convierte el beneficio en la única meta. Lo social desaparece. Está deshecho, sin sentido. De forma que hay que plantearse si hay una fuerza que tenga la capacidad de resistir a ese mundo económico global".

Crear mecanismos de comprensión de la sociedad que permitan la resistencia frente a esos poderes es, insiste, una de las tareas de los intelectuales hoy.Y concluye: "En cierto sentido, volvemos a la Ilustración: los derechos humanos, la dignidad, el ser humano como portador de derechos universales. La igualdad como base de la democracia, pero con carácter universal".

Guy Deutscher: Language alters how we think

From The Observer
Robert McCrum

The linguist argues that in our haste to explain language in terms of genetics we've underestimated the power of culture

Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world.

An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old linguist draws on a range of sources in the book to show language reflecting the society in which it is spoken. In the process, he explains why Russian water (a "she") becomes a "he" once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has.

What's your new book about in a nutshell?

It's about why the world can look different in other languages. I try to explain why in the race to ascribe to our genes all the fundamental aspects of language and thought, the immense power of culture and nurture has been grossly underestimated.

How has it been underestimated?

For example, I argue that the mother tongue has considerable influence on the way we think and perceive the world. But there's a great deal of historical baggage attached to this question and so most respectable psychologists and linguists won't touch it with a bargepole.

It's like being a historian and talking about national character, isn't it?

Exactly. But I think we are grown up enough now to look at this question in a scientific way.

Can you give me an example of what you mean?

The most striking example involves what I call the language of space – how we describe the arrangement of objects around us. Take a sentence such as: "The child is standing behind the tree" – you'd imagine all languages would behave in the same way when describing something so simple. It's almost inconceivable that there would be languages that don't use such concepts at all. For centuries, philosophers and psychologists have had us believe that such egocentric concepts of space such as "in front of", "behind", "left" or "right" are the universal building blocks of language and cognition.

And aren't they universal?

Well, this remote aboriginal tongue turned up – called Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland. These people have a way of speaking about space that is incredibly odd, because they don't use any such concepts at all. So they would never say: "The child is behind the tree." Instead, they would say: "The child is north of the tree."

It also happens to be the language that gave us the word kangaroo.

Yes, it's famous for that, but it should be doubly famous. These people say things such as: "There's an ant on your northern foot", or: "I left the pen on the southern edge of the western table in your northern room in the house." You might think that their weird way of speaking about space must be a one-off. But the discovery of this language inspired a great deal of research and we learned of other peoples around the globe, from Mexico to Indonesia, who speak in a similar way.

What consequences does such a language have for your perception of space?

Growing up with such a language essentially develops in your brain a sort of GPS system, an unfailing sense of orientation, and the reason is fairly straightforward: if from the age at which you start talking, you have to be aware of the cardinal directions every waking second of your life in order to understand the most trivial things that people say around you, then your language trains you to pay constant attention to your orientation at all times. Because of this intense drilling, the sense of directions becomes second nature. If you ask the Guugu Yimithirr how they know where north is or where south is, they look at you in amazement, just as you would be flummoxed if I asked you how you know where in front of you is and where behind is.

Is your dominant interest to do with neurology or linguistics?

My focus is on the effects of language on thought, but I try to concentrate on those effects that can be demonstrated scientifically. Neurology may be an exciting subject, but we are still profoundly ignorant about its subject matter – we know little about how the brain works. So to show any influence of language on thought, we need to find examples where this influence has practical and measurable consequences in actual behaviour.

If we were having this conversation in 50 years' time, it would be much easier to talk about real neurology, because we would be able to scan the brain and find out exactly how each different language influences different aspects of thought. Our current ruminations about the subject would then look pitifully primitive. But progress can only come through trying and failing and failing better.

HERTA MUELLER

FROM EL PAIS
ENTREVISTA: ESPECIAL FERIA DEL LIBRO DE MADRID / En Portada
La vida extrema
CECILIA DREYMÜLLER

"Las frases verdaderas están siempre relacionadas con una herida profunda", dice en una entrevista Herta Müller. La Nobel recrea las vivencias de los rumanos de origen alemán deportados a Ucrania en 1945, entre ellos, su madre y el poeta Oskar Pastior.

Por la puerta de la señorial torre modernista de la Literaturhaus en el centro de Berlín entra una mujer de apariencia frágil, envuelta en amplios ropajes negros. Las facciones duras, nobles, sin edad, le confieren una belleza singular, como de condesa transilvana. Su figura menuda y sumamente discreta pasa inadvertida entre la clientela igualmente discreta del café; solo alguna ceja se alza en respetuosa señal de reconocimiento. Herta Müller (Nitzkydorf, 1953, Rumania, premio Nobel de Literatura 2009) se acerca con el andar de una persona tímida. Habla con voz baja, si bien firme, y con este ligero acento de los rumanos de habla alemana que conservaron durante siete siglos su idioma y sus costumbres del sur de Alemania en esa Rumania multiétnica donde convivieron rumanos, húngaros, judíos, gitanos y búlgaros. Se confiesa agotada por los compromisos que le acarrea el Nobel, aunque sus ojos claros y vivos, la mirada directa, dan fe de una inusual fuerza vital. Sin esta energía tal vez no hubiese logrado abandonar su Rumania natal, todavía en plena dictadura del conducator Nicolae Ceausescu. No hubiese soportado las represalias por negarse a colaborar con la Seguritate, la vigilancia, los interrogatorios, la censura. Ahora lleva un cuarto de siglo viviendo en Alemania, país donde publicó en 1984 su primer libro no censurado, En tierras bajas. Ahora publica en España su última novela, Todo lo que tengo lo llevo conmigo (Siruela).

"Ver la amplitud, el gran espacio vacío de la estepa, fue fundamental para imaginarme un escenario"
PREGUNTA. Dos meses antes del fallo del Premio Nobel publicó usted esta novela sobre la deportación de los alemanes de Rumania a campos de trabajo rusos en 1945. ¿Por qué eligió este tema que ha sido silenciado tanto tiempo en Rumania?

RESPUESTA. El tema me ha rondado por la cabeza durante muchos años, pues mi madre fue uno de los deportados, y me he criado con el silencio angustioso en que estaba envuelto, las alusiones veladas, la intuición del sufrimiento que había detrás. En Rumania esto era un tema tabú -y sigue sin ser investigado a fondo- porque evocaba el recuerdo del pasado fascista. A la gente no le gustaba que le recordasen que el Gobierno de Antonescu fue fiel aliado de Hitler. Solo porque el Ejército ruso invadió el país en agosto de 1944 y lo derrocó se produjo en Rumania el súbito cambio de régimen. Todos los soldados rumanos habían participado en las campañas hitlerianas de destrucción de la Unión Soviética, pero, en enero de 1945 -todavía meses antes de que terminara la guerra-, solo los miembros de la minoría alemana fueron enviados a Ucrania para trabajos forzados de reconstrucción. Fueron deportados en nombre de la culpa colectiva, en concepto de trabajos de reparación. Cercan de 100.000 rumanos de origen alemán fueron transportados en vagones de ganado hacia el Este. No sabían adónde los llevaban y, una vez allí, ignoraban cuánto tiempo debían permanecer en los campos de trabajo. Al final fueron cinco años, que pasaron en condiciones inimaginables. Realizaron trabajos extremadamente duros en minas de carbón, en la construcción y en los koljós, las granjas colectivas. No había comida, muchos murieron de hambre. No tenían con qué resistir el frío, la gente trabajaba a la intemperie y moría congelada. Sufrieron todo tipo de infecciones y enfermedades a causa de las terribles condiciones sanitarias y la mayoría de los que sobrevivieron volvieron mutilados o con enfermedades crónicas.

P. ¿Su madre habló con usted de su experiencia?

R. Nadie hablaba voluntariamente de aquello. De mi madre oía desde niña frases como: "El viento es más frío que la nieve", o "una patata caliente es como una cama caliente", o "la sed es peor que el hambre", que metí directamente en la novela. Pero en un momento dado, en el año 2001, me di cuenta de que quedaba cada vez menos gente que me pudiera hablar de lo que le pasó allí. Que cada vez era más difícil acceder a testimonios directos, pues mi madre, que había mantenido contacto con algunos de los deportados en nuestro pueblo después de marcharse a Alemania, me informaba sobre la desaparición de cada vez más conocidos y familiares. Yo siempre me había interesado por este tema, he escrito bastante sobre ello, tanto ensayo como ficción. En todos mis libros anteriores sale, si bien solo de forma secundaria. En Alemania se ha llevado a cabo una larga concienciación histórica, en relación con el fascismo y la guerra, pero en los antiguos países del Este, como Rumania, Hungría o Bulgaria, queda todavía mucho por hacer. Por eso empecé a hacer entrevistas a los supervivientes, viajé a Rumania, a mi pueblo, y hablé con gente que conocía. Sin embargo, no saqué mucho en limpio. Fue Oskar Pastior, el poeta rumano-alemán afincado en Alemania, el primero en hablarme abiertamente. Después, miré en el cementerio de Timisoara la placa dedicada a la memoria de los muertos en los campos de trabajo, que han colocado finalmente, y me apunté nombres que puse a los personajes de la novela, revestidos de las historias que él me había contado.

P. ¿O sea que Oskar Pastior (1927- 2006), que es el álter ego del protagonista, Leo Auberg, no figuraba como punto de partida de su novela?

R. No, había empezado a trabajar en ella antes. Y aunque sabía que él había sido deportado, no me había atrevido a preguntarle. Le tenía una admiración y un respeto enormes, era un gran poeta, un personaje demasiado venerado. No concebía que él se iba a abrir ante mí. Yo era una amiga, pero de otra generación, ¿cómo iba a compartir conmigo sus recuerdos dolorosos? Pero lo curioso fue que cuando le expliqué mi proyecto le gustó. Parecía que tenía no solo ganas, sino necesidad de hablar de esta parte de su vida que había silenciado tantos años. Y así empezó a contarme cosas que yo apuntaba en cuadernos. Llegué a llenar cuatro cuadernos hasta su muerte repentina. Fue algo completamente inesperado. Era mayor, tenía 78 años, pero estaba bien. Y muy ilusionado con el libro porque habíamos acordado escribir la novela a cuatro manos. Existían ya unas treinta páginas.

P. ¿Y qué hizo usted entonces?

R. Primero no hice nada. Estaba paralizada por el dolor de la pérdida, no podía escribir. Había sido un gran amigo, una persona extraordinaria, y durante casi un año estuve de duelo. Después retomé los cuadernos y decidí seguir adelante con la novela por mi cuenta, también en homenaje al amigo.

P. Llama la atención el conocimiento de los lugares y la recreación de las sensaciones físicas: sobre todo, el hambre, pero también el calor, el frío, el agotamiento... La ambientación de la mina, del campo de trabajo, el paisaje y las condiciones climáticas poseen un verismo increíble. ¿Cómo se hizo con esa información?

R. Para empezar, leí muchísima documentación histórica. Existe toda una literatura sobre los distintos tipos de campos de internamiento rusos, sobre los gulags, los campos de trabajo, etcétera, aparte de los clásicos de Solzhenitsin o Shalámov. De gran ayuda fue también un viaje que hice con Pastior a Ucrania, a la cuenca del Donéts, para visitar los sitios de su cautiverio. No quedaba nada de los barracones del campo, pero sí estaban las minas. Y, sobre todo, ver la amplitud del horizonte, el gran espacio vacío de la estepa, fue fundamental para imaginarme un escenario. Además, disponía, naturalmente, de los apuntes de las largas conversaciones con Pastior, que era de un detallismo tremendo. Se acordaba de todo, y, por cierto, disponía de una mente y de un lenguaje para transmitirlo. Solo un intelectual es capaz de analizar y poner en palabras vivencias tan extremas. A otra persona, que no dispone del instrumento mental y verbal adecuado, simplemente le supera. Oskar Pastior era poeta y había creado un lenguaje para su experiencia. El "ángel del hambre", esa especie de monstruo de la inanición que en la novela acompaña a los deportados a todas partes, es de él. También la "pala del corazón", que directamente es una pala con una hoja en forma de corazón. Me dio tantas metáforas que, sin embargo, corresponden a realidades que derivan exactamente de lo vivido. Hay que añadir que Oskar Pastior mantenía una relación de amor-odio con sus recuerdos. Le perseguían día y noche. Él decía que preferiría no tener que acordarse. De ahí que era capaz de describir meticulosamente los objetos, la gente, los distintos trabajos. En el campo, para sobrevivir mentalmente, había llegado a identificarse con los trabajos que le tocaban, y lo mismo con los materiales. Te hablaba de los distintos tipos de carbón, de arena o de cemento como de un amante. La frase sarcástica del protagonista sobre su jornada en la mina, "Cada turno una obra de arte", es literalmente de él.

P. Entiendo. Como forma de salir de la pasividad del sufrimiento se apropió de esta realidad insoportable. Leo Auberg, en la novela, lo consigue con su imaginación y su lenguaje dadaísta. En su ensayo

De cómo se inventa la percepción, habla usted, ya en 1991, de este fenómeno: el ser humano inventa una percepción propia porque "lo que vemos sobrepasa nuestros limites".

R. Sí, creo que la literatura hace esto, acoge ese tipo de invenciones.

P. ¿De qué manera influye su experiencia personal del totalitarismo en su invención de la percepción? ¿Agudizó su mirada?

R. Yo creo que aquí hay dos temas: por un lado, los factores que llevan a una a la escritura y, por otro, lo que sería una conciencia política. Yo habría desarrollado una conciencia política crítica y resistente de todos modos en Rumania. Ya la tenía antes de empezar a escribir, a los 14 años.

P. En su primer libro,

En tierras bajas, nace la "rana alemana", que representa para la niña narradora el espíritu de control y denuncia dentro de la minoría alemana.

R. Sí, la rana alemana fue el primer dictador que conocí. Ya asomaba en la guardería y el colegio. Lo observaba todo ya en mi infancia, de un modo que entonces todavía permanecía abstracto, pero que luego se iba a concretar: el Estado totalitario, la omnipresencia del servicio secreto. Te enseñaba a inventarte no solo una percepción sino una apariencia con la que los podías engañar.

P. En otro ensayo dice que probablemente cada autor tenga solo una única frase propia. ¿Cuál sería la suya?

R. Esta frase, naturalmente, no existe, no puede existir en la práctica. Pero es una frase que una está escribiendo sin cesar, que hace que sigas escribiendo. Es una frase veraz. Una frase que demuestra su verdad por sí misma. Es este tipo de frases que una quiere escribir y que también busco como lectora. En ellas sucede algo contigo. Si después de 30 páginas en un libro no he encontrado una frase así, dejo de leerlo. A mi modo de ver, las frases verdaderas están siempre relacionadas con la experiencia de una perturbación, con una ofensa de la persona, con una herida profunda. Muchas veces estas ofensas tienen que ver con la guerra, con los lager, con los regímenes totalitarios. Piense en la literatura de Imre Kertész, en la de Jorge Semprún -siempre escribe únicamente sobre su experiencia en el campo de Buchenwald-; piense en Lobo Antunes, en Thomas Bernhard o en Aleksandar Tisma, el novelista serbio. Tisma dejó una obra tan fundamental para entender los totalitarismos y no recibió ningún Premio Nobel. Duele de verdad que un autor como Tisma se haya descubierto y galardonado tan tarde, solo por vivir en un país que le engañó por el reconocimiento merecido. De todos modos, escribir no es algo que se hace por diversión. Es más bien lo contrario y, sin embargo, la escritura no te suelta. Cuando finalmente llego a empezar a escribir, me dedico a ello tan obsesivamente que no consigo pensar en otra cosa, día y noche. Me absorbe todas mis fuerzas y cuando termino dejo de escribir por largo tiempo. Yo no soy capaz de escribir siempre.

P. ¿Es entonces, en estas pausas entre libro y libro, cuando trabaja en sus

poemas-collage?

R. Sí, representan una especie de pasatiempo relajante.

P. ¿Cree que el Nobel beneficia a su obra, al darle una difusión nueva o le perjudica, al reducir la maquinaria mediática sus contenidos complejos a tópicos simplificados y planos?

R. No, mire, yo puedo abstraerme por completo del Premio Nobel. No me siento con él a esta mesa. Naturalmente, significa un bonito reconocimiento, como los otros premios que he recibido. Y, por supuesto, estoy muy agradecida, puesto que para el resto de mi vida ya no necesito preocuparme de cómo llegar a final del mes. Porque esto en mi vida ha sido así a menudo. El premio ni es malo ni es bueno. Y yo, de hecho, gustosamente me olvidaría de él (risa burlona) si la gente no se empeñara en recordármelo constantemente.


El hombre es un gran faisán en el mundo / En Tierras bajas. Traducción de Juan José Solar. Siruela y Punto de Lectura. 140 y 191 páginas. Los pálidos señores con las tazas de moca. Traducción de José Luis Reina. Madrid, 2010. E.D.A. Libros. Benalmádena, 2010. 19,20 euros. 232 páginas.

The Art of Pain

FROM NYTIMES

ONE MORE THEORY ABOUT HAPPINESS
A Memoir
By Paul Guest
202 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $21.99


By CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA

“Almost I rushed from home to tell you this,” begins “Melancholia,” the opening poem in Paul Guest’s first collection, “The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World”:

that melancholia, the word, when broken
down to its roots, its ancient Greek particulars,
means black hole. How perfect. How yes,
I’ve been reading the dictionary again.

There are myriad self-deflating ironies spring-loaded into that seemingly innocuous adverb “almost,” given pride of place by the snarled syntax of Guest’s first line. The poet almost rushes, but does not, because he discovers in time his mistake: melancholia means not “black hole” but “black bile,” one of Hippocrates’ four humors. More profoundly, Guest can only ever almost rush, because he has been, since a freak childhood accident, a quadriplegic.

This blunt truth serves as a kind of grounding to most of the ­poems in “The Resurrection of the Body” and the three remarkable collections that have followed. But Guest is no confessionalist. He comes at his own catastrophe sidelong, alluding to it as another poet might to Stevens or Pound. “O hearts fat with custard, and sweet / forgive that I move at all,” he writes in one poem. Or, elsewhere: “I feel better that none of me / works well at all.” These ­poems — angry, funny, canny — do not depend for their meaning on the facts of their maker’s biography, but they are enriched by it.

Now, in his memoir, “One More Theory About Happiness,” Guest writes more directly than ever before about his paralysis. After a short prologue, the book begins with a recounting, harrowing in its matter-of-factness, of the accident that has shaped his life. Guest was 12 years old, attending a sixth-grade graduation party at a teacher’s house, when he and another boy set off on a pair of borrowed bicycles. As he lost control of his bike, Guest squeezed the hand brake and discovered it broken:

“I was resigned to the inevitability of crashing, and in those few seconds I had before the bike would be dangerously fast I decided it was better to crash on grass than to land on the asphalt. . . . What I did not know, what I could not see, would be what changed the rest of my life. At the bottom of the slope, a drainage ditch ran beside the road, overgrown with weeds and thick tussocks of grass. I hit the ditch still traveling at speed. I was thrown from the bike, over the handlebars, catapulted, tossed like a human lawn dart into the earth.”

Guest had broken the third and fourth vertebrae of his neck. “There is no real way to describe what this felt like, or did not feel like,” he writes about the first moments after landing on the ground, “the sudden, violent abstraction of the body, the brain left to believe all has vanished in a terrible, surgical instant.” Eventually, Guest is taken from his hometown, Chattanooga, to a center in Atlanta that specializes in spinal injuries. There follow several surgeries and months of physical therapy, which leave Guest with some muscle control over his legs, though not nearly enough to stand or walk. Then he is sent home, to live the rest of his life, which is the real story of this book.

Among that story’s highlights are portraits of the various aides hired to help Guest through his days. Sharon, provided by his school to take his notes in class, appears to be dyslexic, forcing Guest to spell out each of his teachers’ words as she takes dictation. The woman’s replacement quits abruptly after announcing that she has fallen in love with her teenage charge. Most memorable is Tony, a muscular Romanian who takes care of Guest during his years of graduate school, where he lives on his own for the first time. Instead of standing Guest up to transfer him from wheelchair to bed, Tony lifts him “like a professional wrestler,” first calling out, “Are you ready to fly?” and “Come to mama!”

For those familiar with Guest’s poetry, his memoir is most engaging as a coming-of-talent story. “The first poem I ever wrote came to me like an accident of the mind,” he writes, and that charged word “accident” recalls the wry fatalism of his best work. Sitting bored in class, Guest is visited by “the propulsive patterns of a poem.” He finds a typewriter in the school’s library and uses his mouth stick to put down the words that have come to him. “There was no doubt, none, that I had stumbled on to something essential about myself, who I was and who I might become, and all around me the future seemed to crackle like a storm.”

Eventually, Guest describes the writing of “Melancholia,” which he claims as his first mature work. He recounts his false etymological discovery and his initial disappointment at realizing his mistake. But then he saw, he says, how his very error might become the real subject of the poem. “This was different, better, truer than all the poems I’d written before,” Guest explains. “Looking at the screen, rereading the lines, I felt changed.”

This is just how the reader feels upon discovering Guest’s work, which cannot redeem his brokenness or ours, but makes something beautiful of it. And that is enough, almost.


Christopher R. Beha is an editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of “The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else.”

MEN ON HORSEBACK

FROM NYTIMES.COM

THE LAST STAND
Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
By Nathaniel Philbrick
Illustrated. 459 pages. Doubleday. $28.95.

EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON
Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe In American History
By S. C. Gwynne
Illustrated. 371 pp. Scribner. $27.50.

Why does Custer persist? Nearly 134 years after his last stand, a military debacle that cost the lives of all 210 men under his immediate command, George Armstrong Custer remains such an iconic figure in the American pageant that mere mention of his name evokes an entirely overromanticized era in the American West. By all rights he should be a footnote. That he enjoys the glory of single-name recognition is a testament to the power of personality, show business and savvy public relations. Custer wasn’t just an Indian fighter. He was one of the first self-made American celebrities.

In “The Last Stand,” Nathaniel Phil­brick, the author of the popular histories “Mayflower” and “In the Heart of the Sea,” offers an account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Maj. Marcus Reno and others who fought that day. But really, Custer steals the show.

How could he not? The man was a spectacular piece of work. Ambitious and charismatic, he graduated last in his West Point class but first in socializing. During the Civil War, he emerged as one of the best cavalry officers in the Union Army. His gallant Gettysburg charge (“Come on, you Wolverines!” he shouted to his Michigan volunteers) helped change the course of the battle that turned the tide of the war.

Even as a young officer Custer cultivated a flamboyant public persona. He fought at Gettysburg in a black velvet uniform (of his own design) embroidered with gaudy gold lace coils. After the war, when he turned his energies to fighting Indians on the Great Plains, he outfitted himself in fringed white buckskin and wore his hair long.

He was a gambler, a probable adulterer, a braggart, a petulant boss and an impulsive blabbermouth. His eccentricity tilted toward stupidity. He once divided up his regiment according to color. Horse color. As you might expect, he wasn’t especially beloved by the troops. “I had known General Custer . . . for a long time,” one of his officers once testified, “and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier.”

What he did have was boldness and fortune on his side, up to a point. A force of fate that he himself called “Custer luck” propelled him up the ranks, and his risk-taking strategies secured an important victory over the Cheyenne in 1868. Custer imagined the 1876 campaign against Sitting Bull’s Lakota Sioux as the capstone to his brilliant military career. If all went well he hoped to ride back East as the hero Indian fighter in time for the nation’s July 4, 1876, centennial celebration and a scheduled lecture tour. Custer, then 36, entertained serious notions of running for president one day. Given his personal charisma and genius for publicity, he might well have won.

All did not go well, of course. The Lakota conflict began with an old-fashioned land grab inflamed by Custer himself. The Black Hills in present-day South Dakota were declared Indian land in the late 1860s, but white settlers began encroaching by the early 1870s. Custer, sent to investigate, instead escalated things by discovering gold in the Black Hills. News of his find flooded the region with 15,000 white prospectors. At this point, “Custer luck” starts to look more like “Clouseau luck,” and it’s hard not to imagine the commander in chief, President Ulysses S. Grant, going all eye-twitchy like Herbert Lom in the old Pink Panther movies.

Grant tried to defuse the situation by offering to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota, but Sitting Bull wouldn’t sell. Faced with a choice between the Indians or the miners, Grant chose to drive off the Indians. And — cue the eye twitch — he sent Custer to help carry out the job.

Many books have been written about battlefield strategy at Little Big Horn, a grassland of shallow folding ravines in southeastern Montana, but it boils down to this: Custer was overwhelmingly outnumbered and chose recklessness over prudence. The paradox is that moments before the first shot was fired, Sitting Bull was ready to make peace. He and his followers escaped into Canada a few months after the battle, and ultimately returned to live on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota.

Custer’s defeat shocked the nation, and there was little doubt even in 1876 that Little Big Horn represented an ignoble moment in American military history. So how did a monumental disaster turn into a courageous “last stand”?

Philbrick’s answer: A widow’s spin and show business. After her husband’s death, Elizabeth Custer, known as Libbie, embarked on a one-woman crusade to rehabilitate her beloved’s reputation through books and speaking engagements. Buffalo Bill Cody took the myth nationwide by ending his wildly popular Wild West Show with a Little Big Horn re-enactment and a call to avenge Custer’s glorious death. But really there was nothing to avenge but the poor judgment of a dangerously ambitious officer. The Battle of the Little Bighorn — the military engagement — was a foolish and entirely avoidable defeat. Custer’s last stand — the myth — was simply good show business.

If Custer illustrates how the spotlight of history sometimes shines on the wrong actor, Quanah Parker exemplifies the more deserving who get left in the shadows. One hopes a better fate awaits “Empire of the Summer Moon,” S. C. ­Gwynne’s transcendent history of Parker and the Comanche nation he led in the mid- to late 1800s.

Born the son of an Indian warrior and his white wife (who had been captured at the age of 9 during a raid on a Texas ranch), Parker grew up to become the last and greatest chief of the Comanche, the tribe that ruled the Great Plains for most of the 19th century. That’s his one-sentence biography. The deeper, richer story that unfolds in “Empire of the Summer Moon” is nothing short of a revelation. Gwynne, a former editor at Time and Texas Monthly, doesn’t merely retell the story of Parker’s life. He pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence, political intrigue, bravery, anguish, corruption, love, knives, rifles and arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. This book will leave dust and blood on your jeans.

Gwynne opens with the May 1836 Comanche raid on the Parker homestead. The Parkers were a clan of Illinois pioneers working 16,100 acres near present-day Dallas. In 1836 they represented the leading edge of white westward expansion into Comanche territory, which the tribe didn’t like one bit. They expressed their displeasure by killing the Parker men (though a few escaped) and taking two women and three children captive.

The term “Indian raid” glosses over the atrocities. Men and babies were killed as a matter of course. Mutilation, rape and torture were common. The lucky died quickly. “This was the actual, and often quite grim, reality of the frontier,” Gwynne writes. “This treatment was not reserved for whites or Mexicans; it was practiced just as energetically on rival Indian tribes.”

The Comanche weren’t merely one of many tribes steamrolled by Manifest Destiny. They were a Native American superpower, a thesis put forth in Pekka Hamalainen’s Bancroft Prize-winning study, “The Comanche Empire,” oddly not cited here. Gwynne presents the Great Plains wars of the mid-19th century as the clash of three empires: the United States, Mexico and the Comanche nation, which controlled most of modern-day Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma.

“They held sway over some 20 different tribes who had been either conquered, driven off or reduced to vassal status,” Gwynne writes. “Such imperial dominance was no accident of geography. It was the product of over 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat against a series of enemies over a singular piece of land that contained the country’s largest buffalo herds.” At the height of their power in the late 1830s, the Comanche contemplated a full-scale invasion of Texas and Mexico.

Native American tribes weren’t — and still aren’t — static entities. They waxed, they waned. Some gained power and territory, others lost it. The rise of the Comanche was the kind of case study of timing and technology that Jared Diamond described in “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” They came from Wyoming; short, squat-legged, with little of the social or cultural development of neighboring tribes. Then everything changed. “What happened to the tribe between roughly 1625 and 1750 was one of the great social and military transformations in history,” Gwynne writes.

What happened was the horse. Spanish conquistadors introduced the animals to Mexico in the 16th century, and they quickly dispersed northward. The Comanche adapted to this transformative technology more quickly and completely than any other Plains tribe. “No one could outride them or outshoot them from the back of a horse,” Gwynne relates. The key was a Comanche warrior’s ability to attack and shoot arrows while at full gallop, a skill few others could master. On the Great Plains this was the equivalent of attacking from tanks, and the Comanche used their military advantage to become wealthy traders in horses and buffalo hides.

Which brings us back to the raid on the Parker ranch. The Comanche didn’t raid for sport. They had specific political and economic ends in mind. The political goal was to drive the white settlers (squatters and land thieves, from the tribe’s point of view) out of Comanche territory. To that end, death, terror and torture proved to be effective. By the 1860s the Comanche were actually rolling the frontier backward in Texas. The economics of raiding were equally straightforward. Young Cynthia Ann Parker was captured and not killed partly because the Comanche needed women to keep their buffalo economy humming. The men killed the bison, but the women, Gwynne writes, “did all the value-added work: preparing the hides and decorating the robes.” The more captives and wives — as with Cynthia Parker, the former sometimes became the latter — the more product a man could produce.

Parker had a son named Quanah. Quanah grew up quickly. When he was 12, his father was killed in battle and his mother was captured by white troops. (They saw it as a rescue, but Parker was forever trying to escape back to the Comanche.) A vengeful Quanah began raiding white settlements. He was good at it, too. But skill in battle wasn’t his problem. Timing was. He happened to rise as a leader just as the whites acquired their own transformative technology: the railroad and the repeating firearm. The railroad could cheaply transport valuable buffalo hides to Eastern markets, which made it profitable for men like Buffalo Bill to massacre the great herds. Between 1868 and 1881, 31 million buffalo were slaughtered, destroying the source of Comanche wealth and food. Meanwhile, the nimble Colt revolver and the powerful Sharps .50-caliber rifle countered the Comanche’s once-superior weaponry. The empire crumbled.

Quanah Parker’s second act was, if anything, more remarkable than his first. Resigned to reservation life, he transformed himself from a death-dealing warrior to a prosperous cattleman and a hard-bargaining politician who earned the respect and friendship of Teddy Roosevelt. He played a leading role in establishing the Native American Church and its practice of peyotism, the use of hallucinogenic peyote cactus in religious ritual. “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus,” Parker once said, “but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus.” In a 370-page biography, Gwynne devotes but a single paragraph to Parker and peyote. There are simply too many other good stories to tell.

We may never shake Custer’s place in the American story. He’s just too colorful a character, and “The Last Stand” will introduce him to a generation too young to have encountered him in Evan S. Connell’s classic biography, “Son of the Morning Star,” or the movie “Little Big Man.” But thanks to Gwynne, the story of Quanah Parker may assume a more fittingly prominent role in the history of the American West. “Empire of the Summer Moon” isn’t just a biography. It’s a forceful argument about the place of Native American tribes in geopolitical history. The word “nation” is sometimes used today to refer to a specific tribe, and it can be confusing to non-Indians. Does it mean a belonging, like Red Sox nation? Or state power, like Germany? The Comanche of the 1800s were truly a nation more like Germany. And you crossed them at your peril.

Bruce Barcott, author of “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw,” is writing a book about the battle over salmon and Indian treaties in the Pacific Northwest.