I’ve spent the last few weeks working with fellow Buenos Aires resident Peter Robertson to produce the latest issue of The International Literary Quarterly. I think the highlight of this issue is an interview with Gao Xingjian, whose novel Soul Mountain
As I’m walking around Buenos Aires, thinking about the city’s history and my own writing, these words by Gao Xingjian stay with me:
… when artists die what is left behind, literature, is the history of human beings, is the interaction between the individual and the condition of history, that trace of history left behind, that is literature. It is the witness, it is the evidence of the individual’s interaction, connection, with history, and that is the trace, that is much more important and significant than the official discourse, the official history.
That is the meaning of literature, the meaning of the writer. That is, the writer, in spite of his or her insignificance, has left that trace that reflects the relationship between the individual and the condition of being alive. That trace itself is timeless, that is the meaning of literature. And that is far more important than the official history of political discourse. That is the real meaning of literature.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:43 am
I think these words will stay with me too.
“…the interaction between the individual and the condition of history, that trace of history left behind, that is literature.” …”That is, the writer, in spite of his or her insignificance, has left that trace that reflects the relationship between the individual and the condition of being alive.”
Perhaps I do not think about my own writing but about writers who left wonderful traces of the relationship mentioned by Gao Xingjian. I think about Roberto Arlt’s “Los siete locos” (The seven madmen) or “Los lanzallamas” (The Flame-Throwers), two books that reflect the interaction between the individual, the condition of being alive and the history as the present he lived in the twenties and the thirties and the anticipation of facts that would have occurred.
Finally, I think about Arlt’s “Aguafuertes porteñas” (Etchings from Buenos Aires), a mirror of normal life, of human characters and of Buenos Aires.
There are so many examples that we could write endlessly.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Hi Flavia,
Thanks for the comment. I agree with you about Arlt. More than most Argentine writers, he really seemed to have captured the essence of living in Buenos Aires during a certain period, especially “Aguafuertes porteñas.”
August 18th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Hi Jeff,
I thank you for the possibility you give me and other people to remember things we had apparently forgotten. Your writing is like Socratic maieutics.
I remember an interesting short story of the book “Final del juego” by Julio Cortázar: “Después del almuerzo”, an extremely beautiful walk around Buenos Aires, a poetic one, with a sort of mistery that Cortázar has always shaped with intelligence. An extraordinary example of interaction. The inner monologue and description of a child, himself, the literature, “the evidence of the individual’s interaction, connection, with history”.
August 18th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I recently read that novel and it has become one of my favorites. I love the way he talks about himself in second person.