Until now, the Latin American "literary explosion" of the 1960s still has a powerful charm, and generations of readers have admired the famous novels like discovering a new continent, feeling confused and at the same time gaining great pleasure in reading. Among this literary trend, the most recognized representative are the "four major generals": Cortázar, Márquez, Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes.
In fact, it was Fuentes who kicked off this "literary explosion" that attracted global attention. In 1958, he published "The Clearest Region", which attracted the world's attention, and only 4 years later, his masterpiece "The Death of Artemio Cross" was published, which has now become a landmark work of this literary trend along with "Hopscotch", "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "City and Dog". The style and content of these four novels are very different, but one thing is the same: none of them are easy to read. "Hopscotch" theoretically has countless "jumping" methods, which are easy to make people jump; the repetition of super-long names in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" makes people feel quite lonely, the structure of "The City and the Dog" is like a labyrinth, figuring out who is talking is a problem; "The Death of Artemio Cross" is the narrator's endless transition between me, you, and him, making people feel that the narrative temperature is cold and hot, like a roller coaster.
Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) was a Mexican national treasure writer and one of the most famous novelists and essayists in the Spanish-speaking world. He wrote more than sixty works during his lifetime, winning the Cervantes Prize and the Prince of Asturias Prize.
But if you get Fuentes' thickest work, Our Land, you'll get a new appreciation for latin American writers' narrative abilities, imaginations, and ambitions. The novel is 1,000 pages long. How can you write so much? The American postmodernist writer Baselm once asked Fuentes in person: "How did you do it in Latin America?" How did you write these tomes? Is there no paper shortage in Latin America? Fuentes replied: "We must fill four centuries of silence." We must let everything that history masks give voice. ”
Fuentes goes out of his way to stress the importance of history (and multiculturalism), saying, "Rediscovering all of our past is a twofold thing." On the one hand, it explains to us what we used to be. On the other hand, it also explains to us what we want to be, what we can or should be", so "I am specifically reminiscing about the past." This is my mission. I keep the Book of Destiny. Between life and death, the only fate is memory. ”
From left to right, Mario Vargas Llosa and his wife Patricia; Carlos Fuentes; Juan Carlos Onnetti; Emile Rodríguez Monegal and Pablo Neruda, 1966.
This article is from the B02-B03 of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's September 10th special feature "Carlos Fuentes I Am Specifically Reminiscing about the Past".
"Theme" B01 丨 Carlos Fuentes I am dedicated to recalling the past
Theme b02-B03 | Carlos Fuentes is the "least friendly" writer to readers
"Theme" B04 丨 "Our Land" "Living Past" hides the answer to the future
"Literature" B05 丨 "Party Phobia" The body's borderless party
"Literature" B07 丨 In the breeze of "Ariel"
"Literature" B08 丨 "Odysseybo" points directly to the inner dilemma of human beings and explores the mystery of existence
In 1988, the 1987 Cervantes Prize for Literature was held at the University of Alcalá in Spain, and the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, who was about to enter the year of the flower armor, received the highest prize in Spanish literature from the then King juan Carlos of Spain and gave a wonderful speech. At the end of his speech, Fuentes said that his passport would henceforth have a new imprint: "Profession: Writer, i.e. Cervantes's retinue." From a rhetorical point of view, the second half of the sentence has aesthetic overtones, and the first half is only a simple expression based on facts.
However, as Fuentes's paradoxical expression is, it is precisely the four words "occupation: writer" that are the most moving words. For Fuentes, the meaning of these words is not just a fact and an identity, but a brave choice made in a difficult situation, a declaration of his own way of existence in the world.
Writing literature as a "profession"
In Mexico, it was Fuentes who opened up an astonishing pattern of literary writing as a profession. Writers before him didn't make writing a career, they just wrote in their free time because writing wasn't enough to feed their families, and they needed a real job to survive.
In that era, writing was just a trivial pastime, for readers, and for many authors. Even a great writer like Alphonso Reyes could not break free from the shackles of reality, and he once advised Fuentes to study law, because lawyers would not starve to death, and writers were very likely. Fuentes heeded Reyes's advice and went to university to study law, but eventually chose to be a writer for a career, or more importantly, a career for a lifetime. As Fuentes' friend Elena Poniatovska (a Mexican writer who won the Cervantes Prize for Literature in 2013) said, it was Fuentes who earned his career as a writer, making him fascinating, interesting, and respected. He opened the door to literary writing for those who came after him, and no one would hesitate to be timid, because Fuentes was in the door, boldly setting an example of a professional writer.
Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012)
"I'm going to discover language." "Language?" "Yes, I will throw away my innocence, words will have me, words will keep me alive, I will live only for it, I will become its master." 」
Elena Poniatovska had heard fuentes say to herself at the age of eighteen, and although she did not understand the meaning of them at the time, they had been etched in her mind ever since. Fuentes was 22 years old at the time, and four years later his first collection of short stories, The Days of the Mask (1954), was published. Four years later, the first novel, The Clearest Region (1958), was born, when Fuentes was not yet 30 years old.
The Clearest Region, by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Xu Shaojun and Wang Xiaofang, Edition: Yilin Published in December 2012
If "The Day of the Mask" is the prelude to his sharpness, "The Clearest Region" is the hammer that pushed him to the cusp of the storm. As Fuentes himself put it, the response to the work was mixed. Fortunately, time has finally won the glory of this work. But from that moment on, Fuentes's writing set a tone that may not have been intentional: constantly uncomfortable for the reader. Kingsley Amis once said that if you write something that doesn't annoy people, I don't think writing makes much sense. Fuentes' writing strongly corroborates this statement on the opposite level.
A model of youthful ambition and early fame
When you have not fully emerged from "The Clearest Region", you have fallen into the "Fuentes Year": 1962. In that year, Fuentes published two novels that were crucial in his writing career, Aura and The Death of Artemio Cross. The latter established itself as a literary giant and is considered one of the works that opened up a new Spanish-American novel and promoted the "explosion" of Latin American literature. As soon as it was published, it was a great success, and the novel was quickly translated into more than 20 languages, which had an important and far-reaching impact on the Mexican literary scene and the Latin American literary circle at that time. The skillful and profound transition between the three persons and three tenses in The Death of Artemio Cross also gives the work a unique artistic character and aesthetic style.
Fuentes and Márquez
"Aura" became Fuentes's best-selling work, this work is only a few dozen pages, but in Fuentes's personal literary career and the history of Latin American literature has had a significant influence, the status is very important, very explanatory charm. Julio Ortega, a prominent scholar of Fuentes studies, commented: "It is rare for a narrative writer to publish two perfect narrative works in the same year, two masterpieces: The Death of Artemio Cross, published in 1962, and Aura, which are still read to this day as if they were published in the present." ”
The Death of Artemio Cross, by Carlos Fuentes, Translator: Yi Qian, Edition: 99 Readers| People's Literature Publishing House, August 2011
Both works appeared in the same year for no reason, and Fuentes himself said that "Aura" is a work about the life of death, and "The Death of Artemio Cross" is a work about the death of life. The perspective of the second person "you" in both works is both one's own and that of others, allowing people to easily travel through different times, even through death... It was a very active year for Fuentes, who met and established a long literary friendship with many writers such as Neruda, Jose Doloso, Mario Bennetti, and many others. "Maybe it was the most heyday of my life, when I loved, wrote, and struggled better...", this year, Fuentes was 34 years old.
Obviously, such a word as "late" definitely does not belong to Fuentes, on the contrary, he is a model of youthful ambition and early fame. It's like a double-edged sword that forever draws a dividing line in Fuentes' writing career, because the top always means insurmountable. Fuentes himself clearly disagreed with this, and all he cared about was the writing itself. For him, on the American continent, writing was an urgent task, not a pastime, not to pass the time, but to become deeply involved in the present and past, history and future expression of the land. It is in this way that he has given respect and generosity to every writer, whether senior, peer or junior, who has enriched the reality of the Americas because of his writing.
In 1955, when Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo was published, Fuentes was one of the first to congratulate and highly value its publication. In 1966, when he finished reading the first eighty pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, he immediately wrote a report announcing the birth of a masterpiece. The following year, when the work was officially published, he could not wait to write to Cortázar to share his excitement and joy. García Márquez said, "I don't think there's a writer who pays so much attention to their juniors, and no writer treats them so generously." For Fuentes, each of someone else's great novels is not just a personal triumph, but a relief: relieving him of the responsibility to write and allowing him to devote himself more to his own chapter.
The writer who makes the reader "unhappy"
In 1975, Fuentes's Our Land was published, which is the best example of how he has worked deeply in his chapters. The work, which took six years to write, is yet another testament to Fuentes' love of writing and his "unfriendliness" to his readers. Julio Ortega says that since the first novel was published, Fuentes has become the most attacked writer in his country.
The reason for this is only because he is the most unpleasant writer. Because whether it is the controversial "The Clearest Region" or the mixed praise of "Our Land", and the dozen or so works written by Fuentes in the 17 years between the two works, including both novels, essays and plays, it is clear that the "unpleasant" writer has used his writing again and again to reflect on the political, historical, realistic and cultural situation of the New World. He uses imagination and language to subvert popular literary creation and the traditional perception of novel writing, and he uses sharp critical brushstrokes to carry out his American expression.
Our Land is such a "thick" work that Fuentes' friends in Mexico joke that reading it requires a bonus. Arguably, this work is the writer's most ambitious writing, another creative peak after the death of Artemio Cross, which won fuentes multiple literary awards.
If "The Clearest Region" is a novel that opens up the writing of Mexican modernity, and "The Death of Artemio Cross" in a sense closes the Mexican revolutionary writing that began with Mariano Ezueira's "The People At the Bottom", innovating and subverting the writing tradition of the novel, then "Our Land" is a new attempt in an aesthetic sense: to create a Borges "Alef" on paper, in which life and death, sublime and despicable, sin and goodwill, loyalty and betrayal can be seen at the same time. Mutilation and perfection, madness and moderation, dreams and sleeplessness, self and the other, history and reality intertwined, myth and epic intertwined, utopia disillusionment, Baroque fullness, non-existent boundaries, everything is possible, everything is suspicious. Thus, it has been said that no novel, in Spanish literature, at least since Don Quixote, has been able to compete with reality and imagination as it did in Our Land.
In addition, in the nearly 1,000 pages of our land, readers will marvel at the abundance of intertext dialogue: with Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Alejo Carpentier's Footsteps gone, Lesama Lima's Paradise, Borges's work, and Juan Goitisolo's The Restoration of the Duke of Don Julian. However, it is particularly important and significant that this is a novel that pays homage to Cervantes, a don Quixote novel.
Since 1944, Fuentes has read Don Quixote every year, and the influence of this work on Fuentes's writing is self-evident. He believes that the birth of the modern world originated from the moment Don Quixote left home, and it was even from Don Quixote that a writing tradition was initiated: La Mancha's writing tradition. Fuentes considered himself the inheritor of such a writing tradition and prided himself on being a Cervantesian writer. It also has a reading "companion", an essay published the following year, Cervantes or The Criticism of Reading.
This pattern of reading "companions" seems to be unique in what sets Fuentes's writing apart. Readers familiar with Fuentes will find that Fuentes not only writes well novels, but also writes essays. One is the spread of imagination, the other is the tempering of ideas, the two often go hand in hand, so some scholars have found that the 1991 publication of "The Battle" can be read together with the "Brave New World" published the previous year, the novel "Skin Change" published in 1967 and the 1971 essay collection "Mexican Time" are exactly a pair, the 1975 novel "Our Land" and the 1976 essay "Cervantes or the Criticism of Reading" should be paired together, the 1993 novel "Orange Tree" And the 1992 essay "Deeply Buried Mirror" is a combination set, while the 1995 novel "Glass Border" and the 1994 "New Time in Mexico" are a perfect match.
Brave New World, by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Rui Zhang, edition: S Code Study| Writers Press, January 2021
Confidant of Milan Kundera
When Fuentes began writing Our Land in 1968, much changed in the international political landscape. In protest against the Soviet invasion of the Czech Republic, Fuentes went to Prague with his friends Julio Cortázar and García Márquez to support Czech independent writers and artists. In Prague, Milan Kundera received them. In a sense, Carlos Fuentes is the Milan Kundera of the Americas, and vice versa. Perhaps it was the same texture of their bodies that made them feel sorry for each other.
Márquez and Fuentes (right)
Milan Kundera said, "When I was a young writer in Prague, I hated the word 'generación', and its convulsive taste disgusted me. The first time I felt connected to other people was when I read Carlos Fuentes' Our Land in France. How is it possible that there is someone on another continent whose path and culture are very different from mine, but who is wrapped in the same aesthetic obsession, allowing different times to coexist in a novel? Until then I naively thought it was just my obsession." Fuentes said that Milan Kundera and I, perhaps because we belong to the same generation, we both believe that what he did in Europe was something that I could not do in Latin America, and what I did in Latin America was something that he could not achieve in Europe.
In 1984, Fuentes completed the writing of another important novel, The Old Yankee, which was published the following year, and the conception of this work dates back to 1948. The importance of this work, in addition to the value of the work itself, lies in the fact that from it, Fuentes's literary writing, or more precisely, the creation of novels, has opened another door and crossed a boundary. Although fuentes' childhood as to what kind of existence the United States was for Mexico is traceable, as a writer, the internalization of this consciousness into literary creation and expression in a conscious way means that Fuentes's ideological vision is a kind of advancement.
The Eagle's Throne, by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Deming Zhao, edition: S Code Study| Writers Published in August 2017
If the previous focus had been on the relationship between Europe and the Americas, specifically Spain and Spanish America, and Spain and Mexico were culturally and historically bound, then, from this moment on, in literary writing, Fuentes's gaze was divided in two, one to "distant relatives" and the other to "close neighbors". José Emilio Bacheco put it well, Fuentes' work "dialogue with Spain on one side and with the United States on the other." "Dialogue" forms the central word of Fuentes' writing. Dialogue means the flow of words, the exchange of ideas, the breaking of certain boundaries, the breaking of silence in discourse, history stirring up the present, imagination penetrating memories.
In three years, Fuentes would receive the Cervantes Prize for Literature, and for the next 25 years he would continue to work until the last moment of his life, not to mention that even death would not stop his writing, because his posthumous works were still published. Let us stop at this moment, no longer moving forward, but looking back, looking back at the moment of his birth.
"Return" to Mexico
In 1928, in a place called Panama City, Carlos Fuentes was born. After fuentes was born, he grew up in different cities around the world because of his father's status as a diplomat, from the city of Panama to Washington, D.C., to Buenos Aires in Argentina, and Santiago in Chile. For Fuentes, who lived until the age of 16, Mexico was a temporary home for holidays, a passport nationality, an identity that was embraced but not yet deeply understood. That moment came when he "discovered" Spanish and decided to write in Spanish. At the age of 16, Fuentes returned to Mexico completely, but this return only determined the starting and ending points for the next trip after trip. The journey is for return, the return is for the restart, birth is for death, and death is for rebirth.
Many years later, Fuentes wrote of his birth: "I was born on November 11, 1928, and the constellation I can choose should be Scorpio, which is also the date shared with Dostoevsky, Kromlink, and Vonnegut. On that day, my mother was rushed to the hospital while she was in a theater that was as hot as a sauna. A few days earlier, Colonel Buendia had led his son to discover the presence of ice in the tropics. My mother was working with John Gilbert, Liliana, and Solana. Gissey looks at Kim Vido's version of The Bohemian, and perhaps the pain of childbirth stems from this anomaly: a silent silver-screen version of Puccini's opera. Since then, opera and film have fought to the death with my language, as if expecting the novel's Scorpio constellation to rise from silent music and images of blindness. "Born in a foreign land. The scene before birth seems to indicate that the great literary hero who firmly attached the label of "Mexican writer" to himself will spend his life using writing to get out of his "return" path.
He saw in Alphonso Reyes that "being Mexican is a fact, not a quality." Writing is not about proving himself to be Mexican, because, for Fuentes, it is a natural fact, writing is only the completion of Ulysses's way home, the completion of a Don Quixote-style journey of "love and justice", the courage to restore the voice from the silence of history, the always cherished faith in the power of literature, the magic of telling that he has learned from Shanruzod and Boccaccio: to save us from death, because a story means to live one more day.
Fuentes was the most vocal writer for the Nobel Prize in Literature for many years, but in the end he failed to do so. It also added him to Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Muzier, Darrell, Henry Miller, Borges, Nabokov, Cortázar, John Updike, Graham Green, and so many writers who failed to win the prize but were more admired and read than many.
Fuentes died in Mexico City on May 15, 2012. But he also never died. Because the story continues, the story is still being heard.
Written by | Zhang Rui
The introduction was written by | Zhang Jin
Editor| He Ye
Proofreading | Xue Jingning