I continue with this kind of Leftist Literature coverage. I open again Damien Tabarovsky´s essay and find the following sentence by Wittgenstein (not the one that many quoted at every opportunity and against all logic-logic was Wittgenstein’s field- but another, which perfectly fits to these columns): How do I know what I’m talking about, how can I know what I mean?
I read:
“Not really knowing it ever, that might be good advice for novice writers. Much of the contemporary Argentine literature is so clear in what it narrates that sometimes it is more interesting to watch television. ”
Could we put Cuban instead of Argentine? I do not know: I think that we don’t even have on our side that defect, that clarity. (In any case, instead of TV we should put Weekly Package, which is like the new ration card). Tabarovsky continues:
“This literature is at the service of efficiency; assumes that language can be efficient, that must provide it its dramatic effects, its targets. It fails because it treats language as a kind of domestic servant, and loses sight that language is not the employee, but the employer and against the employer there is always a single out: class struggle. ”
It is an exhilarating and necessary perspective. Class struggle not as a theme -horror!! Are you sure? – for stories, but, first, as an attitude to the page. Telling you that being a writer does not mean to invoke supposed depths and learned skills: is to postulate some rabid fiber, mobilize certain resentment of displaced … A class consciousness.
What am I? Who am I? I am nothing. I’m nobody.
I read:
“In the last decade, the same values wanted by the society were also wished by Argentine literature: success, promotion, good manners, efficiency, short duration effect, the possibility that language to serve as communicative function.”
Few days ago I was talking with some friends about those same things: Efficiency, success, climbing. I mean, we were talking about money, good manners and cultural flavor that money gives. In recent years it has become a recurring motif, our unhealthy conversations always drift towards the same: how can we win in a bit of money? (Sometimes in which that desire becomes violent, we have reached another level of development: what can we do to someone in Spain or Miami to pay us a lot of money?)
Because money is always owned by others. Money always belongs to others. Money calls the money of others who already have money. And that is what we were talking about, I remember now, about those whose economies are increasingly prosperous and sustainable (I omit the names not to give rise to fiddles, although fiddle is perhaps the only thing we really have): how much did A pay for the house he bought, how much did B earn for a concert and C for taking you some pictures and make a video clip; how much did XY invest in his restaurant and how much did artist Z win for selling you a piece that at first sight seems that you could have done it with a little time, effort and a bit of imagination (but, what do you know? you’re not an artist).
And then a friend told me, as he has told me other times, with the same smile:
“We have the wrong profession.”
There is no other choice then than thinking it that way: literature as the wrong profession. We must accept it without reservations; vindicate it as militancy; making of the wrong writing-from its very origins: out of place, out of time, out of revolutions- a literary policy.
One of the books visited in the pages of Leftist Literature is a study entitled, significantly, ¨La nueva pobreza en Argentina¨ (The new poverty in Argentina). Its author, the sociologist Gabriel Kessler, collected there the metaphor of the fall as the central core of the story that the new poor people make of their situation: We’re going down, they say. We are falling. We fell. “The fall takes many forms, but there is one more terrible than all: the collapse,” Tabarovsky writes.
Keyword: When writing since the collapse, no one knows what can happen. And that not knowing, that state of crisis is an energy plus. The collapse may be today the only possible starting point in Cuban literature.
