No offense intended, comrades — and, after all, if I had in fact traveled to Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, or Cuba in search of you, as I came to Spain in search of Cervantes, I would have found many of you not at home, whereas here in Spain I encounter Don Miguel or his characters again and again. I have sat at what is supposed to have been his writing-desk in Valladolid, and I have drunk deep from the little water fountain in his courtyard there. And I have, in fact, had the privilege of meeting and conversing with Jorge Luis Borges, José Donoso, Manuel Puig, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Nelida Piñon, for example — not on their home grounds, however, but on mine, as guests of my university or as fellow conferees at other U.S. universities.
AND HERE I shall digress for a moment from my expression of gratitud for all this literary plenitud in order to praise our Yanqui university system as an indispensable facilitator of cultural interaction. It was in our universities, after all, that the likes of Einstein and Spitzer and Salinas and Nabokov found supportive sanctuary, and that the likes of Borges and Donoso and Fuentes and Vargas Llosa found their most appreciative North American audiences (my daughter, for example, though not officially enrolled at Harvard University, was able to sit in for a whole semester on Carlos Fuentes’s lecture-course there called “Time and the Novel”—a course that I would gladly have attended myself). Moreover, whatever one might think of the peculiar Yankee phenomenon in the second half of this century of university programs in “creative writing” and the related phenomenon of novelists and poets as university professors — a phenomenon about which I myself have mixed feelings, although I have been one of its grateful beneficiaries — it cannot be doubted that two generations of apprentice writers in the United States have thereby been enabled and encouraged not only to read and study such writers as los Boomeros, but in many cases to hear and meet and speak and even work with them. My own apprentices at Johns Hopkins, for instance, were thus exposed and introduced to all of those writers whom I mentioned a moment ago — and one interesting consequence of this contact is that they sometimes asked our distinguished visitors questions that I myself would have considered undiplomatic, although I listened with interest to the replies. Thus for example during Jorge Luis Borges’s last visit to Johns Hopkins in 1984, we were all disappointed that the old fellow had been passed over once again for the Nobel Prize, but of course none of us mentioned that subject to him — until one of our students asked him publicly how he felt about being passed over once again for the Nobel Prize. While we blushed with embarrassment, Borges himself merely smiled as if happy to have been asked that question, and then replied, “Well, you know, I have been on their short list for so many years now that I suspect that they think that they’ve already given me the prize.” ¡Olé, Jorge! And why did Manuel Puig choose the epistolary form for his novel Heartbreak Tango? Because (so he mischievously declared to my students when one of them asked him that question) he had been working for so long as an airline ticket-clerk in New York City that he had lost confidence in his Spanish; in the epistolary mode, he reasoned, any mistakes in his spelling, grammar, or punctuation would be attributed to the fictional authors of the letters. ¡Bravo, Manuel!
Et cetera. And of course, like any young artists in any medium, these university apprentice writers must undoubtedly have sometimes found from their exposure to such eminent visitors and their works the sort of navigational assistance that I myself found in the works of Machado de Assis and Borges. Just recently, for example, I picked up a new novel by one of our distinguished alumnae from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars — a novel called The Antelope Wife, by Louise Erdrich5—and I read its marvelous opening passage, called “A Father’s Milk,” in which a U.S. cavalry troop in the 1880s slaughters a village of Ojibwa Indians (Ms. Erdrich herself is of half Ojibwa and half German ancestry). One of the soldiers, for reasons that he himself does not understand, deserts his company in mid-massacre, rescues an Indian baby girl, and flees with her into the wilderness. Unable to feed her or to silence her crying, in desperation he puts the infant to his own breast, which she suckles with fierce contentment but without nourishment — until, mirabile dictu, “half asleep one early morning [with] her beside him, he felt a slight warmth, then a rush in one side of his chest, a pleasurable burning. He thought it was an odd dream and fell asleep again only to wake to a huge burp from the baby, whose lips curled back. . in bliss, who. . looked, impossibly, well fed…. He put his hand to his chest and then tasted a thin blue drop of his own watery, appalling, God-given milk.” The renegade soldier believes that his breast-milk has come from God; my strong suspicion is that although North American Indian cultures have their own sorts of Magic Realism, this particular miraculous lactation came from Ms. Erdrich via Gabriel García Márquez, whose fiction she would certainly have been exposed to, and was perhaps nourished by, during her apprenticeship at Johns Hopkins.
I wonder whether that benign and nourishing leche de padre flows in both directions. Have any young Latin-American writers been inspired by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Grace Paley, John Hawkes, Philip Roth, or Toni Morrison? I don’t know. I do know that it pleased me a few years ago to hear Sr. García Márquez acknowledge Hemingway and Faulkner to have been “[his] masters,” and even more to hear him remark (in an interview in the Harvard Advocate6) that Faulkner “is really, you know, a Caribbean writer”—an observation that certainly gave me a fresh perspective on the sage of Oxford, Mississippi. Here is a conspicuous instance of a great writer “creating his own precursors,” as Borges said with respect to Franz Kafka: One reads Faulkner somewhat differently after reading Cien Años de Soledad. Even a few such seminal exchanges (excuse the expression: “seminal exchanges” comes more naturally to me than “father’s milk”) may suffice for cultural cross-fertilization. If there are traces of Faulkner in the literary DNA of Gabriel García Márquez, then no literary paternity suits should be filed by chauvinistic critics who see Magic Realism in Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich.
We are speaking here, after all, of admiration and inspiration, not of international trade balances. 20th-century Modernist and Postmodernist fiction owe much to Ireland, for example, for giving us James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; but Joyce’s and Beckett’s own navigation stars were from all over the literary firmament, and so it’s futile and pointless to try to calculate cultural trade deficits and surpluses — all the more so when we bear in mind my dictum that a writer’s navigation stars are not to be confused with his or her destination. 45 years ago, the brilliant novels of Joaquim Machado de Assis helped me to find my own first voice as a novelist. But much of what I borrowed from Machado to write The Floating Opera, Machado had borrowed in turn from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which I had not yet discovered for myself at that time, and which anyhow might not have had the impact on me that it did when reorchestrated by Machado’s Romantic pessimism. A dozen years later, Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones inspired me to imagine the possibilities of a Literature of Exhausted Possibility and what came later to be called Postmodernist fiction; but Borges’s own navigation stars were chiefly English, from Beowulf through G. K. Chesterton and Robert Louis Stevenson. Apollo be praised for such happy cross-cultural miscegenation!