There is a mysterious link between the novel and the city, a relationship that does not exist in the case of theatre and poetry. Unlike these genres, which flourish in all cultures and in rural civilisations before the rise of the city, the novel is an urban plant which seemingly can only germinate and propagate in streets and neighbourhoods, in commerce and in offices, among the crowded, variegated, diverse throng of the city. Lukács and Goldmann attribute this link to the bourgeoisie, the social class in which the novel had found not only its natural audience, but also its source of inspiration, its primary resource, its mythology and its values: for is not the bourgeois century the century, par excellence, of the novel? However, this class-based interpretation of the genre does not take into account the illustrious precursors we find in medieval and Renaissance fiction — the romances of chivalry, the pastoral novel, the picaresque novel — where the genre has a popular audience (the illiterate ‘common people’ listened, spellbound, to the deeds of the likes of Amadis and Palmerín which were narrated in the markets and squares), as well as, in some instances, a courtly and aristocratic audience. The novel is urban in a comprehensive, totalising, sense: it embraces and expresses equally all the classes that together comprise urban society. The key word here is perhaps ‘society’. However solitary and introverted they might be, characters in novels always need the backcloth of society in order to be believable and persuasive; if this multiple presence is not insinuated and does not operate in some way in the novel, then it becomes abstract and unreal (which is not the same as ‘fantastic’: the nightmares imagined by Kafka, even though they have few characters, are always firmly rooted in the social world). And there is nothing that symbolises the idea of society better than the city, the space of many people, a shared world, a gregarious reality by definition. That this should be the chosen ground of the novel is thus coherent with the novel’s main aim, which is to simulate the life of the individual in a social context.
The city of Danzig in The Tin Drum has the immaterial consistency of dreams and, at times, the solidity of an artefact or of geography; it is a mobile entity whose past is embedded in the present, a hybrid and a fantasy, whose borders are uncertain and figurative. It is a city through which different races, languages and nations have passed or where they have coexisted, leaving rough deposits; which has changed flags and colonists in step with the raging wars of our age. A city which, by the time the narrator begins to remember his story, bears little relation to these memories: it was formerly German and called Danzig and is now Polish and called Gdansk; it was old and its ancient stones bore witness to its long history; now, reconstructed out of its devastation, it seems to have disowned the past. The setting for the novel, in its imprecision and its constant changes, could not be more fictional. One might see it as a work of pure imagination and not something capriciously sculpted by a history that has lost its bearings.
Straddling reality and fantasy, the city of Danzig in the novel pulses with buried tenderness and is shrouded in melancholy like a light winter mist. This perhaps is the secret of its charm. Describing its streets and its port full of inhospitable docks and large barges, its operatic Municipal Theatre or its Marine Museum — where Heriberto Truczinski dies trying to make love to a figurehead — Oskar Matzerath’s ironic and belligerent tone melts like ice before a flame, and he speaks with delicacy and nostalgic empathy. His nuanced, lingering descriptions of places and things make the city human and give it, in certain episodes, a theatrical life of its own. At the same time it is pure poetry: a labyrinth of streets or ruined waste ground, or squalid, unconnected emotions that are part of the ebb and flow of memory, brought to life by the changing moods of the narrator. Flexible and voluble, the city of the novel, like the central character and his adventures, is also an enchanted space, which, through the strength of language and delirium, illuminates the hidden face of real history.
Barranco, 28 September 1987
Deep Rivers
Fantasy and Magic
In 1958, José María Arguedas published Deep Rivers, his best novel. Although it was deeply rooted in personal experience — the journeys through the mountains with his father, who was a lawyer, the periods of solitude when his father was travelling, the time he spent at the religious Miguel Grau School in Abancay, his memories of the Indian communes in Viseca, where he lived happily after escaping from his stepmother’s house, and his memories of the large estates in Apurímac that he later visited — it is more than an autobiographical novel. It is a story so skilfully reworked that it has depersonalised the author’s memories and offers instead a sovereign narrative world, which is what the best fictions always achieve. The book is seductive because of its elegant style, its delicate sensibility and the range of emotions with which it recreates the world of the Andes. Although the novel includes the different social groups in the sierra, at its heart are the cruel and innocent ceremonies of puberty and the early steps that a boy must take into the adult world, which is made up of rigid hierarchies and imbued with violence and racism.
The protagonist of the novel is a boy torn between two hostile worlds. The child of white parents, brought up by Indians and then returned to the world of the whites, Ernesto the narrator is a misfit, a solitary figure and also someone in a privileged position to evoke the tragic opposition between these worlds. At the beginning of the novel, in the shadow of the stone walls in Cuzco where the Indian and the Spanish worlds meet in harsh alliance, as they do in Ernesto (and in José María Arguedas), the boy’s fate is sealed. He will not change, and throughout the story he is disturbed by the thousand and one forms of subtle or not so subtle conflict between two races and two cultures in the Andes. Subjectively identified with the Indians who brought him up and who, for him, represent a paradise lost, and yet far removed from them because of his social position that objectively places him among the whites in Abancay, whose views on the Indian population are anathema to him, the world around him poses an impossible dilemma for Ernesto. One has to live, of course, and since Ernesto cannot escape his predicament, he finds ways to make it bearable. He has two weapons at his disposaclass="underline" the first is to take refuge in an inner world, in fantasy. The second is a desperate desire to communicate with the world outside of men and women: with nature. For this pariah child, with no roots in society, always in exile, the world is not rational but essentially absurd. That is why he displays a fatalistic irrationality and idealises plants, objects and animals, attributing to them not just human but also divine properties: he makes them sacred.
Every magical-religious vision — like that of Ernesto — is irrational, not scientific, because it presupposes the existence of a secret order within the natural and human order, outside rational and intelligent understanding. Such a world can be very refined, but it will always be primitive if we accept the premise that the transition from the primitive and tribal world to the beginning of modern culture is based, precisely, on the advent of rationality.
In Deep Rivers, as in all of Arguedas’s work, there is a desire for a primitive, sociable world: the ‘tribe’ that Karl Popper talks about in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a collective not yet split up into individuals, magically immersed in nature, strongly united by a solidarity that stems from a shared faith in the same gods, in rituals and ceremonies practiced in common. This is contrasted to a caricature of the modern world in which individuals — like Ernesto in this novel — find themselves abandoned and alienated because they have lost the umbilical chord that binds them to society and are at the mercy of hostile forces that at every moment threaten to destroy them.