MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Mondadori ha publicado un nuevo libro de crítica literaria del que, sin duda, es uno de los más lúcidos lectores contemporáneos, además de un escritor excepcional: J.M. Coetzee. El libro se titula Mecanismos internos y en "El Cultural" comentan algunos de sus hallazgos:

Mecanismos internos es un prodigio de la crítica literaria, que completa Costas extrañas (Debate, 2004). Disponemos por fin de las piezas compuestas entre 2000 y 2005. En total, quince años de trabajo ensayístico que refleja el doloroso tránsito de la cultura europea por el siglo XX, sin ignorar los conflictos de la sociedad norteamericana y la crispada Suráfrica. Al internarse en The Misfits (1961), la notable película de John Huston basada en un guión de Arthur Miller, Coetzee se acerca a la atormentada intimidad de Marilyn Monroe. El personaje de Roslyn es el espacio concebido por Huston y Miller para que la actriz "pueda expresarse a sí misma", criatura rota e inadaptada que alcanza su cénit dramático en la escena donde baila alrededor de un árbol entre nubes de Nembutal. Robert Walser es otra de esas vidas malogradas que, según Coetzee, sólo adquieren grandeza en su propio fracaso existencial. Paul Celan pertenece al mismo linaje, un poeta que tal vez exige demasiado al lector porque soporta una carga excesiva como hombre. Bruno Schulz también sucumbiría en el largo pogromo de una Europa antisemita, pero sobrevivirán sus enigmáticos dibujos y sus cuentos, que expresan el paradójico destino del pueblo judío, abocado a una marginalidad esencial, donde la cultura europea ha constituido su identidad. Lo entendió perfectamente Walter Benjamin en el inacabado Libro de los Pasajes, donde el fragmento se muestra más esclarecedor que la obra finalizada. Hay un hilo invisible entre Tierras de poniente y Mecanismos internos: la voluntad de entregar la palabra al sufrimiento. Toda la obra de Coetzee responde a este imperativo, un absoluto moral que permite hablar a los que no son nada, a los que murieron en el olvido y ahora levantan la voz para recordarnos que existieron.

Etiquetas: coetzee, mondadori, NOTICIA, sudafrica, walser

Ahora que Gustavo Faverón está proponiendo hacer un Club de Lectura en su blog, le recomiendo que eche una mirada al club de lectura de la revista virtual de literatura Words without Borders que está dedicado en el mes de junio a la novela de Robert Walser, The Assistant.

Por cierto, en el ejemplar de junio de la revista aparece una serie de textos que tienen como leit motiv la gastronomía de sus países. Se titula The Global Gourmet y trae textos de al-Shirbini, Gabriella Ghermandi, Ronald Giphart, Darra Goldstein, Liliana Heker, Robert Menasse, Paula Parisot, Guillermo Saavedra y Yuan Qiongqiong. Y también tiene el resumen de un programa de TV literario dedicado a los premios Nobel, que esa vez tuvo como protagonista a la obra del extraordinario Joseph Brodsky, y entre sus invitados al crítico William Wadsworth, a Susan Sontag y al también Nóbel Derek Walcott. Se titula "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Joseph Brodsky" Aquí les dejo lo que cuentan cada uno de ellos sobre cómo conocieron a Brodsky cuando llegó exiliado a EEUU:

Susan Sontag (first met Brodsky in January 1976 throughh their mutual publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux): I think people were very open to Joseph. First of all, he made a stunning impression. He was so authoritative personally. That would register here as supreme confidence; and people are—I want to say in America, because I think it’s more so than in New York—Americans are rather disposed to admire, if they are given grounds to do so, unlike the English, whom I find quite spiteful and malicious. If [the English] see that somebody who is presented to them is very important, their first impulse is to try to cut that person down, undermine that person quite maliciously. It’s absolutely the opposite here. If people are given grounds to admire, they like to do so. I think Joseph was admired from the start. There was of course also a small body of readers and alert people for whom his reputation preceded him. The transcript of his trial with those wonderfully quotable sentences was printed in New York magazine. I remember reading it myself and cutting it out. It was . . . the first time I ever heard of Joseph. He made a great impression here from the beginning. People were very open to his self-confident, peremptory manner.

William Wadsworth: I met Joseph in the fall of 1984 when I was a graduate student at Columbia University and attended his seminar. He was unlike any other professor or teacher of poetry I had had, and I think everyone in the class recognized that he was remarkably different from the other teachers, most of whom were poets themselves. Joseph projected a kind of mental energy and a kind of rigorousness that was not common. He challenged the students in ways that they were not used to being challenged, and he treated poetry as a more serious endeavor than most American students ever dreamed it could be. Some students reacted strongly against his attitude, while others, like myself, thought he was the most stimulating embodiment of poetry they had ever encountered.
Joseph was tremendously charismatic, but he also came across in many ways as an absolutist, and was frequently given to outrageous statements, even insults. If you couldn't roll with the punches, if you disagreed with him and your skin was thin, Joseph's manner could seem overbearing. When asked by a student about the repression of leftists in Central America and whether this wasn't comparable to Soviet repression in Eastern Europe (this was in the 1980s when the violence in El Salvador and Nicaragua was at its height), Joseph dismissed the question with one sentence: “I don't give a damn about that part of the world.” On the other hand, one could see Joseph's tendency to be outrageous as evidence of his uncompromising honesty, as a necessary expression of his iconoclasm, his refusal to bow to any shibboleth. He had a terrific sense of humor: irreverent, sardonic, self-mocking. He was expert at seeing through the emperor's new clothes. One day at Columbia he charged into the classroom, cup of coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other, puffing like a locomotive, and said, “You won't believe what happened to me last night . . . I met a god.” He proceeded to recount the story of having attended a reception the previous evening for the Dalai Lama, and made the observation that the most remarkable thing about the “god"'s appearance was the vaccination mark on his arm. Nevertheless, it turned out that Joseph and the god got along well, and at the end of the event, the god gave Joseph a special farewell. As Joseph put it, “And would you believe it, at the end he came over to me—my humble self!—and embraced me.” A particularly worshipful female student exclaimed, “Joseph, it must have been your aura!” Without missing a beat, Joseph responded, “No, I think it was my tie. You see, my tie was the same color as his robe.”

Derek Walcott: Joseph was somebody who lived poetry. He proclaimed it every time I met him. That's why I admired him. He didn't do the English or American thing, you know, of being shy and saying, “I am not really a poet” or, “I don’t like to be called a poet”—any of that nonsense. He was very proud of being called that. He was Brodsky. He was the best example I know of someone who proclaimed that he was a poet; that's what he did. He was industrious and you can't separate the industry of Joseph Brodsky from Joseph Brodsky. I think there's a kind of attitude in biographies, literary biographies, that can say, “Well, you know, W.H. Auden was this, he was a homosexual but he was also . . . ” whatever. So that there are two lives, a literary life and a personal life. Joseph didn't make a distinction between his calling and his life . . .
He saw being a poet as being a sacred calling. I share that view. He never exploited his Jewishness. He never played the victim. He detested people who played the victim and whoever wrote as a victim. I think he thought that was too easy. A clear description of Brodsky is of someone who has an almost medieval devotion to his craft and everything that goes with that, in terms of architecture of the craft, the design of the craft. A lot of the poems are designed like cathedral interiors, the font, the arches, the whole thing the whole concept of the poem as cathedral. That devotion is to poetry as the hermetic craft and it's what you'd find in Donne too. And what he kept going was the concept of perception as a part of intellect, not merely an emotional reaction.

Etiquetas: brodsky, eeuu, liliana heker, NOTICIA, rusia, walser

Ahora mismo voy por la mitad de la novela de Martín Kohan. Más que a La ciudad y los perros, el tono me recuerda a Jakob Von Gunten de Robert Walser, que también sucede en un claustro. En el Radar Libros de "Página12" entrevistan a Kohan y de ahí extraigo una pregunta. Más preguntas en esta dirección.

Antes de ponerte a escribir, ¿te ocupaste de investigar cómo se modificó durante la dictadura el régimen disciplinario en las escuelas?

—No. Yo no investigo nunca. Y una cosa que no dejo de preguntarme es por qué no encuentro la motivación para hacerlo. Cuando yo estaba escribiendo Los cautivos, la novela sobre Echeverría, sabía que la casa en la que él se había refugiado en la Estancia Los Talas se conservaba, e incluso que podía visitársela, porque me lo habían dicho. Pero no fui a Los Talas y no vi la casa hasta después de haber terminado la novela. Y eso quizá tiene que ver con que aunque yo trabaje con personajes reales, como Echeverría o San Martín, o con la pelea Firpo-Dempsey, que fue un episodio real, para mí el hecho de no investigar es un requerimiento para concentrarme en las capas de significación que reposan sobre ellos. Nunca me interesan como hechos reales o personajes reales, sino en la medida en que empiezan a emanar algún sentido. A mí me importa mucho qué significa que Firpo haya tirado a Dempsey del cuadrilátero, y que después haya perdido la pelea, porque para mí ahí hay algo del orden de la argentinidad. Y ahí es donde reside mi principal motivación literaria. Los datos concretos casi siempre son inventados o equivocados en mis textos, y no me preocupa que así sea, siempre y cuando capte bien una significación o la sensibilidad de un mito. Me interesaba captar la verdad de que el Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires se imagine a sí mismo como un concentrado de la Argentina. Una patria en miniatura.

Etiquetas: argentina, ciencias morales, kohan, NOTICIA, premio herralde, walser