IT'S A MAD, MAD WORLD…
On Locos: A Comedy of Gestures by Felipe Alfau by Bronwyn Mills Note: Locos is available through Amazon and Book Depository, the latter with worldwide delivery. Translated into Spanish in 1990, the Spanish translation can be ordered from Casa del Libros. In the 60's, when the world was mad in quite a different way than now, a classic film was born, starring some of the old, familiar names of classic comedy. A Mad, Mad World— What else could a commentary on contemporary life be, but—at the very least—a comedy? |
As to the "now," we seem to be hurtling towards an insanity of extremes. Enter Spain, once thought to be the most backward country in Western Europe but, I hasten to add, now a thoughtful member of the European community. It, too, had its extremes; and one of them—let's get it over with—was in the person of the pro-Fascist Felipe Alfau, an unsung writer with discomfitingly reprehensible views. A while ago, though just before the periodical received news of his passing in 1999—hence the discordant present tense--Barcelona Review's Jill Adams wrote of that city's native son,
Barcelona hasn’t gone out of its way to claim him…given that he is a self-proclaimed Franquista, who goes so
far as to claim that the devastation of Guernica during the civil war was sheer communist fabrication. He
supports the Machiavellian idea of tyranny over democracy, the only two options possible in the world. And
he is, god help us, an anti-Semite (a fact he denies, but those who know him claim is true) and not too keen on
blacks or Hispanics either. He is, at 97 anyway, a crusty old curmudgeon with hardly any appreciable views.
Still . . . there are those novels.
Alfau grew up in a small town in Guernica, but let me qualify that: he spent his first fourteen years there until the family moved to New York City in 1916. He quickly picked up English, penned his first novel, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, in English in 1928; then a collection of children's stories, Old Tales from Spain; a book of poetry in Spanish, La poesía cursí (Sentimental Songs); and finally another novel, Chromos. Locos was not published until 1936, and it went largely unsung. After Locos' rediscovery and republication by Dalkey Archive in 1988, in 1990 Dalkey also published Alfau's Chromos, written in the 40's. Be assured, however, that unlike Ezra Pound's toxic views so loudly expressed in that poet's work, Alfau did not similiarly subject readers to his crabbéd political and social ideas.
Then "…there are those novels…" Indeed. Work that sees the comic in life around its author, and by inference around us—if we just pay attention. Further, how could comedy not intrude when the author employs such devices as we see in that work? In particular, Adams claims that Locos anticipates the so-called modernist tropes of vagabond characters rebelling, and/or going in search of their authors. Yet, unknown to the publishing world, Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky, in Russia, was doing the same thing at around the same time. More than anything, one wonders what was in the world's drinking water during those decades. Yes, Alfau's work features unruly characters that run amok, trick the reader by showing up, uninvited, in another character's story—or skin—but, in his Locos, the book which I focus on, what interests me more than the literary category the work falls into, is the how of his characterization.
First, however, is the matter of language. Were Locos a book in translation, we might apply the criteria one falls back on when writing is literally being carried over from one idioma to another. As the mother tongue is rendered into another one, which we read, is the work good in the other language? ( I refer the reader to our first issue and interviews of Stanislas Lem translator, Michael Kandel, and poet and translator of Turkish poetry, Murat Nemet-Nejat.) Mind, Alfau wrote these books in English not Spanish. In that context, Adams' Barcelona Review article says some things about Alfau's language that are both important in terms of stimulating a dialog but which I find difficult to swallow:
…we have Alfau’s Iberian English, which shows itself occasionally in the hyper correct diction of the non-
native user ("Therefore the nickname El Telescopio with which our same authority on the typical had
baptized it."); the use of Latinate words ("isochronous steps," "craposanct exultation," "in a fit of vesania"
"brachistological fashion"); unusual and often jarring syntax (examples abound), all peppered with the
Spanish vernacular ("you don’t have to get so flamenco on me"), which is rich in bullfighting metaphor: ([the
character]…de los Rios belongs to that very castizo class of Spaniards who always neutralize the charge of
extremism with a philosophical veronica and whose lemma should be: to tame the enraged bull of
radicalism with the cool cape of tolerance." Taken as a whole it’s a most engaging and refreshing employment
of the English language. Enough to bewitch the reader in style alone.
I live in a Spanish-speaking context, albeit not in an Old World one; and I have not felt jarred by Alfau's English. The use of "with which," that Adams cites, is correct, only more formal. He very carefully plays with the boundaries between the two languages. Nor do I think he was translating Spanish thoughts into English, as many non-native speakers might. "Hyper-correct diction"? One must consider that a) Locos was written in the 1920s, nearly 100 years ago, and Chromos in the 40s, both times when writers just might have paid more attention to correct English; and b) while writing in a casual register with a pared-down vocabulary is the contemporary preference, frankly such writing often gets drearily repetitive. You read one; you've read them all. Relevant to Alfau's use of English, his second language, Adams acknowledged that his writing is his "style"—well, yes, let us allow a writer to have one. Not all English language writers need sound like Ernest Hemingway.
As to the Latinate words—hmmm. It takes skill to insert them into English, though it must be said that we already have quite a few of them: we who have imbibed English at our mother's breasts once spoke the language of the Roman Empire for a significant part of our collective, linguistic history, if only to "graduate" into speaking another Latin-infused (Romance) language, French, for a hundred years more. While I caution the tin-earred writer against the use of Latinate words, as it produces discordant music, with the bebop of the comedic, the writer need be wise and tune that ear to a more complex scale. I mean, who would not kill for such a wonderful neologism as "craposanct"? Holy s--t! Latin, my foot.
In short, while I appreciate that Adams, albeit several years back, is among the few who have discussed Alfau's work at all—I unrepentantly think her ideas are inaccurate. So pardon me while wander off the garden path for a moment: dear aspiring writer, know thy mother tongue! Cultivate your vocabulary; grow words and phrases as precious orchidaceae. To put that in slightly different terms, know your own language, don't just imitate it. And for the rare writer who would use a language that is not his or her own for poetry—don’t. (Even Alfau returned to his mother tongue as more emotionally grounded for his poetry.) Whereas for fiction? It may very well be possible; key is whether an author's English reads as "translation" or whether the fact that you are reading in translation goes unnoticed.
In short, what makes Alfau's Locos "Iberian" is almost never his English. Rather, his skill is showcased both by his comedic romp with the English language and his play with the Iberian ambiance. His Iberianidad shows in the fact that he situates the work in the bars and cafes of Toledo and Madrid, in Spain. He also includes Spanish words or phrases here and there. While context can usually tell you what those words or phrases mean, Alfau does not coddle the reader: if you don't know, then get off your nalgas and look it up! And, yes, the anglophone might miss a few nuances. C'est la vie.
One case in point, however, comes with the very first tale (this is a book of interlocked, intertwining, even
kudzu-like, entangling ones.) Alfau writes,
In this story I am fulfilling a promise to my poor friend Fulano
My friend Fulano was the least important of men and this was the great tragedy of his life.
If you do know Spanish, dear reader, you will catch some of the hidden irony in those wonderful few opening lines; for on one level, yes, Alfau is addressing a humble but ordinary man. The expression "Fulano y Fulano," one native speaking friend once told me is roughly equivalent to the English expression "[any old] Tom, Dick and Harry." A Chilean friend has corrected me, however—"Fulano y Fulana." Either way, Fulano is "so and so." Joe Schmoe. And thus Alfau's poor Fulano is doomed from the start, a living double entendre embodying a sense of humor that for this reader makes Alfau's work, if you will pardon the expression, so Spanish.
Although Alfau enjoins the reader to read Locos' stories (chapters?) in any order they might please, as Cortázar later encouraged his readers to do, I am an inveterate beginner-at-the-beginning-and-proceed. At that, I wonder if the author really means his readers to be so free, for there is a certain logic that structures the unfolding of the novel. Alfau begins Locos with a writer's lament. I can't get my characters to behave. They want to be real, then duck back into fiction when the going gets rough, get confused… In the same decade the Russian writer, Krzhizhanovsky, whom I mentioned earlier, noted that his characters were, of course, real: they were based on real people; but they, too, got out of control for the same reason as Alfau's.* In the Americas,
we tend to think of this sort of writing as a subset of Latin American literature, one that plays with the boundary between the real and the imaginary so that you are never quite sure what world your mind has been carried off to. Clearly, this kind of work is not limited to Latin American writing; and it was a sad day when someone dubbed it "magical realism." Sentimentality overtook so many of the New World versions—or at least North American imitations sentimentalized the writing in their superficial attempts to mimic it. Here, in a Spanish-American's novel, it is the characters who dance down that primrose path of the real and unreal; but, if there is one thing Alfau's work is, it is not sentimental. His characters are unapologetically demi-monde—hookers, cheats, thieves, even a murderer with a penchant for bumping off this wives, Bluebeard-like; a most confused medical doctor who may or may not be a quack; and, perhaps gravest of all, a niave writer/narrator who occasionally shows up amidst these flamboyant low-lifes. They lead confused, often harsh, lives.
After introducing his cast of characters, describing them and continuing to rue their failure to behave, Alfau launches his tales, beginning with "Identity," which features the aforementioned Fulano. Now, Alfau seems to thrive, as a writer, on the impossible, the implausible, and the inconsistent; but, one cannot construct a story without establishing a few premises, fictionally speaking. If your work is going to stretch the bounds of the ordinary, as his does, your Fulano—as a socially real, terminally average character—has got to go; were he to stay, he might be briefly disguised as ordinary, but could not remain so for any appreciable length of time. Alfau solves this problem quite imaginatively, letting us know we are in for a ride: if you are setting up shop on that frontier (reality, unreality, where am I?) there is no room for the clumsy mirroring of either the old Soviet-style realism or, as transmogrified now, the dreary chronicles of the U.S. bourgoisie.
In "Fingerprints," Alfau reinvents the discoverer of fingerprints as phenomenon that identify: the author's discoverer is one Don Esteban Bejarano y Ulloa, though he has passed on. Don Estaben's son, Don Gil Bejarano y Roca proudly sustains and enlarges upon his father's tradition; and while we have just read of "identity" as a noun, in this tale it is a verb.* Already appearing as a junk dealer in Alfau's introductory account of Fulano, in "Fingerprints, Don Gil activates the substantive in an abstractly Frankenstein-esque way. Identity comes alive as energy, activity. Simultaneously, we sense an eau de noir about the chapter and, in fact, the entire book, again emphasizing its anti-sentiment: an innocent character takes the rap for a crime he did not committ, impossibly "proven" with prints he could not have made. Surprise, surprise, it is Don Gil; and he is sentenced, no reprieve, though it is hardly the last we see of him.
I will not go further than the subsequent "The Wallet," so as not to spoil a delicious read. However, the heart of Locos is in that tale. This is the tale/chapter which seems the most accessible. It is also the most storylike, a tale which puts some adventure—dare I say structure?—into the author's whacked out characters' actions who, on top of their resistance to unreality, often seem oblivious of plot. I must admit, it was a relief to climb into that world—like climbing into bed after a difficult day.
We also have, weaving in and out, crime. The tale begins with a massive power outage in Madrid, occurring simultaneously with a police convention; and a gang of thieves, pickpockets, holdup men move in on the city's residents. Other than what darkness brings in more normal circumstances—lost virginities, folks walking into the wrong house—the crooks have a field day, holding up the innocent, breaking and entering, with no apparent attempt on the part of authority to stop them. As the sentiment in Spain, Alfau claims, tends to romanticize the outlaw, even some ordinary law-abiding citizens get into the act, trying out holdups, just to see how it is done. So much for good guys and bad guys—identity and association turned on their heads.
The tale is almost Chekovian. We have the Prefect of Police, Don Benito and his nephew, Pepe, son of Don Gil, the latter having managed to get himself kicked out of school in England. Don Benito's primary annoyance is not the crime wave, but the fact that he, the Don, has paid for Pepe's schooling. As the story unfolds, independent of one another, both characters have their wallets filched. Pepe chases the man he thinks has robbed him, secures the knicked wallet; but, alas, the wallet is not Pepe's, as he discovers upon examining its contents (all civilized wallets carry their owners' identification, you know.) I will reveal no more save to say that, in the end, both protagonists at least get their wallets back.
Yet, the way the characters evolve and change, discuss relatives who turn out to be characters in other stories (and thus set the stage for a later chapter,) the way they defy their creator, and so on, is not only something the author has whinged about in the abstract; all that is also mirrored in the plotting of the tales themselves. Identity as an idea is batted around like a volleyball flying from one side of the net to the other: any author can insist upon having well-behaved characters who do what they are told, who manifest a consistency that makes them mirror the "real." They have their own immutable fingerprints. They don't jump over tall buildings, because real people can't do that. But in a world like Alfau's, they can: they can change places like musical chairs; they can crash, not just the party, but also another's story; they can tell their author to bugger off. Yet, having said all that, they are still a writer's creation; and, as the book's unread pages dwindle, they must crawl back in between those fragile leaves and bid the reader farewell.
I don't write that way. What's in work like that for me? Dear aspiring writer, when I spoke of language, you
seemed perfectly content. Mmm. Well, yes, polish those phrases and words, make them shine! Push the
boundaries. You have buffed and burnished your language as a master carpenter cares for her tools. You may
even have dared stray from the nostrums of MFA-dom and used some adventurous vocabulary or phrasing. Now what is it you say you want to write about?
Please don't say, "myself."
It is obvious, but employing the imagination in the service of writing can very well take us out of ourselves—that's a good thing—and get us to pay attention to our human surroundings. One of the things we 21st century readers desperately need is more "us"; and one of the many things that Alfau's work suggests is that perhaps the unwittingly dangerous injunction, "write about what you know," is a bit facile. On the simplest level, Alfau's Quixotic struggle with his characters is an attempt to get into the minds and hearts of other human beings; and in whatever "way" one writes, it may be of interest to the reader/audience, in turn, to look out through an author's eyes without having to be blinded by the author's own ego. Though I may or may not have a non-human character that thinks and talks, perhaps a golem, or a human character that can leap over buildings in a single bound, I maybe able get my reader to join the journey—even if it is a bit of a rough ride. Indeed, the unruliness of characters like Alfau's may have more to do with mirroring the writer's attempts to let us see into the souls of others, without the adolescent me me me of a novice, than completely succeeding at doing so. Nonetheless, give it a go. Stretch! Doing so establishes a focus which ultimately enables writing, fires the imagination, and saves us from drowning in self-absorption.
If you do wander into the world of the fabulist, the fantastic, Alfau's work definitively cautions such a writer against the pitfalls of "cute," "sentimental," and—god help us—"the-moral-of-the-story-is." Alfau's writing allows him, as an author, to consider ideas: not only to talk of the processes of imagination necessary to writing, buy also to reveal the complicated processes of human behavior in a way that strict realism, like the overly serious child, cannot always impose. Further, the comedic is so deeply part of our humanity that once the reader/audience even so much as wryly and ruefully chuckles, despite the author, you just might see a flash of the true.
___________________
* In one instance in Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future, a character's author pushes him to drop a real woman the character has fallen in love with; and the character not only challenges the writer to a duel, but wins. It is a disaster for the affair and all others concerned; for the character, without his author, does not know how to proceed. If interested, see my review in Tupelo Quarterly, "At the Forest's Edge: On Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future."
*Factually speaking, it was actually Sir William Herschel, a British administrator in colonial India who, in 1858, first used fingerprints as a means of identifying people. In 1891 an Argentine police officer used fingerprints to identify criminals; and, in 1892, he famously convicted a woman of the gruesome killing of her two sons. She had partially slit her own throat to claim someone attacked her as well as the children, but her bloody prints were found on a telltale doorpost, thus sealing her fate.
Barcelona hasn’t gone out of its way to claim him…given that he is a self-proclaimed Franquista, who goes so
far as to claim that the devastation of Guernica during the civil war was sheer communist fabrication. He
supports the Machiavellian idea of tyranny over democracy, the only two options possible in the world. And
he is, god help us, an anti-Semite (a fact he denies, but those who know him claim is true) and not too keen on
blacks or Hispanics either. He is, at 97 anyway, a crusty old curmudgeon with hardly any appreciable views.
Still . . . there are those novels.
Alfau grew up in a small town in Guernica, but let me qualify that: he spent his first fourteen years there until the family moved to New York City in 1916. He quickly picked up English, penned his first novel, Locos: A Comedy of Gestures, in English in 1928; then a collection of children's stories, Old Tales from Spain; a book of poetry in Spanish, La poesía cursí (Sentimental Songs); and finally another novel, Chromos. Locos was not published until 1936, and it went largely unsung. After Locos' rediscovery and republication by Dalkey Archive in 1988, in 1990 Dalkey also published Alfau's Chromos, written in the 40's. Be assured, however, that unlike Ezra Pound's toxic views so loudly expressed in that poet's work, Alfau did not similiarly subject readers to his crabbéd political and social ideas.
Then "…there are those novels…" Indeed. Work that sees the comic in life around its author, and by inference around us—if we just pay attention. Further, how could comedy not intrude when the author employs such devices as we see in that work? In particular, Adams claims that Locos anticipates the so-called modernist tropes of vagabond characters rebelling, and/or going in search of their authors. Yet, unknown to the publishing world, Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky, in Russia, was doing the same thing at around the same time. More than anything, one wonders what was in the world's drinking water during those decades. Yes, Alfau's work features unruly characters that run amok, trick the reader by showing up, uninvited, in another character's story—or skin—but, in his Locos, the book which I focus on, what interests me more than the literary category the work falls into, is the how of his characterization.
First, however, is the matter of language. Were Locos a book in translation, we might apply the criteria one falls back on when writing is literally being carried over from one idioma to another. As the mother tongue is rendered into another one, which we read, is the work good in the other language? ( I refer the reader to our first issue and interviews of Stanislas Lem translator, Michael Kandel, and poet and translator of Turkish poetry, Murat Nemet-Nejat.) Mind, Alfau wrote these books in English not Spanish. In that context, Adams' Barcelona Review article says some things about Alfau's language that are both important in terms of stimulating a dialog but which I find difficult to swallow:
…we have Alfau’s Iberian English, which shows itself occasionally in the hyper correct diction of the non-
native user ("Therefore the nickname El Telescopio with which our same authority on the typical had
baptized it."); the use of Latinate words ("isochronous steps," "craposanct exultation," "in a fit of vesania"
"brachistological fashion"); unusual and often jarring syntax (examples abound), all peppered with the
Spanish vernacular ("you don’t have to get so flamenco on me"), which is rich in bullfighting metaphor: ([the
character]…de los Rios belongs to that very castizo class of Spaniards who always neutralize the charge of
extremism with a philosophical veronica and whose lemma should be: to tame the enraged bull of
radicalism with the cool cape of tolerance." Taken as a whole it’s a most engaging and refreshing employment
of the English language. Enough to bewitch the reader in style alone.
I live in a Spanish-speaking context, albeit not in an Old World one; and I have not felt jarred by Alfau's English. The use of "with which," that Adams cites, is correct, only more formal. He very carefully plays with the boundaries between the two languages. Nor do I think he was translating Spanish thoughts into English, as many non-native speakers might. "Hyper-correct diction"? One must consider that a) Locos was written in the 1920s, nearly 100 years ago, and Chromos in the 40s, both times when writers just might have paid more attention to correct English; and b) while writing in a casual register with a pared-down vocabulary is the contemporary preference, frankly such writing often gets drearily repetitive. You read one; you've read them all. Relevant to Alfau's use of English, his second language, Adams acknowledged that his writing is his "style"—well, yes, let us allow a writer to have one. Not all English language writers need sound like Ernest Hemingway.
As to the Latinate words—hmmm. It takes skill to insert them into English, though it must be said that we already have quite a few of them: we who have imbibed English at our mother's breasts once spoke the language of the Roman Empire for a significant part of our collective, linguistic history, if only to "graduate" into speaking another Latin-infused (Romance) language, French, for a hundred years more. While I caution the tin-earred writer against the use of Latinate words, as it produces discordant music, with the bebop of the comedic, the writer need be wise and tune that ear to a more complex scale. I mean, who would not kill for such a wonderful neologism as "craposanct"? Holy s--t! Latin, my foot.
In short, while I appreciate that Adams, albeit several years back, is among the few who have discussed Alfau's work at all—I unrepentantly think her ideas are inaccurate. So pardon me while wander off the garden path for a moment: dear aspiring writer, know thy mother tongue! Cultivate your vocabulary; grow words and phrases as precious orchidaceae. To put that in slightly different terms, know your own language, don't just imitate it. And for the rare writer who would use a language that is not his or her own for poetry—don’t. (Even Alfau returned to his mother tongue as more emotionally grounded for his poetry.) Whereas for fiction? It may very well be possible; key is whether an author's English reads as "translation" or whether the fact that you are reading in translation goes unnoticed.
In short, what makes Alfau's Locos "Iberian" is almost never his English. Rather, his skill is showcased both by his comedic romp with the English language and his play with the Iberian ambiance. His Iberianidad shows in the fact that he situates the work in the bars and cafes of Toledo and Madrid, in Spain. He also includes Spanish words or phrases here and there. While context can usually tell you what those words or phrases mean, Alfau does not coddle the reader: if you don't know, then get off your nalgas and look it up! And, yes, the anglophone might miss a few nuances. C'est la vie.
One case in point, however, comes with the very first tale (this is a book of interlocked, intertwining, even
kudzu-like, entangling ones.) Alfau writes,
In this story I am fulfilling a promise to my poor friend Fulano
My friend Fulano was the least important of men and this was the great tragedy of his life.
If you do know Spanish, dear reader, you will catch some of the hidden irony in those wonderful few opening lines; for on one level, yes, Alfau is addressing a humble but ordinary man. The expression "Fulano y Fulano," one native speaking friend once told me is roughly equivalent to the English expression "[any old] Tom, Dick and Harry." A Chilean friend has corrected me, however—"Fulano y Fulana." Either way, Fulano is "so and so." Joe Schmoe. And thus Alfau's poor Fulano is doomed from the start, a living double entendre embodying a sense of humor that for this reader makes Alfau's work, if you will pardon the expression, so Spanish.
Although Alfau enjoins the reader to read Locos' stories (chapters?) in any order they might please, as Cortázar later encouraged his readers to do, I am an inveterate beginner-at-the-beginning-and-proceed. At that, I wonder if the author really means his readers to be so free, for there is a certain logic that structures the unfolding of the novel. Alfau begins Locos with a writer's lament. I can't get my characters to behave. They want to be real, then duck back into fiction when the going gets rough, get confused… In the same decade the Russian writer, Krzhizhanovsky, whom I mentioned earlier, noted that his characters were, of course, real: they were based on real people; but they, too, got out of control for the same reason as Alfau's.* In the Americas,
we tend to think of this sort of writing as a subset of Latin American literature, one that plays with the boundary between the real and the imaginary so that you are never quite sure what world your mind has been carried off to. Clearly, this kind of work is not limited to Latin American writing; and it was a sad day when someone dubbed it "magical realism." Sentimentality overtook so many of the New World versions—or at least North American imitations sentimentalized the writing in their superficial attempts to mimic it. Here, in a Spanish-American's novel, it is the characters who dance down that primrose path of the real and unreal; but, if there is one thing Alfau's work is, it is not sentimental. His characters are unapologetically demi-monde—hookers, cheats, thieves, even a murderer with a penchant for bumping off this wives, Bluebeard-like; a most confused medical doctor who may or may not be a quack; and, perhaps gravest of all, a niave writer/narrator who occasionally shows up amidst these flamboyant low-lifes. They lead confused, often harsh, lives.
After introducing his cast of characters, describing them and continuing to rue their failure to behave, Alfau launches his tales, beginning with "Identity," which features the aforementioned Fulano. Now, Alfau seems to thrive, as a writer, on the impossible, the implausible, and the inconsistent; but, one cannot construct a story without establishing a few premises, fictionally speaking. If your work is going to stretch the bounds of the ordinary, as his does, your Fulano—as a socially real, terminally average character—has got to go; were he to stay, he might be briefly disguised as ordinary, but could not remain so for any appreciable length of time. Alfau solves this problem quite imaginatively, letting us know we are in for a ride: if you are setting up shop on that frontier (reality, unreality, where am I?) there is no room for the clumsy mirroring of either the old Soviet-style realism or, as transmogrified now, the dreary chronicles of the U.S. bourgoisie.
In "Fingerprints," Alfau reinvents the discoverer of fingerprints as phenomenon that identify: the author's discoverer is one Don Esteban Bejarano y Ulloa, though he has passed on. Don Estaben's son, Don Gil Bejarano y Roca proudly sustains and enlarges upon his father's tradition; and while we have just read of "identity" as a noun, in this tale it is a verb.* Already appearing as a junk dealer in Alfau's introductory account of Fulano, in "Fingerprints, Don Gil activates the substantive in an abstractly Frankenstein-esque way. Identity comes alive as energy, activity. Simultaneously, we sense an eau de noir about the chapter and, in fact, the entire book, again emphasizing its anti-sentiment: an innocent character takes the rap for a crime he did not committ, impossibly "proven" with prints he could not have made. Surprise, surprise, it is Don Gil; and he is sentenced, no reprieve, though it is hardly the last we see of him.
I will not go further than the subsequent "The Wallet," so as not to spoil a delicious read. However, the heart of Locos is in that tale. This is the tale/chapter which seems the most accessible. It is also the most storylike, a tale which puts some adventure—dare I say structure?—into the author's whacked out characters' actions who, on top of their resistance to unreality, often seem oblivious of plot. I must admit, it was a relief to climb into that world—like climbing into bed after a difficult day.
We also have, weaving in and out, crime. The tale begins with a massive power outage in Madrid, occurring simultaneously with a police convention; and a gang of thieves, pickpockets, holdup men move in on the city's residents. Other than what darkness brings in more normal circumstances—lost virginities, folks walking into the wrong house—the crooks have a field day, holding up the innocent, breaking and entering, with no apparent attempt on the part of authority to stop them. As the sentiment in Spain, Alfau claims, tends to romanticize the outlaw, even some ordinary law-abiding citizens get into the act, trying out holdups, just to see how it is done. So much for good guys and bad guys—identity and association turned on their heads.
The tale is almost Chekovian. We have the Prefect of Police, Don Benito and his nephew, Pepe, son of Don Gil, the latter having managed to get himself kicked out of school in England. Don Benito's primary annoyance is not the crime wave, but the fact that he, the Don, has paid for Pepe's schooling. As the story unfolds, independent of one another, both characters have their wallets filched. Pepe chases the man he thinks has robbed him, secures the knicked wallet; but, alas, the wallet is not Pepe's, as he discovers upon examining its contents (all civilized wallets carry their owners' identification, you know.) I will reveal no more save to say that, in the end, both protagonists at least get their wallets back.
Yet, the way the characters evolve and change, discuss relatives who turn out to be characters in other stories (and thus set the stage for a later chapter,) the way they defy their creator, and so on, is not only something the author has whinged about in the abstract; all that is also mirrored in the plotting of the tales themselves. Identity as an idea is batted around like a volleyball flying from one side of the net to the other: any author can insist upon having well-behaved characters who do what they are told, who manifest a consistency that makes them mirror the "real." They have their own immutable fingerprints. They don't jump over tall buildings, because real people can't do that. But in a world like Alfau's, they can: they can change places like musical chairs; they can crash, not just the party, but also another's story; they can tell their author to bugger off. Yet, having said all that, they are still a writer's creation; and, as the book's unread pages dwindle, they must crawl back in between those fragile leaves and bid the reader farewell.
I don't write that way. What's in work like that for me? Dear aspiring writer, when I spoke of language, you
seemed perfectly content. Mmm. Well, yes, polish those phrases and words, make them shine! Push the
boundaries. You have buffed and burnished your language as a master carpenter cares for her tools. You may
even have dared stray from the nostrums of MFA-dom and used some adventurous vocabulary or phrasing. Now what is it you say you want to write about?
Please don't say, "myself."
It is obvious, but employing the imagination in the service of writing can very well take us out of ourselves—that's a good thing—and get us to pay attention to our human surroundings. One of the things we 21st century readers desperately need is more "us"; and one of the many things that Alfau's work suggests is that perhaps the unwittingly dangerous injunction, "write about what you know," is a bit facile. On the simplest level, Alfau's Quixotic struggle with his characters is an attempt to get into the minds and hearts of other human beings; and in whatever "way" one writes, it may be of interest to the reader/audience, in turn, to look out through an author's eyes without having to be blinded by the author's own ego. Though I may or may not have a non-human character that thinks and talks, perhaps a golem, or a human character that can leap over buildings in a single bound, I maybe able get my reader to join the journey—even if it is a bit of a rough ride. Indeed, the unruliness of characters like Alfau's may have more to do with mirroring the writer's attempts to let us see into the souls of others, without the adolescent me me me of a novice, than completely succeeding at doing so. Nonetheless, give it a go. Stretch! Doing so establishes a focus which ultimately enables writing, fires the imagination, and saves us from drowning in self-absorption.
If you do wander into the world of the fabulist, the fantastic, Alfau's work definitively cautions such a writer against the pitfalls of "cute," "sentimental," and—god help us—"the-moral-of-the-story-is." Alfau's writing allows him, as an author, to consider ideas: not only to talk of the processes of imagination necessary to writing, buy also to reveal the complicated processes of human behavior in a way that strict realism, like the overly serious child, cannot always impose. Further, the comedic is so deeply part of our humanity that once the reader/audience even so much as wryly and ruefully chuckles, despite the author, you just might see a flash of the true.
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* In one instance in Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future, a character's author pushes him to drop a real woman the character has fallen in love with; and the character not only challenges the writer to a duel, but wins. It is a disaster for the affair and all others concerned; for the character, without his author, does not know how to proceed. If interested, see my review in Tupelo Quarterly, "At the Forest's Edge: On Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky's Memories of the Future."
*Factually speaking, it was actually Sir William Herschel, a British administrator in colonial India who, in 1858, first used fingerprints as a means of identifying people. In 1891 an Argentine police officer used fingerprints to identify criminals; and, in 1892, he famously convicted a woman of the gruesome killing of her two sons. She had partially slit her own throat to claim someone attacked her as well as the children, but her bloody prints were found on a telltale doorpost, thus sealing her fate.