Photo by Séamas McSwiney, December 1981.
Carlos Fuentes
This interview formed the basis of a profile that first appeared as “Latin Writers: Up from Regionalism,” in the Los Angeles Times (May 13, 1982; V:3), and as an article, “Of the New World and the Old,” in The Times Higher Education Supplement (London; May 21, 1982, 11). The entire interview was first published in The Kenyon Review (5:4, Fall 1983, 105-118), and later in my book Writing at Risk: interviews in Paris with uncommon writers (Iowa, 1991), now out of print.
History, civilizations, the complex cultural identity of Mexico have been the stuff from which Carlos Fuentes’s dozens of books were made. The open adventure of his novelistic structures is indicative of the new language wrought by recent generations of Latin American writers, many of whom he helped to get their work seen beyond their own borders. A keen interpreter of politics, a sincere advocate of culture and thought, Fuentes was above all a man of conscience. Mexican ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977, he resigned his post in protest when former president Díaz Ordaz, responsible for the massacre of hundreds of students by police at Tlatelolco in 1968, was appointed ambassador to post-Franco Spain. For the French publication of his latest novel, Distant Relations, Fuentes was back again in Paris, where this interview was conducted in the offices of his publisher, Gallimard, in late December, 1981. But we began by discussing his massive novel of 1976, Terra Nostra, which Gabriel García Márquez said requires a one-year fellowship to read.
In reading Terra Nostra, it is surprising how much turns out to be factual. So that discovering more about the history, one discovers more about the book.
Yes, certainly. After all, history is only what we remember of history. What is fact in history? The novel asks this question. We made history. But history doesn’t exist if we don’t remember it. That is, if we don’t imagine it, finally.
Did you have a specific sense of where fact and fiction diverge while writing Terra Nostra?
Well, I have another book, it’s an anti-Terra Nostra in the sense that it’s so short, Aura, a novella. And the protagonist of Aura, who is caught by this sort of witch in this house in Mexico City, says, “Well, I’m here to work and make enough money so that I can write what I’ve been imagining all my life I could write. A great opus of the Renaissance world, of the discovery of the New World, of the conquest of the Americas, the colonization.” I mean, this is a historian who would like to deal with fact. But of course he is caught in a world of pure fiction, a surreal world. So, I guess that from this mold, from this matrix, came Terra Nostra. It is written by the protagonist of Aura, who is a man caught between life and death, between youth and old age, between reality and surreality, so he writes Terra Nostra. But it’s not the book he wanted to write, it’s not the history book he wanted to write, it’s a book in which he has to imagine history, that is, to reinvent history. That is, to write history, really.
How long did you spend researching the book?
All my life. I never consulted a note when I was writing Terra Nostra. Because this is something I’ve carried with me all my life, this is my whole heritage. As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a man of the Caribbean basin, of the Gulf of Mexico, of the Mediterranean, all the things I am are there. So, I never had to consult, I just had to imagine my history, and kill a few characters, because of psychological reasons, create or resuscitate others, that’s it. But, basically, as a writer and as a man of political preoccupations at the same time, I’ve always been very impressed by the writings of Vico, in the eighteenth century. Because Vico’s probably the first philosopher who says we create history. Men and women, we create history, it is our creation, it is not the creation of God. But this throws a certain burden on us. Since we made history, we have to imagine history. We have to imagine the past. Nobody lived in the past, nobody present lived in the past. So, we have to imagine the past. And I’ve always had that as a sort of credo. And for Terra Nostra, of course, that is essential, to imagine the past.
And then there is the notion of history as of people, rather than history of leaders.
But here, of course, there is an element, in Terra Nostra, which one could call madness in high places. Something Americans know a great deal about in recent times. Because in societies that have always been pyramidal and authoritarian, as the Hispanic societies—Queen Joan of Spain, Philip II—they count a lot in our lives. When Franco died, Juan Goytisolo wrote a very beautiful piece called, “In Memoriam Francisco Franco.” Of course, he was in opposition to Franco all his life, but he said, “Why have you died on me? What can I do without you? I was born when you came to power, you told me what I could read, what movies I could see, what I should be taught in school, how I should make love, how I should pray to God, you taught me everything. Suddenly I’m an orphan without you. Here I am at forty, an orphan because you have left us.”
What brought about your latest novel, Distant Relations, what was the seed of that?
So many things. It’s difficult to pinpoint one origin. Because, of course, by now I have managed to understand more or less what I am writing and how it all fits in. So, this is part, really, of one novel I am writing, a novel I have imagined with twenty titles—most of which are written, by the way—and twelve different sections. And one of these sections is three novels that deal with another reality, with a parallel contiguous reality, and they are: Aura, Cumpleaños, which is a novel that has never been translated, and Distant Relations. And it has to do with Terra Nostra also. But it has to do with writing, above all, it has to do with fiction. Although on the surface you would say, Okay, it’s a novel about these contacts that have taken place throughout history between France and Spanish America. There’s a lot of stuff about this, about this quantity of poets and politicians and musicians of Latin American origin that have had a prominent role in French life. Lafargue, who was the son-in-law of Karl Marx, and the poets Heredia and Lautréamont and Supervielle and Laforgue, and the musician Reynaldo Hahn, who was so close to Proust, came from Caracas, etcetera. At one level, it is that, but then it is about a family called the Heredias, who have a homonymic counterpart in France, a French Heredia family, and a person who is narrating the story, a French count, Branly, who through the contact of the two Heredias discovers in a way the past he himself had forgotten, as the past of the Heredias is recovered basically through the encounters of two children, whom we are at difficulty to define or to understand the nature of their relationships. Finally, there is a delving into the family tree of the Heredias, but one discovers as one reads that genealogy is very much like fiction. You cannot know all the story. I think the clue to Distant Relations is the final phrase, which says, “No one remembers the whole story.” No one knows the whole story of the Heredia family and therefore no one can tell the whole story. But this can be said of all fiction. It is a fiction to say that fiction can end, that it has a beginning and an end. Because there is a reader. If you are an active reader, you will not let the author finish the story, you want to finish it yourself.
About halfway through the book, French Heredia says: “The new world was the last opportunity for a European universalism: it was also its tomb. It was never possible to be universal after the century of discoveries and conquests. The new world turned out to be too wide, on a different scale.” What does that mean for you?
It means that America was invented by Europe, that America is an invention of the European mind. As the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman has said, America was discovered because it was designed, and it was designed because it was needed by Europe. Europe wanted a place to regenerate history, to regenerate man. It wanted to find the golden age and the good savage. It came over and it burned the golden age, razed it to the ground, and it enslaved the noble savage. So that the utopia on which the new world is premised was promptly corrupted by the epic of the colonization, and the universality of the utopia broke up into the particular histories, the balkanization of the different epics that took place. The dream was killed, yet the dream remains alive. Latin America wants to be utopia, wants to be utopia desperately. And so does the United States. Therefore, we cannot have tragedies, which I think is a tragedy. That Latin America cannot give anything to the very great need of restoring tragic values in this terrible world of ours in which instead of tragedy we have crimes. Because we have not been capable of understanding the conflict between good and good. We only have the Manichean vision of good and bad, of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, this sort of very Ronald Reagan vision of the world. But the only tragedian, I think, of the New World is Faulkner. There’s no other writer who really understands the nature of the tragic and he extracts it from the South, from the defeat of the South, and tells it in baroque terms. Which is something we should have done in Latin America. But we can only tell our great mock epics, our very funny mock epics, like A Hundred Years of Solitude, which resembles Don Quixote so much, in that it is not a tragedy, it is a grandiose hyperbolic mock epic of sorts.
What do you think accounts for the urge to want to embrace everything, among many Latin American writers, which doesn’t particularly exist in North American writers?
Well, I’m thinking of Thomas Pynchon, who raises it a great deal. And John Barth, in many of his works. You do have that sort of writer also.
But it doesn’t seem to be as prevailing. For instance, in your book-length essay on the new Latin American novel, La Nueva Novela Hispanoamericana, you talk about how the New World was too wide. But that has much different results between Latin America and North America, which is also a very wide country, if not as wild in a sense.
It was big and vast, but it was empty. There was hardly anything in the North American continent. There were many obstacles (in Mexico and Latin America), the first of them were civilizations that had to be destroyed. Of course, the North Americans destroyed civilizations also, they killed Indians. But the colonization of the United States doesn’t have an epic like the Chronicle of the Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Díaz, which is really the foundation of our literary life, of our novel. It’s an epic, as of the world it has discovered. Read the chapters when he enters Tenochtitlan, it’s fantastic, it’s like entering a story in The Arabian Nights. And then he is forced to destroy this, his dream has to become a nightmare, and yet he wants to love what he has destroyed. And then he has to remember what he has destroyed fifty years after the events, when he writes the book, which is like Proust, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. So, you have all these very complicated cultural facts which were not present in the colonization of what was to become the United States. It’s a very different cultural program and cultural perspective when you have killed a civilization.
How much, when we speak of this, do you think we can talk about Latin America and how much does it apply specifically to Mexico?
I’m talking about Mexico mostly. Of course, in Peru, maybe, in the Quechua empire. And the Aztec empire. It certainly doesn’t apply to Argentina or Chile, although the Araucanos gave a lot of resistance in Chile, but in Argentina the tribes were decimated and finally really killed by the republican presidents of the nineteenth century, very similar to what happened in the United States. So, the sense of a cultural genocide is much stronger in Mexico and in Peru, but it’s also very strong in the Caribbean because really there the population disappeared completely, completely. Not a single Caribe Indian was left.
Your books talk a lot about a sense of identity. What do you sense as a kind of identity that comes out of the North American experience, which is very different and in a way is more confused because it has so many more elements?
Well, I see a lot more homogeneity in the United States than I do in any Latin American country.
Yes, but it’s not a homogeneity of the peoples in it. It’s a homogeneity of the dominant class.
Of the dominant class, what it offers, what it gives as entertainment, what it gives as styles of living, architecture, eating. That is tremendously homogeneous and terrible. It destroys variety a great deal.
And it’s only been within the last twenty years that people are paying more attention to the cultural heritage as well as the cultural contribution in present tense.
The great effort is, of course, to absorb people into the mainstream, to absorb Blacks into the mainstream. I think the great challenge is going to come from the Hispanics, because they’re much less assimilable than anybody else, for the simple reason that they have their cultures right over the border, or on an island fifty miles away or whatever. They do not give up their culture so easily or their language. So, it’s very different when you have come from Sweden or Poland or Italy, or even from Africa, to assimilate into the mainstream. It’s much more difficult for the Hispanics.
How much, in Mexico, has there been a reconciling of the Indian cultures and the Spanish?
Well, Mexico is probably the only country in Latin America that has made heroes of the defeated and not of the conquerors. In Lima, you have the statue of Pizarro in the central square. In Mexico, you have the statue of Cuauhtémoc, and there is no statue of Cortés, which is a mistake, I think. Because we are the descendants of Cortés also, and of Spain and her culture. But, Mexico has always made the decision to sing the eulogy of the defeated, of the Indians. Is this only rhetoric? Well, if it’s rhetoric, we’re all educated in that rhetoric. Mexicans are educated in the rhetoric of respect for the fallen Indian civilizations and respect for the Revolution. So, this is the only real form of checks and balances we have in our country, that generation after generation of Mexicans are educated in liberal ideas. And they go into society and they are formed by these ideas. So, the problem there is not that we have not recognized the heritage, we have done so. You go to the anthropology museum in Mexico City, and you see that it is mostly children who go there. You see children and students. It means that generation after generation of Mexicans are being educated in the respect and understanding of the old civilizations. Now, the Indians that exist in Mexico today are part of another social and economic structure. There are about four million Indians and they, many of them, like to live in their communities and protect their values and their sense of the sacred, and things that have little to do with the modern world. Then there is a double problem, there is a problem of respect for these values and the integrity of these communities, which is sometimes achieved, sometimes it is not. They are exploited, they are corrupted, and that is where a lot of work has to be done.
How much of the snobbish pride for the pure-blood Spanish ancestry is there in Mexico?
Very little, because there are so few pure whites in Mexico. Very, very few pure whites. If it’s three, four percent of the population . . . We’re all mestizos. I’ll tell you, I have forebears that are Spanish, Moorish, Jewish, German and Yaqui Indian. And I’m a typical Mexican in that sense, I have a total mixture of ancestry. There are very few people who came to be pure Caucasian. You have only to look at us: where are they? I don’t think it’s a racist country. It’s a country that has many social and economic injustices, but racism is not among the injustices of Mexico, I think. Besides, whom would you discriminate against?
And that’s part of the central difference between Mexico and the United States, in that in Mexico the Spanish not only conquered the Indians but they bred with them.
The great difference, of course, is that the United States, in spite of the melting pot, has tended to nurture, as we say, a homogeneous culture. The ruling classes in the United States tend to believe that it is in uniformization, and then atomization within the uniformization, that you have power. In Mexico, we’re very conscious that we coexist with many cultures and many times. It’s a country of many historical times, of many different cultures coexisting. This is the nature of the country, and it is a value. I think it is a great value and it has to be protected. And Mexico is a country that has been very isolated. First, because of its geography. It’s a country of deserts and mountains, chasms, canyons. Very difficult, the communication in Mexico. When Charles V asked Cortés to describe the country to him, Cortés picked up a very stiff piece of parchment from the table of the emperor and crushed it like this and put it on the table and said, “That’s Mexico, that’s the country I’ve conquered.” And I imagine a very moving thing that happened to me, visiting a part of Jalisco, the country of the Huichol Indians, with the president, Echeverría, at that time. A strip was made in one of the Huichol towns for us to land. The plane landed there, and the Indian chiefs were there in their attire, very beautiful, and said hello to the president. This little village was situated next to a gorge, an enormous canyon, the canyon of the Santiago River which is as deep as the canyon of the Colorado River in the United States. The president said, “What can I do for you,” etcetera, and the Indian chief said, “Something very simple, look over the canyon at those people waving at us from the other side. They are our brothers but we have never been able to touch hands with them. Never, never, never, for thousands of years. So, would you take us in your great white bird to the other side of the canyon so we can finally embrace and touch hands?” Well, this is a great image of the isolation of Mexico. You know, the Mexican Revolution had one great success, its cultural success, especially in the sense that it destroyed that isolation to a great degree. The sense of all these great cavalry charges, of Villa from the north, Zapata from the south, means that Mexicans were moving for the first time and meeting each other and learning to cry together and sing together and what their names were and what they talk about, etcetera. So, there is a breakdown of this lack of communication. But not only in an internal sense, also in the international sense. Traditionally, Mexico has been like a cat who was burned with hot water: too many invasions, all contacts with foreigners have been terrible, we lost half our territory to the United States, we were invaded by Napoleon III, we were invaded by Pershing, the Marines took Vera Cruz, don’t have anything to do with foreign countries, we got into trouble. In the last decade, during the governments of Echeverría and López Portillo, and oil had to do with this but also a cultural image of ourselves, we have come out much more into the world. In contact with other Third World nations, in contact with countries that offer us an opportunity to diversify support—political, economical, cultural—as is the case today with the Mitterand government in France, there’s a very close relationship between the two governments.
Mexico also serves as a sort of crossroads between the rest of Latin America and the United States.
Well, yes, the United States has the great, great advantage, the great boon, of having friends on its borders, Mexico and Canada, and not satellites. And friends are not yes men. People who go around saying yes are false friends, they prove to be false; they’re good for our ego, for a couple of days probably, but no more. So, Mexico, a country that has a long experience in the Central American-Caribbean area, tells the truth to the United States. Sometimes a harsh truth, a truth the Americans don’t like, but we do tell it. Because they might avoid making some of the mistakes they have made traditionally, which cost everybody a lot of suffering.
How have you, as a writer and intellectual, managed to reconcile your literary interests and political concerns? How do you find to best express and act upon your political beliefs?
Let me say several things about this. First, my writing is not political in the sense that it’s pamphletary writing or anything of the sort. It’s not even popular writing. It’s rather elite writing, it takes a lot to get into my books and to win readers for my books. I like to win readers, not to have ready-made readers, I don’t care for that. I prefer to have more readers by the year 2000 than to have less readers by the year 2000 than I have today. And that is in a sense of the integrity of the work, I think, it has something to do with that. But I do think that there is a political element in literature always, because we are political beings, because we live in a society. Now, the thing is not to write pamphlets certainly, because that is paving the sidewalks of hell with good intentions. We’ve had too many novels and poems in Latin America that pretend to be political but do not serve either literature or the revolution. They’re just bad writing, they don’t serve anybody, it’s useless. So, what I aim at, I hope to, because these are great models—my God, I’m not comparing myself to them—is what you find in Balzac or Dostoyevsky. And that is that the political reality that you find in La Comédie Humaine or in The Possessed is in constant tension with what Balzac would call the search for the absolute or the metaphysical urge in Dostoyevsky. And this extraordinary tension between what is most passing and brittle, which is the political reality, and something that should be lasting and permanent, creates the marvelous tension of these novels. In that sense, I would like to write political novels, like The Possessed or like Lost Illusions. But who knows? Anyway, writing’s a rather solitary activity, an extremely solitary activity, and I am a gregarious man. I am not a solitary man and I suffer greatly from spending eight or nine or ten hours a day sitting alone, hunched, drawing a hump, and scribbling little fly’s feet on white paper. This can drive you nuts, absolutely. It’s a form of torture and it is against nature. If there’s anything against nature, it is writing. So, my political preoccupation—which is authentic—is also a way of getting together with people, of establishing contact with people. But I try to do it mostly as a citizen than as a writer. Or as a writer who writes journalism. Because I love journalism, I love writing in papers, and I love friendship and contact and conversations with journalists. So, it is at that level of journalism and teaching and lecturing that I try to have a certain political bearing on things.
But as far as your political concerns, does that seem to be a main thread in the Latin American cultural identity?
Yes, yes, yes. Because I’m very conscious . . . you know, a lot has been said about the ideological nature of Latin American writers, and I disagree with this, on the level of the greatest writers. I mean, of Pablo Neruda, or Vallejo, or Octavio Paz, Cortázar, García Márquez, Carpentier. We’re not dealing with ideology. We are dealing with writers who are restoring our civilization, the facts of our civilization, who are creating our cultural identity. This is not the same as offering ideological ghosts for political consumption, it is not the same, it is very different. And I think, yes, we are all in the same boat of trying to reconstruct, in order to construct for the future, the house of our civilization.
It's interesting to hear you say "reconstruct" with a writer like Cortázar. In his work, most often it’s less a sense of history than a sense of what is behind the door that you didn’t bother to open.
Yes, exactly. But that can be history too, what is behind the door. When you recognize yourself in the little axolotl, when the house is being taken over, you are understanding that behind the appearances of reality, of everyday reality, in the world but also in Latin America, there is another reality. Which is basically what García Márquez and Carpentier and the poets are saying also. Because that is our problem, discovering the true reality. And in trying to discover it, adding to that reality, adding something new. Not reproducing reality, but adding something to it.
Which seems, again, a certain divergence between the realism of the North American writers and the heightened realism and the fantastic of the Latin American writers.
Well, there is a great tradition of the supernatural in American fiction. And I, for one, have learned a great lesson from the literature of the United States. There’s a very famous page where Nathaniel Hawthorne asks himself if North Americans can write books of romance and gothic fiction, since they do not have the romantic decor, they don’t have the castles, the moats, the dungeons, all that goes with it. He says, “Well, but I prefer the blessed, sunlit, prosperous tranquility of my native land to all the gloomy gothic backgrounds of Europe.” Well, of course, he wrote supernatural stories. And so did Edgar Allan Poe. That’s a fictional gothic world, the House of Usher doesn’t exist really. But Poe discovers something marvelous for all of us in the New World. He discovers that the heart of fiction, of the supernatural, is really the tell-tale heart. That it’s not in the decor, it is in your heart, and your mind. Then James brings the ghosts out at noon, they don’t know they’re ghosts. Their life goes by waiting for an event and the event doesn’t happen, and it proves they are spectral. So, I think with these three illustrious North American antecedents, one cannot talk about a lack of the supernatural dimension in North American fiction. And then I think Faulkner has decidedly a flavor of the spectral in him. There are lots of ghosts, and the fact that all his novels are novels in which you remember the past, but you remember it in the present, and the past only takes place in the present or as he said, “the present began ten thousand years ago,” he says in Intruder in the Dust. Well, this has a lot to do with us. We’re facing a lot of common problems in the New World, be it Anglo-Saxon or Iberian. But, of course, there are a lot of differences also, because the social and economic conditions of the two worlds are very different.
Though there seems to be more of a sense of the autobiographical in North American writers.
Yes, perhaps the autobiography is more collective in Latin America, in a way. But, in another way, we need very much books of memoirs, we don’t have this. We don’t have the personal recollection. The Donoso book (The Boom in Spanish American Literature, A Personal History) is very interesting in this sense, it’s a wonderful book which I hope will start a trend. Or Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Cuban writer, with his La Habana Para Un Infante Difunto, which is a marvelous book of his memoirs as a child in Havana. But when I think of books like Sophie’s Choice, or The Ghost Writer, or even The Executioner’s Song, I find that we are facing a mutation in North American letters, in which we are coming together a lot more than is perceptible to the naked eye. Styron is recreating the forces of a civilization as it destroys itself, as it meets its opposites, its parallels, Poland and the South in the United States, Stingo in Brooklyn and a Catholic Polish woman at Auschwitz. The extraordinary play on history that Philip Roth offers us in The Ghost Writer. Or the transformation of reality and naturalism through the sheer exercise of language in Norman Mailer, in The Executioner's Song, where you are creating a world with language even if you know the story of Gary Gilmore. It is a different world because Mailer has written it. And besides, the language of the West appears and appears and appears in that novel and suddenly takes over the novel, and it is not the same language of the East. It is finally the language of a different civilization, of a cultural component that is different. So here we are dealing with civilizations, with cultures, with societies, which were not the great preoccupations of most psychological or realistic writers in the past, in the United States. You have a much broader canvas in the works of any of these three writers I have mentioned.
Do you have a sense of North American writers being influenced by Latin American writers?
Well, I hate the word “influences” but I think that we all form part of a tradition, and if you mean that we recognize more and more, north and south in the Americas, that we belong to a tradition and that there are many common points in that tradition, that is right. Allen Tate once called William Faulkner, I guess with a pejorative intention, a Dixie Gongorist. Well, I don’t find anything pejorative about being compared with the greatest European poet of the seventeenth century. But the fact is, that without the previous poetic experience of Góngora, probably the North American and the Southern writer Faulkner could not have written his novels. And without the novels of Faulkner, many of us would not have written our novels. It is in this sense that the health of literature is the openness of its tradition, the openness of its several streams. Who is not influenced, of course! Books are the products of other books, certainly.
What are you working on now?
I’m in the middle of a novel. I think at this stage of my life and my career, I know more or less how many novels I carry in myself. Basically, three big novels I want to write. And I hope I have time to write them. I couldn’t write them before because I didn’t know how to write them. I’ve carried them with me since I was twenty. Now I know how.
There’s something in The Death of Artemio Cruz, where he talks about how he could never see things in black and white like the North Americans. First, is that a statement representative more or less of your own attitude, and also do you think that North Americans can ever learn to see those colors and shades of gray?
Yes, I think you do not understand the world in its shadings. We were talking about the Manichean perspective, the black and white thing, a while ago. And this has a lot to do with success. Rome tended to see the world in black and white, so does the United States. And I think it’s only through the experience of failure that you understand the shadings of the world. And the experience of failure is a rather universal experience, it’s much more universal than success. So, I think that in the measure that the United States meets failure—and it has met it in the last fifteen or twenty years, God knows it’s met it—it will become really a more civilized nation. A nation more capable of these shadings, of which its intelligentsia is capable. Because this way you understand you are part of the human race. You have a better chance of saving yourself if you know you are human than if you think you are superior to the rest.
In some of your books, the accumulative awareness of one’s past and of a nation’s past becomes an identity. Then, what about the history that isn’t written or isn’t remembered, but is there just the same? Does that then become part of the identity that is always discovered?
This has for me a very important literary dimension. To take it by parts. When I hear your question, I think of Kafka. Imagine, of all things. I think of several things in Kafka. One of the impulses of the modern novel as conceived basically by the English writers of the eighteenth century, by Defoe and Richardson and Fielding, and certainly by Madame de Lafayette in France, is the characterization process. The process of differentiation of characters. So that they not be allegorical characters, as they were in some of the Medieval writing. And this I think is taken to its very culmination by writers such as Balzac and Dickens. In Dickens, it is by differentiation that you know the characters. They’re so peculiarly characterized in the way they speak, they dress, they move, their names, everything: Micawber, Uriah Heep, etcetera. Flaubert makes us understand that the characters are the product of the writing, of their names, and that their actions are verbs. I was talking to Susan Sontag the other day and she says, “How difficult it became to write after Flaubert.” Because you are self-conscious, because you’re conscious of every adjective, of every verb, of every noun, every single thing you write. It is no longer innocent after Flaubert, and it’s certainly not innocent after Proust, who I think takes psychological writing to its very culmination. There’s very little you can do after that in the investigation of the self, of the individual, of his internal characterization. And then we have a man without a face, who is the man of Kafka. I ask myself, when I read Kafka, this man has no face, K. has no face. But then, because he has no face, should I guillotine him, should I chop his head off? Or can I give another kind of face to him? And I realize that Kafka is writing stories at the same time which are about forgotten myths, myths he finds in the basements of history and of the mind, things that had been forgotten, precisely as you say, and then recreates them. And he says so, he declares, “I only want to rewrite the old German and Jewish myths and fairy tales, that’s all I want to do in this life.” But of course in rewriting them, he writes a new myth, a new fairy tale, through the appropriation of the forgotten, of the old memory, the forgotten memory. And in this double creation of the new character, this devastatingly solitary and faceless man who becomes a bug, Samsa, in the writing of his fable, we suddenly come upon the meaning of all the opportunities of modern fiction, I think. Kafka said a wonderful thing, “There shall be much hope, but not for us.” And he’s offering a sacrifice of literature and himself for the future, which I find very, very moving. And through this understanding of Kafka, I understand a lot of what we’re trying to do in Latin America, which is not to create psychological characters in the Flaubert sense, or differentiate characters in the Dickens sense, but to discover something new which I couldn’t name for you. Which perhaps we could call figures. I support myself a great deal on archetypes, and especially the great archetypes of Spain: Don Juan, and La Celestina, and Don Quixote. But these are archetypes and I’m interested in figures. I’m interested in three young men thrown on a beach with no identification and no memory. So as to surprise them in the moment in which their character is totally unconstituted and see where we can go from there and how we can construct a new character, a new personality, a new identity, through a more intimate relationship with the facts of our civilization, of our culture.
But is there, in the end, with Kafka or elsewhere, anything that can differentiate the resonances of a story that is fable-like or myth-like as opposed to one that is a new version?
Of course. The old myth disappears in a way. What you get is a story called “The Judgment,” or “The Metamorphosis,” or “In the Penal Colony.” And the original myth is lost. Sometimes in his little, little fables and versions of Prometheus and of Ulysses, he lets you take a look at the way he goes about it. “Did Ulysses hear the sirens or not? Did he plug his ears or did they know that he would have his ears plugged, because he is wily, and therefore that time they didn't sing?” And what happened to Prometheus? And finally, how bored and how tired we are of Prometheus, and the eagle, and the liver, everybody’s tired of the tragedy. These things he lets you perceive, but when he goes into his major works you don’t perceive them, you are right.
Are there particular writers you like to read?
Well, I’ve already mentioned the novelists of the present, I think that fills in the picture quite well. But, in the past, I’m a great reader of Cervantes. That is one book I read every year, I can’t live without that book. There’s a Guatemalan author who lives in Mexico, Tito Monterroso, who has a volume of Don Quixote open in every room in his house, at a different page. And he goes from room to room reading this, he always has Don Quixote open. I would like to imitate him. That’s one book I can’t live without.
This interview formed the basis of a profile that first appeared as “Latin Writers: Up from Regionalism,” in the Los Angeles Times (May 13, 1982; V:3), and as an article, “Of the New World and the Old,” in The Times Higher Education Supplement (London; May 21, 1982, 11). The entire interview was first published in The Kenyon Review (5:4, Fall 1983, 105-118), and later in my book Writing at Risk: interviews in Paris with uncommon writers (Iowa, 1991), now out of print.
History, civilizations, the complex cultural identity of Mexico have been the stuff from which Carlos Fuentes’s dozens of books were made. The open adventure of his novelistic structures is indicative of the new language wrought by recent generations of Latin American writers, many of whom he helped to get their work seen beyond their own borders. A keen interpreter of politics, a sincere advocate of culture and thought, Fuentes was above all a man of conscience. Mexican ambassador to France from 1975 to 1977, he resigned his post in protest when former president Díaz Ordaz, responsible for the massacre of hundreds of students by police at Tlatelolco in 1968, was appointed ambassador to post-Franco Spain. For the French publication of his latest novel, Distant Relations, Fuentes was back again in Paris, where this interview was conducted in the offices of his publisher, Gallimard, in late December, 1981. But we began by discussing his massive novel of 1976, Terra Nostra, which Gabriel García Márquez said requires a one-year fellowship to read.
In reading Terra Nostra, it is surprising how much turns out to be factual. So that discovering more about the history, one discovers more about the book.
Yes, certainly. After all, history is only what we remember of history. What is fact in history? The novel asks this question. We made history. But history doesn’t exist if we don’t remember it. That is, if we don’t imagine it, finally.
Did you have a specific sense of where fact and fiction diverge while writing Terra Nostra?
Well, I have another book, it’s an anti-Terra Nostra in the sense that it’s so short, Aura, a novella. And the protagonist of Aura, who is caught by this sort of witch in this house in Mexico City, says, “Well, I’m here to work and make enough money so that I can write what I’ve been imagining all my life I could write. A great opus of the Renaissance world, of the discovery of the New World, of the conquest of the Americas, the colonization.” I mean, this is a historian who would like to deal with fact. But of course he is caught in a world of pure fiction, a surreal world. So, I guess that from this mold, from this matrix, came Terra Nostra. It is written by the protagonist of Aura, who is a man caught between life and death, between youth and old age, between reality and surreality, so he writes Terra Nostra. But it’s not the book he wanted to write, it’s not the history book he wanted to write, it’s a book in which he has to imagine history, that is, to reinvent history. That is, to write history, really.
How long did you spend researching the book?
All my life. I never consulted a note when I was writing Terra Nostra. Because this is something I’ve carried with me all my life, this is my whole heritage. As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a man of the Caribbean basin, of the Gulf of Mexico, of the Mediterranean, all the things I am are there. So, I never had to consult, I just had to imagine my history, and kill a few characters, because of psychological reasons, create or resuscitate others, that’s it. But, basically, as a writer and as a man of political preoccupations at the same time, I’ve always been very impressed by the writings of Vico, in the eighteenth century. Because Vico’s probably the first philosopher who says we create history. Men and women, we create history, it is our creation, it is not the creation of God. But this throws a certain burden on us. Since we made history, we have to imagine history. We have to imagine the past. Nobody lived in the past, nobody present lived in the past. So, we have to imagine the past. And I’ve always had that as a sort of credo. And for Terra Nostra, of course, that is essential, to imagine the past.
And then there is the notion of history as of people, rather than history of leaders.
But here, of course, there is an element, in Terra Nostra, which one could call madness in high places. Something Americans know a great deal about in recent times. Because in societies that have always been pyramidal and authoritarian, as the Hispanic societies—Queen Joan of Spain, Philip II—they count a lot in our lives. When Franco died, Juan Goytisolo wrote a very beautiful piece called, “In Memoriam Francisco Franco.” Of course, he was in opposition to Franco all his life, but he said, “Why have you died on me? What can I do without you? I was born when you came to power, you told me what I could read, what movies I could see, what I should be taught in school, how I should make love, how I should pray to God, you taught me everything. Suddenly I’m an orphan without you. Here I am at forty, an orphan because you have left us.”
What brought about your latest novel, Distant Relations, what was the seed of that?
So many things. It’s difficult to pinpoint one origin. Because, of course, by now I have managed to understand more or less what I am writing and how it all fits in. So, this is part, really, of one novel I am writing, a novel I have imagined with twenty titles—most of which are written, by the way—and twelve different sections. And one of these sections is three novels that deal with another reality, with a parallel contiguous reality, and they are: Aura, Cumpleaños, which is a novel that has never been translated, and Distant Relations. And it has to do with Terra Nostra also. But it has to do with writing, above all, it has to do with fiction. Although on the surface you would say, Okay, it’s a novel about these contacts that have taken place throughout history between France and Spanish America. There’s a lot of stuff about this, about this quantity of poets and politicians and musicians of Latin American origin that have had a prominent role in French life. Lafargue, who was the son-in-law of Karl Marx, and the poets Heredia and Lautréamont and Supervielle and Laforgue, and the musician Reynaldo Hahn, who was so close to Proust, came from Caracas, etcetera. At one level, it is that, but then it is about a family called the Heredias, who have a homonymic counterpart in France, a French Heredia family, and a person who is narrating the story, a French count, Branly, who through the contact of the two Heredias discovers in a way the past he himself had forgotten, as the past of the Heredias is recovered basically through the encounters of two children, whom we are at difficulty to define or to understand the nature of their relationships. Finally, there is a delving into the family tree of the Heredias, but one discovers as one reads that genealogy is very much like fiction. You cannot know all the story. I think the clue to Distant Relations is the final phrase, which says, “No one remembers the whole story.” No one knows the whole story of the Heredia family and therefore no one can tell the whole story. But this can be said of all fiction. It is a fiction to say that fiction can end, that it has a beginning and an end. Because there is a reader. If you are an active reader, you will not let the author finish the story, you want to finish it yourself.
About halfway through the book, French Heredia says: “The new world was the last opportunity for a European universalism: it was also its tomb. It was never possible to be universal after the century of discoveries and conquests. The new world turned out to be too wide, on a different scale.” What does that mean for you?
It means that America was invented by Europe, that America is an invention of the European mind. As the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman has said, America was discovered because it was designed, and it was designed because it was needed by Europe. Europe wanted a place to regenerate history, to regenerate man. It wanted to find the golden age and the good savage. It came over and it burned the golden age, razed it to the ground, and it enslaved the noble savage. So that the utopia on which the new world is premised was promptly corrupted by the epic of the colonization, and the universality of the utopia broke up into the particular histories, the balkanization of the different epics that took place. The dream was killed, yet the dream remains alive. Latin America wants to be utopia, wants to be utopia desperately. And so does the United States. Therefore, we cannot have tragedies, which I think is a tragedy. That Latin America cannot give anything to the very great need of restoring tragic values in this terrible world of ours in which instead of tragedy we have crimes. Because we have not been capable of understanding the conflict between good and good. We only have the Manichean vision of good and bad, of good guys and bad guys, white hats and black hats, this sort of very Ronald Reagan vision of the world. But the only tragedian, I think, of the New World is Faulkner. There’s no other writer who really understands the nature of the tragic and he extracts it from the South, from the defeat of the South, and tells it in baroque terms. Which is something we should have done in Latin America. But we can only tell our great mock epics, our very funny mock epics, like A Hundred Years of Solitude, which resembles Don Quixote so much, in that it is not a tragedy, it is a grandiose hyperbolic mock epic of sorts.
What do you think accounts for the urge to want to embrace everything, among many Latin American writers, which doesn’t particularly exist in North American writers?
Well, I’m thinking of Thomas Pynchon, who raises it a great deal. And John Barth, in many of his works. You do have that sort of writer also.
But it doesn’t seem to be as prevailing. For instance, in your book-length essay on the new Latin American novel, La Nueva Novela Hispanoamericana, you talk about how the New World was too wide. But that has much different results between Latin America and North America, which is also a very wide country, if not as wild in a sense.
It was big and vast, but it was empty. There was hardly anything in the North American continent. There were many obstacles (in Mexico and Latin America), the first of them were civilizations that had to be destroyed. Of course, the North Americans destroyed civilizations also, they killed Indians. But the colonization of the United States doesn’t have an epic like the Chronicle of the Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Díaz, which is really the foundation of our literary life, of our novel. It’s an epic, as of the world it has discovered. Read the chapters when he enters Tenochtitlan, it’s fantastic, it’s like entering a story in The Arabian Nights. And then he is forced to destroy this, his dream has to become a nightmare, and yet he wants to love what he has destroyed. And then he has to remember what he has destroyed fifty years after the events, when he writes the book, which is like Proust, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. So, you have all these very complicated cultural facts which were not present in the colonization of what was to become the United States. It’s a very different cultural program and cultural perspective when you have killed a civilization.
How much, when we speak of this, do you think we can talk about Latin America and how much does it apply specifically to Mexico?
I’m talking about Mexico mostly. Of course, in Peru, maybe, in the Quechua empire. And the Aztec empire. It certainly doesn’t apply to Argentina or Chile, although the Araucanos gave a lot of resistance in Chile, but in Argentina the tribes were decimated and finally really killed by the republican presidents of the nineteenth century, very similar to what happened in the United States. So, the sense of a cultural genocide is much stronger in Mexico and in Peru, but it’s also very strong in the Caribbean because really there the population disappeared completely, completely. Not a single Caribe Indian was left.
Your books talk a lot about a sense of identity. What do you sense as a kind of identity that comes out of the North American experience, which is very different and in a way is more confused because it has so many more elements?
Well, I see a lot more homogeneity in the United States than I do in any Latin American country.
Yes, but it’s not a homogeneity of the peoples in it. It’s a homogeneity of the dominant class.
Of the dominant class, what it offers, what it gives as entertainment, what it gives as styles of living, architecture, eating. That is tremendously homogeneous and terrible. It destroys variety a great deal.
And it’s only been within the last twenty years that people are paying more attention to the cultural heritage as well as the cultural contribution in present tense.
The great effort is, of course, to absorb people into the mainstream, to absorb Blacks into the mainstream. I think the great challenge is going to come from the Hispanics, because they’re much less assimilable than anybody else, for the simple reason that they have their cultures right over the border, or on an island fifty miles away or whatever. They do not give up their culture so easily or their language. So, it’s very different when you have come from Sweden or Poland or Italy, or even from Africa, to assimilate into the mainstream. It’s much more difficult for the Hispanics.
How much, in Mexico, has there been a reconciling of the Indian cultures and the Spanish?
Well, Mexico is probably the only country in Latin America that has made heroes of the defeated and not of the conquerors. In Lima, you have the statue of Pizarro in the central square. In Mexico, you have the statue of Cuauhtémoc, and there is no statue of Cortés, which is a mistake, I think. Because we are the descendants of Cortés also, and of Spain and her culture. But, Mexico has always made the decision to sing the eulogy of the defeated, of the Indians. Is this only rhetoric? Well, if it’s rhetoric, we’re all educated in that rhetoric. Mexicans are educated in the rhetoric of respect for the fallen Indian civilizations and respect for the Revolution. So, this is the only real form of checks and balances we have in our country, that generation after generation of Mexicans are educated in liberal ideas. And they go into society and they are formed by these ideas. So, the problem there is not that we have not recognized the heritage, we have done so. You go to the anthropology museum in Mexico City, and you see that it is mostly children who go there. You see children and students. It means that generation after generation of Mexicans are being educated in the respect and understanding of the old civilizations. Now, the Indians that exist in Mexico today are part of another social and economic structure. There are about four million Indians and they, many of them, like to live in their communities and protect their values and their sense of the sacred, and things that have little to do with the modern world. Then there is a double problem, there is a problem of respect for these values and the integrity of these communities, which is sometimes achieved, sometimes it is not. They are exploited, they are corrupted, and that is where a lot of work has to be done.
How much of the snobbish pride for the pure-blood Spanish ancestry is there in Mexico?
Very little, because there are so few pure whites in Mexico. Very, very few pure whites. If it’s three, four percent of the population . . . We’re all mestizos. I’ll tell you, I have forebears that are Spanish, Moorish, Jewish, German and Yaqui Indian. And I’m a typical Mexican in that sense, I have a total mixture of ancestry. There are very few people who came to be pure Caucasian. You have only to look at us: where are they? I don’t think it’s a racist country. It’s a country that has many social and economic injustices, but racism is not among the injustices of Mexico, I think. Besides, whom would you discriminate against?
And that’s part of the central difference between Mexico and the United States, in that in Mexico the Spanish not only conquered the Indians but they bred with them.
The great difference, of course, is that the United States, in spite of the melting pot, has tended to nurture, as we say, a homogeneous culture. The ruling classes in the United States tend to believe that it is in uniformization, and then atomization within the uniformization, that you have power. In Mexico, we’re very conscious that we coexist with many cultures and many times. It’s a country of many historical times, of many different cultures coexisting. This is the nature of the country, and it is a value. I think it is a great value and it has to be protected. And Mexico is a country that has been very isolated. First, because of its geography. It’s a country of deserts and mountains, chasms, canyons. Very difficult, the communication in Mexico. When Charles V asked Cortés to describe the country to him, Cortés picked up a very stiff piece of parchment from the table of the emperor and crushed it like this and put it on the table and said, “That’s Mexico, that’s the country I’ve conquered.” And I imagine a very moving thing that happened to me, visiting a part of Jalisco, the country of the Huichol Indians, with the president, Echeverría, at that time. A strip was made in one of the Huichol towns for us to land. The plane landed there, and the Indian chiefs were there in their attire, very beautiful, and said hello to the president. This little village was situated next to a gorge, an enormous canyon, the canyon of the Santiago River which is as deep as the canyon of the Colorado River in the United States. The president said, “What can I do for you,” etcetera, and the Indian chief said, “Something very simple, look over the canyon at those people waving at us from the other side. They are our brothers but we have never been able to touch hands with them. Never, never, never, for thousands of years. So, would you take us in your great white bird to the other side of the canyon so we can finally embrace and touch hands?” Well, this is a great image of the isolation of Mexico. You know, the Mexican Revolution had one great success, its cultural success, especially in the sense that it destroyed that isolation to a great degree. The sense of all these great cavalry charges, of Villa from the north, Zapata from the south, means that Mexicans were moving for the first time and meeting each other and learning to cry together and sing together and what their names were and what they talk about, etcetera. So, there is a breakdown of this lack of communication. But not only in an internal sense, also in the international sense. Traditionally, Mexico has been like a cat who was burned with hot water: too many invasions, all contacts with foreigners have been terrible, we lost half our territory to the United States, we were invaded by Napoleon III, we were invaded by Pershing, the Marines took Vera Cruz, don’t have anything to do with foreign countries, we got into trouble. In the last decade, during the governments of Echeverría and López Portillo, and oil had to do with this but also a cultural image of ourselves, we have come out much more into the world. In contact with other Third World nations, in contact with countries that offer us an opportunity to diversify support—political, economical, cultural—as is the case today with the Mitterand government in France, there’s a very close relationship between the two governments.
Mexico also serves as a sort of crossroads between the rest of Latin America and the United States.
Well, yes, the United States has the great, great advantage, the great boon, of having friends on its borders, Mexico and Canada, and not satellites. And friends are not yes men. People who go around saying yes are false friends, they prove to be false; they’re good for our ego, for a couple of days probably, but no more. So, Mexico, a country that has a long experience in the Central American-Caribbean area, tells the truth to the United States. Sometimes a harsh truth, a truth the Americans don’t like, but we do tell it. Because they might avoid making some of the mistakes they have made traditionally, which cost everybody a lot of suffering.
How have you, as a writer and intellectual, managed to reconcile your literary interests and political concerns? How do you find to best express and act upon your political beliefs?
Let me say several things about this. First, my writing is not political in the sense that it’s pamphletary writing or anything of the sort. It’s not even popular writing. It’s rather elite writing, it takes a lot to get into my books and to win readers for my books. I like to win readers, not to have ready-made readers, I don’t care for that. I prefer to have more readers by the year 2000 than to have less readers by the year 2000 than I have today. And that is in a sense of the integrity of the work, I think, it has something to do with that. But I do think that there is a political element in literature always, because we are political beings, because we live in a society. Now, the thing is not to write pamphlets certainly, because that is paving the sidewalks of hell with good intentions. We’ve had too many novels and poems in Latin America that pretend to be political but do not serve either literature or the revolution. They’re just bad writing, they don’t serve anybody, it’s useless. So, what I aim at, I hope to, because these are great models—my God, I’m not comparing myself to them—is what you find in Balzac or Dostoyevsky. And that is that the political reality that you find in La Comédie Humaine or in The Possessed is in constant tension with what Balzac would call the search for the absolute or the metaphysical urge in Dostoyevsky. And this extraordinary tension between what is most passing and brittle, which is the political reality, and something that should be lasting and permanent, creates the marvelous tension of these novels. In that sense, I would like to write political novels, like The Possessed or like Lost Illusions. But who knows? Anyway, writing’s a rather solitary activity, an extremely solitary activity, and I am a gregarious man. I am not a solitary man and I suffer greatly from spending eight or nine or ten hours a day sitting alone, hunched, drawing a hump, and scribbling little fly’s feet on white paper. This can drive you nuts, absolutely. It’s a form of torture and it is against nature. If there’s anything against nature, it is writing. So, my political preoccupation—which is authentic—is also a way of getting together with people, of establishing contact with people. But I try to do it mostly as a citizen than as a writer. Or as a writer who writes journalism. Because I love journalism, I love writing in papers, and I love friendship and contact and conversations with journalists. So, it is at that level of journalism and teaching and lecturing that I try to have a certain political bearing on things.
But as far as your political concerns, does that seem to be a main thread in the Latin American cultural identity?
Yes, yes, yes. Because I’m very conscious . . . you know, a lot has been said about the ideological nature of Latin American writers, and I disagree with this, on the level of the greatest writers. I mean, of Pablo Neruda, or Vallejo, or Octavio Paz, Cortázar, García Márquez, Carpentier. We’re not dealing with ideology. We are dealing with writers who are restoring our civilization, the facts of our civilization, who are creating our cultural identity. This is not the same as offering ideological ghosts for political consumption, it is not the same, it is very different. And I think, yes, we are all in the same boat of trying to reconstruct, in order to construct for the future, the house of our civilization.
It's interesting to hear you say "reconstruct" with a writer like Cortázar. In his work, most often it’s less a sense of history than a sense of what is behind the door that you didn’t bother to open.
Yes, exactly. But that can be history too, what is behind the door. When you recognize yourself in the little axolotl, when the house is being taken over, you are understanding that behind the appearances of reality, of everyday reality, in the world but also in Latin America, there is another reality. Which is basically what García Márquez and Carpentier and the poets are saying also. Because that is our problem, discovering the true reality. And in trying to discover it, adding to that reality, adding something new. Not reproducing reality, but adding something to it.
Which seems, again, a certain divergence between the realism of the North American writers and the heightened realism and the fantastic of the Latin American writers.
Well, there is a great tradition of the supernatural in American fiction. And I, for one, have learned a great lesson from the literature of the United States. There’s a very famous page where Nathaniel Hawthorne asks himself if North Americans can write books of romance and gothic fiction, since they do not have the romantic decor, they don’t have the castles, the moats, the dungeons, all that goes with it. He says, “Well, but I prefer the blessed, sunlit, prosperous tranquility of my native land to all the gloomy gothic backgrounds of Europe.” Well, of course, he wrote supernatural stories. And so did Edgar Allan Poe. That’s a fictional gothic world, the House of Usher doesn’t exist really. But Poe discovers something marvelous for all of us in the New World. He discovers that the heart of fiction, of the supernatural, is really the tell-tale heart. That it’s not in the decor, it is in your heart, and your mind. Then James brings the ghosts out at noon, they don’t know they’re ghosts. Their life goes by waiting for an event and the event doesn’t happen, and it proves they are spectral. So, I think with these three illustrious North American antecedents, one cannot talk about a lack of the supernatural dimension in North American fiction. And then I think Faulkner has decidedly a flavor of the spectral in him. There are lots of ghosts, and the fact that all his novels are novels in which you remember the past, but you remember it in the present, and the past only takes place in the present or as he said, “the present began ten thousand years ago,” he says in Intruder in the Dust. Well, this has a lot to do with us. We’re facing a lot of common problems in the New World, be it Anglo-Saxon or Iberian. But, of course, there are a lot of differences also, because the social and economic conditions of the two worlds are very different.
Though there seems to be more of a sense of the autobiographical in North American writers.
Yes, perhaps the autobiography is more collective in Latin America, in a way. But, in another way, we need very much books of memoirs, we don’t have this. We don’t have the personal recollection. The Donoso book (The Boom in Spanish American Literature, A Personal History) is very interesting in this sense, it’s a wonderful book which I hope will start a trend. Or Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Cuban writer, with his La Habana Para Un Infante Difunto, which is a marvelous book of his memoirs as a child in Havana. But when I think of books like Sophie’s Choice, or The Ghost Writer, or even The Executioner’s Song, I find that we are facing a mutation in North American letters, in which we are coming together a lot more than is perceptible to the naked eye. Styron is recreating the forces of a civilization as it destroys itself, as it meets its opposites, its parallels, Poland and the South in the United States, Stingo in Brooklyn and a Catholic Polish woman at Auschwitz. The extraordinary play on history that Philip Roth offers us in The Ghost Writer. Or the transformation of reality and naturalism through the sheer exercise of language in Norman Mailer, in The Executioner's Song, where you are creating a world with language even if you know the story of Gary Gilmore. It is a different world because Mailer has written it. And besides, the language of the West appears and appears and appears in that novel and suddenly takes over the novel, and it is not the same language of the East. It is finally the language of a different civilization, of a cultural component that is different. So here we are dealing with civilizations, with cultures, with societies, which were not the great preoccupations of most psychological or realistic writers in the past, in the United States. You have a much broader canvas in the works of any of these three writers I have mentioned.
Do you have a sense of North American writers being influenced by Latin American writers?
Well, I hate the word “influences” but I think that we all form part of a tradition, and if you mean that we recognize more and more, north and south in the Americas, that we belong to a tradition and that there are many common points in that tradition, that is right. Allen Tate once called William Faulkner, I guess with a pejorative intention, a Dixie Gongorist. Well, I don’t find anything pejorative about being compared with the greatest European poet of the seventeenth century. But the fact is, that without the previous poetic experience of Góngora, probably the North American and the Southern writer Faulkner could not have written his novels. And without the novels of Faulkner, many of us would not have written our novels. It is in this sense that the health of literature is the openness of its tradition, the openness of its several streams. Who is not influenced, of course! Books are the products of other books, certainly.
What are you working on now?
I’m in the middle of a novel. I think at this stage of my life and my career, I know more or less how many novels I carry in myself. Basically, three big novels I want to write. And I hope I have time to write them. I couldn’t write them before because I didn’t know how to write them. I’ve carried them with me since I was twenty. Now I know how.
There’s something in The Death of Artemio Cruz, where he talks about how he could never see things in black and white like the North Americans. First, is that a statement representative more or less of your own attitude, and also do you think that North Americans can ever learn to see those colors and shades of gray?
Yes, I think you do not understand the world in its shadings. We were talking about the Manichean perspective, the black and white thing, a while ago. And this has a lot to do with success. Rome tended to see the world in black and white, so does the United States. And I think it’s only through the experience of failure that you understand the shadings of the world. And the experience of failure is a rather universal experience, it’s much more universal than success. So, I think that in the measure that the United States meets failure—and it has met it in the last fifteen or twenty years, God knows it’s met it—it will become really a more civilized nation. A nation more capable of these shadings, of which its intelligentsia is capable. Because this way you understand you are part of the human race. You have a better chance of saving yourself if you know you are human than if you think you are superior to the rest.
In some of your books, the accumulative awareness of one’s past and of a nation’s past becomes an identity. Then, what about the history that isn’t written or isn’t remembered, but is there just the same? Does that then become part of the identity that is always discovered?
This has for me a very important literary dimension. To take it by parts. When I hear your question, I think of Kafka. Imagine, of all things. I think of several things in Kafka. One of the impulses of the modern novel as conceived basically by the English writers of the eighteenth century, by Defoe and Richardson and Fielding, and certainly by Madame de Lafayette in France, is the characterization process. The process of differentiation of characters. So that they not be allegorical characters, as they were in some of the Medieval writing. And this I think is taken to its very culmination by writers such as Balzac and Dickens. In Dickens, it is by differentiation that you know the characters. They’re so peculiarly characterized in the way they speak, they dress, they move, their names, everything: Micawber, Uriah Heep, etcetera. Flaubert makes us understand that the characters are the product of the writing, of their names, and that their actions are verbs. I was talking to Susan Sontag the other day and she says, “How difficult it became to write after Flaubert.” Because you are self-conscious, because you’re conscious of every adjective, of every verb, of every noun, every single thing you write. It is no longer innocent after Flaubert, and it’s certainly not innocent after Proust, who I think takes psychological writing to its very culmination. There’s very little you can do after that in the investigation of the self, of the individual, of his internal characterization. And then we have a man without a face, who is the man of Kafka. I ask myself, when I read Kafka, this man has no face, K. has no face. But then, because he has no face, should I guillotine him, should I chop his head off? Or can I give another kind of face to him? And I realize that Kafka is writing stories at the same time which are about forgotten myths, myths he finds in the basements of history and of the mind, things that had been forgotten, precisely as you say, and then recreates them. And he says so, he declares, “I only want to rewrite the old German and Jewish myths and fairy tales, that’s all I want to do in this life.” But of course in rewriting them, he writes a new myth, a new fairy tale, through the appropriation of the forgotten, of the old memory, the forgotten memory. And in this double creation of the new character, this devastatingly solitary and faceless man who becomes a bug, Samsa, in the writing of his fable, we suddenly come upon the meaning of all the opportunities of modern fiction, I think. Kafka said a wonderful thing, “There shall be much hope, but not for us.” And he’s offering a sacrifice of literature and himself for the future, which I find very, very moving. And through this understanding of Kafka, I understand a lot of what we’re trying to do in Latin America, which is not to create psychological characters in the Flaubert sense, or differentiate characters in the Dickens sense, but to discover something new which I couldn’t name for you. Which perhaps we could call figures. I support myself a great deal on archetypes, and especially the great archetypes of Spain: Don Juan, and La Celestina, and Don Quixote. But these are archetypes and I’m interested in figures. I’m interested in three young men thrown on a beach with no identification and no memory. So as to surprise them in the moment in which their character is totally unconstituted and see where we can go from there and how we can construct a new character, a new personality, a new identity, through a more intimate relationship with the facts of our civilization, of our culture.
But is there, in the end, with Kafka or elsewhere, anything that can differentiate the resonances of a story that is fable-like or myth-like as opposed to one that is a new version?
Of course. The old myth disappears in a way. What you get is a story called “The Judgment,” or “The Metamorphosis,” or “In the Penal Colony.” And the original myth is lost. Sometimes in his little, little fables and versions of Prometheus and of Ulysses, he lets you take a look at the way he goes about it. “Did Ulysses hear the sirens or not? Did he plug his ears or did they know that he would have his ears plugged, because he is wily, and therefore that time they didn't sing?” And what happened to Prometheus? And finally, how bored and how tired we are of Prometheus, and the eagle, and the liver, everybody’s tired of the tragedy. These things he lets you perceive, but when he goes into his major works you don’t perceive them, you are right.
Are there particular writers you like to read?
Well, I’ve already mentioned the novelists of the present, I think that fills in the picture quite well. But, in the past, I’m a great reader of Cervantes. That is one book I read every year, I can’t live without that book. There’s a Guatemalan author who lives in Mexico, Tito Monterroso, who has a volume of Don Quixote open in every room in his house, at a different page. And he goes from room to room reading this, he always has Don Quixote open. I would like to imitate him. That’s one book I can’t live without.