MY DEAR CARLOS:
An anniversary for you, and for me too: seventy years since your birth, and thirty since I met you for the first time, in Prague. You came there a few months after the Russian invasion with Julio Cortázar, with Gabriel García Márquez, to show your concern for us Czech writers. A few years later I came to live in France when you were the Mexican ambassador there. We met often and talked. A little about politics, a lot about the novel. Especially on that second subject, we were very close to each other.
We talked about the astonishing kinship between your vast Latin America and my little Central Europe, the two parts of the world similarly marked by the historical memory of the Baroque, which makes a writer hypersensitive to the seductions of the fantastical, magical, oneiric imagination. And another point in common: both our two parts of the world played a decisive role in the evolution of the twentieth-century novel, of the modern—let’s say post-Proustian—novel: first, during the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, thanks to the constellation of great writers from my part of Europe: Kafka, Musil, Broch, Gombrowicz … (we were surprised to find we had the same admiration for Broch, greater, I believe, than what his compatriots felt, and different: in our view, he opened new aesthetic possibilities for the novel; he was thus above all the author of The Sleepwalkers); then, through the nineteen-fifties, -sixties, and -seventies, thanks to another great constellation of writers in your part of the world who continued transforming the aesthetic of the novel: Juan Rulfo, Carpentier, Sabato, then you and your friends….
Two fidelities shaped us: fidelity to the revolution of modern art in the twentieth century and fidelity to the novel. Two fidelities not at all convergent. For the avant-garde (the ideologized version of modern art) has always relegated the novel to a position outside modernism, considering the form to be old hat, irrevocably conventional. When, later on, in the 1950s and 1960s, the latter-day avant-gardes began to create and proclaim their own modernism for the novel, they did it in a purely negative way: a novel with no characters, no plot, no story, if possible no punctuation: a novel that came to be called the anti-novel.
A curious thing: the people who created modern poetry did not claim to be making anti-poetry. On the contrary, from Baudelaire on, poetic modernism was seeking a radical way to get at the essence of poetry, its most profound specificity. In this same way I imagined the modern novel not as an anti-novel but an arch-novel. The arch-novel would, primo, focus on what only the novel can say; and secundo, it would revive all the neglected and forgotten possibilities the art had accumulated over the four centuries of its history. Twenty-five years ago I read your Terra Nostra; what I was reading there was an arch-novel. It was proof that such a thing existed, could exist. The great modernity of the novel. Its fascinating and difficult newness.
I embrace you, Carlos!
MILAN