inventing revolutionary style
Lucas has an argument with his political comrades on the Left. They want him to write in a simpler style because, as a leftist intellectual, he has (they feel) a responsibility to reach the largest possible audience. To this attack, Lucas offers a fourfold defense.1
First, he tells his friends that “language is a medium, as always, but this medium is more than medium, it’s three quarters at least.” His comrades’ attack views language as a transparent, clean piece of glass through which a crowd could peer upon the unobstructed vista of “meaning” or “content.” Lucas argues that, at most, you can pretend to ignore the glass, but it is there nonetheless, and furthermore that the most stimulating vista is the one in which the smudges and imperfections in the glass (let us call them complications) merge under the viewer’s gaze with the terrain of meaning, intention, theme, and content that, it turns out, only appeared to lie behind and separate from the glass but that are, in fact, part of it, on the same plane. (And perhaps you will have noticed that this writing here is subject to the same qualifications and tension. My metaphor of the pane of glass is itself a pane of glass, a piece of language that only indirectly points to what Lucas is getting at, and if that pane shapes what we see, then no politics of language can afford to pretend it’s invisible..)
Second, Lucas argues that to write (and to read) in a way that accepts the thickness of language means going beyond those habitual (I won’t say “everyday” because it doesn’t have so much to do with frequency as with attitude) uses (or abuses) of language and entering instead the zones of imagination beyond the limits of the word: “language and invention are fraternal enemies/and from that struggle literature is born,/the dialectical encounter of muse with scribe,/the word refusing to say it/until we wring its neck/and the scribe and the muse come together/at that rare instant that later on/we will call Vallejo or Mayakovsky.” [Ù43]
Third, Lucas suggests, turning now a bit aggressive, that there is a kind of resentful will to mediocrity at work in the demands his comrades have voiced. “Can’t there be a secret and sometimes sinister necessity to make the scale of values uniform so as to be able to stick your head above the wave?” Maybe, Lucas hints, his comrades falsely represent the minds and values and desires of the so-called mass reading public.
Lucas isn’t alone in this line of thought. Italo Calvino, writing from another corner of the left, agrees: “If we assume a reader less cultured than the writer and take a pedagogical, educational and reassuring attitude toward him, we are simply underlining the disparity. Any attempt to sweeten the situation with palliatives such as a literature of the people is a step backward, not a step ahead. Literature is not school. Literature must presuppose a public that is more cultured, and more cultured than the writer himself. Whether or not such a public exists is unimportant.”2
Maybe the public for writing is not sitting out there, ready-made with a uniform set of abilities and interests. Maybe it is created, in part, in the act of writing and therefore maybe the public will be as varied as the writing that is set before it. If so, maybe the claims of his comrades – the self-appointed spokesmen for this public – really express their own desire for a mediocre public against which they will stand out; a desire, baldly stated, to preserve their prestige and leadership positions, even at the expense of deprecating their constituents.
Fourth and finally, Lucas seems to let up, breaking the tension by proposing a pact in which “If we [experimental writers] renounce verbal creation at its dizziest and most rarefied level, you will renounce science and technology in their equally dizzying and rarefied forms.”
Is he joking?
1 Julio Cortázar, “Lucas, His Partisan Arguments,” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 137-141. In Spanish: “Lucas, sus discusiones partidarias, Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 307-310.
2 Italo Calvino, “Whom do we write for?” The Uses of Literature, Trans. Patrick Creagh (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 85. Two letters, in particular, from early 1968, show Julio’s effort to practice a way beyond the conventional dichotomy between the aesthetic and the political. Having just returned from a Cultural Congress in Havana on the responsibility of intellectuals in the third world, he wrote “Three weeks I’ve spent discussing these problems with 400 delegates at the cultural congress in Havana; don’t think that it helped me see more clearly, but in any case I understand better what I no longer can or want to do. It’s almost funny to tell you this during days in which I spend my time correcting and sending to my editor a novel that will piss off all my ‘committed’ friends [62: A Model Kit –sc] given that they will find it insolently ‘literary’; I still believe that one gets to the freedom of mankind, and even to the new man that Che sought and desired, by many routes.” Julio Cortázar, “A Jean Barnabé,” January 30, 1968, Cartas 2: 1964-1968, Ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 2000), pp. 1221-2. See also “A Jean Thircelin”, February 2, 1968 in Cartas 2, pp. 1224-5. Interestingly, C. L. R. James attended the same congress (though I’ve found no record of their meeting each other), and there delivered a powerful challenge to the gathering. For a review of James’ views on this topic, and specifically his disappointment in the Cuban revolution on just this score, see my “Silence and Dialectics: Speculations on C. L. R. James and Latin America,” Rethinking C. L. R. James , Ed. Grant Farred (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), pp. 131-164.