inventing exile
“Let us invent, instead of accepting, the labels they stick on us.”1
Julio was speaking on the subject of literature and exile. It was the late 1970s, a dark time indeed for Latin Americans and their writers. The youthful enthusiasm expressed in and sparked by the Cuban revolution of 1959 had given way to an awesome display of counter-revolutionary force, backed by the might of the US government, and fueled by the fearful and fearsome quiescence of many Latin Americans caught in the headlights of inconceivable brutalities.
It would be easy, Cortázar said, to point fingers of blame at the generals, at the US government, at its corporate heads: “too easy and hypocritical,” actually, are his exact words.
Instead Julio marshaled the only weapon he had, he ever had: invention. He didn’t make light of exile, or trivialize its attendant emotional traumas, he didn’t make a silly game of it. But he did challenge his audience to make something new out of it, the way poets have always made something new of the elements at hand, the way life makes something by combining what’s lying around, the way the star-gazer makes something out of a group of gleaming pins stuck in the cool cushion of the night sky.
The first step, as always for Julio in any process of invention, is to let yourself go [Ù23]. In this case, speaking to his fellow exiled writers, it meant let go of the self you’ve identified as “innocent victim”: it would be possible to invent in exile, out of the stuff of exile, he cautioned, only if the writers first “took a step backwards” “to see themselves newly, to see themselves new [Ù47].” Only then could a writer slip off the garment of names imposed upon her by the dictatorship and invent new names for herself. Only then could the exiled writer transform the imposed distance of exile into the adopted distance of balanced perspective and say “This banned or burned book wasn’t altogether good: let us write now another better one.”2
What, Julio asks, if we then were able to see exile as positive, as an opportunity, refusing thus the exile’s view that he had been victim of a grave trauma. How do we “free ourselves,” Cortázar asks, from the “fact” (read: given situation) that “they have expelled us from our countries”?
This is not precisely the world of “Silvia” [Ù8]. It is not, of course, a fictional tale, and the exiled writers of the 1970s are not children faced with the benevolent dismissals of their parents. But the strategy Julio recommends is, nonetheless, remarkably similar.
What emerges as the crucial theme in his speech is that the writers should not fall into the trap of thinking that the dictatorships have the power. Or rather, and more precisely, the writers should not fall into the trap of desiring the power that the dictatorships have because doing so can only lead them to ignore the power they have, a power that exceeds the rigid power of the dictators [Ù54, 60].
Because our true efficacy lies in extracting the maximum advantage from exile . . . . The Latin American dictatorships do not have writers, but rather scribes: let us not convert ourselves into the scribes of bitterness, of resentment, or of melancholy. Let us be truly free, and to begin with let us free ourselves of the commiserating and tearful label that tends to show itself too frequently. Against self-pity it is better to hold up, as crazy as it might sound, that the true exiles are the fascist regimes of our continent, exiled from the authentic national reality, exiled from social justice, exiled from joy, exiled from peace. We are more free and we are more in our land than they. I’ve spoken of madness: it also, like humor, is one of the ways to break the molds and open a positive path that we will never find if we keep folding beneath the cold and sensible rules of the enemies’ game.
So Julio calls for invention, beginning with the invention of the self that has been exiled and proceeding to an invention of the condition of exile. Notice that invention empowers, as it did the children in “Silvia,” and that it does so, first of all, by putting a choice back in the hands of his audience, exactly when they identify themselves by the lack of a choice.
Now, Julio reminds them that they have a choice, the choice of how as writers to write the story of their exile. From there, in choosing an affirmative route, they will be writing also the future story of the past which is to say writing the story of their present. And to write the story of one’s present is already to begin to author one’s own history, to compose one’s own life.
A dictator, who requires an obedient scribe, cannot bear to have a writer invent her own words, cannot bear to have anyone else write the story of the present. The inventive autonomy Julio here recommends works like the bucket of water with which Dorothy douses the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz,” leaving her to whine, as she melts into the ground, “Who would have thought that a good little girl like you could ruin my beautiful wickedness?!”
1 Julio Cortázar, “América Latina: exilio y literature,” Obra crítica/3 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 170.
2 Julio Cortázar, “América Latina: exilio y literature,” Obra crítica/3 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), p. 172.