It's About The Love

Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994)

A continuation of an idea. Remember my essay that mentioned the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti? I thought not. It's OK. It was about what happened to various writers when their countries decided that what they wrote was unacceptable. The piece was an inquiry about whether that kind of police state might be growing in the US.

Here's an excerpt:

[Onetti] went on to become one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, earning Uruguay's National Prize in literature in 1962. In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra's short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. "The bodyguard") as the winner of Marcha's annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day's edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn't and wouldn't do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene Marcha, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime).

Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. A long list of world-famous writers-including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti-signed open letters addressed to the military government of Uruguay, which was unaware of the talented (and completely harmless) writer it had imprisoned and humiliated.

As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr.

Join me in Spain.

Apparently, printing the offending story greatly displeased those in power, and the government responded aggressively with summary imprisonment and ultimately with exile. It could have responded with disappearance, kidnapping, and murder. Until the Marcha story was printed Onetti, evidently, was willing to try to co-exist with a military government, one like the fictional one in Lavanda:

One of the last communiques of the government of Lavanda had forbidden, with plausible whereases and wherefores, anyone to write "eyes the shape of hazelnuts" or "hazel-colored." Just as it was forbidden to surround, to highlight, a form with an outline in white or black. Clever painters use cobalt blue or greenish smears that bring diapers to mind.

Confronted with this, Onetti didn't pack up his typewriter, strap it on his back and cross the border to Brazil, or find solace with other South American ex-pats in the cafes of Barcelona (that's another, long essay entirely), or seek asylum in Mexico like so many Chilean's who later confronted Pinochet's similar, repressive government. No, his love of place let him, required him to stay. Despite an unacceptable government. Despite unacceptable censorship. Despite unacceptable restraints on his vital freedom of expression. His staying was a manifestation of love.

Onetti has frequently been compared with William Faulkner. Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Onetti's Santa Maria, a city resembling Montevideo, was alive in his pre-exile stories, and like Faulkner's, many of Onetti's characters migrate from one novel to another. The pharmacist who is instrumental in helping to open a brothel in Santa Maria in one story turns up again in several others. The doctor who provides an abortion in one novel has nightly soirees in another at his unusual home built on stilts. The novels and stories merge into a place, Santa Maria. The reader becomes unsure how s/he knows so much about the character or the place, but recognizes the familiarity, the connections.

When Onetti was driven into exile, his heart broke, and he could no longer return to Montevideo.

Onetti's first novel after his flight from Uruguay was Let the Wind Speak. It was written in Spain in 1979. And it's a novel of coming of age, nostalgia, recollection, and sadness, set in Lavanda, a city across the river from Santa Maria, a city deeply loved but forbidden to the narrator. The narrator, by turns a phoney doctor, a painter, a police chief, reminisces, and his stories are imbued with his love for his native Santa Maria. And the writing, in this narration by the painter, is extraordinarily evocative, even in translation into English:

Frieda and I listened, in the pauses, to music on the radio. It was, I believe, a German before Bach and the man, his music, were always right. They told me that the only thing that mattered was to paint. That it was necessary, even for the hygiene of the soul, to do without women, friends and money, to lose all interest in landscapes and oceans, never to accept, never to take seriously the meaninglessness of a world, of a life that I didn't make myself, that were forced on me, that are there, outside and inside, implacable each time upon awakening, without anyone's having had the courtesy to consult me, to ask my opinion, at least, about some petty, and apparently, unimportant detail.

I forgot my answers, my objections almost immediately. The man playing music on the radio proceeded from one phrase to another, from one tempo to another, invariably being right and saying so in a miraculous way.

(page 75).

This is all about love, and its negation, its being thwarted. Here, the love of a city to which entrance is denied. The love of old friends, who can no longer be seen. The love of a life that no longer exists. Memories that cannot be replicated. A tangible feeling of remembered but spoiled love.

I read Let The Wind Speak on a long airplane trip, with many landings and take-offs, from the west coast of the US to the east. I had lots of time to think about it as I bounced around the August sky. And I wondered why I and so many others had apparently ceded love of country to the bullies and the loudmouths and the brown shirts and the radio bloviators and the politicians. Why, for example, did I think that most people proclaiming their love of the US were hypocrites, liars, fakers, and totalitarians of various stripes? Didn't I, too, love the country? Well, yes, but not like them. Never like them. Their "love" disgusts me.

So I wondered whether I could find a love of my country that was more like Onetti's. I wondered if I could feel how deeply I love it, but at the same time, how all of its many imperfections, its lunatic, criminal government, its appetite for violence and waste and war and greediness and empire repel me. Could I feel these feelings simultaneously? I don't want to skip over these ideas and feelings. And rush on to politics. No. What I'd prefer is to see whether I can feel all of these feelings of love and despair and sadness and fear deeply, before doing anything, before planning anything.

For now I just want to feel the love and its many complications.

It Can't Happen Here

It Can't Happen Here is the title of a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis. It raises the question whether a rightwing, fascist political party can come to power in the US. It used to be that the very idea was preposterous, unthinkable, impossible. I'm no longer so sure of that, and acknowledging the frightening possibility has changed my reading of stories about events in other countries in frightening, perplexing, alarming ways.

A short synopsis of It Can't Happen Here may help:

It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who resembles (to some extent) the flamboyantly dictatorial Huey Long of Louisiana and Gerald B. Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose far-right views earned him the nickname "The Jayhawk Nazi". It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders.

Hmmm. This isn't the only novel with this theme. The most recent may be Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America:

The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels.

The President Lindbergh of the book is, well, a fascist, a Nazi sympathizer decorated earlier by Nazis. And his presidency fosters nationalism, isolationism, anti-semitism and racism as if those were aspects of US patriotism.

The New York Times review described the book as "a terrific political novel" as well as "sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible."

Preposterous. Because it couldn't happen here, right? Or could it? I used to believe it couldn't happen here. I don't know what we call the trend of the last 7 years, but we cling desperately to the idea that that couldn't really happen here, not really, why, our country is constructed in a way that prevents that from happening, right? I mean, we have the Constitution and a democracy and checks and balances, don't we? Hah.

But what if you believe it could happen? Just assume for the sake of this discussion, that it could. Let's assume that what is happening now and has been happening for the past seven years (the Patriot Act, the torture, the repression, the throttling of free speech, the lawlessness, the signing statements, the extraditions, the raids on immigrants, the endless, long list of abuse of power) became even more pronounced and even more widespread and even more blatant. Then all of those stories we read about the excesses of nearby, foreign governments but dismissed as not being able to happen in the US, all of those stories might actually be read as cautionary tales, stories about what might happen in the US unless things changed, unless Constitutional government were restored.

Three stories, all from South America in the 1970's illustrate this nicely. They make it clear that horrible injustices that have occurred in other countries aren't so impossible in the US. And we need to think of them differently.

Item 1. Jacobo Timmerman:

In the decade of the 1960s, Timerman established himself as a popular journalist, and, before the decade had come to a close, he was able to found two different weekly news magazines. Later, from 1971 to 1977, Timerman edited and published the left-leaning daily La Opinión. Under his leadership, this paper publicized news and criticisms of the human rights violations of the Argentine government during the early years of the "Dirty War". On 15 April 1977, Timerman was arrested by the military. Thereafter, he was subjected to electric shock torture, beatings, and solitary confinement. These experiences were chronicled in his 1981 book , CellPrisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, and a 1983 movie by the same name. /snip

After his release from prison in September 1979, Timerman was forced into exile and sent to Tel Aviv, Israel.

Item 2. Juan Carlos Onetti:

He went on to become one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, earning Uruguay's National Prize in literature in 1962. In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra's short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. "The bodyguard") as the winner of Marcha's annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day's edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn't and wouldn't do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene Marcha, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime).

Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. A long list of world-famous writers-including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti-signed open letters addressed to the military government of Uruguay, which was unaware of the talented (and completely harmless) writer it had imprisoned and humiliated.

As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr.

Item 3. Charles Horman:

In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer. On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc concentration camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. The whereabouts of Horman's body were presumably undetermined, at least according to the Americans, for about a month following his death, although it was later determined that, after his execution, Horman's body was buried inside a wall in the national stadium. It later turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital.

If you read these three items with the idea that Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile aren't the US and these things just couldn't happen here, they are far away, exotic but commonplace examples of banana republic injustice. They feel like scary fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

But if you assume instead that '70's South America isn't really all that very much different from the present US, or, if you insist, from where the US is headed, the stories become chilling, frightening, and worrisome in a new way. They smell like oppression, abuse, repression, and loss of human rights. Are we protected from these things or not? Are we safe? Are we free?

This is just another reason why we simply cannot afford to continue the current trend in this country. And it's a reason why we have to take the present threats from Bushco and its allies seriously. And it's a reason why we need jealously and vigorously to protect our civil rights.

Remembering Juan Carlos Onetti

Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994)

Onetti's Wikipedia entry contains the best micro fiction, except that, well, it's completely true.

An excerpt:

In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra's short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. "The bodyguard") as the winner of Marcha's [Marcha is a Uruguyan newspaper] annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day's edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn't and wouldn't do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene [against] Marcha, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime).

Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. A long list of world-famous writers -including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti - signed open letters addressed to the military government of Uruguay, which was unaware of the talented (and completely harmless) writer it had imprisoned and humiliated.

As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes.

Coming in the future, essays about his writing.