Empty Words E-Book

Mario Levrero

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 209

Beschreibung

A writer fills a notebook with exercises to improve his writing believing that this will lead to improvements in his character. His determination and commitment despite interruptions, distractions, highly inventive procrastination and worries about his mental health make this book extremely relatable in our distraction-filled age. What appears to be merely a functional exercise transforms into reflections and anecdotes about life, coexistence, writing, sense and the senselessness of existence.Written with Kafkaesque lucidity, Empty Words reflects 'the lost spirit' of our time.

Leseprobe

First published in English translation by And Other Stories in 2019 Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Originally published in Spanish by Ediciones Trilce, Montevideo, in 1996 as Eldiscurso vacío. Copyright © 1996 the heirs of Mario Levrero English-language translation copyright © 2019 Annie McDermott Translation rights arranged by Agencia Literaria CBQ SL, [email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book. The rights of Mario Levrero to be identified as author of this work and Annie McDermott as the translator of this work have been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or places is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-911508-50-2 eBook ISBN: 978-1-911508-51-9

Editor: Lizzie Davis; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Steven Marsden

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book was supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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This book and its contents exist in relation to my wife, Alicia, and her world. Although it goes without saying, I should emphasise that this novel is dedicated to Alicia, Juan Ignacio, and Pongo the dog – in other words, to my family.

M.L.MONTEVIDEO, OCTOBER1996

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Contents

Translator’s NoteThe TextProloguePart One: ExercisesPart Two: The Empty DiscoursePart Three: ExercisesEpilogue: The Empty Discourse

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‌Translator’s Note

When asked by one interviewer to name his influences, Mario Levrero listed Mandrake the Magician, a comic-strip hero who hypnotised his enemies, along with Lewis Carroll, tango music from the 1940s, detective novels, The Beatles and the early days of Tía Vicenta, a satirical Argentinian current affairs magazine. ‘It’s a mistake to expect literature to come only from literary sources,’ he said, ‘like expecting a cheesemaker to eat nothing but cheese.’ The Levrero archive in Uruguay’s University of the Republic is similarly heterogeneous, containing records of homeopathic treatment, a guide to yoga exercises, graphs showing how much time he spent on the computer each day, drawings of the students in his creative writing workshops and a personal set of homemade tarot cards.

In Latin America, it’s said that Chile produces poets, Argentina produces short-story writers, Mexico produces novelists and Uruguay produces ‘los raros’ – the strange ones. Levrero was a raro of the highest order, though he rejected the label, complaining that it meant journalists and critics were forever wanting him to do new strange things. ‘It would be far more interesting for them if, instead of writing, I committed a murder,’ he grumbled in a famous ‘imaginary interview’ he conducted with himself. Still, it’s hard to think of a more fitting category for this uncategorisable writer who refused to be bound by rules or conventions, and for whom the ‘only thing that matters in literature is writing with as much freedom as you possibly can’.

Levrero made his first departure from the conventions of ordinary life at the age of fourteen, when a heart murmur (combined, perhaps, with a dislike of going to lessons) obliged him to stay home from school and spend his days in bed, reading and listening to the tango station Radio Clarín – which, thanks to a system he’d devised involving pieces of string, he could turn on and off without having to get up. He didn’t finish secondary school, and has said that the Guardia Nueva tango club in Montevideo served as his university. It was there, for example, that he first heard about James Joyce, and it also gave him the name for the Guardia Nueva second-hand bookshop he ran with a friend throughout his twenties. Though staunchly apolitical in later life, Levrero was briefly a member of the youth wing of the Uruguayan Communist Party, and was one of the protesters who ended up with diarrhoea after fascists poisoned some chorizo donated to a march in support of Cuba in 1962. (José Mujica, later the president of Uruguay, was on the same march.)*

In 1966, at the age of twenty-six, Levrero wrote his first novel, La ciudad (The City). It was inspired by the work of Kafka: until reading him, Levrero said, he ‘didn’t realise it was possible to tell the truth’, and La ciudad was ‘almost an attempt to translate Kafka into Uruguayan’. From this point on, Levrero wrote some twenty books, among them the dreamlike ‘involuntary trilogy’ of La ciudad, París (Paris) and El lugar (The Place); the rollicking detective novel parody Nick Carter se divierte mientras el lector es asesinado y yo agonizo (Nick Carter Enjoys Himself While the Reader Is Murdered and I Expire), and the autobiographical El discurso vacío (Empty Words) and La novela luminosa (The Luminous Novel, forthcoming from And Other Stories and Coffee House Press) – this last, a book with a 450-page prologue explaining why it was impossible to write the book itself, being widely recognised as his masterpiece. It is astonishing, considering the wildly varied nature of his literary output, that it should all form a coherent whole, and yet it does: everything Levrero wrote is instantly recognisable as his.

The novel Empty Words, first published in 1996, is a perfect introduction to the levreriano, or Levrero-esque. It charts the author’s attempts to turn his life around using ‘graphological self-therapy’: if he can improve his handwriting, he thinks, he’ll be able to improve his personality, ‘transforming a whole plethora of bad behaviours into good ones and catapulting me blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, and success’. And yet as he persists with his daily handwriting practice, he comes to realise that the exercises ‘are becoming less calligraphical and more literary as time goes on’. Another kind of text is trying to break through: ‘a flow, a rhythm, a seemingly empty form’ is guiding his hand, and he finds himself continuing to write without knowing what it is that he’s writing, hoping to uncover the mystery of this ‘empty’ text as he goes.

This is pure Levrero: for him, writing is both a mystery to be solved and a means of solving it; at once a tool for exploring the Unconscious and a by-product of those explorations. Also typically levreriano is the way his efforts to understand this mysterious force are discussed in the same breath as his attempts to give up smoking, complaints about the weather, accounts of his dreams, investigations into the inner workings of his computer and musings about the behaviour of his dog. Levrero writes about all these things in the same unmistakable voice, combining an earnestly matter-of-fact desire to make himself clear with a sardonic, deadpan and fantastically absurd sense of humour. Here he is on his worsening mental state: ‘I can feel myself getting more anxious by the day, at a rate I can even represent graphically by means of a curve showing my daily intake of cigarettes.’ On (short-lived) improvements to his daily routine: ‘Allow me to record, so it’s known in the centuries to come, that I’m writing this at eight-thirty in the morning.’ On trying to program the computer to make sounds: ‘After a while, I managed to bring about some interesting bird-like cheeping’. And practising writing the letter r, which he finds particularly troublesome: ‘rhododendron, rower, sombrero, bra strap, parricide, reverberate, procrastinate, corduroys (I repeat: corduroys).’

Throughout his literary career, Levrero resolutely denied that he had any such thing. He shied away from publicity, rarely left his house or even answered his doorbell towards the end of his life, and used to boast that he was impossible to interview because his voice didn’t show up on audio recordings – which he made sure of by speaking in an indecipherable murmur as soon as anyone switched on a tape recorder in his vicinity. And yet, despite his best efforts, he became something of a cult figure in Uruguay and Argentina during his lifetime. Enthusiastic readers and friends went to great lengths to get his work published, and his legendary literary workshops, which focused on liberating the imagination, produced hundreds of students who consider themselves his disciples. Ever since the publication of La novela luminosa in 2005, one year after his death, he has been heralded as one of the great Latin American writers of the twentieth century, and it’s been an honour and a joy to translate him.

ANNIE MCDERMOTTLONDON, SEPTEMBER2018

* Much of the information in this paragraph is taken from Jesús Montoya Juárez’ excellent book Mario Levrero para armar: Jorge Varlotta y el libertinaje imaginativo (Ediciones Trilce, 2013).

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‌The Text

Empty Words is a novel formed from two different strands, or groups, of texts. One, entitled ‘Exercises’, is a series of short handwriting exercises, written with no other purpose than that. The other, entitled ‘The Empty Discourse’, is a single, unified text that’s more ‘literary’ in intention.

The novel in its current form was constructed as a diary. To the ‘Exercises’, which were ordered chronologically, I added the parts of ‘The Empty Discourse’ that correspond to each date, using headings to separate the two. This solution was suggested by Eduardo Abel Giménez as an alternative to my previous method, which had been based on some fairly unreliable typographical variations.

Later, while editing, I removed a few passages and even entire ‘Exercises’, at points to protect my own privacy or other people’s, but always with the aim of making the text less boring to read. I also added the odd phrase or paragraph here and there to clarify the meaning of some references. Apart from these minor surgical procedures, this text is faithful to the originals.

M.L.COLONIA, MAY1993

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Empty Words

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‌Prologue

22December1989

Something within me, which is not me, which I search for

Something within me, which I sometimes think is me, but never find

Something that shows up for no reason, shines for an instant, and then

vanishes for years

and years.

Something I also forget.

Something

which is close to love but not quite love,

which could be confused with freedom,

with truth,

with the being’s absolute identity –

but which can’t be contained in words,

considered in concepts,

or even recorded just as it is.

It is what it is, and it’s not mine, and sometimes it’s inside me

(but not very often), and when it is,

it remembers itself,

I remember it, I think it and know it.

It’s not worth searching; the more you look

the more distant it seems, the better it hides.

You have to forget it completely,

almost to the point of suicide

(because without it life is worthless)

(because those who’ve never known it think life is worthless)

(which is why the world creaks as it turns).

This is my illness, my reason for living.

* * *

I’ve seen God

flash by in the eyes of a whore,

give me signs with an ant’s antennae,

turn to wine in a bunch of grapes in the dust,

appear before me in a dream as a disgusting giant slug;

I’ve seen God in a sunbeam, giving slanted life to the afternoon,

in my lover’s purple jacket after a storm,

in a red traffic light,

in a stubborn bee sucking at a slight, wilted flower,

trampled and sad in the Plaza Congreso.

I have even seen God in a church.

11March1990

I dreamed I was a photographer, running to and fro enthusiastically with a camera. I was somewhere very large, a kind of warehouse or depot, though it could also have been the lobby of a big hotel, and I was trying to find the right angle from which to photograph two lesbians so that, although they were located fairly far apart in the huge space and even at different heights (maybe one was up some stairs), their mouths met in a way that suggested a kiss. They both had their lips painted a deep red. The one closest to the camera was in profile; the other, who was higher up, was facing me.

Later I find myself aboard an enormous double-decker bus – on the roof, or in an open-top area on the upper level. I’m photographing or filming scenes from a big city. All of a sudden there’s a commotion, something happening in the distance, like waves crashing over skyscrapers. People tell me it’s the end of the world. I photograph the chaos, which is far away and difficult to make out, and feel excited and strangely elated. I wake up with tachycardia.

When I go back to sleep, someone’s telling a story (and I see the story taking place), or I’m watching a film, although somehow I’m also part of the action. There’s a brown rabbit buried in the snow, and he’s burrowing to and fro under the surface, moving quickly from place to place. I start to worry he’s going to hit something, a tree or a rock, because suddenly he seems hesitant, but then I find that he’s learned to communicate with a dove by means of a system that, in the dream, was explained in great detail. The dove was flying above the rabbit’s head, above the snow, and guiding his movements.

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‌Part One

Exercises

10September,1990

My graphological self-therapy begins today. This method (suggested a while ago by a crazy friend) stems from the notion – which is central to graphology – that there’s a profound connection between a person’s handwriting and his or her character, and from the behaviourist tenet that changes in behaviour can lead to changes on a psychological level. The idea, then, is that by changing the behaviour observed in a person’s handwriting, it may be possible to change other things about that person.

My aims at this stage of the therapeutic endeavour are fairly modest. To begin with, I’m going to practise writing by hand. I won’t be attempting calligraphy, but I’ll at least try to manage a script that anyone could read – myself included, because these days my writing’s often so bad that not even I can decipher it.

Another of my immediate aims is to develop large, expansive handwriting in contrast to my microscopic scrawl of recent years. A further, more ambitious aim is to make my writing more uniform, since at the moment I mix cursive script and printed letters quite arbitrarily. I’ll try to remember how each letter is written by hand, more or less the way I learned in school. The idea is to achieve a kind of continuous writing, ‘without lifting the pen’ in the middle of words. I think this will help me improve my concentration and the continuity of my thoughts, which are currently all over the place.

11September

Day two of handwriting therapy. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I gave the page I’d written to Alicia and she found it easy to read. Now I’m trying to do three things: (1) keep the letters to a suitable size; (2) get back to real handwriting, without printed letters creeping in all the time; and (3) not lift my pen – that is, only dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s once I’ve finished writing the whole word. This last point might be the most difficult, though the ‘real’ handwriting isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

At first, looking at what I’ve written so far and comparing it to what I wrote yesterday, there seems to be some progress. Today’s writing, however – though larger and more legible – reveals a certain nervousness; I’m writing more quickly now than I was yesterday. But I also notice that the letters are more ‘separate’, more spaced out within each word, less bunched together than before. As if each one had recovered its individuality. All in all, I’m happy with today’s work and the improvements from yesterday. I know I’m still a long way from achieving my goals, even the most basic ones; I know I still can’t remember how to write some capital letters and some lower-case ones. But everything will come with time.

24September

I’m returning to my handwriting therapy after an extended interruption, since my mother’s stroke took me away from home. During that time I really missed this daily discipline: though I haven’t been doing these exercises long, they’ve already started to seem like an entirely positive – and enjoyable – habit, and a big help when it comes to centring my inner self and preparing for a more orderly, purposeful and balanced day ahead.

Now there’s an interruption from the outside world, in the form of a small, flustered woman calling to me in an angry voice, revealing unmistakable signs of impatience. However, I try not to lose the slow, deliberate, meditative rhythm of my writing, because I know these daily exercises will do wonders for my health and character, transforming a whole plethora of bad behaviours into good ones and catapulting me blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, and success with women and in other games of chance. And now, without further ado, I bid myself farewell until the same time tomorrow, or earlier if possible.

25September

My handwriting therapy continues. Yesterday, the person who usually reviews these pages said the writing had become a bit more difficult to read after the long break. I think there are at least two reasons for this, and one, of course, is lack of practice. The other, which is interesting to consider, is the fact that yesterday, unlike previously, the act of saying something and the question of how to say it (in other words, literature) felt more important than the pure calligraphical exercise.

Right. I’m getting distracted again and paying too little attention to the handwriting and too much to the subject matter, which is anti-therapeutic, at least in the therapeutic context I’ve chosen. I’m sure this shift in focus would be welcome and constructive in other therapeutic contexts, but I can’t go mixing the different elements here. I need to stick to what I set out to do: producing a kind of insubstantial but legible text.

I think my handwriting’s clearer today than yesterday. Let’s see what the person who usually reviews these pages has to say about it.

26September

More handwriting practice today. It’s clear from the first strokes of my pen that I’m feeling down, that my heart’s not in it, and I have no interest in talking myself around. Maybe I’m coming down with a cold, caught from Juan Ignacio or Pongo the dog, who’s feeling down today too. There could also be something about the weather that’s bothering us all. Most likely, though, is that my mood is the result of a dream I had this morning involving piles of dead, rotting, blood-covered rats and my grandmother. The dream, in turn, must be the result of everything I’ve been through in recent days (between the twelfth and twenty-first of this month). The figure of my grandmother in the dream surely corresponds to that of my mother in real life, since when I was at my mother’s side during those days, I often found myself thinking about her and my grandmother, and about how much my mother has come to resemble her mother with age. What’s more, there were very few moments during that period when I had a clear sense of being next to my mother: instead I felt, with a profound, spontaneous certainty that came from deep within me, that she was my grandmother.

In my dream last night, my grandmother lived in a house I was staying in; I was just passing through, as if visiting a new place, maybe a seaside resort. There were piles of dead rats in my bedroom, and then I started seeing them elsewhere around the house, especially in the kitchen. I said something about ‘calling the council or the police’, but in the end I didn’t. It was late, and besides, my grandmother seemed perfectly fine with what was going on, treating this situation that to me seemed so out of the ordinary as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

27September

The important thing is to be very patient and concentrate hard, trying as much as possible to draw the letters one by one and giving no thought to the meanings of the words they’re forming – an operation which is almost the complete opposite of literature (especially because it involves slowing down my thinking, which is used to my typewriter and always wants to jump ahead, suggest new ideas, and make new connections between thoughts and images, concerned – it’s part of the job, I suppose – with the continuity and coherence of what’s being said).

I need to stick to simple phrases, then, however empty or insubstantial they sound. The moment I start paying attention to the content, I lose sight of the point of this therapy, namely drawing each one of the letters.

As I write this, Juan Ignacio is being a nuisance and trying to get his mother’s attention, while she’s enjoying a rare moment of relaxation and watching a film I recommended on the VCR. I notice Ignacio has been brought up not to accept his mother’s relaxing, having fun or even being ill; when she does any of these things, he gets more demanding than usual, complaining and sulking intolerably. There’s an unhealthy equilibrium to this household and how it functions, the product of a set of habits or patterns of behaviour that don’t do anyone any good. These patterns have been adopted gradually through ‘chance and necessity’, and the idea of altering even one of them leads to unease, nervousness or even a crisis in any of the original members of the family unit.

28September

I ought to get hold of some phrases for practising letters with ‘stems’, the sort of thing I used when I was learning to type. ‘European port’, ‘I’d like a table’, ‘quite a squint’, ‘tomato ketchup’, ‘fool’s gold’. But monotonous activities like that are so tedious. I’d rather make slower progress – a few steps forward, a few steps back – and often let my writing get smaller or more misshapen as my hand races wildly across the page in pursuit of my thoughts. Because I can’t stand repetitive, routine tasks, and – in writing, if not in life – want my experiences to be somehow new, unexpected, adventurous. Like, for example, my investigations into a computer whose instruction manual is incomplete.

Earlier this week, after hours and days of hard work and research, and various (literally) thunderous failures, I persuaded the computer to make a noise. Then I managed to do it more consistently, knowing what I was doing, and yesterday I was finally able to make music (a basic, rudimentary little tune, but music nonetheless), all without the manual so much as mentioning the word ‘sound’. I managed it thanks to a program in BASIC with a few seconds of music in it, which I was able to ‘open’ and ‘list’. The hardest part was making sense of the lengthy program code, identifying the part that referred to the music and working out the meaning of a series of statements beginning with enigmatic words.

29September

Today I didn’t have the chance to do these exercises (which, like all exercises, are best done daily) at my usual time, around noon – they’re normally the first activity of the day after breakfast – and so I’m doing them on what’s technically 30 September, at 3 a.m. It should be understandable, then, if they don’t go as well as one might hope. I’m only starting them now because once I’d finished all the tasks that prevented me from doing them at the usual time, I forgot all about them and instead sat down at the computer to continue my investigations into sound. After a while, I managed to bring about some interesting birdlike cheeping, which I recorded, though I’m still not entirely sure how I managed it. Previously, using a similar method – or perhaps the same one, since I don’t remember exactly what steps I followed – I made it produce the sound of a guitar or mandolin. But I didn’t record that and now it’s lost, at least for the time being.

I’m still not entirely sure how sound works on the computer. I know how sound works in general, but not specific sounds, since each one involves three values – or four, if we include duration. The most disconcerting thing is that varying one of these values sometimes has the same effect as varying another. So the research goes on, the investigations go on. And for now, I have the cheeping.

30September