I return with this, a quasi-theoretical effort I wrote for the presentation of the book of stories 'so many nights as necessary' of Ricardo Romero.
Maybe I grab the win, and again I go back more often. Do not ask me rhythm, but I can ask my mood.
Romero once told me in an early morning conversation, 'the writers are all wankers, monkey. " Coming from him, and heard by me, or him coming to me, that statement can not be limited to the mood of custom.
That someone is 'wanker' has nothing to do with the amount of times you masturbate, but fidelity to an ethics of masturbation. The pajero true, the writer, knows the pleasure of masturbation has to do with the story. Even starting from a still image, a pornographic picture, which could allow the emergence of powerful image to own lust, it is necessary move it into a story that involves, always, a temporal succession. The vision of the female reproductive organ, without time, can not produce more than anatomical curiosity. This woman in the picture, which is shot that way looking at the camera, thus, has to be somebody. Who is it? She is the sister, the daughter of someone, perhaps even the mother. That is a step. Now, how I came to the picture. I know you from somewhere. Ah, is the daughter of my boss, right. That is, the image gains depth, part of a story. Pajero is a writer and then. Which is this. Romero tales are works on the ethics of the story, he knows something about this.
In a world where discourse is reduced to the power of images without the time, desire is a narrative ethics. Romero
A feature writer, a feature of their living writing that has no visible effect on their texts, is feeling a great pleasure to write. My foreign soil, to read, you can feel as much pleasure writing about characters so desolate, desperate, bitter. But they may think it is possible that pleasure is the feeling generated by the sudden disintegration of a pain. For example, we would understand that sexual arousal is a specific type of pain that leads to break apart what we call pleasure.
Masturbation and writing are two activities that are performed alone, and that necessarily indicate the existence of another. Approaching the other, which is unreachable in itself is a race to infinity. Romero know that writing never going to get to the other, but at least if we go that route in the direction of the story, we can fall every so often on the shoulder of a pleasure unrepresentable.
Thus, when and tells about the tragedy of his characters as his own, to give them the possibility of the story to those beings who do not know what part of the choreography of the human corresponds to them, but they can not stop running the steps the perfect turn, allows us a perspective that goes from the unbearable tension the redemptive laughter.
For this it uses deceptively structures adjacent to the fable. For the future of the action, these characters seem to embody a single feature, thus the effect deriving from stories, like when fables using animals to highlight this quality metonymic, making the character becomes a metaphor for something else. When Romero soulless characters are about to embody the metaphor for something else, suddenly dissolve, they turn all its nuances, become boundless and cease to represent anything other than themselves and their loneliness.
Romero style, at first glance and from a purely aesthetic perspective, it may seem old or outdated. Use all the words are necessary, sometimes more than one test for the same purpose, moving with slow pace, without leaving the reader to find. I mean who does 'resource economy' and has an 'overwhelming pace', or any of those qualities and budgetary gymnastics that are often deployed in critical reviews or Sunday supplements. Whether or
seem (at this point does not matter) does not mean an old book that is written in an old-fashioned way. Quite the contrary. Is that the prose feels an echo of another time, but as if it were the constant updating of a ritual, or trade, or trade ritual that has fallen into disuse, but may kept alive a secret.
Ah, yes, literature.
An old-fashioned text, however, not worth reading. Not because it has happened, because to be literature must have happened, but because fashion, by imposing its own logic, is extinguished when no longer present. And So many nights is old compared to a literature, very fashionable, which is strong at the time overlap. In these times, by a strange effect aplanamento of historicity, is written and read by seeing that in the future will be the text. Inevitably, this produces fashion texts, texts that are not made with soapy matter of present reality, but to calm the anxiety of consumers who want to think and from a future that is not known.
If the theory we think the future will tell what the current literature, and from there wrote recently, if we believe that this requires a consistent literature as if it were possible discrepancy, we were frozen to the reflected image of the future in the lake and drowned in this.
Because the future is the image of the future, and the pure image is the denial of death. In this book, each image is loaded with time: a black basketball player failed, taxi working boy and has the saddest eyes in the world, look at the time in a mirror and rehearse a play of Jordan, clowns are multiplied when nobody Look, when there are images for anyone. A former soldier who works as a watchman in a factory adheres to the image of a distant, flickering light in which he believes to discover, or invent, a series of messages.
The other literature, this pure, historical proposed right now, as the day a couple of planes hit the towers producing faster historic moment in history, this literature can only be defended from cynicism . So many nights ... is a book that gives me the impression not tolerate a cynical reading. And the cynicism already. Went out of fashion. Not deserve to be used as a perspective to read anything.
The denial of transcendence, as proposed by the cynical reading, brings, or need, the damping effect of irrelevance, ensuring the temita this finitude. So a cynical reading would stay asleep reading this book just made flesh in the midst of this temporary mess, which embodies the gap.
The scenario in which these stories develop their temporal masking is the night. And here is half the title misleading, or wrong (usually generate these errors, the language is a virus when it appeals to sentences produced and slogans), the real title should be as many nights as necessary. The night is one, for all the characters, the same, can not be two because it never ends. The night that never ends has to be, is one. And this is not is just a metaphor. Part of the talent of Romero, as I said, is the ability to dribbler metaphors that the action of the texts proposed. Because the night has that ability, as we read in these stories, reproduce, be the same each time, as resorption of the night every night. The day is the sequence and rhythm. Small variations and accumulation generated by the sense of identity, official accounts. The night, however, start from scratch each time. And if the night does not end when the pace finally eradicated, it creates a scenario where no story can stop or end.
endings of these stories have that curiosity, it seems that the characters are desperate to finish the story, to find an outcome that allows them to place your story in the past, a point that makes the wound closure, while the author dissolves all certainties in a continuum that threatens to infinity.
So, then, instead of making his characters are a stage act to strengthen their identity, instead of giving his characters what they want, give them the opposite to see what they do. Given the infinite. And so these little critters, all half suicide to the eternal night comes they are a pride with an apology, the finitude of man.
And so as a writer, without compassion, you can turn tragedy into carnival.
