Crack Manifesto

CRACK MANIFESTO Pedro Ángel Palou, Eloy Urroz, Ignacio Padilla, Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, Jorge Volpi (Translated from Spanish by Cecilia Bartolin and Scott Miller) THE CRACK’S FAIR (A GUIDE) Pedro Ángel Palou Italo Calvino, I believe, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, was the one to accurately point out the challenges facing the Crack novels. In those pages, Calvino refected on how literature and, above all, the narrative have been losing their potential readers to technology developed for entertainment: video games, mass media, and, most recently, for those who can afford them, virtual reality games through which—oh, para- doxes of development—someone with a very modern helmet and ana- tomical gloves can see, hear, and even touch the adventures offered on compact discs. How, then, can a narrator with his scarce means compete to attract readers lost in this vast world of obscurities? Calvino, always one step ahead, knew the answer: by using the oldest weapons of the oldest pro- fession in the world—no matter what people say about prostitution: Lightness. Calvino refected upon this virtue of literature, thinking that works such as Romeo and Juliet, The Decameron, or even Don Quixote © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 177 H. Jaimes (eds.), The Mexican Crack Writers, Literatures of the Americas, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62716-8 178 CRACK MANIFESTO have their powerful narrative machineries built up according to an unu- sual lightness. Or better: to an apparent simplicity. It was easier to con- vey a terrible moral message by using this resource. The sharp look, the acidic social criticism are subject to a light and fresh humor which is not free, by its turn, from the most terrible of sarcasms. Chesterton used to say that humor in literature must produce hilarity, while freezing the smile in a refective grimace that can stop time and unbury the mirror. The frst place which we have visited at the Crack’s fair: The House of Laughter. Quickness. Communication theorists have known for a very long time that an infation of information brings a defation of meaning. The Persian Gulf war, the frst war broadcast via satellite, was a good example: in reality, we knew nothing of it although we believed we were watching and getting to know everything. However, we cannot deny that the frst thing to scare us was the dreadful sterility. If shortly after the beginning of the century the world shook itself, and the verb is graphic, with news of the Titanic’s shipwreck, nowadays the tragedies of the war in Sarajevo do not shock nor even provoke pity: they inform. The second place visited: The Roller Coaster. Multiplicity. Don Quixote is maybe the ultimate work par excellence in literary history. Gargantua and Tristram Shandy are at its heels. It is obvious to point out reality itself is multiple, it comes to us as multifac- eted, eternal. We need books in which a whole world is revealed to the reader, and can trap them. This word has a unique use here. It is not about identifcation, but the superpositioning of worlds which are being talked about. Using all the metaphorical potential of the literary text so we can say again: “So here you are, meet one another.” The third place visited at the Crack’s fair: The House of Mirrors. Visibility. The last virtue of prose, its crystalline texture. Even Flaubert agreed that: “What a sensitive matter is this of prose! One never fnishes to correct it. A good piece of prose must be as rhythmical and sonorous as a good verse.” Not sheer formalism, but a search for intensity of form, going deeply into the magnifcent virtues of the Spanish language and its multiple meanings. The fourth place at the fair: The Crystal Ball. Exactitude. Calvino subtly told us we should isolate the values to which we have been referring. And this item illustrates how there cannot be exactitude without precision, how there cannot be quickness without precision and exactitude, and how it is impossible to have lightness CRACK MANIFESTO 179 without vertigo, transparency, and speed. Every good piece of prose is exact. Even more, it is balanced. The old concern about form and con- tent is useless when a literary work faithfully searches for exactitude. Conan Doyle, for whom effect was everything, was pretty aware of that. To achieve it, one must use everything else. However, maybe the best lesson taken from Calvino’s words is that of the impossibility of exactitude in a literary work if it is naturally opened, reached without effort. Picasso said: “Inspiration does exist, but you have to fnd it working.” What are we trying to say? Agility and capacity of description (and to describe is to observe with the intention of making things interesting, exactly as Flaubert wanted, but also to select the big little things which are not just part of life, but which are life) are the ingredients that allow the reader to keep on reading restlessly to elevate his curiosity. This is what the narrator must pay more attention to at the end of the century: exactitude, which means to use the right word at the right time. And with this we have named the penultimate place visited: The Shooting Gallery. Consistency. Italo Calvino planned to write this section based only on the analysis of one of Melville’s most beautiful texts, Bartelby the Scrivener. This odd character, employed by a notary, refuses, little by little, to exist, repeating the sentence “I’d prefer not to.” In the end, Bartelby is locked up and dies repeating that sentence, even refusing to eat. Consistent with its life project and its future, the Crack novel longs for renewal in the last spot to be visited: another walk through the Crack’s fair, with the same willingness for failure, as shown in the following tetralogy: 1. The Crack novels are not small, edible texts. They are, rather, a bar- becue: let others write the steaks and the meatballs. Between that which is disposable and ephemeral, the Crack novels oppose the multiplicity of voices and the creation of self-ruling worlds, which is not a tranquil task. First commandment: “Thou shall love Proust above everyone else.” 2. The Crack novels are not born from certainty, which is the mother of all creative annihilations, rather from doubt, the older sister of knowledge. There is not one kind of Crack novel, but many; there is not one prophet, but several. Each writer discovers his own breed and shows it proudly. Descendants of champion fathers and 180 CRACK MANIFESTO grandfathers, the Crack novels take all their risks in stride. Second commandment: “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s novel.” 3. The Crack novels are ageless. They are not novels of formation, and Pellicer’s phrase reemerges: “I am old, and believe that the world was born with me.” They are not, therefore, the frst works of their authors, sweet temptations of autobiography; they are not about frst loves or family histories, which underline everything. If the writer’s most valued possession is the freedom to imagine, these novels go much further, demanding more from their narra- tors. Nothing is easier than to write about oneself; nothing is more boring than a writer’s life. Third commandment: “Thou shall honor schizophrenia and listen to other voices; let them speak through your pages.” 4. The Crack novels are not optimistic, rosy, adorable novels; they know, as much as Joseph Conrad does, that being hopeful in an artistic sense does not necessarily imply believing in the world’s kindness. Or they search for a better world, being aware that such a fction can exist only in a place we will never know. The Crack novels are not written in the new Esperanto, which is the language standardized by television. It is the celebration of language and a new baroque: of syntax, lexicon, and the morphological game. Fourth commandment: “Thou shall not take part in a group that accepts you as a member.” ***CRACK’S GENEALOGY Eloy Urroz In his well-known book Mexico in its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity, the American critic John S. Brushwood insisted that Yáñez established the tradition of the “profound novel” in 1947, and, following in the same tradition, Pedro Páramo was published, which Brushwood also commented upon: “It is natural that some readers com- plain about the diffculty of the novel’s accessibility, and that some of them prefer just to despise it instead of making an effort to understand what it is trying to say. This reluctance to such an active participation is comprehensible, though I still think that the fnal results are really worth the efforts.” What is notable in these two cases are, frst of all, the oppor- tune adjective “profound” to refer to a tradition or a series of novels and CRACK MANIFESTO 181 novelist writers who, in their times, “profoundly” understood creative work as the most genuine expression of an artist who has compromised with his work. When Brushwood talks about the “diffculty of access” to certain books, for example, the Crack writers immediately think about the novel “with demands” and “without concessions;” “demands” whose results, in the end, “are worth the efforts,” and “concessions” that, in the long run, only help to further weaken the panorama of our narrative and to discourage honest readers. So, the dilemma of the Crack novels is that they aspire to the heroic feat of fnding what Julio Cortázar called “active participation” from their readers, at the same time the authors sell and the readers consume an abominable “reluctance.” Thus, Crack’s genealogy is taking shape.

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