Communications are not always simple with Havana, but after exchanging several emails, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez attends us via videoconference from his home. He demonstrates an exquisite kindness, which might surprise anyone expecting to encounter the rough narrative voice of his Dirty Havana Trilogy, following which he was globally hailed as a kind of tropical "Bukowski." We talk about the limits and presumptions of autofiction in our conversation, largely motivated by the exercise of doubling that he stages in Dialogue with My Shadow. On the Craft of Writing, his latest book published by Anagrama. A work he wrote quickly ---"everything was in my head, unconscious, the questions and the answers"--- due to the need to "stabilize my position regarding the act of writing", aware that throughout the thousands of interviews conducted ---they are preserved in a Princeton archive, he explains to us--- his answers, to similar questions, had been fluctuating.
Traditionally, it has been suggested that the genre in which author, narrative voice, and protagonist coincide is autobiography. But even when the narrated events have been lived by the author, literary artifice intervenes in their assignment to a protagonist figure, transmuting reality. It opens the window to that realization of life from the doubling that is fiction: "I have been living with Pedro Juan since September 1994, when, together, we began to write Dirty Havana Trilogy", Pedro Juan Gutiérrez acknowledges in the prologue of Dialogue with My Shadow. "I am me. And he is my shadow. Although the gentleman has his ego well-mounted, and if asked he will say the opposite: 'I am me, and Mr. Gutiérrez is my shadow'." A kind of alter ego, doppelgänger or daimon that wanders and accompanies him in the same settings, even getting involved in literary matters, not just as a character. That is why the "philosophy of life" that writing is for Pedro Juan Gutiérrez unfolds from the adjustments and disagreements "between the damned, bastard Pedro Juan, and me, who are so different."
Of course, this baroque-like splitting has its tradition in literature. The emancipation of the creature, which happens in the Quixotic Niebla ---when at one point in the fiction, towards the end, the protagonist addressed the demiurge himself, Miguel de Unamuno, to demand a happier fate, having caressed the tempting invention of a different genre, that of the "nivola"--- also appears at the beginning of that shamelessly biographical text ---Diálogo con mi sombra. Sobre el oficio de escritor--- in which Pedro Juan Gutiérrez recalls his foray into the world of literature and drops the masks. Or, rather, he makes explicit how necessary their use is in the course of the narration, complementing what was stated in the text conceived practically at the same time under the title Estoico y frugal. In this, his last novel published by Anagrama, he also talks about his childhood and his formation as a writer: "I think that since childhood I had learned to become engrossed and observe the world from a hazy distance" (…) at the same time that "I was effusive and I liked to converse and have friends, I never liked living apart and in silence."
"I am me. And he is my shadow. Although the gentleman has his ego well-mounted, and if asked he will say the opposite: 'I am me, and Mr. Gutiérrez is my shadow'"That ambivalence, the oscillation between the intense experience of life and its recreation in perspective, points to nothing less than the Aristotelian purpose of "knowing," that is, knowing the reasons for what exists or understanding oneself: "I immediately realized that almost everything that went into the diary was a distillation of my days, and served to clarify the small daily mysteries that are revealed when writing," he explains inStoic and frugal. While inDialogue with my shadowit reflects it in a key of perplexity: "I have spent my life trying to understand where that need to write comes from. And I don't understand it." A sincere or rhetorical answer, but one that in any case continues to encourage that task, investigation or "craft." Writing functions asmeans for diagnosis and, although it does not eliminate the problem or suffering, it opens a parallel world for its possible assimilationthrough representation in a tragic, comic, or tragicomic key. The thaumaturgical role of catharsis, the purification enabled by one's own or others' narratives ---experienced in any case as one's own, as they are always understood from oneself--- was already described by Aristotle in hisPoetics, the first reflection on the aesthetic experience promoted by literature.
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez confesses that he doesn't understand why he writes, but it is the awareness of that ignorance that, precisely, motivates him to keep writing. A compulsive yet controlled feedback. In his self-interview, he states that "writing is seeking an answer, analyzing, studying something you know well (…). One tries to understand so as not to go crazy (…) perhaps that's why I feel best in poetry. In poetry, demons are unleashed, I feel free." A practice that, compared to writing diaries, he alludes to in Stoic and Frugal as an "even more filtered distillation, through invisible spiders moving in the dark." In that same work, he speculates the following: "Perhaps I only write to avoid the journey to the bottom of hell (…) it is necessary to devise control mechanisms before reaching the point of shipwreck. Observe, meditate, write." The exorcism that literature enables, the discovery of the word that refers to what cannot be referred, grants a sense of consistency even when working with something that happens on the other side. For really, there is no such thing as two worlds, a strict separation between fiction and reality. "If one day I am a writer ---Pedro Juan explains he told himself, after discovering Breakfast at Tiffany's--- I want to be one in that way, so that it is not known what is reality and what is fiction."
About mimesis
Today we know what Kant and other thinkers already intuited about imagination, or the faculty to remember/produce images: that it comes into play in most mental operations ---with or without consciousness--- allowing us to understand what happens in the present and, similarly, enabling the conception of other worlds, lived with a comparable degree of reality. The affective discharge that precipitates tragedy ---even when the mournful event happens to another--- reveals the scope of truth aroused through "imitation" (Mimesis). Aristotle studied it in Poetics, emphasizing not the literal reproduction of reality, but the "verisimilitude" of what is represented: "Imitation is connatural to man from childhood (…) and through imitation he acquires his first knowledge." In addition to pointing out the pleasure he finds in the course of this activity, he specifies that even facts that seem exceptional can become credible, provided that the author puts himself in the situation and experiences what he writes about. Materials are carefully elaborated and certain parameters are altered so that the fabulated reality is plausible in its narrative concatenation.
The case of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez is paradigmatic in this sense. With unwavering sincerity, in our conversation he recalls that "there are writers who are terrified of writing about their own lives. My project has been different. I write from my most immediate experiences. I always carry a notebook with me." However, the promotion of this kind of never entirely false dissociations ---which we discussed a year ago with Milena Busquets regarding Gema, her fictionalized exercise of remembrance--- is not free of conflicts: "It brings me many problems ---confesses Pedro Juan Gutiérrez in Diálogo con mi sombra--- because most readers are convinced that there is no fiction in my books. And embarrassing situations arise." An idea that we find again in Estoico y frugal, a practically coetaneous novel that we have been quoting and that confirms the parallel fixation of his concerns, in this case the reflection on the literary fact: "I use the lives of neighbors, family, friends. And that is betrayal. At the same time as a stigma, the writer's betrayal is also a lie. Only an appearance of betrayal, because one never copies in detail." An expression that prodigiously condenses the spirit of mimesis.
"There are writers who are terrified of writing about their own life. My project has been different. I write from my most immediate experiences. I always carry a notebook with me"The raw material of the novel is life itself, which is why after a meticulous effort of selection and reframing ---a "distillation", with the precious elaboration of a direct and uncluttered language, inspired by Capote and Hemingway--- Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's literature seems to beat with its own pulse.The pirouette of artifice consisting of reflecting life without artifice, just as it is ---raw, beautiful, or doomed to meaninglessness---, is as attractive to some as it is annoying to others. InHerralde's Papers. A History of Anagrama (1968-2000), Jordi Gracia includes a letter that the editor addressed to Pedro Juan Gutiérrez regarding hisTropical animal"I think the novel works well and that your readers will like it, it will conquer others and also irritate others, like your previous books." And it is that Pedro Juan had been deservedly cultivating the fame of a cursed writer since theDirty Havana Trilogy, with scenes of striking rawness, which ---as he has explained--- reflect the misery and hopelessness that Cubans had to experience after the dismemberment of the former USSR, and which dramatically illustrated the phenomenon of the rafters in the mid-90s.
Among the many authors that Pedro Juan Gutiérrez includes in his particular Poetics in the form of a self-interview ---the Dialogue with my shadow. On the craft of writing--- the mention of Milan Kundera is not surprising, who in novels such as The Joke or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting ---probably his two best works--- recreates some of the traumatic experiences lived under Soviet domination. However, the Cuban's allusions refer above all to the exercise of theoretical reflection that he poured into The Art of the Novel. There we find statements regarding the ontological status of modern fiction, whose limits are porous, while encompassing the sphere of all reality, and which the author of Don Quixote would have outlined with visionary daring: "To understand with Cervantes the world as ambiguity ---explains Kundera---, to have to confront, not a single absolute truth, but a bunch of relative truths that contradict each other (truths incorporated into imaginary egos called characters), to possess as the only certainty the wisdom of the uncertain, that requires an equally remarkable strength."
The author, that character
When the narrator is the protagonist and, as in Pedro Juan's case, that recreation has been carried out so recklessly, the tendency on the part of not a few readers is to eliminate the quota of ambiguity and essentialize the author, turning him into a mask with typified features. From it, he seems to want to distance himself in Diálogo con mi sombra, as if to bequeath an image more akin to his reality or more distant from that of his character, who ---nevertheless--- insists on reappearing. Regarding a recent project, in which it was proposed to opt for a completely different narrative point of view, he explains to us: "Pedro Juan is stubborn... I try to get away from him. 'Go away!' I tell him, like a demon". The creature that one cannot stop being emerges ex novo due to its constitutive closeness. As an alter ego, it stands as a creator and ratifies how blurred, in truth, the line separating fiction and reality is. And it is that, as happened to Søren Kierkegaard, the final clarifications, supposedly conclusive by the author of authors ---"or of characters with their own voice"--- are largely condemned to ambiguity.
About the craft of writing, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez acknowledges that it is "solitary", and that one must be "stubborn": you have to "believe deeply in what you do", he repeats on more than one occasion. The inaugural one ---in the chapter of Diálogo titled "The Beginnings"--- is perhaps the most striking: "As soon as a writer becomes humble or repents, he is already lost. All his creativity stops. You have to say: 'I am the best.' And believe it". Who is speaking in this confession? Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, or rather his tortuous daimon, who pushes him to the task that precisely gives consistency to lived reality? In one of the most interesting chapters of the Poetics, which in some editions has been titled "Advice to Poets" ---as in the Gredos edition, from 1974, with a translation by Valentín García Yebra---, Aristotle states that "those who are within the passions are very persuasive, and he who is agitated truly agitates, and he who is irritated truly angers. That is why the art of poetry is for men of talent or for the exalted". The latter term is sometimes translated as "madmen", as it can be related to the divine rapture or mania that his master Plato had already mentioned.
"As soon as a writer becomes humble or repents, he is already lost. All his creativity stops. You have to say: 'I am the best.' And believe it"The empathic identification with what is represented on stage or narrated in different formats is promoted with greater verisimilitude from its experimentation by the author, an approach with Aristotelian reminiscences that we find again in the Cuban's proposal: "Inside me there are several men who sometimes fight and detest each other, but almost always collaborate and unite when the enemy approaches the walls." Thus, the discretion and generosity that Pedro Juan Gutiérrez demonstrates in our conversation may clash with the image of ---in his words--- "unbearable, macho, and rude Caribbean man." It is not unthinkable that, from among the multiplicity of characters that we all potentially are, it can be producedan evolution towards a predominant character, more worked, consciously chosenand aimed ---in this case--- at "spiritually calming down." In our conversation, his hand doesn't shake when affirming, against his character ---Pedro Juan--- and against those who ask him for otherHavana Trilogies"Since 2007 I have been trying to lead a slightly healthier life... and to write from there. Because writing always comes from life, from context. If you have an aggressive, furious life, well, that's what comes out."
Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's drift towards a more sophisticated or exquisite form seems clear ---as he specifies in his Dialogue with my Shadow---, and even a "tendency towards stoicism (...), towards the study of Buddhist texts and frugality." The quote does not come from the novel Stoic and Frugal, but it illustrates the extent to which his craft as a writer runs parallel to the meaningful narrative of his own life; and how the inquiry into the "laboratory of fiction" (Paul Ricoeur) is not only aesthetic, but also activates axiological evaluation, the revision or putting into perspective of moral values. In the course of that inquiry, and thanks to the bifurcations, one hits and strikes the bullseye of interiority. A kind of connection that temporarily reveals the good relationship with one's own daimon ---that treated by Aristotle in his Ethics--- and which is usually mistranslated as "happiness."