George Steiner, O Silêncio dos Livros
tradução de Margarida Sérvulo Correia
Gradiva

George Steiner, O Silêncio dos Livros
tradução de Margarida Sérvulo Correia
Gradiva

George Steiner, O Silêncio dos Livros
tradução de Margarida Sérvulo Correia
Gradiva

George Steiner, O Silêncio dos Livros
tradução de Margarida Sérvulo Correia
Gradiva

George Steiner, O Silêncio dos Livros
tradução de Margarida Sérvulo Correia
Gradiva

George Steiner, O Silêncio dos Livros
tradução de Margarida Sérvulo Correia
Gradiva

George Steiner, O Silêncio dos Livros
tradução de Margarida Sérvulo Correia
Gradiva

Voter, c’est nazi !

[Photo ILYSite exhumée des poubelles - à tri sélectif - de l’Histoire. ]

o outro começa com um poema do autor:

O silêncio é a morte
E tu, se falas, morres
Se te calas, morres
Então, fala e morre.

Tahar Djaout

«Para nuestro modo actual de ver las cosas, el poema de Rossetti es una bagatela. En suma, en este momento de la historia de la sensibilidad y de la percepción verbal, es difícil 'leer en absoluto' los Sonnets for Pictures. Sus palabras están en la página; una crítica textual y erudita puede proporcionarnos toda la asistencia léxica o sintáctica necesaria. Sin embargo, la mayoría de nosotros sólo podría llegar a comprender ese soneto por medio de un ardid: una suspensión de los reflejos naturales en beneficio de algún objetivo didáctico, polémico o arqueológico.
Y es que, estamos 'ciegos', 'verbalmente ciegos', ante la poesía decadente y prerrafaelita. La ceguera proviene de un cambio capital en los hábitos de nuestra sensibilidad. Nuestro sentido contemporáneo de lo poético, nuestros presupuestos, a menudo incuestionados, sobre la utilización válida o espuria del lenguaje figurado, se han desarrollado justamente a partir de una negación deliberada de los ideales de fines de siglo. Precisamente con el rechazo de la estética victoriana y posvictoriana que animó a los escritores modernistas, empezó a cobrar fuerza una nueva severidad, una nueva insistencia en estructuras comprobables. Durante algún tiempo nos hemos declarado incompetentes para realizar una lectura abarcadora y comprehensiva (palabra que en sí misma lleva la raíz de comprensión) no sólo de una gran parte de Rossetti, sino también de la poesía y de la prosa de Swinburne, William Morris, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson y Richard Le Gallienne. 'Cynara', el poema de Dowson, o Javanese Dancers, de Arthur Symons, constituyen de algún modo la prueba. Aun bajo la fría luz de los primeros años de la década de los noventa, resulta innegable que esto es poesía, real, genuina. Algo vivo y pleno de autoridad propia tiene lugar allí, fuera de nuestro alcance. Está en juego mucho más que un cambio de moda, algo más que la aceptación por el periodismo y la academia de un canon de la poesía inglesa elegido por Pound y Eliot. Este canon ya está siendo puesto en tela de juicio; la supremacía de Donne puede declinar, mientras que Browning y Tennyson están en visible ascenso. Un panorama literario que ve pocas cosas encomiables entre Dryden y Hopkins sólo evidencia su miopía. Pero el problema de cómo leer a los poetas prerrafaelitas y en general a los poetas de fines de siglo afecta zonas mucho más profundas. ¿Cómo imaginar una revolución del espíritu que nos devuelva a esa tierra de leyendas y colores cristalinos

In a region of shadowless hours
Where earth has a garment of glories
And a murmur of musical flowers...?

Es, literalmente, como si se hubiese perdido una lengua o la clave de un mensaje cifrado».

*Después de Babel, 2005, México, FCE

It is like weeping at a funeral. Are you crying for the deceased or for yourself?
Obviously for yourself. What is that?
Self-indulgent.
It is akin to stamping your foot and throwing a temper tantrum because mummy won't take you to McDonalds.

This reminds me a little of a documentary i saw about Mugabwe's youth training camps, which systematically brutalised generations of children. One chap, who had raped the young girls as they came into the camps, was asked if he felt any remorse. With the same disconnection from any recognisably human reality, he said calmly, "No, I only took the pretty ones."

As Nietzsche observed, reason is pre-determined by character. So a true sociopath could see, for example, a man crying because his wife is dead and pronounce coldly "self-indulgent", or quite honestly deny any remorse for raping young women because, after all, he "only took the pretty ones."

My response to an argument, whether in conversation, email, blogging, or a book, isn't so much to do with the logic as the tone. Thus i acknowledged the intelligence and many virtues of Stanley Fish's How Milton Works while deeply disliking the authorial voice and reacting against him at every turn. It took me a while to understand my response: the key is in the title - 'How Milton Works' - there is something mechanistic and deadening about Fish's mind; he offers the definitive, final account of Milton, as if the poet is a piece of clever machinery taken apart and analysed. Fish has figured out how Milton works, the end.

My favourite works of literary criticism, by contrast, have a generosity and spaciousness which encourage thought and interpretation. Thus i have read Harold Bloom's The Western Canon three times over the last decade, and am planning a systematic & no doubt joyous re-read of my George Steiner library this autumn. i would never, ever, touch How Milton Works again and if i were trapped in a lift with Fish i would intimidate him with my waistcoat.

i don't think the kind of writing i like need be wishy-washy or unsure of itself; but it doesn't pretend to be absolute and final, because, after all, as a human being neither am i absolute or final. My explanations are not the only ones, just the ones that make sense to me at the time. Those who aim for a monolithic righteousness, their opinions to be taken as unanswerable verdicts, make themselves somehow inhuman; thus the sociopathic note in the funeral comment above.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion….  Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

*

It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance.  To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look!  I am alive.

~ John Williams, Stoner

[A diptych.  Can love of persons and love of art really be construed as expressions of the same basic force?  Is philanthropy (in the literal Greek sense) a subset of aesthetics – or vice versa?  Elsewhere Williams writes that love is “not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”  In Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, George Steiner writes that “literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love.”  Can we speak of a basic ecstatic impulse, to know and be known, encompassing all these things?]

Dans un mail, ce matin, Muriel évoque Appelfeld, Nelly Sachs, Rose Aulander, la Bucovine et Czernowitz la ville natale de Célan...
Tout à coup la phrase "au nord de l'avenir" me revient en tête, obsédante. Je l'avais entendue à l'époque dans la bouche de George Steiner :

“… je suis à la gare de Francfort entre deux trains. Dans un kiosque, un livre m’intrigue. J’ouvre et - première phrase - je lis: “Une langue au nord de l’avenir”...
J’eus un choc quasi physique et j’ai presque raté mon train. Cette phrase a changé ma vie. J’ai su qu’il y avait là une immensité qui allait entrer dans ma vie. Ce fût ma première rencontre avec l’oeuvre de Paul Celan”.

“Une langue au nord de l’avenir” ... la phrase est magnifique en effet ; et je la comprends d'autant mieux en ce moment que ma langue - et ma vie également - sont quelque part "...au nord de l'avenir"... Le choc existentiel, quasi physique de Steiner eut lieu à gare de Francfort ; J'ai regardé par la fenêtre du train le nom de ma gare : il y avait marqué en grosses lettres Alzheimer.

IN DEN FLÜßEN nördlich der Zukunft

werf ich das Netz aus, das du

zögernd beschwerst

mit von Steinen geschriebenen

Schatten.

J'avais parlé à l'époque (post de décembre 2003) du petit lapsus de George Steiner

“(…) o acto de leitura é profundamente solitário. Separa o leitor do resto da sala. Encerra a totalidade da sua consciência por trás de lábios imóveis. Os livros bem-amados são a sociedade necessária e suficiente do indivíduo que lê a sós. Fecham a porta às outras presenças e tornam os intrusos os demais. Em suma, a leitura reclama silêncio e um isolamento feroz (…) A colheita e recolha nos sentimentos no interior do silêncio de quem lê são atitudes duvidosas.” George Steiner

Nos tempos que correm, o silêncio está morto. Falo do silêncio interior e do próprio silêncio da sociedade. A leitura é um acto extremamente solitário e silencioso. Com a morte do silêncio, a leitura quase morreu. Há os que sobrevivem, os teimosos, que não se rendem à morte do silêncio, que preferem um bom livro ao ruído impertinente da vida exterior. De acordo com vários sociólogos, a pós-modernidade é caracterizada por um ruído permanente, onde a música assume um papel primordial. E o silêncio? Onde pára o silêncio? O indivíduo não consegue estar só, precisa a todo o custo da televisão, da música, da rádio, dos amigos, precisa de ruído. Daí a crescente dificuldade em ler um livro, em se concentrar. O que é terrivelmente assustador. O Homem matou o silêncio. E o silêncio é condição essencial para o estudo, a leitura.

Nos últimos tempos tenho-me aproximado cada vez mais da noite, do momento em que o mundo pára, e se consegue finalmente ouvir e estar em silêncio. O silêncio, tão maltratado, é uma condição essencial não só para ler mas para se conseguir viver (não sobreviver).

[citação: George Steiner, in No Castelo do Barba Azul, Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 1992]

The age of the book is almost gone.

George Steiner

Here's an excellent, Ondaatjian passage from his chapter on Joseph Needham:

-

He was a secretive man versed in collecting the saliva of foxes.  He exercised hypnotic powers. Essentially, however, he was a 'level-headed metallurgical chemist' capable of producing such alloys as pinchbeck or gold-plated iron.

-

Superb stuff.

"Everything I love most comes from a dying world." (Bryan Appleyard on Private Passions)

There's a great line somewhere on Scorsese's Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, in which Bob says he never felt that he really was the Robert Zimmerman everyone thought he was, that he didn't feel his home was where he'd been raised, or his family were really his family. Scorsese's title (from 'Like a Rolling Stone') was astute. Recently i read in John Crowley's The Solitudes, of a character's shocked sense that there is another, wholly different reality, that not only the world but he himself are other than he had always thought. An old story, going back to Plato and probably to the Orphic cults, and i dare say even further. Crowley's character seeks out knowledge of this other world, as Neo follows the white rabbit in The Matrix, delving into the strange and recondite as a purposeful unforgetting.

Bryan didn't mean, i think, that he was only interested in the past; but for myself the past as experienced in history and art is so much more vital than the present. Partly, that's because - as Bob Dylan pointed out when asked why he mainly played old music on his show - there's just a great deal of good art available from the dawn of art to, say, the 70s. Also the winnowing of time has consigned the novel and timely to the archives, while the unfashionable and untimely have a survivor's prominence.

i am also temperamentally inclined to prefer the established and tested to the novel and untrustworthy. When Papa Bear enthused over his iphone i admired the cleverness of it, then quickly lost interest. On a recce to Durham to scout out potential accommodation, should i decide to PhD there in October, my guide to the postgraduate accommodation in her college, recognising my temporal disaffinity, said, "It's good old stone. It's not just sprung up overnight."

There is good art, good writing and thought, of this age. i am excited when a new Michael Mann or Terrence Malick film comes out; likewise with books by Cormac McCarthy, George Steiner; i have read newly-minted blog posts by Ensio Kataja, Longsword, or Steven Moore and cackled with glee; music by Bonnie Prince Billy, Spiritualized, Arvo Part, Nick Cave, Low, Bruce Springsteen, even the often unbearable U2, all have often drastically changed my sense of the world. For all the great excitement i felt, 12 or so years ago, to encounter Bob Dylan and Beethoven after 2 decades of tedium, i reserve a special glee for the newly-minted, for works of art from my time.

But the worthwhile art of this time is a thin sliver indeed, compared to the vast storehouse of the past. i'd say 95% of my tastes are for the art of a dead world, for Sophocles, Homer, Bach, Proust, Dante, Milton; a contemporary novel must hold against the example of Dostoevsky or Jane Austen, as non-fiction must compare to Kierkegaard, Montaigne. Rather than disastrously alienating me from the modern world, this largely unseen rooting allows me a dextrous unpredictability in this mechanistic age. Having read and re-read Antigone, i am drawn into the substratum of human being, and emerge with a peculiar but adroit grasp of what does not change, what will always be true to us.

i take education and art seriously because works such as Antigone or Don Giovanni are for me traces, aftershocks, of the divine. Crowley's hero wonders if, like Hansel, he may have left a trail of crumbs, a way to retrace his steps from forgetting and loss, back to the truth. Kierkegaard likewise - though speaking very much of his mortal life - wrote of himself as a man lost in Faerie, who could only escape by precisely retracing every step. i am uninterested in this life, my life as Elberry. i am interested in what has gone before, what is beyond me.

As universities are pumped full of unintelligent, uninterested, ignorant pupils, who all must get a Pass, the 'canon' is no longer canonical, as being too difficult for the barely literate. The nonsense of Literary Theory has likewise conspired to shift emphasis from established writers to the secondary and fashionable, from Shakespeare to black lesbian dwarf novelists who, being black, lesbian dwarves, are judged to be superior to a 'dead white male'. i remember one student - now the Head of English at a school somewhere (and, i'd guess, earning about two or three times my salary) - refusing to read Paradise Lost "it's too long, weird, I'm not wasting my time on that", deriding me for having a copy of the King James Bible in my room, and plagiarizing an essay of mine on Emily Dickinson, because he couldn't be bothered studying her for himself. When he learnt i was planning to a MA he scoffed, "what for? You wanna be out there, earning!" And this was a relatively intelligent student.

This kind of laziness and stupidity is now encouraged; the obverse is scorned as elitism. This is a pity, as there is much to be had from the study of distant times and places. The human spirit being essentially unchanged, yet subject to very great surface change from age to age and place to place, to study Dante or Homer is to unlearn one's most superficial self, to delve into the deep, where we have our enduring being. The disjunction necessary to understand Homer is an energising difficulty, a means of slipping free of one's time and not so much into Homer's as into the timeless substratum in which Ancient Greece is no different to 21st Century Manchester. Just as, to triangulate a signal, it's best to take readings from two very different locations, so with wisdom: to be enchanted by Russian art, or Homer, or Dante, is to be drawn to the enduring and true, under the accidents of time and place.

This would be scorned as antiquarian and elitist by most people, i suppose. They would invoke the cliche of the Ivory Tower academic and sneer about 'real life'. But a rooting in the past, in the living art of a dead world, is to have room to manoeuvre in the present, not to be wholly a creature of one's time, a passive, bewildered fool. Anyone who had studied Thucydides would look with some scepticism on the war-mongering and self-righteousness of America, 'the renegade hyperpower' (in John le Carre's words).

The great lie of the present age is that only one's own lifetime has significance; what has gone before is consigned to period drama and watered-down history. But since most human beings will in fact have had several lives before this one, some going very far back, we take our substance from this now ignored past. To pretend that it no longer has relevance, because we have iphones and ipods now, is to deny the majority of one's own, unknown being. The sense of loss and bewilderment in our culture, as if we are amnesiacs wandering in the dark, is to do with this wilful abdication of the past.

But if so few of us are now raised within a tradition (however one may have kicked against it), the art of the past is still available, as Hansel's trail of crumbs, leading back out of forgetfulness. The white rabbit of The Matrix is the innocuous enough harbinger of greater remembering, of the dissolution of the thin world, and an entering into the kingdom of power, where we are truly human.

[George Steiner, Vere presenze. Contro la cultura del commento, una difesa del significato dell'arte e della creazione poetica]

(Absolutely due to laziness, I’m reviewing four books together, and I’m not doing full in-depth stuff for each not because of any lack on the part of any of the books, but because of the laziness. Each of these books are fantastic: all were (and should be) read and enjoyed slowly by the reviewer, very much moreso than the terse, quickly written reviews might otherwise imply.)

Joe Wenderoth’s No Real Light.

1. Wave books=gorgeous. Also: great writing.

2. It came out last year. I know. Whatever. It’s not like you can only buy a book the year it comes out.

3. Wenderoth is the best—and one of very few—poets who is, far as I can tell, almost unsaying stuff. I’ve spent hours with this book and I don’t really know how to get more clearly at what it feels like what he’s doing. It’s a poetry of incredible quiet, of very true, hopeful-in-spite-of (meaning: maybe overtly sad or whatever but never without some shine) moments. In all sorts of really significant ways, Wenderoth’s work could/should be some heavy duty tonic for what otherwise passes for poetry.

Tod Wodicka’s All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; And All Manner of Things Shall Be Well.

I’m not usually a fan of the you’ll-love-the-book-despite-the-character books: I like liking stuff, and I’m pretty fond of good and happy things, and so having to get over a character’s personality in order to enjoy a book isn’t typically what I’d consider A Good Time. T. Wodicka: thank you for getting me past this struggle.

The book’s centered around Burt, a Medieval re-enactor, but through Burt and his splintered family and real shaky relationship with the present, the story becomes an evocative tale (if slightly scary at times) of what it means to try to live within time, of who “owns” history, of how we all avoid or embrace or choose-your-verb our past (the scary part of the tale is the fact that Burt, so wrapped up in reenactment, spends bunches of his time reading books, which of course is not the best thing in the world to do, but of course you’re realizing that fact as you’re sitting there, feet on the red ottoman, reading a goddamned book). It’s also, at its heart, a real basic family drama—basic in the sense that families are always, in some way or another, fractured and crazy, and maybe family itself isn’t a noun but a verb and it means “putting shards together that may or may not have ever fit together in the first place.”

(review up by J. Maslin at NYTimes here) 

(and Kalfus' NYTimes Sunday review (read: take-down) here) 

Richard Zoglin’s Comedy at the Edge.

Good but not great, Zoglin’s book does a thorough job of painting pictures and telling tales about the standup comedy scene of the 70’s (with detours into the 60’s and into the early-80’s, but mostly about the 70’s). With whole chapters on Lenny Bruce, Carlin, Pryor, and Steve Martin (and some others, but those were the chapters that were best)(also the chapter that, weirdly, coupled A. Kaufman and R. Williams. Not that they shouldn’t be joined, but certainly those two had enough influence to each get their own chapter, right? More than, say, Albert Brooks, right?), the book reads much more as an interesting, detail-filled romp through the fun days of excess and hilarity in LA and NYC.

That said, the book works far, far better as an hilarious compendium for the excesses and successes of a certain time period and certain comics than it does as some causality-implying tome about how standup changed lots of things. We know that Letterman and Leno and Conan and Stewart and Colbert are doing fundamentally different comedy than the comedy that was done by Carson et. al, but telling how comics changed things is, in USA Today pie-chart terms, a small slice of the story. That said: I could be totally wrong. I was 0 years old when most of the stuff in the book actually transpired, so maybe this is one of those you’re-too-young-to-get-it arguments. If so: I’m a moron.

Still, for all that, regardless: get the damned book. Read it. The first five chapters alone are worth the investment of time and money.

George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books.

Oh my god this guy’s incredible. I’ve heard all of thing zero about George Steiner in my entire life, and what’s totally possible, after having read this book, is that I’ve heard nothing about him ever because I’m just not smart enough to even be aware of someone this smart.

I can’t get into this book here. There are two way, way better reviews (here and here) that you should read—this book just trips me and I start stammering. It’s so much wonderfulness, though: a (it’s got to be certifiable, even if it hasn’t been certified) genius writes a book about the seven books he never wrote but wishes he could have, somehow also talking about (which is just tremendously resonant, for someone who has books he’d like to write) how wanting to but not writing a book creates a sort of “active shadow” (his words)—like a generative absence. It’s just fucking spellbinding. It’s not even the end of January and this might be the smartest book possible in 2008.

A propósito de Steiner, vale a pena ler esta crítica venenosa e muito bem escrita de Joseph Epstein.

La memoria es un elemento esencial para el aprendizaje de cualquier disciplina y debe usarse regularmente, sin abusar pero sin olvidarla.

i abandoned New Year Resolutions many years ago, when i realised i never kept them. But instead, here are books i'd like to write but probably won't (in my case because i don't have enough free time):

1. A book on Dante, principally The Divine Comedy, the characters, some peculiarities of Dante's scheme, the internal contradictions, the brashness of conceit.

2. A book on Satan as a literary character. The surprising continuities and the great differences.

3. A temp's manual. How to survive in an inimical environment. Scams, wiles, ruses and hoaxes. How to take being fired.

4. A guide to good pies. Possibly the history of pie. The wicked emperor Tiberius banned pastry: possible connection between pies and morality?

5. A study of Andrew K in his natural habitat. The author would follow Andrew for several months, bug his house, adopt many disguises, perhaps drug him and throw him into a Republican conference armed with a shillelagh, stovepipe hat and mutton-chop whiskers. In the end, the author would successfully impersonate Andrew K in some amusing and catastrophic manner, ending in death.

6. A book about killing people.

7. The Elberry Prophecies - highly accurate and bloodthirsty predictions regarding the self-termination of the human race.

FuoriTesto # 5 è on line, qui: http://www.rvnet.eu/.

Il libro di cui blablo stavolta è :

Dieci (possibili) ragioni della tristezza del pensiero (Garzanti, 2007, 87 p., 11 €)

E questa è la quarta di copertina:

“Se i nostri processi di pensiero fossero meno urgenti, meno vividi, meno ipnotici (come negli accessi di masturbazione e nei sogni ad occhi aperti), le nostre costanti disillusioni, la grigia massa di nausea nascosta nel cuore dell’essere, sarebbero meno invalidanti. I crolli mentali, le evasioni patologiche nell’irrealtà, l’inerzia del malessere mentale potrebbero essere, essenzialmente, tattiche contro la disillusione, contro l’acido della speranza frustrata. Le correlazioni fallite tra il pensiero e la sua realizzazione, tra ciò che abbiamo concepito e le realtà dell’esperienza, sono tali che non potremmo vivere senza speranza – Coleridge: “ Il lavoro senza speranza spilla nettare in un setaccio, / e speranza senza oggetto non può vivere ” – né superare il lutto, la beffa che accompagna le speranze tradite. “Sperare contro ogni speranza” è un’espressione forte, ma che riconosce, in definitiva, la rovina che il pensiero getta sulla conseguenza ”

Cuatro años llevábamos esperando, los lectores de Cercas, su último trabajo. Y por fin llegó: "LA VELOCIDAD DE LA LUZ", Tusquets editores, Barcelona, marzo de 2005.

EL trabajo anterior, "Soldados de Salamina", más allá de su enorme éxito de ventas, resultó ser una magnífica e incontestable novela que dejaba el listón realmente alto.

¿De qué trata "La velocidad de la Luz"?

En pocas palabras es, por una parte, la historia de un aspirante a escritor y su relación con un excombatiente de Vietnam, a quien conoce en una universidad americana y, por la otra, la historia del escritor zarandeado por el éxito. Ambas historias le sirven al autor para reflexionar sobre uno de los extremos de la condición humana: la capacidad de infringir el mal, y sobre las consecuencias del éxito social para todo aquel que, consiguiéndolo, erre en su gestión.

Además, y como en "Soldados de Salamina" esta nueva novela se nutre (desde mi punto de vista) del mismo planteamiento formal: el proceso de creación literaria, la relación realidad-ficción y el logro de conseguir que el lector deduzca que el libro que se está escribiendo a lo largo del texto es, precisamente, el que está leyendo.

Este mismo planteamiento formal ha sido usado recientemente en diferentes obras por diferentes autores. Valgan como ejemplo además de los dos últimos trabajos de Cercas, "LA Sombra del Viento" de Ruiz ZAfón y últimamente Bernardo Achaga en "El hijo del acordionista".

Pero continuemos con "LA velocidad" y vayamos por partes:

La historia descrita en "La velocidad de la luz" coincide, a grandes rasgos con la biografía del autor. Está claro que Cercas "juega" a la identificación autor-narrador, a hacer creer al lector que todo lo está escrito es real, entendiendo como real el hecho que los personajes existan más allá de la novela, que lo narrado sea más o menos cierto, que sea, (ay) verdad.

El incipit ya nos pone en aviso: "Ahora llevo una vida falsa, una vida apócrifa y clandestina e invisible aunque más verdadera que si fuera de verdad".

A lo largo del primer bloque, las consignas son, me parece, claras:

>

Cercas inserta en los diálogos del personaje escritor y Rodney fragmentos que giran y giran sobre la relación entre la realidad y la literatura, y que convergen en la figura del escritor:

>

La propuesta es clara: el narrador (en primera persona) no es el mismo que el autor. Sin embargo, todos los indicios, a partir de lo narrado, apuntan a la identificación de ambas figuras. Del mismo modo que la Cercas de "Salamina" no era el "Cercas" autor, en "La velocidad" el escritor que narra no es el Cercas que escribe.

Pero... más allá de la táctica formal que Cercas arma para dar cuerpo a su historia, coemntaba que "La velocidad de la Luz" trata sobre dos temas:

1. la historia de un aspirante a escritor y su relación con un excombatiente de Vietnam, a quien conoce en una universidad americana.

2. la historia del escritor zarandeado por el éxito.

Veamos el primer tema:

El escritor sin nombre conoce, en su estancia en la Universidad de Urbana, a un excombatiente de la Guerra del Vietnam.
Valga como nota que no deja de ser extraño que Cercas aborde semejante tema.

Sea como sea, el eje central de este bloque temático es la experiencia de Rodney, el excombatiente, en la Guerra del Vietnam. Cercas se encarga de describirlo antes, durante y después de su intervención en el conflicto y la bruma de lo que el personaje vivió durante su estancia en Vietnam no la descifra sino en pequeñas dosis intentando maximizar la impresión de los hechos narrados sobre el lector.

El opuesto paralelismo con "Salamina" no pasa desapercibido: mientras que en la primera novela, en una situación de conflicto bélico un soldado permite que Sánchez Mazas huya a pesar de tenerlo encañonado, en "La velocidad" un soldado que algunos meses atrás era un civil ejemplar, se transforma en una bestia de matar enrolado en la tristemente célebre Tiger Force.

Cercas planea sobre el tema sin acabar de profundizar lo suficiente, como si narrase intentando no herir sensibilidades...

Cualquier hombre normal y corriente, en determinadas circunstancias puede devenir un asesino descontrolado.

Los textos son, sin duda, escalofriantes, sin embargo, en una sociedad tan harta de conlflictos y de sus descripciones, estos fragmentos no acaban de conseguir transmitir el horror que Cercas intenta hacernos llegar:

En el artículo "Kurtz: De Conrad a Coppola" puede verse un ejemplo de literatura que sí alcanza a transmitir ese horror... Conrad y Coppola lo consiguen en "EL corazón delas tinieblas " y "Apocalipsis now" respectivamente.

Pero dejemos el "horror" para pasar al segundo tema sobre el que bascula "La Velocidad" y que parece ser, es el que más ha llamado la atención de la crítica y la opinión pública: las consecuencias del éxito.

Cercas intenta retratar una caída en picado del escritor que conoce el éxito:

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De alguna manera se nos habla de un vago paralelismo entre la deshumanización del hombre-soldado y la des-real-ización del hombre víctima del éxito, y que ambas realidades dependen de las circunstancias y no de sus protagonistas... aunque no parece que Cercas quiera insinuar ningún determinismo existencialista.

Quizá es la parte más floja de la novela. No deja de ser curiosa la repercusión que ha tenido en los medios de comunicación el hecho de que Cercas novele su propio éxito con "Soldados" siendo la parte menos verosímil y menos convincente.

Sin duda, esta última novela de Cercas cosechará un éxito similar al de "Salamina" y, claro está, acaba de consagrar a Javier Cercas como escritor de referencia en lengua castellana.

No en vano cuenta con "la bendición" de nada más y nada menos que de Steiner, y como reza el dicho: "palabra de Steiner: ta adoramos señor"

Ramiro Tomé
info (arroba) arquera.com