Words&Dirt

“‘To plunge one’s self into a reality or into a possible mode of a reality, and to feel how that which at first sight seemed to be the wildest absurdity comes to have some value, to articulate itself with others forms, absurd or otherwise, until the divergent weave (in relation to the stereotyped sketch of everyday life) appears and is defined in a coherent sketch which only by timid comparison with the former will appear mad or delirious or incomprehensible.  Nevertheless, am I not sinning in the direction of an excess of confidence?  To refuse to make psychologies and at the same time to place a reader––a certain reader, that is true––in contact with a personal world, with a personal existence and meditation…That reader will be without any bridge, any intermediate link, any casual articulation.  Raw things: behavior, results, ruptures, catastrophes, derision.  There where there should be a leave-taking there is a sketch on the wall; instead of a shout, a fishing-pole; a death is resolved in a trio of mandolins.  And all of that is leave-taking, shout, and death, but who is prepared to displace himself, remove himself, decenter himself, uncover himself?  The outer forms of the novel have changed, but their heroes are still the avatars of Tristram, Jane Eyre, Lafcadio, Leopold Bloom, people from the street, from the home, from the bedroom, characters.  For every hero like Ulrich (more Musil) or Molloy (more Beckett), there are five hundred Darleys (more Durrell).  For my part, I wonder whether someday I will ever succeed in making it felt that the true character and the only one that interests me is the reader, to the degree in which something of what I write ought to contribute to his mutation, displacement, alienation, transportation.’”

––Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, pg. 437