2023-04-30 02:55:00
My straight line gets tangled, I feel that the line is failing me,
and the drawing is now a rope that I tie myself around
By the neck. The past, the present and the future, all mixed up
in the same memory apachurradora machine,
in the same disinfectant tray.
Fernanda Trias, Pink goo.
Not long ago I came to read a short story entitled “That place” that I found in a collection entitled Anthology of Uruguayan new / young narrative that attracted me for its way of narrating and the way of conceiving a suffocating narrative. I was intrigued by this author who, to my surprise, soon won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prize for her novel Pink Mugre shortly following her. My obsessive self was set in motion by that world that is made up of spaces that, even though they seem to be wide, end up enclosing you in an environment that afflicts you and makes you a stranger to it. The elements raised by the Uruguayan author are extremely important to understand the representation of the urban from a perspective alien to what is known, as a foreigner in inhospitable lands where resignation to belonging seems to be the only option.
A curiosity occurs to me when contemplating a new representation of the urban within the Uruguayan literary panorama, since this type of writing began with the well-known Juan Carlos Onetti, who configures a need to write regarding reality outside rural environments to contemplate the problems what is considered civilized. However, Onetti’s narrative ends up configuring a fictitious territoriality that he called Santa María to give rise to characters that are constantly moved by their desires and sins where the marginalized has a place to be observed as part of urbanity and leaving aside various rules. considered as moral, to enter an environment of anguish and decadence that comes with the old age of the body and miss the past of a lost youth.
Similarly, there was another case prior to the Uruguayan writer who has focused on the urban, that is, Mario Levrero. This Uruguayan author configures urban environments that consume his narrators within a violence that suffocates and becomes inevitable. An absurd environment that ends up consuming like that jelly that gradually consumes the city (reference to his short story “Jelly”) or that war that is threateningly approaching a Paris that will be consumed by destruction (reference to his novel Paris). This second author, mentioned as a teacher of Trías in writing workshops, manages to conceive the urban as a monster that he consumes and over which we have no control. A place to which we belong as one more entity within the urban immensity and where the idea of civility ends up being put aside by human barbarism focused on carnal desires.
Thus arises the possible line of the urban within Uruguayan literature, where its third pillar, within what I have read and even my knowledge, might be the currently acclaimed Fernanda Trías. Who has been concerned with portraying the urban in an exceptional way within two novels that should not go unnoticed, such as The Invincible City and Pink Mugre, two different proposals where the urban is represented from the strange. The first case reveals a cartography of life in Buenos Aires from the perspective of a narrator who feels persecuted by a suffocating past that she cannot leave behind and the complexity of a new beginning in another city. It is possible to put together a city from a personal perspective that leads to a sensation of constant strangeness and where an environment that appears to be hostile to the narrator persists as it is constantly observed by that ex-boyfriend whom she calls “the Rat”.
Within The Invincible City, he is dedicated to portraying the reality of a Buenos Aires that emerges in fragments without being able to reach its total complexity, but denoting its urban demons given in a panorama that resembles our present day. This fragmentary panorama manages to position itself in an individuality that appears to come from a memory of the big city in which it was inspired, as well as the difficulty that relationships become for a foreigner. In the same way, this first sketch gives rise to contemplating an evolution in the narrative of Trías, since the urban is presented once more in his award-winning novel Mugre rosa, from a dystopian perspective that moves away from the first urban proposal, but retains some elements. that denote a point in common: the sensation of strangeness, the complex relationships and a suffocation that consumes in some way.
Within the second mentioned novel, urbanity enters into an epidemic that plagues a port city, where the narrator lives with an environment with which, currently, we might all relate in this post-pandemic era. The novel, written long before the 2020 pandemic, manages to represent the anguish caused by an unknown disease that arises from symptoms. In this case, the urban is represented not only by the loneliness that occurs in the streets, but is also reflected in the bodies of the characters that constantly accompany the narrator. Like the boy Mauro and his syndrome that forces him to think only regarding eating, a love that goes hand in hand with the disgust of having to be the nanny of a sick child. Like the relationship with his ex-husband who belongs to chronic patients and has to be bedridden with the almost zero hope of being able to heal.
The spaces configured by Trías in this novel are overwhelming, they cause the sensation of the ambiguous, of the uncertainty of contagion and the constant fear that is generated collectively. A loneliness emerges from the space that resembles the one perceived by the foreign narrator in the other novel. That loneliness that always accompanies everywhere due to the distancing that we have generated with the social. On the other hand, there is also constant decline, fatigue, sorrow, moments that are perceived as a tragedy that never ends, that seems to knock on the door and is lost with the wind that carries the disease.
The perspective of the narrator of Pink Mugre is complex and at the same time daily, the city becomes part of a reality that, perhaps due to collective experiences, we have resembled as probable within that dystopian era armed with correct assumptions. The urbanity represented by Fernanda Trías becomes moldable to the unexpected, it seems familiar but it can always become sinister and unknown once more with the passage of time. This dystopian world is constantly abandoned, losing contact with the outside to remain in a simple survival, the decadence of the civilized is narrated without reaching violence, but rather the despair of a search to manage to continue with little food and without the certainty of an established future.
Both novels reflect the notion of the urban from different perspectives, the notion of the act of remembering in the case of The Invincible City and the dystopian possibility that is no longer distant for those who read this brief reflection and Trías’ novel. However, the city of Trías resembles the current conception to get away from its previous peers. That is to say, the Uruguayan writer manages to capture in her lines the idea of cities that consume and are entities that resemble strangeness. Threatening and suffocating territories, places that do not fully accept you and keep you from fully understanding their totality.
Trías might become a pillar of Uruguayan literature by managing to establish accurate representations with the problems that occur in today’s society, it reflects the fears of the sick, the constants of memory and its complexities, Trías naturally represents elements that belong to the society in which we live to mold them to its shape and perspective, where the urban, memory, its narrators, are part of a line that, alluding to the epigraph that opens this brief reflection, can end up being a noose around the neck.
Originally published in La Desvelada / @LaDesveladaMX
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