2023-09-09 03:22:00
I remember it like it was yesterday. But I also see the ice banks of time working their blinding tides of confusion and oblivion. At one point in my adolescence a book by Alberto Vanasco fell into my hands. I don’t know if it was However Juan lived or if it was Others will see the sea. I have the impression that this was a book that, even if I didn’t understand it at the time, was destined to produce a lasting effect. It was, perhaps, the first narrative text that produced in me a stimulating change of meaning, the difficulty of understanding and the fascination of going following what was escaping.
I can’t specify what the novel was regarding because I lost it during a move and Vanasco’s work is no longer found anywhere. He is my first lost avant-garde. I do know, however, that that book ordered literature for me for the first time: it proposed an order and a meaning and an idea of continuity. And more than the novel itself, a prologue by the author that – as I remember – revealed to the reader that the novel he was regarding to read was part of a broader system or order: the chain that orders a tradition of reading. .
If I do not misquote him, if I do not dream of a reading that never existed and in the misunderstanding of a false attribution I add one more fiction to the innumerable ones that populate the world, Vanasco proposed that literature, at least Western literature, is organized under the form of many books that tell a single perpetual story: that of the reader who goes crazy reading and applies to his life the extreme way of acting that literature outlines: that of consuming himself in his own passion. The idea, if I am not still mistaken, is that reading is a mirror passion: one reads to read the way in which reading transfigures our own lives, and one also reads to warn of the dangers of reading. The novel itself that we read is its example or moral. Thus, Vanasco said, if I’m not mistaken, Don Quixote goes crazy because he misreads an anachronistic genre, chivalric novels, and Madame Bovary ruins her existence because she misreads the romantic and corny novels of her time.
Vanasco gave some more examples, but I only remember my astonishment at seeing how this reduction to the operant nucleus illuminated everything. At any given moment in Bioy’s Borges, his protagonist says that The Thousand and One Nights come from the Book of Esther, and of course, Robert Graves says that the Bible is the appropriation of older Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian myths. Reading returns to the reader’s eye the stone of madness where everything is sacrificed to the matter.
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