Carlos Fuentes

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Hello, Ramona Koval here, welcoming you to Books and Writing on ABC Radio National, and the first in a series of interviews from the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, Canada. We begin with the winner of this year's $10,000 (Canadian) Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, awarded annually to a writer of international stature and accomplishment, as a celebration of a lifetime of literary achievement. And the 2005 prize-winner is one of Latin America's most prominent men of letters, the great Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, who accepted the prize at the festival's opening gala event.

Born in 1928 in Panama City, Carlos Fuentes had Mexican parents and he later became a Mexican citizen. A writer of essays, literary history, novels, screenplays, plays and short stories, Fuentes combined his life as a writer with a successful career in international relations that culminated in being appointed Mexico's ambassador to France between 1975 and 1977.

Fuentes' major works include Where the Air is Clearer, The Death of Artemio Cruz, A Change of Skin, Terra Nostra, The Hydra Head, The Old Gringo, The Campaign, and most recently Contra Bush-'Against Bush'-and . In this last book, Fuentes tells us that as far as literature is concerned, the second half of the 20th century belongs to Latin America-think of Garcia Marquez, Paz, Borges, Neruda, Asturias, Cortazar-the list is nearly endless, and think of Fuentes too. His novels were inspirations for many readers who wondered how writers could speak for their societies, even as they tried to analyse and change them.

Fuentes has weighed in with a kind of literary testament, looking both backwards and forwards from the posh bordellos of his youth to the dangers and uses of globalisation. This book is essentially a memoir, somewhat constricted by the structure of the alphabet. He begins with 'amour' and ends with 'Zurich', and in between his concerns range from the overtly political to the most personal, in which we learn about a few family secrets, his past lives and loves, and the tragic death of his son.

When I spoke to Carlos Fuentes in Montreal, I first asked why it was that people turned to writers in order to understand the world around them.

Carlos Fuentes: It's one of the possibilities of knowledge...what can one learn from a child? What can one learn from a madman? What can one learn from an actor or an actress? What can one learn from a painter, from a politician, from a peanut vendor? One can learn from everyone. We are in a process of learning from each other all the time. A writer is just one more element of the process of knowledge on which the world is based.

Ramona Koval: But people come to writers, don't they?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, but they also come to peanut vendors.

Ramona Koval: What have you learnt from a madman?

Carlos Fuentes: There was a madman that St Paul talks about who was in an empty theatre laughing all the time. They say, 'the man is mad, take him away and put him in an asylum'. He was taken out of the theatre. He said, 'You have gained nothing but you have taken away my pleasure.'

Ramona Koval: And what do we learn from that?

Carlos Fuentes: We learn from that that 'there are more things in this world, Horatio, than are thought of in your philosophy'.

Ramona Koval: You begin with A for amour, and end with Z for Zurich. In between the A and the Z you write a kind of literary and personal memoir, from politics to the family, from the history and literature of Mexico to the idea of civil society and writers of the past. How did this book come into being? When did you decide?

Carlos Fuentes: Listen, it was a contract with the French publishing house, Craci(4:15). They had been publishing a series called Ce que je croi (this I believe). It began with Francois Mauriac about 40 years ago. Naturally, he spoke about the faith, being a Catholic writer. And it's been going on with many, many writers and friends-Francoise Giroux, Jean Daniel, Bernard Rix Levy-many people have participated in the series, and once they asked me to do it I said, 'Of course I'll do it, and I will do it in alphabetical order.' The book came into being through a contract with a French publishing house. If not, perhaps I would not have written it.

Ramona Koval: Were you surprised at what you believe when you wrote it?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, one is always surprised. For example, the chapters on Jesus and God were totally unforseen for me as I'm an agnostic, basically. When I started thinking of the figure of Jesus, I said, 'Why is he so important? Why has he outlasted everything? Why has he been around for 2,000 years, and everybody else disappears in smoke?' So I began wondering about the figure of Jesus, and the way an agnostic can participate in the lessons of Jesus Christ. So that was one of the many revelations I had, writing the book.

Ramona Koval: You say that as far as literature is concerned, the second half of the 20th century belonged to Latin America. What made it time for the Latin Americans to come to the fore?

Carlos Fuentes: I think we have an extraordinarily rich tradition which we were not aware of. After independence in 1821, we decided that to imitate European modes was the fashion, that we had to be romantics and realists and naturalists...we were writing mini Zola novels all over Latin America, forgetting that there was a huge past of great imagination that came from the literature of Spain, from Cervantes, basically, that came from the facts of the discovery and the conquest...all these fabulous bestiaries of the Indies where the discoverers see sirens and huge whales and beaches strewn with black pearls...all these marvellous things they saw. Why has this imagination left us, and we have to write about fallen women and orphans?

No, there was more to it than that and this is the great gift we receive from Borges, Carpentier and Asturias, which was to recover all that fabulous past and bring it to date. It was the mission of my generation, of the so-called boom, with Garcia Marquez and other writers, to say, 'let us tell all the things that have not been said.' This was a fabulous enterprise and gave our generation a mission, and made us write interesting books. Now that has been done, there is a new generation. They are not concerned about the wealth of the past, of what has not been said in Latin America, they're more concerned about how women are treated, relations between couples, life in the city, divorces. That's okay, we did our job, and your generation is doing their job.

Ramona Koval: Except why was the west ready to hear all this? I mean, that's an interesting question too.

Carlos Fuentes: I think the west had a paucity at that moment. There were kind of tired novels being written. The great wave of creativity that culminates with Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner had come to an end, perhaps, and suddenly you had...in the midst of realism and western literature, you had this appearance of writers who had very powerful imaginations, and who found a consonance with new European writers such as Gter Grass, Milan Kundera. It's curious that from Latin America and Central Europe, the wave of renewal of the novel came forth and, well, it has lasted until our day.

Ramona Koval: A character in your novel, Inez, says, 'I already know that you Latin Americans cling desperately to logic and reason, concepts totally foreign to you because you want to escape the supernatural imagination that is your heritage.' Is that still going on?

Carlos Fuentes: Oh it has been going on for a long time, it's incredible. I mean, you visit the Indian communities of Mexico which are based on myth and imagination and ceremony, and so many Mexicans (who are very Indian-looking, by the way) say, 'No, no, no, this goes against reason, logic. We must implant the reign of reason and logic in this terrible country that has too much imagination.' No, I think reason and imagination can coexist but reason should not kill imagination.

Ramona Koval: It's an interesting question about the relation between politics and international affairs and globalisation and the writer and you. Can we talk about that for a moment? Your left-wing politics barred you from the USA between 1962 and 1990. Even though at the same time, in the 70s ('74 to '77) you were the Mexican ambassador to France, so obviously you had a role on the international diplomatic scene but you couldn't go to America...except I think in '64 Robert Kennedy said you could come to Manhattan...

Carlos Fuentes: For four days.

Ramona Koval: And Norman Mailer took you to Brooklyn.

Carlos Fuentes: He took me to Brooklyn and we broke the law. We were followed by a shadowy CIA man whom we dubbed 'Humphrey'. He was a trench coat and a Stetson.

Ramona Koval: Well, lets talk about how you've managed the worlds of a writer and the political world.

Carlos Fuentes: Well, it's not a rule, of course, but I was writing since I was 7, 8, 9 years old. That has always been my primary vocation, but I also grew up in an age...the New Deal in the United States. My father was legal counsellor of the Mexican embassy in Washington, so we were there during those very creative, fabulous years of the Roosevelt administration, which happened to be the years of the Cardenas administration in Mexico with implementation of the Mexican revolution. From there I went to Chile, where the popular front of radicals, communists and socialists was in power, and from there I went to Argentina where the extreme right-wing military were in power. So I was surrounded by politics from my early childhood. I was very conscious of it. My father was a diplomat, a lawyer, so these things were discussed around the table all day long. So it's not a miracle that I should be interested in such matters.

Ramona Koval: But as a writer, though, you make it clear that there is a wall between your activism and the literary world.

Carlos Fuentes: No, no, because both filter into each other since I'm using language for both purposes, you see? But nevertheless, I do keep things apart. What belongs to the literary world-what belongs to God belongs God; what belongs to Caesar belongs to Caesar, though they shake hands over the wall.

Ramona Koval: I think you once said that time is the subject of all your fiction, and you have a chapter in your A to Z on time, in which you say there exists more than one time in the world. Are you talking about relativity here?

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, relativity has become the substance, and the shadow, I might add, of most of the great artistic and scientific creations of our time. It's Einstein and Heisenberg, it's Picasso and Cubism, it is Joyce and Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, it is Einstein and the great film-makers...I mean, it is everywhere, everywhere you have a sense of the point of view of the relativity of points of view, which is why I'm such a fan of Cervantes and Don Quixote (I'm talking about this here in Montreal...) because there isn't the imposition of one point of view, of one ideological or literary or artistic truth. You have this variety of where you are placed. The principle of uncertainty of Heisenberg, I think it's become the law...not even the law, but the possibility of creating some kind of logic in the world...the only logic possible is the multiplicity of points of view on the world that we live in. There's no longer one single point of view. Science has been revolutionised, and along with it the arts and politics and all the rest. So when you have a totalitarian, an ideological imposition, you can't tolerate it, it's not possible, you can't believe in it, it mocks itself. When George Bush says America is the last great hope of humankind, I start laughing. What about Australia? What about Mexico? What about the Fiji Islands? I mean, there are so many possibilities of humanity. You cannot give one nation, one ideology or one man, in that event, the possession of the whole truth.

Ramona Koval: Talking about men and leadership, you say that Stalin's favourite writer was Edgar Allan Poe. What can we tell from examining the favourite writers of dictators?

Carlos Fuentes: A lot. I mean, this was discovered very recently. It wasn't told during Stalin's lifetime, but the reason biographers of Stalin revealed that he had Poe by his bedside...what was he telling Stalin? How to bury people alive? How to burn down houses and have everyone in it incinerated immediately? I mean, the most terrible forms of extinction which are proposed by the imagination of Edgar Allen Poe, Stalin brought to reality, so it tells you a lot about the way he thought.

Ramona Koval: It also tells you that he liked to be a bit scared.

Carlos Fuentes: It also tells you that he is very scared. He was afraid of his own shadow, which is why the film of Ivan the Terrible is so terrible, in the sense that Eisenstein is constantly having the shadow of the Tsar projected and frightening him. He is he and his shadow, and I think Stalin was he and his shadow.

Ramona Koval: But being a lover of literature doesn't necessarily make you more humane, does it?

Carlos Fuentes: Not necessarily but it goes a long way.

Ramona Koval: Although, you know, many leaders have been lovers of literature but somehow it hasn't changed the way they behave in the world.

Carlos Fuentes: No, no...or maybe it did and we don't know. But I don't think men and women of politics are particularly guided by literary values. On the contrary, they think they are in possession of reality, and that their acts have to do with reality. Usually that is the real realm of fantasy. People who think they're well settled into reality and that there is no other dimension than that on which their reality rests, are the greatest fantasists in the world, and the wave of the empires and the governments and the great powers that be in the world...crumble...show it. The great lesson of Kafka, who I think is the greatest writer of the 20th century in the sense that he told everything that there was to know, is to tell us that the emperor is naked but he doesn't know it, of course.

Ramona Koval: I was going to bring up Kafka because it's an interesting thing that in this book you have four chapters devoted...I mean, you mention a lot of writers that you've loved, and film-makers...but you've got four chapters devoted to four specific writers; to Kafka, to Cervantes, to Faulkner, and to Balzac. So I wanted to talk to you about those writers. Why take those? Why are they closest to your heart? And you said that Kafka is there because he's written about everything, you say.

Carlos Fuentes: Well, he's the great writer of the 20th century in the sense that he prophesied what the 20th century would be like; a century of horror, fear, persecution and injustice, and not knowing who accuses you of what. It's a century of the knock at the door at midnight, and they take you off and you don't know why. You've gone off to a concentration camp suddenly, or you're taken to a television studio, it's the same thing.

Ramona Koval: Luckily we're on the radio and I won't take that as an insult, then. And Faulkner...?

Carlos Fuentes: Faulkner is the American writer who admits defeat. A country ruled by the axiom 'nothing succeeds like success'...Faulkner says that nothing tells you who you are as much as failure...and the defeat of the south...and through this filter the tragedy of the human personality is captured by William Faulkner, and he is unique in American literature in that sense. Maybe after him some of the black writers like James Baldwin or Richard Wright...maybe even the mystery writers-Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain-they see the dark side of the United States. But in general the United States has been such an optimistic country, so sure of itself, that when a man comes and tells you, 'no, we are tragic too,' it's a great event and he does it so beautifully with such extraordinary prose. He has had such a great influence in Latin America. He is the great Baroque writer of the United States, therefore he's ours.

Ramona Koval: And Balzac...?

Carlos Fuentes: Balzac is the incisive view of the human comedy, and of the two distinct dimensions of that comedy; the social comedy, of power, rise in society, making money, losing money, jealousy et cetera. At the same time, the fantastic side. To possess the wild ass's skin means that every time you desire the skin will grow shorter and so will your life with it. It means, Louis Lambert, the fantasy of a man who knows so much and thinks so quickly that he has to sit in a dark room without any communication with anybody, it's the prefiguration of Nietzsche. I mean, Balzac is, for me, a great, great master because he has both the realistic side and the fantastic side coexisting, and he's great in both of them, so it's a fantastic lesson for a writer like me. I read him when I was 18 and he impressed me enormously forever.

Ramona Koval: And your beloved Cervantes who you read constantly...Don Quixote. Tell me why Cervantes.

Carlos Fuentes: Cervantes is the source of the modern novel. He is the man who breaks the moulds of previous genres and pulls all the genres to dialogue amongst themselves. Sancho Panza< is a picaresque genre, Don Quixote is the epic genre, there's a pastoral, there's a novel within the novel, there is the Byzantine romance, there is the Italian novella, all the previous forms come together so that the novel becomes a dialogue of genres. The novel is the genre of genres in his hands, and he does it with the Spanish language, and he gives us all the instruments for writing and thinking and loving and desiring in Spanish; they all come from him. So, for all these reasons, and many, many others (I won't bother you with all my reasons) Cervantes is our god, our literary god, to this very day.

Ramona Koval: You read him every...

Carlos Fuentes: At Easter...at Easter I say, 'Now is the time for a good Cervantes read, for a Quixote read.

Ramona Koval: You read him like you read the Bible.

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, almost. You know, there was a question asked by the Norwegian Academy to 100 novelists in the world. They write us a letter saying, 'What do you think is the greatest novel ever written?' Fifty of the 100 answered Don Quixote, fully 50. Who came later?-Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, in that order.

Ramona Koval: You say, 'I'm a creature of the pavements. I prefer cities because neither they nor I are under any illusion about our respective permanence.' And you say that you're fascinated by what you call the literature of the city. What is the literature of the city?

Carlos Fuentes: It's the literature that takes place in cities to begin with, which is not that old an event. Most happened in the countryside or in the seas. It is only with the rise of the modern city that you get novels that are placed in the city, beginning with the picaresque genre, and then the great novels of the 19th century which take place in London and Paris, Petersburg, Berlin, Madrid, et cetera. So there is an urban novel which I'm very attached to because I don't understand nature that well. I love it but it frightens me because suddenly you get a tsunami and you say, hey, is this the beautiful nature that loves me? It doesn't love me, it's indifferent to me. Schopenhauer once asked us, 'Try to be nature just once.' We can't be nature, we're something else; we're the pavements, we're the building.

Ramona Koval: The book ends with your entry on Zurich, as we mentioned before, and a time when you observed Thomas Mann in 1950 when you were 21 years old. Tell me about that incident and why it was the final entry in your book.

Carlos Fuentes: I told you the great difficulty of finding something worthy of the Z, and I settled on Zurich because it's a city...I was studying in Switzerland when I was 21. I was studying international law but also with my vocation as a writer, and I will never forget the evening at the Baur au Lac Hotel in Zurich, it was summer and there were Chinese lanterns and the restaurant was on a floating wharf, and I was sitting there with a family of Mexican friends and suddenly I looked and there was Thomas Mann having dinner with two ladies. Imagine, for a 21-year-old aspiring writer to see Thomas Mann. I never went near him, I just saw him, the way he ate, the way he was dressed...wow! And then I later found out that Susan Sontag had interviewed him when she was 18 years old. She was in college in Los Angles, and achieved, with another friend, an interview with Thomas Mann in California. They were so awed, the two of them, that they never asked a question, they let Thomas Mann talk. That was enough, of course!

Ramona Koval: But you observed him over the next couple of days.

Carlos Fuentes: Yes, I saw his little flaws and coquetries with young men, and his daughter pulling at him and saying, 'Hey, hey, don't go too far with that tennis player.' He was bisexual, yes.

Ramona Koval: But how did that make you read Death in Venice again.

Carlos Fuentes: Well, I re-read it with glee, with greater understanding than ever.

Ramona Koval: And you say in the book, 'I will always be grateful to that night in Zurich for silently teaching me that in literature, you only know what you can imagine.' What does that mean?

Carlos Fuentes: That means that knowledge and literature is different from scientific knowledge or political knowledge or any other kind of practical knowledge. It has to do with imagination. What you imagine in literature is what you know. There is no other form of knowing in literature except through the imagination, that's what I mean.

Ramona Koval: You say also, 'Now, more than ever before, a writer, a book and a library give a name to the world and a voice to the human beings in it, and now more than ever a writer, a book and a library tell us if we do not give things names, nobody will give us one. If we do not speak, silence will impose its dark sovereignty upon us.' And yet you're an optimist in the face of the mass-media turning readers into spectators around the world. How come?

Carlos Fuentes: I think that all forms of communication are useful; it depends on how you use them. I mean, they are neutral. This thing I have in front of my face is neutral, but it depends...you are using it intelligently; somebody else could use it to spew hatred against the Jews or the blacks, for example. Hitler used the microphone very efficiently. So it really depends on how you use the media. When I see the bombing of Baghdad, what I see is a beautiful spectacle in colour. When I don't see the dead, I know I'm being fooled, and I think many people are being fooled because of what the media does not show. There is a selection in the media which eventually means that some people do not know everything that's going on. The power of the image is such that you have to oppose it with the power of the word. When the images of the media become ethereal and banal, which they can do very easily, now is the time for the writers to say, well, there is the word as well, and the word is ambiguous, it is uncertain, it is searching but it does not fool you. And that is very important I think.

Ramona Koval: Carlos Fuentes, speaking to me in Montreal at the 2005 Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. And finally today, here is Carlos Fuentes reading at the gala event at which he accepted his prize. He's reading from his collection of novellas titled The Crystal Frontier, and this reading begins on the Mexican/US border.

Carlos Fuentes: You know that one does not chose one's family or one's neighbours [laughter]...So we're the only two only countries that neighbour the United States-Canada and Mexico-which means that we choose our friends.

[reading from The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes] From: 'Stopped for the night by the river's edge...' to '...or in resignation and despondency.'

Thank you very much.

Ramona Koval: Carlos Fuentes, recorded at the recent Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, reading from his collection of novellas, The Crystal Frontier. That's all from Books and Writing this week, which is produced by me, Ramona Koval, and Michael Shirrefs.

Publications

Title: This I Believe

Author : Carlos Fuentes

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2004