“Literary Controversies” by Alberto Chimal

“Barroom squabbles,” some (writers) have called them. One must ask, however, the reason for such indifference.

In recent days there have been not one, not two, but three controversies among Mexican writers, in which some very serious issues have been raised, even beyond questions of aesthetics: the use of public resources, class discrimination, corruption, racism. However, the news of the day has been dominated by Mexico’s national soccer team’s defeat in a match against Chile (the score: 7-0). Or perhaps the Father’s Day holiday. Or, for those who follow such things, the death of Anton Yelchin, a young Hollywood actor.

Not even the brutal repression of dissident teachers at the hands of armed federal forces in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca, seems to merit as much debate, despite the seriousness of the event (to the point that the official communiqués either distort or minimize it, and important aspects of it are appearing first online or outside Mexico). But amid these news items, and those to emerge in the coming days, the three literary debates that I mentioned will soon be forgotten: they are but more filler in the news cycles on social media and the few other media outlets that have reported them.

What is certain is that these conflicts matter to almost no one: they do not resonate with anyone more than with the colleagues of those implicated, who jump in to defend a polemicist, to attack another, to complain about the general state of national literature (or the discussions of national literature); however, they barely manage to make themselves noticed beyond their own circles of friends.

“Barroom squabbles,” some (writers) have called them. One must ask, however, the reason for such indifference.

It is possible that the Mexican literary culture of the past century—which largely remains intact today—is partly to blame, since at that time many writers viewed the ideal of their profession as separate from the reader: whether as a rejection of commercialism, out of snobbishness, or because they were more interested in cultivating access to political power, it was not important for them to reach large audiences rather a few “important” people. Octavio Paz lauded “the recognition of the knowledgeable, which is what really counts.” In fact, the roadmap for many who followed Paz has been what led them, as the poet and essayist Armando González Torres wrote, to “stop writing and begin ruling”: literary activity as a prelude to power itself.

Part of the blame also falls on the global trend, at least in Western cultures, toward a moving away from reading. Worse still, this trend has grown stronger in Mexico due to the appalling deficiencies of our education system, which for decades has alienated the majority of the population from learning and does nothing about the general dumbing-down promoted by mass media.

Today, while political power proves to be less and less interested in courting the “intelligentsia,” there appears to be a positive trend in the publication (and especially diffusion) of authors who are interested in writing for their readers, in an accessible way and at the same time without abandoning their eagerness to oblige or defend the “current state of affairs.” They exist, among other genres, within so-called children’s and young adult literature, which has become a more fertile ground than others as it has traditionally been marginalized from “high culture” and has never been seen as a “genre” worthy of prestige. But the disadvantage for those who wish to withstand this general trend is enormous, as it has been gained strength for the greater part of a century. In many cases, it is not solely a matter of a huge distance between the interests of writers and the majority of the population; sometimes it seems practically impossible that one group would talk to the other.

For example, two texts in recent years that strike me as very important: the poems Antígona González by Sara Uribe and Anti-Humboldt by Hugo García Manríquez, which academic criticism discusses and exemplifies as important and revealing, and which contain very clear and relevant arguments and political positions, will go completely unnoticed by millions of people who have never had the chance to learn the minimum terms necessary to approach either the academic criticism, the committed text, or even poetry.

In one of many discussions about the recent controversies on social media I came across one interesting idea (it was difficult as it was necessary to separate it from the noise: jokes, misinformed opinions, statements made just for the sake of making them, and others in which passion matters more than arguments, etc.). Remarking on an anthology of Mexican poets published by the Ministry of Culture to be marketed in France, the writer Luis Felipe Lomelí commented on Facebook that the poets with the greatest presence in the country were missing from the selection. When asked, Lomelí said he was referring to Javier Sicilia, who for some years has devoted himself exclusively to social activism, and Armando Alanís Pulido, founder of the Acción Poética campaign, which has made graffiti out of poems and other texts on the walls of various cities and has now gone far beyond Alanís himself.

And Lomelí is right: the world of literary circles is, in fact, very small, and an author’s relevance outside of it, today, is probably not due to his written work published in books. A news item heard or read in passing about Sicilia, or a painting by Acción Poética, will be the only possible contact with poetry and literature in general—the only one in their life—for lots of people who go from one side of Mexico’s cities to the other, always in a hurry, and between throngs and hardships, on their way to a job that has enslaved them, or returning, to the many problems of a tiny apartment, perhaps in a violent neighborhood.

Translated from the Spanish by George Henson. 

Alberto Chimal (1970) is the author of the novels La torre y el jardín(2012) and Los esclavos (2009), as well as numerous short-story collections, which include Los atacantes (2015), Gente del mundo(2014), Manda Fuego (2013), El último explorador (2012), La ciudad imaginada (2009), and Éstos son los días (2004), in addition to books of essays and a handbook of creative writing. Alberto holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, where he teaches workshops in creative writing and is a member of the faculty of the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. A leading practitioner and researcher on the “fantastic” and online writing, he has presented numerous virtual projects, including Día Común, #MuchosPasados and #CiudadX, at international festivals such as #TwitterFiction (USA) and Ciudad Mínima (Ecuador). His website can be found here.

George Henson is a translator of contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose. He has translated works by many notable writers, including Elena Poniatowska, Andrés Neuman, Claudia Salazar, Raquel Castro, Leonardo Fuentes, and Luis Jorge Boone. His translations have appeared variously in Words Without Borders, Buenos Aires Review, BOMB, Literal, and The Literary Review. His translations of Alberto Chimal have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Flash Fiction International, and World Literature Today. His book-length translations include Sergio Pitol’s The Art of Flight and The Journey, both with Deep Vellum Publishing. George is a member of the Spanish faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he is affiliated with the Center for Translation Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas.

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