{"id":153105,"date":"2021-06-16T13:52:58","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T17:52:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=153105"},"modified":"2021-06-17T16:56:03","modified_gmt":"2021-06-17T20:56:03","slug":"diving-into-the-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/06\/16\/diving-into-the-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Diving into the Text"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: \u00a9 isman rohimly ibrahim\/EyeEm \/ Adobe Stock.<\/p><\/div>\n

I first read the Uruguayan writer Juan Carlos Onetti in December 2007, when I spent three weeks in the hospital due to an appendectomy gone wrong. Between doses of antibiotics, I asked my father to bring me a book that had just been published, of Onetti\u2019s complete short stories. Before long, I came to one entitled \u201cConvalescence,\u201d which seemed appropriate given my situation. A woman is recovering from an illness in a hotel by the sea. Onetti doesn\u2019t tell us what the illness is. A man keeps calling her on the phone, making threats, insisting she return to the city. I knew it might not be the best idea to read Onetti while laid up in a hospital bed\u2014he\u2019s not exactly the most upbeat writer. But the feeling that came over me as I turned the pages was one of joy.<\/p>\n

Back then, I used to go on diving trips with a couple of friends. I was really into it\u2014getting away from S\u00e3o Paulo and heading down to Ubatuba or some other town on the coast, spending the weekend in the water, going out at night to drink acai juice and chat in a sandwich shop or some beach bar, wondering what the next day\u2019s adventures had in store. As my friends exchanged long emails, hammering out the details for their next so-called expedition, like a pair of Jacques Cousteaus setting sail on those windy, unpredictable mornings in the silvery sunshine of our little patch of lush South American coastline, a nurse was changing the dressings on my right abdomen and adjusting the IV in my arm.<\/p>\n

I had had two general anesthesias, an infection, two operations. Throughout my entire recovery, I kept reading Onetti. Rather than revolving around a desire to pick apart and reconstruct meaning, these stories seemed to be aimed at revealing something else. It was as if Onetti were saying to me, It\u2019s impossible to have access to everything, a narrator may actually exist to throw us off, and there\u2019s always something we can\u2019t see. <\/p>\n

Soon, I had a favorite: \u201cEsbjerg by the Sea.\u201d The narrator situates the reader right off the bat: a couple, Kirsten and Montes, walks along the docks of Buenos Aires and watches the ships depart. The narrator claims to have heard the story, \u201cwithout understanding it,\u201d one morning when Montes showed up, humiliated, and confessed to stealing from the narrator. At the narrator\u2019s office, Montes, \u201ca pathetic man, a bad friend, a bastard,\u201d explained that he\u2019d concealed a series of bets, planning to cover them himself, so that he could raise money for Kirsten to travel to her native country, Denmark. But his plan didn\u2019t work, and now he was unable to pay back what he\u2019d lost.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he told me the story,\u201d the narrator says, \u201cor almost all of it, that first day, Monday, when he came to see me, cowering like a dog, his face green, revolting, cold sweat shining on his forehead and down the sides of his nose.\u201d More than just signaling the narrator\u2019s one-sided perspective\u2014\u201cI heard the story, without understanding it\u201d; \u201cI think he told me the story, or almost all of it\u201d\u2014Onetti makes this lack of transparency, and everything the reader can\u2019t see or understand, the secret theme of the story.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Esbjerg is a seaport town in Denmark. In the story, it\u2019s presented as an obscure place. Kirsten is always miserable, but she won\u2019t say why. She fills the house with photographs of her home country, landscapes with cows and mountains. One day, letters start to arrive from Denmark. Montes doesn\u2019t understand a word of them, and Kirsten says that \u201cshe\u2019d written to some distant relatives and these were their replies, though the news wasn\u2019t very good.\u201d There\u2019s a sentence, in Danish, that Kirsten keeps repeating, and this is what impacts Montes the most. He doesn\u2019t understand those words (neither does the reader), but something in Kirsten\u2019s voice makes him want to cry. \u201cIt must have been, I think, because the sentence he couldn\u2019t understand was the most remote, most foreign, and it came from the part of her he didn\u2019t know,\u201d the narrator speculates.<\/p>\n

After Montes\u2019s plan goes awry, Kirsten begins leaving the house constantly, never saying a word. One day, Montes follows her. Kirsten goes to the port, where she stands for hours, stiff, looking out over the water. The story ends with Kirsten and Montes, side by side, watching the ships depart, \u201ceach with his or her own hidden and distinctive thoughts\u201d: a feeling that \u201ceach is alone, which always turns out to be surprising when we stop to think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, the couple\u2019s story hangs like a veil of murky water between us and the narrator, someone who ultimately just makes everything more unclear. What sets in is a feeling of being at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by schooling fish, octopuses parading their tentacles in the dark, and Onetti saying, You\u2019ll have to excuse me, but you won\u2019t be able to see much here, even up close it will be impossible to make out much of anything besides the uncertainty of another\u2019s thoughts, and you won\u2019t get any satisfactory answers.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen moving, use extra care not to disturb the sediment\u201d is one of the commandments of sport diving on shipwrecks. If a diver\u2019s fin grazes any surface of the boat, it will stir up silt, muddying the water. The same goes for cave diving. Visibility can be reduced to almost zero, so you have to use ropes and cables and be prepared to make a blind ascent. In the Coral Sea, off the coast of Australia, it\u2019s the opposite: the waters there are some of the most crystal clear in the world. Sixty meters of visibility, lending an illusion of total control over your surroundings.<\/p>\n

What governs visibility underwater is a concept in physics known as opacity, the measure of how penetrable or impenetrable a given medium is to a wave, electromagnetic or otherwise. For example, an opaque medium doesn\u2019t allow light to pass directly through it; it absorbs, refracts, or reflects. Consequently, the intensity of the beam of light is reduced, and it fails to reach the other side. On Ilha das Palmas, an island south of Ubatuba, underwater visibility is about eight meters, and the seabed is rocky. Thanks to ocean currents, the area is frequently visited by a variety of fish: moray eels, parrotfish, starfish, and sand dollars. That was where we used to go, dreaming of the Coral Sea or the Andros Barrier in the Bahamas, where we\u2019d finally be able to see everything.<\/p>\n

I encountered this hope for seeing things clearly in the work of the French surrealist Michel Leiris, whom I\u2019d also started reading at that time. Compared with Onetti, Leiris was a much different diving instructor, so to speak. Leiris promised so much more, with the confidence of someone who\u2019d take us to see reef sharks and dolphins swimming in infinite blue waters. Leiris, who was Onetti\u2019s contemporary, said that literary activity\u2019s \u201conly justification is to illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others.\u201d In the essay \u201cDe la litt\u00e9rature consid\u00e9r\u00e9e comme une tauromachie<\/em>\u201d (\u201cLiterature Considered as a Bullfight\u201d), a sort of introduction to his confessional autobiography, he wrote that he \u201cintended to elucidate certain still obscure things for which psychoanalysis had attracted my attention when I experienced it as a patient.\u201d<\/p>\n

Words like illuminate<\/em>, communicate<\/em>, and elucidate<\/em> gave an idea of how Leiris\u2019s thought interacted with his language (clear, not overdone, ostensibly nonliterary). But while Leiris had wanted to \u201celucidate,\u201d the interaction between Onetti\u2019s ideas and his language (murky, disjointed, nonlinear) produced an altogether different effect: the search for answers or clarification didn\u2019t exist. The stories I was discovering from my hospital bed seemed to lead the characters (and the reader) into even greater darkness. We could think about our world, a world of shipwrecks and wasted dreams, where visibility, for the most part, was brutally low. And how might we give shape to this world? How much could we really know someone or even ourselves? How might we dive into those murky waters, more saturated with sediment by the day, and communicate this state?<\/p>\n

My friends kept exchanging emails, listing dream destinations, equipment, water conditions. It\u2019s important to note that opacity is not absolute\u2014that is, what is opaque for some wave frequencies can be translucent for others. There\u2019s a kind of glass that is transparent to normal light waves (you can see through it) but completely opaque to ultraviolet waves (the ones that burn your skin on a beach in the Bahamas or the Australian Coral Sea). Generally speaking, this has to do with the interaction between the frequency of the medium and the frequency of the wave that\u2019s trying to travel through it. Depending on the degree of syntony between these frequencies, the wave will either pass through or be stopped in its tracks.<\/p>\n

One of Leiris\u2019s mantras is to \u201creject all fable\u201d and \u201cadmit as materials only actual facts, and not only probable facts, as in the classical novel.\u201d Leiris wanted to set in motion a kind of realism that was \u201cnot feigned, as in most novels,\u201d but made up of \u201cthings experienced and presented without the least disguise.\u201d In some way, this felt connected to another world, one that would show itself more and more over the coming years: autofiction, stories where the use of real or biographical events was a value in its own right, an interest in private life, diaries on public display, confessional storytelling, Instagram stories, our painstakingly psychoanalyzed life (the epic of subjectivity), the assumption that there\u2019s a correlation between our perception of the world (\u201cour truths\u201d) and the world itself, the desire to \u201cmake clear,\u201d to understand oneself, to see how things \u201creally\u201d are; the belief in the illusion of transparency\u2014when we go to update our Facebook status, the little box prompts us to share, asking, \u201cWhat\u2019s on your mind?\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

While there may be many paths that lead us to transparency (a watering down of Leiris\u2019s confident gesture), Onetti is a kind of Zen master of opacity, a diving instructor who takes us to spots where we can see very little. His own image reinforces this: lying in bed, smoking, scribbling on bits of paper, bedsheets reeking of gin. In Onetti, the entrance to this murky-watered world isn\u2019t through the fantastic or the magical, like some of his Latin American contemporaries. Or at least, not only that. His most unforgettable and sorrowful stories\u2014\u201cA Dream Come True,\u201d \u201cMost Dreaded Hell,\u201d \u201cThe Face of Disgrace\u201d\u2014are realist narratives that seem to crush the modern hope of seeing everything. There\u2019s a play between the affirmation and negation of reality\u2014a subterranean current that seems to connect his work to Bola\u00f1o\u2019s short stories. This is mainly because in Onetti\u2019s stories, these mechanisms of memory, invention, and partial ignorance are contained within what is being told.<\/p>\n

When we read, we\u2019re often looking for things to be made clear. We want that beam of light to reach the other side. We want to see and to understand, both of which give us an unmistakable feeling of comfort and happiness. This is what makes us forge ahead in a novel: the search for a reason, a rationale, a purpose. Life, in general, also works like this. But inevitably, there are things we can\u2019t see. All along the way are blind spots, hazards, twists and turns. Like those mornings and afternoons spent diving\u2014when we were immeasurably happy and then all of a sudden, out of the darkness, came some staggering revelation\u2014everything happens somewhere between opacity and transparency. We can compare and contrast these categories for all practical purposes, but the truth is that one does not exist against the other; unbeknownst to us, they\u2019ve been coexisting the whole time. It may seem paradoxical, but Onetti, despite the blurred timelines of his stories\u2014or perhaps because of them\u2014is a transparent writer. He is transparent in his endeavors to produce opacity. His writing lets us see precisely what we cannot.<\/p>\n

\u2014Translated from the Portuguese by Zo\u00eb Perry<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emilio Fraia was born in S\u00e3o Paulo in 1982. His English-language debut, <\/em>Sevastopol<\/a>, translated by Zo\u00eb Perry, was recently published by New Directions in the U.S. and Lolli Editions in the UK. Fraia was named one of <\/em>Granta\u2019s Best Young Brazilian Writers. In English his fiction has appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>Grand Journal, and <\/em>Two Lines 19: Passageways.<\/em><\/p>\n

Zo\u00eb Perry\u2019s translations of contemporary Brazilian literature have appeared in <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>Granta, <\/em>Words without Borders,<\/em> and <\/em>The White Review. She is a founding member of the Starling Bureau, a literary translators\u2019 collective, and was selected for a Banff International Literary Translation Centre residency for her translation of Emilio Fraia\u2019s <\/em>Sevastopol.<\/em><\/p>\n

All Juan Carlo Onetti quotations from <\/em>A Dream Come True: The Collected Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver and published by Archipelago Books. Courtesy of the translator and publisher.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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