The Tiger in the Music Room, the Mollusk in the Zoo

The Tiger in the Music Room, the Mollusk in the ZooAuthor(s): Paul WestSource: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 10, No. 20 (Spring, 1982), pp. 83-88Published by: Latin American Literary ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20119303 .

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THE TIGER IN THE MUSIC ROOM, THE MOLLUSK IN THE ZOO*

An oration delivered at Indiana University, Bloomington, on September 20, 1980, in the presence of Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas

Llosa, and William Gass.

By PAUL WEST

The biggest surprise at the symposium on ?The Novel in Spanish? held at Indiana University in September of 1980 was provided neither by the

presence nor presentations of Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa?who, along with myself, comprised the trio of guest stars at the per formance?nor by the gratifying and often quite interesting papers offered

by the numerous Hipanists invited to speak, but by two splendid speeches, full of generous criticism and literary wisdom, from two important English

speaking novelists: William Gass and Paul West. The contribution from Paul West, author of The Very Rich Hours of

Count von Stauffenberg, cast on contemporary Hispanic narrative a new,

original, and creative light, which, coming from where it did, was welcomed

by us all with curiosity and excitment. Paul West's words, like those of William Gass, were the real heart of the symposium; and it is fitting that

they were: isn't the other's view the indispensable element for the total and

objective understanding of oneself?

JUAN GOYTISOLO

Once upon a daredevil time, before the trivialization of taste and the

vulgarization of publishing, I cooked up a little essay for the old Kenyon Review, whose title I intended to be ?Eloquentia Standing Still: The Novel in Modern Spain.? After such knowledge, can there be forgiveness? When the essay appeared in print, its title had resentfully backfired into being ?Leoquentia Standing Still? ?

which, I guess, is the Eloquence of Lions at

the Halt. Whichever flukey deity oversaw that printer's lionization was

right, I think. Lions, tigers (sad, trapped, or crouched on the belly of Mex

ico), jaguars, and a whole miscellany of other gorgeous enigmatic beasts, figured little in the fiction I was reared upon, I having been born in foreign parts of foreign parts. They

? the lions et cetera, not the foreign parts ?

figured rather more in the fiction of the North America I fled to, and they abound in the fiction of that other America to the south, which I now

83



84 Latin American Literary Review

believe was the imagined America I came to these shores to find, like some

disenfranchized addict looking for his drug, as if South America ?

primitive, bizarre, and lumped together just like that, were the land of

heart's desire. Was it really that outlandish? Or were its scribes bizarre

beyond belief? Down there (you could just hear it in the Sixties), kings of in

finite space were playing bowls, and the cannonade got through to Penn

sylvania, making a din in my creative sleep. That was where the Leoquentia was: the energy, the zest, the esemplastic license taken to the full, whereas

where I had come to, the land of Rip van Winkle and whales and timber

wolves, was more like the Valhalla of chimney sweeps, where people knew

what fiction was for without knowing what it was.

Had I come to the wrong place, then? Was my literary compass that far

off? My head was in Patagonia, or four hundred miles off the Chilean

coast, on the island of M?s a Tierra, where the German master-spy Admiral

Canaris had played at being Robinson Crusoe nearly two hundred years after the real (or the fabricated) Robinson had been marooned. I am afraid

my magination has never quite grown up, although it can still relish the in

congruity of what Admiral Canaris found in 1915 or M?s a Tierra: a cann

ing factory for crayfish. What had happened in my head was clear,

although it may not be clear to you: the rebellious young student, who won

the continual rebukes of his tutors, had surfaced again, called out into the

open by the neighborly thunder of Latin America ? a region of the mind so

ravishing in prospect, and propinquity, that I ought never to go near it.

That young student was always being told he should be studying the lions of

English Literature ? Sir Walter Lion, Lion of Hawthornden, Percy Bysshe Lion, Lord Alfred Lion, George Lion (a woman), and of course Geoffrey Lion and Beowulf the Lion too. Don't waste your time, I was told, with all

that ?foreign stuff,? which included Gide, Mann, and Pavese, and lots of

Faulkner. Beware the foreign pox, and above all steer clear of Walter Pater, that drawing-room atavist who kissed cats on the mouth.

Well, compulsive exotophile that I was, I didn't cotton to English

puritans any more than I do to those who maul North America even now, and I came to see my avocational truancy under the auspices of an

altogether more likeable lion, who turns tail and lies down when Don Quix ote tries to provoke him out of his cage. I too got an affidavit from the

keeper, proving I had tried: an imaginary non-event had become an im

aginary real one; and, when in my first novel I tried to entice a lion of my own out of its cage, all I heard was a squeak from The Times Literary Sup

plement, calling me the English Truman Capote. I moved on, fast, coming to North America, my new-found-land, only to find over almost twenty

years yet another regime of deadheads: not a Gulf Stream of the imagina

tion, but a stale canal patrolled by the fanatics of merely expository prose, and ? what's worse ? a sort of grassroots humdrummery practised by woofer-writers who pride themselves or writing within the expectations of the

reading public. To put it very plainly: I had imagined North America as



The Tiger in the Music Room by Paul West 85

more exuberant. You could get by, of course. There were always enclaves of

geniality in which imagination wasn't thought a blight; but they were few.

They still are. South of the border, however, as I began to realize with a sense of envy verging on paranoia, things were happening of which,

spiritually, I felt a part. (I don't mean politics, of course.) I thought of the fabled statue of Pallas Athene which guaranteed the safety of Troy as long as it remained within the city, and, in my inflationary war, I said to myself: The conversations and explosions in the cathedrals, the obscene birds trap ped in the green houses and the music rooms, all those marks of identity scratched out of the Spanish calendar by requiem-singers doomed to count

centenaries of silence in caustic exile, these in their tormented way ensure

the safety of imagination in the old world, the new world, and the next world. They keep an available paradiso warm. And the statue, not of Pallas Athene but of Hapless Atheneum, goes into exile but from a distance spon sors a bad-luck reading room of the mind, making terra nostra firmer by contributing to literature without first passing through the sluices of this or

that national catchment area. I mean it. No doubt people more erudite and more painstaking than I have examined the role of exile as catalyst; all I can

do, speaking from the tip of the plank I have walked from Oxford to Morn

ingside Heights to what feels like nowhere at all, is to point to these three

gentlemen, from Mexico, from Peru, from Spain, and realize that from designates not so much origin as the fact that they are away from those

places. I see them, and some half dozen others who make the heart go Boom, as Magi in reverse: the wise men from the south (at least, below the Barcelona-Boston line, or, if you will, the line from El Paso to Casablanca), getting the hell out of Bethlehem to set up the statue of Pallas Athene in the international manger of the fable. Of course they write about the ethos their

brain cells were born into: that's a tic you never lose; but, in so doing, they create, they have already created, the fictional counterpart to Andre

Malraux's museum without walls, in which the voices of silence are loud and burly through sheer exercise, and I mean exercise of fiction's ancient

privilege: to transport the reader or the listener from this place to one com

pletely other, as if we were in som updated version of Sir Richard Burton's Soko de barra in Tangier, which now belongs to Mr. Goytisolo: a foul

slope, slippery with viscous mud or powdery with fetid dust, and dotted about with graves and decaying tombs, foul booths and tattered tents, where dishevelled folk tend their squatting camels and haggle over cattle for

the beef-eater s in Gibraltar ? at least until the reciter begins, a tough looking guy wearing only a broad waist-belt into which he's tucked his lower chiffons, and most remarkable for his mane of hair, the tiny hour

glass tom-tom on which he taps the period of his tale. He cavorts, he

grimaces, he mines, and (Dirty Dick Burton says) even Europeans who can not understand a word of Arabic ?divine the meaning of his tale.? After

wards, he goes round for alms and waves his bits of silver in the air. It's a sly vignette. Burton makes a tale out of th tale-teller's act, and




I'm reminded that, on one of his return trips to London, his landlady asked him if in the course of his travels he'd ever met Captain Gulliver. Now that, for better or for worse, is the world my mind moves about in ? where the distinction (a dys, a stink, and a shone) between fact and falsity goes out the window. Or between what's Mexican, what's Peruvian, what's Spanish. Categories are so pervasive we need not suck up to them. Instead, we agree that fiction adds to the sum of created things; that the novel is only one of

the trees in the forest of fiction; that the national or the regional is the

plasticine which Promethean fiction-writers use to transcend themselves,

fashioning what Cort?zar's Morelli calls the novel of anthropophany. Poor

Morelli, loaded down with jargon to vindicate the novel he couldn't write ?

from lo(co)gic, which is loco logic, to the liber fulguralls, the forked book

about the lightning bolt. Yet his intuitions are far from daft, and his sense

of a super-novel which is at once matter-of-fact and magical, both over

whelming and in need of an accomplice reader, is rather moving. It certain

ly, in a hit or miss way, fits the Palladium which these Spanish- or

Portuguese-speaking prose-writers have built. Only, perhaps, in the work of some writers from behind the Iron Curtain ? 'Abram Tertz,' Bruno

Schulz, Uwe Johnson, Christa Wolf, say ? does the scrupulous delineation

of the at-hand exceed itself in the same way, as if the pressure of enormus

energy or bison-sized emotion made every image curl and buckle. Nearly

everything that's said feels like a metaphor for something else, like

something irradiated, or pulled down by the rest of the iceberg. It's uncan

ny. It's more than a set of indices to strain. It's what happens, I suppose, when impulsive self-mythologizers light out for the territory of the word, where the dictionary is king, full of the voices of the dead, and of the way their throats, their mouths, were built.

Who indeed hasn't wondered at the instant ecumenicality of writers who deal copiously with the postrevolutionary bourgeoisie of Mexico, the

seamy weathecock politics of Peru, the ritualistically quarantined decadence of Spain (and Spain's language). It sounds like rather specialized

material, of enormous national interest but hardly likely to make the rest of

the world hold its breath, and yet it comes through as shiny as fresh-cut

sodium, as potent as some newly minted myth, and as important to know as

one's own address. Wondering why, I've pondered various answers, among them the following. These nation potraits comes to us from citizens of the

world. Latin America was the Eden that Spain grabbed and then ignored, thus making it ripe for North American influence ? so perhaps what lures

us, Europeans and North Americans both, is the vision of yet another Rip van Winkle waking up. Something sequested and retarded has broken

loose, stirring up the dirty water of dreams we never knew we'd had, and

paddling about in the cognate guilt of twin imperialisms. Something almost

pre-literate comes to life again. The oldest surviving schizophrenia stalks

among us, innocently answering its own questions. And it is all done with

dionysian intensity, offered in the context of world history, and, in the least



The Tiger in the Music Room by Paul West 87

of its manifestations, coming home to roost, like a noetic hangover, bet ween Andy Griffith and Abbott and Costello, at six-thirty in the morning, in Summer Semester, on the darkling plain of channels whose numbers no

one knows.

If I were in a hurry, I'd settle for that, I'd leave it at that; but there are

two other elements, or factors, that matter a great deal. One is these writers' sense that so-called actuality is a mental thing, subjective and malleable and

open to speculation, which means that the matter of Mexico, Peru, Spain ?

much like what used to be called the matter of Greece and Rome ? can be

narrated inventively, expressionistically; and what's lost as fact returns in a

diagnostic dream. Homo ludens can tell the story of this history, then, without giving up a shred of literary artifice. I hear Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil behind The Death of Artemio Cruz, and some hear Orson Welles. Flaubert stands behind Mario Vargas Llosa and Joyce behind Juan

Goytisolo. Not only that: imagination playing ? in other words weaving its

text, because a text is what's woven ? fuses Aztec sacrifice with Nazi exter

mination camp in Carlos Fuentes's A Change of Skin. Vargas Llosa, for all

his voluminous documentary, has evolved a whole strategy, of secrecy, de

nying a character vital information, or turning time into a vertical layer cake, or, when time is horizontal like a line of prose, changing tempo

through short ellipsis or long hiatus. And Goytisolo's Count Julian, in that

overflowing life-sentence of a novel he inhabits, has his tongue in his colon from the very first word.

Now all this, some would say, is trickery, optical illusion, narcissistic

window-dressing, whereas to me it's the characteristic behavior of an agile, fertile mind, such a mind as you don't find behind the scenes of the class conscious English fiction published over the last thirty years. To the

English, class is as sovereign as Mother Nature herself; it's as if they wrote

about umbrellas while ignoring the nature of the rain.... In a way, that brings me to my second element or factor, which is that

these writers have an acute sense of trauma, not just historical, but on

tological too; so we get not only the viciousness of historical regimes, but

also, infiltrating the social fabric like a beneficent plague, the trauma of be

ing alive. I say trauma overall because there are the joys too, and the jux taposition is shocking. You listen to your blood. You watch your lymph, your spit, your tears. Your pupils are made of the same pulp as your brain. Your nails grow. Your peristalsis loops the loop. And, just over the

horizon, lurks the Hayflick Limit, past which no human cell can go; bungl ing proteins bump us off. I find that trauma in these writers, not denudedly as in the fiction of Samuel Beckett, and not peeping out through the gaps in

between veils of mortified saving suavity, as in Nabokov, and not just technically either, as in Richard Selzer's Mortal Lessons: that fragrant sty of medical curiosa. I find it diffused, though not in any sense blurred, in their frescoes of what it's like to be alive, subject to almost incalculable forces best evinced in what Charles Darwin called panmixis

? when




chronology's garbled, places are fused, and what wasn't there before im

poses on you to the point of hypnosis. Protocol sinks back into an

thropology and formula back into the swill of phenomena. A thing is itself

only a bit more than it isn't and its legitimate context is no less than all the

things it's not. Call it the metaphysical mind, perhaps, as we find it in the

poetry of Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, and Diane Ackerman; it's a see

ing into and beyond; it's a raising to exponential maximum of the drive to see things atomically, which is to say undividably from the molecular,

mythic, magical matrix seen as a continum. On this mental Rialto we find

metamorphoses Ovid never dreamed of; and if fiction still deals in what

happens next, then ? at the hands of these novelists present, and of their

congeners (not all of whom I can pronounce!) ? we find out what's right

next door to what happens next. I doubt if anyone of rather fixed literary taste would go away unchanged by a banquet of Cort?zar, Carpentier,

Garc?a M?rquez, Lezama Lima, Puig; those engrossing Brazilians (Osmans Lins, Lispector, and Pi??n), the sonorous gourd of Lezama Lima, and the

sprightly, antic other Cubans, Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Reinaldo Arenas. And, if nothing is what happens next (when the lion really halts), then we find out what's next to that as well.

Did I imagine all this? Is this version of these writers' work as im

aginary as my old image of America was? Hearing the natives of

Madagascar shout ?indry!? whenever a certain lemur showed up, the French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat concluded indry was its name; but indry! was the imperative of the verb ?to look.? Nonetheless, to this day, an

indry's called an indry, stuck with a name as I am stuck with a view. If I've

sympathized for the wrong reasons, I still have sympathized. A recent book

puts me in this company anyway, for my notion of the artist as a cosmic

gangster who usurps the divine role and creates possibilities unrecognized in

real creation. The same book mentions Mr. Gass, who long, it seems to me,

emigrated from downhome North Ameican to his own private Sheikdom of

sheer Style, taking along with him the special metallurgical radiance that is

his own. I can see why he's here. To be on the safe side, though

? at least if you believe in graven im

ages ?

you unfold a paperclip and, scoring until the blood comes, lengthen your life-line a couple of inches or so, right down past the so-called bracelet

of your wrist. The tiger got away. The lion died. The mollusk has exceeded

his time.

The Pennsylvania State University

The original Spanish text appeared in Quimera, No. 2.



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The Tiger in the Music Room, the Mollusk in the Zoo