But anyway, that’s not what Villoro and I talked about. We talked about other writers, like Henry Miller or Artaud or B. Traven or Tristan Tzara, writers who contributed to our sentimental education and who are now impossible to find in the depths of bookstores for the simple reason that they have hardly any new readers. And also about the youngest ones, writers of our generation, like Sophie Podolski or Mathieu Messagier, who were simply incredible and highly talented and who not only can no longer be found in bookstores but can’t even be found on the Internet, which is saying a lot, as if they’d never existed or as if we’d imagined them. The explanation for this ebb of writers, however, is very simple. Just as love moves according to a mechanism like the sea’s, as the Nicaraguan poet Martínez Rivas puts it, so too do writers move, and one day they appear and then they disappear and then maybe they appear again. And if they don’t, it doesn’t really matter so much, because in some secret way, they’re us now.
PHILIP K. DICK
In my long conversations with Rodrigo Fresán about Philip K. Dick in bars and restaurants around Barcelona or at each other’s houses we’ve never run out of things to say.
These are some of the conclusions we’ve reached: Dick was a schizophrenic. Dick was a paranoiac. Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the twentieth century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage. Dick talks to us, in The Man in the High Castle, in what would become his trademark way, about how mutable reality can be and therefore how mutable history can be. Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream. Dick writes, at times, like a prisoner, because ethically and aesthetically he really is a prisoner. Dick is the one who, in Ubik, comes closest to capturing the human consciousness or fragments of consciousness in the context of their setting; the correspondence between the story he tells and its structure is more brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo. Dick is the first, literarily speaking, to write eloquently about virtual consciousness. Dick is the first, or if not the first then the best, to write about the perception of speed, the perception of entropy, the perception of the clamor of the universe in Martian Time-Slip, in which an autistic boy, like a silent Jesus Christ of the future, devotes himself to feeling and suffering the paradox of time and space, the death toward which we’re all heading. Dick, despite everything, never loses his sense of humor, which means that he owes more to Twain than to Melville, although Fresán, who knows more about Dick than me, raises some objections. For Dick all art is political. Don’t forget that. Dick is possibly one of the most plagiarized authors of the twentieth century. In Fresán’s opinion, Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis, is a shameless ripoff of Counter-Clock World. I prefer to believe that Amis is paying tribute to Dick or to some precursor of Dick (let’s not forget that Amis’s father, the poet Kingsley Amis, also championed science fiction and was a great reader of it). Dick is the American writer who in recent years has most influenced non-American poets, novelists, and essayists. Dick is good even when he’s bad and I ask myself, though I already know the answer, whether the same could be said of any Latin American writer. Dick portrays suffering as forcefully as Carson McCullers. And VALIS is more disturbing than any novel by McCullers. Dick seems, at moments, like the king of beggars, and at others like a mysterious millionaire in hiding, and by this he may have meant to explain that the two roles are really one. Dick wrote Dr. Bloodmoney, which is a masterpiece, and he revolutionized the contemporary American novel in 1962, with The Man in the High Castle, but he also wrote novels that have nothing to do with science fiction, like Confessions of a Crap Artist, written in 1959 and published in 1975, which shows how well-loved he was by the American publishing industry.
There are three images of the real Dick that I’ll carry with me always, along with my memories of his countless books. First: Dick and all his wives — the incessant expense of California divorces. Second: Dick receiving a visit from the Black Panthers, an FBI car parked outside his house. Third: Dick and his sick son, and the voices Dick hears in his head advising him to go back to the doctor again to inquire about a different illness, very rare, very serious, which Dick does, and the doctors realize their mistake and they perform emergency surgery and save the boy’s life.
THE BOOK THAT SURVIVES
Although it may seem like a memory exercise, it isn’t. The first book I was given by the first girl I fell in love with and lived with was a book by Mircea Eliade. I still don’t know what she was trying to tell me. Somebody else, somebody less foolish, would have realized immediately that the relationship wouldn’t last and would’ve taken the proper steps to protect himself from suffering. I can’t remember the first book my mother gave me. I do vaguely recall a fat illustrated history, almost a comic book, though closer to Prince Valiant than Superman, about the War of the Pacific, that is, the war between Chile and the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance. If I remember right, the hero of the book — a kind of War and Peace of underdevelopment — was a volunteer who had enlisted in the Séptimo de la Línea, a famous infantry regiment. I’ll always be grateful to my mother for giving me that book instead of the children’s classic Papelucho. As for my father, I don’t remember him ever giving me a book, although occasionally we would pass a bookstore and at my request he would buy me a magazine with a long article in it on the French electric poets. All those books, including the magazine, along with many other books, were lost during my travels and moves, or else I let people borrow them and never saw them again, or I sold them or gave them away.
But there’s one book I’ll never forget. Not only do I remember when and where I was when I bought it, but also the time of day, the person waiting for me outside the bookstore, what I did that night, and the happiness (completely irrational) that I felt when I had it in my hands. It was the first book I bought in Europe and I still have it. It’s Borges’s Obra poetica, published by Alianza/Emecé in 1972 and long out of print. I bought it in Madrid in 1977 and, although Borges’s poetry wasn’t unfamiliar to me, I started to read it that night and didn’t stop until eight the next morning, as if there was nothing in the world worth reading except those poems, nothing else that could change the course of the wild life that I’d lived up until then, nothing else that could lead me to reflect (because Borges’s poetry possesses a natural intelligence and also bravery and despair — in other words, the only things that inspire reflection and that keep poetry alive).
Bloom maintains that it’s Pablo Neruda, more than any other poet, who carries on Whitman’s legacy. In Bloom’s opinion, however, Neruda’s effort to keep the Whitmanian tree growing and thriving ends in failure. I think that Bloom is wrong, as he so often is, even as on many other subjects he’s probably our continent’s best literary critic. It’s true that all American poets must — for better or for worse, sooner or later — face up to Whitman. Unfailingly, Neruda does so as the obedient son. Vallejo does so as the disobedient or prodigal son. Borges — and this is the source of his originality and his cool head — does so as a nephew, and not even a very close one, a nephew whose curiosity vacillates between the chilly interest of the entomologist and the stoical ardor of the lover. Nothing more alien to him than the quest to shock or to stir admiration. No one more indifferent to the vast masses of America on the march, although somewhere he wrote that what happens to one man happens to all men.