Borges, Kafka, Joyce, Pessoa, Rilke, Proust… What do all these names have in common? Well, actually, there must be many similarities between them (to begin with, that they are not names but surnames), but one that I always like to point out is that, although all of them are considered the greatest writers of the twentieth century, none of them received the Nobel Prize. All, by different paths (in the end, led by a kind of common magic), seem to have distanced themselves from the committee where, every year, the judges of the famous Swedish contest hang some literary genius to display to the world.
The Mexican politicians of old would say of them, “No way, they moved, and they didn’t appear in the photo,” where “moved” means stepping outside the mainstream. The photo… we already know what it is, that of all those who feel (or learn to feel) comfortable subjecting themselves to the conventional, to the common: the famous photo, for example, of the “most important scientists of the first half of the twentieth century,” where, by the way, according to the criteria of the time, only one woman appears – “the exception that confirms the rule,” members of that profession would say. (By the way, it is not lost on me that in the picture I presented of the six great literary figures, I did not include any female writer, a shame that I will carry throughout this text and to which, in the end, I will give its due place).
For now, the theme is that of those mythical beings who stand far from the center, out of focus, away from the target where the sharp arrows of the mainstream pierce even the greatest geniuses. Borges, Proust, all of them, on the contrary, remained off-center: Borges, distracted in his labyrinth of books; Proust, in another, less abstract and better furnished, searching for his memory; Pessoa, spit into a thousand people to traverse his own; Rilke, creating a silence in which one could hear the flight of angels: All all seemed not to belong to any order, not to come from anywhere, nor to harbor any illusion of ending the journey elsewhere.
I speak of them as immortal beings, without beginning or end, without any anchoring, as if they did not tread the ground: the Kafka myth, the Proust myth; immortalized, sometimes by their books, more than by their statues. But one only must read them to realize how far they were from dreaming of themselves as a stone; and how close they were to yearning for simpler lives, like ours. “I envy everyone for not being me,” said Pessoa, but everyone could subscribe to that feeling at some point.
I do not want to delve into their sins and sacrifices: Borges, his sublime skepticism, his impartiality – which was almost indifference – towards human affairs, led him to receive the recognition of a criminal Argentine dictator, forever staining what he cherished as one of the greatest values: his decency. (Years later, he showed his repentance in an act and a text as shocking as they were ignored.) Rilke protected his solitude by despising his benefactors; Pessoa – more decent – ended up offering his body to the Minotaur of alcoholism.
None of them – even if we want to make them monolithic beings – was exempt from human ordinariness. This is obvious: no one is, just as none of us is exempt from having mythical traits, mysteries, and secrets that make us indecipherable. Luigi Pirandello, the great Italian playwright (who would have been as mythical as those other six if he had not been awarded the Nobel Prize), wrote plays whose titles speak to how little he trusted that each human being could be seen as one and only one. In them, he mercilessly challenged the claim of some to become that, and repeatedly exposed the farce that what human beings say and do can be deciphered in a single meaning: Mrs. Morli, Two in One; Right You Are (If You Think So); One, None, and a Hundred Thousand; When One is “Someone”… (This issue, by the way, is also the great dilemma that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the discovery of relativity and, two decades later, when the new quantum science, among other things, proposed that an electron can be in two places at the same time.)
Human beings are like that: something tends to fix us in one order while another “something” disperses us in infinite directions. Our life is a paradox: we yearn for unity and diversity in equal measure, identifying our freedom with both, as if we inhabited chaos and cosmos at the same time.
An example of this paradox is what happened to Jean-Paul Sartre, a notable philosopher and prolific novelist and playwright. He did not receive the Nobel Prize, not because it wasn’t offered to him, but because he did not want it: he rejected it. Many of his contemporaries branded him as egomaniacal and opportunistic (they said he did it to gain publicity). Still, his explanation was clear: he rejected that recognition, along with almost a million dollars, to prevent his readers from biasing their reading of his texts and valuing them simply because they were “the work of a Nobel Prize winner.” In short, he did not want that to compromise their freedom. Unfortunately, despite this noble and radical attitude, Sartre, who would have wanted to appear unconventional, had already put himself too much in the spotlight to achieve it. He tried not to appear in the photo, but when he moved, all the cameras swung toward him.
Undoubtedly, he made a mess of things. But he is not the only one. In fact, it happens to all of us. Continuously, we screw up: we dissent, we take off and fall into a new pattern, and so, flight after flight, pattern after pattern, fleeing paradox, we end up weaving it, devising it, spinning it. Very few are lucky like that innocent character in Life of Brian, the British comedy film. In one scene, a certain boisterous leader delivers a stirring speech to the crowd, exhorting everyone to defend their freedom of decision: “Because we don’t want to be sheep, do we?” he exclaims. “Isn’t it true that none of you want to be sheep?!” The crowd roars a unanimous “Noooooooo!”, which has very little autonomy, and when the fervor subsides, a timid voice is heard in the silence:
“I do.”
That man is the only free person on the planet who accepts his alienated condition despite everyone else. He plunges himself into the paradox of existence and swims in it like a fish in water, becoming a miracle. Perhaps humility is, deep down, nothing more than a lack of fear of ridicule. For most of us, the paradox suffocates us: we do not want to be like everyone else and, because of this, we are. We join that majority voice of freedom, but what saves us, in the end, when we are left alone, is that, stunned and remorseful, we see the consequences of our actions.
Thus, thinking about this paradox and tragic error, I arrive at the topic that I left pending: the shame of not mentioning the great, unrecognized literary masters who did not win prizes: Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers, Marguerite Yourcenar… I begin by noting how, unlike those men of letters, these women come to mind not only by surname but also by first name. Is it perhaps an attempt to embrace entirely, not partially, and not as statues? Woolf, Plath, De Beauvoir: memorable stones. For recognizing only the surname is to uphold the memory of the father, the fathers, the male ancestry. Then I remember the words I heard a few days ago, truths that suddenly let us see the human multitude left out of the picture. In an interview I saw on Instagram, a young thinker spoke about terms that cannot enter philosophical, psychoanalytic, or political discourse, because they are associated with the childish and the feminine. (Examples are the word sweetness, inaugurated as a philosophical concept by the French Anne Dufourmantelle, and “In our patriarchy, the infantile and the feminine are not places producing meaning or thought.)
I repeat: they are not places producing meaning or thought. The surnames Joyce, Kafka, and Proust perhaps reveal to us the value of humility, but hide arrogance, to say the least, concealing more than half of the world: women, children, and all marginalized people, who, little by little, manage to capture our attention and step into the spotlight due to the conspicuousness of their absence.
We human beings will never stop experiencing our paradoxes or unveiling the invisible: we will always discover new transparencies that, if we are attentive, will come to open fragments of meaning and thought. For me, who boasts of being a feminist, today, life gave me that shame I speak of, allowing me to recognize and confess it.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
