Living Things

I. ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION

‘We can’t change reality, but we can change the subject.’
— James Joyce, as cited by Ricardo Piglia

The day I met my friend G, he told me that as a kid he devised a theory about short stories that stayed with him all his life. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the purpose of stories is to classify, to impose order and hierarchy on the real world. But reality is a wilderness – a jungle or desert – a place that cannot be mapped. Every time something wild disrupted his life, my friend G would tell a story, any story, it didn’t matter what, anything would do. His parents would be screaming at each other at home, and he’d start talking about how the girl he liked had tripped in class, or how the baker had short-changed him, or whatever. He kept up this habit, or tic, as he got older – or maybe the truth is that he never lost it – and went on perfecting his theory. ‘Listen, the cut-off point between the way we cast light on the world and the world itself is the exact moment when that light is lost: death. Every civilization has built its identity – its cosmology or Weltanschauung – around this point. I can’t think of a single work of fiction where someone dies without saying or at least trying to say last words, words that are then subjected to interpretative violence, as if they were a summary or sublimation of everything that person had thought, felt and believed throughout the course of their life.’ I agreed with him because he was right, or at least I thought he was, and also because I always agreed with him. As the years passed, G took this argument to the extreme and said something that could have gone on to become his last words. Roughly, that ‘stories were born the moment our ancestors experienced great terror, the moment before one of them died, or when their camp was under siege, or when they lost a loved one’. That probably wasn’t what he said word for word; his exact phrasing no doubt did a better job of enshrining his thanatotic theory about short fiction. For him stories were intimately connected to death, and one could not be grasped without the other. With time, this theory impacted his relationship with the world, and he began to see proof that he was right all around him. Of course, the same applies to all theories, but among G’s various talents is an ability to drum up the most ingenious proofs, examples that linger in the minds of his listeners. I clearly remember him referring more than once to the scene in Pulp Fiction where Samuel L. Jackson has a gun pointed at him and starts talking about an epiphany he had, something his interlocutor finds incomprehensible and yet in that moment makes perfect sense to that character (and to the viewer). Stories as a way of momentarily forgetting death, stepping into death, or simply looking the other way as life carries on.

G would say that the story I’m about to tell is less a story than it is a prayer to ward off the horror that has been whispering to me for years. Maybe he’s right. But I’m going to tell my story – or our story – anyway, and even more rightfully, by hewing to the truth. So don’t expect to find any embellishments here beyond the ones imposed by language – which I realize are more than a few. A pessimist would insist that language inflicts so many nuances and misunderstandings – which, by the way, are not the collateral damage of language but the conditions of its existence – that the difference between the most straightforward writers and the most prolix, between the most sincere and the ones who take great pains to cut rubies out of lies, that this difference, I say – or rather, a pessimist would say – accounts for less than three or four per cent of all textual embellishment. I’m inclined to take a more positive approach, one less faithful or perhaps more straightforward, and start counting the flourishes at the point where language allows us to speak for ourselves: what you might call embellishment degree zero.

There are dozens of authors who have engaged in a cheap literary tradition that seems to take a variety of forms, all of them extremely poor. I’m talking about found manuscripts, false testimonies and mises en abyme. More than a few writers have dabbled in these sorts of gimmicks, convinced they were inventing literature anew when all they were doing was proving how little they cared about it. Paradoxically, I – who do not consider myself a writer (not any more) – will be the first to declare that the emperor has no clothes, the first to take the floor with the courage needed to flout the frills and artifice, the first to tell the story as it unfolded and nothing more. Time will banish the rest of them to the depths of history. For now, my act of revenge will be to withhold their names.

Before I begin my story, I should give a couple of examples of the kind of literature I want to avoid. In the pages after this preface, you may come across a sentence like ‘everything is covered in blood’. If that happens, don’t try to tease out any hidden meaning. I’m not saying that horror coats everything like a fine, invisible film; nor does the image signify sexual desire or the urge to kill. All you should understand is that everything is covered in blood. The snow, the gravel, the houses, the lamp posts. Everything. And not fresh blood either, but dry blood – extremely dry. Another example: if I describe a scene where a person is wearing a baseball cap, don’t try to tease out a metaphor. There is no metaphor. Just picture someone in a baseball cap. Whatever hermeneutic violence you unleash on this image should be no greater than the violence you unleash on the real world. In other words, this text is only a book inasmuch as everything is a book. That’s it. There is no intent, just storytelling. Embellishment degree zero. If you do your best to read it this way, then I should be able to tell you my story – the real story, what actually happened.

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