the time that has yet to exist
by Douglas Messerli
Javier Marías Dark
Back of Time, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (New York: New Directions, 2001)
Although Javier Marías characterizes
his own fiction as a "false novel," the work has little to do with
the traditional roman, concerned with
a hero and his life (although the author, his characters, and his friends are featured
in the work), choosing instead to focus on the debris at the edges of life, the
incredible accidents and coincidences that occur at the borders of Marías'
writing activities.
The book first focuses on a previous Marías fiction, published in English as All Souls (in Spanish, Todas las almas), broadly based upon his tenure as a guest professor at Oxford in 1983-1985. Although Marías goes to some lengths to insist that all but one of the figures of the work were fictional—as with almost all writers, he admits to stealing small characteristics of the people he knew, but argues that he combined them in ways that resembled no one he'd met—many of the professors with whom he worked specifically identify others and themselves as characters in the fiction, determining that his work is a roman à clef, and going so far as to rechristen the characters of All Souls with the real names of their colleagues.
Marías is quite horrified by that fact, afraid of offending individuals
who he hardly knew (a woman acquaintance is identified by his friends as a
female he portrays as having an affair in his work) and possibly even being
sued. The British publisher, delaying the contract, is quite afraid of slander,
and it apparently does not matter in British law that all the characters are
fictional, for even if one imagines that he or she is being portrayed a lawsuit
is allowed to go forward. At one point in this hilarious conundrum, Marías
reiterates the fears of all writers; after the British publisher explains that
"All that it would take (for a lawsuit) was for someone's circle of
acquaintances...to believe they recognized that person in a character in a
novel 'with resultant hatred, disdain, discredit or derision,' and the real
individual would be able to file suit against the book's author and publishing
house and have the suit accepted for consideration," Marías responds:
"But how can that be avoided when it depends on the way readers read the book and not the way the writer wrote it? Any lunatic can believe anything he wants, can't he? Any paranoid could recognize himself, couldn't he?.... How can it ever be known if the arbitrary identification has caused hatred or derision?... It can't be known with any certainty, since that depends, above all, on the perception of the injured party."
In short, almost any writer using fictional
figures might possibly— according to British law at least—be liable to a suit.
But the problem Marías identifies is perhaps even more disconcerting than a
lawsuit. Since interpreting a fiction or other literary work is also dependent
upon the reader, how can any fiction be separated from reality? Or how, to turn
the equation on its head, can reality be separated from fiction? How can anyone
possibly ever determine the truth, however one might want to define that? And
if there is no way to determine "truth," how do we function as a
moral society?
To support Marías' claim of
Gawsworth's authenticity, he published two photographs of Gawsworth in All Souls and reproduces them in Dark Back of Time, one representing a
handsome younger man, the second a death mask of the poet by someone named Hugh
Oloff de Wet (who, so I later discovered, also did busts of British poets Louis
McNeice and Dylan Thomas).
Gawsworth, a man connected with a group of writers in early 20th century
England, including figures such as Shiel, Arthur Machen, Lawrence Durrell,
Richard Middleton and Hubert Crackanthorpe—the last two who committed suicide
at an early age—gave them various roles in his uninhabited kingdom of Redonda.
Gawsworth's own literary achievements were devoted primarily to
anthologies of "mystery and terror," of which Marías mentions eight
volumes between 1932 and 1937, many of them containing writings by his circle
and work by younger authors whom Gawsworth promoted, including Wilfrid Herbert
Gore Ewart (1892-1922). He attracts Marías' attention, the author going so far as
to translate one of Ewart's stories and publish it in an anthology of rare
tales of fear appearing the same year as All
Souls. Although Marías is able to find names of several books Ewart
published, he is unable to locate copies, and knows little about the author
except for his "strange" death in Mexico.
Soon
after, Marías receives two mysterious letters: one from a Mexican essayist,
Sergio González Rodríguez, on the death of Ewart, and another in 1990 from a
man named Rafael Muñoz Saldaña, who claims to have tracked down the facts of
Ewart's Mexican death. Through a bit of further research, with help from
Marías' novelist friend Juan Benet, the author gathers together information on
Ewart's service in World War I, his quick rise to literary success, and his
breakdown recounted by a close friend of Ewart's, Stephen Graham.
That story takes the character on a voyage from England to the US and
eventually to Mexico, ending in Ewart's "accidental" shooting on New
Year's Eve on the balcony of his Mexico City hotel. But the pieces of the tale
are stranger even than fiction, and several contradictions arise even in
Graham's telling of the story and through other bits of information, including
the revelation that the hotel in which Ewart stayed on the 5th floor did not
have a balcony at that level. Marías reveals these strange facts with all the eagerness
of a great fiction writer and amateur detective. Yet his methods of gathering
information are strangely passive. He insists that he only seeks out books
through bookdealers and will not move forward unless someone sends him
information. Marías claims that he does not use a computer and uses only
materials that have "sought him out."
So the plot thickens when Marías receives a book edited by Stephen
Graham, the narrator of Ewart's death, signed by John Gawsworth. More
significantly, another correspondent writes him that, coincidentally, his first
poem was published in a magazine edited by John Gawsworth and that, years
later, he met Hugh Oloff de Wet in Madrid and was entertained in a local café for
several weeks by de Wet's wonderful stories. Thus the photographer of
Gawsworth's death mask and the mysterious poet King Juan I of Redonda are
magically brought together as Marías now recounts an equally fabulous tale of de
Wet, interweaving the two with various other real figures from Sir Conan Doyle
to Ödön von Horvath (the Austria-Hungary writer who spent a life in fear of
being struck by lightning and died, oddly enough, in Paris of the effects of a
lightning bolt) that interconnects the figures he has mentioned with war, their
literary activities, their somewhat insane actions, and their deaths, which
Marías brilliantly reflects back upon his own life and activities.
In a strange way, accordingly, Dark
Back of Time is almost like a reverse image of a fiction, as if Marías were
challenging those Oxford professors who confused imagination with everyday
reality; but it is almost certain that many of the characters of this book, who
are all real (I found substantial entries for all on the internet, and had
previously read works by Machen, Durell, and von Horvath) will be thought of as
imaginary given the outrageousness of their lives wherein events, as the author
himself admits, were "random and absurd."
Just as the author learned to write as a child—he is left-handed and
learned to write backwards so that his name XAVIER read to others as REIVAX—the
strange worlds Marías relates in this fiction, are visions of existences where
the past is the future, worlds of times that do not yet exist. Thankfully he
promises us at least one more future journey to that "Dark Back of
Time."
Los Angeles, June 7-9, 2009
