Emily Post-Avant: On the Recovery of a Lost Summa Ficta by the Great Crime Writer and Metafictional Master, Ricardo Piglia
Dear Emily Post-Avant,
I am writing you from Mendoza, Argentina. I am a restauranteur, chef, writer, and translator of English-language poetry. I have read that you once lived in Montevideo, a city to which I take the hydrofoil ferry on a regular basis, as one of my restaurants, El Gaucho Matrero (yes, the allusion is to Borges), is located there, in the Old Market, by the port. Montevideo is a fine and mysterious place. I am sure you must miss it.
In 2009 and 2010, I was a student in the Bilingual Creative Writing Program, at University of Texas-El Paso. The founder of that program, Johnny Payne, was my teacher. I remember him fondly. I saw, before you migrated your column over to Caesura magazine, that Mr. Payne had contributed some pieces to Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, where I followed your writing avidly. I have tried to reconnect with Mr. Payne in recent weeks, but with no luck. Would you kindly send me his current contact information, should you have it?
Market in Montevideo, Uruguay. Pinimg.
Indeed, this letter to you has to do partly with him, as it does, very much, with the late and great and unclassifiable writer of Argentina, Ricardo Piglia, considered by many to be inheritor of the mantle of Borges. The circumstances are somewhat strange and exciting. Allow me to explain and then to propose something, though the proposal is contingent on Mr. Payne’s permission. I am quite sure, if he were asked, that he would consent immediately.
You see, in that class at UTEP, Mr. Payne had assigned Piglia’s first and most famous novel, Respiración artificial (1980). It is a detective novel wherein fiction, fact, literary theory, and speculative (possibly) history (e.g., Hitler meets Kafka in Prague) fly into and out of each other’s various orifices in vertiginous ways. I suspect you know the book well. Payne had spent some time over drinks with Piglia in Princeton, years before, at some conference. They apparently hit it off, and they started an intermittent correspondence, it seems, following that.
All of us students were thrilled by the fiction, even as no one seemed to be able to agree on much at all concerning its meaning. Which was ironic, since the novel opens with an epigraph by T.S. Eliot about the meaningfulness of “the approach to the meaning.” A few months later, at the very end of the semester, when we were to discuss Bartleby & Co., by Enrique Vila-Matas, Mr. Payne strode into class, grinning, waving a few pages in triumph above his head. “I have a crazy surprise for you all!” he cried.
Cover of Ricardo Piglia’s novel Respiración artificial (1980). La diaria.
And then he sat down, and read us, in a mildly vatic tone, a very long letter written to him, in English, by none other than the (then) greatest living writer of Argentina, Ricardo Piglia. (Piglia, you might know, taught for many years at Harvard and Princeton, and his English was magnificent.)
Amazingly, Mr. Payne, reacting to our hermeneutic distress, had decided to write Piglia an email, letting him know we grad students had studied his famous Respiración artificial and had been left both aesthetically astonished and somewhat interpretively shipwrecked by it. Could he offer some help in shedding light on the book for us, Mr. Payne had written the author to ask. Even more amazingly, Ricardo Piglia had replied with an epistolary essay, addressing us directly, in a charmingly and disarmingly personal manner. Like a hip Rilke, coming down to our level, addressing a group of young poetas and ficcionistas, and with swag, for someone in his late sixties. You might imagine how surprised and flattered we were. Or you will imagine it once you read the letter, which is a work of epistolary and critical art, I would say—a significant lost document that now enters the strange labyrinth of Piglia’s archive. Which is a labyrinth, certainly, that is not accidental.
Ricardo Piglia at the Constitución station in Buenos Aires in the 80s. El Pais.
It was the following semester, shortly before I returned to Argentina, that I approached Mr. Payne and asked him if I might have a copy of the letter he’d read to us. I told him I wished to translate it into Spanish, where it would surely be grabbed up by a major journal in the Southern Cone somewhere, I was sure. Mr. Payne graciously agreed, without delay, and after he’d pulled the document out of a file drawer, we walked down the hall together to the Department’s pre-9/11 Xerox machine.
What do you plan to do back home, Horacio? Mr. Payne asked me. Well, believe it or not, I want to be a chef, I said. Really, said Mr. Payne. Yes, I said, I have for a long time wanted to have my own restaurant! I think that is marvelous, he said. But that doesn’t mean you need to stop writing. Please don’t stop writing, because you have the goods, young man. Look at this guy, Anthony Bourdain, for instance…
Well, that made me feel like a million bucks. It’s funny how the most important moments for a young writer can be the most banal, even clichéd, words of encouragement from our teachers. Usually, they will never know it.
Anthony Bourdain with a psychoanalyst in Buenos Aires on Parts Unknown, 2016. Medium.
The thing is, Emily, shortly after I got back to Buenos Aires, I had to quickly move from the flat I had rented, back to Mendoza, because my father was very ill. And in that move, the Piglia document completely disappeared. This was back in 2012. I had given up hope of ever finding it. And having lost touch with Mr. Payne, I gradually put the letter and my plans to translate and publish it behind me.
But then, two weeks ago, clearing out some old papers from one of my bookshelves, look what reappeared, stuck into a folder of (of course!) old seminar papers from UTEP that I had saved. I was flabbergasted. And upon rereading the letter, even more so. As I said, it is a work of epistolary art, by a true master. And so, thinking it over, I have decided to not translate it, at least not for now (this is partly due to my packed schedule), and to offer it to you, if you would like to be the first to publish it, in your resuscitated column, at Caesura. I have been a fan, and I would be honored if you would. And I have no doubt that Ricardo Piglia, master of hardboiled crime fiction involving literary texts, would be delighted for you to do so, as well!
We must first, I believe, seek Mr. Payne’s approval, for the letter is, technically, his property. If you are in contact with him, please go ahead and ask him. And please provide him with my email, for I would love to have contact with him again after all these years: ##########@gmail.com
I attach Ricardo Piglia’s lost letter here.
Yours, with best wishes in this most challenging time. Please let me know.
—An Admiring Chef in Mendoza (and Montevideo!)
Dear Admiring Chef in Mendoza (and Montevideo!),
I don’t know how to tell you what a thrill your letter brings, my sweet boy. I mean, your letter that brings a truly remarkable lost-and found-letter along with it.
Bravo, Chef!
My young friend, do you know that Ricardo Piglia is one of my favorite prose writers? In fact, almost all my most beloved prose writers of the past fifty years are in the Spanish language: Borges, Bolaño, Aira, Vila-Matas, Marosa di Giorgio (prose poems and novels, some of the greatest prose of the world), and the great Ricardo Piglia.
Artificial Respiration is one of my favorite books of “fiction” of all time. And yes, I had been in touch with Johnny Payne. I was introduced to him by Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson, the two Dispatches editors who screwed me over. He is a very special writer. I have a publisher’s proof of his brilliant new novel here, Confessions of a Gentleman Killer, though I don’t know why Payne would have had it sent to me, since we had a pretty hard spat about a year ago, when he sarcastically responded to a quite original bilingual translation I did of Vallejo’s “I Am Going to Speak about Hope,” calling it “cholo Spanish.” This was quite hurtful to me. He seemed to want to tell me he had more Spanish than I did, which I know is not the case. In fact, his presumption is laughable. But credit where credit is due: His book of poems, Heaven of Ashes, is actually very good, as well. But after such insult, I am not going to write the man. And the thing is, if he freely gave you a copy of the letter and assented to its translated publication, then there is absolutely no reason I can see that he could object to its original text being published in Caesura.
Jorge Luis Borges surrounded by students in Buenos Aires, 1978. Monaco Reporter.
So I am going to call boss on this one and just share Piglia’s delightful tour de epistolary force below, for the delectation of all Piglia fans, present and future, and for the theses and dissertations of Piglia scholars in the drawn-out global catastrophe that is to come. If I get sued, I get sued.
Oh, thank you, thank you, young Chef. And you know what else? The tree covered city of Mendoza is one of my favorite places, ever, though I have only been there once. It was for a big conference on “Borges in the Next Millennium,” in 1999! I gave a paper on Borges’s dear, little-known friend, Macedonio Fernández, who was centripetal in the writer’s development. I met both the younger Bolaño and Aira there, and I smoked with them one evening, at a corner bar, just the three of us. They liked my paper and that I had grown up in Montevideo. Bolaño was coughing, constantly. Aira was patting him on the back, sometimes slapping him quite hard. Piglia was at the conference, too, but I was too stupid to try to meet him. Those were the days, eh? When you could fly in airplanes for twelve hours and drink and smoke in tango bars without first taking off your mask, only to then put it back on.
Gaucho Matrero, carajo!
con Saudade,
—Emily Post-Avant
Macedonio Fernández, a significant influence on Borges. Escaramuza.
[The transcription of the lost letter by Ricardo Piglia follows]
Dear Readers of My Novel,
I understand from your professor that some of you were upset by the assigned task of reading my novel in its interminable entirety. I have no way of knowing whether Professor Payne reported to me with any degree of accuracy your collective conversation. After all, he holds most of the cards in this matter; too many, in my opinion, and his report on your displeasure may simply have been his way of rebuking me without taking responsibility himself for the dislike he felt toward my pages. For all Professor Payne’s studied casualness and his laughing air of je m’en fou, he can be cagey, I’ve noticed. There are a few of his type in Entre Rios, who usually end up in a corner before the end of the night, muttering into a glass and laughing at their own jokes in a disturbing manner. And as a fellow novelist, he may be feeling just the slightest bit competitive. But I will take his report at face value, for as Emilio Renzi once said to me, even in the presence of a fellow human meeting our gaze with his own, we can never know directly that odd phenomenon called personhood. We can only know a man by the report he gives of himself, and so it is our perennial curse to work inward toward his being from that meager catalogue. But we are no more certain of the culprit’s true identity, after the fact, than if we were basing our impressions on a hastily-composed police sketch drawn by an amnesiac.
Cover of Ricardo Piglia’s novel Los diarios de Emilio Renzi: Los años felices (2016). Shavelzon Graham.
You may feel that after 300 pages, I’ve already exceeded my quota of words, but I did want to say just a few things to you, for like the Senator, I am unable to explain without words. First, I’d like you to know that I never meant to go on at such length in my novel. I got inspired — that is, what I understand to be inspiration — and I couldn’t stop. It’s that simple. This seldom happens to me. In fact, every time I sit down to type, I’m terrified that I’ll never be able to write another word again. In some strange manner, I’m always writing for my life, nursing the vain hope that the next time around, the terror of composition will abate. It never does. Second, I want you to know that I did not write Artificial Respiration expressly to irritate you, though I seem to have had this effect on several persons of my acquaintance, who felt compelled to read the novel for one reason or another, then skulked around afterward trying to avoid me for weeks. This subterfuge only increased their irritation, until finally they would bump into me at a cafe, entirely flustered, at which point they vented their fury about my novel in a spontaneous fit, and then we were able to resume normal friendly relations over wine and seltzer water. It was a great relief to me. Many of my compatriots are highly emotional. Our national specialty is overstating the case. It is impossible for us Argentines to simply dislike something. We must detest, despise, abhor, revile, like gentlemen exchanging strong oaths right before a duel. It is simply not in our character to say “I don't know. It was all right, I guess.”
Once I realized the salutary effect of these cathartic encounters with my skulking acquaintances, I made a list of all the people who seemed to be avoiding me, then called them up at once so that we could experience together some brief sobbing and shouting about my novel over the telephone. Afterward, we’d schedule a dinner together a few days hence, where we could talk together freely and laughingly on all our favorite subjects: Wittgenstein, Vico, the gaucho Dasein, baroque radicalism as a style of thought, and whether or not Hitler actually ever met Kafka. These are arguments we’ve had for years, not ones we can ever settle, but simply things which are fun to think about, and moreover to argue about, especially when one is a little drunk. It has occurred to me to suggest to people that they get a little tipsy before they start reading my novel. I believe that in the American West they say that every man becomes a philosopher after three beers. I don’t mind admitting that the fellow in the Ramos Bar toasting the beautiful Miss Giselle with the same speech over and over is based on me. As Marcelo Maggi says, when imagination fails you, you have no recourse but to stick to the facts.
Franz Kafka, Horse and Rider, 1909-1910. Drawing. Open Culture.
I did notice, when I took the liberty of perusing your weekly short papers, that in spite of your exasperation, several of you had quite interesting and perceptive things to say about Artificial Respiration, showing at many turns a deep comprehension of its mysterious aims — aims that for the most part had remained inscrutable even to me. Just because I wrote Artificial Respiration doesn’t mean that I understand it. Indeed, I probably understand it less well than anyone. It simply grew within me like an unplanned pregnancy, and I had to deliver myself of it, get rid of it, whether I wanted to or not. If anything, reading your comments on my novel clarified my puzzlement about it on many essential points. For instance, it had never occurred to me to begin on page 213, and read backward from there. Nor had I considered the possibility of skipping 20-page segments of it so that I could find out more quickly what Hitler said to Kafka, and what Kafka answered back. I thank you for those insights, the more so as I know how much it cost some of you to arrive at them, in the face of your own resistance. My fellow Argentine Julio Cortázar gave his readers two choices about the order for reading Hopscotch by listing two different numbered sequences at the beginning of that novel. I wonder whether I should have done the same.
One of you posed the question: Has the reader a right? A right to object? I don’t know what Professor Payne would have to say about that, but I, standing safely behind him, at a prudent distance from his impetuous ire, would strenuously defend that right. My only proviso, regarding anyone’s novel, is this: That the brief against a novel you dislike, even despise, be made with as much ingenuity and skill and care as the brief you make for the novel you cherish. That the argument be made with as much eloquence as passion, whether the animating emotion is love or hate. Any of you who has ever had to suffer through a clumsy declaration of love made by a tongue-tied suitor to whose affections you were indifferent will know that passion without eloquence can be an ugly thing.
But as for disliking certain novels, I do sympathize. Roberto Arlt, for instance, drives me to distraction. Yes, I know that I have a long story called “Homage to Roberto Arlt,” and that I also seized upon his figure with gusto in Artificial Respiration, but that was only a ruse. I staged that debate about lack of style to see whether I could pull it off, the same way a woman or a man will do technical climbing on a steep cliff, simply for the dizzying experience of it all — what you call, in that good, precise, sensible Yankee idiom, a “rush.” My characters are always saying things in my novels that I don’t agree with, but for some reason, I seldom manage to shout them down. When a whole roomful of people starts talking all at once, you hardly know who to object to first. Then once you do object, they sort of gang up on you, forming a temporary alliance among themselves, in spite of all the differences between them. For nothing unites tipsy amateur philosophers like a common enemy, and as you may have discovered, sometimes an author is the best enemy of all.
But as for me, I find Arlt’s writing insufferably pedestrian, if you want to know the truth, though at one time I read everything he wrote, like a teenage girl who goes on some crazed all-popcorn diet she’s heard about. Who was that intemperate youth named Ricardo Piglia who couldn’t stop reading Arlt? I scarcely recognize him now. I actually thought I liked Arlt, but every time I go back to the actual words he’s written, I suffer an intense fit of ostranenie, and I have to lie down for half an hour. I think I was more in love with some image of myself reading Arlt than I was with the work itself. For I do like to cut a dashing figure as a reader. Don’t we all? I want to be seen as one who is hep to what’s going on. So I kept fiercely reading into each of Arlt’s novels, trying in vain to make it the Platonic novel I wanted it to be, until at some point I had to go off and write my own novel in order to be satisfied. A state of creativity is often preceded by a strong sensation of disgust, at least in my experience.
Cover of Roberto Arlt’s novel Los Siete Locos (1929). Infobae.
In point of fact, some of the authors whose work I hated most passionately, in the beginning, and with whom I had the most contentious relation, ended up being the ones, in the end, who got into my blood; the ones whose vexing, marvelous pages I have gone back to, time after time, over the years. I have no idea whether I am such an author, but like everyone who ever wrote a novel, that is my ambition and my keenest desire. Authors are sly creatures. Like lovers, they’ll use any means possible, without shame, to get into your blood. Like lovers, those consummate Machiavellians, they believe that the end always, without exception, justifies the means. I wonder what Borges would say about that. As you may have noticed, thinking about one writer’s prose tends to send me off in a galloping reverie to another writer. I’m sure the Russian Formalists have some term for that, but I can’t think of it offhand.
Again, thank you for your patience, and I do hope we’ll meet again, down the road.
Sincerely,
Ricardo Piglia
