Author: dark blue
1967 was not a peaceful year. In January, Apollo 1 caught fire and crashed; in June, the “Six Day War” broke out in the Middle East; in October, Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia. A conversation about Latin American literature seems insignificant to a world steeped in chaos and turmoil.
“Two Kinds of Loneliness” by Marquez Llosa Nanhai Publishing Company · New Classical Culture
Judging from the situation at the time, it seems that this is indeed the case. In September, the southern hemisphere is full of spring. Although the lecture hall of the Architecture Department of the National Engineering University of Peru is full, people may be more out of curiosity. The guest of honor at the event, 41-year-old “foreigner” Gabo, is said to have written a novel that sold 30,000 copies in three months, but the book has just hit the shelves of bookstores in Lima, most Peruvians. People have not read it yet; the host is the native Peruvian writer Mario who is more familiar to them. This gentleman is 9 years younger than the “foreigner”, but he has already achieved remarkable achievements. House” won the Romulo Galagos Award, the most prestigious literary award in Latin America.
Of course, today we are more accustomed to calling the former Marquez and the latter Llosa. But to the world at that time, they were just “Gabo” and “Mario”-although they had already made their debut, it still took time before they had an “exclusive title”. However, the “Latin American literary explosion” led by two people (Note: “Four masters of the Latin American literary explosion”, the other two are Argentine Cortazar and Mexican Fuentes) has not yet become a reality. In the words of one participant who witnessed the conversation, “They talked about what was going on around them candidly, even a little surprised, like two young pterosaurs asking each other ‘what the hell is evolution’. “(Juan Gabriel Vazquez, “The Recovered Words”, included in “Two Kinds of Solitude”, and the quotations that do not indicate the source in the following texts are all quoted from this book.)
This is what is interesting about the conversation recorded in Two Kinds of Loneliness: At first, no one noticed what this literary event meant, even after a long time; , as Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and delivered the famous speech “The Loneliness of Latin America”, with Llosa winning worldwide fame with his works such as “Long Talk in the Bar” and “The Battle of the End of the World“. Reputation, as this “literary explosion” really changed Latin America’s position in world culture and even reality, people began to realize that everything may have originated from such a “singularity”.
Because no matter what happens in the future—whether it is the splendor brought about by the “literary explosion” mentioned above, or these two people who have evolved together, written novels together, and even named their children after each other The “young pterodactyls” end up turning against each other so much that they throw their fists at each other… At the beginning of it all, nothing can hold them back.
But this does not mean that these two young men in 1967 only rely on “confusion, danger, failure” (Borges’s words) to impress their audience. In fact, on the contrary, they were all literary backbones with clear goals and achievements at the time, and this was the original purpose of this event: not so much that the organizer, the National Engineering University of Peru, hoped to invite these two novelists to express the different aspects of the novel. The second method was taught to the students, rather all the people of the “turbulent sixties”—all Latin Americans—were eager to know if they could tell their own stories, have their own “literature” like Westerners.
What these two young men have grasped is the answer to this question. Before this literary event, they have given a firm proof through their own efforts. In the conversation between the two, the practice path became clearer:
Vargas Llosa: We cannot say that Latin American writers thirty years ago were not as good as Latin American writers today, but almost all of them were “part-time” writers.
García Márquez: That’s right, those writers do a lot of work at once…[Actually]you have to spend your best, most energetic time on literature, and that’s the most important thing.
Taking writing as a career——As Marquez said, “What I can confirm now is that writing is an urgent ambition. Writers with this ambition have to write. Only in this way can they get rid of headaches and indigestion problems”, perhaps This is the biggest difference between the “literary explosion” generation in Latin America and its predecessors. They are no longer just storytellers, but self-conscious, professional writers who need to respond to the broader and urgent demands of their own long-silent continent.
Therefore, the confusion about the “literary explosion” that Marquez raised earlier was also answered later by himself. When Llosa asked: “What do you think is the cause of this upsurge in narrative literature throughout Latin America?” Marquez said: “If readers read the works of a certain writer, we can assume that readers agree with the author. The author. From this point of view, I think the reason is that what we write just meets the needs of readers at the moment.”
In other words, Marquez is more inclined to “explosion of readers” than “explosion of writers”. After all, if there is no demand from readers, the writing of writers is doomed to become a spectacle. And it is not difficult for us to find that whether it is “It is raining in Macondo” (Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude”), or “the wind came down from the Andes and covered the streets of Piura with a layer of white” (Llosa’s “Green House”) never comes from the writer himself, but from Macondo or Piura’s desire to be told.
It was under such a consensus that Marquez, Llosa, and more Latin American writers came together to create that miraculous age of stars. What needs to be pointed out is that the differences in personality between the two are obvious. Marquez is humorous, romantic, and practical; on the contrary, Llosa, who is younger, is rigorous, calm, and principled. Perhaps it was precisely because of the difference in personality that became more and more prominent in the days when the two fought side by side in the future, which led to the irreparable breakdown of the friendship between the two. But in any case, the meeting of these two young people with their own “loneliness” in the spring of 1967 was wonderful.
“We want to give them the Romulo Galagos Literary Prize again…another two-person discussion on Latin American fiction in Lima…all of this, with one purpose, to bring Gabo and Mario together again To be the founders of the lineage of the ‘literary explosion’: José Arcadio and Ursula, Ley and McCartney, Hippy and Sabey, Turks and Indians, poets and architects.” (Angel Esteban, Ana Gallego Quinas, “From Marquez to Llosa: Retrospecting the Literary Explosion”, translated by Hou Jian, Life·Reading·New Knowledge Joint Publishing) Although this “explosion” brought Everything that has come is gorgeous enough, but we will never refuse to return to that spring-the most beautiful thing is always when everything is possible. (The author is a youth book reviewer)
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责编：崔益明 ]