By JUAN CARLOS CHIRINOS
The 20th century began very late in Venezuela, or so a certain historiography has always told us, perhaps emulating that idea that comes from afar (with echoes in Hesiod) and that Iliá Ehrenburg takes up to say that the 19th century has been the longest in history. history, since it began in 1789 and ended in 1914. Something similar could be said of the Golden Age, which actually lasted more than a hundred years, or of the war of the same name (of one hundred and sixteen years), or of the so-called Age of Pericles, which for some did not last more than eighty years. There is something magical in violating the calendar in which the events are registered, and perhaps this is a way of explaining ourselves to the world.
If we accept, which I do not accept, that the last century did not begin in Venezuela until the death of Gómez, in 1935, we would be condemning to “nineteenth-century” authors as of our time (or of the future) as Rufino Blanco-Fombona and his news stories, precursors of the short story, and like Teresa de la Parra and her very Proustian recovery of memory; like Julio Garmendia from El cuento ficticio and all his other texts; and even a novel like Cubagua (1931), by Enrique Bernardo Núñez, would remain submerged in that century of “centennial scoundrels” and which, reread today, seems to have been written fifty years from now, since it has nothing to do with the worst of the 19th century. Not to mention the work of that our father who is in all heaven, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, who died in 1930, but whose delirious prose still percusses and affects writing in Spanish. So it does not seem accurate to say that in Venezuela the 20th century began in 1935; perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that, at least in literature, some, when Gómez died, continued into the 19th century; and others, many more than we think, were already in the 21st century even years before the dictator died. (I cannot resist the temptation to name an author from the 19th century but who seems, due to his intellectual excess, the erudite part of the beat generation: Félix E. Bigotte, who died in 1907, and whose written biography gave us so much brilliance Francisco Javier Pérez ). Thus, the works of writers such as Rufino Blanco-Fombona, such as Teresa de la Parra, Ramos Sucre or Enrique Bernardo Núñez are the ones that lay the aesthetic and intellectual foundations that will make possible the appearance of a novel as current and in progress as Percussion ( 1982), by José Balza, whose first edition is already forty years old.
There is an “experimental freedom” in the writing of this novel that continues to amaze me; perhaps I should clarify that when I speak of freedom and experiment I am not referring to a senseless exercise in fireworks and sudden coincidences (Sandoval dixit), no; The writing of this novel is not reached by chance or without tradition. As I have already said above, Balza is the heir to a literary and intellectual tradition that, if they push me, I would extend to Andrés Bello or Father Navarrete, and as such heir cannot escape their influence: Balza is free to do with his tradition what he knows how to do best, but that tradition will always mark the genome of his speech. And he also has the right to experiment with the forms and the senses, but provided he is aware that every path has already been trodden, every experiment has already been tried, with or without results. Perhaps for this reason, José Balza includes his writing in the “exercises” section, because he knows that each of his experiments — each text that comes out of his hands — is the continuation of his own essays and those of his ancestors. of the. There he lies the power of his freedom to write: he already knows what the teachers of him.
So, are you breaking up with something or someone, Balza?
Well yes and no. It depends from where one approaches Percussion and all his work. The simplest, or simplest (or simple?) answer would be to point out the break with criollismo, realism or naturalism of authors such as Rómulo Gallegos, but a more captious look could detect not a few debts and assets to that tradition that the author has rejected on some occasions; However, the autonomous voice that emerges from Balz’s work leaves no doubt that Ramos Sucre, Bernardo Núñez, Julio Garmendia, Teresa de la Parra and, above all, Guillermo Meneses are the sources from which he has drawn with greater relish.
The fiction writer who is Balza in Percussion, in the previous March or in Medianoche en video: 1/5, for example, does not abstract from the essayist Balza: I believe with more and more conviction that the communicating vessels that exist between the essay and the creation in authors like Balza are numerous, intricate and unknown: yes, the restless novelist dominates in the novel and the “pure critic” (as Wilfrido Corral calls him) in the reflective texts: but both are contaminated and sustained, without getting in the way In Percussion, for example, a reflection on the passing of time from back to front and the magic and wonders of the mountain as a symbol thickens fiction; while in books like El fiero (y dulce) instinct terrestrial (1988) the eutrapelia of those who know how to narrate “intervene” the texts gracefully so that they are not mere material for scholarship and reach higher levels, those that Alfonso Reyes would have called the “judgment heights”.
Perhaps one of Balz’s tools for amalgamating his writing(s) is the one that allows him to move between genres with such ease and grace: music. The very name of the novel, Percussion, refers to the tom-tam that characterizes us as a continent (“I am the song of the bongo”, reminds us of Nicolás Guillén), but also because when one reads the novel, apart from the obvious (re)percussions of memory, of mountains, of cities, of the past over the future (and perhaps vice versa, because literature can do anything), each sentence refers to others and, these, to others; each character can be conceived as the enharmonic equivalence of another, as is the case with Isidra, a modern gerontophile, and Janneke, who speaks any language and is the recipient of the world‘s disease.
Given so much “narrative matter” in Balza’s work, how can one not assume a powerful influence on the generations that followed him? There is a lot to choose from, as is always the case with great authors. It is enough to approach the stories of Silda Cordoliani, Humberto Mata or Sael Ibáñez, or the novels of Slavko Zupcic, Milagros Mata Gil, Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón to understand that this narrative tradition that sinks its roots in Bello and Navarrete, that It flourished with Bigotte, Blanco Fombona, Teresa de la Parra, Garmendia and Meneses, it has also passed through the Balzian sieve and has irremediably contaminated these authors, even when they did not consciously want it to. It is what the tradition to which you belong has: it hits your books and you can do nothing to avoid it, except enjoy it.