The power of the writer resides in his outsider status

Fred de Vries interviews Carlos Fuentes

Inevitably there was that question from the audience, the one about the issue of the cartoons and the Prophet. Could the literary giants on the stage please give their views?

The three writers looked at one another and, out of reach from the microphones, debated in hushed tones. After a few minutes, André Brink took the mike and began a passionate plea for freedom of expression, which gradually turned into a lecture on responsibility. The audience applauded. Then it was Nadine Gordimer's turn. She added that despite the often vicious portrayal of their godlike and holy characters, Christians and Jews had never resorted to violence as a revenge.

And the third writer behind that long table? Carlos Fuentes remained silent.

Our interview takes place the following morning, in the house of Gordimer, where the Mexican author and his wife are staying. The appointment has twice been postponed, because the 77-year-old Fuentes needs a bit of time to get started. He is visiting South Africa as the guest of honour for the Nadine Gordimer Lecture, a yearly literary highlight in Johannesburg. Day one has Fuentes, Gordimer and Brink conversing about writing and opposition in the Wits Great Hall. On day two Fuentes holds a long lecture about Don Quijote, in which he waxes lyrical about the avant-modernist mastery of Cervantes. Day three sees Fuentes and five South African writers and poets reading from their own work. In between he gives interviews, holds press conferences and catches a few glimpses of South African life.

Shortly after 10 o'clock Fuentes enters Gordimer's living room. A dignified man in a light-blue shirt and beige pants. His grey hair has been combed back, longish and curly in the neck. A razor sharp moustache gives him the appearance of a literary generalissimo. He sits down on a wooden chair.

Okay, straight into that bugging question: Why did he remain silent on the cartoons, when reliable sources told us that behind closed doors he, Brink and Gordimer have had an exhausting discussion about the issue?

"André and Nadine carried the ball. I was very discreet," says the man who on the 13th of May will receive the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Prize for Freedom of Speech.

In his collection En esto creo (This I believe - an A-Z of a writer's life, 2002), which was largely written before 9/11, he hardly touches upon Islam. In the event of a new edition, would he consider adding "Cartoons" under C? Or, slightly more seriously, "Islam" under I?

He shakes his head. "No, no, no. Those cartoons are a passing event. It'll be out of the news in ten days. As for Islam … Part of my culture is Jewish because I come from Spain, and Islam was in Spain for seven centuries. The Jews were there for seven centuries as well. I owe my language for a great part to the Arabs; one quarter of Spanish is made up of Arab vocabulary. I also owe my language to the Jewish communities, who wrote the first histories of Spain not in Latin but in the language of the people, which is Spanish. Add to that my Christian tradition and you can see I'm stuck in the middle of the clash of civilizations."

A short pause, to let those dreaded words, coined by the conservative American political scientist Samuel Huntington, sink in. "But I'd rather call it the dialogue of civilizations. It must end in a dialogue. I'm a citizen of a secular society, obeying secular laws, respecting other faiths which I do not share, and hoping that these faiths respect one another. That's all I can tell you. I'm being very diplomatic."

The answer is less evasive than it seems. It accommodates the complex, dialectic persona of Fuentes: writer, thinker, activist, polemicist, diplomat, cosmopolitan, Latino, European. The son of a career diplomat, he grew up in Panama, the United States, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Switzerland. His mother insisted that Spanish was the language spoken at home. His father educated him in the history of Mexico. His first novel, La regíon más transparante (Where the air is clear), was published in 1958. Since then his name has decorated the covers of a few dozen books - fiction, essays, plays and journalism. "One can be a bigamist in writing," he laughs. "You can love two women at the same time. I love fiction more. Maybe fiction is my wife and journalism is my lover."

Given his impressive oeuvre and his political outspokenness ("I am more blunt than my friend Milan [Kundera]"), it's not surprising that an interview with Fuentes resembles something of a mini-lecture. Every question receives an extensive answer, with Fuentes intermittently dropping names, citing literature and making references to world history. His adversaries like to portray him as "having lost touch", "pompous", "namedropper" and "dandy of the revolution".

He certainly doesn't lack self-confidence. While Brink and Gordimer came across as defensive and slightly provincial during the discussion at Wits, Fuentes radiated the pride of an aristocrat who in his essays and interviews never ceases to stress that the Mexican struggle with identity is a thing of the past. His country acquired this identity through "blood and strife and war and revolution and construction and finally debate". Fuentes plays with his long, remarkably skew fingers, and dives into the history of Latin America: "The Spanish monarchy had been the protecting roof for three centuries. Suddenly it was blown off by wars of independence. We didn't know what to do. We were against the Spanish - they were the colonisers, so we refused the heritage. We were against the blacks and the Indians, because they represented backwardness. What represented progress was France and England. So we thought: let's imitate their laws so we'd become a Nescafé republic, an instant democracy."

It didn't happen like that. Millions of poor people, huge land issues, and a lack of institutions and political talent paved the way for a series of prolonged crises, which ultimately led to the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

"After that we started accepting who we are, accepting our roots and building our society on reality, not on fables. Not Westminster, but our own institutions. The Revolution brought forward that Mexico was a mestizo country, not a country of a fake Prussian army that paraded on Sundays with plumes on their helmets."

The lesson for South Africa? "I'm very touched by the realisation that apartheid went only eleven years ago. We have been independent since 1821. Look at all the things we had to fight over. And we did not have extreme racial tensions. I am very admiring of what went down in this country, and I would like to give it time. It's going to require time to reach a level of equilibrium. You are on a much better road than we were when we were eleven years old. We didn't even have diapers."

The turbulent Mexican history and its ambiguous relationship with the United States - Fuentes calls the post-war border of 1848 a "scar" - form the basis for most of his work, which often has a holistic touch. In Los Años con Laura Díaz (The years with Laura Diaz, 1999) he manages to link the Mexican history with the 20th-century Spanish Civil War, America during McCarthy and the death of his son, who suffered from haemophilia. And in Terra Nostra (1975) his imagination travels from the ancient Romans to the apocalyptic end of the last century.

The power of a writer, says Fuentes, resides in his outsider status. His geographically scattered life has enabled Fuentes to confidently take the position of the observer, on the outside looking in. For him, the ideal writer is someone who always feels like an exile, even in his own house. "A writer always has to be in opposition, also if his party is in power. He has to be a critical voice of everything, not only of his enemies but of his friends as well. Even more of his friends!"

Literature, therefore, still has a huge role to play. The digital revolution and the possibility of a new semi-literacy due to a non-reading culture don't scare him. Literature will not become an archaic entity like croquet or Orania. "There have always been media and entertainment that exist along with literature, even in ancient Greece and Rome. Circus Maximum was certainly more popular than the works of Tacitus. I grew up with radio and film, and everybody saying this is the end of literature because everyone will be going to the movies and listening to the radio. That didn't happen."

Literature, he stresses, is essential for our survival, almost in the same league as breathing and eating. "It has to do with how you employ words, what you do with words, which value you give to words. We are dealing with a realm in which words circulate - 'Good morning'; 'Pass me the tea'; 'Go to hell'; 'I love you' - words we are using all the time. It's our duty to transform these words of everyday circulation into gold and give them back their profound meaning. That's the mission of literature. Every line from Shakespeare will refer you to a very existential situation, to which he has given its highest possible verbal meaning."

He leans forward to recite Shakespeare's Hamlet. "To be, or not to be; that is the question; Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing end them."

"[These words] become fantastic, unforgettable, part of your life, thought and soul. So a writer works in two realms: memory and imagination. That's what gives him his potency. After that he can take his political position. Sometimes he can take mistaken political positions, like Borges who was in favour of [Chilean dictator] Pinochet, or Neruda who was a Stalinist for a long time. That does not withdraw any merits from their work. My position is: let us work at the highest possible level of quality on what is properly ours, the imagination and language. And then, if we wish to, let us participate in the political debate. That is what I do."

His pet hate is the Bush administration. In 2004 he wrote Contra Bush, a diatribe against the American president. "What Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their clique are doing is really a debasement of public discourse and the democratic process. You can't have a democratic process hinged on questions around fundamentalism, faith, fear and terror. We are not tackling what has to do with the environment, rights of women, minorities, the poor, education, children, opportunities for work, the infrastructures of our nations, poverty. All these things are on the backburner because we have to fight terrorism."

In his latest, epistolary novel, La silla del Águila (The Eagle's Throne, 2003), which is set in 2020 with Condoleezza Rice as the American president, Mexico has been cut off by the US from all forms of modern communication. Telephones, the internet, faxes, satellites, nothing works. The people are forced to write letters again. Is this another example of Fuentes the prophet (of doom)? After all, the Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco once told him that from his debut, La región más transparante (1958), to Christóbal nonato (1987), "all of your forecasts have quickly come true".

Says Fuentes: "As a novelist you're always very tempted to write in order to exercise: write about this so it won't happen. And then, when it becomes reality, you become a prophet. Well, I certainly hope that Condoleezza doesn't become a president."

Outside a television crew is getting restless. Brink and Gordimer appear for a photo session. "One more question," says Fuentes.

Why does he live in London, a city he has described as grey, full of bad food and people like cold fish? He grins. "That's exactly why I live in London. I have too many friends in Mexico, New York, Paris and Madrid. Sometimes I'm smothered by social obligations. In London I'm left alone. I have a wonderful life. I get up at six in the morning. I do my own breakfast. I start writing at 7:30. I work until 12. Then I go for a big walk in the cemetery, where I read the inscriptions. I have lunch with my wife, and read for three hours in the afternoon. And then you have a great capital with the best theatre in the world, two opera houses, music, cinema, art exhibitions. And I'm an hour from Paris. I can go there and drink champagne with my friends. I can go to Madrid to the bullfights and the flamenco. But there I don't write. In London I write a lot."



LitNet: 24 February 2006

Have your say! To comment on this interview write to webvoet@litnet.co.za, and become a part of our interactive opinion page.

Click here and subscribe to our fantastic free newsletter - for your weekly cultural fix! Click here to see the latest edition

to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.