2023-10-06 04:00:46
Imaginatively evoke a father through the omnivorous power of fiction. Literarily conceive the diffuse contours of a speculative and Zapatista philosopher who became an emblem of how work leads inexorably to life and how there is no possible life if there is no work. Understand, from the necessary distance that time provides, how to make aesthetics a non-negotiable ethic and vice versa. Tracing the ungodly hours of a man for whom his “inner world was made of themes, not anecdotes.” Provide the reader with the image of a temporary frieze about the recent history of a turbulent and exciting Mexico at the same time. Trying to investigate the invisible twists and turns that shaped one’s personality through a father of whom I could glimpse most of the time “what he thought about the country, but not what he thought about us.” Try to know why the one he happily nicknames “the Carthaginian” looked for the meaning of the current world in ancient civilizations. Engage in confessional dialogue with the man who became a public figure and who wanted to put his own ideas at the service of social causes for which it was worth living and, ultimately, form an accurate drawing of a man who “was no stranger to to passion, but he preferred to be moved through ideas.
The reader suspects that Juan Villoro (Mexico City, 1956) has written his most intimate book – “writing means systematically disorganizing a series, the alphabet; in the same way, evoking means systematically disorganizing time” – and he also does so through his mother, Estela Ruiz Milan, philologist and psychoanalyst, because she, although “does not need to be imagined”, is the counterfigure that allows him to explore in all their breadth the anchor points on which to build the paternal edifice. It is also to her mother that she dedicates “The Figure of the World” and with whom she closes it in a long, essential epilogue that she calls “Distant Relatives.”
Yes. To date, it is Villoro’s most personal book because, in an oblique and displaced way, he talks about his father, his mother, his brothers, his friends, his unbridled and excessive passion for football, he talks about life. university, social and political in Mexico with the first and last intention of explaining himself, of understanding himself through his father, of turning him into a mirror along the length and breadth of the path that summons, from a distance, the accuracy of an image imperishable, as if that “I am another” of Arthur Rimbaud was the key to reading this calm tribute to the Barcelona professor Luis Villoro who had to be exiled to Mexico after the Civil War: “I do not intend to erect a statue to the Great Man or discredit him through infidelity. For the rest, the point chosen to narrate defines the author more than the protagonist portrayed.”
That chosen point, which is the starting point, is not very different from the one he used in his novel “El trigger de argón” (1991) because both texts – perhaps this is the other side of that one – seek to establish what are the parameters that They allow you to look at the world with different eyes. A look linked to the affections, to the friends of youth and those who remain now, to the personal, family and political memory, to the life sustained as if it were the commitment of a writing that for one burned in the field of thought (in Greece before Rome), and for the other, in the wasteland of fiction: “I dedicate myself to literature, where one aspires to write better than one thinks, and he dedicated himself to philosophy, where one thinks better than what is written.”
Villoro Jr.’s book about Villoro Sr. reminded me of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio when he collected the Cervantes Prize in 2004. Echoing the essay by Walter Benjamin “Destiny and character” and regarding a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche –”he who has character also has an experience that always returns”–, Ferlosio tries to show which literary characters have had a visible life, of character, whose manifestation was within everyone’s reach, and which characters were crossed by the silent field and the battlefield of destiny, not so visible and whose actions appeared transmuted precisely under that condition: destiny.
The philosopher-father, the author of “The great moments of indigenism in Mexico”, of “Believe, know, know” and “The significance of silence and other essays”, the one who became friends with Subcomandante Marcos, now Galeano , the one who accompanied his son to the stadiums not “because he was a fan, but because he was a father”, the one who in his last years “judged, in an unchangeable way, that life corroborates thought”, had a visible, amplified life due to a contradictory nature. But the Villoro who writes here knows that in more ways than one he wanted to approach his father in the devilish form of a destiny loaded with small gestures that had to be read under a slow hermeneutic, the figure of a world as if it were a library in whose On the shelves, life is not so obvious, and that is where he directs a speech that is nothing melodramatic, nothing regrettably sentimental, but rather under an ophthalmological and contained emotion, as if he wanted to say that, after all, he tried to understand why “to the son of a teacher, understanding is a way of loving.
The figure of the world
Juan Villoro
Random House, 272 pages, 21.90 euros
#Character #destiny #Spain