Against Talent-Dulling Factors

It is common for some people that writing is a continuous conversation with the poetics of authors who have shaped their life, their literary world; let’s say the plural, tumultuous, and amusing external world they “carry inside.” Without a doubt, the Argentine Alan Pauls, the author of The Borges Factor, is one of them. I just noticed this more than ever in an interview with his compatriot Hinde Pomeraniec regarding the release of his new essay book: Someone Singing in the Next Room. It may not seem like it, but it is a Virginia Woolfian title. In the interview, it becomes clear when Pomeraniec encourages him to comment on the title and he confesses that he took it from an essay by Virginia Woolf, where she discusses why it is so difficult for her to read her contemporaries and even more so to write about them. It was an essay by Woolf that took the form of a letter to a nephew who had reproached her for not writing about her contemporaries. In her response, Woolf stated that this was not possible for her because, to her, her contemporaries were people singing in the next room. And although it could be said that Woolf expressed this with some disdain, Alan Pauls loved the phrase because it regained for him the idea that all the people and works he writes about can be considered contemporary since, after all, they are literatures with which he is in conversation.

In fact, the factor of conversation is essential for Pauls in his new book: “I thought it was important to include dialogues within an essay book. Because there is something about the essay genre that has a lot to do with that.”

Suddenly, the interview shifts to some words from Alan Pauls that for me could even be sacred because he talks about how, while he was working on the book, he realized he was actually gathering essays on poetics that somehow composed him: “Because in this book one can read what I am made of. And see that there is a kind of X-ray of my writer’s chemistry based on all those from whom I fed, plundered, and vampirized. And in that sense, I believe it is a very loving book; I have eliminated those that are critical in an aggressive or disputative sense.”

But yes, there are, she points out Pomeraniec, severe admonitions for certain reviewers who were harsh with people like Roberto Arlt. Or Kafka. Well, says Pauls, because they are writers who for me are obviously very important, but it was also very important how certain readings of those writers imposed an image of what they did and their practices that was completely, I don’t know if false, but let’s say very disputable. Until there came a moment when those writers were well-read, or read in an innovative way, and suddenly, there, those writers “unleashed all the potential that the other readings aimed to suppress.”

Oh, I am left thinking of this infernal heat in Madrid, where it would be wise to seek and capture so many who dull literary talent.