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Literature

Cervantes, Borges, Calvino

Apr 1, 2022·18 min read

Image Taken by the author in the Tsinghua gardens

Life can't do without literature,

and literature can't do without the avant-garde.

I like to call myself an Indie Fetish.

It's a phrase I made up, and you could roughly translate it as "lover of all things independent."

The word "Indie" comes out of video games. There's no firm definition of an "indie game." It points more toward games made in an independent spirit, where the creator is brave enough to express themselves, to show off ideas and inventions you won't see anywhere else, and where the starting point is expression rather than profit.

Indie developers are dreamers. They have no backing from a studio or a publisher, so they shoulder every cost of development themselves. In exchange, they get the one thing every creator longs for: complete creative freedom. That freedom is exactly what gives birth to so many strange and wonderful works.

I'm always chasing after things with that "independent quality," the way a pilgrim chases a shrine.

Avant-garde literature, contemporary art, experimental music, art-house film, indie games.

Gifted creators break the old rules and chase new ways of telling a story, new forms of expression, new rhythms and timbres, new ways to move a camera, new ways to let you interact.

Their breakthroughs then become the new model, and the creators who come after study them, imitate them, and overturn them.

The independent spirit never stops, and so culture keeps turning.

Today I want to talk about literature made in that independent spirit.

I'm not fond of sorting literature into categories. Every writer has a temperament all their own, and every great piece holds its own little marvels. If you force a piece into some dead, taxonomic frame, the playful spark in it gets snuffed out by a stiff little "such-and-such-ism."

So, the way a music critic tosses anything hard to pin down into "Alternative," I'm going to be sweeping about it and dump all this independent-minded writing into the big bin marked "avant-garde literature." Bear with me, reader.

Today I'll talk about three writers I love.

  • Maestro Cervantes

The giant who ended the chivalric romance and opened the door to metafiction and the modern novel. Also: compiler of Spanish jokes. - Maestro Borges

Blind, yet able to see clear across to the far shore. A philosopher-writer with so many fine essays and poems that you'll never get through them all. - Maestro Calvino

Famous for an astonishing trilogy of novels, who then fell so deep into writing postmodern fiction he couldn't pull himself out.

Cervantes

Every literary critic loves Cervantes's Don Quixote. The study of this book and its author has become a whole scholarly field of its own.

It seems impossible to overpraise Don Quixote, and it sits on every "books you must read" list out there.

But I'll say this: a classic is a classic, and still you have to pick your moment to read Don Quixote.

Study hall, the library, slacking off in class: none of these is a good place for Don Quixote.

Doubling over with laughter isn't exactly polite, and clamping your mouth shut to bottle it up is a good way to give yourself a stitch.

The story goes that Philip III of Spain, looking down from a palace balcony, saw a student reading and roaring with laughter, and declared the boy must be reading Don Quixote, or else he was a madman. Sure enough, the student was reading Don Quixote.

Chinese essays that analyze Don Quixote mostly fix on the qualities of the hero, that pitiable, ridiculous, admirable knight. You rarely see anyone dig into the book's breakthrough in how it tells a story.

At the start of Part Two, Don Quixote hears that his exploits have been written into a book (Part One of Don Quixote, naturally), and that it has spread far and wide. He's curious about how the biographer portrayed him, so he pulls a young scholar aside to chat about the book.

And so we get one of the scenes that earned its place in literary history.

Don Quixote and the scholar size up Don Quixote and pick it apart. Don Quixote thinks the book ought to include fewer of the stories where he gets a beating, while the scholar points out that one tale is badly inserted, with nothing to do with Don Quixote's own life.

...he told me my deeds were already in a book, called The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. He said I'm in it too, by the name Sancho Panza, and so is the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, along with things that only the two of us went through, so that I crossed myself in pure astonishment, unable to fathom how the man who wrote it could have known.

from Don Quixote, Cervantes

Don Quixote isn't only the first "modern novel" in literary history. It's also the first work of metafiction.

Metafiction is "fiction about fiction." In the definition of Patricia Waugh, professor of English at Durham University in Britain:

"Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality."

In a traditional work, the world of the book and the world of the reader stay sealed off from each other. The reader is a bystander who, by silent agreement, doesn't question whether the book's world is real, never interacts with its events, and only watches the story unfold. Metafiction is different. It tries to break the "fourth wall," whether by pulling the reader into the book as one of its characters, or by deliberately making the reader aware that the fiction is fiction, or by letting the characters realize they're fictional.

And with that, the line between the imaginary and the real comes down.

In the game Undertale, the characters know the protagonist is the player, with the power to "save" and "reset." When the player reaches the perfect ending, the game even begs the player not to "reset" this world, to let it finally rest in peace.

In truth, the clever narrative tricks in Don Quixote go well beyond this (for instance, using a character's mouth to grumble about how the author fell behind on his own earlier writing). I'd written out long stretches of quotation and analysis, but on reflection I cut all of it. No need for extra spoilers, or I'd ruin the freshness and the thrill of your first read, which would be a shame.

Borges

What can I give you to hold you?

I give you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged outskirts.

I give you the sorrow of a man who has long looked at the lonely moon.

from What Can I Give You to Hold You, Borges

Borges is much loved in China. His essays and his poems are both beautifully made. Not only good, but plentiful: the Complete Works of Borges has to be split into a First Series and a Second Series, two thick stacks of books that together run you close to a thousand yuan, and you'll never read your way to the end of them.

Borges loved Cervantes. He has a famous piece, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," that tells this story:

A writer named Pierre Menard decides, in the twentieth century, to write Don Quixote over again, word for word identical. For convenience let's call Cervantes's work the Don Quixote and Pierre Menard's the Quixote. The distinction is necessary, even though the two are exactly the same.

The very same sentence carries a different meaning in the Quixote than it does in the Don Quixote. Under Cervantes's pen, a line is "a rhetorical praise of history" and "an easy command of the Spanish then in fashion." Under Pierre Menard's, the same line becomes "barefaced pragmatism" and "an affected, archaizing style."

The first time I read "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," I took it for a harmless little joke of Borges's, a tip of the hat to the great Cervantes by way of something close to sophistry.

But on a closer read, Borges won me over. I began, sincerely, to believe that if the Quixote really existed, it would in fact be the richer of the two. Even with every single word the same, I would honestly count them as different works.

To borrow Borges's own words from the piece:

This is a new technique, deliberately scrambling era and authorship, and in doing so it changes the way a book is read.

It's like treating the Odyssey as a work that came after the Iliad, or reading Lu Xun's Call to Arms as a modern Weibo essay, so that the work leaps free of the assumptions we bring about its author and its age, and gains an endless capacity to be reinterpreted across a vast field of possible authors and possible times.

If Don Quixote's metanarrative blurs the false and the true and toys with the reader, then "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" teaches the reader how to make a real text turn unreal, throwing the author into disarray and filling the calmest book with wonder.

That's the kind of writer Borges is. The more you turn him over in your mind, the deeper he gets.

A short passage from his essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" became the very first spark for the French philosopher Michel Foucault when he sat down to write The Order of Things.

Borges is unmistakable. Once you've read him, you can pick up something new and know almost at once that it came from his hand. Very few people can imitate his style, but Chen Chuncheng managed it in The Submarine in the Night. If you love Borges, I'd recommend you read The Submarine in the Night too.

Calvino

Have you heard of that hotly contested perfect-score essay from the college entrance exam, "Living in the Trees"?

Its title comes straight from Calvino's novel The Baron in the Trees, whose hero is the eldest son of an aristocratic family in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. After one fight with his family, he takes up residence in the trees and refuses ever to come down to live on the ground again.

Yes, Calvino is famous for the trilogy Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The Nonexistent Knight). But my own favorites are his later, postmodern novels, Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler.

This piece will only talk about If on a winter's night a traveler. One glance at the first paragraph of the first chapter and you'll see why I simply had to bring it up.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice, they won't hear you otherwise. "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell, "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

from If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino

I have to say, when it comes to playing with narrative method and the form of a text, If on a winter's night a traveler reaches a height almost no one can touch.

Once, reading certain narrative-bending pieces on the SCP Foundation (an online collaborative fiction community), I was floored. In the stories from the Narrative Department, people realize they're inside a story and try to seize control of the writing of it. In the Metaphysics Department's tales, people discover their fate is governed by a god, the "horror author," and so they try to kill that god and win back their peace and their freedom. In the antimemetics stories, the subject the text describes erases all information about itself, so the writing seems vague and evasive, and the text turns into an exquisite puzzle, where the empty spaces themselves make for a strange and captivating read.

New media give rise to new literature. Online writing can lean heavily on hyperlinks and wiki syntax, so creators can write with entirely new methods and formats. As I keep insisting, format and medium are content too. You could even say the medium is the most essential thing, and the words are only the form the medium takes. Different media give birth to different literatures, and a wholly new medium gives birth to a wholly new literature.

The Foundation sits right at the leading edge of avant-garde writing. As the community has drifted and grown, it has long since outgrown the limits of urban legend and become the most inventive, most possibility-rich writing community around, producing a handful of works you could fairly call serious literature.

But playing with form and narrative is hardly something new that arrived in the twenty-first century with internet literature. Even though the Foundation's writers have managed some genuinely cheering achievements, set beside Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler they're still nowhere near as well cooked. Take any two passages at random:

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. ...

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or rather: that man is called "I" and you know nothing else about him, just as this station is called only "station" and beyond it you know nothing, except that someone you call from here doesn't answer. Maybe a telephone is ringing in some far-off city, and no one is there to answer it. ...

from If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino

Writing tricks like these fill a book that isn't exactly thin. Every time I read If on a winter's night a traveler, some surprise is waiting for me, and now and then it pulls a gasp out of me: writing can actually do that?

To put it in slightly more romantic terms, some of the Foundation's pieces are like brilliant single stars, giving off a light that makes your eyes go wide. Calvino's writing is a whole river of stars. It's far more than slow accumulation finally let loose; it's something you can only look up to from the foot of the mountain.

Hypertext and metaliterature

In 1960, Ted Nelson conceived of a way to handle text on a computer and called it "Hypertext." The idea later gave us the HTTP protocol we all know, where the HT in HTTP stands for Hyper Text. Hypertext uses hyperlinks to gather text from different places and weave it into a single web.

Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars and Raymond Queneau's A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems might both belong to the category of "hypertext fiction."

The first is a dictionary from another world, its whole cosmology and all its stories broken apart and tucked into one entry after another, left for the reader to go hunting through. The second is a collection of poems you assemble at will, where every line on every page is cut along a horizontal strip, so the reader can combine them into a hundred thousand billion different sonnets.

Cast the net wider, and the game Disco Elysium counts as hypertext fiction too. You play a detective, deciding the shape of the story across countless choices, while revolution, the legends of a nation's founding, self-redemption, and political reflection all lie hidden deep in the text. The games Dark Souls and Elden Ring count as well. The legendary creator Hidetaka Miyazaki shattered the whole world and its history into fragments and buried them in item descriptions and ruined walls, and there are players online who reconstruct the dynastic upheavals and the loves and hatreds of that dying land by poring over the statues, the family crests, and the layout of the architecture scattered through the game.

So what does "hypertext" have to do with the subject of this piece?

Borges wrote "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and pointed back to Cervantes, and Calvino, in his book Why Read the Classics?, heaped praise on Borges.

Maybe it's only the narrowness and bias of my own reading, but I have a faint sense that some mysterious line of succession runs between these three writers, and that this chain of pointing forms a peculiar "hyperlink." Each carries an "independent spirit" of their own distinct flavor, and one generation after another breaks through the old forms of literature, searching for what literature might yet become, then becomes a new form itself, to be studied, imitated, and broken through by those who follow.

I think this might be a metaphor for the whole history of literature, and beyond that for the whole history of thought, the whole history of humankind.

The philosopher Heidegger doesn't put the human being at the center of the world. He sees the human being as set within the total web of the world's connections, and he calls that web the "fourfold."

The existence and the meaning of every thing link to one another, forming a "web of meaning" across four-dimensional spacetime, and every question about "meaning" has to find its answer within that web. A classic example: what is the meaning of a hammer? If you weigh it only in isolation, on a single sliced-out instant of spacetime, it's nothing but a combination of a wooden stick and a lump of iron, with no "meaning" at all. Only when you set it within the whole of spacetime, from the craftsman who made the hammer from nothing for some purpose, to the person who drives a nail with it, can the meaning of the hammer be sensed and understood.

The meaning of a life works the same way. As the philosopher Chen Jiaying puts it in The Reasons of Value, "I fuse with the people and things around me into a fate too tangled to pull apart." We can't lift ourselves clean out of the world around us. We have to hold the world in our concern, to Care about it, and it's that care that keeps us, as beings, bound to the world.

Because the nature of Dasein (being-there) lies in its existence, that is, in realizing its possibilities. Any movement from the present reality toward a future condition must give rise to the question, "What shall I do?" This is Care. Care is rooted in Dasein's capacity to choose its own being.

Care is regarded as the basic relation between Dasein and the world, and is the ground on which Dasein finds meaning in this world. It is the fundamental state of all Dasein's experience.

from Wikipedia, "Martin Heidegger"

Ningningning Jinghai pressed Ctrl+V on the keyboard and pasted in the passage above, the one about Heidegger's thought, copied straight from Wikipedia.

He badly wanted to say that the fourfold is hypertext and metafiction, that countless links form the "web," and that history and meaning are born out of it.

But he stared at the cursor blinking on the screen for a long while, and for the moment had no idea what to write next.

The piece was drawing to a close, and Ningningning Jinghai still didn't know how, how to end it.

After writing four lines with a meta element to them, he had a sudden flash of inspiration and decided to close with a poem by Bei Dao.

It's the shortest poem in the Chinese language, a single character in its entirety:

Web

from Life, Bei Dao

I'm Ningningning Jinghai. Thank you for reading.

You're welcome to reach me by any means at all.

My email is lunar_mare_official@outlook.com.

Write to me and let's talk. I answer every message I get :)

References:

"Metagame: Breaking the Line Between the Virtual and the Real," by Moy, cowlevel.net

LiteratureAvant-gardeMetafictionHypertextPhilosophy
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