Pablo Palacio

In this short novella, published in 1927, Pablo Palacio pulls a character from his mind: "Lieutenant, you've stayed with me for years. Today I tear you from me so that you may be a source of derision for some and of melancholy for others." He then writes about a day in the Lieutenant's life. The man thinks about women and how he'd like to have one, daydreams about money, wanders around the city, and meets a friend of his, who tells him about an experience he had with a woman whom he visited one day. He eats with the friend, and they part ways. Different parts of the city (unnamed, but most definitely Quito) are described in function of their particular importance in the life of the Lieutenant. Night falls, and the Lieutenant continues to wander the city, without having anything in particular to do. A parenthetical section describes an attempted seduction in which the Lieutenant has a series of meetings with the neice of the owner of the building he lives in. Then, in a brief ending, the Lieutenant's fate is described and Débora, for whom the book is titled, is introduced.

Interspersed with the Lieutenant's story, the author makes a series of comments about the art of writing, pointing out flaws in realist conceptions of what is "real." It took me a while to completely comprehend the dual aims of this book (paint a truly realistic picture of a day in the life of a person, while explaining the author's artistic motivation for doing so), and the first couple of dozen pages were confusing. When I went back and read through the book a second time, they made more sense, and I began appreciating the interplay between the Lieutenant's story and the author's artistic affirmations. After systematically illustrating bits and pieces of reality such as it often is, Palacio concludes his attack on realist conventions:

"And the death knell has already begun to sound. The realist novel is painfully misleading. It abstracts the facts and leaves the text full of empty spaces; it gives them an impossible continuity, because the true facts, the ones that they silence, wouldn't interest anybody."

At this point, we've already seen a series of events in the life of the Lieutenant which would surely have been omitted from said realist novels: daydreams, aimless wanderings through the city streets, and his frustrations regarding the lack of ladies in his life. The downside is, banal reality can indeed be boring. Palacio affirms as much, stating when night falls that, "in effect, the night is empty and follows an empty day." The realists, in saying that they're painting a real picture of the world as it is, are actually depicting something of the exception to the rule: the series of exceptional events that very, very occasionally happen in a person's life; the days that might be the least representative of reality in a life filled with petty daydreams, failed attempts to connect with other people, and mealtimes that are looked forward to as the one part in the day when an idle person such as the Lieutenant justifiably has something to do. Luckily, Palacio has a nice way with words and is more than capable of bringing plenty of life and vigor to his combination of boring protagonist and anti-realist author. The strong presence of the creator throughout the pages of this short book as he points out realism's deficiencies complements the Lieutenant's realistic story and the two stand together as a compelling whole, where they might not have been effective as independent texts.

Last week I read an article about Spanish writers' reaction to early Latin American modernists such as Rubén Darío, which in turn led me to a series of two letters that Juan Valera wrote to the young Nicaraguan poet, praising the cosmopolitan spirit he exhibits in Azul in a mildly condescending way (I see, then, that there isn't an author writing in Spanish more French than you...). The letter, as well as the article, illustrates how hard it was for established Spanish writers, often belonging to the realist persuasion, to accept the new currents of modernity, especially when they came from the former colonies across the Atlantic Ocean. I thought that this short book by Palacio would have been an excellent and extremely timely refutation of the artistic aims of Spain's realist writers, had it been written near the end of the 19th century; in 1927, it at first seemed a bit out of place in a world that was already quite modern. I thought Palacio was beating a horse that had been dead for some time. Maybe not, though. I know hardly anything about Ecuador's literary history, and I wonder what kind of books were being written and printed in Ecuador in the early decades of the 20th century. The only other Ecuadorean novel I've read is Huasipungo, by Jorge Icaza. It was published in 1934, and presents a realistic depiction of injustices committed against indigenous communities in the Ecuadorean highlands. I thought that perhaps other earlier works, if not focusing on indigenous issues, could have at least influenced Icaza with respect to his social realism. I've done my usual Google and Wikipedia searches to try and find more information on social realism in early 20th century Ecuador, and I've found enough to believe that, on the national level, Palacio's refutation of realism may have been more timely than I gave it credit for. The writer Luis A. Martínez is credited in Wikipedia with "bringing realism to Ecuador" through his novel A la costa, published in 1904. Maybe, then, in the twenty years between A la costa and Débora, Ecuador saw a steady stream of mediocre realist fiction, troubling Palacio to the point that he decided to unleash his ordinary Lieutenant and voice his own thoughts on the matter.… (meer)

I checked this book out along with a book of Pablo Palacio's short stories entitled Un hombre muerto a puntapiés (A man kicked to death), based on an article I read about the author that intrigued me. On the title page, the subtitle reads "Novela Subjetiva," or "Subjective Novel." There is some information at the end of the novel that could lead to multiple (subjective) interpretations of the text. The reader also has to choose how he or she wishes to interpret the text as they progress through the novel, because the voice and perspective of the narrator give rise to questions about his sanity and whether what he is relating to the reader is to be interpreted literally as being representative of reality, or as the babblings of a crazy person. I enjoyed the choices in interpretation given to me, and I once again enjoyed the author's style and ability to construct and develop a character whose mental faculties are questionable. He has a gift for writing from this perspective, and this book was interesting as a bit more extended study of a mentally-abnormal character.

The life of Andrés (the hung man) is presented in a series of vignette-like chapters. He's got a woman, Ana, and he at some point fathers a son as well. He eventually commits an atrocious crime, and is tried in a circus-like courtroom atmosphere. He talks a lot about the cube that people live in, and the beginning feels like something between a clandestine political meeting and a carnival sideshow. The story of his relationship with Ana is told disjointedly, and I especially enjoyed some of the segments describing Andrés's awkward social interactions with Ana and her gaggle of friends. There are some odd moments interspersed, like a couple of pages describing a strange autopsy; there are a couple of dream sequences as well. In truth, there's a dreamy (sometimes nightmarish) quality to most of his ramblings, especially when he takes his young son in his arms and starts talking to him about the world he lives in and what it's all about. The twist at the end is pretty neat, and I think, since this was a really short and quick read, that I will go back and read through it again before returning it to the library.

I wonder if Palacio was a big fan of Franz Kafka. I am, regrettably, not very well-versed in Kafka's work, but I once saw Orson Welles' movie version of The Trial. The judgment of Andrés reminds me of that movie, which I admittedly saw many years ago, and don't really remember at all. His trial has a surreal quality to it, and it descends into an absurd shouting match between judges, lawyers, representatives of student militancies, and other sectors of society who wish to vocalize their outrage at Andrés's crime and its meaning in the greater societal sphere of which they all form a part. It reminded me a bit of L'Étranger as well, because in both cases, the individual is being tried for his socially atypical actions. Ecuadorean society is even less happy with Andrés than Algerian society was with Meursault, and the trial, with the various interruptions and diatribes by different sectors of society, has an even more surreal and disorienting quality than that of Meursault.

I was surprised to find that you can buy a copy of an electronic version of this book on Amazon. I'm certainly not going to spend $10 for the electronic rights to this book (or any other book), but I was surprised and pleased that somebody is out there making books like this available in electronic form.… (meer)

At the beginning of this year I read an article on an Ecuadorean author named Pablo Palacio, describing him as one of the "great rarities" of world literature (the article is available here: http://edant.revistaenie.clarin.com/notas/2010/01/12/_-02115939.htm). The article painted a very curious portrait of a man whose stories focused on the sick, the deformed and the abnormal; it also described him as being three times marginalized: for the inquieting nature of his texts, for his location on the periphery of the cultural centers of Latin America, and for his situation as a prose writer in a Latin American vanguard populated by poets such as César Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro and Oliverio Girondo. I was intrigued, but it was very hard to find any of his books. I was recently able to check out copies of two of his books from my new library of choice: the book of short stories Un hombre muerto a puntapiés (A man kicked to death) and the "subjective novel" Vida del ahorcado (Life of the hanged man). I began with Un hombre muerto a puntapiés, which in turn begins with a brief note from the author:

Wearing operating gloves, I make a small clump of suburban mud. I set it rolling through these streets: those who cover their noses will have found it to be flesh of their flesh.

It is a strange note, and the stories were indeed odd. The title story is about a man who's intrigued by a note he read in the newspaper about a man found kicked to death; he conducts his own investigation of the homicide and develops a theory involving a failed homosexual advance made on the street by the dead man. Another one of the stories is about an imprisoned cannibal who was unable to resist the urges he felt to sample human flesh. The longest story in this edition is about a siamese twin (I say twin because the narrator, who refers to herself as yo-primera, considers herself and her other part, yo-segunda, to be a single entity and even takes the time to analyze the grammatical difficulties that she has in writing about herself). Another story is about a man who is unable to tolerate a certain peculiarity of his wife's language, eventually rushing to the arms of a neighborhood woman of the street, who gives him a disease that causes him to go crazy (strangely enough, life apparently imitated art in this case, as Palacio spent the last several years of his life in an institution due to the effects of syphilis contracted through his relationship with a prostitute). The style of the stories is direct and conversational, which helps compound the strangeness of the reading experience. It was a bit like reading the writing of a mentally imbalanced individual.

I like art that pushes these sorts of boundaries. In searching for points of comparison between him and his contemporaries, I see a bit of Roberto Arlt in his marginal perspective and forceful, disquieting topics. Arlt comments that: "we will create our own literature, not through continual conversations about literature, but rather by writing in proud solitude books that contain the violence of a "cross" to the mandible. Yes, one book after another, and 'let the eunuchs grumble'." That seems to be an apt comment to apply to the work of Palacio, and I certainly see an affinity between both men. I also like to compare writers to rappers, and in this case, the comparison was an easy one. It is almost as if Mr. Palacio were reincarneted some seventy or eighty years later in the person of Keith Thornton, also known as Kool Keith. Insanity, physical deformity, strange, complelling and unique fictional personages, cannibalism, and disquieting language and topic matter: these are all aspects of much of Kool Keith's discography. Maybe the next time I read this book I'll pop on my headphones and listen to his Dr. Octagon album. I wish that Pablo Palacio's work were available in English (and I think they'd be fun to translate), because I can think of more than a few friends of mine who would get a kick out of these stories, especially if I described the author as a 1920s Ecuadorean Kool Keith.… (meer)