A Recursive, Discursive History, and an Homage to Bolaño and Some Other Heroes

What Javier Cercas did in Soldiers of Salamis was to write several interlaced histories of a moment: the history of an event with its roots and branches; the history of the people in its shade; the history of the writing of this particular history; and a sort of compressed, modern roman a clef in which he, Cercas, the equivocal historian, gets a sentimental education while trying to tell "a true story". The history, of course, is elusive and unknowable. The fulcrum event happened a long lifetime ago, in a state of pandemonium, obscured [even as it transpired] by war and political passions. And the hearts of the people involved --the soldiers, the witnesses, Cercas himself-- are equally unknowable, burdened, confused. But through a kind of triangulation, approaching the crucial historical moment from several angles at once, Cercas finds a moral location that he is able to describe in more-or-less historical terms: I think something like this happened on this date in this place, and that these people were in some way involved, and that there were consequences I will never begin to know for certain, and that in any case civilization marched on heedless of the people who died to preserve it.

To retrieve this from the abstract: in 1939, in Catalunya, one of the most influential Falangist apologists, the writer Rafael Sanchez Mazas, is captured by the Republicans as they flee to France. He is put before the firing squad but somehow escapes into the woods. A guard finds him, but spares him, and lets him escape. Sanchez Mazas goes on to become one of the most forceful voices in the Franco regime, and the soldier who spared him disappears into history, unknown. Many years later, Javier Cercas looks into the story, which has become political myth, and finds that a few survivors of the war can remember just enough of the event to lead him to its central actor.

What distinguishes this history is that its discovery is, in itself, another crucial history, in which Cercas' action as historian parallels the unwitting and inexplicable action of the mysterious soldier. Cercas and the soldier, separated by sixty years and by the seeming profound dissimilarity of their roles, do essentially the same thing: they save from seeming inevitable extinction the people who will, inadvertently and despite their intentions, carry civilization onward. And, in a strange but crucial aside --apparent aside-- Cercas discovers, quite by accident that the writer Roberto Bolaño has information that will allow Cercas to finish his research, or to make it, finally, "a true story". Bolaño knew the mysterious soldier just well enough to inadvertently share a detail that allows Cercas to finish his job. Here the interlaced histories become, possibly, in the telling, another typical post-Modern narrative, in which several unreliable voices blur the traditional distinction between author and story: Bolaño's own contribution to narration, not in this book, but in his actual writing career, was to retrieve "soldiers' from the oblivion of history through storytelling. In his books, minor historical actors who would normally be forgotten are animated --kept alive-- because Bolaño remembers and recounts their passionate vivacity. That Bolaño particularly is Cercas' chosen agent for animating this history is, I believe, significant. This is the sweetest possible homage to Bolaño's work. When Bolaño set out to rescue "all those young Latin Americans" who had died, who never knew life as adults, I believe he was correcting a history that insisted on the great works of great men, and his depiction of heroism as essentially ignorant and impulsive or instinctive is, I think, one of the great contributions to literature.

So Cercas, at the end of this novel, which is historical but is not a historical novel, proposes a kind of animating ceremony for the mysterious soldier: when he dies, Cercas imagines, he will dance on his grave with the nun who has cared for him, and Bolaño will be there to witness, and in that irreverent dance much unsayable will be understood and a hero will be made immortal:
"...a Chilean lost in Europe...would be smoking, his eyes clouded, standing back a little and very serious, watching us dance a paso doble beside Miralles' grave just as one night years before he'd seen Miralles and Luz dance to another paso doble under the awning of a trailer in the Estrella de Mar campsite, seeing it and wondering if maybe that paso doble and this one were in fact the same, wondering without expecting an answer, because he already knew the only answer is that there is no answer, the only answer is a sort of secret and unfathomable joy..."

Jen Describing Her Young Self:

"Left out and underchristed"

A Prophecy

Let's
Do this.
Let it begin,
Though what begins will middle
and end.

I trust you.
I like you.
I am in your hands
and then
I will not be: Either you will have let me go
(which is to say: dropped me)
Or groaning almost-silent geology
will break your grip.

We lean into a colorless non-place:
The food we love will be paper.
Fire will shrink to ash.
Music tin and dull.
We lean.
The sun quicker.
The moon less remarkable.

These particulars:
The yard too big to mow.
The stream too wide to jump.
The wine too strong
but flavorless.
Meat too tough to chew.
Friends one by one into the white.
Our health. I lose my glasses.
The opening of our hands.

I'm Glad that the Nazis Were Wrong About Landscape, Memory, and Destiny

The two great disappointments of my youth were, one, to be prevented by my religion, or by my devotion to it, from enjoying sex before marriage; and, two, to experience what pallid pleasures remained in the presence of the fluorescent glow of mere commerce: fast-food restaurants, billboards, the tawdry cheap come-ons of Speedway Boulevard, Tucson, Arizona. Somewhere I had read -I was always reading- of a youthful sexual fulfillment in a Provence summer night: the scent of thyme, the dusty grey-greens of an olive grove, the earthy scent of wine, the trilling of cicadas, the overhanging golden orb of the moon. These lent a dignity and heat to the passion of first sex that I was denied by crass and insipid geography. I was already angry at a forced move to the utter provinces, and Tucson's endless advertisement, its many square miles of barely-solvent small businesses and placeless big-box stores made my first love somehow cheap, puerile, disposable, slightly nauseating. I felt, to the considerable depths of my teenaged self, cheated and debased. And I imagined that my long future would be forever tainted. I would never be able to look back on stone houses, ancient groves, a settled legitimacy borrowed from Rome as the setting of the founding of my adulthood. I would instead have my roots in Burger King, Pep Boys, and Firestone. And I would be less for this impoverished soil.