There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another.
There are literary monuments that don’t allow for intimacy. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is one of these imposing masterpieces; Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is another. Vastly ambitious, densely intelligent, profoundly inquisitive, these works demand from the reader constant attention and unlimited patience to make out the images reflected in what Broch called the ‘dark mirror’ of fiction. Unlike Proust’s monumental Recherche, into which the reader can wander and stay to converse with a particular character or linger in one of its many rooms, Musil and Broch’s constructions are not meant for comparative reminiscences. Neither is Javier Marías’ magnum opus, the trilogy entitled Your Face Tomorrow, whose third and final volume, Poison, Shadow and Farewell, has at last appeared in English, in an impeccable translation by Margaret Jull Costa.
Superficially, Your Face Tomorrow is a tale of spies and spying. Jacques Deza, the protagonist of an earlier Marías novel, All Souls, began the present trilogy by being recruited for the British Secret Service by the Oxford don Peter Wheeler and by a shady character called Tupra, thanks to his uncanny ability to foretell a person’s behaviour by looking at the face. After a number of unfinished adventures punctuated by lengthy dialogues and reflections, Deza reaches the novel’s third volume where he must confront the essentially violent doctrine of the Secret Service world, ruled by the law of ‘every man for himself.’
The reality [Tupra tells Deza] is that we’re doing violence to ourselves by not following and obeying it at all times and in all circumstances, but even so we apply that law far more often than we acknowledge, but surreptitiously, under cover of a thin veneer of civility. . . Among individuals and among nations.
This is the stuff on which our societies are built, Tupra insists, and to teach Deza how true this is, Tupra shows him DVD after DVD of important personalities indulging in illicit sex, or being victims of abuse and torture. Made to watch, Deza feels that he is being fed poison. There is no such thing as innocent contemplation.
What interests Marías in the theme of spying is its emblematic proximity to writing fiction. Telling stories and reading stories are our literate way of experiencing the world. But neither is a guiltless activity, each carries with it the danger of contamination by the uncertain nature of what language — words or images — can grasp. The first volume of Marías’s trilogy, Fever and Spear, began with a warning against storytelling for that very reason:
One should never tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories or make people remember beings who have never existed . . . Telling is almost always done as a gift, even when the story contains and injects some poison, it is also a bond, a granting of trust, and rare is the trust or confidence that is not sooner or later betrayed.
And, near the very end of the third volume, the warning is repeated: ‘Why did you tell me all this today, Peter?’ Deza asks Wheeler, his old mentor.
I find it odd that, after years of knowing each other, you should tell me about all these things you’ve never said a word about before. And once you said to me: ‘One should never tell anyone anything,’ do you remember?
Stories betray both the teller and the receiver of the tale, so that in the end telling serves no purpose other than to warn us against the harm of its labours. It is as if, in Wheeler’s injunction, Marías were calling for the death of fiction. It is a sobering thought that he requires some 1,500 rich, hallucinatory, absorbing pages (including several illustrations) to make his point.
This unreliable quality of storytelling seeps through the whole of Marías’s writing, even in the person of the narrator himself, as he moves uncertainly through the many pages of his story. Nothing about Deza is adamant: neither his voice, nor his aspect, nor the events he describes. Even his first name changes from Jacques to Jaime, from Jaime to Santiago and Diego and Iago, all forms of the same name but whose multiple use blurs Deza’s identity.
Deza seems to be speaking from the shadows, as is appropriate for a spy, and his voice, as it recalls events and characters, lends these that same murky indefinition. Though the reader is given to understand that a spy story is unfolding on the page, with its attendant suspense, its crime, betrayal and redemption, only the sense of menace is communicated, as if the language itself in which the half-truths are told were too ineffably threatening to evoke anything concrete.
We are far from the world of John Le Carré, in which the moral and ethical dilemmas are grounded in documentary realism, and closer to the nightmare landscapes of Alfred Döblin, in which a real city (Berlin in the case of Döblin, London and Oxford in the case of Marías) changes visibly from stone and mortar into something demonic, nightmarish, verging on the impossible. ‘When I read Marías,’ W. G. Sebald once said, ‘I always have the impression of reading something else.’
Marías, other than having acquired a reputation among his peers as one of today’s foremost European novelists, is also known as a superb translator, notably of Lawrence Sterne and Sir Thomas Browne. The choice is not coincidental, since translation is the keenest method for dissecting the fabrications of literature and exposing its lies. Also, the two authors mentioned are particularly happy examples of literature laying itself bare, revealing its artificial devices and building itself up from its own ruins.
Marías’s fiction never pretends to suffice itself: after a dramatic episode or a comic anecdote, a reflective, philosophic tone sets in, asking the reader to stop and think, offering arguments that perhaps lead nowhere and opinions meant mainly to disturb, essayistic passages that force the story to change course, sometimes to abandon its apparent purpose, retract itself and start again. Marías writes as if Tristram Shandy eavesdropped on his Uncle Toby discussing universal questions with the author of Religio Medici. It would be impossible for a full-fledged reader not to be tempted to listen.
Sometimes great writers find their audience, large or small, in unexpected places. The Germans devour Marías’s books: he sells hundreds of thousands of copies in Germany, where he is recognised as a contemporary classic. The English pick at him fastidiously. The Spanish intelligentsia, by and large, refuses to have him at its table. It is true that, in Spain, Marías stands alone outside the circle of his contemporaries. Spanish literature is, above all, the literature of the baroque, the apotheosis of language winding its excrescences and volutes around an invisible, perhaps non-existent centre.
Marías no doubt shares this exuberant tradition, but based on intellectual preconceptions rather than on a magical or realistic perception of reality. Like the Mannerists of the 16th century, his settings, though clearly named, remain deliberately blurred or unclear, so as to insist on the importance of the human figures; his colours are vivid and harsh, used to heighten the emotional effect of his story rather than to describe any formal relationship or character. For that reason, Marías’s fiction presupposes an educated reader who knows the rules of the classic novel and who can therefore recognise when they are broken.
The third volume ends with the last verse of the song ‘The Streets of Laredo’: ‘But please not one word of all this shall you mention , when others should ask for my story to hear.’ ‘No,’ Deza replies, ‘nothing bad.’ The assertion forces the readers to reconsider everything they have read in order to understand whether the revealed atrocities, the meditations on violence, on corruption and betrayal, might not be seen as ‘something else’ in Marías’s dark mirror.
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