Natural History
by Carlos Fonseca
tr. Megan McDowell
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 2020)
An envelope sets Natural History, Carlos Fonseca’s second novel, into motion. A Caribbean biologist and curator receives an envelope containing notes of a failed project he undertook nine years previously with Giovanna Luxembourg, a well-known but since-deceased fashion designer. Insomnia and a detective-like obsession for sparking narratives become the framework for the novel—and for the gradual unveiling of Luxembourg’s family history. An emotionally seismic event provokes this history, catapulting family members around the globe, from Israel to the Mesoamerican jungles. An envelope and an event, both generating narratives that explore the unending task of interpretation.
Since the release of his debut novel, Colonel Lágrimas, Fonseca’s work has been heralded as “kaleidoscopic” and “polyphonic.” Natural History, his sophomore work, reaffirms and more thoroughly fleshes out the poetics proposed in the first novel. Natural History overflows its author’s text; its prose lays bare what is most difficult in writing—a poetics as method. Behind the virtuosity, the organizing principle of his work is a method of writing that places its weight on writing itself. Walter Benjamin once wrote that the work of art, upon completion, is the death mask of its conception; the act of writing vanishes and is preserved only in language that serves as mere tracings. There is a sense that Fonseca works with this writerly frustration, taking it as an insurmountable challenge, as mythos, so that the proliferation of stories and voices spring precisely from his desire to preserve the creative miracle. A world’s complexity becomes mirrored through multifaceted language.
Fonseca is arguably one of the leading Latin American stylists of his generation, and Natural History fundamentally testifies to his belief in writing. At a time of extraordinary accumulation of information, one can think of Natural History as an attempt to redeem the task of writing by placing the creative moment at the center of its polyphony. Is there any greater purpose for literature? In hopes of teasing out more insights into the brilliance behind this work, I recently held a conversation with Carlos Fonseca via email in which we tackled some of these topics.
—Diego Azurdia
Diego Azurdia: How are you coping with the COVID-19 situation?
Carlos Fonseca: We are doing well. A bit exhausted, like everybody. Strangely, I started suffering from insomnia during the lockdown. I have always been a pretty good sleeper, but now, like so many, I started waking up at two or three in the morning. We have a baby, so I would wake up to give him his pacifier only to find that I couldn’t go back to sleep. But this led me to discover that perhaps those hours—between 3–5 a.m.—are my favorite reading hours. There is a peculiar sense of peace, relaxation, and even boredom that works quite well with reading. So I started reading diaries—Piglia’s, Cheever’s, Kafka’s, Sontag’s—which is something new for me. Perhaps it was my way of stealing the experiences of others during these critical but rather empty days.
There is a long tradition of urgent writing, of storytelling in moments of danger. Amid the pandemic—and the general despair of the moment—have you found a more somber, Decameron-like place to write?
I like that tradition, perhaps for strange reasons. Confronted with catastrophe, literature and storytelling become shelters, sanctuaries. This stresses literature as something eccentric, something performed from the margins in a very private and isolated setting. Isolated characters—like Joris Karl-Huysmans’s des Esseintes in Against Nature or the protagonist of George Perec’s A Man Asleep—have always interested me, and I find it interesting that, in a way, we’ve all become those sort of figures during the pandemic. But strangely, the inverse has also occurred. Everyone was expecting writers to react immediately to the crisis—to write essays about it, to sketch critical responses, to act as the moral high ground—in such a way that might risk mixing literature with journalism. I think the relationship between writing and the present moment is a very complex one, and sometimes, the writers that, at first stance, seem to turn their back on the present are those that can explain it the best. During this pandemic, for example, I keep thinking of books written with a very different context in mind: Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room or even Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude. The true delight of literature resides there: It becomes engaged with the present precisely when it wishes to avoid speaking of it directly. I often get the feeling that when books try to speak directly about the present, they end up confusing their place with the equally valid yet completely different task of journalism.
How should writing meet the present moment? Can it?
Yes, definitely, and therein lies its political task. But whenever we try to forcefully push writing toward the present, it just doesn’t work. It becomes evident, it becomes pedagogic, didactic. It’s a bit like looking at a book from too close a distance. Instead, literature works transversally by appealing to reality precisely when it seems to be talking about something else. I recently heard Enrique Vila-Matas speak brilliantly about this while sharing a memory from his adolescence: Miles Davis once stopped by Barcelona while on tour. To the surprise and horror of the crowd, Davis decided to play with his back to the audience. There, where most saw an act of snobbery or arrogance, Vila-Matas found a poetic: “I have always thought that great art is really somewhere else because it speaks about its own contemporary world without actually speaking about it. For isn’t contemporaneity a way of sticking to our own times, while distancing ourselves from them?” I agree with him. I think art speaks of the present whenever it doesn’t wish to, or whenever it refuses the didactic role that people sometimes assign to it. In that sense, writing has more to do with the forgotten art of the oracle than it does with broadcasting: It appears to speak enigmatically of a present that is yet to come. One could say that the true contemporaries of these strange days are Huysmans, Perec, Hrabal, de Maistre, but also—and for different reasons—Machado de Assis, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin.
We think of New York and Paris as cities that Latin American writers and artists have gravitated to, yet there is also a quieter pilgrimage to London ongoing. Where does writing best find its corner: a Parisian café, a jazz club in a Harlem basement, or in a semi-empty pub showing an old Premier League game in the back?
I once heard an interview in which one of the authors who is often cited as part of the “Latin American Boom” highlighted the fact that, while people always speak of their time in Paris, most of them had actually gotten their writing done in the less sexy, cold, and misty London. Mario Vargas Llosa used to live here, as did Carlos Fuentes. They both got most of their writing done in London. Even García Márquez spent time in the city during the late 1950s, writing the short stories later collected in Big Mama’s Funeral and Other Stories. He has a hilarious article from those years which begins: “When I arrived in London I thought the English talked to themselves in the street. Later I realized they were saying sorry.” I love it. But of all of them, I feel closest to the Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who lived in Gloucester Road for more than five decades, just steps away from the Natural History Museum and T.S. Eliot’s old house. I think they all found in London a type of serenity that is good for writing. But good writing can happen anywhere, even in a placas as boring as a post office, if you try to imagine the young Faulkner musing through his jottings while at work. I think the most important thing is for the writer to construct, as you mentioned before, a space of tranquility within the chaos—what you just called “a somber, Decameron-like place.”
The place where you teach, Cambridge’s Trinity College, calls to mind such names as Nabokov, Wittgenstein, Ramanujan, and of course Newton. All obsessives. Some tortured in their demented projects of total knowledge, more transcendental than universal … not unlike some of the characters in Colonel Lágrimas and Natural History. Could you see them walking past Porter’s Lodge at Trinity?
I like the mixture of scientists, writers, and philosophers. As you say, they all seem to be adamant about pursuing their fixations to the utmost limit. When I was fifteen, my dream was to be a mathematician. Srinivasa Ramanujan was my idol. I think what fascinated me about mathematicians was their capacity to provide models that seem to respond only to their highly capricious sense of beauty, but which nonetheless end up describing reality. This paradox always baffled me. In a way, they all seem to be trapped within what Wittgenstein would call “private languages”—projects that only they can understand, obsessions that guide their own private quests. That is what Bernhard understood so well in his depictions of Wittgenstein in books such as Correction, that meaning is something imposed by the passionate and, at first sight, nonsensical pursuit of an idea. While discussing the history of the novel as genre, Ricardo Piglia used to say that Descartes’s Discourse on Method was the first modern novel because it traced “the passionate pursuit of an idea.” I like this way of mixing passions and ideas, vitality and thought. As you say, the characters of my novels belong to that tradition: They seem to give up everything in order to passionately pursue projects that might initially seem senseless. In doing so, they show that the meaning of the world is not something that we inherit, stable and given, but rather something each of us constructs actively by pursuing our individual obsessions and passions to the very end.
You mention Ricardo Piglia. The personal, literary, and academic connection between you two is evident. It seems like he was amongst the most well-adjusted writers who had one foot in academia. How do you balance both? Do they inform each other? Would you ever choose one over the other?
For a while, I thought that to be a writer within academia was to be a Janus-like, two-faced monster. The same eyes looking in two different directions, each face trying to hide the other. Meeting Ricardo Piglia offered a subtler solution. Piglia comes from a tradition that is encapsulated brilliantly by Don DeLillo: “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.” In Piglia’s work, thought and storytelling interweave perfectly, to a point where each informs the other. To think, one must engage with language and become a storyteller in a motion that reminds us of another great in-between figure, Walter Benjamin. I think I am interested in writers that inhabit that in-between space: Walter Benjamin, Ricardo Piglia, Don DeLillo, Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson, Clarice Lispector, Thomas Bernhard, Bohumil Hrabal, W. G. Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, Enrique Vila-Matas, Mircea Cărtărescu. I think the distinction between essay and fiction is artificial. As an academic, one must remain faithful to that intuition.
In your academic work, you continually revisit the nineteenth century. What about that time period interests you?
The nineteenth century was crucial to Latin America: The century saw the formation of the modern nation-states across the continent, the sketching of new frontiers after the collapse of the colonial system. It was a foundational century in that sense, one which saw the reconfiguration of the relationship between Europe and America. It also coincided with the great age of scientific explorers and natural historians—people like Alexander von Humboldt or Darwin—who traveled throughout Latin America and found there a way of reimagining nature and, in doing so, reimagining society. I think this pairing of nationhood and nature is what interests me about the nineteenth century and what ties it to our present-day reality, where both nationalism and nature seem to be in crisis.
Natural History references that tradition of nature explorers. Latin America has often been imagined through its nature. Not only by foreigners like von Humboldt or Darwin, or even contemporary tourists, but by its very own writers. There are wonderful books like Domingo Sarmiento’s amazing Facundo, with its cartography of the Argentine pampa, or Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, where there is the suggestion that Latin American identity is hidden at the very end of the jungle. In Natural History, I wanted to play with this tradition of natural voyages, to reflect upon their meaning and their artificiality, to reimagine the jungle as something more than a lost paradise.
Does the nineteenth century provide solutions for the twenty-first century? When we turn to your work in fiction, the present takes center stage, although with the weight of nostalgia. There is no more difficult hermeneutic practice than that of interpreting the present, and you’ve already acknowledged that literature isn’t really well-positioned to assess its historical moment. How do you manage this?
Yes, I think that to rewrite the nineteenth century means to rewrite our foundational fictions, those national constructs which today seem to tremble. I grew up reading and admiring writers of the generation preceding my own, for whom history played little if any role at all. Writers that seemed to be working within what Francis Fukuyama once called “the end of history”—that post-historical period after the Berlin Wall came down. I admired them but couldn’t share that lack of a historical horizon. For me, history is the ultimate horizon and the historical archive is the ultimate basis for storytelling. That might be why I found the essays of Walter Benjamin, the books of W. G. Sebald, and later the novels of Álvaro Enrigue so fascinating: They offered a new way of confronting history beyond the dusty and traditional historical novel. Both Sebald and Enrigue see the novel as something akin to the cabinet of curiosities amassed by natural historians of the Renaissance: material spaces for collections and fascinations. They all understood that our present is perhaps best comprehended through the disjointed figure of the collection rather than the linear narrative. In one way or another, both Colonel Lágrimas and Natural History work within that tradition of historians and collectors.
Speaking of Natural History, I had the chance to read both the original and the translation, and I noticed some fascinating differences. Was there a thought process behind the changes made between the Spanish and English texts?
I think writing is a never-ending process. It gets artificially interrupted by publication, but that is external, almost artificial. Writing could always continue. Editing could be an eternal process. Every book, in its way, is imperfect and the possibility of writing feeds upon that imperfection. It keeps it going. So I have always thought of translation as a way of retaking the writing process, through editing and through rewriting. In this case, I was extremely lucky to be accompanied by the amazing translator Megan McDowell, and by a remarkable editor, Julia Ringo, both of whom helped me immensely in this process of editing and rewriting. We began by changing the title, which would have been something like Animal Museum if it had been translated literally, and from there, we went on to rework each of the sections. We handed in final edits at the very last minute, and I am sure that if we had had more time we would have continued. As Borges showed, there is no original, just rewritings.
If we think of translation as writing’s multiplicity, we can read Natural History as embodying what seems to be at the heart of the novel: masks, performativity. Could you discuss your interest in mimicry and masking?
That’s exactly what I was thinking when you were asking me about the changes that you could see in Natural History compared to Museo animal. The problem regarding translation lies at the very heart of the novel. Natural History is a novel about identity and dissemblance: It finds in animal mimicry and their capacity for dissemblance a metaphor for the trembling of identity at each level. Following the examples of the chameleon or the praying mantis, the novel shows that identity is always a mask, a performance. Camouflage blurs the frontier between the self and the other, the original and the copy. We get copies that are more original than the supposed originals and fakes that are more genuine than reality, all wrapped within a game of masks that is played against the history of camouflage and the crucial role it has played in the politics of war.
I like mimicry because it stages a phenomenon that lies at the very intersection between art, politics, science, and philosophy. Art has always been, since the very beginning, an act of imitation. In that act of imitation, we have a lot to learn from animals and their games. Abbott Handerson Thayer, the father of military camouflage, developed his theories based on his observations of animals, which according to him, adopted the colors of their surroundings when confronted with a moment of danger. His findings inspired the military groups of the First World War, which soon found in artists a great tool. Even Picasso is said to have proclaimed to Gertrude Stein, when he first saw a camouflaged tank traverse the street of Paris, “Yes, this is we who made it, this is cubism.” Natural History attempts to trace the shaky grounds that mark this space where art, politics, science, and philosophy meet.
And now I’m reminded of the more subtle masks of transformations related to journeys. There are many in your novel, and they seem to propel the stories, like leaps of faith. Why your interest in becoming and not being?
You are right, I hadn’t thought about it. The second part of the novel begins with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which reads: “The road would be long. All roads are long that lead towards one’s heart’s desire.” It is this desire to become Other that drives the narrative forward; it is that secret wish to become Other that gets everyone on the road. At some level, Natural History is just the story of a family whose members attempt to hide behind masks: The daughter tries to find a new identity by changing the color of her hair and her eyes; the mother attempts to lose her past by taking a new name; the father attempts to forget by burying himself in a ghost town. And as you mention, all of these becomings are mediated by journeys. Journeys that never lead to an end goal but rather to new journeys, like Russian dolls, ad infinitum. Deep down, being is never a possibility for us because desire keeps us in motion: It makes us anxiously reach towards the other.
It seems, then, that masking and revelation allow for proliferation. Natural History indeed presents us with myriad characters. While writers like Márquez have approached the question of proliferation through genealogy, you seem to prefer polyphony. Where do you place the limit of polyphony in relation to noise in your novel?
Yes, once originality is bracketed, it allows for proliferation. And this extends all the way to style. Finally freed from the weight of the oft-mentioned author’s “original voice,” the narrative is free to act and play like a ventriloquist; it can adopt other styles and voices. Natural History is structured a bit like that. As you say, it’s a polyphonic novel: Each of the parts adopts a new style and a new voice. In each of them, I play at adopting the voice and style of different authors that have had an effect on me. The idea, however, was to place these voices in dialogue, as counterpoints that would allow for harmony rather than noise. This is nothing new but rather something that collage artists have been practicing for decades: The attempt to find one’s own voice by playing with the materials produced by others.
I want to come back to the mode of obsession and obsessiveness, which is inherent to most of your characters. In your novel, obsession works almost as fuel for failure. We think here of yet another tradition, of Benjamin and his Arcades Project, or closer to home, your fellow Central American poet Salvador Godoy. What is it about failure that works so well in fiction, and in your novel specifically?
When I think about the history of the novel, I see a genealogy of obsessive characters. From Don Quixote, obsessed with the idea of chivalric novels, all the way to Faulkner’s Colonel Sutpen, obsessed with the construction of a legacy, via Melville’s Captain Ahab, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, García Márquez’s José Arcadio Buendía, Piglia’s Luca Belladona, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy… They are all, like Bernhard’s or Beckett’s characters, losers or failures, as you say. I think these are all characters whose idées fixes drive them to the point of eccentricity. They become outcasts, immersed in private languages that nobody else can understand. I think that what drives them to failure is the monumentality of their projects. And perhaps nobody has synthesized that simultaneous feeling of grandiosity and failure so well as the Honduran poet Salvador Godoy, who in his unpublished journals, perhaps rephrasing Beckett, wrote: “To fail. Yes. But to do so splendidly.”
And yet you still seem to believe in writing…
Of course. My wife once told me that I seem to only believe in writing. And I agreed with her—or at least I couldn’t disagree completely. If I believe in anything else, even in politics, for example, this is through my belief in writing. In an ever-increasingly cynical society, where nothing seems to be devoid of distrust and mockery, I find in writing the last refuge for belief. Of course, I am a bit cynical about literature as an institution and about the publishing world, but I am not cynical about the moment of writing itself. It is like a small sacred space within a highly corrupted world. Natural History is a novel about belief and its aftermath: What happens when belief is broken and the knights of faith, of which Kierkegaard spoke, about are left dangling in the void?
Pulling out to the bigger picture, there’s a lovely idea described in your novel: “Behind every natural variation, behind any difference, a single pattern exists.” In a time of saturation, fake news, and exabytes of information vulnerable to State surveillance, is it possible for something like unified field theory to exist? Can there be a poetics with such ambition?
The idea of a single pattern I borrow from Sir Thomas Browne who, in his 1658 book The Garden of Cyprus, posited that nature and culture meet in the simple figure of the quincunx, a geometric pattern of five points arranged in a cross, in what always reminds me of the five-side of a die or domino. I always loved that idea of a simple way of looking at the world. It’s a way of unifying nature and culture via geometry. As you say, we live in a world of simultaneous fragmentation and saturation, where the excess of information is forever positing impossible totalities. If any unified theory is possible, and if there is a style capable of such ambition, I guess it would look something like Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project or like Sebald’s books, or perhaps like the Anarchitecture of Ricard Greaves, which I recently discovered while reading Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s latest novel Aphasia.
In both novels, you offer a kind of poetics, an idiosyncratic use of the archive and the library. It’s no stretch to think of those two realms as labyrinths of sorts. In your new projects, can we expect an escape from these labyrinths, like Theseus after following Ariadne’s thread? And putting you on the spot, literally, can we expect the author to make an appearance amongst the voices?
I never know where I will land next, but now that you mention the labyrinth, I remember that beautiful parable by Borges entitled “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths.” One Babylonian king orders his subjects to construct an impressive labyrinth. When an Arab king visits his kingdom, he asks him to explore the labyrinth in an attempt to mock him. When the king finally reaches the exit, exhausted, he promises to one day show the Babylonian his own version of that labyrinth. Soon after, he launches an attack in which he captures the Babylonian king. He then proceeds to take him on a long camel journey before he releases him in the desert, where he dies of hunger and thirst. After reading your question, I was reminded of Borges’s perfect parable and thought that that might be where I am headed: to that point where nature becomes the perfect, inescapable labyrinth. Natural History already begins that movement away from the library and into nature. At the end of the day, nature is nothing but an archive, full of strata that depict the traces of untold stories.
Carlos Fonseca is the author of the novel Colonel Lágrimas, and in 2018, he won the National Prize for Literature in Costa Rica for his book of essays, La lucidez del miope. He teaches at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lives in London.
Diego Azurdia is a PhD candidate in Spanish and Portuguese at Cambridge, and formerly continental philosophy at Stanford and Columbia. Originally from the volcanic swathes of Guatemala, he is now most at home in literature.
Banner image: “Porter’s Lodge,” by Tom Parnell. Reproduced under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.