The Magician of Vienna

THE MAGICIAN OF VIENNA

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E. M. FORSTER

THE MIMETIC APE. Reading Alfonso Reyes revealed to me, at the appropriate time, an exercise recommended by one of his literary idols, Robert Louis Stevenson, in his Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art, consisting of an imitation exercise.¹ He himself had practiced it with success during his apprenticeship. The Scottish author compared his method to the imitative aptitude of monkeys. The future writer should transform himself into an ape with a high capacity for imitation, should read his preferred authors with an attention closer to tenacity than delight, more in tune with the activity of the detective than the pleasure of the aesthete; he should learn by which means to achieve certain results, to detect the efficacy of some formal processes, to study the handling of narrative time, tone, and the organization of details in order to apply those devices later to his own writing; a novel, let us say, with a plot similar to that of the chosen author, with comparable characters and situations, where the only liberty allowed would be the employment of his own language: his, that of his family and friends, perhaps his region’s—the great school of training and imitation, added Reyes, "of which the truly original Lope de Vega speaks in La Dorotea:

How do you compose? I read,

and what I read, I imitate,

and what I imitate, I write,

and what I write, blot out,

and then I sift the blottings-out."²

An indispensable education, provided the budding writer knows to jump from the train at the right moment, to untie whatever tethers him to the chosen style as a starting point, and knows intuitively the right moment at which to embrace everything that writing requires. By then he must know that language is the decisive factor, and that his destiny will depend on his command of it. When all is said and done, it will be style—that emanation of language and of instinct—that will create and control the plot.

When in the mid-fifties I began to sketch my first stories, two languages exercised control over my fledgling literary vision: that of Borges and that of Faulkner. Their splendor was such that, for a time, they overshadowed all others. That subjugation allowed me to ignore the telluric risks of the time, the monotone costumbrismo and the false modernity of the narrative prose of the Contemporáneos, to whose poetry, at the same time, I was addicted. In this splendid group of poets, some—Xavier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, Salvador Novo—also excelled for their essays. They had availed themselves during their early years of the lessons of Alfonso Reyes and of Julio Torri. Nevertheless, when they made incursions into the short story, they inevitably failed. They believed they were repeating the brilliant effects of Gide, Giraudoux, Cocteau, and Bontempelli, whom they venerated, as a means of escaping the rancho, the tenebrous jungle, the mighty rivers, and they succeeded, but at the expense of careening into tedium and, at times, into the ridiculous. The effort was obvious, the seams were too visible, the stylization became a parody of the European authors in whose shadow they sought refuge. If someone ordered me today, pistol in hand, to reread the Proserpina rescatada [Rescued Prosperpina]³ by Jaime Torres Bodet, I would probably prefer to be felled by bullets than plunge into that sea of folly.

I must have been seventeen when I first read Borges. I remember the experience as if it happened just a few days ago. I was traveling to Mexico City after spending a holiday in Córdoba with my family. The bus made a stop in Tehuacán for lunch. It was Sunday so I bought a newspaper: the only thing about the press that interested me at the time was the cultural supplement and the theater and movie guide. The supplement was the legendary México en la Cultura, arguably the best there has ever been in Mexico, under the direction of Fernando Benítez. The main text in that edition was an essay on the Argentine fantastical short story signed by the Peruvian writer José Durand. Two stories appeared as examples of Durand’s theses: The Horses of Abdera by Leopoldo Lugones and The House of Asterion by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer completely foreign to me. I began with the fantastical tale by Lugones, an elegant example of postmodernismo, and proceeded to The House of Asterion. It was, perhaps, the most stunning revelation in my life as a reader. I read the story with amazement, with gratitude, with absolute astonishment. When I reached the final sentence, I gasped. Those simple words: ‘Would you believe it, Ariadne?’ Theseus said. ‘The Minotaur scarcely defended himself,⁴ spoken as if in passing, almost at random, suddenly revealed the mystery that the story concealed: the identity of the enigmatic protagonist, his resigned sacrifice. Never had I imagined that our language could reach such levels of intenseness, levity, and surprise. The next day, I went out in search of other books by Borges; I found several, covered in dust on the backmost shelves of a bookshop. During those years, readers of Borges in Mexico could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Years later I read the stories written by him and by Adolfo Bioy Casares, signed with the pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq. Delving into those stories written in lunfardo posed a grueling challenge. One had to sharpen his linguistic intuition and allow himself to be carried away by the sensual cadence of the words, the same as that of fiery tangos, so as not to lose the thread of the story too quickly. They were police mysteries unraveled from an Argentine prison cell by the amateur of crime, Honorio Bustos Domecq, a not-so bright man with a healthy dose of common sense, which linked him to Chesterton’s Father Brown. The plot was of least importance; what was superb about them was their language, a playful, polysemic language, a delight to the ear, like that of the serious Borges, but nonsensical. Bustos Domecq allows himself to establish a euphonious proximity between words, to surrender to a bizarre, rambling, and torrential course that gradually sketches the outlines of the story until arriving in an invertebrate, secretive, parodic, and kitschy fashion to the long-awaited climax. On the other hand, the verbal order of the books by the serious Borges is precise and obedient to the will of the author; his adjectivization suggests an inner sadness, but it is rescued by an amazing verbal imagination and contained irony. I have read and reread the stories, poetry, literary and philosophical essays of this brilliant man, but I never conceived of him as an enduring influence on my work, as was Faulkner, although in a recent rereading of my Divina garza [Divine Heron] I was able to perceive echoes and murmurs close to those of Bustos Domecq.

To establish a symmetry, it is necessary to mention the language of Faulkner and its influence, which I willingly accepted during my period of initiation. His Biblical sonorousness, his grandeur of tone, his tremendously complex construction, where a sentence may span several pages, branching out voraciously, leaving readers breathless, are unequalled. The darkness that emerges from the dense arborescence, whose meaning will be revealed many pages or chapters later, is not a mere narrative process, but rather, as in Borges, the very flesh of the story. A darkness born of the immoderate crossing of phrases of a different order is a way of enhancing a secret that, as a rule, the characters meticulously conceal.

‘THE MAGICIAN OF VIENNA.’ Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book, says Borges. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is an extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of his arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of his memory and imagination.⁵

The book accomplishes a multitude of tasks, some superb, others deplorable; it dispenses knowledge and misery, illuminates and deceives, liberates and manipulates, exalts and humbles, creates or cancels the options of life. Without it, needless to say, no culture would be possible. History would disappear, and our future would be cloaked in dark, sinister clouds. Those who hate books also hate life. No matter how impressive the writings of hatred may be, the printed word for the most part tips the balance toward light and generosity. Don Quixote will always triumph over Mein Kampf. As for the humanities and the sciences, books will continue to be their ideal space, their pillars of support.

There are those who read to kill time. Their attitude toward the printed page is passive: they repine, revel, sob, writhe in laughter; the final pages where all mysteries are revealed will ultimately allow them to sleep more soundly. They seek those spaces in which the elementary reader always takes great delight. To satisfy them, the plots must produce the greatest excitement at a minimum cost of complexity. The characters are univocal: ideal or abysmal, there is no third way; the former will be virtuous, magnanimous, industrious, observant of every social norm; they are excessively kind-hearted even if their superficial philanthropy sometimes tarnishes the whole with cloyingly saccharine registers; by contrast, the wickedness, cowardice, and pettiness of the indispensable villains know no bounds, and even if they attempt to turn over a new leaf, an evil instinct will prevail over their will that is sure to haunt them forever; they’ll end up destroying those around them before turning on themselves in their desire for unremitting destruction. In short, readers who are addicted to the struggle between good versus evil turn to the book to amuse themselves and to kill time, never to dialogue with the world, with others, or with themselves.

In popular novels, beginning with the nineteenth-century feuilletons of Ponson du Terrail, Eugène Sue, and Paul Féval, female orphans appear in abundance, defenseless all; to the tragedy of orphanhood the narrator sadistically adds other troubles: blindness, muteness, shrewishness, paralysis, and amnesia, above all amnesia. When these female orphans lose their memory and are rich to boot, they become easy prey for fortune hunters. Clearly the wide array of male fauna who wander through these stories have PhDs in evil. One of their specialties is pretending to be deserted husbands or lovers. When they happen upon one of these fragilely forgetful young women and discover their circumstances, they go about laying claim to nonexistent children whom the aforementioned amnesiacs took out for a stroll years ago, never to return; they almost always convince them of, and threaten to denounce them for, having brutally murdered the children whom they detested; they inform them that during the weeks prior to their disappearance they did nothing but talk about the visceral hatred they displayed for the accursed offspring born of their womb, and that they implored God with the ferociousness of hyenas that He rid them of these detestable children. Thus, seizing on the horror they feel for themselves and the panic they instill in them, these lotharios enslave the damsels carnally, seize control of their assets, force them to sign before a notary a thick stack of papers that consign their real estate, their jewelry deposited in safe deposit boxes, their bank accounts, and investment documents scattered in national and international banks to these insatiable wolves, who were precisely that, counterfeit husbands and lovers who had so suddenly and suspiciously surfaced.

Some, the most credulous, were convinced that in their previous incarnation—a term they used to allude to their existence prior to their amnesia—they had been nuns, and in that capacity had committed unspeakable blasphemies and countless depravities, such as strangling the portress of the convent, the gardener, or even the Mother Superior, only to wander the world lost for years thereafter, until being found, identified, and reunited with the vast fortune that their deceased parents had deposited into some banking institution.

A perfect model for this style of light literature is The Magician of Vienna, a novel that sails under triumphant flags in more than a dozen languages and has fascinated all strata of society, with the exception of the contemptuous sector of the illiterate, of course. The author introduces us to an immense, complex, and (if we may disclose a bit of the plot) mysterious firm, Imperium in Imperio, a center of immense power that operates a multitude of branches in Mexico City. Its offices and workrooms are scattered everywhere, in the skyscrapers of Reforma, in the upscale neighborhoods of Polanco and Las Lomas, in the palaces of the colonial sector, in sheds and even huts in the city’s most squalid neighborhoods. Of course, each sector is incommunicado from the other. Save a few members, everyone would be surprised, indeed, they’ll be aghast, to discover the names of their colleagues. People of every social class collaborate in this criminal enterprise. The base is comprised of the foulest ruffians from the capital’s roughest barrios; conversely, the apex, whose role is to serve as the empire’s protective façade, boasts the perfect hostesses, the supreme beauties of the moment, some foreign titles of nobility, the great couturiers and their models, the highest paid soccer players, the worlds of finance and entertainment. And between these poles operates a web of brilliant professionals: detectives, attorneys, notaries, psychiatrists, doctors; that is, a multibrain whose function is to enhance reality. In short, a perfect pyramid, led by an enigmatic character-turned-legend, thanks to the thousands of stories circulating about him. His house is located on Vienna Street, in the borough of Coyoacán, just a few blocks from the house where Trotsky was assassinated. All that is known of him is that he studied psychology in his youth, without graduating, and later supported himself with little success as a seer, magician, or shaman. No one knows how he came into his fortune. Aided by an extraordinarily effective team, this extraordinary man succeeded in ascertaining the whereabouts of hundreds of missing amnesiacs, studying their families and financial backgrounds, not to mention their tragic circumstances; women whom he doesn’t pursue as ruthlessly as in the old dime novels; rather, he manages to coax them with considerable ease by introducing them to a gang of super-hunks: Brazilians, Italians, Cubans, and Montenegrins, and why not? He later reveals that they are their former husbands or fiancés whom they had married or were about to marry just days before succumbing to the amnesia that left them in a void for several years.

What is surprising is that none of these women becomes startled or expresses the slightest doubt as to the identity of these men; each claimed to have recognized the man of her life by the scent of his cologne, deodorant, or by the loins of these young men, corroborating the shaman’s oft-held thesis on the mnemonic power of perfumes.

Maruja La noche-Harris, the highly controversial literary critic, to put it mildly, wrote a solemn defense of the book. She proffered the thesis that amnesia was a parable of the virginity of memory, of course, that scourge imposed on our time by computers. Memory, as we know, is today artificial; it is deposited into a device to be retrieved at our pleasure with the mere push of a button or a few codes, such that if a young woman, romantic and starry-eyed like so many others, goes out onto the street and asks herself something to dispel her ennui, which as a rule is the motivation for her outing, she is unable to orient herself because her responses have been stored in the computer. There lie the birthdates of her children, their names, their zodiac signs, the dates on which the Aztecs arrived at the site where the great Tenochtitlán was erected, the names and characteristics of the most magnificent hotels in Cancún, Puerto Vallarta, Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo in Mexico and Cartagena de Indias in Colombia, of the caravels of Columbus and of his captains, Don Vladimiro Rosado Ojeda’s lectures, which she attended as a young girl, on the laggard transfiguration that architecture has undergone from the Romanesque to Bauhaus, the vices of each of the Roman emperors, the list of films in which Tyrone Power appeared, the most picturesque streets of London… Everything! Absolutely everything! And at the moment she discovers that she’s unable to answer because she doesn’t have the artificial memory on-hand, she inevitably succumbs to panic. She makes a near fatal effort to contemplate those questions the answers to which no one can evade: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?, then falls to the ground. When she comes to, she’s in a clinic; she doesn’t remember who she is, much less her home address, or where she was going. To make matters worse, a curious young man who allegedly rendered first-aid has stolen her purse with her identification. At that moment, a nameless woman is born, devoid of family, home, memories, newly unemployed, and, even worse, educated for nothing.

Señora La noche-Harris infers from her reading of The Magician of Vienna an urgent call to return to the old days of rote memorization, since a brain with frequent relapses into nothingness remains under the absolute control of institutions, dogmas, all types of power, public and private, ecclesiastical, familial, and above all, the worst of all, that of the senses, an elegant allusion, if ever there was one, to the abundance of procuresses, panderers, and pimps who populate the novel.

A rigorous defamiliarization, as called for by Shklovsky, an intelligent dissolution of pathos, and a method generously parodic of the romance novel’s devices contribute to the architecture of its remarkable ending: from the bunker inhabited by the shaman on Vienna Street, a convoy of buses, trucks, and motorcycles departs every three or four months for clandestine airstrips and ports. In addition to contraband, they carry shipments of extremely beautiful women who will travel to to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf emirates. At each port of destination, a well-organized squadron belonging to the network and at the service of the Magician of Vienna will deliver them, like door-to-door service, to palatial homes or brothels so lavish they recall those from the pages of Arabian Nights. There is no need to add that, in addition to the young orphaned women from well-to-do families, those opulent dolls who, after regaining their memory, recovered their fortunes only to hand them over a few months later to the stallions the shaman has chosen for them, other libidinous beauties were sent, obviously born to families of more modest means. It is impolite, La noche-Harris points out, to reveal all the details of the plot; suffice it to say that in the last chapters we learn of the triumph of those multinational hunks who were hired and trained to serve as sex objects, or worse: as fornicating robots, feigning for a brief time to be the husbands or lovers of a string of extremely loving women whom every so often they were required to misplace. A sense of revolt arose out of the awareness of their degradation. Their hearts proved not to be bulletproof and made room for feelings they had never known before. Slowly but surely, these men moved into the light: their pagan instinct, their romantic nature, and a congenital chivalry led them into battle, and one night they lynched the shaman and his henchmen, set fire to the immense house on Vienna Street, freed the women they loved from their cells, as well as hundreds of unknown young women, made public their deed in a press conference, and revealed the shady international businesses that were concocted on Vienna Street, borough Coyoacán. The trial was not complicated; just weeks later these brave men were acquitted by an exceptionally decent judge, a humanist, who understood that it was not merely a matter of a sordid and mechanical coup d’état against a company but a healthy release of energy born of a love of justice and love itself. Indeed, shortly thereafter, the same judge who acquitted the gallant young men performs their nuptials to the saintly young women they idolized.

Maruja La noche-Harris declared at the book launch that to classify The Magician of Vienna as a light novel was to diminish the work. It could only be light if one were thinking of its absolute and captivating charm, but owing to its subject it belonged to the most noble literary caste of our century: Kafka, Svevo, Broch, and the contemporary Spanish writer Vila-Matas. Names that someone surely must have whispered in her ear. The press published some of the concepts of this literary criticism the following day:

As with all great books, we can read The Magician of Vienna for what it seems to tell us. The surface enchants; we follow the destinies of innumerable characters, entering a drawing room, suffering the passion of love, visiting military headquarters, experiencing the disasters and senselessness of the war of the sexes, relishing the joys of the ironic happy ending, through a horizontal, infinitely meticulous reading. We can, on the other hand, consider the novelistic surface a veil, behind which a secret truth is hidden: in that case, we concentrate our attention on a number of points that seem to us to hide a more intense thickness.⁶

Reading that paragraph confused those who had on other occasions stumbled upon Señora La noche-Harris’ abrupt and at times rather salty prose, but to learn that someone has managed to improve herself in her craft never fails to produce joy. Two days later, a reporter found that this paragraph came from a biography of Tolstoy written by Pietro Citati. La noche-Harris had applied to The Magician of Vienna words that the Italian biographer had dedicated to no less than War and Peace; La noche-Harris’ contribution was minimal: where Citati writes, an infinitely meticulous reading, she adds "a horizontal, infinitely meticulous reading,"⁷ and where the Italian biographer writes: disasters and senselessness of war, she expands the concept as follows: disasters and senselessness of the war of the sexes, which infects the paragraph with a cheerful flutter of madness.

I cannot know if The Magician of Vienna can be considered the best example of an industry product, but it at least seems to come close. For now, it has generously benefited its publisher, bookstores, and author. There is nothing alarming in this: this genre of storytelling has always existed. Since the novel’s beginnings, a wide range of subgenres has managed to find shelter under its skirts. Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, magnificent authors if ever there were, also coexisted with storytellers who were more widely read but bereft of prestige. They wrote and published stories similar to those that the current light literature produces, and enjoyed legions of eager consumers of a treatment that alternated between severe chills and bouts of maudlin sentimentality. The language must have been rather rudimentary, since illiteracy at the time was spectacularly high, and had to favor those who still had trouble with the printed letter. Those authors became rich but did not achieve fame, the press barely mentioned them, they circulated in spheres different from those of the literati. Their lives were anonymous, which did not seem unusual to anyone, not even to them. For a long time, the relationship, or rather the lack of relationship, between the two groups was transparent. In general, they were content with the position they occupied. Things are different now, which in many ways is grotesque, not to mention unpleasant. The creators of light literature demand the same treatment that, as a rule, would be extended to Stendhal, Proust, Woolf. How about that!

Despite the complex interests that revolve around the book, the sophisticated marketing mechanisms, the cutthroat competitiveness in the market, there continues to exist a readership receptive to the form, demanding readers whose palate would not tolerate such grisly stories or the lachrymose flavor of the feuilleton, a public that fell in love with literature during adolescence, and contracted even earlier, in childhood, the addiction to traveling through time and space through books. Within that audience can be found a tiny group that is truly a supergroup, that of writers, or the adolescents and young people who will become writers in a near future. For them, reading is one of the greatest pleasures life has afforded them, but also the best school any of those striplings attended before publishing, in a cultural supplement, in a very modest magazine, or on a supremely elegant plaquette, the poems, short stories, or essays with which they’ll make their debut into the world of letters. First readings are critical to the fate of a would-be writer. And he, years later, will discover the importance that those long hours held when he was obligated to forego thousands of celebrations to be alone with Anna Karenina, The Charterhouse of Parma, Madame Bovary, Great Expectations, only to arrive later to Ulysses, Absalom, Absalom!, To the Lighthouse, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, Pedro Páramo, where one more or less signs on.

Thanks to these readings and those yet to come, the future writer will be able to conceive of a plot as distant from reality as that of The Magician of Vienna, to do everything possible to exacerbate its garishness, its vulgar extravagance, to transform its language into a palimpsest of ignorance and wisdom, inanity and exquisiteness, until achieving an absurdly refined book, a cult novel, a snack for the happy few, like those of César Aira and Mario Bellatin.

I do not know the training of today’s young people. I imagine it to be very different from the writers of my generation owing to the visual and electronic revolution. I amused myself recently glancing at the several volumes of magnificent interviews published by the Paris Review. They are interviews with great poets and novelists from different countries and languages. They were published during three decades beginning in the fifties. Most of these authors would today be between 80 and 100 years old, or more, if they were alive. Almost all contributed to the transformation of twentieth-century literature. They speak insistently about their reading, especially those of their formative period, and all, without exception, were early, insatiable, omnivorous readers and, by the same token, refer passionately to the old masters, from the Hellenic legacy and the classics of their language to the indispensable figures of world literature. Cervantes is almost always present in their statements. William Faulkner read Don Quixote tirelessly, at least once a year. Other frequently mentioned names are: Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Poe, Melville, Conrad, Dickens, and Sterne. All of the interviewees claim to have read with special interest those works that arose during the periods of greatest splendor in the literature of their country. My generation was nourished by the Spanish classics, which are also ours, and those of