A Neo-Baroque Carnival
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By Daniel Saldaña París
An aging writer sits down to write a novel. Before even coming up with a character, let alone a story line, he lists some of the readings he wants to engage with in this new book of his. The start of the novel feels somewhat academic, but there is playfulness and mockery in the gesture. To begin by declaring your influences is not what they teach you at your average MFA workshop, but there are other ways of writing a novel, other literary traditions. And the mid-twentieth-century generation of Mexican writers embodies one such tradition: Carlos Monsiváis, Josefina Vicens, José Emilio Pacheco, and Sergio Pitol form the core of that generation. Pitol is perhaps the most bookish—hypertextual if you prefer—and the most meta of them. Which is why he sees no problem in starting a novel like this: an old writer sits down to write a novel, and before anything else, he tells us the philosophical melting pot from which he will be drawing inspiration: Rabelais, Russian formalism, Bakhtin, Gogol, Carnival. His aim is to “study the relationship between the ceremonial, the mystic, and the feast in primitive as well as contemporary industrial societies.”
Only after noting these intellectual tributaries does the writer in the novel proceed to sketch a main character—Dante C. de la Estrella—pulling the name and a handful of attributes from personal memories he unveils for the reader (“Petty interests, obtuse nationalism!”). Dante de la Estrella is an exaggerated, farcical character. Pedantic, self-absorbed, a relentless storyteller, Dante seems obsessed with an episode from his past in which he was humiliated by a brilliant woman, a famed anthropologist and widow who, he claims, is nothing but a fraud—Marietta Karapetiz, a.k.a. the Divine Heron.
That is, in a nutshell, what we find in the first chapter of Taming the Divine Heron (Deep Vellum, 2023), a sort of Cervantine preface or artist’s statement where Pitol shows us the inside of his kitchen, the ingredients he’ll deploy in this second installment of what was later labeled as his Carnival trilogy—three separate novels, published in Spanish between 1984 and 1991, in which he set out to portray, in a distorted, expressionist-like manner, Mexico’s bourgeoisie, its hopes and woes.
But Pitol can’t be understood exclusively in the Mexican context. A translator of Polish (Jerzy Andrzejewski, Witold Gombrowicz, Kazimierz Brandys), English (Joseph Conrad, Robert Graves, Jane Austen, Ford Madox Ford), Russian (Anton Chekhov, Boris Pilniak), Hungarian (Tibor Déry), Italian (Luigi Malerba), and Chinese (Lu Hsun) literature, he worked for Mexico’s foreign service for several decades, doing stints as a diplomat or as a mere expat in places like Moscow, Warsaw, Rome, Beijing, and Barcelona. Pitol’s literature is as much in conversation with Austrian novelist Robert Musil as with Juan Rulfo, author of Pedro Páramo, or Spanish philosopher María Zambrano. In my personal map of affinities and correspondences of twentieth-century world literature, Pitol can be read as a queer, Catholic cousin of Elias Canetti, another author he revered. Like that Nobel Prize winner, Pitol also wrote an extensive, genre-bending autobiography (his Memory trilogy, also published by Deep Vellum) in which readings and cities, languages and politics interweave in a multilayered tapestry of memories. Following this very comparison, Pitol’s Taming the Divine Heron would be something like Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe. While both are mature works, they rely heavily on humor, parody, and a sense of lightness as a tool for social criticism in a way that evokes the youthful exploits of a witty contrarian. Divine Heron, much like Canetti’s novel, brings to mind the cartoons of Georg Grosz, a sour depiction of an idle class struggling to appear sophisticated while coming off as grotesque and clownish.
In the novel, structured as a series of Russian dolls, Dante C. de la Estrella tells the story of a trip to Istanbul—accompanied by Ramona and Rodrigo Vives—where he meets the famous anthropologist Marietta Karapetiz, “a living fraud,” who introduces him, unwittingly, to the scatological rites of Santo Niño del Agro, a Catholic patron saint of everything excremental. In Dante’s monologue, delivered to the captive audience of the Millares family during a stormy evening in Tepoztlán, the character-cum-narrator tells the most unreliable version of his Turkish trip, presenting himself as a victim of the Divine Heron’s malice.
Pitol gives us the key to reading the scatological references in a symbolic context: as is often the case, the story about feces masks one about money, and what we witness is Dante’s effort to behave as a socialite without spending a dime, an exercise in social mobility by way of pedantry and an abundance of Gogol quotes. The result is an exhilarating fable, the highbrow style of Pitol’s prose descending into the abysses of popular culture: “The afternoon of that day became a magnificent torrent of filth: stench, shit everywhere, flies the size of eggs. Would you have me believe that some of those present, those from the enlightened sector, shall we say, sensed that mystical connection of the soul with the earth that demagogues proclaim so loudly, of the link between the act of emptying the body and the union with the divine, of which no less than the serene Ulpian spoke? Tell that one to someone else!”
Sergio Pitol’s fiction took some time to earn its rightful place in the Mexican canon. Only when younger generations of Spanish-speaking writers—Enrique Vila-Matas, Mario Bellatin, Juan Cárdenas, and Valeria Luiselli among them—started crediting him as a mentor and major reference did it become clear that Pitol opened more than one path for his literary heirs. If his memoirs and diaristic essays gave way to a new autobiographical form, in the vein of Natalia Ginzburg’s personal essays, peppered with criticism and laced with translation, his Carnival trilogy, of which Taming the Divine Heron is the best novel, opened the door to humorous, neo-baroque offspring.
Marvelously translated by G. B. Henson, who has committed to rendering Pitol’s oeuvre in English over the past few years, Divine Heron might bring a blast of fresh air in a time obscured by formulaic stories aimed at confirming the reader’s political beliefs. No one will be tempted to identify with Dante C. de la Estrella, and yet we can all use Dante’s self-aggrandizing tendencies to laugh at our own idiocy. While culture might be made of high ideas and good intentions, Pitol seems to point out, the spirit of Carnival is to turn all these noble ingredients, by way of digestion, into gusts of laughter and foul matters.
Daniel Saldaña París is a Mexican-born novelist and essayist living in New York City. He is the author of three novels—Among Strange Victims, Ramifications, and The Dance and the Fire—and a collection of personal essays, Planes Flying over a Monster. His work has been supported by MacDowell, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Eccles Center at the British Library, and the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires.
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