Literary Goals | An Interview with Julián Herbert
Interviews
By Christina MacSweeney
In his excellent review of the work of Julián Herbert, Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado says that if the author “were a soccer player, or if literature could be described in soccer terms, one could say that he scored a hat trick of masterpieces in the short period of four years.” He is referring to three of Herbert’s most important texts, two of which have been translated into English: Tomb Song and The House of the Pain of Others (Graywolf, 2018 and 2019). The third is his brilliant visual poem Álbum Iscariote (Iscariot Album). But with the forthcoming publication of the short story collection Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, Julián Herbert is about to add one more goal to that impressive achievement.
Born in Acapulco, Herbert had a peripatetic childhood, following his mother in her search for work, which often included prostitution. He now lives in Saltillo, Coahuila State, and has forged an enviable reputation as one of Mexico’s most talented and versatile writers. As a poet, novelist, short story writer, chronicler, literary critic (not to mention musician), Julián Herbert’s work defies definition and exhibits an extreme disregard for traditional genre boundaries. It has been an honor to translate his books into English and is an equal honor to talk to him about his writing.
Christina MacSweeney: Julián, I’m constantly amazed by the way you move between different styles in your work, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. Could you say something about your writing process and the importance of this movement and of technique (a concept you often mention)?
Julián Herbert: I often think about technique in an industrial sense. I know that I’m idealizing my process, but I’d like to believe that it involves something of what I learned from the metalworkers who surrounded me as a child: tough men who could pass in a single sentence from a crude joke to the most sublime and sincere declaration of loyalty to their family and union. Then, from seventeen to twenty, I worked as a copyeditor and reporter for two weekly magazines, so the first literary writing I learned was in the field of journalism. At the same time, I was studying Golden Age Spanish literature at university: I analyzed dozens of sonnets, read Don Quixote, and took four classes in Latin, while at home I was learning to play songs by Pearl Jam and Nirvana on my guitar. What I’m trying to say is that the sort of linguistic hybrid I write possibly comes from some unconscious but also inevitable zone: I’m the product of social mobility. I’ve also been a migrant, although I never left my country during that period: I was born in the south of Mexico but grew up in the north, very near the border with the United States. Even though I’ve never studied the English language, it is one of my main influences: as a child, I used to watch English-language cartoons because the only TV channel we could get at home came from Laredo, Texas.
But in all that, I’m speculating about memory and the past. In fact, the best technique is daily practice. I think my writing has changed a great deal over the last couple of years because my way of thinking about life, culture, and emotions also changed, changed radically, after an existential crisis I underwent in the spring of 2018.
Another aspect of my process is that I almost always write in a sort of dual way: reading each sentence aloud to gauge the rhythm.
CM: That last point is really interesting because it’s also something I do with both the Spanish and English when I’m translating your work. But if you had to try to classify yourself, would you say you’re a poet, a fiction writer, a critic, a philosopher, a musician . . . ?
JH: One of my favorite descriptions in sport is something said about the Dutch soccer squad during the 1974 World Cup: “They all defend and they all attack.” In Mexico sportswriters called the team The Clockwork Orange. They used to say that they played “Total Soccer.” I’d like to be able to write literature in that way, not thinking too much about genres (or my position on the field), but trying to do everything at the same time, as writers did in Rabelais’s day. I’m interested in genres, but only to the extent that you can see them as processes in search of a structure: more as intuitions than institutions. Rather than genre theory, I like to think in terms of Gerard Genette’s concept of narratology, quantification and scansion in making poetry, the manual of rhetorical figures, and Peter Stockwell’s cognitive poetics. Tzvetan Todorov believed that the primary ambition of artists is not to leave genre intact: to modify it slightly in their work. That was the long answer. The short response is that I mainly consider myself to be a “dude” who makes poems.
CM: I’ll remember that last response if I’m ever asked to define your work. Moving from form to content: when talking of Mexico these days, there seems to be no way to avoid the issue of violence. In The House of the Pain of Others, for instance, you return to a massacre that took place in Torreón in 1911 at the dawn of the Mexican Revolution. For me, translating the section of the crónica that recounts the events of those three days was a harrowing experience, despite the fact that, or perhaps because, you in no way sensationalize the violence and don’t shy from highlighting the underlying racism that gave rise to it. How important is the depiction of violence in your writing?
JH: I guess there are things that you can’t attempt to avoid. Quite often you’re trying to talk about something (childhood, racism, eroticism, laughter, diasporas, drug use), and the topic of violence emerges as a contrast medium. In Mexico it happens all the time, but I don’t think it’s only here. I have the sense that there’s a lot of violence in some forms of Arabic literature. Or some works of African literature. Not to mention the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre or the French Revolution or the Vietnam War. I think it’s hard to address social or historical issues without some manifestation of violence appearing sooner or later. Particularly when you’re talking about the struggle for space in economic life, or the hegemony of racial or spiritual criteria, or the lassitude with which society perceives relationships between reality and legality. In my case, instead of romanticizing or avoiding violence, I try to produce a contextual reading of it: I’m interested in the channels taken by blind rage and the bureaucratic phenomena that give rise to what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil.” I’ve received a certain amount of criticism for not getting straight to the point in The House of the Pain of Others: for starting with a historical reconstruction of the social composition of Torreón and the causes of the Cantonese diaspora, then closing with an epilogue relating the impunity that followed the massacre of the Chinese in 1911. For me, all that part of the story is as important as the narrative concerning the violent events. And that’s why I often make use of ekphrasis in my documentary work: reconstructing historical photographs in literary terms rather than just publishing them. It’s a stylistic technique as old as the Iliad, and I use it to vary the point of view and construct a social and historical frame for violence. The Mexican writer José Revueltas described the strategy as realismo dialéctico (dialectical realism).
On the other hand, there’s a phenomenon that seems to me very characteristic of certain cultures (for instance, Mexican and Spanish), where violence and humor are linked. Nabokov thought that Don Quixote was a deeply violent book whereas for many of us who read it in Spanish it’s Chaplinesque: its violence is, for the most part, a sort of custard-pie war (as my mentor David Huerta would say), a deeply corporeal form of mimetic parody. This also occurs, for example, with love of verbal miasma in a certain French tradition, or the intricate wordplay of many English writers: there’s a humorous impulse there that’s not easy to translate. George Steiner wrote some beautiful essays on that subject.
CM: I’m pleased you brought up the topic of humor because something I really appreciate in your books is the dark humor. I’m thinking, for example, of the wonderful dialogue between Rosendo and Gildardo as they drive to a pizza-and-mezcal restaurant (a scene that ends in a brutal attack). How did that need to insert humor into your work arise?
JH: I’d like to be able to say that it comes from reading, but it doesn’t: I believe it has more to do with the spoken language I learned as a child, living with my mother. Four of us slept in the same bed, in a one-room house with a roof that leaked in heavy rain, and she would keep us awake in the darkness explaining her consternation at not being able to remember whether or not she’d closed the windows of her latest-model Mustang. I can’t remember the exact words she used in her monologue, just our loud laughter. One of the last times I saw her on her feet, she’d lost all her hair after having chemo. We both knew that she was close to death. She said: “Do I look presidentiable? Maybe not.” (She was referring to the bald pate of the former Mexican president Carlos Salinas.) There are layers in all those rhetorical devices that I’m still trying to decipher. Resentment, but also joy. Social criticism, but also stoicism and absurdity. Self-ridicule, but also the triumphal arrogance of someone who’s capable of laughing at herself and knows it. And there were catchphrases, a sort of language for the initiated, because humor is morally demanding: expressing solidarity with pain is much more neutral, less uncomfortable than laughing at it while retaining compassion. Humor is one of the two fairy godmothers my mother left me when she died. The other is music.
CM: Despite or maybe because of those two great fairy godmothers, taking your work as a whole, it feels to me that you are an uncompromising critic of both yourself and the society in which you live, particularly in relation to concepts of masculinity. Do you think it’s possible for literature to change our values? Has it changed yours in any way?
JH: I suppose literature is a bit like a screwdriver, isn’t it? You can use it to repair a fuse box or to stir vodka and orange juice in the mornings, to stab a woman in the darkness. Ideally, you should repair the fuse box, turn on the lights and not end up stabbing anyone in the darkness. But that’s not always how things go. What I’m trying to say is that literature educates us and opens us to criticism and self-criticism, but not in a moralizing sense: it’s more like something neurobiological. And opening oneself to something isn’t always easy, not always pleasant: there are dragons in there. Literature has been hugely helpful for me: it taught me to drink and to stop drinking, to breathe and to earn money, to make love, to think, to write, to travel, to tie the laces of my shoes. It taught me to be fragile without shattering completely. It took me out of my barrio and offered me a stamp album of paradise. And yes: it possibly helped me to attempt a search for a less self-satisfied form of masculinity, although I think most of us men are not far off the starting block in that task. I can’t talk for the rest of the human race, but I’d be a miserable creature without literature. I’m not talking about the books I’ve written but the books I’ve read.
CM: Which writers do you feel are doing the most groundbreaking work in contemporary Latin America? And how do you foresee that literary culture developing?
JH: I think primarily of poets, although that may not be a popular opinion: Raúl Zurita, Tedi López Mills, Germán Carrasco, Angelica Freitas, Fabián Casas, Tamara Kamenzain . . . In terms of nonfiction prose, obviously Fernanda Melchor. In Mexico there’s a poet and novelist who’s always sent my head spinning: Luis Felipe Fabre. Another crazy genius is the Chilean short story writer and novelist Álvaro Bisama. In Ecuador, the short stories by María Fernanda Ampuero. Other writers I admire a great deal and who are already quite well-known in English are Cristina Rivera Garza, Yuri Herrera, Samantha Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, Emiliano Monge, Guillermo Arriaga, Alejandro Zambra. There are authors older than me, published some time ago, who still seem relevant but whose works haven’t received the international recognition they deserve: Enrique Serna, Héctor Manjarrez, Diamela Eltit, María Luisa Puga. And younger voices that I find very interesting: Arelis Uribe, Jazmina Barrera, Isabel Zapata, to name but a few. I think the main challenge for the new Latin American literature, and for literature in general, is to keep its head and specificity as it navigates between the low-impact fascism decreed by social networks, the bureaucratization of rebellious thought decreed by the cultural studies departments of universities, and the overproduction of complaisant rhetorical structures decreed by the Netflix algorithm.
CM: One last question. It seems unavoidable to mention the pandemic in this interview. In what ways has it changed your life, and do you think the experience will have an impact on your future work?
JH: For me personally, the pandemic is part of a much longer, complex, and deferred process. I’ll tell you the story now. One day I was making a playlist (I love making playlists) of one-hit wonders, and I included “96 Tears” by Question Mark and the Mysterians. I wondered what had become of the band and so did some Googling. Among other things, I ended up reading about the Mysterian philosophy and something David Chalmers calls “the hard problem of consciousness”: the hypothesis that—like space, time, and matter—consciousness exists at a subatomic level. It’s an unsolvable problem in physics. Naturally, most neurobiologists don’t accept this opinion, but for me it brought on a crisis: I discovered that I’d spent my whole life as a recalcitrant atheist and, at the same time, feeling that there’s something sacred underlying language. I had a breakdown. I ended up in Shanghai, with no money, a case of glandular fever, my body swamped with alcohol and drugs, seeking the compassion of the Buddha Amitabha in the temple in Jin’an. That was in 2017. In 2018 I checked into rehab for three months and learned to give my life a more or less monastic structure. When I left the clinic, I invented a program: I get up at half past six, exercise, and do Zazen meditation. Then I do housework, go shopping, or repair things; I cook for my family, have a siesta, write in the afternoon and evening, and watch an hour of television at ten. At eleven I do a Tarot reading and try to be in bed before midnight. At first, the only things that interfered with this system were my social life and travel for work. Then came the pandemic. Like everyone else, it’s caused me a great deal of angst, sadness, and concern. But at an everyday level, my life and writing have changed very little. Or rather, they had already changed and the pandemic formalized the new inner order. Of course, there must be a great many things that I’m unconsciously repressing or that I can’t yet see in all this. The truth is that during the last year or so, I’ve experienced more moments of serenity than I had in the first seventeen years of the twenty-first century. I know how this sounds: like a religious conversion brought on by a psychotic episode. And I’m sure that’s true. But I also know that the pandemic is a gigantic wave, and for some reason, when it rolled into my life, I was carrying a surfboard.
Christina MacSweeney is the translator of The House of the Pain of Others andTomb Song by Julián Herbert, and has published translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms and contributed to several anthologies. She was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. She lives in England.
Julián Herbert was born in Acapulco in 1971. He is a writer, musician, and teacher, and is the author of The House of the Pain of Others and Tomb Song, as well as several volumes of poetry and two story collections. He lives in Saltillo, Mexico.
More Interviews