Reality Exaggerates: An Interview with Guillermo Saccomanno
Interviews
By Andrea G. Labinger
Guillermo Saccomanno is recognized as one of Argentina’s foremost living writers. Although often linked to neo-noir fiction, Saccomanno resists categorization. While many of his works take place in an anonymous, but identifiable, urban center (yes, that city of milongas, milanesas, and an improbably pink government palace), others play out in smaller, coastal resort towns equally rife with corruption and violence (See, for example, the epic novel Gesell Dome, 2016). But The Clerk (El Oficinista, 2010) fits neither of these descriptions. In contrast to the baroque lushness of Gesell Dome, this is a relatively slim novel whose characters are as schematic as they are scheming: anonymous, pathetic creatures who could easily be spinning out their lives anywhere, at almost any intersection of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Even though these characters have no names, we come to know them just as intimately as we know the topography of our own personal failures and disappointments.
The story is deceptively simple: An unassuming office clerk lives in fear of losing his miserable job. A professional toady, he dreads offending his overbearing boss just as much as he worries about provoking his monstrous wife and pack of savage kids. No one can be trusted, especially not the co-worker who arouses his suspicions by being friendly toward him. Even the smallest sign of kindness is a sign of fear, weakness, and perhaps imminent treachery. Only two human contacts are capable of awakening the Clerk’s tenderness: his feeble, youngest child, known only as “El Viejito,” whose cowering demeanor painfully reminds the Clerk of his own debilities, and the Secretary, whose affair with the Boss isn’t humiliating enough to extinguish the Clerk’s passion for her.
Having already enjoyed the privilege of translating two of Saccomanno’s other novels—Gesell Dome (2016) and 77 (2019) for Open Letter Books—I was eager to embark on this new project, as well as to ask Guillermo to expound on how his style reflects (or doesn’t reflect) his view of humanity and its prospects for survival. El Oficinista received the Biblioteca Breve Prize from Seix Barral Publishers (Spain) in 2010. The Clerk is out today from Open Letter Books.
Andrea Labinger: In some of your novels (e.g., 77), the characters are fully fleshed out, while in others (e.g., The Clerk), they appear to be almost cartoonish, deliberately reduced to essentials, living miserable lives in Kafkaesque anonymity. When beginning to write a new book, what factors influence your style of character development? Has your previous work in cartooning had an impact on how realistically or schematically you choose to depict your characters?
Guillermo Saccomanno: Maybe the difference between The Clerk and my other novels and short stories consists precisely of its allegorical take on the nineteenth-century literature of clerks, in particular three key works dealing with humiliation, resentment, and the victims’ passivity. I’m referring to Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” These three texts, in turn, are forerunners of Kafka’s tales The Trial and The Metamorphosis. Let’s put it this way: The Clerk aims to share shelf space with those works I’ve just mentioned, which, for me, have been not only a point of reference, but a microscope through which I could adopt the perspective of an entomologist, observing the reality that surrounded—and still surrounds—me. In The Clerk, we’re looking at a humiliated guy, defined by his submissiveness and inability to rebel. Dominated by frustration, he takes refuge in his impossible dreams and spends his life harassed by nightmares that are all too real. It’s true that you can find traces of the comic strip in this book, and that’s no accident. I’ve been writing for that genre ever since the 70s, and I’m still a scriptwriter today. The story actually comes from a script that takes place in 1929, during the Wall Street collapse, and describes the fall of a middle-class clerk. Sometime after seeing this script, I had the idea of exploring the plotline more deeply, and that’s where this story, which took on a literary life of its own, comes from. In other novels and tales, I start out differently—generally from a phrase, a scene, an anecdote, a slice of reality that’s captured my attention. Reality always offers hints for creating fiction, and in general tends to outdo the imagination. “Reality exaggerates,” as writer Antonio Dal Masetto has ironically remarked.
AL: Comments about “the Russians”—i.e., iconic Russian novelists—abound in The Clerk. The Clerk’s office mate is enamored of Russian literature and tries to convince the Clerk to familiarize himself with the classic Russian canon. To what extent do your own literary preferences coincide with this character’s? Or is this admiration to be taken as tongue-in-cheek, since the office mate is an unsophisticated reader, someone who practically swoons when he discovers that the Clerk drinks tea, such a quintessentially Russian habit?
GS: Russian literature has been a strong element in my development. I think I read Crime and Punishment when I was fourteen. And since then not a year has gone by without my reading one of Dostoevsky’s or Tolstoy’s great novels. And, as Dostoevsky said, speaking of his writer compatriots: “We all come from Gogol.” I imagine that same influence is reflected in my novel. That’s why the references to Russian literature you may find in the novel aren’t gratuitous or accidental. And maybe that’s what accounts for certain thematic constants in my work, like guilt, both personal and collective, the question of otherness, the relationship between the individual and the totality of things. Ivan Karamazov’s great question: If God doesn’t exist, is everything permitted? And an affirmation: Perhaps one can love one’s neighbor only from afar. These are questions that, in my opinion, have become more and more relevant in these days of hyperconnectivity and isolation, where the only way to show solidarity is to lock oneself in.
AL: It’s also not hard to find references throughout the novel to so-called “feminine” and “masculine” traits, comments that I assume are to be taken ironically. For instance, the protagonist, the Clerk, fantasizes (not without pleasure) about being the Boss’s sexual object as well as his lackey. One of the Clerk’s most frequent fantasies concerns being flung facedown across the Boss’s ample desk and sodomized by the Boss. The Boss himself feels sexually inadequate because he hasn’t been able to produce an heir and is obliged to cede to his wife’s wishes to adopt a set of twins from the Balkans. Not until he impregnates the Secretary does the Boss acquire the full scope of his so-called masculinity in the novel. Additionally, certain traits, like keeping a personal journal, are described as being “feminine” (or weak), and nearly all the female characters are odious to a certain degree. Could you please comment on your reasons for offering readers such a merciless view of what it means to be male or female in the world of this novel?
GS: I think that the gender perspective that controls how the characters in the novel operate is simply that of beings who are governed by the contradictions of capitalist society. Individualism, erotic relationships encoded in materialism, bodies destroyed by the pressures of the system. Everyone wants to climb, to win, to appear better than what they are, simulation as a kind of strategy for survival. And yet, reality defeats them. If the Clerk imagines himself being sodomized—that is, feminized—by the Boss, this is due to the machista view both of them have of women. Imagining himself as a woman, imagining himself sodomized, in this instance is a form of humiliation.
AL: Speaking of novelistic “worlds,” let’s talk for a moment about dystopian literature in general and the extent to which The Clerk can be viewed as a dystopian novel. Is it futuristic? Contemporary? Can it be identified with any precise moment in history? I’m fascinated, for example, by the seamless blend of anachronistic features: pocket watches, inkwells, and functioning pay phones coexisting with gangs of cloned dogs roaming the streets, computers, and a pandemic virus that sounds suspiciously like AIDS. In your opinion, what is the purpose of this dizzying chronological mélange, and what effect does it have on the reader?
GS: Whatever might have seemed crazy more than ten years ago, when I was writing the novel, is reality today. Whatever might be considered dystopian in my novel, no longer is. In Third World countries—and I don’t believe they’re the only scenarios, because they can also be found in the slums of the First World—the most advanced technology coexists with the most backward conditions, and the division between the very wealthy and powerful and the great masses of the exploited grows sharper every day. The novel is nothing more than a detailed record of visual data, the coexistence of yesterday’s dregs with other bits that represent tomorrow, an increasingly threatening tomorrow. I haven’t been original here. In any case, I simply looked around and glimpsed what was there, lying in wait.
AL: All your work, up to and notably including Gesell Dome, contain social commentary that is applicable, not only to Argentina, but to most industrialized and developing nations today. And while the class differences aren’t subtle, they’re presented so starkly and so matter-of-factly that they end up being much more effective than a more histrionic presentation would have been. As an example, we have the Secretary, whose middle-class aspirations and kitschy taste are eclipsed by her missing bicuspid and the dismal housing project where she lives. What observations or memories of class consciousness in your own life have influenced your literary depictions of social class?
GS: Characters like the Secretary in The Clerk can be found in my short stories and also in novels like Gesell Dome. In broad terms, you might say that they’re examples of the middle class, beings who identify with the ideology and values of higher, more glamorous social strata and who reject the ideas and codes of their own social condition. And—let me make this clear—this uneasiness, this always-unsatisfied desire is true of as many men as women, converting both sexes into victims who tend to function as traitors, and who, when taken to an extreme, can become snitches, or as history demonstrates, torturers and hangmen. Bertolt Brecht maintained that “there is no worse fascist than a frightened bourgeois.”
AL: In a recent interview for this magazine, author Juan Cárdenas commented to his translator, Lizzie Davis: “I don’t think contemporary dystopias are just a confirmation of our present’s discontents. What dystopias really reveal is our repressed desire for utopia. Actually, I see a lot of potential in our current putrefaction.” Do you agree? Have we finally hit bottom and only now can begin to work our way back up to the surface? Is there, in fact, any hope or redemption in The Clerk, and if so, what does it consist of?
GS: I’m not an optimist. And it’s hard for me to think of hope in a world that holds debates in a permanent cataclysm. I write these lines during a pandemic. The virus triggers the chaos, and the chaos seems absolute in a system where hyperconnectivity is the rule, and yet we’re becoming increasingly isolated. We’re heading for a global reorganization. Unlike those who think that the post-pandemic world will be more rational, I believe that capitalism and digital companies will be strengthened. The resulting crisis is not just economic. It’s psychological and mental, as well as a crisis of hope. Since literature doesn’t exist independently of social processes, it seems to me that my novel might not be so much a prediction of the world to come as a diagnosis of the one we’re already in. I’m not afraid to contradict myself: it’s likely that my novel isn’t either dystopian or predictive, but realistic.
Andrea G. Labinger translates contemporary Latin American fiction. Gesell Dome, her translation of Guillermo Saccomanno’s noir novel Cámara Gesell (Open Letter 2016), won a PEN/Heim Translation Award. Her translation of Saccomanno’s 77 was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award, 2020. Forthcoming translations include: Patricia Ratto’s Proceed with Caution (Schaffner Press); Daughter by Ana María Shua (Literal Publishing); and Saccomanno’s The Clerk (Open Letter).
Guillermo Saccomanno was born in Buenos Aires in 1948. Before becoming a novelist, he worked as a copywriter in the advertising industry and as a scriptwriter for cartoons and other films. Saccomanno is a prolific writer, with numerous novels and short story collections to his credit. One of his novels, Bajo bandera, was adapted into a film by director Juan José Jusid. Among Saccomanno’s many literary distinctions are: the Premio Nacional de Literatura for El buen dolor (2000); Seix Barral’s Premio Biblioteca Breve de Novela for El oficinista (2010); the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for nonfiction for Un maestro (2010); and two Dashiell Hammett Prizes (for 77 in 2008 and Cámara Gesell in 2012). His work has been translated into many languages, including English, French, Italian, and Russian. Cámara Gesell, undoubtedly his most ambitious novel to date, has been described as “[a] choral, savage, and ruthless work, considered to be the great Argentine social novel” (www.europapress.es/…noticia-guillermo-saccomanno).
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