Stylistic Promiscuity: A Conversation with Rodrigo Blanco Calderón
Interviews
By Noel Hernández González
It’s 2010 in Caracas, Venezuela. The city is plagued by recurring blackouts which cast shadows both literal and metaphorical. A psychiatrist discusses literature and femicides with his friend, a down-on-his-luck writer whose latest project, The Night, is titled after a song by the band Morphine. Through this writer he meets a new patient, an advertising exec who believes that his future is coded into a nonsensical story he wrote years ago.
These details provide some sense of the premise behind Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s novel The Night, but this is a book that operates on many levels beyond plot. You might be drawn into a novel because of its location, or because you know it’s partly about someone you admire. It might deal with a turbulent political landscape you want to know more about. Or, simply, because its first paragraph takes you to a strange place, and the gripping prose anticipates mystery and surprises. The Night did all the above for me, and once it got me hooked, it kept delivering like the proverbial gift that keeps on giving.
The Night is Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s first novel, but you might be forgiven to think the Venezuelan author wrote it with the certainty that it would be his last one as well. Such is its ambition and scope, metafictional scaffolding, ever-revolving door of characters, and the cacophony of genres it contains; it’s as if the author wanted to get in everything he likes or, more to the point, everything he’s obsessed with, and that reverence transcends and is contagious. The Night is a tale of tales, of interweaving narratives from which one glimpses the tapestry of a country upon which darkness has fallen. But it’s also a novel about novels—about the strangeness, wonder, and power of the written word.
I feel very lucky to have translated this novel alongside Daniel Hahn and am equally honored to have talked to Rodrigo about it.
Noel Hernández González: The critic Ignacio Echevarría said of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that, rather than being unfinished, it was an unfinishable novel. I thought about that phrase when I came across The Night, with its vast array of themes, characters, plots and subplots, locations, and timelines. I’d like to ask you whether the tremendous scope of the novel was planned or something that happened as you wrote it. Did the book ever feel like it was getting out of hand?
Rodrigo Blanco Calderón: It was a bit of both. On the one hand, I started to write the novel the day after [Venezuelan poet and palindromist] Darío Lancini died. The news of his death activated something inside me that allowed me to see the novel. And as soon as I had that vision it was clear to me that Darío Lancini would be my Cesárea Tinajero, the disappeared poet in Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. That identification led me to appropriate the structure of Bolaño’s novel. In that sense, there was an element of premeditation. What I didn’t anticipate was how writing in that way would affect the scope of my novel. When I was halfway through and ready to start the descent, I did feel vertigo about the proliferation of stories, characters, and connections. However—and I don’t know why—I always trusted that the final scene would, at some level, resolve all these plots.
NHG: And if the finished product had such a dimension, I don’t even want to think about where the first drafts were leading to, all the stuff you needed to leave behind. Would be there enough material for The Night Part 2 or a prequel?
RBC: Actually, the novel was written as the reader reads it: the first part, second, third, and epilogue. I mean, I was discovering the story as I was writing it. That’s why, and also because it was my first novel, there weren’t any drafts. There were corrections, and editing work, of course, but the result is pretty close to the manuscript I handed in. The Night ends referring to something called The Year of Mercy, which is a very long novel and, now that I think about it, could work as a prequel and a continuation of The Night. In fact, I started writing The Year of Mercy before I wrote The Night. I still am.
NHG: The previous questions are about the themes you touch upon, but from a stylistic point of view, the novel experiments with a wide selection of genres, from crime fiction and police procedural to blog posts and biography. Why this “stylistic promiscuity?”
RBC: “Stylistic promiscuity,” I love that. I’m not really sure why. I suppose that, and to extend your image, I was guided by the desire to keep the reader in a state of alert throughout the narration. Those changes in the genre were necessary to keep myself interested in the story I was telling. It’s like constantly shuffling about while sitting on an uncomfortable chair. And I think that writing is just that: sitting and working for hours, days, months in a very uncomfortable chair.
NHG: Wordplay in general, and palindromes in particular, give The Night a spectacular dimension. They are like fireworks displays within the prose. I don’t know which experience was more intense for me: the pleasure I experienced as a reader discovering the palindromes, or the headache I got when trying to translate them. Could you tell me how wordplay made its way into the novel?
RBC: Yes, I know that the playful side of the novel has been a real challenge for translators of The Night. Wordplay has been there since the beginning of the novel, and it comes from two places. First, from reading, ever since I discovered the palindromes of Darío Lancini in 2001 or 2002. Secondly, from experience, because the story of the motorcyclist that goes around Caracas at night delivering coded and apocalyptic messages was something that actually happened to me around the same time. One night, in the middle of a dark and deserted street, a motorcyclist stopped beside me and gave me a slip of paper with a deranged message about future tragedies awaiting my country. Time proved he wasn’t mad. Or that the madmen were elsewhere, in power, since all the presages of that eccentric motorized prophet have been confirmed.
NHG: Apart from palindromes and other puzzles, the novel is playful in a postmodern way, like when it questions and analyses itself. Who are your influences in this regard?
RBC: I like literature that talks about literature, and novels and short stories whose characters are writers or readers. In my case, all of this comes from Borges. He’s the author I’ve read the most, the one I’ve enjoyed the most and in whose work I always discover new things. Around the time I started to write The Night I was also influenced by two of his main followers: Roberto Bolaño and, to a greater extent, Ricardo Piglia.
NHG: There are many real-life characters in the book, and you write quite extensively about some of them, such as Mark Sandman and James Ellroy. Are those profiles so exhaustive because you feel personal admiration for these cultural icons?
RBC: I became obsessed with every single character in the novel as I was discovering them, especially if there was some reciprocity or aesthetic affinity between them. Mark Sandman and the band Morphine, for example, appeared from the beginning. When I started digging into Sandman’s life, I found a character with a tragic and captivating story. I found out that Ellroy was one of his favorite writers, and that blew my mind. So, I told Ellroy’s story too. That’s more or less what happened with every key character in the story. In that sense, The Night is a boundless novel.
NHG: El Nacional’s short story prize is mentioned several times in the novel, and the character Matias Rye thinks of award-winning entries and authors “as metaphors for the fairness or unfairness of life.” I’m aware that you won this award with “Los golpes de la vida.” What would Matias Rye make of your short story, and of you as an author?
RBC: I’m sure Matias Rye would hate me and slag off my story. In fact, I’ve met many Matiases: oral writers who talk all the time about the books they want to write, yet they never actually write anything. He represents the shadow of the failed writer that exists within every writer. I think that, deep inside, we all think we are a failure. At the same time, Matias Rye has a very refined aesthetic sensibility. He’d like to be like Israel Centeno, a great Venezuelan writer who has dabbled in the Gothic style. Matias admires him, and so do I. Hence the wordplay between Rye and Centeno.
NHG: You mention Israel Centeno. Something that I found exciting in The Night is that it works as a showcase for obscure Venezuelan writers. Starting with Dario Lancini, of course, who is one of the main characters, but also Ramos Sucre, Humberto Mata, Guillermo Meneses, and so on. Are there more Venezuelan authors you’d like to add to the list?
RBC: That’s one of the greatest pleasures this novel has given me: knowing that readers from other latitudes are starting to discover very valuable Venezuelan authors. The list of Venezuelan authors “to discover” is long. It starts with classic figures such as Vicente Gerbasi, Rafael Cadenas, Teresa de la Parra, José Balza, Elisa Lerner and Francisco Massiani, through Oscar Marcano, Victoria de Stefano, Rubi Guerra, Karina Sainz Borgo, Juan Carlos Chirinos, Keila Val de la Ville, the aforementioned Israel Centeno, Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez, and Sonia Chocrón. I can think of many authors, with solid oeuvres and for all tastes. And I know that for reasons of space I’m leaving out many other voices to consider.
NHG: Let’s talk about Venezuela. The Night contains a great deal of sociopolitical commentary, and it comes at the reader from many different angles: allegorically, with the image of Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de La Méduse, for example, or, more directly, when characters talk about President Chávez. However, such references are always restrained, measured. I suppose someone like you, who was born in Caracas and lived through the Chavismo, would have strong—and not at all restrained— emotions about the situation. How do you balance your role as a writer and as a citizen? Is there any friction?
RBC: If something was clear before I started to write the novel it was that I didn’t want it to be a protest or propagandist book. That explains the book’s oblique or sober approach to the Venezuelan conflict. Of course, the sociopolitical situation is present in the novel. In fact, it’s what frames it from the beginning: the blackouts, the energy crisis, the political conflict. But I started off with that because I wanted it out of the way—because I intended to write other stories.
That’s with regards to my role as a novelist. With regards to my role as a citizen, I haven’t been at all restrained. In fact, I’ve been very direct in denouncing the Chavist dictatorship. But that discourse has been relegated to opinion pieces and, for a long time, to quarrelling on Twitter. Right now, I think that, fortunately, I’m recovered. The Venezuelan dictatorship is solidly established and tolerated by the international community. So, as it stands, there is nothing to do about it.
NHG: Finally, I think there is a lot of humor in the novel, something that mainly comes through in its dialogue. It’s also a very Venezuelan humor, with its resigned and fatalistic tone. How do you see it?
RBC: I’m glad you think that some, or a lot of, humor remains in my characters despite the mess they are living in. I suppose that comes from the nature of the Venezuelan, or the Latin American, in general: that tendency to laugh to keep from crying. Although, after reading Svetlana Alexievich, who said the same about the Russians during the horror of Stalinism, I think it’s a distinctive trait of the human being that comes to light in particularly difficult contexts. I think about Spain, the country where I’ve been living for the last three years—in Malaga, in the south of Andalusia. Spain is a country with lots of problems, quite unstable in some ways, especially when it comes to regional conflicts. But overall it’s one of the best countries in the world to live in. You don’t need much to live a decent life. Yet a Spaniard would take none of that. When you read contemporary Spanish literature, it seems like the authors are bitter all the time. You’d think Spain is second to Afghanistan when it comes to national disasters. And I understand the grumpiness of Spanish intellectuals. When you live in a welfare society, at least when compared to countries with really dramatic crises, you can start to feel like you don’t have anything to tell. Here in Spain, humor can be found in the people in the street: people who are in a more precarious position than many writers and, for that reason, resort to humor.
Noel Hernández González is a writer and translator. Originally from Tenerife, he lives in Norwich, England.
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