MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
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extravagance hypnotize us, making irrelevant any aesthetic or ethical
objections we might raise in good conscience.
1 have a similar reaction to Alejo Carpentier, without a doubt one of
the greatest novelists of the Spanish language. His prose, when removed
from the context of his novels, is exactly the opposite sort of writing 1
admire (1 know it's impossible to make such a distinction, but 1 make it
to
clarify my point). I don't care for his stiffness, his academicism, and
his bookish mannerisms, which always give me the sense that they are
informed by meticulous searches in dictionaries, a product of that old
passion for archaisms and artifice which seized the baroque writers of
the seventeenth century. And yet, this same prose, when it tells the story
of Ti Noel and Henri Christophe in
The Kingdom of This World,
an
absolute masterpiece which I've read at least three times, has such a con–
tagious and overwhelming power that it cancels my reservations and
antipathies and instead dazzles me, making me believe wholeheartedly
everything it has to tell. How does the starched and buttoned-up style
of Alejo Carpentier accomplish such a thing? Thanks to its unflagging
coherence and its aura of indispensability. His style has a conviction that
makes readers feel that he tells the story the only way it could be told:
in
these
words, phrases, and rhythms.
It
is relatively easy to speak about the coherence of a style, harder to
explain what I mean by
essentiality,
a quality required in the language
if the novel is to be persuasive. Perhaps the best way to describe essen–
tiality is to explain its opposite, the style which fails to tell a story
because it keeps us at a distance and lucidly conscious; that is to say,
conscious of reading something alien, not experiencing the story along–
side its characters and sharing it with them. This failure is perceived
when the reader feels an abyss that the novelist does not successfully
bridge in writing his tale, an abyss between what is being told and the
language in which it is being told. This bifurcation, or split between the
language of a story and the story itself, annihilates the story's power of
persuasion. The reader doesn't believe what he is being told, because the
clumsiness and inconvenience of the style make him sense, between
word and deed, an unbreachable divide, a fissure that exposes all the
artifice and arbitrariness that fiction depends on, and which only suc–
cessful fictions manage to erase or hide.
These styles fail because we don't feel they are necessary; on the con–
trary, as we read we realize that the same stories, told in a different way
or in other words, would be better (which in literary terms simply
means more persuasive). We never feel any dichotomy of language and
content when we read Borges, Faulkner, or Isak Dinesen. The styles of
