Infinite variations of a work

When a writer's literary work goes into this endless loop of memory and the interpretation that feed the bunkers where they keep the manuscripts and unpublished tapuscritos, notebooks, drafts and forgotten texts, it is assumed that the author emphatically already is in the center of the canon. With the "new books" of a past closed by the posthumous, publishers eager to satiate the pleasure of the text of the orphans and the alluvial readers exegesis of scholars. Unexpectedly, the writer continues to write for us, confirming the spectral character of the literature: there is no "death of the author," perhaps because everything is already a dead author, all writing is probate and how I wanted Chateaubriand, can only be written "memoirs from beyond the grave." Even in the unfinished and makeshift as always about literature and with it there is a core of meaning that is expanding: the unpublished writings of some particular way dialogue with the figure of the writer put into play and readers who make up his audience, implicit addressee.

One of the ways that opens up the literature retrieved texts is what kind of relationship they establish in a new plot, with the known texts, and also what kind of writer is there, who was that guy in the suspension, timeless and while dated, the act of writing literature. If the author of these texts recovered file is Juan Jose Saer (1937-2005), like these working papers , the first volume of the collection of unpublished drafts , its discovery is fascinating. Saer, as observed in July Premat Heroes Without Qualities (2009), was "along with Borges, an Argentine authors with more insight and dramatic intensity set in the center of its literature the question of how to be, or be re- , or remain, a writer "and had, since its inception, a true fictional project. Premat, one of the sharpest specialists in the work of Saer, author of The Joy of Saturn (2002) and the critical edition of gloss and the stepson published in the Archives collection (2010) - found in the wardrobe department and library Saer in Paris sixty books, twenty folders and flyers with "manuscripts of much of the literature, an important series of poems and essays" and a set of writings that includes "ideas, aphorisms, truncated texts, some reports completed , early drafts, reading comments, witticisms, diagrams, etc., etc. ". For five years, a team of researchers led by him, and with the help of another, based in Argentina in the field of CONICET (project files Saer, directed by Miguel Dalmaroni) - compiled, studied, classified and structured for fluid reading that huge and spread "textual heterogeneous mass" whose publication begins with this book.

The critical work of Premat and his team is remarkable, a critical acumen and an extraordinary intellectual honesty, because, despite his statement that there is work to be published posthumously except that which came to organizing the author, as the Large (2005) or testing of Work (2006) - in fact produce "new" books that expand and modify Saer perception of his work known and profile writer. It is a truly compositional task, that belies the very poetry of Saer, but even the states from the very subtitle of Drafts . The term, Premat writes, "is no stranger to the semantic and logical system" of his work. In the story titles like "Half delete" or the novel The indelible in the temporary nature of the literature, the rejection of definitive books, Saer think, as genetic criticism, "literature from the variations , the unfinished, the incomplete. Drafts of all work, no manuscripts of published books. " Working Paper contains a prologue establishing the typology and chronology of the texts and a comprehensive set of notes that rebuilt its entirety and detailed links with all the known work. Premat divided the writings of this volume into four parts: the "Book 0" (youth unpublished texts prior to 1960), the "Argentine Papers" (seven notebooks and loose texts, pre-trip and establishment of Saer in France); the "Book Core I" (almost autonomous and valuable book of general ideas about literature, reviews, quotes and short essays written between 1963 and 1978) and, finally, documents and variants of the novel The occasion .

The mere reading of the eighty-three pages of tightly font that reproduces the "Notebook Core 1", Saer referred to as an old notebook in which he notes on fiction, essays, some quotes taken up in a novel, and justifies the volume. This is a fully Saer, which reflects on the art of fiction or outlines arguments, which defines, for example, that "the national is childhood" in a way akin to anarchism, as no state can adjudicárselo since that represents the "single practice crucial" for the acquisition of language and experience the world on the horizon, because memory updates the native and the narrative flashes that matter. Or speculate on the historic landscape and the way in which time changes the nature embodied in the story. But there are also re-readings of surrealism, Borges, Lugones, Faulkner, James, of Pavese, the artist as a critic. Also, the usual Saer strong opinions, their preferences known and some of the belligerents, as Marechal or disdain for the brutal, sarcastically reasoned that begins: "David Vines is like a boneless chicken. Have fiber, but fiber of the breast , if you boil it loses cohesion. "

The rest of the notebooks provides multiple epiphanies where the reader can perceive various traits. One is the proliferation of early or expansion of the stories. For example, the early attempts of the actual lemon (1974) or of the time (1986), or that make this expansion both the phenomenological sense of place or area in the literature of Saer as the characters turn to the mode a genealogy narrative: stories in which these scenes are completed, as narrated in "less", which reveals what happened after the assassination of Rivarola in the story "Fire to Rivarola," included in the area (1960). Or another version entitled "Half delete" or the stories that surround tales place Unit (1967), or the reappearance of characters from Tomatis, Barco, Leto, Natal. Another feature is the confirmation of the radical importance of poetry for Saer, not only as a reader but as a poet, with the inclusion of several poems published in The art of storytelling (1977 and 2000) or very early draft of a "novel poetic. "

Notably the project self lucid writer and writing. In The concept of fiction (1997) Saer wrote that "the writer is not nobody" and that, for the rest of mankind that no content is filled with social images "to the writer the whole thing is to preserve "them. These books recorded the poignant statement that "will not let anyone enter my notebooks, as they did with Kafka and Pavese. I do not die. I will choose the time what the word is just and necessary that I say" and also struggles against the dispersion and loss of time, the fierce relentless work spreads in each of the notes, of beginnings, of evidence of statements. Nothing contradicts it. This volume argues that literature is a pure act Saer, a continuous realization and, at the same time, an exercise open, unfinished. Like all great writers, these notebooks also Saer we still provides, inventing as readers. .

Source in Spanish.