I write the following brief lines having been witness to a process by which literary theory achieves growth, evolution and function. The initial gesture that attracted my attention was an invitation from a group of Latin Americans resident in Toronto and linked to the Casa Salvador Allende to help them to organize an international short story contest in honour of their late Chilean compatriot, Professor Juan Carlos García Vera. Noting the insistence with which they made the request and having a high regard for Juan Carlos who had passed away in the previous year, I added this task to the many in which I was involved.
My most important early duty was to announce the contest, mainly in Spanish-speaking countries, giving my description of it the seriousness that would attract the high level of talent and dedication to be expected of contestants in this special event. The evocative quality of names such as Salvador Allende, Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso imbued the launch of the project, including the formation of the small but certain-to-be hardworking jury, with a revolutionary spirit. Everyone involved was well prepared to stimulate the effort to uphold and improve the possibilities for this versatile genre to prosper, this genre of intensity and brevity – so beloved in Latin America and the Caribbean – that nevertheless may very comfortably accommodate any appropriate proportion of the epic, the dramatic and the lyric.
The response to our call to writers to participate in the contest was astonishingly positive. From some thirty-six countries we received slightly more than a thousand short stories. This no doubt would have pleased Juan Carlos, a principled counsellor of peace, harmony and productivity and by whom the concept and practice of rancour was intensely disliked. In the face of this unexpected avalanche of kind creations the small but resolute jury made no appeals but continued in the revolutionary spirit.
Coinciding with the date scheduled for the prize-giving, a date now made unuseable by the need to resist COVID-19, a few friends and associates in Toronto of Juan Carlos and of Naín Nómez received email copies of Naín’s poem “Baldío” [Waste Land] shortly after its composition, May 12, 2020. The poem was clearly not intended for the Short Story Contest. Its arrival was seen rather as the happy coincidental appearance of a symbol of the strong bonds of friendship between Juan Carlos and Naín and of the exceptionally high quality of their literary production. I was thrilled to know such an amazing poem, and I shared it with several friends in different parts of the world who were equally moved by it. I saw it as helping to sustain the high spirits of those who had been working so hard on the Contest.
The poem’s title and its epigraph link it closely to T.S. Eliot, and through him to Dante; but Eliot is established immediately as the primary companion, challenge or target. When later in the text Naín speaks of being on the threshold of the outside and the inside, he is alluding to the role of paratextual markers and specifically to the definition that Gérard Genette gives of the epigraph in its relationship to the text. So the outer comparisons with which the poem begins soon give way to a viewing of the inner world of this “Waste Land,” a land whose diminishing population is being ravished by the virus. Naín goes on to display knowledge from a wide range of fields of contemporary civilization in the rest of the poem as he reveals a deep concern for the survival of this world, wanting to see it freed from its glaring inequities. He even wonders about a next pandemic that would mean the total collapse of the environment. But Naín, the poet of “Waste Land,” does not give up. He is alert to a battle that is being waged but with undermining handicaps which are subsumable under the great flaw of social inequality; and he is insisting that this flaw should be corrected and is hopeful that it will be.
Eliot, on the other hand is almost youthfully gleeful, when in his poem “The Hollow Men” three years after “The Waste Land” (1922), he enlivens his poetic discourse with unusual rhythm as his characters celebrate the world ending “not with a bang but a whimper.” The Spanish Civil War would break out in 1936, with a Fascist uprising, both Spanish (led by Francisco Franco) and German, against the Republican government. It escalated rapidly, with the military advantage going to the Franco forces, to such an extent that the killing started to reach people of Eliot’s own vocation, well-known poets such as Federico García Lorca, and sent others, repulsed by the widespread slaughter, fleeing for their lives: poets, such as Rafael Alberti and Antonio Machado, foreign poets, journalists and other artists, such as Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, among them. In spite of this Eliot continued to counsel neutrality.
Whereas the relationship between the author of “Waste Land” and Eliot reveals differences that imply or even compel the assumption of different stances in the course of the poem – companion, challenge, target – , Naín builds a steady partnership with his fellow Latin American, the Honduran, Augusto Monterroso. On the face of it, the achievement of such a frictionless cross-generic relationship may seem paradoxical; but in fact literary theorists should find the achievement to be purely instructive because Naín has made not just the short story, but the shortest short story, function dynamically by creating the brilliant work that is “Waste Land.” On writing his poem, Naín Nómez, a Chilean with gentle posture and great dreams for humanity, succeeds in achieving something new; he demonstrates a further, previously unheralded, capacity of the short story genre, one based on its surprising quality of being mobile within a text while it maintains its structural integrity and its intensity: its quality of being short, durable and intense. The intensity is often enhanced due in great part to usages that derive, paradoxically, from the unwillingness of the author to indulge in sensationalism, to exploit, stressing them, the generally known circumstantial or background effects of the long days and nights, months and years, of terror that had been unleashed on the Chilean people by the U.S.-backed Pinochet regime.
Chilean writers of this period have been finding ways of presenting indirectly or reluctantly their harrowing and persistent experiences. For example, Juan Carlos produces this description of the brutal effects on a close friend of his who had been detained by the Fascist Pinochet forces. Juan Carlos says a great deal with just a few words, economy being essential for the art of the short story. The descriptive sentence is:
Era, sin duda, él.
[It was, without doubt, him.]
That is to say, the friend was so disfigured by the beatings carried out by the police that even his close friends had to examine him carefuly before they could reach the conclusion, not without an ironic sense of relief, that he was really the intimate friend that they had known. These techniques of the art of the short story were so frequent in the work of Juan Carlos that they came to reflect his personality, his propensity to understate ironically, especially with regard to acts of cruelty. It is in this sense that Naín has the genial alleviative recourse to Monterroso’s story, giving it an ancient mission of parable and, in a more contemporary and still enduring sense, the role of metaphor. In his poetry Naín indicates in a different way a reticence to report suffering, a way that eludes or mitigates its full weight. He does this impressively by employing catachresis in his use of the adjective “exiled,” as if to express painful empathy and at the same time not fully reveal his own painful experience and that of his compatriots who are forced to spend a long time away from their native Chile. Thus he speaks of the indigenous “exiled from everywhere.”
Cuando