This chapter is interested in the individual act of writing and the way in which my colleagues in Havana describe the act of translation from idea to written word. I am interested in dissecting their use of concepts that have been of interest lately in anthropology, primarily that of the questionable distinction between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ through the act of invention.
I am interested in what starts a writer writing or what keeps a writer from writing. As we have seen, in some cases, an idea can be so powerful that it chases a writer, forcing them to write or to be plagued and stalked in dreams and waking thoughts. Words are portrayed by the writers as both the enemy of writing, and, of course, as the necessary tool or vessel to carry their ideas outward toward the goal of authorship. When the writers I spoke with faced la pagina blanca, they were not struggling with ideas, but rather with the words, the ‘savages’, needed to articulate those ideas and communicate with their reader. I believe both the driving force and the struggle with words can be found in the relationship between the writer and the idea of the reader or Eco’s ’model reader’. Whilst they were presenting their work to an audience in the room, the finished work, after the editing, was not only written for the people in the room, but an unknown reader. There is then an importance of writing not only as a way of telling a story but a way of
communicating a reality.
The act of writing seems to be tied to a constant renegotiation of world making. We tend to draw a line between fiction and ‘reality’, but as writers write, they are bound by certain shared (with readers or with fellow writers) conceptions of different realities. The writer is alive in a text, as Raúl says, as are notions of the reader. Ideas, oftentimes coming from the ‘real’ world, are taken, changed and born in text. Writing seems to challenge definitions of what is ‘life’ and what is ‘art’, and writers transgress any notions of boundaries between those binaries.
Chapter 4
‘He didn’t exist before I wrote about him’: The relationship between
character and author
The monthly peña literaria (literary circle) of Grupo Ariete had just finished at the Union de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos (UNEAC). It was a very muggy day, in early springtime, and the low, grey clouds dimmed the sunlight creating a late-afternoon, yellow brightness of a particularly eerie quality. The group left the meeting with a levity induced by post-performance adrenaline and helped along by a large rum bottle that had spiked most of our tea during the readings. The group did not want to end celebrations at UNEAC and we made our way in a large, disjointed line of pairs and groups to the park with the dilapidated pagoda around the corner. The musicians and dancers who were featured in this reading came with us and everyone threw their bags down and placed the rum bottles and litres of tuCola, Cuba’s version of CocaCola, around the centre of the now ruined structure, gathering in circles, laughing and conversing loudly as if the park was theirs alone.
There was one group gathered on the edge of the raised pagoda, some dangling their legs, while others stood in front of them and another group sprawled on the stairs. I was pulled into a particular group of poets standing next to the pagoda. The people I was speaking with were not the group members I was most familiar with and they wanted to know about my research. We spoke at some length before our conversation was interrupted by a loud disagreement between two Ariete members in another circle of participants. While the details of the disagreement were not
immediately clear, one of the participants walked away from the disagreement and joined our discussion. It was getting late and I felt I should get home. I said my goodbyes and left the remaining Ariete members who were merrily enjoying the rum and decided to walk straight to Linea, one of the major crossroads of Vedado, to snake my way home.
A few days later, I met with Lena to hear about what I had missed when I left and to speak about the latest books she was writing: two novels, one of an experimental form, and the other a suspense, an experimental genre for her. The first, she explained, was a story in which she was hoping to play with traditional narrative structure by producing three simultaneous storylines around the same character. The novel was about a woman named Mariana, a teenager from the countryside, who was faced with an important life decision: whether or not to join the armed forces. The plot diverges at this point. The following chapters explored three different scenarios about her future dependent on that choice. The character is named Mariana but Lena gives her nicknames in two of the plots, Ana and María, in order to keep the divergent stories clear. In the first story, the character, going by the name Ana, accepts the place at the military school and succeeds within the system. In the second story, Mariana accepts the place, but experiences a tragic accident while enrolled in the school and in the third story, the character, now María, declines the position entirely.
This character, she told me, was very much based on a similar position she was put in as a teenager when she was offered a place at a military boarding school in the country. She
remembered the process of visiting the school, of seeing the bunkroom, something she described in detail, before agonizing over what decision she should make. She tells me that she was about to accept the place, but her mother frantically talked her out of it. A few weeks after deciding not to attend, she heard that one of the bunks collapsed, killing a new student while sleeping. While her decision is not something that preoccupies her, she does feel like it was a pivotal moment in her life when everything from that point forward could have been different. While she is clear that the character is not her, she also explains that she is using the character to think through her choice. The motivation to create this character stemmed from her time spent thinking about how her life would have been different if she made a different choice in that situation. ‘These experiences pass through my filter,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I decide to just change things, but the emotional moments are the one I just let be’.27
The other book she was writing was a book about a serial killer. She never told me his name. She noted that she has a very different relationship to this story and to this character. While the first novel she mentioned seemed to act as a sort of catharsis, a way of imagining the different outcomes of a similar decision she made in her life, this novel and the protagonist are very different to her experiences. Instead of relating to the character, she speaks of this character as ‘haunting’ her, which she feels when she is writing him and writing his story. She tells me that the character she has created has become so unsettling to her that she gets nervous when she is alone at home. In fact, she has claimed that writing this character has even affected the way she sees certain
scenarios playing out in her life and among her friends who she knows well.
‘Remember after the peña on Tuesday, we all went to the park?’ She asked rhetorically. ‘I had had a bit too much to drink by the end of our time in the park, after you left…’ She continues to tell me that at the end of the event, people were getting restless and two men began disagreeing, which I remembered. The group decided to move to a different location. They split up to find some food with the idea to reconvene elsewhere later. Lena parted ways with the two men but agreed to see them both soon. Upon meeting at the next location, one of the men involved in the heated conversation did not show up. According to the other participant in the conversation, who was the last person Lena had seen with him, he had decided to go home instead. Laughing, Lena told me that in her mind, she found his disappearance very suspicious. She told me that, starting to panic, she quickly whispered to her partner, pressing him to find out what happened, insisting that she could not help but think that something bad had happened to the friend who was not there. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that something sinister had happened between the two of them when the group disbanded. She continued to recall her paranoia animatedly, with long pauses, wide eyes and a smile stressing her conviction at the time as both real and absurd. She acknowledged that the alcohol had affected her, but she blamed her odd assumptions on the new character she was currently writing. She knew both those men well and had been friends with them for over a year. Yet, as she told me, she felt inspired to see the world differently, specifically to see the world with an awareness of his murderous influence. Having read books in the genre of horror and suspense, I can relate to the idea that characters can preoccupy the mind of the reader, challenging a sense of safety. Yet what struck me about Lena’s experience is
that the character she is reacting to was of her own creation. While this killer was written from her imagination, writing this character had made her aware of a world that he could occupy.
The writers I worked with understood what it meant to be a writer in socio-historical terms, as discussed in Chapters One and Two. Yet to be a writer is also an action or a practice. In this chapter and the last, I show how the writers I worked with participated in the praxis of writing. The last chapter considered the idea of invention and world-making as a way of reconceiving an idea as a story, concentrating on the ideas that make up the ‘basic story stuff’ (Eco 1979: 27) and not the plot. In this chapter, I am interested in what that idea becomes once it is written; I am
interested in the relationship between a writer and their text. In order to highlight the complexity of this relationship, I look specifically at the idea of the character (personaje) and how the writers I knew created and related to this aspect of their invention. As I hope to highlight throughout this thesis, being a writer in Havana is comprised of different sets of relationships. Some of those relationships challenge the conception of writer for the people I worked with, while others, like the relationship between writer and character, make real and give power to the idea of writer as they create something that is both of them and independent of them simultaneously.