Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Impurity, and the Trials of the Amateur
Juan LePuen
Copyright 2012 by Fario
Published at Smashwords by Fario
Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Impurity, and the Trials of the Amateur
Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Impurity, and the Trials of the Amateur
In The Periodic Table, the writer and chemist Primo Levi evokes his work with zinc in a university laboratory: “Zinco, zinc, Zinck: [. . .] it’s not an element that speaks to the imagination. It’s gray and its salts are colorless; it’s not toxic and it doesn’t have showy chromatic reactions. In short, it’s a boring metal” (34).[1] Ordinarily, Levi notes, acids make mincemeat of this soft and yielding metal. But when it is very pure, Levi adds, “it puts up a fierce resistance” (35); this virtue, writes Levi, makes it possible to draw two opposing conclusions: “praise for purity, which, like a hauberk, provides protection from harm; praise for impurity, which leads to changes—that is, to life” (35). It is little wonder that Levi is drawn to the latter conclusion: “For the wheel to turn,” he writes, “for life to live, there have to be impurities, and impurities of impurities [. . .]. There has to be dissent, difference, the grain of salt and the mustard seed” (35).
Like Primo Levi’s zinc, the life and work of the Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro (1929–1994) suggest conclusions about the respective virtues of purity and impurity; likewise, examining the ties, pure or impure, that bind Ribeyro to his work, work either literary or intended solely for financial gain, sheds light on the process by which Ribeyro, as a writer, attempts to tip the scales toward permanence and away from oblivion. In a diary entry dated 6 December 1975, Ribeyro notes: “as a writer, I’m at the toughest stage” (La tentación del fracaso [The temptation of failure] 473). It is from this point on, then, that what one might term the impurity of Ribeyro’s literary work—the difficulty of classifying it, its ductility—is the quality that keeps it alive nearly twenty years after Ribeyro’s death (and despite an almost complete failure to break through in English translation, a failure that speaks less to any quality inherent to Ribeyro’s work than to the provincialism, short-sightedness, and cowardice of many English-language publishers[2]).
It may seem beside the point, at first glance, to dwell on the trades that Ribeyro takes up in his lifetime, but it would be no less questionable to ignore them. After all, his relationship to these trades, as well as to the commercial activity his literary work entails, is characterized, like much of his literary work, by impurity. In addition, Ribeyro is the rare writer whose person is very hard to dissociate from his writing. For that reason, an examination of his attitude toward the jobs he takes to make a living is no less likely to shed light on his approach to his literary work than are analyses that rely on more conventional literary or theoretical points of departure.
As a man of letters, Ribeyro is an amateur; indeed, his skepticism of the possible professionalization of his writing is one of the determinants of the impurity of his work. It is not that he refuses money for his work. Far from it. In fact, his letters to his brother Juan Antonio, especially those from the nineteen-sixties, attest to the pains Ribeyro takes, usually in vain, to win a literary award or to get an expenses-paid trip to Lima. In a letter of 15 June 1965, for example, he writes: “It’s an unfinished book [Los geniecillos dominicales], which would have gone on being unpublished if not for the bait of the prize” (Cartas a Juan Antonio [Letters to Juan Antonio] 116).
With the exception of his letters to his brother and a handful of entries in La tentación del fracaso, his diary, Ribeyro’s work includes few explicit references to his efforts to ensure greater circulation of his literary work. They are efforts he delegates to what he calls his inner manager:
I make a very clear distinction between writing and publishing. Writing is a personal matter for me, a task I impose on myself because it pleases me or distracts me or helps me keep living. Publishing, on the other hand, is a different phenomenon, an arrangement I assign to a different part of myself, the administrator, good or bad, that we all have inside us. The author takes no part in the work of the administrator, who generally considers a literary work merchandise and sells it to anybody to balance the household budget. So I can say without contradicting myself that I write because I like to and I publish to earn money. Which doesn’t prevent me from admitting that I don’t like everything I’ve written and that after twenty years of publishing I have earned laughable sums that decorum keeps me from specifying. (476–77)
More prominent in Ribeyro’s work, perhaps above all in Dichos de Luder (Luder’s remarks), a brief collection of aphorisms, is the motif of thwarted ambition, as well as expressions of resentment (not for all of their wit any less resentful). Some of Luder’s remarks—Luder is a writer whose sayings, Ribeyro, in a brief introduction, purports to have collected and published—suggest resentment of a type of novel: “‘Have you read his latest novel?’ he is asked about a famous writer. ‘What musicality! What rhythm! What a wealth of voices! It’s a real oratorio!’ ‘Let him sing it,’ says Luder” (11). It is perhaps not entirely by chance that the novel, praise for the musicality of which Luder reacts to with his terse “let him sing it,” calls to mind many of the novels of the Latin American boom, from which Ribeyro cannot but consider himself excluded, as his work, like Luder’s, has little in common with an oratorio: “‘The difference between French and North American writers,’ says Luder, ‘is that the former merely cultivate a garden, whereas the latter rush out to clear a forest.’ ‘And you?’ ‘Ah, I just water a potted plant’” (30).
Dichos de Luder can also be read for the writer’s views of the reception of his work: “‘Doesn’t it worry you to write for thirty years and achieve such minor renown?’ Luder is asked. ‘Of course. I’d like to write thirty more years and become completely unknown’” (32). Elsewhere, Luder, clearly Ribeyro’s alter ego, goes after his readers and critics: “‘I’m like a third-division player,’ Luder complains. ‘I scored my best goals on dusty field in the slums, in front of four drunk fans who don’t remember anything’” (21). It is hardly the sole disparaging remark Luder has for the “four drunk fans,” as he calls his readers and critics: “His is shown an article in which all of the writers of his generation but him are mentioned. ‘I escaped the sweep,’ says Luder” (28).[3]
Of course, in Dichos de Luder, neither prose writers nor poets come in for any less criticism than do critics and ordinary readers, criticism that, yet again, calls to mind the profound skepticism and ambivalence with which Ribeyro views all literary work, including, above all, perhaps, his own. It is sometimes a downright suspect activity: “‘He has published a new book of poems,’ he is told of a prize-winning writer. ‘I know,’ says Luder. ‘He’s added yet another item to his record’” (42). In his diary, Ribeyro is less categorical, less cynical, but his skepticism is no less evident. On 17 July 1976, he writes: “These days that I have twice seen José Donoso I have felt a keen desire to go on writing, to struggle to finish or try to finish what I’ve started. Donoso’s company is especially stimulating because he is a writer who has faith in what he’s doing and in literature in general, a contagious passion” (496).
Unlike Donoso, then, Ribeyro appears not to have that faith in what he does, in literature; implicitly, it is clear that he is inclined toward the infidelity, as it were, that characterizes the more cynical, more embittered, remarks of Dichos de Luder.
The 1974 story “The Dust of Knowledge” is likewise suggestive of this infidelity. Here, the removal of a family library from one house to another saps the vitality of the narrator’s father; the narrator expresses sympathy for a tenant of a student lodging house (the fate of the mansion that once housed the library whose removal proved so harmful to the narrator’s father’s health), who asserts: “I’ve never seen a book in this house” (Cuentos completos [Complete stories] 420); finally, the narrator himself finds the old books in a storage room: now, full of germs, they are “excrement, death” (421). In this story, everything that has anything to do with books comes to a bad end. Blessed are those who, like the student and his fellow lodgers, have never seen any.
One may also recall Ribeyro’s occasional expressions of regret for the hours, the days—“the sound of life”—lost to writing. In short, like Isak Dinesen’s Charlie Despard, Ribeyro seems to ask himself if he has not deliberately squandered the treasures that belong to the Lord—moonlight, the sea, green grass, friendship, love, combats—for the words that describe them.
For all of his skepticism—“as a form of expression, the short story no longer says anything to me; it’s a dead genre” (473), writes Ribeyro in a diary entry from late 1976—Ribeyro never yields to the temptation of failure: his last stories (“El libro en blanco [The blank book],” “Nuit caprense cirius illuminata,” “Surf”) date to the months preceding his death. In fact, Ribeyro’s work is itself the arena, so to speak, for the struggle between the temptation of silence and temptation of prodigality. Subject to this tension, the work is created, in spite of its author’s skepticism, in the space between these two temptations. But it is precisely this skepticism, as well as the tension between two opposing poles that accompanies it, that lends Ribeyro’s work its relief and its intensity: paradoxically, his resistance to the temptation of silence—which is not without perceptible effects on his work—makes of him a richer, more suggestive writer than many of his more voluble contemporaries. The phenomenon is not new: pure volubility is exasperating. Ribeyro himself is aware of it: