Of flashes and lights: “Yesterday” by Juan Emar

The Italian poet Corrado Costa wrote: «and you barely have time / just after a flash / to remember the light». Costa materializes the moment before our eyes, the light happened, but it happened because of the flash, it was rapid, and – without running the risk of being banal – lightning fast. In that speed, however, everything happened, everything that could have happened will have happened, and – at the same time – everything that could have happened did not happen, or (happened) in passing: touching us, wounding us, crossing us like a memory outside place and time, like a glancing stab wound, a movement of imagination, a lateral thought, the transit of all our imagination.

These three verses have accompanied me for a long time, they also explain the synthesis of the poem very well, and they came to mind after reading the first pages of Yesterday by Juan Emar, published by Safarà and masterfully translated by Bruno Arpaia; The introduction written by Alejandro Zambra is also notable.

Yesterday morning, here in the city of San Agustín de Tango, I finally saw the spectacle I so longed to see: the guillotine of an individual.

Juan Emar is the pseudonym of the Chilean writer and art critic Álvaro Yañez Bianchi, born in Santiago de Chile and lived between 1893 and 1964. He published four books between 1935 and 1937 which aroused amazement and scandal among critics and literary circles . Emar amazed the community of his time, which was unable to see him, hear him, understand him, as we often have to say when great writers are rediscovered: he was too far ahead. Today he is rediscovered and appreciated, considered one of the greatest Chilean writers of the twentieth century. Bolaño joked, in his own way: «[…] the Chilean writer who most resembles the unknown soldier.”

Emar was visionary, brilliant, experimental, a healthy bearer of imagination and language, reading him is a real pleasure. One gets the impression that science, philosophy, thought and humor have converged on the pages. It’s always a question of looking, you just need to understand the writer to what extent he is capable of pushing it, you need to see if we readers are up to it. You have to let go and concentrate and both are two ways of letting go. And letting go has – in the literary field – finding oneself as a natural consequence.

Indeed, the invisible ones were there.

Let’s go back to the light and the flash of Corrado Costa and enter Yesterday. The narrator puts together a series of events that happened yesterday, he claims. Events in which he witnesses, participates and experiences together with his wife. Among these facts, a man is guillotined in the public square, for an absurd reason. Here we will say things like absurd, unusual or strange, so as not to linger in the description of the scenes so as not to deprive the reader of natural amazement. Later, at the zoo, you will notice an episode between an ostrich and a lioness. Husband and wife will then visit a painter, and there will be a whole discussion between green and red and their complementarity. Then a lunch and a dinner at the same restaurant. A strange visit to relatives. A herbal tea, a piss and a fly.

Finally, the return home. Everything takes place in the city of Sant Agustín de Tango, an invented place – like Juan Carlos Onetti’s Santa María – and as such a generator of absurd events that seem natural there; landscape capable of accommodating parallel worlds, third (Shakespirian or not) thoughts, profound reasoning about nothingness. Nothing capable of erecting dancing cathedrals in place of what we commonly consider the whole.

This is how things happen, gentlemen. Not just for poets and company.

The protagonist experiences these facts and then slips into a sort of other dimension that leads him to re-elaborate the day, the famous yesterday, looking for a key, a glimmer of light – the light of Corrado Costa – the elusive that gives meaning to everything. Light is rapid, oddities are the only way to endure and understand and draw reality and then we have to go back, several times to yesterday, opening wonderful, hypnotic reasoning, pervaded by the rhythm and glow of prose. For Emar everything is in relation to something else. Observing is never just one thing. Being in one place means being in at least ten others. Deciding or not is always equivalent to not deciding seriously. Not deciding is always a decision. Everything is governed by a balance, and balance does not exist except between two or more things.

Juan Emar is South American, he is considered a precursor of Cortázar and Rulfo, but if I had to think of who he reminds me of – in terms of rhythm, inventiveness, obsessive search for vocabulary and visual and syntactic repetition – I would say Thomas Bernhard.