The Absolute, page 42
The Absolute pays homage to specific writers, works and traditions, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (Alexander Scriabin / Adrian Leverkühn), the Argentine movie El Fausto criollo (1979), Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (especially the Grand Inquisitor section), Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Lamborghini’s condensed writings, and Nabokov’s various tongue-tapping works, from Speak, Memory to—perhaps especially—Ada, or Ardor. From the latter there are not only moments quoted (such as the line “to leave is to die a little, to die is to leave a little too much,” in turn borrowed from Edmond Haraucourt), but also similar imaginaries like Anti-Earth, symbols and erotic episodes, as well as the broader theme of how a family might attempt to alter the Universe.
But, of course, this is a book chock-full of references, and looking for “influences,” versions or thefts in Guebel’s extended wink only gets you so far. What matters is how he transforms or transmogrifies them into his particular and moving style. Often lyrical, he is also fond of resources that poetically condense material, such as lists, anecdotes and jokes, as well as jack-in-the-box surprises and other forms of humor. Both the possible failures and the possible powers of literature are gloriously affirmed. As a writer, Guebel has been associated with the “Generación Babel,” which published the ’90s magazine Babel; while avoiding shock value for its own sake, the writers in this loose group did subscribe to the belief that no topic or style is off limits in writing if taken on with audacity, in the search for meaning.
Literature is ultimately a wager. The Absolute is composed by a mother writing a history of her family’s geniuses. By imagining their various attempts at mastery and entering into details, she discovers the specific luminosity of each life; she makes them geniuses. Yet this activity eats away at her own life. Are these biographies worth her soul? What is the value of her productions within art and eternity? Literature is a time machine, but it is also the great consumer of time.
Keyboard with Lights (Music)
While translating I listened constantly to the piano music of Alexander Scriabin, a character but also the theoretical impetus behind Guebel’s novel. Scriabin, a Russian composer and “tone poet,” was linked to theosophical ideas and practiced an exhilarating synesthesia on the basis of mathematical chord progressions. In his works for pianoforte—from the études to the sonatas to the preludes to the symphonies—notes clatter, crash and thunder in dissonant sonorities, not a continuous flow but a discrete overlap of sounds. Yet somehow this remains satisfying to the ear.
A couple of years ago, Scriabin’s notebooks were published by Oxford University Press, ecstatic declarations in Russian cursive that radiate freedom and bliss, torment and ecstasy. They do not touch earth, but remain high above in a mystic flight of the spirit, far from graspable material objects and tangible desires. There are no small moments of affection and humor; the senses are everything, but the body is missing. Only extremes reign, and a whole range of colors is absent from the palette. They are fascinating, yet I can live in his words for only a short time.
But his music—his music! His music is everything. It exalts, it melts ice blocks within you. What fatigues in literature intrigues in music. Scriabin aimed to play upon all the senses through his art, working with lights and sounds and colors to raise listeners to a higher plane of existence. To watch Glenn Gould play Scriabin’s chords, raising a hand up and then letting it drift slowly down, is, indeed, ecstasy . . .
The special piano—the tastiera per luce—that Scriabin invented does truly exist, as does the mystic chord, even if he died before they were put into action. Scriabin’s great project, to bring together humanity in a community through music and change the course of the planets and history, is perhaps the greatest failed project of the twentieth century, the awesome “what might have been.” Or perhaps its failure is an acknowledgment that we cannot realize the absolute in mediated fashion, and will forever stop just short of knowing.
Music, as many have argued, is the purest art; it does not allow for representation, for concept, for the intervention of language or image. Scriabin’s music does not seem abstract like this, however. It is more like literature, accessing fundamental ideas through superficial symbols, and through surfaces, colors, textures. Idea and substance. At its best, Guebel’s writing extends the project of Scriabin’s music, embodying a similar sensorial exaltation, lyrical yet avant-garde. It is art because of the intention and beauty of its process, but also as a created object—the work.
Time Machine (Science)
Guebel riffs on the “divine science” of theosophy, as well as on Pythagoreanism, doctors’ jargon, popular science, alternative medicine and astronomy. These are treated as sources of wonder, even as they are affectionately mocked. Science comprises not just theories derived from experimental data, but also theories that cannot be confirmed—fictional constructions, hypotheses, alternative proposed versions that burst open and expand current visions of the known to form new Wissenschafts, anti-systems, other ways to understand or organize the world. Science includes its own paradigmatic critique, and need not be reduced to a system. It does not progress in an obvious way, but continues to discover the essential in kaleidoscopic forms—just as in the last scene, we zoom both toward and away from the Big Bang, as ending becomes origin and the labyrinths, tunnels and wormholes that seemed so disparate connect via looping repetitions, constantly renewed.
Wormhole (Translation)
Is it possible to create a parallel work of art in another language, a wormhole from Spanish to English? The original novel is trying to act, do something, affect bodies and minds. Characters in the book dream of other lands, other forms of communication. The Absolute makes categories like the “national” or “global” novel seem miserly and all too human. Again, the reader comes back to the question of what literature can do. Often, while fiddling with this or that phrase, I thought of the entire translation as a mirror of Guebel’s. A parallel system of relations. Not a ghostly double but solid and material, neither more nor less true. Mirrors hold both horror and fascination, as “fulfillers of an ancient pact / to multiply the world,” as Borges put it. The espejo fiel, or faithful mirror, with its many significances of translation between worlds and texts, is at the heart of the Sephardic Jewish tradition. But faithfulness is an abstraction that can encompass nearly everything . . . Such were my thoughts as I engaged in the foolhardy task of “correcting the Absolute,” at least this translation.
For this is the kind of mirror that doesn’t just reflect and multiply, but lets one fall through to the other side. The word transido repeats throughout the book, and on one page we find the expression transido de escritura, racked by writing. Taking the meaning of rack as torture device, to be “racked” is to be “pierced through,” in agony or ecstasy. The path from writer to page to reader is a wormhole, especially with a mystical and marvelous writing that forges systems of correspondences with a passion for detail. The writer is racked, the reader is racked. But what kind of a wormhole is translation? Is there an absolute of language? How can one set of symbols be racked by or pierce through to another? Is a translation a second wormhole that bifurcates from the first, the creation of a parallel universe?
Two or More Absolutes
Throughout his book, Guebel plays with ways of thinking about the self and the whole found in both nineteenth-century European Romanticism, and in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. He also plays with Eastern settings in other novels; his latest is set in the world of Japanese samurai.
While differences between East and West are exaggerated and do not exist in any real sense anymore, if they ever did, perhaps the historically constructed dichotomies they represent still hold. This book flirts with two visions of the absolute, loosely mapping onto supposed Western and Eastern traditions. The Western Absolute is time, events as unfolding process, with changes and developments in the material tending toward an end (possibly utopia); it favors scientists and revolutionaries, and is ultimately self-creation. The Eastern Absolute is the negation of time, events as illusory succession, with changes and developments in the material unveiling themselves as non-reality that reverts to impersonal silence; it favors mystics and contemplatives, and is ultimately self-abnegation. To reconcile these two visions of the absolute seems impossible. Perhaps any attempt at unity is destined to fail. Or perhaps, just as there are false divisions between geographies, there is also a false division between what is now and what could be.
The Absolute is about building things that are imperfect and transitory—whether these be sculptures, musical works, political structures, poems, relationships or families—but whose effects continue to resound in the universe. Both creation and abnegation form a part of what’s made in practice, and theoretical contradictions cease to be so in the lived paradox of human experience.
Sometimes, when listening to a piece of extraordinary music—or reading an extraordinary novel—I feel myself poised on the brink of something between the physical and the mental, between reality and its negation. On the endlessly delicate, quivering line between This and That, an inviting abyss. Such a singularity, I tell myself, must be Art.
Jessica Sequeira
DANIEL GUEBEL has published over twenty-five books, including novels, short stories and plays. He won Argentina’s National Literature Prize as well as the Argentine Academy of Letters’ novel prize. The Absolute was chosen by La Nación newspaper as its book of the year and The Emperor’s Pearl won the Emecé Prize. His autobiographical book The Jewish Son also won the Buenos Aires Book Fair’s award for literary criticism. Guebel’s latest novel is A Japanese Crime. A lover of Japanese literature, he owns a sushi restaurant.
JESSICA SEQUEIRA is a writer and literary translator. She is the author of the novel A Furious Oyster, the story collection Rhombus and Oval, the essay collection Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age and the hybrid work A Luminous History of the Palm. She has translated over twenty books by Latin American authors, and in 2019 was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke.
Daniel Guebel, The Absolute
