 |
Author Interview |
|
Sylvia Iparraguirre
TIERRA DEL FUEGO by Matthew N. Proser
All quotations are from an interview with Sylvia Iparraguirre in Buenos Aires on February 13, 2001
Thus begins Sylvia Iparraguirre's remarkable new novel in its English translation by Hardie St. Martin, a version which the author herself characterizes as "a splendid translation, very good work."* The setting is Argentina and London in the mid-nineteenth century, and this very first paragraph exhibits some of the book's signal characteristics: suspense, precise observation and detail, the evocation of an older writing style without a sense of imitation and constraint, and the ability to plunge directly and economically into the state of mind of a key character. The year is 1865. The speaker -- or writer in this case, since these words are in fact being written in a journal -- is a 53 year old "blond" gaucho and retired sailor, John William Guevara, the son of an English sailor, William Scott Mallory, and a native Argentine woman, Lucía de Guevara, whom Mallory never married, and the dot on the horizon will materialize into a rider bringing a life-defining letter from a functionary of the British Admiralty in London. "Mr. MacDowell or MacDowness" (since the paper is folded exactly where the signature has been written) requests that Guevara recount the details of a journey he made years ago on a British ship-of-sail along with the novel's focal figure, "Jemmy Button," all the way to the Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, "the continent's southernmost islands, where oceans furiously converge." What was the nature of this voyage and what is the significance of its
events? In attempting to respond to the request, but then transforming
the task into a journal clearly no longer meant for the eyes of MacDowell
or MacDowness, "Jack" Guevara takes on the burden of opening out his life
and experience, both past and present, on paper: a progress of words and
events, and responses to events, that stretches from the pampas of Buenos
Aires Province in the new world and the colonial cities of Buenos Aires
and Montevideo to the Tierra del Fuego -- home of the Yámana Indians
and Omoy Lume, or "Jemmy Button" -- thence to the European capital, London,
and again to Tierra del Fuego, and finally to Port Stanley in the Falkland
(Malvinas) Islands for a final judgment. But this entire excursion is locked
in the defining consciousness of Jack Guevara, who reads his own past as
he writes it and measures his own destiny while he measures that of the
world. What we have in this account is one of those rare pieces of fiction
not only based on fact, but one which also shows insightfully and clearly
the exact relation of its characters to the larger political and economic
movements of the day. Like the great English 19th century novels of Thackeray,
Eliot, Dickens, and Conrad, but equally in the tradition of the adventure
novels of C. S. Forester, Nordhoff and Hall, and Robert Louis Stevenson,
Iparraguirre concerns herself with an age of materialism, of conquest,
colonialism, and imperialism. But her insights are inflected with a modern
self-consciousness. Behind her also stands Borges, of whom she was a student,
with his ambivalence and internalized reading of reality. In him we have
another Argentine produced by English and Argentine parents, the blind
"Georgie" who with his Tiresian self-conscious consciousness in his own
way described strange, remote worlds that inflamed the imagination:
But here the man standing near the strait, above the dragon's tail, farther south than the flatlands and peaks of Magellan, beyond the ghostly blue mountains where men coming from the east dreamed of the enchanted valley of the immortals, the Golden City of the Caesars, ... would look stubbornly southward, in a straight line, to Cape Horn.
Guevara asks in his journal: "Have you ever been face to face with what the books call a savage, a naked man with ribs exposed, covered with grease, his genitals swollen with disease, his face painted with streaks, and tangled, coarse hair?" This is what the youthful Jack sees when he looks at Jemmy Button for the first time. Jack has managed to snare the job of cabin boy on the Beagle with the English he has learned from his father. On ship the two boys become friends, and Jack's growing relationship with Button on shipboard, then in London, and then upon their return to the Tierra del Fuego, and even afterwards, intertwines his humanity with that of Button. The two youths circle each other, touch each other, their stories converging, paralleling each other, so that now in the present as he writes at the age of 53, Jack can in his own record correct his first youthful impression: "This is how I met Button, but it was through him that, behind such an appearance, I discovered the man I believed did not exist. And behind the man, a people with beliefs and spirit, with respect for life in all its forms, whom I had not known before and would not know again." The personal story of Jack and Jemmy is one of bonding and separation and reunion. They share experiences in learning the ways of Victorian London and the ways of the sea and its challenges on board the Beagle both during its return to England and again on its return to Patagonia and the Tierra del Fuego -- this time with the as yet unknown Charles Darwin on board. But their story emerges, it might be said, out of a larger story, a defining context captured in Fitz Roy's new mission as described by the British Admiralty: "to map the coasts of Brazil and Patagonia and study their flora and fauna. All expenses paid." As Guevara so eloquently puts it, the Admiralty's sudden granting of moneys it had in fact only recently denied "was not the product only of a love of science or altruism but of the strategic value of the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn...." The larger contextual story of England's colonial/imperialistic intentions encompasses and blends with that of Fitz Roy's private plan to return his hostages to their homeland in order to confirm the power of the "civilizing" forces that had taught them English, dressed them in proper Victorian clothing, reduced them to a popular, sought-after diversion, and even led to their introduction to the Queen! At the very same time, on board the Beagle, the new, "modern" figure of the youthful Darwin, energetic, sharp-tongued, and furiously intelligent, challenges the backward notions of the blind if well-intentioned Captain Fitz Roy, whose misbegotten aristocratic and old-world notions garner him a self-inflicted slit throat in the end. Iparraguirre has pointed out elsewhere that the relations between Great Britain and South America have always been conflictive, especially concerning Patagonia. Britain has long had geopolitical interest in the region and this is borne out even today by its retention of the Falklands (Malvinas) and the brief war over them as recently as 1982. It is not generally known in North America that the English attempted to take Buenos Aires in 1806 and then again in 1807. This was when Argentina was still a colony of Spain and when the Spanish and English were still struggling with each other's imperialistic designs (a struggle which goes all the way back to Renaissance times and the days of the Spanish Armada). The remote and inhospitable Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn seem unlikely prospects for colonization and imperialistic domination in the 19th Century until one remembers that then there was no Panama Canal until the beginning of the 20th and that the only route by sea from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean was around Cape Horn and through the Strait of Magellan. The country which controlled this route dominated the seas in the area and thus could control all trade through it. Fitz Roy's mission on the Beagle links his own ambitions inevitably to the grander notions of the well-mannered, somber men in the Admiralty, "some in uniform and others in civilian clothes," who advance "like a procession" along its "marble floors and balustrades." The fiction, Tierra del Fuego, is rooted in historical fact and is nourished by its author's consciousness of historical conditions. Equally, though conceived of as a fiction, many of its main characters are based on real people: Button, Fitz Roy, Lord Castlereagh, Darwin, the three additional Indians taken hostage, and various others. But as the author tells us: "I am not a historian. I am a writer. The novel appears to me when the fictional character appears ... And in this case this was John William Guevara. From the moment I imagined John William Guevara I had a novel. For in reality this novel is like the fictitious memories of Guevara, but these fictitious memories enter a real story, the story of Jemmy Button, his companion in the adventures of his youth. The whole story of Guevara is invented, the story of his father invented, and that of his mother too. But the real characters bring their roles in already fixed." What are the implications of this statement? Iparraguirre seems to link her creative process to reality while insisting that the creative element is lodged in her imagination, which she pours into the consciousness of Jack Guevara as he works at his journal over a period of months, interrupting his progress from time to time with comments and descriptions concerning his daily life and the woman with whom he lives, Graciana. Reality and imagination are linked by a process of words -- Iparraguirre's words, which are Jack's. It is these words, derived in part from the facts in historical documents, that make the experience real, that "bring it to life." The whole process of writing for Jack is a process of remembering and "this permits me the play of his subjectivity ... and that frees me from a historical preciousness. It is he who is remembering." One of the things that is important for Iparraguirre about this memory-prodding act of writing is that it humanizes the writer, Jack. "He becomes conscious of how Button was through this writing ... this is how writing puts in the present all that has taken place in the past. And this obliges one to reflect." Through the act of writing, Jemmy becomes real -- more human -- in the fullest sense. And for Iparraguirre this reflection stimulated by the act of writing is reproduced in the act of reading. It too is humanizing. At the conclusion of the book Jack determines to teach the unlettered Graciana how to read -- even if she is his only reader. "Through the act of writing he begins to know her, he begins to identify her, he begins to care for her. ... So when he puts the candle on the table and begins to teach her to write, this is a positive gesture." Now she, like us, will re-experience what he wrote. And this reading, one might add, is a real process of civilization. In this light, Tierra del Fuego's wonderful descriptions of the pampa or the tumultuous sea or the mysterious land and waters of the Yámana, where the natives keep their fires alive and travel with them burning in their canoes, are not to be regarded as simply romantic decorations. Iparraguirre's notions on this subject are important: "The descriptions in the novel create the scene. There are two major areas which are in certain ways incommensurable, one coming from the Argentine educator-president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who wrote of the pampa, the other from Herman Melville, one of my favorites who affected me deeply and who wrote of the sea. But there is a third location, making, let's say, a triangle, and that is the Tierra del Fuego. And there one finds Jemmy Button. So the landscape of the pampa, or that of the sea, or that of Cape Horn, are the engines of the action. They are the places where the action develops and exposes the lives of the characters." But the landscapes are also the sources of being of the characters whose geographies they carry in their bones just as the material world of imperialistic design shapes London and the figures it gestates. The active, physical life required of an Omoy Lume; the blank page of the pampa over which Jack Guevara broods reflecting on his life; the cool, self-justifying ambitions of Fitz Roy in London -- each imbeds its character in a concrete reality long past which now only words can make real, like the words in the London Record Office or Lucín's account made real in Guevara's journal, which is the novel of Tierra del Fuego. At its furthest reach Tierra del Fuego questions the true nature of civilization and the validity of acts often done in its name. For Argentines this inquiry finds its intellectual crux in the famous book, Facundo, Or Civilization and Barbarism by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Argentina`s second president under the 1853 constitution. For the 19th Century man, Sarmiento, "barbarism meant the Indians." Iparraguirre continues, "The country's project included the price of exterminating the Indians, like what happened in the United States during the conquest of the West. They had to exterminate the owners of these lands in order to establish their own people." But the author continues that her novel is not about the "noble savage" in the Rousseauvian sense. The characters are not painted in black and white, but rather in chiaroscuro. "What I wanted to do in the novel was to look at the other side of the picture with this journey to the periphery of the world." The picture she paints is alive with the adventures and excitement of two very different youths, Jemmy Button and Jack Guevara, who are equally comrades and competitors, and it is dense with a descriptive power often cinematic in its nature: the hot, yawning pampa, the houses and inns of Buenos Aires beyond belief to Jack's young eyes, the thrilling port of Montevideo with its tall ships and bustling docks, London's raucous, filthy streets, the swirling, tumultuous seas in the midst of storm, the black waters of Wulaia with the fires which give the area its name flickering along its shores: Land of Fire. At the same time, the book is dramatic, like a mystery story, and actually concludes with a long trial scene derived from actual records, in which Button's true role in terrible massacre on Cape Horn of missionaries from Keppel Island is exposed. Filled with interesting, believable, and identifiable characters, Tierra del Fuego is a book that readers will find difficult to put out of their minds. Furthermore, not the least of the book's accomplishments is Sylvia Iparraguirre's impressive ability to get into Jack Guevara's mind. Jack's identity as a male is complete and Iparraguirre's capacity to enter that male mind and bring it to life is thoroughly convincing. The reader never questions Jack's voice in the journal. The author's ability to adapt a 19th century writing style and use a masculine voice so unself-consciously makes one think of George Eliot. Equally, Iparraguirre has something of Eliot's capacity to enter the human soul, or psyche -- its moral landscape. Indeed, above all, it is the moral landscape of the 19th century that Jack's written excursion so clearly and subtly delineates. This moral landscape also raises important questions concerning the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. One remembers the dilemma only recently confronted by Argentina during the so called "dirty war" of the 1970s and early 1980s, when in the name of Argentine "purity" and "Christianity" the reigning junta "disappeared" 30,000 people, forced the exile of thousands more, and ruined the lives of countless others in what can only be called a reign of terror. During this period Sylvia Iparraguirre herself was forced into "internal exile," a state in which she could not publish, suffered poverty along with her husband, the writer, Abelardo Castillo, and watched their friends endure even more terrible fates. Notwithstanding, Iparraguirre was involved in several magazine projects. Tierra del Fuego thus finds a context larger than the materialism of the colonialist and imperialistic periods. It also finds a context in the immediate present. The novel may be about the Yámana, an indigenous group which has since disappeared. But, alas, it is not about a world that has disappeared. That world still survives around us, shapes us, and drives us toward our own journals of self-recognition.
|
Contact Us Search Privacy Policy Site Map
Curbstone Press content © 2001 Curbstone Press. All rights reserved.
Curbstone Press is supported in part by: 
