Scatterbrain: a letter from the North Pole
Spectacle-dependency; old manuscripts; never-ending drafts
What’s a story? Who gets to tell it? What for?
It’s minus five degrees in the Republic of Hackney. If you are a polar bear, it might not seem that cold but it’s certainly too cold for this South American. Especially when I head out early in the morning on my battered Dutch bicycle, to end up with stalactites of snot hanging from my nose on the way to the office.
Talking about South Americans and cold weather, this week I watched the latest film to deal with the Tragedia de los Andes — that is the 1972 flight disaster in which a Uruguayan Air Force flight carrying forty-five people crashed in the Andes. This incident is renowned for the terrible conditions and circumstances that the passengers of the doomed flight endured. These include the crash (obviously), but also two avalanches, extreme weather, lack of food leading to anthropophagy, and an expedition by two of the survivors, lasting more than ten days, with no equipment, in order to reach civilisation and bring about the rescue of those who had remained in the wreck. The ordeal lasted seventy-two days, with sixteen passengers making it out.
La sociedad de la nieve (J. A. Bayona, 2023) deals with this remarkable story of survival. I wasn’t planning to watch the film, since the Tragedia de los Andes is a very well-known event in my neck of the woods, and there are several books and previous movies dealing with it. But an article by Uruguayan writer and academic Jorge Majfud in the Argentine press annoyed me so much that I had no choice but to watch (and enjoy) the film. If you can’t read in Spanish, or can’t be bothered to read it, in this article Majfud explores reactions to the film and the media’s fascination with the event, comparing this with the attention received by other tragedies involving lesser classes or subaltern groups, highlighting the tendency to focus more on stories that involve more privileged individuals.1
The specific section that made me howl was this one:
“The “Tragedia de los Andes” has been commercialised to the point of saturation, like none of the terrible stories of thousands of tortured and disappeared from the lower classes in the same involved countries (Chile, Argentina and Uruguay).”2
A potential valid criticism about the lack of representation of these other tragedies could be made without: a) lamenting the lack of commercialisation of said narratives; and b) ignoring what is so attractive about the story La sociedad de la nieve deals with, from a story-telling point of view.3 More importantly, Majfud’s criticism misses the point of how the media and mainstream cinema work, and with what ends. I’m not surprised, since this demand for representation is a recurrent ideological blind spot in much of the left, with many believing that the panacea for all social injustice ills is to see this or that subaltern demographic in a box office hit, without sparing a thought for what these kinds of films stand for, or how they are often part of an apparatus that sustains power and hegemony, even when they incorporate a modicum of self-reflexivity or criticism in their diegesis. Not to mention that Majfud is here confusing the lack of journalistic coverage of live events,4 a coverage capable of affecting the event’s outcome, with making films about events that took place decades ago, which have received and continue to receive plenty of attention, thanks to the work of human right organisations and activists. Not to mention, once again, that there are many films dealing with those narratives already — dozens of them! For example, Argentine film production during the 1980s greatly focused on the disappeared and the recent dictatorship. Alas, one of these films — La historia oficial (Luis Puenzo, 1985) — even won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
I personally wouldn’t want to see the narratives of the disappeared and tortured in South America turned into a Netflix series, even if it means the uniformed Anglo-American viewer won’t find out about our appalling recent history. The job of the progressive intellectual shouldn’t be to demand canonisation by the Spectacular-Industrial complex, but to produce the discourse and facilitate the existence of the cultural spaces in which these narratives can survive, in ways that they continue to challenge the status quo, instead of becoming part of it, thus ossifying.
And I believe all this can be done whilst letting people enjoy a good story every now and then too, lest we end up talking to ourselves.5
Never-ending writing
If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you might have realised that when I send out one of these “scattered brain” letters it’s because my mind has been preoccupied with something, and I lack the brain power to write something more focused. This preoccupation is more often than not work-related, because of Odradek, or due to family commitments. But this week it’s been down to a sudden urge to go over some finished manuscripts that either have been gathering dust in a computer folder, or were sent years ago, have been ghosted ever since by prospective publishers and agents.
I never re-read the things I write once they are published, so coming back to an old, finished manuscript always feels pretty strange to me. It means coming back to an old version of myself, to a different person, and to a different writer. There were things in these manuscripts that made me go “thank god this wasn’t published!” — has the cultural context of literary production ever moved faster than today? Other parts made me go “where the hell did I get this idea from? — this inability to trace the source of an idea shows that much of what I write, I write on autopilot, picking up concepts that are floating in cultural ether.
Like I’ve said, some of these manuscripts were already out, and yet I couldn’t resist the temptation to work again on them anyway. One is in its fourth draft after this new revision. This week I might start working on its fifth draft. I still don’t know if I will send it out again, or just stash it somewhere and forget about it for a while. But I know for sure that I will keep working on it, as long as it remains unpublished. And here comes a very important question: when should one stop revising a manuscript? This is a question I can’t answer, not with certainty. But I believe one of the possible answers would be “never”. Perhaps one should never stop working on a manuscript. Perhaps knowing this at an unconscious level explains why I don’t read the things I have already published. Maybe this isn’t lack of interest, but a cowardly fear that I will read my own work and regret that I hadn’t gone through yet another version before sending it out, that it could have been better (because everything always can be).
These are some of the themes Andrew Gallix explores in his essay “The Draft of the Medusa”, which serves as the introduction to his book Unwords (Dodo Ink, 2024). In this piece, Gallix explores a paradox: the desire to capture everything in words and the simultaneous recognition of the impossibility of such a task.6 Read the essay yourself — it’s a good one. There’s a lot in it that resonates with me, especially this paragraph below, with clichés included:7
Writers who do not feel the need to publish in order to affirm or reaffirm their status qua writers. Writers for whom literature is the ‘locus of a secret that should be preferred to the glory of making books’ (Maurice Blanchot). Writers who write in order to be able to stop writing. Writers whose decision to stop writing imparts ‘an added power and authority to what was broken off; disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness’ (Susan Sontag). Writers who write in invisible ink. Writers of works whose potentiality never completely translates into actuality. Writers who seek out the untranslatable. Writers who think that words can do what they cannot say. Writers who believe in the existence of the books they have imagined but never composed. Writers whose books keep on writing themselves after completion. Writers who strive, quixotically, to bridge the gap between art and life…
Now I need to go back to the nth draft of my manuscripts — writing in circles is a good way to stay warm, since I know for a fact I won’t be setting any old work on fire.8
There I go: I’ll hit send. Or should I revise this letter just one more time?
The survivors of La Tragedia de los Andes were all from well-off Uruguayan families.
Original: ““La “tragedia de los Andes” se ha comercializado hasta el hastío como ninguna de las terribles historias de miles de torturados y desapariciones de las clases bajas en los mismos países involucrados (Chile, Argentina y Uruguay).” My translation.
Let’s say you don’t get to eat your friends every day, whether these are rich or poor. But also, this is a classical story of “return against the odds”, much like Homer’s Odyssey. And yes, Ulysses was a well-off too! Should we stop reading Homer then?
He mentions for example the disappearance of minority women in the USA, and so-called “missing white woman syndrome”.
I also wonder what would Majfud say about a film like Patricia Riggen’s The 33 (2015), which deals with the story of the collapse of a mine in Copiapó, Chile, in 2010, and the subsequent rescue of thirty-three trapped miners — the working class labourer par excellence. Was this story taken to the silver screen because Riggen is a socialist or because the miners’ rescue is a good story, the kind of story that makes for captivating story-telling, the kind of story-telling that sells cinema tickets?
Andrew Gallix is briefly mentioned — in Russian version — in this story of mine, which deals precisely with a writer’s inability to ever finish a draft: “But of course, there’s an element of freedom in not getting published,” I say. “Like this guy Andrei Gallevich, the one who edits 3:PM Magazine, says. You know... It’s a statement against the market and the publishing industry. Or something like that.”
Clichés that Gallix is aware of, as clearly indicated earlier in the essay.
If I had to give you one writing tip, just one: never throw anything away. Everything can always be turned into something else when the right time comes.
Didn’t Flannery O’Connor revise one story till her dying day?
It’s in The Growing Craft: A Synoptic Variorum Edition of The Geranium, An Exile in the East, Getting Home, Judgement Day by Karl-Heinz Westarp.
While asking Father Google for the name of the collection in which the lifelong revising of “The Geranium” lives... I came across this piece which might be of interest.. I am not familiar with the book.
https://www.pw.org/content/the_art_of_revision_black_box
I also came across why we have cancelled Flannery O’Connor (missed that memo).