Writer Jorge Valenzuela: “Fictions exercise an absolutely real power over our lives” | Interview

In the story that opens the book Continuous fictions, a group of botanists and zoologists, followers of Carl Linnaeus, lost their lives in the 18th century in their attempt to summarize the flora and fauna of the Earth in inhospitable places. In parallel, a daughter evokes her deceased mother, a conservationist and admirer of the System of Nature of Linnaeus, who in the burning Peru of the 1980s tried to materialize a project in favor of American camelids. The daughter reads the novel dedicated to her mother and fiction allows her to meet her again. In another story, a guardian of Ricardo Palma’s memory cannot live his life beyond the fiction that he has created as a dapper and respectable academic. In this way, Jorge Valenzuela enters the field of life as an expression and extension of fiction and gives us a set of stories in which he explores the possibilities of metaliterature.

How was the gestation of this book, in what way did you begin to work the metaliterary?

The metaliterary interests me to the extent that a fiction (a book, a novel, etc.) allows us to reflect on our own life, not as something aimed at showing the relationships between fiction and reality as a game of mirrors, I do not go there. In my book, fictions, and the fictional lives that produce them, constitute the lives of my characters. And they constitute it not because they “reflect” reality, but because fictions have become the “reality” in which they live. They live the experience of reading fictions as suffering that has ended up constituting them as subjects. In this way, they are the result of fictions whose function has been to feed them with hope or to lead them along the paths of tragedy.

That is why in the first story the daughter evokes the story of the ecologist mother from two stories: from the writings of Linnaeus’ followers and from a novel. In addition, the story is a tribute to Barbara D’Achille.

That’s how it is. There, what interested me to see was how the representation of the ecologist in the novel affected the grieving process of the daughter, who is the one who tells the story. This intersects with the fact that the mother, as a biologist and conservationist, was a great reader of scientific books that also constructed an image of the world as the System of Nature of Linnaeus. I am interested, as I say, in the way in which we construct ourselves and what surrounds us from the fictions that others make. Then, this hurt daughter finds in the fictions about her mother, a door that allows her to dialogue with her.

In the second story, you allude to the canonical figure of Palma, the traditionist who told us a fictional history of Lima, who reappears in this academic and questions his life, to the point that the character of the story cannot get out of that fiction created by himself .

For me, the figure of Palma and its traditions are fictions. They are fictions created by literary criticism, they are fictions created by readers through their approach to Palma’s work. So, in the story “The mirror of Palma”, what interested me was to see how a life and a work affected by fiction could influence a man who is the guardian of the traditionist’s legacy. The presence of the ghost of Palma inside the museum house is proof that these fictitious lives are very active and have an influence on real human beings. This academic, in his permanent contact with Palma and his work, has problems relating to reality, with that reality represented by this young visitor who breaks into the museum house and wants to tear him away from that fictional world in which he lives. In other words, when the ghost of Palma appears, it is not a game, this man feels Palma as a presence and can hear her voice speaking to him. Deep down is the voice of your conscience. It is a presence that becomes consciousness in him. Fiction for these characters is a serious thing, it totally cuts through them.

Another of the great themes of the book is the figure of the father in writers like Arguedas, Valdelomar, Vargas Llosa, Kafka, is the relationship with the father always difficult for a creator?

Not necessarily, but the fact that you have chosen writers whose relationship with the father was problematic indicates something. In the end, the fictional lives that we can know through the biography of these writers can also be very decisive when relating to ourselves. When this literary critic begins to investigate the lives of these Peruvian writers with respect to their parents, he discovers the relationship he had with his own father through a series of coincidences and finally comes to understand himself through those lives. What I want to show, in the end, is the power of fiction. Fictions exercise an absolutely real power over our lives. What we call fiction, in the end, constitutes our own life.

The book is also a tribute to great writers who have been meaningful to you.

Somehow, yes. Cortázar, Kafka, Arguedas have had a very important influence on my training as a writer, so approaching their lives or trying to understand their lives through fiction is something that seems worth writing. In the case of Cortázar, what I do, through a story, is try to understand how Cortázar – I am making a hypothesis of course – experienced the issue of infidelity as a human being. In this case, I use the fiction to return the reader to the writer who produced that fiction. I am not interested in the metaliterary as a game of mirrors in the sense that Cortázar does in “Continuity of the parks”, which is to disorient the reader regarding what is reality and what is fiction, that game does not interest me. What interests me is the way in which a fiction or a fictionalized life generates in the characters themselves and in the reader a reflection on their own life, that is the central point.

You cite in the book a letter from Cortázar to Jean Bernabé, in which the Argentine says that he is seeking to reinvent himself as a writer, to get out of the famous structure of the story as the middle and end, were you thinking of doing that too when you wrote these stories?

In a way, yes. A little, leaving the familiar scheme of the story as an artifact and entering a more existential problem, if you want. I think that’s what it’s all about. To get out of the traditional schemes of the story and turn the story into a space of search, of inquiry, of question, before a game that involves an approach, a climax and a resolution. The stories in the book are not about solving a problem that has been generated from an initial situation that reaches its maximum contradiction, rather they are explorations that have to do with an aspect of the lives of the characters in which fictions decisively influence them. All are texts linked to other texts.

Or to photographs as in the case of the story about Kafka

Kafka’s photographs… They are an exploration of that aspect of Kafka’s life as a collector of pornographic photographs and that is part of the fiction that has been created about Kafka himself. It is the fictionalized life that interests me there, in a very dark aspect, but possible.

The book “Continuous Fictions” contains the stories: ‘The Apostles of Linnaeus’, ‘The mirror of Palma’, ‘The others’, ‘Cortázar’, ‘The photos of Franz Kafka’ and ‘The letter of Kafka’. It has been edited by Garamond and is 118 pages long.

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