Miguel Vitagliano: “That fiction that seems to comfort us but stops us is social networks”

(By Emilia Racciatti). The writer and teacher Miguel Vitagliano manages, in his novel “Journey to Things”, to focus on the life of the novelist and scientist Guillermo Enrique Hudson, but he does not do so by forcing a biography but by resorting to fiction to enhance those events of a life. that are nourished by chance and thus manage to tell perspectives and projections located in the 19th century.

Guillermo Enrique Hudson (Quilmes, 1841 – Worthing, 1922), also known as William Henry Hudson, integrated a corpus of compulsory reading in schools with his book “There far and long ago” (1918) and was considered by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada as the great Argentine author.

“Journey to Things” is the second novel in a trilogy in which the first was “Buried” and the third is already underway. About this project and the compatibility between classes and writing, Vitagliano (Floresta, 1961) spoke with Télam one afternoon before teaching classes at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).

“During the second semester I am more exposed, so sometimes I can’t write what I want and I feel like an imprisoned lion. That makes me very bad. With what is happening in the country, it is also very difficult for me to sit down and write,” explains the owner. of Literary Theory III and also author of books such as “Cielo Loose” or “Vuelo triumphal”.

-Télam: Was it the figure of Hudson that brought you together for this book?

– Miguel Vitagliano: We are what each of us projects from what we dream of being. The novel has to do with that, with that myth of the 19th century, that field, the extension and all the possibility. And to write about a writer who for me will continue to be William Henry Hudson, not Guillermo Enrique Hudson, after writing it even more because I think he is more Argentine than the rue. I was a Hudson reader and I started studying him when we taught him in college, that’s when I realized that he was different. Regarding that scene that occupies three lines in the novel, when he gives a bouquet of flowers to his mother, I went out of my way to look for those flowers and I even ended up believing that they were the ladies of the night. I lived in San Isidro and I filled my house with those flowers because of the fragrance they had, convinced that they were Hudson’s flowers. They are Proust’s madeleines in La Pampa and it is a whole sense of literature because what difference is there between a weed and grass? That one has the courage to make grass. But what is the objective difference between one flower and another flower? It depends how you look at it, how you frame a distinction. And that’s what I saw in Hudson.

-T: The novel is part of a trilogy. How do you place “Journey to Things” in that project?

-MV: It is a trilogy where the stories barely intersect. As literature should be for me: without too much effort in a thematic tension. I’m interested that the theme of all three novels is “the novel.” The first was “Buried”, about what literature can do in the face of history. In this case it was the situation of the authors, the writers. The third is the novel itself as a form, which is why there is a whole problematization of Robinson Crusoe. The novel takes place in Italy, with Argentines and Italian-Argentines in 2022 and the goal is to show what the novel does by combining different elements. The idea was for it to be a trilogy, first about fiction, the second about the authors and the third about the novel.

-T: Identity is a key issue: from nationality, his birth in Argentina but his writing in England, or the definition of him as a writer or scientist.

-MV: Absolutely, the writer who is not recognized as such among writers and among scientists is a writer. That is one of the powers that the novel has. One wants to think of it as a narrative that accommodates the gaze of the bourgeoisie but on the other hand, the novel is a form of inquiry. I think there is literature and the novel, which is the most worn out. Her perfect way of being is the difference between weed and grass. Bakhtin said that the novel is the only art that is more made up of non-art. That has to do with the fact that it is made of a lot of grass. The world is condensed there. Novels have that: they capture how we think they capture the songs, but the songs set the music to what we already grasp.

-T: Characters appear that existed but on the other hand it is fiction. How did you work through that tension between documenting and writing fiction?

-MV: A friend told me “because when in the novel Joseph Conrad says” and I thought “I made Conrad speak.” I never realized I made Conrad talk but I think that Conrad is Conrad. Luckily I didn’t think about it: that’s Conrad, that’s Hudson and I don’t want to reveal too many things. What do significant events in a novel mean? Things that have a date are true. Now, the reasons why Conrad wrote such a thing may not be, but they can be defended to the death.

-T: There is a line in the novel that says “the forcefulness of that judgment was less a reckoning with the truth than the will to find a place for his own truth” and it is precisely not presented as a biography or as an adjustment You don’t have the truth but the proposal is different.

-MV: I see myself answering things about biographies or historical novels and I have to explain that in reality historical novels are made about a territory and a map is made to reach the territory and here the territory and the map are made together. That was the fascinating thing, otherwise there would have been no point in writing it. The wonderful thing was that encounter between one and the other. And yes, in reality I loved working on real elements but it didn’t stop me and suddenly it was choosing between things. In those novels that play with that idea of ​​writing the map on an already given territory, there is the idea of ​​whether it is not a settling of scores, you point with your finger at what it has to be, and here everything is done for the benefit of the narrative. I imagined and I loved thinking that there is a chapter where it tells what each thing costs. It was difficult for me because I was searching through scattered information to find out what each thing was worth. I wanted to do what I like as a reader: think about how much tobacco was worth, how much a flower sold.

-T: In a country like ours with such a great immigration tradition. Were you interested in thinking about identity from nationality?

-MV: I always thought of him as Argentinian, knowing that he was English. For a good part of my life they called me ‘Tano’ and I don’t even have a passport, my family is Italian but who among us doesn’t have these marks: Galician, Tano, Russian, Polish. His texts today are more powerful when read because they resemble this time. They are fictional texts that are made as essays and essays that are made as fictions.

-T: In such dizzying times, with so much information circulating, does fiction gain more power?

-MV: Sometimes one makes the mistake of proposing literature equals fiction and it is wrong because literature may not be fiction and fiction may not be literature but, in the case of literature, thinking fiction accompanied by language makes fiction have a power that other types of fictions do not have, the image does not have, for example. Fiction puts distance on things. The relationship between material reality and concerns would not be divided into one being a medium of the other. Reflections are not a means of a material thing but rather they are both ways of thinking about the same thing.

Raymond Williams said that it was curious what happened to the novel in England because between 1835 and 1845 a good part of the canonical novels of the 19th century were concentrated. This coincides with the metropolization of London. Does the novel copy reality? No. The anguish produced by the changes that are being experienced begin to look for a different form, which was at that time the realist novel. Today we destroy the narrative. As Byung-Chul Han says, the brain is told like a novel, the paranoid novel. A little novel that was written a long time ago but that no one reads. Today that fiction that seems to comfort us but stops us are series, social networks.