Literature is a space of twinned opposing forces: danger and refuge, death and life, and regrets and longing. Enrique Vila-Matas guides us into this treacherous realm so completely that I have learned to approach his books with a mix of excitement and dread. What connections will he illuminate between life and literature? What will he reveal about a life devoted to books? His books show how the absorption of literature sustains the desire to write while threatening to bury a would-be writer in a tomb of endless possibilities.
Vila-Matas’s latest novel, Mac’s Problem, is the reverse image of Bartleby & Co, which is about writers so overwhelmed by their “very demanding literary conscience” that they choose not to write. Mac’s Problem is about rewriting and repetition. While Bartleby’s writer-protagonist composed footnotes to other works of literature, preserving the white space of his own blank page, Mac repeats and revises until the page is solid black. He is Pierre Menard verging on Jack Torrance while wishing he were George Perec. He is also a retired construction contractor — or was he fired, or was he actually a lawyer? We can’t know, because he turns his diary into fiction, writing about the book he plans to write and then overwriting his life with fictional versions. Mac has decided to spend all of his time writing a “fake” posthumous novel. That is, a novel that will be kept unpublished until he dies, at which point it will be discovered and assumed to be interrupted and incomplete. It’s a pathological shortcut for an aspiring writer, but it gives him a form to engage with.
Repetition is a close cousin of incompleteness, which Mac identifies in a story by Alejandro Zambra about a student known as “the repeater,” who repeats the school year over and over without completing the requirements. To his peers, this would be a devastating setback, but “the repeater” is content to be immune from change. Instead of “I would prefer not to,” we have “I don’t do change,” the refrain of a nondescript nineteenth-century literary copyist like the one in Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” For a beginner like Mac, a literary “debutant,” there is a comfort in remaining suspended in the realm of possibility, relieved of the pressures of completion and, most importantly, of mortality.
Mac’s secret, self-effacing ambition is partly a symptom of his name. For some reason, his parents named him after an old bartender in a scene from John Ford’s My Darling Clementine. “Mac, you ever been in love?” asks a young Henry Fonda, to which the bartender replies, “No, I been a bartender all my life.” What were they thinking? Do people have children only so that they can grow old and die alone? With his marriage on the rocks, Mac becomes occupied with life’s central absurdity: “We come into this world in order to repeat what those who came before us also repeated.”
He becomes aware of this problem through reading, then rewriting, a book written by a neighbor named Sánchez. Called Walter’s Problem, it is a fictional memoir narrated by a ventriloquist so overcome by his own ego that he has lost the ability to speak in voices other than his own. To solve the problem, the narrator composes short stories in the voices of other writers. It’s the perfect model for a novice like Mac to follow, and he comes to feel that the book was written for him, just like his daily horoscope.
Walter’s Problem allows Vila-Matas to riff on the origins and mutations of the Borgesian genre that he’s practiced in his own work, and which he cites Marcel Schwob as an early pioneer of. Vila-Matas comes closest to the surface when identifying the sources of Mac’s inspiration, which could easily have been his own sources for Mac’s Problem. Specifically, George Perec’s 53 Days, an incomplete posthumous novel that Mac believes was rendered complete only by the author’s death. He (and perhaps Vila-Matas) imagines that Perec did this intentionally — that the novel was “‘finished’ and perfectly thought-out” before he died.
In the spirit of repetition, Mac is propelled forward, seeking the happiness promised by Kierkegaard in his distinction between repetition and recollection: “What is recollected is repeated backward, whereas repetition properly so-called is recollected forward. Therefore repetition, if it is possible, makes a man happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy.” Mac is also guided by Nathalie Sarraute’s theory of writing as the process of finding out what he would write if he wrote. The problem is that in his determination to look forward and invent, rather than look over his shoulder, the revelations are few and far between, and occasionally this makes the book wear thin. Fortunately, it is revived by Quixotic episodes in which Mac takes to the streets of Barcelona to press his interactions with people into potential stories to include in his novel.
Mac’s writing project has given him a reason to live. It’s gotten him out of the house. In this regard it makes sense that he would want to hold onto the work for the rest of his life and never release it into the world. His behavior is just an extreme version of the problem faced by many creative people who hesitate to let go of what they’ve produced. Still, Mac is pulled into darkness, overcome by fear and jealousy of Sánchez, whom he believes is having an affair with his wife. As the rewriting progresses and Mac leaves Barcelona for Lisbon and then Morocco, the lines blur between diary and fiction, and between imagination and mental breakdown, to the point that it becomes difficult to locate Mac in physical space. Perhaps he has found the place he wanted to inhabit all along, the space of literature.
[Published on April 30, 2019 by New Directions, 256 pages, $16.95 paperback]