When Garcia Marquez died in 2014 he left an unfinished novel, comprised of five drafts and nearing 800
pages. He also left explicit instructions to his sons that it should not be published. Now, they have done so.
Should they have? Who is to say?
Did his instructions stem from his inability to write, or, as his memory failed in late years, his ability to read, to understand what he had already written before his memory began to fail? Again, we can’t know.
I don’t intend to read it. But I do intend to read both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Choleraagain. Since very few books written in the twentieth century measure up to those two, I don’t know why we would expect the posthumous book to do so.
Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, famously disobeyed Kafka’s wish to have all his unpublished work destroyed after he died. A cause for celebration in that case.
I am a compulsive keeper of my own papers. I couldn’t tell you why. Old syllabi, notes, journals, annotated calendars, rough and abandoned drafts of various projects. Lists of gear to be packed for climbing trips. Correspondence (from the analog era). The thought of leaving this mess to my wife or son after I’m gone is truly embarrassing. And yet . . .
Was going through these (six bins) the other day, looking for the first decent piece of writing I managed to do. Something we would now, perhaps, call autofiction. It was a portrait of an old friend who performed an almost invisible heroic deed when we were sixteen years old.
The occasion for this search was that my friend, the subject of that story, is now suffering from some form of Alzheimers; I don’t know the exact diagnosis. But it’s heartbreaking to observe firsthand.
I saw him at an alumni gathering last in December. He could be out in public, with his brother and sister as handlers. He knew who I was and we were happy to see each other. A big strong hug ensued, and lingered. I could see that he was in there, but somehow access to his full self had been denied him.
When I moved off to talk with some others, he said to my sister, “I’m having such a good time, I just wish David could have been here.”
When searching the bins I also came across a packet of academic essays that I wrote in graduate school, circa 1986 to about 1999. Even these I couldn’t toss. Not only did I not remember writing them, I did not remember reading many of the books (texts) upon which they were based.
I wrote down the titles, fourteen of them, including:
“A Recurring Moment of Negotiation: Odysseus’ Encounters with Nausicaa, Kirke, and Penelope”
“A Close Reading of the Text within the Text of Jim Harrison’s ‘Legends of the Fall’”
“Problems of Closure in the Roman Farce: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Moby Dick”
The one that was met the most approval from my professor was on Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. Today, I couldn’t tell you one thing about either The Unfortunate Traveller or what I had to say about it.
All writing contains aa mostly unwritten message: “I was here.”
During that same time I also wrote an equal amount of fiction, all of which I remember, and much of which would become my first published book, Letters from Chamonix, almost a quarter century later.
Last week we went to hear John Gorka, a singer songwriter of about my age. A couple audience members familiar with hi work shouted out titles of his songs they hoped he would play. “Those are pretty good songs,” he said, paused a beat and added, “But I don’t know them.”
In a graduate school Henry Staten was lecturing on literary theory, probably deconstruction. “It’s like, he said, when you go to the library, and you know where the book you’re looking for is, but when you reach for it, it’s not there. There’s a gap where you expected it to be.
I clearly remember Henry’s metaphor, but not the point which it was supposed to illustrate.
If you don’t remember something, how do you know that you don’t remember it? You must remember that you don’t remember. You must be aware of the gap, the hole where the memory was stored. This must be related to what Henry was talking about that day.
At the alumni gathering,in a quiet moment my friend, confided in me, “David I am fucked. I. Am. Fucked.”
“We all are, my friend,” I said, “We all are.”
