Third lap the podcast with Alejandro Gaviria and Ricardo Silva Romero, a podcast from
the locutorio shoots the locutorio of that one. For me, maybe he'
s got a great aspiration as an inventor of fictions It' s been to
find a character who gets out of the books. I am impressed, for
example, by Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Frankenstein, The Quijote of Hamlet,
who in general people know who they are without having to read the books.
By the way I reminded you of a phrase by an American prison science writer
from champ that says or puts to say one of his characters all, absolutely
to everyone we invent homeland stories of us. That also portrays life. Okay.
Alejandro. I greet this time because I have been thinking that while we
meet again next week, after these agitated days that have had us both in
a thousand things. It would be interesting to think of which fictional characters have
served us in life to understand things or to get out of trouble, which
fictional characters come to mind constantly, as companies, even as advisers, as
examples. Then of course the great fictional characters who come from multiple places of
drama, comedy, novel, story, painting, film, television, comic,
have some archetypes and remind one of a certain way, the tarot that
one creates by portraying letter by letter, the possibilities of oneself, the ways
in which one can fall according to circumstances. For me, perhaps the great
aspiration as an inventor of fictions has been to find a character who gets out
of the books. I' m impressed, for example, by Pinocchio,
Peter Pan, Frankenstein, The Hamlet Quijote, which in general, people know
who they are without having to be read. Books transcend the stories they star
in, they become archetypes, figures to which people resort without having to know
their stories. Therefore, the first character I mention is that Pinocchio, who
is a fundamental character and who, thanks to the re- reading that makes
poloster of him, because one understands much better the idea of being a real
child or a real person and having to have rescued the father, that is,
to have been the father himself to become, to graduate from being human.
It seems to me like a masterful summary, a huge finding, almost
like a scientific finding that leaves me unspoken every time I have it close to
me. I' ve read that novel, I' ve seen the movies,
and it seems to me that pinocho is the great find he' s
given to someone who makes fictions. It is an extraordinary summary of the orphanhood
we all feel and the need we have to find within ourselves, our own
security. Hi, Ricardo. We resorted again to Whatsapp' s audio exchange
to keep our weekly conversation alive in the third round. This week, as
well said, we were a busy week from here to there and we could
not meet before we began the conversation on the subject that proposes, about fictional
characters, fictional characters that have become, that become already part of humanity.
I want to congratulate you on the publication of Alpe de West, your latest
book, your latest novel. I' m going to read it that I
have it with me and invite all the third- round listeners, who listen
to us from the return to read it. You can also add a rich
character to the characters that mention these mythical fictional characters that have transcended the books
and that, as I said, are part of humanity. But nothing more
disturbing, and I want to do so by taking advantage that now, in
August of this year, one hundred years after the death of novelist Joseph Conrat,
In my opinion, one of the novelists, among modern quotation marks,
most important. Conrat published in nineteen hundred and three a novel that has since
captured the imagination of human beings, the heart of the ten nebls. The
novel describes a journey through the dark rivers of the Belgian cone in the 19th
century, until reaching our character, an enigmatic ivory merchant who wanted to bring
civilization to the natives, but ended up exterminating them. A character who is
described by his last words, the two words he utters before his death,
which is horror, horror. A character who sums up that Conradian idea that
there is no history of humanity, a very great distance between civilization and barbarism.
This mythical character already Kuritz has transcended the books. Many of those who
hear us in the third round will have seen the film Revelation know that premiered
in a thousand nine hundred and seventy- nine, which describes the same journey
yanó for the Congo way IgA, but in Vietnam, and which describes the
same character, in this case, Colonel Kurutz, which summarizes that terrifying,
horrifying part. Let' s say something like that about the human soul and
it has since become one of these mythical characters of literature. He spoke before
Pinocchio and is Pinocchio one of those characters like Peter Pan not Frankenstein, who
are voices and are spirits that we all carry inside, like the mythical characters
of all mythology, like icaro or like Neas, or like orpheus or like
Achilles or Ulysses, characters that do what we do, warn us what we
are going to do at some point in life. But there is a character
who at first sounds more prosaic, less mythical, more particular, more contextualized.
Let' s say that he is Holden Coffield, the protagonist of the
guardian among rye, which for me is very important and summarizes me all the
great initiation characters and great teenagers with which one can give in books if pinocho
is the orphanhood that we all have to solve. I broke the fury,
the exasperation, the indignation at the world they brought us to. He is
a teenager who is discovering, who was deceived, who painted a life that
did not exist and who is throwing his monologue in a rage to respond to
that injustice, the injustice of growing up in a world that has so many
interesting traps. What Richard did about Holden Kouldfield is a rabid thing that becomes
our own voice as a fictional character that we somehow make our own. I
didn' t read the guardian in wanting us to, being a teenager.
The ten years later, already twenty- nine or thirty years, he was
studying a doctorate in economics dedicated to other things. His voice was cautious,
of course, but I didn' t have that immediate identification that had his
ginte you' re Act that without When I first read at Andrés Caisero School,
I remember finding in a trunk in my grandmother' s house, a
handcrafted edition, the crossed one. I also remember reading that he saw the
music, finding that kind of identity. I remember from those readings then a
phrase by Andrés Caisedo. I hate it because I' m fighting for it.
Or another voice that also made its own and is a somewhat strange voice
Ricardo, because he is a character who is in turn author. It is
the voice of Fernando Vallejo, of his self fictions, autofections that make an
important part of Colombian literature during the last forty or fifty years. That child
who describes Vallejo, that child who fills his head with things without knowing what,
that nostalgic one who visits the paradise of his childhood, that distressed existentialist,
that loving sadrop that I say. I don' t know if God
or evolution or the one who created all this was thinking about whatever it was.
He' s a very chambonous workmaster. To me, this with old
age and death, it does not serve me that love life that says that
time, old age and death are the same thing. I have here I
took it for Azara in my library the Gift of Life, published in nineteen
hundred and ten. It' s this voice of Vallejo' s autopectations that
has captivated me ever since. How many times you haven' t touched the
love at your door and you didn' t see it because of those blouses
of yours you know you didn' t. Love is a one- way
chimera, like the arrow that has only one tip one two. When you
have seen an arrow that goes there come love is to give it, not
to ask for it. He doesn' t ask for love from him.
He' s got it And if he doesn' t, then he doesn
' t. That voice of Fernando Vallejo has been to me one of the
fictional characters. In this case of self- fiction more as we said most
influential in my readings of the last thirty years. He spoke before holding Coffield,
the protagonist of the guardian among rye, which is a way of saying
that lucid teenage voice, which is in the center of the island of the
Treasury, of the lord of flies or of Boby Dinghan or of the graduate.
And then I began to think of the character that has impacted me the
most in adult life, which is the Count of Montecristo, which is something
similar to pinocho in the sense that it portrays our vocation to invent ourselves.
But it goes a little further and shows us the effort to simulate ourselves before
others, to create our own mythology, to disguise ourselves and fill ourselves with
tixies of appearances to survive a particularly harsh world in the Count Christ can find
one from Gatsby to Indiana Jones. You can see Don Draper de madment or
godfather Corleone there. People who create themselves almost in costumes and who baptize themselves
to face the world and how to avenge themselves and who have something tragic about
these people because they end up colliding with the world realizing that revenge is impossible,
that revenge is never satisfactory. And that seems fascinating to me to see
interesting what Ricardo did, which suggests about the masks, the lives of adults
with the system good measure, in my opinion, in that, in putting
on the mask and going out to face the world every day. Or I
reminded you of a phrase by a science writer, American fiction Teck Chank,
who says or says one of his characters. All of us, absolutely all
of us, make up stories of our own homelands. That also portrays life
and invents those homeland stories. I' m going to write another fictional character
has marked me whose ideas shook. It has not been digested, but it
has had an influence on my way of seeing and understanding the world. It
is a character that appears the main character of a short novel, but important,
my opinion, the most interesting novels in the 20th century. Graham Green
' s impassive American. This character is a foreign correspondent. He' s
in Vietnam in the middle of a pre- war conflict in the 1960s Fowler
Surname. This character is one is someone who looks at the world with a
certain sharpness, but also with indifference. And it' s a character that
somehow defines itself in contrast to another character in the novel. And the impassive
American Pile studied at Harvard, he' s full of good intentions. He
wants to change the world, he wants to do institutional engineering, he wants
to improve, he wants to improve society. But the most interesting thing about
this Fowler foreign correspondent character is that his ethical clarity, his moral clarity,
comes from that pessimism and dispassionateness. And, if you want, yourself,
Spyle, the character full of good intentions, the impassive American, who ends
up doing more damage. And that voice, the voice of this reporter,
of this cynical poller, to me is one of the most interesting voices I
' ve ever read. The most disturbing characters in contemporary literature. There is
a drawing of Picasso, Don Quixote and Sancho that I had in my room
when I lived alone for about seven years, and it is a drawing that
moves me in a very particular way, difficult to understand. Finally, I
gave the drawing when we came to live in this apartment. And yet what
left me is the idea that there are people who come to two silhouettes,
who come together and who are one silhouette. There are couples who are like
this and there are friends who are like this and without a doubt, the
quijote and Sancho are those, those first people who come from two. For
in the plane of literature, of course, there is one that is the
one that goes head- on in fantasy and there is another that is the
one that treads the earth, the ideality and the realistic, the knight and
the rogue, but above all they are a couple a couple or a friendship
that is always like moving to see repeat, from Rome and Juliet to the
strange couple Nell Simon. The story of those two divorced people who are going
to live together and recreate a marriage without realizing it is fascinating and to die
of laughter, but of that moving silhouette, so beautiful that I was very
excited in Picasso' s drawing, I also have that idea of living in
the fantasy of becoming oneself, in the fantasy that seems to me picks up
Pinocchio and gathers the Count of Montecristo, because he is above all in the
quijote, this man who again baptizes himself and goes out to make the life
that he thinks should be so. Be more fiction than anything else, for
that man is also in Chaplin' s character and is also in the character
of Cantinflas. It is a people who live as in an intermediate dimension and
insist and play it for that and there is a stubbornness, there is an
obstinacy in their way of being, that is very beautiful and that seems to
sink with the boat, playing it for a way of being consistent forever,
which is to be a little crazy and on the way to leaving beauty watered
everywhere, like that of Chaplin, or that of Cantinflas or that of Quixote.
Those characters have always fascinated me and I think I see them, for
example, in my mother' s behavior, remind him in du Ricardo that
he told the dus Hopslink that human beings are amphibians. We inhabit this world
that we can touch and tread, but we also inhabit the world of ideas,
of imagination, in the world of worlds that we invent for ourselves.
From there perhaps the fascination with this Picasso engraver of Quixote and Sancho, and
there also the fascination of humanity with quijote and defines that essence of human beings,
but also a novel that has invented humanity itself. I would like to
speak briefly of a fictional character, of another fictional character in fascinating opinion is
from a more recent reading, of a reading that I had been posting for
many years and that I did about a few years ago. It is Don
Fabricio, the Prince of Salina, in sicily of the famous novel El Gatopardo
de Juseph de Lampedusa, this species of refinal aristocrat, melancholy, existentialist,
a kind of tolerant sport. What I' m most interested in this fictional
character they say is the writer' s great- grandfather prepared his life to
write this his only novel. He said that what interests me most about the
way he accepts the decline, the decline of his life, his mind and
his body. It says at the end of the novel that of the many
years lived perhaps it would have been worth a year or two added in total,
not much more. And the way he accepts revolution, the reversal of
hierarchies. With this attitude of resigned and distant belief the idea that in the
reversal of hierarchies comes a new emerging class that has to accept that it will
perhaps reproduce all its defects in none of the virtues. But he accepts decay
as an aesthetic species. He was fond of astronomy and looked at the sky,
perhaps as some kind of comfort or acceptance that in the life of human
beings. And I think this novel and this character above all a reflection on
that. Everything is happening, but everything also remains the same. I would
like to close with the monologue of the merchant of Venice, the character of
the merchant of Venice. Perhaps, obviously, in Shakespeare' s works there
are wonderful characters for my taste, Lady Macbeth and Yago, the maleolith puppeteers
are the brightest, the brightest characters, of Shakespeare' s work too,
as there is obviously Hamlet and there is Juliet' s Rome and it is
good all the characters we know prosperous in the storm. But I always hear
the monologue of the merchant of Venice, which is a chilling monologue and which
in today' s context, in today' s world, seems especially relevant
to me because it is not only, of course, a response to anti
- Semitism, but, in general, a response to fundamentalism and the lack
of humanity. The monologue who launches the Venice marketing can accommodate any human group
that is being unknown, being denied, being stereotyped and violated. And then
he' s a constant character in my life and when I' m making
up my stories, it seems to me that I always try to fit into
them a monologue like that of the merchant of Venice, just as you see
Ricardo in the monologue of the merchant of Venice, an urgency, a way
to connect that world of Shakespeare with our world and that you like to recreate
it, incorporate it in your novels. I have another idea, of another
fiction, the imagined fiction, an idea that has obsessed me over the last
few months and I would like to call it a simple faith preacher. I
would like to recreate this character quickly, based above all on the last readings
of recent years, from this fanl bike. Richard could demand it this way.
I can imagine him first in a fur room with his wife. Both
are getting dressed for a writers' conference that will take place in a few
hours where he has to give the main speech. His wife approaches his back
and helps him fasten the bow tie through the elevator. They take a cab
or Carlos is waiting and takes him to the conference. When the cameras arrive,
they chase us towards the threats. Before they sit at the table and
the other one. His wife talks livelyly with the diners all writers. In
the meantime, he hasn' t been distracted. Someone pronounces his name.
He stops with the two leaves in his hand, goes to the podium and
reads his speech, a discourse on the invisibility of the human spirit. After
the speech comes the widespread applause to which his wife joins mechanically, but her
expression says it all. He has already lost faith in what he preaches.
This idea, Ricardo, this kind of fictional character, of preaching to the
world in a difficult time, a time of madness, which has been a
recurring theme in the third round, preaching to the world in what is no
longer believed, but which in some way the preacher considers necessary. It'
s an idea that has haunted me these days. I insist on hugging,
Ricardo. We' ll meet. No. It' s clear we can
all write. It is clear that we can all, with luck and vocation,
devote ourselves to the craft of writing. But lately I think we can
' t just write, we should write. Writing is the best therapy we
have at hand. Welcome to Fictionario. An audio course on how and why
to write. Take the audiocourse of fictional writing in the locutorio com slash fictionario
with Ricardo Silva Romero. Always choose a good time, always choose a good
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