Juan Cárdenas: “We all need to pull in the same direction.”

While visiting Buenos Aires to present his latest book , La ligereza (Lightness ), Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas returned to a ritual that connects him to our city: visiting the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and, in particular, the paintings of Cándido López. This interest isn't surprising when you remember that, in addition to being a narrator—the author of seven novels and two short story collections—and a translator, Cárdenas is also an art critic.

Also, it is often works of art that are the seed or the source from which his literature draws . For example, when writing Transparent Peregrino , a novel set in the 19th century in what is now Colombia, he reviewed an entire pictorial tradition surrounding the naturalists who came to the area: maps, watercolors, and illustrations of 19th-century scientific expeditions.

This time, in front of Cándido López's paintings, a revelation occurred, something to do with point of view: "I realized I'd never seen before that if you stand right in front of the painting, the painting closes in and you can't see clearly because the work has a complex perspective: it's not based on classical perspective with a single vanishing point. Suddenly, I started standing to the sides and looked at the painting again and said, 'Oh, look!'"

The anecdote serves as an introduction to the author and is relevant to the book he is now presenting, La ligereza (Sigilo). It includes a series of essays written between 2019 and 2024 , that is, that span the pandemic , and in some ways also exudes Cárdenas's practices as a writer, critic, and essayist.

A book of varied and poetic texture, as lucid as it is beautifully written, exuding humor (or humors) and reflecting a training in diverse fields of knowledge—in critical theory, philosophy, and literature—in the service of ideas, and above all, writing. Signed in the cities of Bogotá, Curitiba, Athens, Santiago de Chile, and Cajibío, it also reveals the extent to which Cárdenas's writing is always permeated by travel and migration. Clarín spoke with Juan Cárdenas at the headquarters of the Sigilo publishing house.

–I'd like to know what the scaffolding was like, how you conceived this very particular "literary artifact" that is Lightness.

–Look, essays are for me like a rag that I wipe over reality or time, and that rag becomes stained with patina, grime, or whatever you want to call it. A kind of sampling of a moment; a sensitivity that tries to capture things that are also half-floating in the air, and of course, always supporting everything with readings, a work of art, a film. I was writing these texts, and it's over the years that, suddenly, I realize there's a line, some echoes, some resonances. That's when I realize this is missing, and that's what the book is built with. This has happened to me twice: with a previous book called Volver a comer del árbol de la ciencia (Return to Eat from the Tree of Knowledge , Sigilo, 2018) and now with La ligereza (Lightness ). There are a series of things that I think urgently need to be thought about. The thing is, that urgency is sort of displaced, because I'm obviously talking about something else: when I talk about Pasolini ("Two Jargons of Authenticity"), I'm actually talking about very specific current problems. Ultimately, it's a bit about taking the pulse of the present, but with anachronistic gestures. So, the book is the result of that operation.

–Do you write these texts somewhere between fiction and fiction, or can you be writing, for example, a novel and then write an essay?

–That's impossible, impossible. They're really somewhere between novels. Novels, in a way, organize my time. I spend years until I say, "Ah, now it's time to sit down and write the novel," but I actually take notes for a long time, and it's curious because writing essays is, in a way, like a path, a mediating passage between one novel and the next.

–Something about the character of Lightness makes us think of a kind of aesthetic treatise. Even in the very first sentence, “All great art bears the mark of lightness,” the beginning of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory resonates. I was wondering if there was a desire to think of these essays in those theoretical terms?

–Adorno's Aesthetic Theory wasn't a very conscious reference, but having trained myself reading critical theory, Benjamin and Adorno are regulars at the bar, and they're there at a small table talking to each other. In fact, in my book, there's an essay called "Two Jargons of Authenticity," and that is an allusion to that part of Negative Dialectics where Adorno talks about the jargon of authenticity, referring to all of Heideggerian ontology: that is perhaps the only conscious nod. It seems to me that today more than ever it's important to return to Adorno's critique of Heidegger to say: "Wait a minute, how is it that we're using the ontology of an ultra-reactionary, Nazi gentleman, who believed in an organic form of authenticity and being, to think about ourselves today, supposedly from places of progressivism?" Okay, guys – and girls – it's time to return to these issues and think them through more closely, because obviously no one – I mean, no one sensible in the progressive camp – could go against minorities, please, that's absurd.

In “Parábola del no vuelta,” Cárdenas paints a picture that is both epochal and autobiographical . The author recounts having lived in Spain for fifteen years, and says that it was in Madrid where he “invented a life as a writer.”

It was during these years that Cárdenas witnessed " a beautiful change in peninsular Spanish, which eventually opened up to receive other rhythms, other vocabulary, other intonations modeled on remote geographies."

This transformation, which the Colombian interprets in the anthropophagic terms of Oswald de Andrade ("Spaniards eating South Americans eating Spaniards in an endless loop of happy gluttony"), corresponds, in turn, to a moment in the publishing industry in which new independent publishing houses accompany Latin American writers who circulate, produce, intersect, and find broader audiences.

–More than a decade after that birth, where do you think the debate (and your production) is headed?

–Look, obviously, history doesn't advance in a straight line, nor does it always go in that desired direction of progress. In fact, we must always expect setbacks, slowdowns, reversals, and spirals. That's inevitable. My friend, the Colombian academic José Figueroa, calls this situated universalism. Yes, indeed, there are always very particular incarnations and configurations, but ultimately they are still incarnations of something universal. During these last decades of critical theory, it was said that this universal was imperial, that it was white, etc. The problem is that we threw out the baby with the washing water—as the grandmothers say—and wrongly diagnosed that the universal was an inherent part of that imperialism. And I don't think that's the case. I believe that if we sink into particularisms, if we sink into the exaltation of other identities in the name of supposed ancestral origins, or if we even sink into the fetishization of the marginal, we run the risk of losing sight of the fact that we all need to pull in the same direction to create, well, a species and give meaning and a future to that species.

–How did this paradigm shift in the literary ecosystem impact you personally and your production?

–Although I'm not a good sociologist of these issues, you're right that we've all had this same experience, this crazy change in working conditions, and in the conditions of reception of texts as well, so yes, exchanges have become much more dynamic. I think we're much more connected now than we were a few decades ago. National isolation is breaking down, I think, slowly, but it's breaking down. And in that, the diversity, let's say, of that kind of literary publishing ecosystem plays a role: there's a before and after. Now it seems like a kind of retreat is taking place, it seems, or a retreat, in which corporations are once again gaining a lot of power, for example, when it comes to attracting authors and imposing a certain conversation. They've also started to copy strategies from independent publishers. I want to clarify that I have nothing against the industry—at least the book industry, I mean—: the only thing I think is that we have to guarantee the conditions for the continued existence of literature, that's all. In many countries in the region, independent publishers have reverted to that role, somewhat like a breeding ground for talent, which corporations then absorb. I also find that problematic. I prefer an ecosystem where an author can continue working with independent publishers for many years and pursue a career in those publishing houses, which is a commitment I'm personally trying to make. It may sound corny, but I hope it's clear: in my case, editors are my friends. Sometimes they were my friends before becoming my editors, and sometimes they were first my editors and then became my friends, but precisely because of that dialogue you're mentioning.

If in the second essay, Cárdenas criticizes Pasolini for his essentialism – which he reads as plain and simple fascism –, the third text, “Around a crisis of faith,” focuses on the recovery of the figure of the Peruvian writer, poet and anthropologist José Miguel Arguedas , analyzing his posthumous novel, The Fox from Above and the Fox from Below , and defining what he considers to be “literature with faith.”

–Why the rescue of this author, and in particular, this work?

–I think Arguedas is an extremely poorly read novelist. Sometimes he's barely read, but when he is read, he's been read from a particular perspective. It's very striking that both the readings that are made, let's say, from a certain progressive critique, and the readings that Vargas Llosa might make—who reduces him to folklore, craftsmanship, ethnography, and diminishes his literary value—both coincide in reading him from a particular perspective. For me, Arguedas is interesting, first, as an explorer of forms; he's an extremely sophisticated writer in the sense that this exploration of forms has to do with the best way to express certain historical forces, but also with conflicts of the present: in that sense, Arguedas is an urgent, ultra-modern thinker, who speaks to us today about a host of problems we face today. At the same time, it seems to me that in his Andean approach to the world there are keys to universalizable thought. In the book essay, I focus on his posthumous novel, published after his suicide, The Fox Upstairs, the Fox Downstairs. An absolutely stunning book that's like a suicide letter, but at the same time, it's a diary where he settles his score, and it's also the record of his writing in the book he's having trouble writing...

–In a beautiful anecdote included in the essay that gives the book its title, you say that language has a “feathered origin,” referring to a parrot that replaces a teacher who has disappeared in a community as a teacher. To what extent is lightheartedness related to humor?

–More than humor, I like the older connotation, where there wasn't just one but many humors: these Hippocratic medical doctrines that then spread throughout Antiquity. The connotation humor has now seems frivolous and not light. That's why I prefer to talk about laughter: laughter does seem like an important issue to me: carnivalesque laughter, that semi-Bakhtinian tradition. In fact, I'm a kind of observer of how people laugh. I mean, laughter reveals a lot to me about a person. When it's a spontaneous laugh, when it comes out of someone, it's connected by a cable that goes to the stomach, to the sex, and to the earth; that's like the connection between worlds, between the lower and the divine. Laughter connects those two extremes through the body.

–But your text also filters through –through the slip of the tongue you read in Arguedas's novel– the (Freudian) tradition of the joke and its relationship with the unconscious.

–Deep down, I think they're all along the same lines, because it's that laughter that connects you to that world that, at its core, is the underworld, which, at its core, is the unconscious. I'd almost say that laughter is a theme that runs through all my books. There's always laughter in my writing, and I'm obviously interested in that laughter being deep, cavernous, this semi-telluric laughter that connects with the underworld, with the world of the gods and the Etruscan tombs.

–One of the reasons you say led you to return to Latin America was to think of the territory as a sort of library you wanted to continue exploring, something you would have requested if you stayed in Spain. Did that imagining come true?

Latin America is inexhaustible. Since I returned in 2014—more than 10 years ago—I've been learning about many things I didn't know about, but I'm also understanding much better places I thought I knew: the things closest to my own country, places even very close to where I was born, are as if they never run out for me in any sense: not socially, historically, materially, or even naturally. Sometimes I revisit things I thought I knew, like in the research prior to the novel Transparent Pilgrim : I thought I knew that tradition, but the more I delved into it, the more I realized my tremendous ignorance and that I hadn't noticed things that were there, hidden from everyone's view, like Poe's purloined letter. And that has been a truly exciting process. Like what I told you yesterday in front of Cándido López's paintings. I love those things, and they're what keep me alive.

Juan Cárdenas' books are located at booth 1720 in the Yellow Pavilion.