10.13125/2039-6597/2648
In some contemporary literary works, the presence of the ‘other’ and the representation of the ‘foreigner’ emphasize the problematic ways by which human beings relate to foreign people, revealing how those issues are pressing concerns in modern society.This study questions how the shift in the way we perceive identity and belonging are depicted in Enrique Vila-Matas and Antonio Tabucchi’s fictions. Both authors aesthetically represent episodes and situations where characters’ relation to space is problematic, showing how the idea of belonging can be related not only to a specific country or a special space, but also to a desired space. Furthermore, based  on the pregnancy of the notion of ‘dwelling’ theorized by Emmanuel Levinas, this study  analyses how characters and narrators aesthetically represent the complexity of belonging and examines some of the transnational transfers and multicultural connexions displayed by both autors, mainly in Never Any End to Paris and It’s Getting Later All the Time.
application/pdf
2039-6597
2648
13
en
Maria João Simões
Between
alterity
Transcultural and Imagological Figures: Disenchantment, Allophilia, and Belonging in Enrique Vila-Matas and Antonio Tabucchi
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
7
Identarian Images
2017-06-02
2017-02-17
2017-06-02
2017-06-02
1
Maria João Simões
2017/06/02
10.13125/2039-6597/2648
Universidade de Coimbra
2039-6597
13
alterity
en
Transcultural and Imagological Figures: Disenchantment, Allophilia, and Belonging in Enrique Vila-Matas and Antonio Tabucchi
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/2648/2502
7
    Transcultural and Imagological
 Figures: Disenchantment, Allophilia,
 and Belonging in Enrique Vila-Matas
        and Antonio Tabucchi
                            Maria João Simões


     Antonio Tabucchi and Enrique Vila-Matas – the former an Italian,
born in 1943, and the latter a Spaniard, born in 1948 – have in common
the fact that they both lived through diverse multicultural experiences
which they transposed into their woks. They have in common the
explicit acknowledgment that some of their life choices were routed by
specific writers and literary works. Tabucchi traveled extensively
throughout Europe purposely in search of the authors he had become
familiar with in his uncle’s library (see Tabucchi 2010:15). In Paris, he
became acquainted with the works of Álvaro de Campos, one of the
heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, and was captivated by this poet’s
country and its culture. Pursuing this appeal, he decided to learn
Portuguese and later to study Portuguese literature. Vila-Matas, on the
other hand, escaped the franquist regime, and in seeking exile in Paris,
strove to follow in the footsteps of Hemingway, who also lived in Paris
and whose appearance he tried to emulate (Vila-Matas 2014: 3, 9, 35).
     Both writers ingeniously translated their experiences into writings
that combine fiction, biography and documentary, engaging readers in
a game of great complicity rich in irony. These works consequently
display not only what could be described as the authors’ ‘literary
transnationalism’, but also different impressions of the foreign countries
that welcomed them, as well as their encounters with the natives who
did not, making them feel alien and different.


Between, vol. VII, n.13 (Maggio/ May 2017)
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



      This essay will focus on some of the imagological representations
inspired by Tabucchi’s and Vila-Matas’ transnational experiences,
identifying similarities and differences in the way these images are
constructed and inferring the underlying themes and motifs in their
respective fictions.
      The autobiographical tendency in some of both authors’ fictional
works, shows that the roots of their displacements were different.
Enrique Vila-Matas exiled himself in Paris due to political and personal
reasons: he wanted to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere of his
country and to prove himself an indubitable writer, therefore also
proving himself worthy vis-à-vis his father with whom he had a
somewhat complicated relationship — as he reveals in Bartleby and Co
(2011: 5). Once arrived in Paris, he wished to follow in the footsteps of
his idol, Hemingway, and lived for two years in an attic rented from
Marguerite Duras. Though he kept his distance from the political
fervour of exiled Spaniards, he did meet several of them, and he also
socialized with exiled Latin-Americans. Tabucchi shared with Vila-
Matas this cosmopolitan appeal and this passion for foreign lands
inspired by literature. However, in his case, it was his passion for artists
that drew him first to Paris and, later, to Portugal, where he met his wife.
From then on, he lived half the year in Portugal and the other half in
Italy, where he taught Portuguese literature.
      The two authors can be perceived as personalities that internalized
cultural experiences marked by cultural hybridism, allowing, thus, an
approach oriented toward the unravelment of the cultural interchanges
that inform transnational studies.
      In fact, transnationalism (or transnationality1) can bring new light
on those matters in accordance with Paul Jay’s claims:


      1
       In order to emphasize both “processes of social connection and
belonging”, Nina Glick Schiller pleads for the term transnationality which can
place “cities within the synergies and tensions of the mutual construction of
the local, national and global”. Moreover, she stresses that “to speak of
transnationality and the city is to challenge the paradigms that underlie most
urban research and public policy.” (Schiller 2012: 23)


2
                                            Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)




         Since the rise of critical theory in the 1970s, nothing has reshaped
     literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of
     transnationalism. It has productively complicated the nationalist
     paradigm long dominant in these fields, transformed the nature of
     the locations we study, and focused our attention on forms of
     cultural production that take place in the liminal spaces between
     real and imagined borders. (Jay 2010: 1)

      Tabucchi repeatedly recognizes his cross-border position and the
inlayed permeability of cultures of his own works in several interviews2
and presentations, namely in “Portrait d’un écrivain en miroir”
(Tabucchi, 2007). In this text, he explains how much he is influenced by
foreign paintings, films, photographs3 and stories he heard from
different people, and how all this shaped his fictions in an
unconventional and fragmentary way — a feature particularly visible in
It’s Getting Later All the Time (Si stá facendo siempre piú tardi). Tirelessly,
Vilas-Matas also reveals to his readers how he is indebted to mixed
cultural and literary influences, stressing, especially in Never Any End to
Paris (París no se acaba nunca), how his exile in Paris contributes for those
cultural interferences, all the more so because he was “forming part of a
long line of generations of writers who had gone into exile” in the Latin
Quarter and, in so doing, he was “embracing the order of those who are
for ever foreign” (Vila-Matas 2014: 67). The fragmentary mode explored
by both authors in their autobiographical fictions, in the midst of other
contemporary writings, may have participated in what Paul Jay
identifies as a welcome contest to uniformity:


     2
        A list of some the multiple interviews given by Tabucchi is presented in
the official website www.antoniotabucchi.it/ dedicated to the author.
      3
        The importance of those artistic interchanges can also be perceived
when Tabucchi explains, in the same text, how he insisted foreign publishers
use a particular and unique photograph on the cover of his book It’s Getting
Later All the Time (which is the same in all the editions in foreign languages).


                                                                                    3
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



         One claim that is often made against the changes ushered in by
      the transnational turn in literary studies is that it has led to a
      debilitating fragmentation. Principles of coherence that have
      guided the field for decades have given way to a focus on
      pluralities, differences, hybrid identities, and complicated
      transnational geographies that are seemingly incoherent and
      unmanageable. I do not agree, because I believe that literary studies
      as a field has always thrived on fragmentation and challenges to
      coherence. (Jay 2010: 3)

     The two authors’ experiences illustrate a new cultural reality that
could be called, following Stephen Greenblatt’s claims, a “cultural
wandering”: the cultural flow of writers and men of letters who enjoy a
variety of cultural experiences – through grants, experiences abroad,
such as Writers in Residence programmes, and voluntary cultural
delocalization. In fact, according to Greenblatt (2010: 251), mobility
studies should take into account, not only the traditional forms of
movement, marked as “serious”, but also “others, such as tourism,
theatre festivals” which “are rendered virtually invisible”. Although
these situations — and those experienced by the two writers — are not
without historical antecedents, they go beyond the traditional attraction
of artists for cities known for their artistic ambiance and creative
freedom. This difference is acutely perceived by Vila-Matas when he
describes the artist Cozarinsky:

         I went to the cinema a lot and Edgardo Cozarinsky must have
      gone a lot too, as I often found him watching the same film as me.
      Cozarinsky, a late Borgesian according to Susan Sontag, was an
      Argentinian exile who seemed to have ended up feeling
      comfortable in the role of outsider. A writer and a film-maker, he
      lived between Paris and London [...]. I admired him because he
      knew how to combine two cities, two artistic allegiances [...]; until I
      arrived in Paris, it had never occurred to me that one could live in
      two cities at the same time [...]. Ten years after I left Paris, I specially
      admire his book Urban Voodoo, an exile’s book, a transnational book,
      employing a hybrid structure very innovative in those days that has



4
                                            Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



     since become more established in literature (Vila-Matas 2014: 112-
     3).

      Pondering the liminal position of the Argentinian film-maker,
Villa-Matas notices that the roots of the hybridity exhibited in his work
lay precisely in the core of his own experience, allowing him to create a
fictional work of mixed cultural ambiances — a transnational book, as
he called it himself. Furthermore, Vila-Matas also insinuates that his
own situation bears a true resemblance with the exiled companion,
suggesting that the same transnational features could be applied to his
own book. In some aspects, the hybrid structure associated with Urban
Voodoo4 can also be detected in Never any End to Paris (Paris no se acaba
nunca), namely in its mixture of documentary novel and fictitious
autobiographical lecture. In other words, elements of self-fiction and
memoirs are interwoven with elements of documentary tone, inasmuch
as the narrative of the learning years of the young Vila-Matas (a sort of
bildungsroman) is interspersed with the narrative of Hemingway’s life
and the portrayal of the ‘lost generation’5 (which is one of the leading
topics of this work). This textual appropriation oscillates between
parody, pastiche and quotation, in a composition that either combines
both embedding and alternation, or that explores the mise en abyme

     4
        Configuring a protagonist (Edgardo Cozarinzky) modelled on the
author Urban Voodoo also stands as a memory log. The main character is a well-
known artist who finds himself in Paris with no money to pay the rent, just
like Vila-Matas. Susan Sontag sees this novel as a “tratado do exilado”,
“cosmopolita y por lo tanto transnacional”, in its medley of languages and
genres. In his turn, F. Cabrera Infante suggests that Cozarinsky, talking about
a lost Buenos Aires and other cities, in letters or in imagetic postcards, written
from Paris, in the second paratext of the work, “escogió el exilio como forma
geográfica de la nostalgia”. It is not surprising, therefore, that the author of
Never Any End to Paris greatly admires this work, one more to have greatly
inspired him.
      5
        The expression «lost generation» may have been coined by Gertrud
Stein, as Vila-Matas (2014: 160) explains based on Hemingway’s A Moveable
Feast.


                                                                                    5
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



technique, for the author keeps finding similarities between episodes
and scenes of his own life and episodes narrated by Hemingway or by
other artists.
      Another point of comparision can be found in the resemblance
between the characteristics underlined by Vila-Matas in the lifestyle of
the Argentinian artist and certain aspects of Tabucchi’s life, as the Italian
writer also lived in between two cities. Moreover, the admiration of the
hybrid structure inscribed in the book of the Argentinian writer is
similar to the appreciation made by Vila-Matas a Tabucchi’s book bout
Donna di Porto Pim, which is an example, for him of “border book”: an
“inquisitive contraption of tales, memoir fragments [...], maps [...], pieces
of an islander woman story [...], all transformed by a firm literary will in
a pure fiction.” (Vila-Matas 2011). In fact, some of Tabucchi’s books are
also characterized by the use of a strong subjective space as the starting
point for narratives of fictional or invented memories, namely in It's
Getting Later All the Time. This novel is constructed with several feigned
letters sent from many different locations, such as Italy, Greece, London,
and others places, while spatial references are even more diversified,
from Abyssinia to Brazil and the Americas, among others, most of which
result from the author’s own life experiences. Moreover, the stories of
love encounters and ruptures are brought about, or permeated, by
literary and artistic references.
      These aspects can be clearly seen in the third letter, entitled
“Forbidden games”. Echoing the author’s real life experience, the sender
of the letter wanders through the streets of Paris, and recalls his earlier
life there: the route to the Cité Universitaire, at night, after the theatre
shows, the Buñuel films, the jazz clubs (“caveaux”) of Saint Germain and
the musical anarchism of Boris Vian – showing that, like Vila-Matas, his
nostalgic feelings are filled with literary recollections. This short text is
full of allusions, and references to, philosophers, writers and artists, as
well as works equally mentioned by Vila-Matas, thus showing that the
Paris experiences of both authors shared common references.
      Concerning the strategies adopted by Tabucchi to convey the
cosmopolitanism and contemporaneity of his artistic experiences, one
other aspect that should be pointed out is the self-reflexivity of his


6
                                         Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



writing, which demystifies the very processes of fictional construction.
This can be observed, for example, in the book Si sta facendo sempre più
tarde that adopts an epistolary style, but, here and there, also
deconstructs this discursive genre through irony and other stylistic
devices, such as the impersonation of a scientific element — the
hemoglobin — when the narrator unusually and ironically starts the
letter with the sentence “My dear beloved Hemoglobin” (Tabucchi 2006:
56) .
      Also, in the epistle, under the English title of “Forbidden games”,
the author jokingly explains to his girlfriend (who has left him) “what a
novel is”, offering her “a summary” of a “hypothetical novel”, which
could be interpreted as «let’s say, a small contraption of the do-it-
yourself», urging her to learn more about “narrative structures”, about
the choice of a homodiegetic or a heterodiegetic narrator and, even
more, challenging her to complete the plot by filling in the gaps and
blank spaces of the story (Tabucchi 2001: 48). On the other hand, in
“Strange Way to Live”, Tabucchi deconstructs the fictional strategy of a
supposed found book, often used in literature, and playfully demystifies
its verisimilitude through a process of mise en abyme concerning the
motives that trigger the literary creation. The letter is a veiled tribute to
Vila-Matas: it alludes to and reinvents the steps taken by some
characters of Vila-Matas’ book El viaje vertical, thus interpolating their
stories with some personal references concerning Vila-Matas’ own
fragmentary, personal ideas. The title of the letter, in its turn, alludes to
another Vila-Matas’ book, entitled Extraña Forma de Vida, a title that is
also picked up in another title, this time from an LP record of Amalia
Rodrigues whose cover had captivated Vila-Matas. These gimmicks
force readers to unfold all the superposed layers of references presented
like Chinese boxes. But, as Bruno Ferraro (2001: 59) stresses, “it is
precisely the intricate web leading to the creation of the stories, the
fragments and the characters in them that intrigues the readers of
Tabucchi’s texts”, urging them to search for an interpretation, not unlike
a game of reverse game played with meanings. Other strategies used in
this text are, on the one hand, the deconstruction of the author/narrator’s
omniscience, by presenting a lack of full knowledge about the characters


                                                                                 7
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



and, on the other hand, the break of temporal linearity of the narrative
and possible facts, visible in this sentence:

          And that book by an author who had already foreseen
      everything about you, your itinerary, your path, made you think
      that maybe you were pursuing your future and at the same time it
      made you reacquire the meaning of what you had lost: it is your
      vertical journey; in its veritable, implacable and unwitting end, on
      the contrary, it is as if your journey had shifted to the horizontal:
      it’s true!, it’s true, you are in movement, and time passes through
      you, your future is looking for you, it finds you, it is living you: it
      has already lived you. (Tabucchi 2006: 170)

     Self-reflexivity is also continuously present in Never Any End to
Paris, writing being one of the main, if not the main theme of this novel,
given that this work resorts to the characteristics of the bildungsroman to
construct an ironic novel on a young writer’s apprenticeship. Given the
chance of renting his apartment from the feared and admired writer
Marguerite Duras, whose advice he timidly seeks, many of his thoughts
turn around the thirteen instructive points highlighted by Duras to
achieve a good, solid and captivating work of art, that functions like a
recipe:

         1. Structural problems. 2. Unity and harmony. 3. Plot and story.
      4 Time. 5. Textual effects. 6. Verisimilitude. 7. Narrative technique.
      8. Characters. 9. Dialogue. 10. Setting(s). 11. Style. 12. Experience.
      13. Linguistic register. (Vila-Matas 2014: 21)

     In terms of imagological configuration, both authors weave images
of Paris imbued in the fascination and admiration typical of youth (here
configured as a time impregnated by intense cultural and artistic
learning). However, while those images are conveyed, the reader is
purposefully reminded of how the critical detachment of later years is
inscribed in it. But, foreign national imagotypes are also built upon
cultural stereotypes belonging to the different social groups of a given



8
                                          Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



country (Beller 2000). With the intricate interplay between the past(s)
and present of this autobiographical text, Vila-Matas plays with old
images of cultural groups and jokingly reminds readers of his young
literary options, as when he remembers hearing about a literary meeting
— “an OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) meeting” — and
remembers wondering whether he should go or not:

        Oulipians, pataphysicists, situationists… I thought the most
     prudent thing would be to carry on being a situationist, though not
     a practising one. I wasn’t in the mood for too many new adventures.
     But I had to admit that Paris was so full of surprises that there was
     never any end to them. (Vila-Matas 2011: 149)

     Tabucchi also plays with time differences as when he ironically
refers to his youth. An example of this strategy is the jocose recollection
of to his naïve belonging to a sort of “coffee shop existentialism” – a
theoretical leftism rather than a leftism of real engagement. And thus
(also exploring the backward look allowed by the autobiographical
register) his images of Paris, which convey the admiration and
fascination he feels for the city and reveal his enduring allophilia for
French culture, are joined by more critical and disenchanted images, like
the one showing how in Parisian cafés, contemporary students prefer
American to French songs (2006: 54). In contrast with the
disenchantment, he witnesses the gesture of a Frenchman who opts for
a sentimental chanson by Charles Trenet. If, at first, Tabucchi identifies
him as a native of Auvergne,6 stressing how his physical description
conforms to the regional stereotype – a short, stocky man with a
typically French face –, but, soon after, the stereotypical perspective is
broken, on the psychological and emotional levels, because the author
identifies himself with this common man, sharing his old-fashioned and


     6
       In this reference to a man from Auvergne, there may be some echoes of
the verses of the well-known «Chanson de l’Auvergnat» by Georges Brassens,
which deconstructs the stereotype of the “Auvergnat” as stingy, and underlies
the capacity to understand and to be sympathetic with the foreigner.


                                                                                  9
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



generational taste in music and felling close to him through it. In this
sense and following the writer’s thoughts and moves, the reader can
perceive either the stereotypes or their deconstruction.
      In the author’s recollection of young experiences, the emphasis is
laid on the interculturality induced by social interaction at the Cité
Universitaire, which is illustrated by the friendship between the
protagonist and some Japanese students, among whom he recalls a
medical student who used to sing Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tabucchi
thus goes beyond stereotypes, as the hetero-images created in this work
are very complex because the ‘other’ they portray presents multiple
facets and is sometimes idealized and sometimes criticized. This
complexity highlights the challenges imagological studies must face
nowadays since, according to Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen (2007:
432-33), if “literary imagology deals with attitudes and judgments as
fixed in texts”, its main objectives are to examine, interpret and
demystify them. As Beller stresses that not only “mutual relations
between nations are a social given”, but also “the artistic invocation,
articulation and instrumentalization of national themes and figures is a
given” and, being as it is, the imagological approach has the important
task of uncloaking the processes leading to prejudicial images.
Moreover, it will have to deal with new ways to interpret national
identity, since this can no longer be understood as an impervious or
static concept.
      It is precisely a different way of being in the world and of
perceiving the relationship with national characteristics that these works
depict, demonstrating that the two authors are permeable to the ‘other’
and to his/her cultural difference, thereby transforming the ‘I’ and its
own identity in a dynamic way. In fact, according to Levinas, the
conceptualization of alterity implies understanding the ‘ipseity’ (or
selfhood) of the ‘other’, of what characterises him/her, as well as the
acceptance of the changes it causes in the ‘I’:

         To be I is, over and beyond any individuation that can be derived
      from a system of references, to have identity as one’s content. The I
      is not a being that always remains the same, but is the being whose


10
                                           Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



     existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity
     throughout all that happens to him. He is the primal identity, the
     primordial work of identification. The I is identical in its very
     alterations. He represents them to himself and thinks them. […] The
     soul […], to be sure, dwells in what is not itself, but it acquires its
     own identity by this dwelling in the ‘other’ (and not logically, by
     opposition to the other). (Levinas 1991: 36, 115)

      This identity process –which includes psychological and
sociological elements –can be observed in Tabucchi’s “Forbidden
games”. In this text, the author embraces French culture, and exposes
every episode to a French spatial and temporal contextualization.
Morevover, he includes a letter written in French in the original Italian
publication.
      This incorporation of the language of the ‘other’, which underlines
his “dwelling in the ‘other’”, to use Levinas’ term, is even more
profound and extensive in his novel Requiem, originally published in
Portuguese, a proof of his strong lusophilia. The intensity of this work
is matched by Vila-Matas’ Dublinesque, where the author’s fascination
with Joyce’s Dublin is depicted. The two novels are homages to writers
and to these writers’ connexion with a city: Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon
and James Joyce’s Dublin.
      If in Never Any End to Paris admiration becomes a sort of “manie”
(the term used by Daniel-Henri Pageaux in contrast with “phobie”7), in
Dublinesque epithets such as adoration or veneration are more adequate8.

     7
        Pageaux (1989: 157) differentiates between three types of fundamental
figurations, “phobie”, “manie”, “philie”, considering them the main
distinctions concerning the establishment of imagological relationships.
      8
        Stressing the complexity of the relationships with the ‘other’, in an
introduction of a book on Imagology, I proposed a two-entry table combining
different types of relationship (with the ‘other’) with several degrees of
emotional commitment. This table is followed by a diagram representing the
nuances and recursive complexity of these combinations, where the multiple
and dynamic features of the relationships with the ‘other’ is clarified. (Simões
2011: 45).


                                                                                  11
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



In this novel, fascination and veneration indeed drive the characters’
behaviour, since its protagonist, Samuel Riba, a retired editor, wishes to
recreate and relive the experiences of the main characters in Joyce’s
Ulysses. He even tries to understand the obscure and mysterious “man
in a mackintosh” seen by Joyce’s protagonist, Bloom (Vila-Matas 2013:
98). Beyond Samuel Riba’s attitudes, however, the reader can feel the
veneration of his creator towards Joyce’s work, similar to the Tabucchi’s
veneration of poet Fernando Pessoa.
      In Never Any End to Paris, Vila-Matas recreates the image of Paris as
a capital city, artistic and cosmopolitan, in contrast with its Latino-
American counterparts, crushed under the weight of dictatorship, and
with the self-image of a provincial, bourgeois and enclosed Barcelona.
However, if Paris is portrayed as the city of artists,9 welcoming and
liberating, it can also be intimidating in its elegance. Undoubtedly, the
value placed on success here can be overwhelming, and its intellectual
trends can be elitist or hermetic: Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia
Kristeva, and other thinkers of Tel Quel, are seen from a great distance
by the bashful Vila-Matas. As young writer, he is flabbergasted when he
discovers the exotic destinations they are invited to (Vila-Matas 2001:
57), or when he reads Jacques Lacan’s cryptic comments on Marguerite
Duras (ibid.: 185). In different ways, they are all part of the inaccessible
glamour of Paris, which is ironically portrayed by the mature author
while it had induced feelings of despair and isolation in the young, then
unknown writer.
      Regarding Tabucchi’s imagotypes, although he creates positive
hetero-images of cities like Paris or Oporto, he does not avoid less


      9
        Paris is such a welcoming city that the Valencian concierge of the
building where the penniless Vila-Matas rents an attic acts more like a
concierge than as a Catalan fellow citizen, in the eyes of the anxious young
aspiring writer. According to the narrator, the concierge’s perspective is
clearly determined by her professional status, with a tendency to stereotype
the tenants, thus showing that her sense of identity with the homeland is
mitigated by the process of acculturation. Underlying all of this, one feels the
fragmented identities of a forcibly unified Spain.


12
                                           Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



flattering images of Portugal and of its colonial past. He does not ignore
the effects of this oppression on present-day Portugal either –something
which is evoked by a street vendor in Oporto singing a ballad in Creole
by the Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora:

        Na ausência e na distância,10 sings a voice on the street, and
     immediately after comes the cry: laranjas, laranjas! It is necessary to
     shift from childhood to the categories of the present, dawn is
     peeping in at the window, and a street vendor has learned a song
     by Cesária Évora: Africa, which Portugal conquered with arms and
     ships before bringing on the civilization of Christ, the tong of the
     West, and slavery, now returns like a nemesis […]. She sings Africa,
     ah, Africa that I have never known, Africa the mother, Africa the
     womb, Africa that my Europe has raped for centuries, Africa the
     immense, poor, sick yet still cheerful [...]. (Tabucchi 2011: 169)

      The poignant criticism embedded in Tabucchi’s perspective draws
a negative hetero-image of Portugal due to its colonial past, and also a
negative auto-image, since the author extends his criticism to Europe
with an acute sense and awareness of belonging to it.
      Beyond the recurring theme of literary writing (displayed in these
but also in other works by Vila-Matas and Tabucchi), there are others
themes common to both authors. Directly or indirectly, like many others
of their generation, both deal with the Spanish Civil War, as well as with
the question of censorship and abuse in dictatorships. In Vila-Matas’
work, these subjects recur both implicitly and explicitly through the
references to Hemingway, whose life and work are closely tied with
Spanish events, and through the process of emulation, the narrator tries
to follow in the steps of his idol (this being one of the conductive theme
of Vila-Matas’ book). This is particularly noticeable in the recreation of
the episode of the storming of the Hotel Ritz during the occupation,
when Hemingway confronted Malraux, after he felt the latter had


      In the Italian original text, these few words “In absence and in distance”
     10

appear in Portuguese.


                                                                                  13
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



abandoned the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War (Vila-Matas
2014: 117).
     This Civil War is also thematically present in Tabucchi’s novel
Afirma Pereira (Pereira Mantains), about a period in the life of a journalist,
a melancholic and naïve widower who gradually becomes aware of the
injustices brought about by Salazar’s dictatorship in Portugal. He is
cured of his earlier abulia as he starts to help a Portuguese young man,
an orphan who lost his Italian father and Portuguese mother and is
involved in the resistance movement. With his girlfriend, Marta, and his
cousin, Bruno Rossi, a typographer, Monteiro Rossi travels to the
Alentejo, in Southern Portugal, to recruit fighters for the Spanish
republican cause, which will eventually cost him his life at the hands of
PIDE, the Portuguese secret police.
     In this novel, history is reconstructed with plenty of literary
references, highlighting the stance of intellectuals and writers on
political causes:

         Well, said Father António, it all began with the Basque clergy,
      because after the bombing of Guernica the Basque clergy [...] took
      sides with the Republic. [...] In the Spring [...] two famous French
      Catholic writers, Francois Mauriac and Jacques Maritain, published
      a manifesto in defence of the Basques. [...] The problem was
      complicated by the Vatican, which claimed that thousands of the
      Spanish clergy had been killed by the republicans, and that the
      Basque Catholics were “Red Christians” and deserved to be
      excommunicated [...], and to make matters worse Claudel [...], a
      Catholic writer himself, wrote an ode “Aux Martyrs Espagnols” as
      the preface in verse to a swinish propaganda leaflet produced by a
      Spanish nationalist agent in Paris. (Tabucchi 2011: 132-133)

     Thus does Tabucchi reconfigure some of the events leading to the
Civil War, providing different group imagotypes: religious, political and
cultural groups, and showing the entangled relationships between
them.




14
                                         Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



       This work by Tabucchi is also a real indictment of the explicit
forms of censorship typical of authoritarian regimes, but also of the one
exercised by democratic regimes through corruption and demagoguery.
This was the reason for the book’s great impact in Berlusconi’s Italy. The
intelligentsia, in opposition, singled out this novel as an example of the
fight against censorship, comparing the old Portuguese censorship with
the current Berlusconi rule. Although the novel may have been used for
specific political purposes, it nevertheless shows the potential of the
literary work for universality. The author thus inserts a dark period of
Portuguese history in the wider European political game, exposing the
connections between Franco and Salazar, as well as the support Franco
received from Mussolini and from Germany (Tabucchi 2011: 142).

     Both Tabucchi’s and Vila-Matas’ works demonstrate how, while a
novel may start from an intense interest in one culture, acquired from a
young age and by living abroad, it can also comment with great insight
on more worldwide matters. Both authors excel in forming hetero-
images through many cultural references –as seen in Tabucchi’s Pereira
Mantains, and in Vila-Matas’ Never Any End to Paris. Interestingly, at the
end of It’s Getting Later All the Time, Tabucchi confirms the pertinence of
the narratives strategies’ comparison in both authors when he adds a
postscript with information on his sources, on the people11 and on the
episodes that inspired the various letters. In his explanation of the
circumstances that propelled him to write the letter “Strange Way to
live”, he makes an explicit homage to the Spanish author, at the same
time confirming his own way of capturing cultural relationships in order
to picture them in his complex and entangled fictions: “‘Strange Way to
Live’ takes its title from an old fado by Amália Rodrigues, and can be


     11
         According to Tabucchi, the “text “What’s the Use of a Harp with Only
One String?” owes much to the memory of a friend who departed one day for
his own Elsewhere without coming back, to a brief encounter with the
representative of the Jewish Community of Salonika, to the pianist Sandro Ivo
Bartoli, with whom it is nice to talk about music, and to a person who once
talked to me about the remote past of Alexandria”. (Tabucchi 2011: 231)


                                                                                15
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



read as a tribute to Enrique Vila-Matas and to the anthropophagic
brilliance of his work.” (Tabucchi 2011: 231)12




      12
        About those anthropophagic fictions, Tabucchi explains himself
stressing that “he was not a robber, but only a good listener” — « Là je n’ai pas
été un voleur, j’ai simplement été à l’écoute » (Tabucchi 2007).



16
                                         Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)




                              Works cited
Abbrugiati, Perle, “Éloge d’Antonio Tabucchi”, Italies, N° spécial (2007),
    http://italies.revues.org/3700 online (accessed 10/2/2017).
Beller, Manfred - Leerssen, Joep, Imagology. The Cultural Construction and
    Literary Representation of National Characters, STUDIA IMAGOLOG-
    ICA 13, Amsterdam-New York, Rodopi, 2007.
Beller, Manfred, “Imagologia”, in Cometa, Michele (ccord.), Dizionario
    degli Studi Culturali, 2000, http://www.studiculturali.it/diziona-
    rio/pdf/imagologia.pdf web (accessed 10/2/2017).
Cozarinski, Edgardo, Vodú Urbano, Madrid, Editorial Anagrama, 1985,
    http://docslide.us/documents/39745203-cozarinsky-edgardo-vudu-
    urbanopdf.html web (accessed 28/7/2015).
Deidier, Roberto, “Antonio Tabucchi”, Enciclopedia Italiana, VI appen-
    dice, 2000, http://www.treccani.it/ web (accessed 10/2/2017).
Jay, Paul, Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies, Ith-
    aca, Cornell UP, 2010.
Ferraro, Bruno, “Antonio Tabucchi revisited: the specularity of fiction”,
    in Antonio Tabucchi: Geografia de um Escritor Inquieto / Antonio Tabuc-
    chi: Geography of a Restless Writer, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gul-
    benkian – CAM/ACARTE, 2001.
Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An essay on exteriority,
    Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic, 2011 (Orig. Totalité et Infini : Essai sur
    l’extériorité, Paris, Kluwer Academic, 1961).
Pageaux, Daniel-Henri, “De l'imagerie culturelle à l’maginaire”, Précis
    de Littérature Comparée, Dir. Pierre Brunel & Yves Chevrel, Paris,
    PUF, 1989: 133-162.
Simões, Maria João, “Imagology and relational complexity: the group
    stereotype”, in Beyond Binarisms. Discontinuities and Displacements:
    Studies in Comparative Literature, Ed. Eduardo Coutinho, Rio de Ja-
    neiro, Aeroplano Editora, 2009: 81-90.
Simões, Maria João, “Introdução: Cruzamentos teóricos da Imagologia
    Literária: Imagotipos e Imaginário”, in Imagotipos Literários: Processos
    de (Des)Configuração na Imagologia Literária, Coord. Maria João Si-
    mões, Coimbra, Centro de Literatura Portuguesa, 2011: 9–53.


                                                                                17
Maria João Simões, Transcultural and Imagological Figures



Schiller, Nina Glick, “Transnationality, Migrants and Cities. A Compa-
    rative Approach”, in Eds. Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Tho-
    mas Faist, Nina Glick Schiller, Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Re-
    search Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, London, Routledge,
    2012.
Tabucchi, Antonio, It’s Getting Later All the Time: a Novel in the Form of
    Letters, trad. Alastair McEwan, New York, New Direction Pu-
    blishing Corporation, 2006 (orig. Si sta facendo sempre più tardi. Ro-
    manzo in forma di lettere, 2001).
Tabucchi, Antonio, “Portrait d’un écrivain en miroir”, Italies, N°
    special (2007), http://italies.revues.org/3736 online (accessed
    10/2/2017).
Tabucchi, Antonio, Viaggi e Altri Viaggi, Milano, Fratinelli, 2010.
Tabucchi, Antonio, Pereira Maintains, Edinburgh-London-New York,
    Canongate, 2011, (orig. Sostiene Pereira, 1994).
Vila-Matas, Enrique, Bartleby & Co, London, Vintage, 2005 (orig. Bartleby
    y Companhía, 2000).
Vila-Matas, Enrique, Dublinesque, London, Vintage, 2013 (orig. Dubli-
    nesca, 2012).
Vila-Matas, Enrique, Never Any End to Paris, London, Harvill Secker,
    2014 (orig. París no se acaba nunca, 2003).
Vila-Matas, Enrique, “Viajar, derrumbarse del sueño (Antonio Tabuc-
    chi)”, in El País. Babelio. 5 de Febrero (2011) http://elpais.com/dia-
    rio/2011/02/05/babelia/1296868389_850215.html web (accessed 10-2-
    2017).



                                      The author
        Maria João Simões

Maria João Simões is PhD Professor of the Department of Languages,
Literatures and Cultures at the Faculty of Humanities - Universidade of
Coimbra (Portugal). Main subjects of research: Portuguese literature,
comparative literatura, imagology, literary transnationalism and


18
                                      Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



Realism. Membre of Executif Committee of the portuguese research
eentre “Centro de Literatura Portuguesa”. Coordinator of the ongoing
project “Literature, Imagology and Transnationalism: Representation of
Migrations”. Coordinator of a project, completed in 2011, with results
has published in the volume Imagotipos Literários: Processos de
(Des)Configuração na Imagologia Literária (2011). Publications:
“Imagology and Relational Complexity: The Group Stereotype” , in
Coutinho, Eduardo F. (ed.) Beyond Binarisms. Discontinuities and
Displacements: Studies in Comparative Literature, (2009). Editor of the
volumes O Grotesco, 2005; O Fantástico, 2007; co-editor of the volume O
Século do Romance. Realismo e Naturalismo na Ficção Oitocentista
(2013).

      Email: mjsimoes@fl.uc.pt




                             The paper
Date sent: 31/01/2017
Date accepted: 15/04/2017
Date published: 31/05/2017



                    How to quote this paper
Simões, Maria João, “Transcultural and Imagological Figures:
Disenchantment, Allophilia, and Belonging in Enrique Vila-Matas and
Antonio Tabucchi”, Longing and Belonging/ Désir et Appartenance, Eds.
Massimo Fusillo, Brigitte Le Juez, Beatrice Seligardi, Between, VII.13
(2017), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




                                                                             19
