What It Means to Write by Adrian McKerracher

Author:Adrian McKerracher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Creativity Is a Conversation

Mariana Docampo and I met for our interview in a café across from Parque Saavedra. She too was a connection from the friend who had written about Cortázar and politics. While Mariana talked, I listened with the hands of my mind outstretched to catch her speech so that I could bring parts of it back to her, saying, look what I found in your words, what do you think? Two hours vanished into minutes.

In one of Mariana’s stories in a collection called La fe: Relatos (The Faith: Relatings), the narrator remarked, “Comprendí en ese momento que las palabras eran un límite para la comunicación entre las especias”5 (I comprehended in that moment that words were a limit for the communication between species).

I wondered, wasn’t that limit between people, too, not just between species?

Did I write “species”? or “people”? Mariana said, surprised. Well, yes, I believe so. I believe that the language for expressing one’s self is very precarious. It’s the only thing we have. Well no. It’s not the only thing. We have other manners, we have gestures, we have other things. We don’t only have words. It’s one of the modes, not even the most efficient mode, for me to make you understand.

She paused as if to catch up to herself.

I think a lot in relation to language, she continued, and in general in what I write there’s a lot of reflection on language and on the limits of language. In principle, it’s one plane of the universe and of social relations. We communicate with what we can and we have certain conventions. But I believe that it all could be something else. That everything could be interpreted absolutely in another manner.

For example, she said, it happens in discussions with one’s partner. Someone says something, but the language is very limited. I say this, the other person says otherwise, and in reality one has to account for thousands of other variables that surround what’s being said to be able to understand it. One has to be thinking of much more than only what is said. So, yes, for me language is a limit.

Stories – Mariana preferred the word relatos, like relatings, accounts – are doubts, she said. What interests me is to put in question what’s said. That in some moment the reader distrusts all that one is saying in the relating.

If you watch television, Mariana continued, if you watch TN and you watch Canal 7, for example, which are the two poles, it’s very clear that Argentine reality is a construction. A family that watches TN will have one reality and a family that watches Canal 7 will have another. Without a doubt neither one of them is the reality.

But the theme, she said, is that one who is raised in either reality, when he or she soon sees something else, everything collapses. The point is not to go to the other side as if it were the true reality. That’s why I always try to make everything that’s constructed deconstruct itself as a mode of advancing.

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