Daniel Saldaña París

AB

Is there a place in the United States that reminds you of Cuernavaca? 

DSP

Thirty or forty years ago, Cuernavaca was a more Mexican city, but due to its proximity to Mexico City, it has become a suburb or satellite that feels very American. There is an urge to erase all traces of history and replace them with shopping malls. In that sense, I have seen a ton of places in the U.S. that remind me of Cuernavaca. But Cuernavaca is also the city that I grew up in. I feel it’s inevitable for me to see something of Cuernavaca in every place because it’s my first model for a city. It’s the first city where I wandered on my own, the first city where I got lost, the first city where I had intense emotional relationships, so I project a bit of Cuernavaca onto every place. 

I remember spending a summer in Montreal with my best friend from Cuernavaca, and we used to replace the names of Montreal streets with Cuernavaca streets. We would call each other and agree to meet on Avenida Zapata, but it was actually Avenue du Parc. There is something childish about that game, but there is also something real in the gesture of reproducing the same city everywhere you go.

AB

My first impression upon reading The Dance and the Fire was that it was a novel about the impossibility of returning––the fact that finding oneself in a place of one’s past won’t bring back the past itself. But when I reread the novel, I realized that that is only clear in one of the parts, but not in the other two. Erre returns to Cuernavaca, but what about Natalia and Conejo? How do you envision their movements?

DSP

There are three different movements in the novel, even in a musical sense. Erre stands for the longing to return, not only to the city, but also to an idea of community, or a style of intense and close friendship. He lacks emotional proximity to other people and he’s trying to move towards it and reconnect. Natalia represents an almost opposite movement. She’s looking outward, wanting to leave or starting to entertain the idea of leaving. 

AB

And in the end, she leaves. 

DSP

She leaves because she has an opposite trajectory. Meanwhile, Conejo represents the acceptance of the decision to stay. Even though it seems like he’s the one that has his shit the least together, he’s also the only one that is at ease with his stability. 

AB

Did you write the three parts in sequence?

DSP

Not really. This novel had many false starts and I was trying to find the right form for a long time. The first thing I wrote was Erre’s section, the middle part, which focuses on the body. It’s also the most autobiographical part of the novel. At the time I was writing it, I had an undiagnosed disease that caused me a lot of pain, so I was taking note of my symptoms in order to better understand it. I wanted to reach a point where I could present my notes and my medical history to someone that could give me a diagnosis. After I started writing that, I began to explore the aspect of dance, which is also deeply connected to the body and pain. I was thinking of different ways of losing control over one’s body. This can be pain, which expropriates your body. But it can also be moments of ecstatic dance or other forms of rapture, even erotic moments which remove you from your own body. Once I began writing Natalia’s part, everything became clear in my head. I set everything else aside, and I started writing things in order. 

AB

Would you say that Conejo is also removed from his own body? He spends most of the time smoking weed, but I don’t know if that counts. 

DSP

It’s more than that. Conejo’s voice isn’t only his. He’s removed from his own body because his voice is also his father’s. I tried to imagine a narrator in the moment when you live with someone and you have a symbiotic or almost codependent relationship. Sometimes you’re not able to tell where your ideas begin and the other person’s end—I wanted it to feel a bit like that. It’s the historian’s knowledge blending into Conejo’s conspiratory paranoia. He also loses control over his body, but through the willing act of lending it to his father, who is blind and confined in his house. Conejo becomes something like a medium for his father’s voice. 

AB

I like The Dance and the Fire as a title because it provides an interpretative key to the novel. One is constantly looking for the interplay between both terms. Regarding the former, I was wondering if the musings on dancing as a creative process can also be read as reflections on the act of writing. Even though they seem like opposite activities, maybe there is something that they share as creative processes?

DSP

I believe there is. If you disregard the medium for a second and consider the most abstract part of creation, there is a state of creative alertness that allows you to link things that aren’t normally related to one another, be it through the body or through language. I believe that state is common to all creative processes. Of course, there are many differences, but there is also something about the state of flow in dance—the state of forgetting oneself or being outside oneself—which reminds me a lot of the moments when writing works the best. I believe that being at a party and forgetting oneself while dancing, becoming part of the music and the flow of movement, feels a lot like the moment when you forget that you’re writing and suddenly you realize that you don’t know how long you’ve been sitting there. You take a pause after a paragraph and you feel like someone turned off the music all of the sudden. That feeling of forgetting oneself is very strange, because you lose control while retaining control over what you’re creating. 

AB

Given your trajectory as a poet, can you outline a distinction between prose and poetry relating to their performative and bodily aspects and the comparison to dance?

DSP

Poetry is an art of breathing. In that sense, it is much more connected to the body. Beyond the quality of the result, I feel that prose redeems me as a human being when it is closest to poetry, because it becomes another way of inhabiting time and filling its space. I read out loud when I write, and I search for the bodily dimension. This is also a way of saying that sometimes I want writing to feel more like dancing. For this novel, I tried to write the first part from the body. I recorded myself doing movement exercises, I watched the videos, and then I tried to write and describe those movements so that they would have a real bodily anchor. 

In order to experiment like that, I need to establish clear formal parameters beforehand. I need to decide the structure of the book, as well as the characters and tone. Within that rationally delineated structure, I can look for the space of freedom where language becomes poetry.

AB

So, when you write, your purpose is not only to tell a story, but to find the precise words and the rhythm for it. 

DSP

I like for there to be a bit of both. I care about the plot and I don’t think that we should completely abandon it because it presents one of the many possibilities for a novel. But within a structure that moves forward, I like for there to be repetitions and moments of opacity. I feel like literature in the U.S. insists on transparency and on the notion that a good literary style is hyper-transparent. And I enjoy this as a reader, for language to be almost invisible and to be entirely absorbed by the world of the story. But in my own books, I like for there to be moments of opacity, so that you realize that you’re reading and you allow yourself to go in and out of the world of fiction. 

AB

I was also thinking about the role of documentation in the novel and in your work. You have taught courses at the Center for Fiction and Columbia University on the diary as a form and have also written on the subject on several occasions. Is there a clear distinction between writing fiction and keeping a register of your own process? Does one form of writing spill into the other?

DSP

Both do. I wanted this novel in particular to feel like three different styles of logs. Even though the entries lack dates and other textual markers that are typical of diaries, I wanted this to read like possible ways of keeping a register. What I like about diaries is that everything fits into the same notebook, so you can be writing something creative, or taking notes for a future project, and then that gets interrupted with a grocery list, or you have a fight with your partner, or there’s a family drama. So I like the way in which the personal and the creative blend into each other in a diary. I wanted Natalia’s part to read like that while Erre’s part is a log of his bodily symptoms. 

In general, I like for there to be a research process that becomes part of the novel—to have the feeling of found documents, photographs, archival work, and diaries that feed into the narration. It’s a very baroque gesture, but it is also part of a Latin American tradition that ranges from Borges to Cristina Rivera Garza, passing through Severo Sarduy and many others. Sarduy’s idea of the Latin American Baroque is that the text is interwoven with other texts, so the writing also establishes a dialogue with other sources. I appreciate the feeling that is generated by a multiplicity of layers.

Oftentimes, when we talk about the memoir or autobiography, we tend to think of it as if it was completely detached from other readings, but the truth is that being able to tell where research ends and where autobiography begins seems impossible for those of us who spend most of our working hours reading. At least it’s hard for me to discern between one and the other. For me, writing about my life is also writing about the books that I’ve read at different stages. I feel that it’s natural for anyone who is writing about their life to connect with what they are reading and watching. That’s why I included the description of a movie in Natalia’s part.

AB

Which movie is it, by the way?

DSP

I actually came up with it for the novel. I believe it’s only a short scene with someone that commits suicide on a train. I enjoy making up books and works of art and mixing them with real ones.

AB

It’s a very Borgesian gesture. I wanted to talk about the other part of the title: the fire. Besides setting the atmosphere for the entire novel and moving the plot forward, it lends itself more clearly for a political reading: the fire is a result of unsustainable urban projects, corruption, climate change, and so on. However, the tone is never fully accusatory. How did you strike the right balance? How far along in the writing process did the fire appear?

DSP

The fire was there almost from the beginning. I had written maybe twenty or thirty pages when the bad air quality in Mexico City started to affect my breathing. I grew up with asthma, so sometimes, when the city is very polluted, that happens. I left for Cuernavaca trying to escape from the pollution, but when I arrived, I discovered that the air quality was actually much worse than in Mexico City due to the onset of the fire season. This was in 2019, which was the first year of this new wave of massive fires all over the world, in Australia and California. It was the same all over central Mexico, especially in Morelos and Guerrero. Cuernavaca was surrounded by fire. That’s when I introduced the element into the novel. 

It’s a political concern, but to me it’s also historical in the sense that the fires are linked to the history of the city itself. To put it differently, the current fires in Cuernavaca are linked to corruption. Costco paid millions in bribes to fell the trees for the Casino de la Selva. But if you go back, you’ll see that the first form of deforestation and extractivism in Morelos was carried out by Hernán Cortés himself. Cortés felled the avocado forest in the high part of Cuernavaca in order to create the first sugar cane plantation in the area. To me, that history, which began in the colonial era leads up to the present series of fires. It is certainly political, but in a sense of the political that reaches back way into the past. You cannot simply explain this by saying that the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) stole a lot of money.

AB

So that’s where the voice of Conejo’s father becomes important again. He’s not only a historian, he’s also blind. 

DSP

His gaze is facing backwards and he literally cannot see the present. The only thing that appears in front of him are images from the past. Besides this concrete political dimension, which connects to climate change and everything else we’re living through, the fire also works as a symbolic element. It was a way to talk about a form of ecstasy that was also related to dance. Fire destroys, but it also has a purifying element on a symbolic plane, and I wanted that to be in the novel. 

When I was doing my research on medieval dance epidemics, I also learned that one of the possible explanations for these episodes was that they were the result of great environmental tensions. There were severe droughts in Strasbourg around 1518, which led to a famine that was followed by the last remnants of the bubonic plague. These were the environmental conditions that allowed for a dance epidemic to occur. People were already a bit crazy because they had no food. So I tried to imagine what kind of environmental crisis could trigger something like that in the present, and the answer was fire.

AB

The part of me that likes neat correspondences and is kind of obsessive feels like I should ask this: if you have three protagonists and three plots, shouldn’t there also be a third word in the title of the novel? Which one could it be? What other central element is there beside the fire and the dance?

DSP

I think it could be friendship, but a complex kind of friendship that is tied to desire and the confusion of sexual awakening. The novel was always about these three friends that form a particular kind of love triangle. Since the beginning, I knew it would be a triangular story and that there would be sexual tension between the characters. It’s also my way to make a discrete homage to Under the Volcano, which also features a triangular friendship and takes place in Cuernavaca.

AB

Friendship does feel like the third central theme, but maybe it wouldn’t work for the title.

DSP

It would be too corny.

AB

The dance, the fire, and the friendship. 

DSP

El baile, el incendio y los tres amigos. [Laughs.]

AB

You’ve been active in the literary world in Mexico and Latin America for a long time working as an author, translator, and editor. More recently, your work has received increased attention and recognition in the U.S. Do you feel like there is something distinct about the way in which your work circulates in the U.S.?

DSP

The relation to literature in translation in the U.S. has changed a lot since I published my first novel in English about nine years ago. Back then, reading literature in translation was like eating your vegetables. It was perceived as something morally positive but slightly boring, something that people would obnoxiously brag about. Whereas now, literature in translation seems to be more integrated, maybe not as much as we would like, but I do think that translated works are now judged according to the same measure as works written in English. People read Fernanda Melchor or Mircea Cărtărescu with the same interest and respect. It didn’t use to be that way. Translated authors would have to pass away in order to be read with that horizontality. And now young authors are being read with that interest and a sense of curiosity that isn’t moral, but aesthetic. 

AB

I think you also encounter a lot more young writers in the U.S. that name foreign authors as their influences and their main references. 

DSP

There is a lot more cross-pollination. Naturally, my trajectory and my reception in the U.S. have benefitted from that. It’s also true that there has been a boom in female Latin American writers that has opened the door for many other authors in the region to be read with great interest. Because someone like Valeria Luiselli has been living and publishing here for a while, because Samanta Schweblin has established herself as an outstanding author, or because Cristina Rivera Garza has translated herself and opened a space for Latin American literature in the market and in academia, there is much more curiosity in general. 

With my trajectory in Mexico, I feel that I’ve been very lucky to publish my work in the places that I liked the most. My books have been in the catalogues of the publishing houses that I read and that formed my taste as a reader. The main difference is that it’s a much smaller literary market, but it’s also more interesting because of that: there aren’t large economic trends ruling over the way in which you should write, so there’s more variation in style. The landscape is much more experimental, and I like that. In general, it’s harder to define a mainstream. Within that context, my writing is narrative and it has a strong focus on the prose, so it’s not one end of the spectrum or the other. I’m not really experimental, but I’m also not on the side of the absolute transparency of language and completely legible prose and plots. 

AB

Speaking of your reception in the U.S., I wanted to bring up some of the comparisons that have appeared in the promotion for your last book Planes Flying over a Monster as well as for your new novel. The three names that pop up are Philip Roth, W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño. I wonder how that sits with you given the significant differences in their works and their biographies. I’m particularly interested in the comparison to Bolaño. At this point, it seems like a blessing and a curse to be put next to him as a contemporary male Latin American writer. Do you see the influence of any of these writers in your own work? Do you read them? If so, how?

DSP

I think there are two different things. One is the world of blurbs and comps, which doesn’t belong to the field of literary criticism, but to marketing. What you have there is a marketing strategy, and we all fold to it in the most pathetic way because we are told that it’s going to work in our favor even though in the end we don’t really know if it makes any difference. But we all play our part in believing that it works and we accept to be compared to anyone as long as that supports the fiction that the book will have a better reception thanks to that. 

Proper literary criticism is an entirely different thing. For instance, there’s a text by Federico Perelmuter where he writes about the Latin American heirs of W. G. Sebald, and I find that more interesting because it’s not a comparison that is restricted to name-dropping. Instead, it traces textual strategies and establishes a whole genealogy of the way in which Sebald has been read in Latin America and the way in which he himself engaged with Latin America. Regardless of whether I agree with what he says or not, I find that much more interesting. If a text of literary criticism compares me to Philip Roth, I will probably have my reservations and I might disagree, but it’s a different kind of reading altogether. It’s a more profound form of engagement, and I respect that.

Now, when it comes to Bolaño, I feel like there’s no way to be at ease with him, because even though I admire him as a writer and I continue to read him and be interested in him, I know that any comparison will have less to do with my way of engaging with him, and more with the cultural place that he occupies in the U.S. He’s an author that has been read extensively, so he serves as a point of entry to read many other Latin American writers. And that has little to do with Bolaño’s literature or mine, for that matter. So it does put me in an awkward position, also because it links me to all the ‘Bolaño bros,’ who became almost farcical characters and have little to do with actual literature. I love Bolaños’s short stories. I reread them occasionally. Sometimes I knowingly imitate him. There are also things of his that have less interest for me, or views that I object to. 

AB

Like what?

DSP

For instance, I feel like Bolaño created a nostalgia for the literary avant-garde. And I find that incongruous because the avant-garde presented itself as a movement to abolish nostalgia as a literary value. So I find something deeply contradictory in Bolaño’s project as a whole. At the same time, I think he’s one of the greatest Latin American novelists and short story writers in the last fifty years. I also revisit his conferences quite frequently, or even YouTube videos where he talks about literature. I think he was an excellent reader. I do feel like a bolañista in the sense that my relation to many of the authors that Bolaño read is indebted to him. I wouldn’t read Antonio di Benedetto, Juan José Saer, or Julio Cortázar the way I do if it wasn’t for Bolaño. For me, Bolaño also works as a critical key to approach the work of other authors. 

AB

Beyond their stylistic and thematic differences, what these three authors have in common is that they are representatives of a male-dominated literary cannon that has been increasingly put into question. You have expressed a desire to resist the markedly patrilinear tradition in the context of the recent history of Mexican literature. Are there any female writers that would feel more befitting as points of comparison for your own work?

DSP

For sure. That’s also the reason why comps tend to feel backhanded, because it’s always authors that are troublesome in that regard: they represent an idea of the closed male writer. At least in the case of Roth, I feel like he was a bad writer in that he didn’t figure out how to represent women. Someone who isn’t able to portray an experience of humanity that includes more than half of the human population isn’t a good artist, period. You have to be able to see humanity in its entire complexity, which obviously implies saying something about what it means to be human and therefore what it means to be a woman on earth. I think that’s why the lineage that I’ve reclaimed for myself is also connected to the diary, which is a genre that is traditionally marked by the feminine, where women are the main creators who explored a temperature of intimacy that the men never worked out. Alejandra Pizarnik’s diary is fundamental for me, for example, as well as Virgina Woolf’s.

As far as challenging the traditional lineage of Mexican literature, it seems obvious to me that Elena Garro has become the central figure in Mexican literature in recent years. Garro came back as the eternal return of the repressed and occupied the central place that she was always meant to have. Being in that central place obviously lends itself to distorted readings. She is being read and vindicated in ways that are complicated to pull off. I don’t think Garro was a moral beacon or a feminist role model. She was a highly complicated person. But I do believe that it’s undeniable that she was the great Mexican short story writer, maybe together with Amparo Dávila. Restructuring the canon by putting figures like Garro, Dávila or Nellie Campobello in the center allows us to read the entirety of Mexican literature in a different way. 

I feel like the same thing is happening all over Latin America. We’re reading through the canon backwards, and now it’s clear that we cannot think of ourselves as a literary tradition without authors like Hebe Uhart, Sara Gallardo, Marvel Moreno, and many others. I feel much closer to those voices than to writers like José Donoso, for instance, whom I find interesting and who was experimental in a sense that I would want to explore, but I feel emotionally distant to those traditional figures of the Latin American Boom. I feel much closer to many of the writers that came afterwards. 

I think of the diary as a form of queer writing, not from a place of identity, but from a place of intimacy. I find the idea of a queer writing that necessarily implies an affirmation of identity burdensome and uninteresting. I’m more drawn to the forms of writing that blur the lines of identity. As a form, the diary intrinsically questions identity. There’s always a moment of unfolding where the person who writes starts to wonder: am I the one who is writing? There’s an existential doubt that fractures identity while at the same time allowing for the expression of sexual diversity. That’s also why we know about the queerness or the bisexuality of many writers—through their diaries, from Gombrowicz to Donoso and John Cheever. These writers were traditionally categorized as male, straight, et cetera, but when you read their diaries, there’s an experience of bisexuality in all of them, and not in a form of identitarian affirmation. I feel like that resonates with me and that has become my own line as well. 

AB

To destabilize rather than to affirm. 

DSP

Or rather to develop a writing of intimacy rather than identity. 

AB

Do you imagine that you’ll ever feel like writing something that isn’t related to Mexico? Do you aspire to that, or will you always return?

DSP

I can picture myself writing things that have no direct connection to Mexico: novels that take place in other parts of the world with characters that aren’t Mexican. But I feel like it’s inevitable that my writing is Mexican at the level of language, in the Spanish that I use. Besides, my experience will always be informed by my childhood in Mexico. No matter how much time I spend abroad, childhood is childhood, and it’s the origin of all repetitions. All the things that creep out of my unconscious and into my books will be marked by my childhood in Cuernavaca, even in spite of me.

AB

You will still project Cuernavaca onto every place.

DSP

Yes. I guess there’s no way around that.