“Life attacks us like a blind beast.” – Álvaro Mutis.
Melancholy is sly. It has the inveigling appeal of romance. It informs many of the world’s stories and I have to confess, I usually fall for it, as I do here, with The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. However, too much of a good thing, especially all at once, is always a mistake.
Presented as seven collected novellas, I’ve been reading them one after another. Bad idea. It makes you look too closely. Style and content begin to wear and what was initially wonderful becomes … Well, too much.
Maqroll the Gaviero is the titular hero of this collection of stories by Columbian writer Álvaro Mutis. In one story, The Snow of the Admiral, Maqroll is referred to as, “… a hostage of the void.” He’s a hero who returns from all of his escapades with Pyrrhic victories. They are always characterized by loss — the victory consists in saving his ass — and they reinforce a persistent and implacable masculine melancholy.
I use those last few words deliberately. Adjectives like ‘implacable’, ‘irremediable’, and ‘inexorable’ appear with astonishing frequency in these stories.
The phrase ‘masculine melancholy’ is one I use to describe the tone and viewpoint. Alternatives might be ‘masculine romanticism’ or ‘masculine sentimentalism.’ It strikes me as a male vision, though not exclusively, and one shared by many writers.
You find it in the works of Gabriel García Márquez. You might think it a South American or Latin thing except it’s also in the novels of Ernest Hemmingway and the works of Ross Macdonald. It’s in the songs of Leonard Cohen.
It’s Mr. Biswas in V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.
It’s the heroic tilting at windmills that must fail — the task is impossible — yet the hero does so anyway, an act of defiance despite inescapable defeat. It’s Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name in his early westerns, who becomes Dirty Harry in his later movies, and is finally Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino, all isolated men battling a fallen world they know they’ll never beat. Even when they win, they lose.
Mutis is aware of this, to some degree at least. In one of his Maqroll stories (The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call) a character asks him, the author, what kinds of poems and stories he writes. He says:
“My poems and stories usually turn out to be fairly melancholy.” “I think that’s very strange,” she remarked. “You don’t look particularly sad, and it doesn’t seem to me you’ve been too battered by life. So why write sad things?” “That’s how they turn out…I can’t help it.”
It’s a breezy answer. You get the sense the author doesn’t take the question seriously and is dismissive of the woman asking it. She’s not on the same intellectual level; she doesn’t understand the metaphysical depths of literature. Yet it’s a question that needs answering because that melancholy is telling, particularly when coming from someone who doesn’t appear to be, “… too battered by life.”
In part, I think it’s a reflection of a particular generation’s view of the world, a mix of machismo and fatalism. It’s one that likes, among other things, gender postures and categorizations. It particularly likes the image of the isolated male; the outsider.
It wouldn’t matter, really, except it accounts for the tone, which is sustained throughout the novellas. It wins me over initially, as do the stories. But sustained, as when reading all the stories one after another, the romantic appeal begins to grate as it increasingly recalls the sentimental moaning of an ivory tower elite. Mutis is intellectually and culturally clique-ish.
So it’s not surprising a reader might react with irritation. Mutis reminds us over and over, either as himself or through his character, Maqroll, of his obscure erudition. There are also times the stories read as if they are part travel features as Mutis describes, in romantic prose, places as obscure as his learning.
It’s not that there is anything wrong with any of this. It’s just that it’s too much.
I suspect Maqroll is a kind of alter ego for Mutis, though not exactly. He’s more a fantasy figure the author aspires to, despite all the tragedies he gives his creation. Maqroll is the romantic figure the author wishes he was himself, seeing his own life as characterized by convention and mediocrity. But I’m only guessing.
The romantic cowboy silhouetted against a moonlit sky continues to have his appeal. He’s the lonely hero riding off into the sunset to, in Maqroll’s world, another defeat, until the final one at the hands of his eternal nemesis, Destiny. And that’s okay. The message of Maqroll’s life boils down to this: If you are going to lose, and you will, do it grandly. It’s as good a message as any in literature and maybe the only one worth hearing.
Regardless, the rest of us will watch the Maqrolls from a distance as we, “… follow the common path of gray routine in an age of mindless conformity.” (From The Tramp Steamer’s Last Port of Call.)
