Juan Emar’s Literary Laboratory

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A (probably apocryphal) anecdote ventures that late nineteenth-century Chilean president Federico Errázuriz Zañartu, frustrated no one wanted to take charge of his finance ministry, declared that the first person to walk past his office would be appointed. Ramón Barros Luco, a lower house member of little importance, was strolling by. True to his promise, the story goes, Zañartu immediately made him finance minister, and the position kickstarted Barros Luco’s successful political career. He became president in 1910, and today is mostly remembered for his favorite sandwich—meat and melted cheese—which became forever known as a “Barros Luco.”

The anecdote serves to illustrate an absurdist strand that runs through Chilean history. No writer is better at capturing this national tendency towards playfulness than Juan Emar, pen name of Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi, the son of one of the most powerful senators in Barros Luco’s liberal caucus. Emar’s short-story collection Ten (1937), totally ignored by critics of the era but now considered by many to be his greatest accomplishment, was recently published for the first time in English by New Directions, courtesy of an excellent translation by Megan McDowell. 

Ten’s stories feature a bug whose bite provokes a particular kind of philosophical melancholy; a stuffed parrot who takes advantage of a gentleman’s good manners to go on a murderous rampage; a flea and a cat who together provide a rural landowner with a kind of triangular mystical revelation. Emar’s mastery of absurdist humor puzzled the provincial literary milieu in which he published. Today, it is hard to conceive of contemporary Chilean literature without understanding his surreptitious influence.

Emar wrote in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 1929, which destroyed the export-based Chilean economy and turned easy-going politicians like Barros Luco into vestiges of a quaint past. As many Chilean writers wrestled with issues of nationalism and the social question, Emar looked the other way. In the context of his time, Emar’s writing was both forward-looking and nostalgic: closer to the avant-garde experiments of early twentieth century Chilean poets than to the socially hyper-conscious novels and short stories that defined the post-war period. While Emar’s contemporaries had a hard time making sense of his work, by the 1960s and ‘70s he was valorized by younger writers, and treated to increased admiration from old friends like Pablo Neruda, who labeled him “our Kafka”.

Yet no matter how preposterous, Emar’s tales ultimately emphasize the absurdity not of the fantastic, but of the quotidian. Their resistance to canned models exposes the fragility of the sclerotic aesthetic order that reigned in his time.

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Juan Emar was born to Eliodoro Yáñez, an influential senator and owner of the liberal newspaper La Nación. From the start, he was an odd duck. Being the son of nouveau riche privilege in the early twentieth century, he was expected to go into agriculture, law, business, or politics, sectors that his father at first encouraged, then pressured him to pursue. Instead, he fell in love with European painting of the times, especially in the styles of fauvism, cubism, and expressionism. He quickly became an enthusiastic supporter and practitioner of these art movements as a member of the “Montparnasse group,” a cadre of avant-garde Chilean painters. These pictorial trends, all pushing towards abstraction, seemed to open the possibility for an art that distanced itself from the prevailing values held by his peers.

Emar never gave up painting, but his more enduring works ultimately are in writing. Starting in 1923, the young Yáñez wrote a regular column for his father’s newspaper, taking up the pseudonym Jean Emar, a homophone of the French expression “j’ai en marre”, or “I’m fed up”. The columns were loosely structured: they ranged from conversations with his painter friends, to personal musings about writing or cinema. Several of them consisted of savage and funny attacks on other Chilean art critics of the time. Their nationalistic ideas about what constituted art—which prized alternately neoclassical historical scenes in the style of Delacroix or David, or pastoral “criollista” representations of countryside life that exalted the purity of peasant life—were leading them to resist, he thought, the destabilizing potential of abstraction.

In the late 1920s, as Chilean politics turned increasingly authoritarian, La Nación was expropriated and turned into a propaganda outlet by the nationalist military dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. Emar stopped writing his columns as his family entered financial turmoil. Emar’s father, a key opposition figure, was forced into exile until 1931, the year Ibáñez left power, and died shortly after his return to Chile.

Those years of political, economic, and familial hardship saw Emar turn to writing with a newfound seriousness. He worked on a few tentative books, but ultimately chose not to publish them—a few of these early works have been published after his death. In 1935, aged 41, Emar finally decided to publish three novels simultaneously under the adjusted pen name of Juan Emar: Ayer, Miltín 1934, and Un Año. Since he struggled to find interest among established publishers, he had to finance the publication himself. Although some fellow writers, like the Peruvian César Miró, anticipated intense debates about what he called Emar’s “anti-novels,” they were largely ignored by critics and the public. Ten was the last book he published, in 1937, to a deafening silence. (Five decades later, when a professor gathered over a hundred newspaper articles and reviews of Emar’s work from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, he couldn’t find any mention of Ten’s publication.)

Given his resistance to the prevailing aesthetic doctrines—coupled with a somewhat reclusive personality—Emar never really found his group in the writing scene. He maintained good relationships with different clusters of artists who often seemed to despise each other—he was close to both Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro, literary celebrities of the time who spent years tied in an intense public squabble. Yet no one seems to have felt like they knew Emar at all. Neruda, in fact, wrote after his death that he “knew Juan Emar intimately without ever knowing him. He had great friends who were never really his friends.”

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Ten opens with “The Green Bird.” Its narrator explains at length how a stuffed green parrot made it into his possession; it was caught in the Amazon, stuffed in Paris, then found by his friends in an antique shop during a night of revelry. The narrator flies back to Chile, parrot in tow, where he spends most of his time in the company of a sanctimonious uncle. One day, the uncle notices the bird, and the narrator explains its origin. Disgusted at the mention of partying, the uncle screams: “Vile creature!” Hearing the insult, the parrot comes back to life and attacks the uncle’s head. As the narrator, who shares Emar’s name, tries to stop it, the parrot asks politely: “Mr. Juan Emar, if you would do me the favor of…?” He replies: “At your service”. His gentlemanly obligations forbid the narrator from coming to his uncle’s aid in time, enabling further violence. Every attempt to intervene ends with the parrot asking the same question, and the narrator responding in kind, thereby stopping and allowing the parrot to strike again: 

“Upon impact—I remember it perfectly—the pedestal swung like a pendulum and its base—which must have been pretty filthy—struck my uncle’s big white tie, leaving an earthy stain upon it. At the same time, the parrot cleaved his bald spot with a violent peck. His forehead crunched, gave way, opened up—and from the crack, just as lava flows, swells, surges, and spills from a volcano, so flowed, swelled, surged, and spilled the thick grey matter of his brain, and several trickles of blood slid over his forehead down his left temple.

…

“Mr. Juan Em…?”…

And so I, as to finish quickly:

“At your ser…”… 

Third strike of the beak.

…

There was a low whistle. A death rattle. Silence. My uncle José Pedro passed away.”

“The Green Bird” exemplifies the typical structure of Emar’s stories. A situation is described that seems plausible except for a few unusual details. It then gets progressively more absurd until the narrator reaches a sort of twisted or nonsensical epiphany. Here is that revelation in this story: 

“Today, on June 12, 1934, it has been three years, four months, and three days since the noble old man passed on. My life during that time has been, for all who know me, the same as the one I have always led. But for me, it has suffered a radical change. I am more complacent toward my fellow man, for whenever they require something from me, I bow and tell them: 

“At your service.”   

Toward myself I have become more affable, for, faced with any business of any sort that I might attempt, I imagine said business as a grande dame standing before me, and then, bowing toward the empty air, I say: 

“Madame, at your service.””

The effect is comical and romantic; a parody of a stereotypical short story denouement and a moment that possesses its own absurdist beauty. Regardless of how ludicrous their stories become, Emar’s narrators maintain their composure. Like a vintage pair of well-made trousers, they drape elegantly, and only suffer slight changes. 

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The Argentine writer and essayist Ricardo Piglia wrote that a great short story “always tells two stories,” a superficial one and a hidden one. The key moment in any classic story is the turn, the moment of recognition: the second narrative bubbles up to the surface and is finally glimpsed by the reader. Piglia uses a story Chekhov outlined in one of his journals to illustrate the point: “A man goes to the casino in Monte Carlo, wins a million, goes home, kills himself.” The outcome of the tale reveals that, under the surface, the suggested story (the man is lucky) is a smokescreen for a deeper truth (the man is desperate). In Piglia’s telling, great short story writers like Poe or Borges follow the broad outline of this technique while finding innovative ways to revitalize it.

Emar, though, would likely have found these formalist theorizations laughable. In his view, insofar as a short story succeeds, its mechanisms cannot truly be distilled to a formula; attempts to do so are bound to debase its magic. Examining Edgar Alan Poe’s work, Emar wrote in a column that even though “people often admire the strange events that befall his characters,” we should instead focus on “the inexorable sense of inevitability” that propels those events forward. That feeling of inevitability “is always the consequence of an internal feeling, and never of an imagination in search of an outlandish premise.” In other words, it is not through the turn itself, but the way the internal mechanisms lead up to it and infuse it with meaning, that a story becomes effective.

In his own work, Emar attempts to summon a feeling of an uncanny logic that underlies all events. But while his short stories sometimes follow familiar molds, the resolution (Piglia’s moment of recognition) almost always breaks with the logical, stylistic, or emotional patterns that had been sketched up to that point. 

This is the sense in which Emar’s novels could be conceived as anti-novels, and his short stories as anti-stories. Emar’s denouements deny the reader any moment of recognition, the satisfaction of everything falling into place. Instead, by employing non-sequiturs that still somehow fit the piece’s themes or atmosphere, his work pushes the boundaries of the traditional short story by provoking frustration, laughter and surprise. A sense that life and literature’s mysteries can never be resolved neatly.

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In the history of Chilean literature, the paths of prose and poetry have often diverged. In Emar’s time, poetry (like painting) was subject to a surge of avant-garde creativity by Pablo de Rokha and Pablo Neruda, the “creationist” Vicente Huidobro, and the dark surrealist poetry championed by Mandrágora magazine. In the world of prose, however, these innovations were largely ignored.

Of the two main strands of “serious” prose writing, the criollista movement was represented, among others, by Mariano Latorre. His writing sought an almost sociological authenticity, attempting in particular to capture the Chilean dialect. Writers in this movement sought to combat the imposition of European artistic models by showcasing the uniqueness of the Chilean identity and locales.

Criollista novels feature detailed portraits of rural life, with such vast sections of landscape description that Chile’s lush geography sometimes seems to be their true protagonist. In his novel En Panta, for example, Latorre spends several paragraphs painstakingly describing a valley in which upon “every slight movement of the air, a cloud of dandelions breaks from its stem and spreads throughout the countryside, be it flying vertiginously, or crawling desperately in between the trunks alongside which they were born.” Only after four pages of scrupulous description is the main character mentioned.

Against criollismo surged the imaginista movement, an aesthetically diverse set of writers who rejected the idea that fiction should only aim to represent specifically Chilean topics, customs, and ways of speaking. Unlike criollistas, they freely drew from nineteenth century European models, eschewing the countryside in favor of a wide variety of subjects and styles, copious literary references, and a neutral dialect. While Luis Enrique Délano wrote humorous short stories about trying to become a writer in the small city of Quillota, Salvador Reyes wrote Ruta de sangre, an adventure novel about piracy in the Chilean coast. 

In this limited milieu, in which literary value was dispensed by a few bourgeois critics one could divide between the socially conscious—more favorable to criollismo—and the aesthetes—partial to imaginismo—there was no place for Emar’s style of writing. In several of his columns from the 1920s, he described his sense of alienation, decrying the emptiness of both existing frameworks. About criollismo, for example, Emar wrote, “We lack a national art, they say … and to solve this, they prescribe writing about the rodeo and making our characters speak like farmers.”

Ten’s second short story, “Damned Cat,” can be read as a corrective companion to this critique, poking fun at what he saw as the criollista’s obsession with descriptive exactitude. It begins on “February 21st, 1919” at exactly 6am, as a man saddles his horse and gallops along a beautiful countryside road. He apologizes to the reader for not being able to pinpoint the exact temperature—that day, he had forgotten his thermometer. “All I can say is that the horse’s gentle gallop provided the precise temperature that translates onto the skin without one feeling a millidegree of heat or of cold; that is, a temperature so well-suited, so exact, so precise, that while the horse was galloping gently, the temperature disappeared.”

Exaggerating the criollista form, Emar meticulously describes every climate the man passes through, and every scent he smells; but strange details start to appear, then take over the story. The temperature is perfectly balanced because the horse’s galloping creates a breeze. But, when the horse stops on its tracks, the narrator is burnt to a crisp by the sun. As he surveys the countryside, he describes a huge lilac bug with snapping claws, a plant that smells like “interplanetary distances”, and a kind of berry so cold that, as soon as he touches it, it instantly heals his burns. As the story unfolds, Emar suggests, mimetic precision breeds its own kind of imaginative absurdity.

This kind of writing mocks criollismo, but it also has no place within the imaginista movement. In one of his columns, Emar criticizes two types of imaginista writing: a literature of “bluff” focused on adventure that gets lost searching for ever more fantastical plot points, and a more solemn kind, in which a writer “goes directly and valiantly for general ideas … reaching that abstract universality well-known to any member of the bourgeoisie who enjoys setting aside a few moments for the cultivation of the spirit.” The kind of absurdist elements that define Emar’s writing style were absent in both; as was his mordant sense of humor. 

The prevailing models, Emar thought, invited distance through mechanical repetition: “Art in our country tends to become, I don’t know why, so solemn and so removed from everyday life, with all its desires and disappointments, that upon mere mention of it, people start trembling,” he wrote in a column. Emar’s aesthetic formula was aimed at illuminating overlooked aspects of everyday experience, including the absurdities and inconsistencies he saw all around him, in a way that could produce the very emotions of discomfort and confusion that criollismo and imaginismo were designed to avoid.

Literary critics, he thought, were co-conspirators in the crime of flattening and taming Chilean art. In his novel Miltín 1934, Emar takes aim at Hernán Díaz Arrieta, the foremost critic of the era who wrote under the pseudonym “Alone”—also depicted by Roberto Bolaño in By Night in Chile, in which his name is changed to the equally pretentious “Farewell”. The protagonist of Miltín 1934 spends weeks slogging through a history of early twentieth-century Chilean literature published by Alone, and Emar bundles his grievances into his review: 

“Mr. Alone’s book is … flat and indeterminate. … But could it have been done on purpose? It might well be that, for the author, the Chilean literature of this century is flaccid, colorless, flat, hopeless. Consequently, as a good artist would, he created in his book a faithful representation. A flaccid, colorless, flat, hopeless book. … If so, congratulations. The desired effect has been achieved.”

No wonder, then, that his books were so thoroughly ignored by the critics of his time.

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Emar’s personal politics are not easy to pin down. He had leftist friends, but he was not militant by any means. He admired the Russian revolution chiefly due to the flourishing of avant-garde art it produced in its early years, and in his La Nación column, he once imagined what would happen if Chile played host to such a revolution. He strongly suspected, he wrote, that the Communist vanguard would know exactly what to do with the National Bank. They would topple the Virgen de San Cristóbal in Santiago and erect a statue of Lenin on its pedestal. It was unlikely, though, that they would know what to do with the National Museum of Fine Arts. The Russian revolutionaries, Emar thought, understood “perfectly well that a revolution without art is nothing but a counterfeit revolution … From the moment a whole people decided to shake their shackles in search of new ideals, it was paramount that the arts started shaking as well.”

He thought this was highly unlikely in Chile, where art was conceived, across the political and aesthetic spectrum, as something transcendental and fixed, something “which must be spoken of in a low voice … so that everyone understands immediately that the artist belongs to a world of ineffable superiority.” Chile lacked enough of what he called “young” artists “who desire an artistic renovation,” to mount an aesthetic revolution to go along with the social one. 

This concern points to a core ideological preoccupation of Emar’s art: a profound anti-bourgeois sentiment. Meaning: a rejection of, and even disgust with, the intellectual elite’s artistic self-satisfaction—including that of progressives. Their sense that they had already found the “correct” models to represent reality in accordance with a stable worldview. The conviction among critics, pundits, and even many creators that all that was required of them was to celebrate and imitate the art that best fulfilled their preconceptions. “There is nothing sweeter than sleeping on top of an immovable belief,” Emar wrote, as he warned that “artists, scientists, religious figures and politicians will protest and oppose every single attempt at renovation.”

Ridiculing a famous art critic of the era after a showcase of avant-garde art in Santiago, Emar imagined he “left the salon intrigued, yet downcast. He walked down the street wondering: In that still life I saw, were the fruits apples, or plums? They were most definitely plums, I am sure of it! Or perhaps they were apples. Or maybe they were plums.” The critic never really looked at the painting. He only asked himself: of which familiar thing is what I am seeing a representation of?

Most intellectuals seem to think, he wrote in another column, that “their work is on a superior plane” and that observing the world around them plainly is “something anyone can do.” But the truth, he wrote, is exactly the opposite. “Anyone can weave theories that force order upon the world and pretend to solve life’s problems,” he ventured. “The superior task is seeing plainly what’s around us.”

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In his memoirs, the criollista Mariano Latorre remembers the Chile of his youth, that of the 1900s, as split starkly between “the primitive laboriousness of the provinces” and “the Europeanized and wasteful” elite of Santiago. Children of the upper classes, like himself, were taught only European notions of art and history, knew almost nothing about Chilean geography and customs, and looked down on the Chilean dialect of Spanish. His criollista project, he explains, started as a rebellion against the status quo of his youth in an attempt to “capture the man of America and his customs.” Through his writing and his teaching, he claimed to encourage Chileans to see and value their own reality and break free from stifling European preconceptions of what art should represent.

By the late 1920s, however, Latorre’s aesthetic principles had become enmeshed. Criollista works proved amenable to the political project of dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, who promoted them as part of an attempt to vindicate local and traditional customs against the encroachment of modernity, promote “love for our race,” and “reanimate the patriotic spirit”. After the financial crash of 1929, as Chilean political consensus shifted towards promoting industry and pulling away from international trade—a project politicians of the time called “inward development”—criollismo became politically useful as an art that captured the Chilean national spirit. The innovative nature of criollista art had been tamed. It had been made palliative, functional to the new consensus of the post-1929 era.

Emar’s stories attempted to break free from this stifling environment. In the aforementioned story “The Green Bird,” for example, the narrator’s gentlemanly manners become useless against the onslaught of the bird’s violence. The narrator doesn’t mourn, or fight against injustice: he readjusts his worldview. Like many of Emar’s contemporaries, he conforms. The story can be read as a playful take on how traumatic, consistency-breaking events are quickly absorbed into banality under a new consensus.

In “Damned Cat,” after the lengthy descriptive section that occupies its first half, Emar’s narrator dismounts. He encounters a cat and a flea inside a cave. He draws a triangle in his mind connecting them, and the three of them become suspended in time. Any movement, the narrator realizes, would upset the status quo, their delicate equilibrium, with potentially devastating consequences. The second half of the story unfolds as a series of speculative attempts by the narrator to break free from the prison of equilibrium without producing a huge explosion. Then he has a revelation:

“Hence the figure, the very fine triangle, is drawn and becomes, isolated as we were, a whole, and each part an element in that whole. Hence, we had gone from being free and living entities, from errant and unused forces, to three stable elements in a new form that had not existed as such until that moment at noon on February 21, 1919. From that moment on there was something else in the Universe, an additional formation, a reflection, a mirror. But here, listen well, the word “mirror” could lead one to error. I use it because there in the funnel an other was reflected, the All. But not only was it reflected, it was also reproduced. Let me be clear: it was replicated. It was a new whole, balanced exactly the same as the great whole. Small, negligible, stunted, miserable… call it whatever you like! But it was a whole.”

We might read this as Emar’s declaration of art’s purpose; a miniaturized staging of life’s absurdities and complexities; circumnavigating the comfortable fictions that underpin our sense of safety, and through this process, revitalizing our perception and our sense of awe at reality’s inherent incongruity. 

The same idea goes for other stories in the collection. In “The Vice of Alcohol,” he breaks social mores by representing a masochistic relationship, a taboo of his time. In “The Hotel Mac Quice,” he breaks with our sense of spatial logic. Through these breaks with his tradition, Emar’s work points to the ways in which we try to tame and obscure an overwhelming reality through social systems, artistic doctrines, and patterns of representation.

There is no question that Emar himself was, by inheritance, one of the members of the bourgeoisie that he purported to ridicule. Yet over time, his work has been picked up by writers of later generations who have been able to match his experimental techniques with more overt political goals. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading up to the coup of 1973, leftist experimental writers like Carlos Droguett championed a reevaluation of Emar’s work precisely because it resisted the aesthetic consensus of its era. 

Functioning as somewhat of a secret back alley of Chilean literature, Emar’s work inspired Droguett and others to break free from the stale models of their own time. Emar, Droguett wrote, “signed a series of stories that were uncanny and mystifying, powerful harbingers. … That strange and unbearable brother was a writer who shattered the language with a couple of sparkling books, and for that he was never forgiven, and for that he was kicked out of the kitchen by the critics, and expelled from the drugstore by literary historians.”

The enduring flexibility of his work allows it to be reinterpreted as an antidote to any given status quo of Chilean literature. Because Emar’s work—unlike Mariano Latorre’s, or, for that matter, Neruda’s—has never been turned into the stuff of middle school reading plans and national pride; it has never been properly institutionalized. Yet, contemporary writers still can—and do—use him to build an alternative history of Chilean literature that undermines canonical accounts.Refracting his characters through endless prisms, moving ever closer to capturing dream logic, Emar sought to craft an unabashedly modern and forward-thinking oeuvre that remains fresh, free, and playful. Under this light, Ten can be read as a chronicle of his attempts to crack the “flaccid, colorless, flat, hopeless” wall of bourgeois Chilean prose and cross over to the other side.