Childhood and Its Antecedents: On Alejandro Zambra’s Childish Literature
Alejandro Zambra, transl. Megan McDowell | Childish Literature | Fitzcarraldo Editions (Penguin Random House in the US) | October 2024 | 224 Pages
From the carefully pruned novella Bonsai to the more conventional narrative of Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra’s prose cannot avoid earnest family scenes and compelling reflections on the nature of storytelling. He makes his readers feel safe, often writing on the brink of corniness, though never crossing the line. All of the above is also true of his most recent effort, Childish Literature, translated by the seemingly omnipresent Megan McDowell (translator of Mariana Enriquez, Juan Emar, and Lina Meruane amongst others) and edited by Zambra's long term collaborator Andrés Braithwaite. However, the text is not the “eclectic guide for novice parents” it is purported to be. From the opening chapter, Zambra lambasts the “hackneyed [and] humiliating advice” that self-help books for fathers spout. And throughout the collection he paints the paternal experience as something both singular and unteachable: “Our fathers tried to teach us to be men…but they never taught us to be fathers.” Disavowing himself of any didacticism, Zambra’s stories—which all sit somewhere between story and essay—can be better seen as an ode to his son, the ever-present Silvestre.
Childish Literature ponders on the aesthetic ideal of childhood, offering glimpses and sharp insights into the everyday lives of parents. From the off, Zambra’s preoccupation with language is clear. It’s a preoccupation that runs throughout Zambra’s work, as in Chilean Poet, in which he bemoans the word padrastro whose unfair suffix, -astro, denotes inferiority or worthlessness. Zambra is again out to absolve language of its unnecessary negative connotations. Here, as the titular essay determines, his target is “Childish Literature” itself. The term is redundant, he believes. For Zambra, literature is fundamentally childish. The project of writing is to “recover perceptions that were erased by the ostensible learning that so often made us unhappy.” He points to the likes of Bruno Schulz, Gabriela Mistral, and Hebe Uhart, all of whom seem to approach their subjects as if for the first time, writing with a lightness and curiosity. Take Uhart's crónica Good Manners, in which her inability to read the seemingly illogical social cues between an old lady and a bus driver leave her feeling like a child again:
Her silence made me feel like I was six or seven again, playing with a nutty girl I knew back then: every time I went to do something - swing in the hammock or take off running - the girl would stomp her foot angrily and say “No!” It made me feel like I was perpetually in the wrong.
By turning back to childhood, Uhart transforms something as typical as bad manners into an original and captivating experience. Literature can be reduced to childishness, and those works of art that disavow us of this notion are in bad faith. “We surrender to our real age as if under false evidence,” writes Zambra.
Naturally, childhood is the fount of this childishness. Zambra admires—and maybe envies—his son’s way of looking, porous and curious. He admires his “newsworthy voice” which narrates the most commonplace things. Zambra strives to regain this outlook onto a brand new world as a means to produce art, while Silvestre exists there free of obligation. Being a parent puts us into close contact with this way of seeing, Zambra claims, and helps us to recover some of our lost childishness, something we lose gradually, by virtue of understanding which dulls our sense of curiosity: “Parenthood re-legitimizes games that we gave up when our sense of the ridiculous managed to take over everything—even, sadly, our inner lives.”
There is, of course, a painful brevity to this early stage, and all parents would, perhaps selfishly, slow it down if they had the chance. While carrying his son home, Zambra begs him to never learn to crawl or walk; “I could carry him in my arms my whole life.” Milestones are reached, and comprehension dulls our eyes to the intrigue and curiosity we used to shoot towards the world at large. This mourning of childhood reminds me of Jim Dodge’s poem “Learning to Talk,” in which his conventional pronunciations of beaver and squirrel eventually replaced his son’s own spin on them:
I did my duty
And I’m sorry.
Farewell Beeber and Skirl.
So much beauty lost to understanding.
Other stories in this collection read more like diary entries, simply recounting what happened between Zambra and his son that day. Despite the delicacy of these pieces, their existence implies an urgency. He is making sure to capture these moments with his son while he is still a child. In these notes, he offers us glimpses into the everyday experience of fatherhood. He notes the instances of role reversal, in which his son temporarily becomes as assured and wise as the paternal figure. When, for example, Zambra is nervously attempting to read a book in French—a language he speaks badly—his son doesn’t complain or cry: “‘You do know French, Papá,’ you say, to encourage me.” Likewise, when he steps out of a reverie, only to realize his son has been paying attention to him the whole time, having painted his papá looking out of the window, Zambra captures a moment in which his child appears emotionally sophisticated and attentive beyond his years. He might turn away for a moment, but Zambra always turns back to his son: “even if I locked myself in to draft a novel about magnetic fields or to ad-lib an essay about the word word, I would end up talking about my son.” While trying to write Bonsai, Zambra envisaged a man who stayed at home watching a tree grow, eventually growing closer to this character when his friends brought him an elm tree. Life imitated art and vice versa, which perhaps explains the lived-in quality of Zambra’s Literature. With Childish Literature, Zambra is now in touching distance with the affectionate fathers that lead his novels, thanks to the gift of his son. All roads lead to Silvestre.
Like any good parent, Zambra wants to keep some kind of record to ward off forgetting. He wants to keep reminders for Silvestre, who will doubtless forget virtually everything from these early years. In “Childhood’s Childhood,” Zambra turns to the topic of childhood amnesia—the period before episodic memory kicks in, episodic memory denoting memories of everyday events, fleshed out by a subjective sense of time and extra contextual details (emotion, place, sensory information etc.). While children remember things before this time—“at three or even two years old, kids can remember... sometimes surprisingly precise[ly] and other times just as vague[ly]… as everyone else”—the emergence of episodic memory seems to wipe away the vast majority of what came before it, “so that we can reinvent ourselves, start over.” The blank years left behind are, at times, “strange and sad” for Zambra. Memories of Silvestre’s formative years are entrenched in his parent’s minds, but they will almost undoubtedly be wiped away as first hand experiences for Silvestre. Intuitively, Zambra tries to hold onto these memories, to preserve them through photographs and letters. Otherwise, they risk falling out of the world for good.
Zambra has no desire to satisfy these curiosities regarding his own lost years. He feels no need to “materialize or maybe verify [his] conjectures,” and is content with keeping them nebulous. Why, then, would he feel that his son might want to satisfy this desire? Is he simply responding to a paternal instinct, keeping dispatches to punctuate the years his son will forget? Zambra admits that it seems unfair to keep his son away from a “shiny new forgetting” the absence of these records would allow. Perhaps childhood amnesia serves a purpose. “Gaps are my starting point,” Paul Valéry declared. They allow us to appear on the scene well after the first act. With our gaps, we arrive already partly formed. “Like moviegoers who missed the first few minutes,” as Zambra puts it, we arrive confused and enigmatic, somewhat out of the loop.
The strangeness of our blank years is a token of our lost childishness, something to look back on with a curiosity and interest that was once our default reaction to everything. Perhaps this mystery of our erased years will only be dulled by obsessive dispatches. Ultimately though, they are gone, and no amount of photos or videos or notes can recover them. It was our firsthand account of those days that gave them their edge. While Childish Literature spends a great deal of time lingering on the phenomenological state of childhood, Zambra is wary that the experience of parenthood isn’t exhausted by time spent with our children. It is also a time of reflection, in which we inevitably turn towards thoughts of our own childhood and our parents.
In “Jennifer Zambra,” Zambra ponders on the name that was meant to replace Alejandro, had he been born biologically female. First names are poetry, our narrator declares, “contain[ing] latent whims, intentions… possibilities… nearly always the only text that the mother and father write together.” Caught up in the throngs of his obsession, he pads out a life for his possible sister/self, in a world in which they coexist. He imagines her whole life, so rich in possibility and intrigue by virtue of her absence:
I’d see her bouncing off a wall on the playground of an empty school. Or bored to tears at Midnight Mass. Or hiding away from the world to triumphantly braid her stunning raven hair in solitude.
Making good on his earlier assertion, Zambra's prose finds its way back to his son, imagining him fatalistically circling his parents on their first date, “applying for life from the very first flirtation… Delighted to fill out the form.” While Zambra plays around with the possibility of Jennifer, his son encroaches upon the story, vying for his father's affection.
Pulling together a mixture of Zambra’s contained fictions and his astute prose essays, Childish Literature is an ode not just to childhood, but to having a child. It hones in on the inner world of children, and the hangups and awe of their parents. In the essay “Free Topic,” Zambra declares that “all books can be read in function of the desire to belong.” Perhaps the greatest accolade of this book is how immediately and convincingly this desire is achieved on the part of the reader. Following the themes that run throughout Zambra's continued collaborations with McDowell and Braithwaite, Childish Literature is an open house. It is open to all and points us towards our own personal sense of childish belonging.