A Snail’s Pace Suits Me Fine: On Mario Levrero’s “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine”
Mario Levrero, transl. Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter | The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine | & Other Stories | October 2024 | 155 Pages
Despite his reputation as a raro and a varied oeuvre encompassing meta-fiction, short stories, detective novels, crosswords, comics and more, Mario Levrero may cut an oddly unified figure to his anglophone audience. His two novels translated into English, Empty Words (2019) and The Luminous Novel (2021), share common ground. In the former, a novelist begins a course of graphological self-therapy—handwriting exercises that he believes will also improve his general character. The sole focus of longhand soon proves boring, and, to the detriment of his handwriting, he finds himself delving into literature. The latter tracks Levrero’s year of writing funded by a Guggenheim grant. He is convinced the novel he has been paid to finish is impossible, and gets around it by producing a 420 page diary/prologue to the unfinished book. In both novels, literature is accidental. The Sissyphean narrators are also out to undo psychological faults, but their motivations are constantly stunted.
The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, Levrero’s 1970 debut short story collection, goes some way to reflect the writer’s multitudes. Translated by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, these stories offer a more kaleidoscopic approach to Levrero’s ideas and style than previously afforded in the English language. These stories range in form and style from novellas to single page micro-fiction. “The Basement” is a fairytale with echoes of ETA Hoffmann. “The Boarding House” tells two stories simultaneously, separated by parentheses. “Jelly” is a dystopian narrative. The collection is bookended by descriptions of domestic scenes, “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine” and its chaotic negation, “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (Negative).”
While a far cry from the aforementioned novels that would come some thirty years later, the Levrero of these later works remains visible in this early effort. The protagonists in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine are victims of diversion. In “Beggar Street”, the simple act of lighting a cigarette is endlessly rerouted:
I take out a cigarette and put it to my lips, but when I bring the lighter close and spin the wheel, it won’t light. I’m surprised, because it was working perfectly just a few moments ago, with a strong flame, and there wasn’t any sign the fuel was running low. What’s more, I remember replacing the flint and refilling it only a couple of hours ago.
He forgets about the cigarette, and sets out to find why the lighter isn’t working. Soon enough, he decides he’s more interested in getting a general sense of the lighter’s structure, requiring him to dismantle it entirely. His attention darts around. Each paragraph unearths a new motivation. Dismantled entirely, the constituent parts of the lighter take up more than half of the room, leaving our narrator crawling through the tunnel his apartment has become, ending up on the street. What is being curtailed here remains unclear, though the speaker seems to be in what Levrero refers to elsewhere as a state of “self-kidnap,” in which the self has been mired and will-power becomes virtually non-existent. To avoid ruminating on the root cause of their inner turmoil and the breakdown of their self-control, Levrero’s protagonists are constantly preoccupied: “I wanted something to do. I hate inactivity, it makes me think.” While Levrero takes a more direct, self-referential approach to his psychological troubles in his later work, here they often culminate in supernatural intrusions, a sign, perhaps, that Levrero was yet to uncover a sufficient framework for dealing with his torments.
“The Basement” is another tale punctuated by forks in the road, though here they are less pernicious. Carlito, a young boy with an insatiable curiosity, is determined to figure out what’s behind the locked door to the basement in his family home. His parents refuse to divulge anything, setting Carlito off on a wild goose chase for the basement key. Both Carlito and the narrator, who turns towards other narratives before remembering the story he is trying to tell, are constantly being drawn away from their objective. Levrero’s narrator offers insights into the nature of curiosity and chance, which seem more sympathetic to diversions than “Beggar Street”:
Curiosity is a dangerous thing, because it often leads us astray… the new paths uncovered for us by none other than curiosity are usually a thousand times more interesting than those which curiosity led us to abandon in the first place.
Beyond taking us to ever more interesting places, curiosity also leads us to “find something we’re not looking for, or not looking for anymore.” Every so often, these mindless diversions are re-evaluated as fatalistic changes of course. While the mystery of the basement is never resolved, Carlito’s journey—from conversations with a last of its kind insect to verbal duels with a gardener who only tells the truth at the third time of asking—is ultimately one of self-discovery. The story’s turns foster his imagination in a way that simply going down to the basement right away wouldn’t have. As is the case with the goal of finishing the novel or the graphological exercises, the direction of the narrative is unearthed by wrong turns. And though the initial setup is usually a farce, Levrero rewards his characters for having faith in false starts, knowing that certain times are conducive to certain events.
Levrero’s characters are often caught between their inner lives and more practical obligations. This dichotomy is often exacerbated by means of diversions. In “Golden Reflections,” a punctual office worker is about to begin his commute to work, before a peculiar sound distracts him. Eager to find out where it is coming from, he checks the attic unsuccessfully. He uncovers a long neglected view though, and falls into a state of grace as he looks out at the houses and trees. The church clock strikes, and rather than functioning as a startling reminder of his responsibilities, it is interpreted as “just another pleasing, logical brushstroke, a detail of the landscape.” The church bell becomes part of “a sense of duty even deeper than the one that binds me to my office.” Eventually he finds the source of the noise, in a small hole in the basement wall. He peers through it:
The scene couldn’t possibly have been real. And yet there it was. A place somewhere between a park and a forest, which immediately brought to mind certain Bottícelli paintings; the light was spring-like and crisp, the variety of greens infinite, and everything, the trees, the plants, the people – because there were people too – shimmered with golden reflections.
Chipping away at the hole reveals a wider panoramic of this idyllic scene, and soon enough the hole is the size of the narrator’s fist. In the space of a sentence, years have gone by, and the office job is entirely forgotten. The once punctual office worker seems to be responding to a different order all of a sudden.
“There are some pointless things the soul can’t do without… it’s only pointless things that the soul can’t do without,” Levrero declares in Empty Words. By whose standards? While an employer would undoubtedly consider this day-off in favor of aesthetic bliss as pointless, the once punctual office worker will surely see anything beyond this new Bottícelli-esque reality as completely pointless. We might replace pointless with impractical to get a better sense of Levrero’s idea; There are some impractical things the soul can’t do without. Levrero’s writing is full of ostensibly impractical tasks—chasing sounds, washing up, playing computer games—while practical matters are perpetually delayed, or dealt with begrudgingly. For Levrero, only the former cultivate the soul, only they leave the mind “unattached to anything other than my contemplation of the thing I’m doing.” From The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine to his later works, practical duties and duties of the soul remain at loggerheads.
The inner world supervenes over practical matters. Levrero’s characters often uncover something long neglected, or turn inward in some other way. Consequently, the protagonists in these stories are seemingly at odds with their reality. For one preoccupied narrator, the promise of a lucrative treasure isn’t enough to get him out of his chair and join in with the search, while the protagonist of “Jelly” navigates his dystopia with all the angst of a retired holidaymaker; a poisonous jelly encroaches the world and has subsequently induced total societal collapse, though the narrator could care less: “It’s spreading, I thought, the jelly had stopped worrying me a long time ago.” Despite the impending extinction of human life, he still jokes around: “‘Tell me we’ll never be parted,’ she said. ‘Never,’ I answered.”
In Empty Words Levrero describes his zen-like approach to tasks: “things should be done when they’re good and ready, and their readiness is something I need to feel coming from within myself.” An argument recurs centering on his wife’s impatience to buy a new house. She is unsympathetic to his philosophy of action and inaction:
The new house, the work that needs to be done on it… I still haven’t been able to put into practice my system of mentally ‘placing myself’ in the new house and imagining how things will work there… the house is taking on forms that haven’t been ‘lived’ by me (or anyone else), because this is all being forced upon me – just as here, in this house, rituals and ways of life that I haven’t had the chance to examine are imposed on me. We don’t do the things we do because of any genuine need; they’re not necessary. We do them because there’s a pattern, an abstract form, acting on us all like a supernatural force.
Levrero’s drive is tempered and methodical. It turns a blind eye to necessities, while ensuring the goal is achieved—eventually. In this way, Levrero hardly budged from the principles apparent in his 1970 debut.