Los Alegres Desahuciados

I feel really bad about not having written very much lately, but with exams coming up I've spent most of my time reading text books about Discourse or Orientalism. Once the exams are over I might well incorporate those themes into some articles, but for now, here's some thoughts on the one book I've read this week that has nothing to do with exams, Los alegres desahuciados (The Happy Hopeless) by Andrés Mariño-Palacio (1948).

I read this book in a day shortly after having finished Blue of Noon and promptly lost the will to live. It's not that it's badly written - quite the opposite - but there's only so much misery I can take. It is nonetheless a very important novel in the history of Venezuelan literature, and therefore worthy of attention.

So, back to the beginning. Mariño-Palacio was a prodigious talent. At 19 he was already writing literary criticism for a national newspaper, the darling of the Caracas literary avant-garde. He wrote Los alegres desahuciados at 21, as well as Batalla hacia la aurora (Battle to Dawn), which was noto  published until ten years later, and then rapidly fell into madness, from which he would suffer until his premature death in 1966. All of his genius is evident in LAD, but so is the encroaching madness, which is what makes it such upsetting reading.

LAD is not so much a story (very little actually happens) as a portrait of a young, rich, Venezuelan intelligentsia, Mariño-Palacio's people, far removed from the 'typical' Venezuelan's portrayed in the national narratives that abounded during the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship of the time. There's Abigaíl, who sees casual wickedness as the only release from the mundaneness of his bourgeois life; Vivian, who lives only for pleasure; Lombardo, a 'sensitive soul' in love with an older woman and yet sleeping with Malva, who has many other falderillos (literally men who go from skirt to skirt); Zoilo, who gives off the suicide vibe to anyone who meets him and wants to be 'the most beautiful corpse ever seen'.

So you can see why it's not the most fun reading! But it is important. Why? It is one of the earliest examples in Venezuelan literature of a novel that makes no attempt to present an image of the nation, and certainly not a positive image, an image that unites the people. Instead, the characters are at best morally ambiguous, at worst utterly reprehensible. I get the impression that Mariño-Palacio is presenting himself and his people to the world, showing that the Venezuelan population is much more multifaceted, more complicated than the image of the nation created through traditional 'identity fables' (as Ludmer calls them), and that literature can and should be used to create a detailed psychological profile of a few individuals. The novel is also littered with literary references, sharp changes from third person to first person narrative and self-deprecating references to Mariño-Palacio himself, all of which makes for a very rewarding literary analysis experience.

However, one thing that most intrigues me about this novel is that the version I read was republished in 2004 by Monte Avila, the official publishing house of the Venezuelan government, as part of its Basic Library of Venezuelan Authors. It seemed very strange to me that such a nationalist government, a socialist government, a government which promotes the idea of solidarity between all the different races that make up the countries population, would promote in this way a novel about rich white people in a world of their own (the only experience of other races is when Abigaíl violently attacks a 'negro' who doesn't even get a name, just because he's getting on his nerves). I can only guess that as Mariño-Palacio is recognised as an exemplary literary talent, his promotion as Venezuelan lends weight to the country's cultural credentials. I will read more though and maybe come up with some better answers.