Chains and the Hall of Letters

The Venezuelan poet Rafael Cadenas. Cabalar (EFE)

The place in the world that I naturally associate with the person of Rafael Cadenas is a block of classrooms in the Humanities building of the Central University of Venezuela, in Caracas.

There will be no more than half a dozen and they are reached by going up a ramp that leads to the corridor of the School of Letters.

A very powerful force of attraction for Venezuelan youth has emanated from that corner of Ciudad Universitaria for much more than half a century.

It is conceivable that someone can get close to the nature of that attraction, and perhaps hopefully define it as well, by looking at the composition and career of the alumni body, their interests, the scope and scope of their intellectual achievements.

It could then be said that Literature is taught there with deep, very ambitious, ecumenical and liberal criteria.

Successive casts of teachers and disciples have imposed on themselves, as far as I know since 1968, levels of excellence uncommon in our America.

The result is a bastion of civil society entirely dedicated to the circulation of ideas that are not always literary, at least not in the sense that we ordinarily give this word.

One would not be lying because, certainly, from among the rubble to which a quarter of a century of arrogant stupidity has reduced the Venezuelan universities, the Hall of Literature classrooms emerges as an anomaly that embarrasses disaster.

What I am saying is not rhetoric of the resistance but rather something well known in Venezuela: to say “the corridor of Letters” is to name a cardinal point, anyone in Caracas will show you the way.

I dropped out early from a university degree, back in the 70s, and for a while I was thinking about entering Letters.

Although I never did it formally, on many occasions I went up the ramp to sneak into the classes that Adriano González León taught.

There must be something in the air since Rafael Cadenas was awarded the Cervantes Prize: right now a friend reminds me, via WhatsApp, that today, Tuesday November 15, is the 91st birthday of the unforgettable author of

.

I take it as a call to attention: "Stick to the case, put your finger on the map and tell us at once what you know about the enchanted ramp of Letras UCV."

The French May is often spoken of as the remote cause of the student unrest registered in many universities in our hemisphere.

There was no shortage of imitators who scratched the walls with graffiti translated directly from French.

However, I have always thought that in our Ciudad Universitaria the winds of the ignominious August of Prague and, above all, of the bloody October of Tlatelolco blew more than those of the Dionysian eviction of the Sorbonne.

Of course, there were libertarian rallies and angry calls for curriculum reform and permanent student power caucuses but these, seen now, were almost all shrill parodies of Vinccennes.

With the exception of Letters.

There were also, of course, flaming assemblies and manifestos, Mick Jagger thundered from the ramp to the corridor and squadrons of what my Mexican friends would call “teporochos poets” flew, but in the gathering, at low tide, a concert of maestros miraculously shone , some of them co-opted (skilfully circumventing the hiring rules) among notable practitioners of Literature and other arts.

When I think of the curricular offer that they ended up managing in Letters, the clearest image I have of it is a book by Cortázar,

.

That chair was not born poisoned by the university credentialism that Gabriel Zaid already denounced in Mexico at that time.

He named only two of them because they knew how to exercise their teaching leadership with Apollonian temperance: María Fernanda Palacios and Jaime López Sanz.

Palacios is the author, among others, of a book that is considered essential about Teresa de la Parra:

López Sanz, poet and translator, famously conducted a seminar that today would be called “interactive” on John Coltrane and brought Károly Kerényi's classic,

into Spanish .

Without intellectuals like them, and many followed them!, the spirit that blew then could have dissipated.

“People of Letters”—this is how they were called, and are called, equally, teachers and disciples—did not allow it and has managed to perpetuate it to this day.

Of all this miracle of the spirit that I praise here—heterodox and very Creole cross between a civic center and a circle of classical studies—, the omphalo has been the poet Rafael Cadenas for half a century.

In one of his best books,

, one reads:

“Venezuela has suffered four positivisms, liberating and limiting at the same time: that of the Enlightenment, that of the positivist generation itself, that of Marxism and the most recent, the modern.

The soul will have to cross them, recover and be.

It is not a question of going against science, so prodigious —it is our magic— but of seeing that it is not everything, of opening up to what is beyond, or more here?

To the enigma, to the inexplicable, to what makes silence obligatory”.

Recover and be.

It is the lesson of the Hall of Letters.

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