Will Solomon Goldfarb, aka Salo, be the literary person of the year? (Hopefully). Could it be that Mauricio Kartun, its creator, will leave the dramaturgy to devote himself to the novel? (Hopefully not, hopefully continue with both.)
Salo solo (Alfaguara) is Kartun's debut as a novelist. If he had already excelled – and continues to do so – with great plays such as La vis cómica, El niño argentino and la sublime Terrenal, now it turns out that he also stands out as a writer of novels. One that makes you laugh – and a lot – at every sentence, at every step, in every love affair of Solomon Goldfarb, a sixty-something widower who can only sleep by dint of pills and with enough desire to rejoin the world of love relationships.
"Circle, Solomon. Circulate. In the usual places you will not find anything: with the ones you had to happen it has already happened, and with the others it will never happen. Open up and circulate," the new psychiatrist practically prescribes.
Salo listens to him and what we will read next are, precisely, the love affairs of Solomon who, willing to strictly comply with the prescription, signs up for theater and philosophy workshops, gets off Tinder, goes camping on the coast, talks to his neighbor downstairs and even joins a group of anti-abortion activists.
"Salo solo", by Mauricio Kartun (Alfaguara, $7,599 paper; $1,895 ebook).
Kartun himself began to circulate, not like Salo, but he did decide to move a little from his theatrical comfort zone to venture and know this other world, that of the edition of a novel in a publishing house like Alfaguara, and the possibility that these stories become a series and even add new adventures of Salomón. (Hopefully).
In Kartun's mind, the character was born in the midst of a pandemic. Confined with his wife for more than a year in a house in Cariló, in the middle of the forest, he said that it was not the time to write theater – how to imagine a premiere with people at that time? – but he understood that there was something like a captive reading public in the networks.
"I started publishing. I didn't know if this was going to go beyond a couple of stories with the same character. When I got to the third story I realized that it was really simply about looking for new alternatives for the character, that I had it very clear in my head, that I had a lot of fun doing things with him. That allowed me to value many things that my separated friends or widowers had told me that very distressing search, "he says in a chat with Clarín Cultura.
"Do you tell the real adventures of your friends?"
"They told a friend about circulating. And these adventures flowed without thinking about a totalizing structure. They were the adventures of the patrolman of love. Someone who goes out looking for love. Pushed by his therapist to unusual places, places where he would not have frequented otherwise.
It was with time that I glimpsed that what I had done that for me was a saga of adventures of a character, actually had literary antecedent in many centuries, nothing more and nothing less than in the format of adventures, like Don Quixote or the Lazarillo de Tormes.
Why is humor less frequented in novels?
–It is actually a classic format, less frequented because it has been trapped in the limits of the minor genres of the publication by installments.
Here it was to make an edition already thinking about that book format and the fortune that a large distribution publisher like Alfaguara was interested in publishing it because I felt that it did not make sense to publish it in a closed circuit. I had already been part of a closed circuit that was social networks. The character of this, which is nothing more and nothing less than that of comedy, only makes sense in open circuits.
Mauricio Kartun: "Humor is always considered a minor genre, it is considered an inconsequential will as it produces a very cathartic discharge." Photo Maxi Failla
"You circulated too, in the manner of Salo. In addition, laughter provokes the novel, humor is present in all your production. What interests you about that search?
-A friend told me that her father went to visit her in France and that the father arrived telling her that the stewardesses on the plane asked her not to laugh so loudly that it bothered the rest. That's the goal of the comic novel. Humor has a goal, which is the reflection of hilarity. In a way it's laughter. Beyond the fact that an implicit meaning is put together. The will, the end in itself is that of humor, which, by the way, for me is not minor.
You said that humor has been trapped as a minor genre. But it is very difficult to make people laugh with a book, it does not rely on the gestures or performances or silences of an actor, on a vignette, on an image, only on the written text. Does it not account, on the contrary, of a superior intelligence?
-Humor is always considered a minor genre, it is considered an inconsequential will as it produces a very cathartic discharge. I think that humor always carries the suspicion of the banal, the suspicion that it does not want to go beyond making people laugh. As if making people laugh were not enough.
Is it the most difficult mechanism to achieve?
It is extremely difficult, but the assessment is not in the difficulty, but in the contribution. And indeed, in popular genres in general, what they have brought is entertainment, they have brought some immediate satisfaction; Then the humor has stayed there, it is diluted.
Humor goes out of fashion much more quickly than drama, which is moving, poetic. The humor is more impious, it changes continuously, even for decades. We watch Argentine humorous movies from the 90s and find them pathetic. Why don't we laugh anymore? Because the codes change.
Why is humorous production not usually highly valued?
"I'm going to put it in a half-extravagant theory. Laughter is a reflection of luxury. It has no apparent biological utility. However, when one thinks of moments of laughter, what one realizes is that laughter is a private, it is a kind of party in which one, in the very middle of the profane world, installs an instant of the sacred.
I step out of myself, I transform into another, I scream, I flow in a weird way. There is a short circuit in your head and your head decides that for an instant it will come out of the profane. You enter the sacred and there is also a small party of personal celebration.
It can never be seen well from the humor system, because it is never well associated with production. Think what a guy would be like driving a machine in a factory and laughing. You can't laugh and produce. To laugh is to create a state of time out of time, it is to create an ecstatic state.
Concretely it is ecstasy, it is to create a sacred place, it is to leave what is being attended to and neglected. That is why, in the classroom, the teachers, for example, do not allow that state. What is this? A revue theater? What do we come here for? Laughter ignores, baffles and deconcentrates.
–Mess.
"It messes up, but looked at from the place of preeminence of order. Now let's look at it from the other side. Let's look at it from the need for inevitable, essential disorder that we have in life. We live in an orderly society, which creates increasingly orderly heads. We need that which makes them explode into disorder to break and arm again. If not, our heads would be a kind of vinyl.
That's why we get together at parties or get drunk with fear, because drunk we laugh more easily. We get messy. Disorder is actually coincident with poetic phenomenon, which is disorder in the natural order. Laughter produces exactly the same phenomenon. So it is clear that from the field of order laughter is always looked at as suspicious, because it messes up.
"I think humor always carries the suspicion of the banal, the suspicion that it does not want to go beyond making people laugh. As if making people laugh were not enough," says Mauricio Kartun. Photo Maxi Failla
However, I imagine that to write, to create, you must have a certain order.
-I have an order, which surely seen from the point of view of the field of order is not seen as such. It turns out that to create something original you need something new. So my order is an initial chaos. Always the same. Go for a walk. If I go for a walk, I need to walk at least an hour. I know that within half an hour, I don't know why curious effect, images begin to appear. I always go with a notebook.
Sometimes I log for days. When I feel that I have a lot of material, I do need to put together something that both philosophy and creativity call the dynamic scheme. When I have this assembled, I order the stockpiling, I organize it.
After that I can go to a messy last instance as well, which is imaginary improvisation. Of course, for me it is a formal order that is sometimes almost military and I say I am tied to my order. Seen from a mathematical point of view, it is nonsense. The big drawback is that you are capturing clouds, images with aura. That is the extremely difficult thing about conceiving our matter. They are not buttons that you can cook.
Did you laugh while you wrote, while you went from the profane to the sacred?
-Not only did I laugh in comic places, but whenever I write I laugh when something new appears and what I have realized is that there are different instances in life in which the same thing happens to me. I am a gardener and one thing, for example, that makes me laugh is the appearance of a first flower on a plant. It is the physical manifestation of joy.
The same thing happens to me when I see a good image, when I find a good resolution from the idea. When a text appears that I like, not necessarily funny, it is the celebration of happiness. Laughter is a form of celebration of the new.
How many times does someone start telling a joke and see in people that they are trying to go ahead to say 'I already know him' and in that way justify that 'I'm not going to laugh because I already know him' or 'I'm going to laugh in a conventional, civilized way'? Humor is just a short circuit in the heads.
-You mentioned Don Quixote, the Lazarillo de Tormes, what other readings have made you laugh?
–The tales of Fontanarrosa. There's a superior humorous intelligence there, it's really witty. He reminded me of another author with whom I have laughed a lot and who later stopped publishing, which is Woody Allen. In the '80s, '90s, he published two books of humorous short stories that are hilarious. And even that in my case they were even impulse to write something theatrical.
And again, Fontanarrosa is not in the consideration of the Academy as a writer, because he did humor and comics.
Your stories are extraordinary, they have a surprising intelligence. Another example at the international level, which includes theater, is Dario Fo, who won the Nobel. One sees the work of Dario Fo and it is a superior work, it is characterized by his love for popular genres, his love for humor and his love for theater.
Was there always humor in your family, with your parents?
"We lived in San Martín. My old men were theatrists and we came on Saturdays to see theater in the center. Since I was a child I accompanied them. My mother was Spanish and we went to see comedies from Spanish companies.
When my father chose, we went to see revue theater. It was the time when kids could enter the theater and there was something, I would say, like an obscenity in pediatric doses. I was allowed to listen to three and laugh. Something of 'I'm not going to take you to an obscene show, but you're going to learn a little bit of a little bit of a joke'. That humor fascinated me. That's where I get that taste for the humor of outright laughter of trying to find the explosion of the charge.
We had a third alternative that took me to the theater side, but at that time I was not so enthusiastic: a communist branch of my family that every so often invited us to an independent theater of the time. We were going to see the works of Alberto Drago.
Kartun: "With the old we have lost the gaze of desire on them." Photo Maxi Failla
–Old age appears, what about the representations of old age?
"It's considered a depressing moment. No one wants to talk about old age, in the same way that the relationship with the old is considered depressing. There is always something possessive in the relationship with the old: you have to be patient with them, you have to listen to them always repeat the same thing, you have to forgive them anachronisms and above all, you have to hide that we do not look at them.
We have lost the gaze of desire on them. That is, when you look at an old man, there is no desire, they become transparent. I think I found in Salo that thing that happens inside the head of the elderly.
"A stowaway on the ship of youth," you write with great grace. Salo, and not only him, resists old age.
"It's what we all do. What do I maintain from the state of youth? In any case it is to maintain the state of party. Tato Pavlovsky once said a consideration that moved me very much. He said that he had found, as an adult, a way to prolong the state of happiness of the child who plays, because he had become an actor, playwright and psychoanalyst. Find as an adult the status of child.
Now let's go beyond adulthood and into old age, into old age. What can sustain you? Effectively, maintain that childish state. Maintain the state of enthusiasm. It would seem that after a certain age enthusiasms are pathetic and the truth is that the only thing that keeps us healthy is enthusiasm, the state of exaltation.
When you dance, if you dance with desire, you are enthusiastic. When you laugh, if you laugh heartily, you are enthusiastic. Sometimes dancing and laughter are thought of for the elderly in a therapeutic way.
It is applied in a palliative way to something that would appear to be a disease called old age. Without understanding that old age is a state that can be maintained very well. The problem is that one is always prey to the gaze of others. When the gaze of others corners you in that place of lack of enthusiasm, of depression.
-Precisely the problem of the beginning is that Salo takes sleeping pills, looks for an effect in the drugs that he then gets in that exaltation.
Recently I was reading Capitalism and the Death Drive by Byung-Chul Han, and he says something like depression is a narcissistic excess, because it is only looking inside and therefore repressing oneself and therefore compressing oneself.
That is, a being is compressed within itself and is depressed in the most literal sense of the physical, it is not repressed, it is compressed and on the contrary, happiness is expansion. And we can only expand in the presence of another in front of another, it works in community.
That other place of isolation, of loneliness, inevitably leads to psychotropic drugs. Because one is loaded with rolls and seeks therapeutic help. But in any case, the therapeutic aid will also indicate the same thing as Salo: circular.
In theatre
Savage, written by Mauricio Kartun from the story "Juan Darién" by Horacio Quiroga (from the book El Desierto, 1924), has just premiered in the María Guerrero room of the Cervantes Theater.
Directed by Luis Rivera López, it stars Valentina Bassi, Carlos Belloso, Mónica Felippa, Diego Ferrari, Carolina Guevara, Pablo Mariuzzi, Gustavo Masó, Julieta Rivera López, Carolina Tejeda and Blanca Vega.
Basic Kartun
- Playwright and director with extensive experience. He wrote about thirty plays, among them, Chau Misterix, Sacco and Vanzetti, The Partner, The Madonnita, The Argentine Child, Wing of Servants, Salomé de Chacra, Terrenal. Pequeño misterio ácrata (Critics' Prize for the best Argentine book of literary creation at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, in 2014) and La vis cómica, his latest production.
- Creator of the Dramaturgy career of the Metropolitan School of Dramatic Art of the City of Buenos Aires (EMAD), he was also holder of the chairs of Collective Creation and Dramaturgy at the Faculty of Art of the National University of the Center, and of Theater Writing in the career of Theater Promotion of the University of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
- Of continuous pedagogical activity in the country and abroad, he has given innumerable workshops and seminars throughout America and Spain.
His works and productions have won the most important awards, such as the First National Prize for Dramatic Literature, the First Municipal Theater Prize, the Platinum Konex, the Argentores Grand Prize of Honor, the Grand Prize for Trajectory of the National Fund for the Arts, and the ACE de Oro, the highest award of the Association of Chroniclers of the Spectacle.
Take it out alone. The Patrolman of Love is his first novel.
PC
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