The Solemnity of Childishness: On Alejandro Zambra’s "Childish Literature" — by Mubashir Karim

[dropcap]E[/dropcap]very new Alejandro Zambra book is a prequel to his earlier works. In doing this, Zambra comes close, at the technical level at least, if not in the application of themes, to the kind of writings produced by the English writer Jeanette Winterson. When disapproved about the insipid repeatability of themes in her literary oeuvre, Winterson stated that her “work is full of Cover Versions.” To tell the tale already told in a dissimilar manner is, she further adds, to put a fresh emphasis or to come to terms with a new bias.

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[dropcap]V[/dropcap]arious themes recur in Zambra’s works including for example, the role of children, the idea of reading, masculinity in societies, the role of the dictatorship in general and of General Pinochet in particular, among others—all of which are hued and brewed with humor, jokes, and a singular poignancy. One other recurring theme, throughout his oeuvre, is that of Fatherhood—something that takes center stage in the latest one by Zambra playfully titled Childish Literature. In his earlier books, especially his The Private Lives of Trees (2010), Ways of Going Home (2013) and Chilean Poet (2022), the relationship between fathers and sons is overtly present throughout.[1] However, in this book, he looks at this bond with a singular individual emphasis on account of him becoming a father in real life to Silvestre—his son. As such, Silvestre’s constant presence throughout the book, hence Zambra’s fatherhood, acts as a pivotal point throughout the narrative.

Shelving the book in a specific genre would be to undermine its potential, as it is composed of essays, memoir, stories, and poems all laced together. In the book, Zambra tries to build up further his idea of fatherhood in relationship to his son Silvestre, his relationship with his father, and the lack of literature about the same. This becomes clear in the very first chapter and the most sublime one in the book written in sections corresponding to the number of days of the birth of his son. In the essays, Zambra succinctly comments:

What I find striking, in any case, is the almost absolute lack of a tradition. Since all human beings—I assume—have been born, it would seem natural for us to be experts in matters of child-rearing, but it turns out that we know very little, especially men, who sometimes seem like those cheerful students who show up to class blissfully unaware that there’s a test. While women passed on to their daughters the asphyxiating imperative of maternity, we grew up pampered and ineffectual and even humming along to “Billie Jean.” Our fathers tried, in their own ways, to teach us to be men, but they never taught us to be fathers. And their fathers didn’t teach them either.

The comment captures the essence and the primary theme of the book. Men in patriarchal societies are taught how to act manly with special emphasis on crude masculinity—all muscles and no brain, riding on testosterone-driven vehicles, while women, through their mothers, learn the art of mothering as the ultimate art of being called women in the same society. The writer is critical of the roles that we are made to play in the larger narratives historically written for separate genders. This idea is later invoked by the writer in the book when he wishes that the first memory of being a father, and of fatherhood in the eyes of his child, to be the one wherein “. . . no woman is at the service of any man, a world where it’s his father who makes him breakfast every morning . . .” and not the way it has been experienced by generations so far. In other words, Zambra longs for his son to be nurtured in a world, or a household, where the disciplinary roles of the patriarchal society are at ‘play’ if not absent.

The dependence of the father on his son for unlearning certain ways of life and of the son on the father for his needs is portrayed throughout the book as a dependence of mutual respect. In a typical Zambra style wherein humor, melancholy, and sentiments lull each other, he writes:

“This week you gained the same four ounces that I must have lost dancing with you in my arms. The son gains the weight that his father sheds. It’s the perfect diet.”

The relationship of the father and the child thus balances itself on the bartering of one’s energy, a perfect diet, thus making us visualize the fragmentation of beings as just an illusion – an idea that is redundantly associated with the being of Mother rather than Father. In the story titled ‘Skyscrapers,’ Zambra further comments on this through the relationship between a son and a father. In the story, when the character of the son abandons his home where the family lives, the father delays the reading of the letter written by the son in which he has written down everything the father needs to know regarding him.

The reluctance on the part of the father to not read the letter seems to stem from the frustration he compounds on his son’s leaving the home but also on him deliberately staying unaware about learning ‘everything’ about his son. Afterwards, when the son wants to know what the father thinks of the ideas composed in the letter, he can’t help but get distracted by the appearance his father has acquired over these days. Zambra writes:

I noticed, as I often did, the burst blood vessels in his eyes, especially the left one: they were like tiny tributaries of a river that seemed to indicate a kind of suffering whose origin and terminus I couldn’t presume to know. It was my father’s suffering, but also mine. The suffering of meeting my father’s eyes and realizing that I didn’t know him, that I had lived my whole life with someone I did not know and never would.

The realization of his father’s suffering as his own compliments the perfect diet that Zambra exchanges with his son. Together with this comes the realization of living an alienable life with those who stay too close to us—the way objects in close proximity to each other are reduced to a blur. This thought seems to echo in his earlier novel Ways of Going Home as well where the narrator pronounces: What kinds of faces do my parents have? But our parents never really have faces. We never learn to truly look at them.

Plain and personal as it may seem; it is however pertinent to mention that this suffering of the fathers in Chile could also be political. Living under the brutal dictatorial regime of General Pinochet in which killings, disappearances, and tortures were the usual calling of the day, the father’s suffering and anxiety find roots in those elements as well, as it did to the whole generations living therein.

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his element of political repression and the subsequent vent is aptly captured by the writer in the story titled “An Introduction to Soccer Sadness” in the second section of Childish Literature. In it, Zambra writes about the fanatical and obsessive nature of Chileans in relation to football. The trope of a father letting his son win in the game while the father deliberately chooses losing is something that finds reference in both this book as well as his previous novel Chilean Poet. In fact, one entire section of Chilean Poet is devoted and dramatizes the idea of parenthood, of fathers and stepfathers and the idea of family in an urban setting and their relationship to their sons. However, in this essay, Zambra is concerned with something entirely different. In it, he writes about the difference that exists between the football sadness in the children and the football sadness of fathers belonging to the earlier generation.

The sadness of the fathers in connection with football finds roots again in the political atmosphere of the times they lived in. For those fathers to disremember or to forget, at least momentarily, if possible, about the terrible lives they were living in the then Chile, they willfully submitted themselves to the soccer-madness. However, this football madness in Chile seems almost superimposed, for that generation, with another image, that is, with a torture center—a country where, in 1973, as Zambra puts it in Ways of Going Home, the National Stadium was turned into the largest detention center. They thus tamed themselves by being purposely sad, acting childish, and cursing the opponent teams and fans to ‘free’ themselves from the fetters of the political and social history.

In one of the most beautiful scenes in the book, Zambra reads a book that his father had recommended to him decades ago which he has deliberately delayed reading till now, while his son is sleeping soundly beside himself. In a poignantly jocular strain, he states:

My son is asleep, and I lie down beside him to read A River Runs Through It while I think about the enormous quantity of books and songs that in the future I will recommend to him and he will ignore in favor of something else.

The scene aptly captures the relationship with a parent in which an oft-forgotten advice, a counsel by the father is realized achingly late by the son, sometimes so belated when he has himself donned upon the role of the father. This realization of a tender filiation is poetically crafted by Zambra in Ways of Going Home when he writes: “. . . sometimes we need to wear our parents’ clothes and look at ourselves for a long time in the mirror.”

Furthermore, the way Zambra reads stories to his son Silvestre in this book seems very close to the way his character Julian narrates stories to his foster daughter in his novel The Private Lives of Trees. The story of a baobab tree and a poplar tree is narrated by Julian to lull the daughter to sleep so that she doesn’t think about the absence of his mother, who hasn’t returned home yet.

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n Childish Literature, Zambra praises the stories and literature written for children as ones that instead of lulling one to sleep “wake [one] up a little more” even sometimes to a point where one enounces sleeping as a waste of time. Zambra goes as far as to critique the very label that is “children’s literature” as “condescending and offensive” even “redundant” as he contemplates that the whole institution of literature is at its core, if not anything, but childish—that is, minus its commonplace usage as childish. In the essay, “French for Beginners”, he further comments on it by stating his bafflement that there is such thing as children’s literature which in turn gives way to something as “non-children’s literature, literature for adults . . . a literature-literature that is real literature”.

He admits his befuddlement at the idea that this so-called “children’s literature” is read and pronounced as “a kind of substitute or alternative or preparation for real literature” as unfair and false. By doing this, Zambra further improves on the age-old literary debate of “High Literature vs Low Literature” or the tussle between the “Canon and the Popular.” In this reading sense, therefore, the employment of almost all the genres within Childish Literature seems not just a personal but a political choice on the part of the writer, whereby he is being mindful of, to use Jacques Derrida’s phraseology, “the law of the genre.”

Zambra’s oeuvre is like the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s movies where the repeatability of mundane events contains in itself the larger term called "life.” His books are, to use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s title, a “Repetition with a Difference

, and a remarkable difference at that. To put it complexly, Zambra’s latest book is nothing new, in fact, it is all about everything that he has already written about, and hence something that profoundly deserves our absolute attention.

[1] All the Years of Publication mentioned are the English translations of the books and not of the original Spanish.