Submerged Narrative. On Locuela, by Carlos Labbé
As can be confirmed by anyone who reads them, Carlos Labbé’s novels are unusual narratives which seem to be constructed around the confusion and feverish discourse of people undergoing extreme situations, presented from the limits of good sense and alienation. It is usual for a perfunctory reading of any of the three, published as “conventional” books until now –long although very interesting, where he spoke about his experiments in the medium of the internet -, namely: Libro de plumas (Ediciones B, Chile, 2004), Navidad y Matanza (Periférica, 2007) and the recently published Locuela (Periférica, 2009), to produce the idea of a twisted, crazy narration, more centred around the text, from tectus (fabric), than on the framework of the story that serves as an excuse for the novel; Labbé’s narrative, ultimately, consciously breaks with the conventional idea we have of a narration. In other words, he is perfectly aware of the fact that the surface of the narrative, the discourse, is what makes up its existence and in itself gives it entity. Putting it another way so that we may understand it better: a novel is not the story it tells, but the discourse that the author generates around that story.
However, Labbé is wise enough to know that one must go farther when following this reasoning. As a good reader of reality, he realises that this is yet another invention. We can take fiction as truth and question the mechanisms with which the real is told to us. Or, as in the case of Onetti’s characters, flee to invented spaces when we do not want or are unable to live in the space where we are. What happens in the narratives by the Uruguayan author –possibly the most modern of the great masters of South American writing of the last century- is that the characters, now turned into shallow beings, abandon reality. But in Labbé’s novels, and especially in Locuela, the characters constantly live in a reality, that of the novel, without being able to determine exactly what is true and what is false. For example, in the case of Neutria, that imaginary space that appears in the book-- for what reason do we tend to imagine it as less real than Santiago or Roncagua. Why don’t we find it on a map of Chile? What moves us to think that Santiago is less fictitious, more real and solid than Neutria? Nothing. We sign a pact, and decide that what is known to us, what is familiar to us, is real. The other is not. Precisely from that emerges an artistic movement that is itself the storyline of the novel: Corporalism. Its foundations are simple and clear: the artwork must be eliminated, as it is hardly a product that the market and society demand, and we must approach creation as a vital attitude. No more works of art, but artists, readers. From the analysis and invention of that movement emerges a text, which is but an exercise of a student –observe the fact that all the pages are numbered on the right, which emphasises the idea that we are not before a book, but before a school work- that little by little takes that movement seriously until it becomes the living example of it. Several times one of the voices in the narrative, the Sender, insists that everything is an ecphrasis. The ecphrasis is the description of a work of visual art within a written narration. All that we are contemplating is nothing more than the description of another work, that of Corporalism.
Or perhaps not; perhaps we are reading that discourse to which the quote by Barthes refers, which opens the book. That verbal delirium, the result of the impossibility of achieving what one desires, the locuela of the amorous discourse. A verbosity that transforms, which is conveyed to us from different voices that are changing at the same time, as the Recipient alternately uses the first and third person, reinforcing the idea that we are before the narration that the protagonist himself structures as a work of art in its own right.
It is not an absurdity; on the contrary, it is the exciting example of a work that cannot be “told” because what is relevant is not the story itself, but the experience of its reading. Surprising and therefore captivating.
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