Love and transitions in Emar

Juan Emar’s Yesterday (1936; trans. 2022) is an attempt by its narrator to reconstruct the events of a previous day’s trip around the fictional city of San Agustín de Tango. The sights and events form a series: a beheading, a zoo, a restaurant, a friend’s studio, a waiting room, the restaurant again, the narrator’s family’s house, a tavern. At the tavern, the narrator has a revelation of sorts, and he and his wife Isabel head home, where he intends to share the revelation with her. He is caught in a sort of memory loop, however, and wrestling his way out of it becomes his final challenge, as it were.

It would be relatively easy to conceive of Yesterday as a phantasmagoria of remarkable and strange events in a city full of incomprehensibly dulled citizens. The beheading of the first chapter is so astonishing, and the transition from it to the next scene is so sudden, that it is difficult not to conceive of the book’s purpose, as it were, as simply that of conveying a series of bizarre episodes and encounters. After the beheading, the narrator and Isabel leave the place in disgust, and the next chapter begins with them going to a zoo, where further wild scenes await them. One crazy thing after another.

But the one-crazy-thing-after-another reading misses the continuous thread: Yesterday is a love story. It isn’t the story of a bewildered narrator navigating a crazy city full of crazy sights. It also isn’t a love story in the usual sense that Isabel and the narrator break up, dwell in misery, and then get back together. Rather, it is the story of two people exhibiting a distinctively mature love for another, and it is a story told in some respects very obviously, and in other respects less so.

Leaving aside the metaphysical puzzles of the final chapter, the book has three guiding elements: a scene; the narrator’s desire to quit that scene; and Isabel’s consent. The first is the bulk, of course. But the second two, and the third in particular, make for the particular form of connection between episodes. Without them, the walking tour has no internal rationale—which would not be a critique, of course; that book is certainly writable, and it would be a fine book, I’m sure; but it is not Yesterday.

In Yesterday, Isabel and the narrator conclude each of the first six chapters (there are seven in total) with a brief exchange in which they agree to leave. In addition to being charming in themselves, these exchanges—two of them in particular—reveal interesting dimensions of their relationship. The first two give literal descriptions of the scenes they’re about to leave behind:

1. Page 13, after the execution:

“Enough already of executions, guillotines, and all the rest! Let’s get out of here! Let’s go!”
“Yes,” she replied. “Enough already. Let’s go!”

2. Page 28, leaving the zoo:

“Let’s go! Enough already of lions and ostriches.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Enough already. Let’s go!”

And this style is more or less repeated in the fifth and sixth transitions:

5. Page 81, leaving his family’s house:

“Don’t you think this is enough of foolish bets and corner sofas?”
“Enough already,” she answered.
“Then, I beg you, let’s go, let’s go!”
“Yes,” she repeated, “let’s go! Let’s go!”

6. Page 90, after the “revelation” at the tavern:

“Yes, my dear wife, enough of linden tea and taverns. On to the revelation! Let’s go!”
She responded gently: “Enough of taverns, it’s true, enough of linden tea. The revelation is coming. So let’s go!”

The third and fourth transitions, however, introduce subtleties, and efficiently convey the depth and nature of the relationship. In each of the following instances, it’s worth noting how Isabel responds with nearly the exact same zeal and agreement as above, raising no objections or questions about the narrator’s depiction of the scene they’re leaving behind.

The third transition comes after they have already left their friend’s studio, suggesting first of all that the point of the exchange is not so much to conclude to some future action as it is to provide for a particular kind of seam between one scene and the next. Or, put differently: The point of the exchange is not primarily to finish with one thing and then depart for another; it is for the partners to hear and to express their agreement that they are finished with one thing and ready for something else.

3. Page 44, after leaving their friend’s studio:

“We’ve had quite enough of greens, of reds, of painters and aquatic environments. So hurry, then. Let’s go! Let’s go!”
“Yes,” she answered. “It’s been quite enough. Let’s go! Let’s go!”

Something else to note here is that this third transition turns on descriptions of two sorts: the usual mention of something literally encountered—namely the greens and reds, which featured as the object of the theoretical discussion at the painters studio—; and mention of the “aquatic environment” of the studio, which however is not something discussed literally between them but was the narrator’s private interpretation of the quality of light in the studio. As much as consenting to leave, Isabel is implicitly consenting to, or at least not objecting to, the author’s internal characterization of what they’re leaving behind.

Perhaps the most interesting transition, however, comes at the end of the fourth chapter. That chapter begins with the narrator and Isabel agreeing to go somewhere quiet to reflect. In addition to one literal conversation, over the course of the chapter the narrator internally converses with Isabel, agreeing to refocus his efforts on discovering some “conclusions” to what they have seen over the course of the day. At the end of the chapter, when he implores her to leave, his description of what he’s had enough of includes mention of what he’s been thinking about in the meantime.

4. Page 61, in the waiting room:

“I think I’ve had enough already, enough of potbellied men, lamps, squares, chasubles, people, cosmoses, and shop windows. And so, for pity’s sake, let’s go, let’s go!”
“Yes,” she answered, “for pity’s sake, let’s go!”

To get the salience of this moment, imagine sitting quietly, picturing pink elephants, and then being tired not only of thinking of pink elephants but of sitting, and turning to your partner and saying: “I’ve had enough of pink elephants. Let’s go!” Your partner concurs with the desire to leave, and raises no questions about the pink elephants, nor about your rationale for leaving. That is what everyday trust looks like. In Yesterday, that is what love is.

More than once—in the fourth and final chapters in particular—a sort of internalized Isabel serves as a rudder for the narrator’s wandering reflections. Not only the end-of-chapter agreements but the relationship with Isabel generally provides an abiding sense and rationale to the procession of the novel.

But such things are not always steady. In one of the most formally remarkable moments of the book, a lioness is about to attack an ostrich and find herself in the ostrich’s throat (which is not the remarkable thing I’m drawing attention to), and the narrator interrupts his own narrative to reflect on how much he loves his wife.

The she lion landed. The ostrich stopped. One facing the other. There were no more than fifteen meters between them.
Oh, my dear, beloved wife, why must I love you so tenderly?
And then it happened, the appalling thing. (21)

Here, suddenly, for no externally obvious reason at all, he exclaims his love of his wife. He doesn’t follow this up at all with anything like an explanation; it’s just an isolated explosion of feeling for her. (Incidentally, “the appalling thing” does not happen “then.” It happens three pages later, after what is certainly one of the showpieces of the book: a description of the image and mechanics of an ostrich swallowing a lion.)

The intrusion of the narrator’s declaration of love for his wife in this moment suggests—suggests alone, it’s worth emphasizing, in a nod to the economy of Emar’s style—that their relationship isn’t just the rounded-over thing of implicit understanding and mute acknowledgement. It’s a source of passion and intense feeling. The narrator’s mind goes to his wife at a moment of white-hot intensity because she is the image of it for him. In that sense, the sudden declaration of love for his wife isn’t an interruption but a direct expression of the ferocity of the scene, and only an indirect expression of his love for his wife.

Inversely, the final chapter, in which the narrator rehearses the events of the day, is testament to what’s lost when the narrator becomes unmoored from Isabel. After the narrator tells his wife of an impending “revelation,” they return to their apartment, he sends her out of the room, and he more or less spins out, alone in his bed (91).

There are exactly two moments in the book when the narrator is not immediately next to his wife, and they are this moment—about all of the last chapter—and the moment in which his “revelation” occurs to him, that is, while peeing in a urinal at the tavern (85–9; yes, hahaha, five pages of it). In the final chapter, as he is trapped in cycles of reconstruction, he struggles, as he puts it, “to grasp those first foundations of the ‘I’,” which (in English anyway) might be misread as an attempt at self-reflection, but that is in fact the prelude to his attempt to call for his wife: “I-s-a-b-e-l! Six letters! A fierce struggle for each one, and I had not the fortitude to begin the first . . . nothing!” (99).

Finally he manages to call for her, and when she enters the room, he asks her to “draw [his] body” (106). In an interesting suspension of her earlier trust, she asks: “To what end?” which heightens the drama, and in part because it is so out of character for her and for their relationship. (Perhaps we could see the ‘traditional’ love story as occurring in just this brief interval: He asks her for something out of the ordinary, she questions him; he requests it again, she delivers. The Matter of Being Drawn: A Romance in One Action.) He implores her: “Draw!” (107). She draws, and when she is done he escapes the loop of memories he’s been trapped in, saying: “As far as the day we lived today, my dear, from the guillotine on, we will sum it up and frame it in your drawing of my body. The shape you have made will conserve the day on paper, outside of me” (ibid.).

Other than this, nothing else seems obviously to capture anything like the anticipated “revelation.” What’s the revelation? The revelation is that she, his partner, defines and limits his integrity and individuality, and the world (and even his thoughts about the world) as a thing separate from him; she makes him whole and separate; distinguishes him from the swirl of nonsense around them. It isn’t just that she is someone else, but that she affirms his interpretations of things, consents to them, and then perhaps not in point of substance but merely because they are his, her partner’s.

In Yesterday, the world itself is nonsensical; there is no hope of the narrator finding reason in it. And the episodes of his ‘spinning out’—first at the urinal, then later in bed—are material demonstrations of what his attempts at making sense of things without her amount to, both of which conclude to the same idea: that she, her presence, is a condition of his making sense of the world. When she is not at his side—in the blunt presentation of Yesterday, when she is not physically at his side—he is lost in fugues of memory and imagination, indistinctness. In the final chapter, he is melting into the mattress and the floors before she draws him.

If Yesterday, then, is a love story, as I suggested—in other words, if love features in it not only as something that happens and shapes events, but as something that provides the work with its structure—, that is not just because of the narrator’s ‘discovery’ of Isabel as his metaphysical and moral anchor. It is also, crucially, because of the actual anchoring of episode-to-episode transitions in Isabel’s agreement and eagerness to go.

Yesterday is difficult to place in any of the official timelines of Latin-American literature, and in part because Emar doesn’t seem to match the movements and spirit of his contemporaries. If anything, he seems to write in the spirit of later times, with the bent of a Julio Cortázar, Mario Levrero, or César Aira. Fittingly, he has been championed by Roberto Bolaño, Damiela Eltit, and Juan Luís Martínez as a forebear to later and more experimental Chilean literature.

Likewise, Isabel in Yesterday stands out as a compelling alternative to literary depictions of women and to literary depictions of love, and in ways also that don’t fit into timelines, say, of liberation. Isabel isn’t just a ‘yes-woman’. She injects her views, shares in the direction of the course of the day; indeed, in the crucial fourth chapter, she encourages—demands—the narrator to continue in his reflections when he pleads that he has come up with nothing. There is nothing tragic about her; she is not objectified, martyred, mythologized, sanctified. She is, in every sense, the narrator’s partner.

Isabel is also herself emblematic of the many ways in which Yesterday is such a radically different sort of novel than its contemporaries. The marvelous and the bizarre, and their quotidian, offhanded modes of appearance, certainly mark out one axis of originality. But the maturity of the central relationship, as I’ve tried to sketch it here, marks out another. And, remarkably, after all that, I have really only skimmed the surface of Emar’s short novel, rubbed the joints, as it were. The love story may be the foundation of Yesterday, but, truly, in some ways it is only that. Further mysteries abound in the upper, stranger floors also.

Texts

Yesterday was translated by Megan McDowell for New Directions in 2022.

Incidentally, there isn’t a ton of Emar in English, and not because Emar didn’t write; Ten, a collection of stories, is available in translation by McDowell, from New Directions also, as of 2024, and that’s about it.