Andrés Neuman’s Imaginative Studies of the Self

There’s a passage in Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar’s marvelously confounding choose-your-own adventure novel, in which the enigmatic writer Morelli, perhaps a stand-in for Cortázar himself, describes his creative process:

First there is a confused situation, which can only be defined by words; I start out from this half-shadow and if what I mean (if what is meant) has sufficient strength, the swing begins at once, a rhythmic swaying that draws me to the surface, lights everything up, conjugates this confused material and the one who suffers it into a clear third somehow fateful level: sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, book…In that way by writing I go down into the volcano, I approach the Mothers, I connect with the Center—whatever it may be.

Morelli-Cortázar likens writing to a kind of groping in the darkness. The writer discerns a rhythm and lets it lead him to someplace interior and primordial, where the writer immerses himself in the ur-stuff that precedes such expression. For metaphors capacious enough to represent this encounter, he invokes geology, metaphysics, and the physical being that every person who has ever lived experienced prior to consciousness itself: the mother.

Two works by Andrés Neuman, newly translated and released concurrently, reveal the Argentinian-Spanish writer engaged in the deep work Cortázar’s Morelli describes: a writer immersing himself in his deepest source material to better understand who he is, and the remote, occluded origins of his creative impulse. In both Sensitive Anatomy and Once Upon Argentina, the writer asks: Who, really, am I? From what stuff am I made? 

To that end, both books grope in the darkness, considering topics so proximate as to be strange, writing in different directions toward common themes. One book seeks answers in the physical stuff that comprises Neuman’s writerly self: the body. And the other seeks answers in the people and places that shaped him: his ancestry—especially the all-important mysteries of his mother, the body from which his own emerged—and his Argentine homeland.

Sensitive Anatomy meditates on human corporeality by considering, in playful vignettes, the personality quirks of 30 different body parts. It is a work of whimsy, a dance of connotations and impressions celebrating the body as terrain both intimate and strange. Alighting briefly on each body part, Neuman offers breezy quips and free-associative commentary. Consider a philosophy-flavored epigram from the chapter entitled “The Heel out in the Cold”:

If one considers its essence, bibliography and mishaps, the heel is not exactly the foot. Rather it puts up with it with a stoicism akin to that of the leg of a table or the wheel of a vehicle: knowing who will win praise and who can upset the balance.

Or, a lyrical jag from “Freckles and the Space Between”:

There’s no use fighting a bunch of freckles: fury fragments into infinite dots and deeps through little by little, like a thick liquid through a sieve. The spangled forearm will cunningly ward off any attack and blush at the slightest pressure.

Despite some quasi-scientific impulses (“There has been much speculation about blinking. Is it hygiene, is it seduction, is it the parasympathetic system?”), Neuman’s endeavor is more exegetical than empirical. He reads body parts like texts, teasing out undercurrents and backstories. “Two bellies lying on their sides fit together like pieces of a mosaic,” he writes, “Recovering their breath, back to back, each couple keeps its love in parenthesis.”

There is a thrum of playful, reverent eroticism throughout, as Neuman imagines all body parts, not just the traditional erogenous zones, as sacred space for disclosure and exploration. Even the utilitarian elbow gets some praise: “One day we’ll see it rise up and bring about its own little sensual revolution,” declares Neuman. Readers familiar with Neuman’s break-out novel Traveler of the Century, which explored parallels between the pleasures of sex and literary translation, may note a similar vibe here. The body is a wonderland of weirdness and wordplay.

Despite back-cover ad copy that promises resistance against the “culture of Photoshop,” and an occasional complaint about the ways sexism, racism, and capitalism distort our understanding of the body, Sensitive Anatomy is more aesthetic appreciation than social argument. It’s clever, fun, and fleeting. But, just as Cortázar could be both frivolous in his prose and deadly serious in its underlying intent, there is a gravity to Neuman’s investigation. For the body is the seat of the soul, an “avant-garde work with no author” that “metabolizes images and secretes visions.” With all of its idiosyncrasies and subtexts, its inquiring shoulders, secretive armpits and rhythmic feet, the body holds creativity itself. But where does the body come from?

Longer and more ruminative, Once Upon Argentina is a multigenerational family-history novel, a swirling fusion of memory and imagination made weighty by turbulent historical context. It interlaces Neuman’s own childhood in Argentina with the trajectory of his extended family, a group defined by displacement, strong personalities, and a passion for the arts. We meet Louise Blanche, a fastidious French grande dame, famous within the family for her enormous bowel movements. We meet aunt Silvia, who was kidnapped and tortured by junta soldiers in front of her husband Peter. We meet great-grandfather Jacobo, a Jew who fled Poland to Argentina using a passport stolen from a German soldier, and out of poetic necessity, assumed the soldier’s name: Neuman.

We also meet an imagined version of Neuman’s younger self. An ambivalent student of the prestigious Colegio Nactional, his earliest writing included gory “absurdities and palimpsests,”  an “extravagant ode to a pizza,” and poems resembling Beatles lyrics. A biographical letter from his grandmother “bequeathed…[a] light, burdensome legacy” of storytelling, and gave the imaginative young writer permission to write from emotional, rather than literal, truth. It’s an important moment, foreshadowing the mature writer’s fascination with the interplay between individual and collective memory.

But the emotional center of Once Upon Argentina is Neuman’s mother Delia. A talented violinist, Delia is bohemian in her cultural leanings, but perfectionistic about her art. “Either we make a whole world sound through our fingers, or we’re merely typewriting, child,” says her teacher. Neuman’s prose is likewise free-flowing, and meticulous. In 1973, Delia was performing with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic at Ezeiza Airport when right-wing Peronist gunmen attacked the crowd. Neuman imagines her escaping onto a bus with her violin case, shaken but courageous. The family would eventually flee to Spain, fusing Neuman’s memories of his mother with his feelings about his lost homeland:

Mom, you traveled the country from north to south with your instrument; you plowed grooves in a record that was a map. Meanwhile, that corner of the planet went on spinning round a hole, spinning and spinning until it was scratched.”

The novel was first published as Una vez Argentina in 2003, when Neuman was 26 and his mother was still alive. He has since revised the text significantly. Today, Neuman is established in his art and increasingly prolific. Sensitive Anatomy and Once Upon Argentina reveal a writer flourishing, expanding his oeuvre to include shorter-form and hybrid works that don’t fit cleanly into established genres. Cortázar followed a similar path.

But they also reveal Neuman on the cusp of 50, interrogating his body and his ancestry, probing the rhythms that underlie his creativity. My own idealistic parents, of the same era as Neuman’s, might declare this a middle-aged search for values. I look forward to the next work he coaxes from the shadows.

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