The question about How someone becomes a writer It usually involves the possibility of recipes, advice, roads. “There is no general Platonic writer but particular individuals who By one thousand paths and life stories totally different have insisted on that. Even the writers themselves are responsible for defenestrating each other and others are thought of as a brotherhood, in an inevitable idealization, ”he writes Hebe Uhart.
The role of the writer, he adds, is equivocal especially in our lands, and despite the envy he feels for American and European colleagues in terms of the recognition of the environment, “it seems good to me that it is so, that he hides his profession when he has to declare what he dedicates himself to the janitor of a hotel, and hides it for fear of teasing or disbelief”.
In the text “The formation of a writer”, found in a 2002 digital fileand that it seems to have been prepared for some day for the references made at the end, which Hebe Uhart had distributed in printed copy to his workshop, is part of A small part of the universe (Adriana Hidalgo), compiled by Pía Bouzas and Eduardo Muslip, And what is a new book posthumous of the remarkable Argentine writer, who died in 2018.
Most of the texts gathered They were written since the mid -eighties From now on, many of them unpublished writings and some very little known.
Humor flashes
Under his acute gaze, with flashes of humor, earthly wisdom and an inexhaustible capacity for astonishment, texts are found About writers like Felisberto Hernández, Enrique Wernicke, Fogwill y Heker; on favorite philosophers, such as Simone Weil, Spinoza and David Hume; also about Greek culture –Prometeo, the Iliad–, Sarmiento and Alberdi; and reflections on the writing and role of the writer.
In the end There are rescues from your file With the title “Miscellaneous of a voice”: facets less known as his first readings, childhood stories, logbooks of his writing by hand and scenes of his favorite film, The story of Adela H., All texts that dialogue with their fiction and their chronicles.
Born in 1936, author of book books such as The light of a new day y Guiding the ivyof the novel Camilo ascends and chronicles like Chronic Traveler, from Patagonia to Mexico y Animals, Until 1983 Uhart’s teaching activity – despite being graduated from philosophy – it was limited to the Primary teaching And in the last dictatorship he taught In high school.
The return to democracy, the expanded space of Argentine public universities, implied for it an important change: He started working in the chair of philosophy of Tomás Abraham in the UBA And at the University of Lomas de Zamorauntil his retirement, at the beginning of 2000.
Throughout these years, in addition, developed a growing activity in the dictation of private literary workshopsin which he would work until his death. The theoretical and critical readings that he carried out throughout his life – the close to theology by his priest brother, which he did in the teaching, which he discovered in Philosophy studies, which he added in the context of university teaching – found a development space that would give rise to the bulk of what is found in a small part of the universe.
There are traces of your heterodox formationbetween the classic and the contemporary, and notes as essays as to search for texts for their students, without neglecting their eagerness to write travel notes, chronicles of characters and situations of the most varied.
There, by case, there are several texts about Simone Weil, one of her favorites. He writes: “What is Simone Weil? Writer, philosopher, mysticism, expert in comparative religions, militant of the working cause, scholarly? She would have refused all these attributions.”
I am dry leaf color
He continues: “He says of herself:” I am dried leaf, like those insects that mimet. “Even more: From your experience in factories to understand and share the working conditionhas lived the misfortune in his own flesh, which consists of horror and contempt of himself, in the impossibility of being. This feeling leads her to write in the working condition: “Humanity is divided into two categories: the people who are taken into account by anything and those who are not taken into account at all.”
Then it is the turn of The literary workshopstradition that tracks more of Americans than of Europeans. Carson McCuller, the great writer, emerged from a workshop and Uhart knew that in New York the manuscripts of her corrected on the margin by her workshop teacher were sold.
But Nothing like Buenos Aires: Literary workshops are usually countless; neighborhoods, individuals, university dependent and diverse cultural centers, sometimes criticized rightly and sometimes without it. Hebe Uhart has seen a wide variety of students pass And he was interested, above all things, that they could detect the issues that were their own and within them, the nuances; work long in the education of the look.
How does a workshop act to produce an effect? Is it useful? Would it may have written the same without going to the workshop? I outline a possible answer: “These are questions that cannot be answered: they are similar to the initial, how do you write their stories? To this question many writers answer: ´The truth is that I do not know ‘. As for the workshop, what I do today, and I always do what I think of, is to move them with praise, severities, advice, laugh arrive. I don’t work too muchbecause I know that if someone has something interesting to say, in the long run they find the form. “
And add: “It seems to me that a workshop works like those radios before one hit them and they went to workhere it would be the student who would be placed in another way in front of what he will tell. And I think that the story we read has so much influence on the students, the indications, such as the jokes we make and the cookies we eat. ”
Among his most intimate texts appear one dedicated to his cat Catalinasomeone challenging and the time “worker”, and lists their daily actions: unplugs the computer, removes the cigarettes from the ashtray, wants to take mate, drag the floor rag in triumph as a bullfighter who beats the bull, suspects a velvety bag with the legs and bites all pipe how hard it seems.
In another, He says that among the first memories of his life is the marriage of his aunt Elisa, that he had married great for the parameters of his time, after the forties, and the greats said: “It is already older, it does not correspond to marry white.”
Concept of justice and beauty
That family anecdote connects it to the concept of justice and beauty of the Greekschildren’s stories such as Gulliver or Cinderella, and myths like those of Procusto and his bed. And it ends in a reflection on social classes and specifying that the middle class of New York, for example, does not resemble Nigeria.
“But we must also add those who do not enter this classification: they are the ones we call marginal, which is another way of putting a side, so you soak. Because a marginal high -class marginal is not the same, to which his family holds, that one of the middle class that goes to the psychoanalyst, that one of the lower class, that goes to the pipes. The perplexity to what does not fit through ´Frontizo´ ”.
An intellectual and plebeian, scholarly and earthly, intimate and universal hebea uhart. In her human formation and as a writer – which is part of the same – each reference is read as a sediment in a slow course and at the same time.
Are Passion for detailfor the rescue of the forgotten and for focusing the extraordinary of the ordinary, the delicacy of the look and the insightful observation, everything is read in the construction of a narrative voice that was aware of the siege of the common places to transform them into something else, measuring their effects and without ever giving up the poetic quality.
Capture the gestures of people, the hidden and the invisible, what is said and what is silent, distrusting what and the rational thought of the characters. Prefer the work of the form, that is to say how, that that his admired Chekhov in his Autobiography He said as “the word of man makes sense and sound. Listen to meaning and you will not know man. Listen to the sound and you will know man.”
A small part of the universeby Hebe Uhart (Adriana Hidalgo).