I don’t know why I’ve been so into Silvina Ocampo. The allure could be the creepiness, the weird children, the precise ambiguity of her prose, the seemingly plotless, experiential stories. Often, I finish a piece with no clue what I’ve just read, knowing I experienced something, unsure what. And I keep coming back for more.
It’s not like she was some outsider writer that hipsters pretend to like. Ocampo was a big deal. She was part of an Argentinian creative circle that included her husband author Adolfo Bioy Casares and the legendary Jorge Luis Borges, producing collaborate novels, anthologies, illustrations for poetry, and tons of oddness.
Yet, Ocampo has been overshadowed for decades by other Latin American writers. For whatever reason, I hadn’t even read Ocampo in my Latin American literature classes (then again, maybe those experiences are lost in my college memories, memories that if retold would manifest in an Ocampo-esque narrative haze).
Her relative obscurity makes sense. There is the obvious sexism in the publishing industry, and everywhere else. She was barely translated into English until recently. There is the fact that she preferred to stay out of the spotlight. But there’s another critical factor: her writing is weird as hell.
Even her friend, the infinite weirdo, Borges—whose sister Norah provided Ocampo countless illustrations for her work—thought she was bizarre. He said in her stories “there is something I have never understood: her strange taste for a certain kind of innocent and oblique cruelty.” If Borges doesn’t get you, that’s saying something.
Writer and translator Suzanne Jill Levine suggests that Ocampo’s steadfast belief in her own work put her at the risk of “invisibility.” Indeed, Ocampo seemed to relish in cruelty and the resulting freedom of anonymity. In 1980 she told an interviewer that her work had been denied Argentina’s National Prize for Literature because it was “too cruel,” then in the late 80s, working with Daniel Balderston on translating her first collection into English, she insisted they choose her “cruelest stories.”
I like her style. Clearly, she did her own thing, which I wonder if she picked up from the surrealists. A trained painter—trained by no less than Surrealist painter Giorgio di Chirico—she covers terrain expected by someone associated with surrealism.
But her work asserts a reality that is strange yet real, so in a way she rejects the surrealists and ventures into lo real maravilloso (“the marvelous real” that Alejo Carpentier proposed as counter to the impulse of the Surrealists who rarely sought the marvelous in reality.
The strangeness the Surrealists saw as admirable was “premeditated and calculated to produce a sensation of strangeness.” In his opinion, the surrealist project was contrived, each work a “manufactured mystery.” On the other hand, the marvelous real is encountered in its “raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American,” where “the strange is commonplace, and always was commonplace.”
Author Salman Rushdie describes “magical realism” as a “grounded in reality” experience where unrealistic elements are given the same status as “observable facts”. Although I hesitate to use the overused “magical realism,” I believe his description of the phenomenon is a succinct way to express the machinations of lo real maravilloso.
In Ocampo’s stories, that there will be weirdness is often clear in the first sentence, but the over-arching world appears not so different from ours. Often, strangeness and unfamiliarity accumulate, as readers are lulled into a new reality, thinking everything is normal—or just a little off-kilter—until a breaking point, like in the short story “Icera,” when the protagonist, Icera, suddenly grows four inches in a month.
This story ends with the “head of the doll department, Darío Cuerda” wrapping Icera inside a doll box at the display window, then realizing thirty five years had passed since he had last seen her. Parsing the text for a logical thread to explain this manipulation of narrative duration and chronology is useless. The story moves seamlessly from Icera’s girlhood vow not to grow anymore to her finding refuge in the story after a neighbor informs her that, in fact, she has grown.
This blurry sequence of events could be a musing on the ineffability of memory and time, because there seems to be no attempt to offer a logical thread—at least that with a familiar logic. Time and causality seem to abide by their own set of rules.
What I find most interesting is Ocampo’s use of a child’s perspective in her phenomenological exercises. Her stories remind me of two of my favorite movies: Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973) and Germany Year Zero (Roberto Rosselinni, 1948).
Each film offers a different construction of a child’s reality. Rossellini presents the struggles of a German child in the aftermath of WWII, Erice offers a six-year-old girl forming her reality—trying to figure out what’s real or not—in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. The child is a vessel to introduce viewers to a new experience.
Many of Ocampo’s pieces present the reality of a child, layering innocence with creepiness, as readers reckon with an honest and unwitting (for the most part) unreliable narration, in first person or third person limited.
Whether through the narrative frame of a child’s letter about his summer describing the sadistic assault—and likely murder—of the town’s hunchback (“The Clock House”), a watchmaker who happens to live on the roof in a “little hut he built himself that looked like a doghouse,” or in the depiction of a sickly girl propped up by family members for photos until “her head hung down from her neck like a melon” (“The Photographs”), Silvina Ocampo’s writing produces an extraordinary, strange experience—or marvelous in the Carpenterian sense.
“The extraordinary is not necessarily lovely or beautiful. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; rather, it is amazing because it is strange. Everything strange, everything amazing, everything that eludes establish norms is marvelous.” - Alejo Carpentier “Baroque and the Marvelous Real”
Often, when I reach the end of an Ocampo piece, I first wonder what the hell just happened. Then, I consider whether I’ve been on a journey only made possible through reading—could any other medium create such an experience? I grapple with questions about writing in general, about narrative mode especially, with particular regard to narrative distance and narrator unreliability.
Calling her work autotelic might be too simple, or inaccurate. Her work isn’t contained within itself, even if the referent might be the experience of reading. There is an outside world, a reality that other characters experience to which we don’t have access since we are limited to the narrow perspective of a child whose own reality is limited—the reality beyond that child’s reality is asserted.
In “The Clock House”, the mother of the nine-year-old narrator grasps the gravity of a situation in which her drunken child is swept up in the orgiastic mob that attempts to iron out the watchmaker’s hump. Shielded by his ignorance, the child relates the macabre adventure in detail, so readers can come to their own conclusions about what happened. The narrative frame of a child’s letter distances the reader from the action the child has observed and suggests the child believes what he has written, though what the child has understood is much different than what readers have determined.
We can’t say that we know the truth, though—the boy’s story is his truth. That the child’s truth is privileged is crucial to Ocampo’s work. Seeing as a child is a strange experience, because adults have lost access to the child’s world, the child’s Umwelt.
In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben explains Umwelt as the phenomenally experienced world as it presents itself to an animal, proposed by Jakob von Uexküll, an early 20th century German biologist. Agamben explains that we imagine how the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world, but this illusion rests on the belief of a single world in which all living beings are situated.
Uexküll shows that a unitary world doesn’t exist, just as concepts of space and a time vary among living things. He distinguishes between the Umgebung (the objective space in which we see a living being moving) and Umwelt (the environment-world that is constituted by a broad series of elements called Bedeutungsträger (carriers of significance) or Merkmalträger (marks), which are of unique interest to the animal.
Through an understanding of Umwelt, we can consider the differences between the world of children and adults, the lack of mutual comprehension among these actors: their marks are different. No longer do we show the child how things ought to be, asserting the supremacy of our Umwelt, we experience things as they are to the child.
In “Forgotten Journey,” readers experience the interaction between adult truths and child truths. A nursemaid comforts the young protagonist by re-affirming the child’s truth, affirming that babies do in fact come from department stores in Paris, and not from the tummies of mommies as the older children insist. In another instance, the older sister states the ugly truth that the groundskeeper trashed the multi-room nests (with bedrooms and kitchens) the young girl had created for birds. The nursemaid gently reassures the girl that “‘The little birds have taken the nests up into the trees, which is why they are so happy this morning.’”
“Forgotten Journey” story begins with the confounding “Quería acordarse del día en que había nacido y fruncía tanto las cejas que a cada instante las personas grandes la interrumpían para que desarrugara la frente. Por eso no podía nunca llegar hasta el recuerdo de su nacimiento.” (translated by Daniel Balderston as “She was trying to remember the day she was born. She furrowed her brows so much that the adults interrupted her telling her repeatedly to unwrinkle her forehead. That was why she couldn’t reach the memory of her birth.”)
The readers is initiated into a worldview that isn’t reinforced by adult logic. We experience a child’s truths—like “babies come from department stores” or “nests with multiple rooms”—presented in a manner befitting of lo real maravilloso.
In Ocampo’s stories we experience absurdity as the narrator does: as simply truth. By the end of “Forgotten Journey,” I see the world through the eyes of a child, experiencing directly myself the experience of one whose reality is fractured, unique, and unfamiliar. And I wonder how this experience is achieved through text. I also wonder why the hell Ocampo would want to do this. And then I go back for more.
Maybe Ocampo’s husband, Bioy Casares described the Ocampo experience best: “Silvina wrote like no one, in the sense that she is similar to no one and doesn’t seem to have been influenced by any other writer. Her work seems like it influenced itself.”