By Lida Prypchan
On Sunday, April 18th, El Nacional published an interview with the Venezuelan writer born in Valera, Antonieta Madrid.
… When speaking of her voice, the interviewer says: “It is an outrage of tenderness.” But I think that her voice and most importantly her words “are more outrageous than tender.”
… One of the questions she is asked is why she writes.
She responds “with her outrage of tenderness:” We shouldn’t waste time asking and answering that question. It appears that her activity is so blurry to her that she does not even know why she does it. That question is often asked to observe people’s motivations for choosing their career or job, etc. …
… Another of the questions she is asked is: Which of the country’s problems distresses you most? Antonieta, with her delicate and tender outrage, answers: “I prefer not to talk about the country. I love it very much. It’s an intimate matter, so personal.” This does not seem to me to be the sincere attitude of a person who “loves their country.” If you love it so much, why not talk about it? It’s like saying that she loves her mother very much, but prefers not to talk about her.
… Antonieta Madrid says that nothing is achieved with bitterness. She is right. Well, bitterness often achieves making life difficult for the person who caused us the bitterness. It is a form of revenge. In any case, it is a way of making life more dramatic when life is of itself already dramatic.
… Lastly, I would like to make some comments about one of her statements, which is: “I do not suffer when writing.” In reading her statement, I wondered: Who suffers when writing? What would “suffering when writing” be like? I think that you cannot suffer when writing because it is an art that allows and includes unburdening oneself above all. To put it better, I will give you an example: Goethe. He was a quiet, brilliant man, who tried as far as possible to not complicate his life; he was a man who when he fell in love and things started to go a little wrong, he would go on a trip to refresh his mind. When his time or period of suffering arrived, he did not keep that thorn inside, but rather he extracted it from his heart and turned it into a book: “Werther”.
… Giovani Papini, when he refers to Freud in his book GOG, says that Freud based his method on his hero, Goethe. I copy verbatim what Papini expresses: “The first impulse for discovering my method stems from my beloved Goethe. You know that he wrote Werther to get rid of the morbid incubation of pain: literature was catharsis for him. And what my method consists of to cure hysteria is merely to have the patient tell “all” in order to free himself from obsession; I did nothing more than force my patients to proceed as Goethe did.”
… And like Goethe there have been many.
… Indeed, literature is, for many writers, a form of unburdening themselves. But more than a form of unburdening themselves, it is a way to seek explanations for their personality, or it can also be a way to express what they think about things, life, death, women. And if we start to analyze, we realize that only those who express their way of seeing life with honesty and without fear become great. And sometimes they are not satisfied with expressing, they instead prefer to denounce the absurdity of society or perhaps they prefer to accuse or insult.
… They are faithful to their ideas, their points of view, however radical they are or appear, their likes, their dislikes, and everything that their person signifies!
