LITERARY SOCIETY OF THE SUN

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Submitted Date 06/15/2019
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Anyone who has frequented one of our meetings will understand right away that we have not always been an organization that rewards literary talent.

Our origins date back to the last century, when our ancestors organized a society whose primary purpose was to give the whereabouts of people who had been lost during a hurricane or major disaster. Once a year we gather to give a literary prize to the person who best describes our purposes as a society or who provides us a narrative that best describes the real reason that brings us together in the present moment. In general, the literary contestants do not explain why there is a poetry or story contest. Our contest is different in this sense, since it's not based so much in the genre chosen by the participant as to the topic that he chooses to discuss, that is our prerogative. Also, there is another detail, we ourselves choose our guests, rather than submit a free competition to all. Almost always the person who wins the award is part of the jury for the next year, until finally accepted as a member of the society. In order for such a society to function, as it's natural, it's necessary for us to explain our origins. We will not invite a person, without further ado, just because we've been told that he writes well. The participants who compete have already made been eligible in advance, already, in a certain way, have won a prize for participating. What we are interested in is not the quality of the text, but the degree of verisimilitude which he can explain our purposes. We distinguish ourselves from other forums because our society was originally non-literary, but one that helped people who had forgotten who they were. Something that happened a lot during the immigration movements, the fires in the poor parts of the city; was the forgetting of one's own identity, and a lot of people not knowing who they were, who had forgotten their own relatives, they found asylum among us. What purpose does a similar society have nowadays? That is precisely what we submit for competition, every year, more or less, at the same date. There are those who say we don't matter anymore, that the reasons we joined in the past no longer exist today, but by the entries we received every year and the criticism of the literary heritage sectors, who consider us a minor prize, the reason is that we have persevered to the present.

By everything else, we look like an ordinary literary society. Most of us members have already reached our senior years. We feign interest in young talent, the same as other societies. The one who can tell us a better story about ourselves, gathered in the middle of a Friday night, even if he doesn't win a prize, will receive a warm welcome. We prefer, however, that someone will surprise us with a different version about ourselves as a society. Sometimes a person, who has spent many years courting us, may receive, in a pejorative way, an honorable mention, but certainly not one of the prizes. Those who come see us during an award ceremony will be surprised to see that we are always surrounded by small children, and that they are not always our children. There are occasions in which we go to the beach to discuss the award we are going to grant, and discuss weather that person deserves the award in light of ourselves. Unlike other societies maybe we aren't an authority on literature, other than the experience of living from day to day. Concerning other people, we usually know everything in other times. Because of that, we usually award stories, anecdotes about natural disasters. Last year someone won, as far as I remember, a prize for an essay on the way people forget during a grand fire. Says the essayist: "One imagines, during a great fire, people burned and firefighters rushing from one side to another, over the widespread scorching, but one never imagines that a person would forget their name and not know their true activity as a result of the same disaster. On such a person, one could tell a story that could remind the society of its original purposes. The imagination has much to see at the time of classifying any disaster. If it's a fire we see the burned one. If a tidal wave, people drowned on the beach, fish from the sea dead on the shore, and no one deigns to gather them to eat. However, when that happens in the imagination of the people, we know that the disaster has been so great as to move us like the original society that we were. We to perpetuate ourselves towards the future, content ourselves with some mythical forms that are native to the original disaster from which we came. We can imagine some victims or heroes that saved them, but in modern times we have never encountered, as far as I know, an enormity similar to one of Oedipus, which during the disaster in Greece forgot that he was the son of kings, became ignorant of his legitimate descent to the Greek throne with his conduct. We do not see Oedipus but a case of misplaced identity. We could say that during the last century we were active, as writers and essayists, when thousands of displacements in this area threatened people with an air of tragedy. We did stories about the father, the mother and son because those institutions seemed to be undermined by displacement and slavery. Now, as a literary society, we don't know to what extent is has lost its own identity. We keep functioning as a society that rewards small anecdotes, to know until what point that individuals ignore what is their true ancestry, etc. I, on that, have something to say by way of essay."

Another issue that seems to me legitimate to discuss is our position regarding apocryphal stories. The reader would be greatly surprised if he discovered that the vast majority of the stories relating to disasters, which occasionally appear in magazines, in which a person is saved from a snowfall or mudslide, prove to be false in general. Remember that there are insurance companies by means of, at least, when it comes to mudslides or fires. What we call the subculture of the victim, which last century had a flourishing underground economy, an underground that took advantage of the poor communications of the time, was one of the principal topics, now lost in the modern era, of the humorous works of Mark Twain. Removed today from the rivers, we lose the "pathos" of the essential charlatanism that surrounded the great enormities of history. Societies such as ours existed in spite of this. To give just one example, think of the insurance charged by a slave ship on a load dropped on the sea, enough motivation to give rise to a thousand sumptuary narrations of the vessel. As well as there is a classical world, which we refer to by myths, exists a modernity that we access through anticipations. I can't tell with total accuracy when we were born as a society, but having existed in the times when that ship was sunk, we would have awarded a narration that appeared immediately an attempt was made to collect the insurance, written by a freedman whom his henchmen called pejoratively King of Sweden. This man not only discovered the fraud, already being an abolitionist in England, he wrote a detailed chronicle of the traffic to expose the thousand they said to have disembarked the sunken vessel. We lose the flavor of the English underworld that lived by usurping identities, pretending to be drowned, to collect perks from overseas. That is what Twain meant, for example, when he said that Walter Scott embodied in his writings the worst of the American south. First of all, the celebration of the underworld, which lived no only of a continuous usurpation of foreign identities. For him, the English people resisted by means of illegality in all its facets. The corrupt son of a vicar resembling scum as a smuggler, reinvigorated the fanatical protestant when he stole his daughter. No one like Twain to denounce this celebration of crime, that today we don't hear discussed except superficially as a footnote, precisely because the margins appear to be the origins of the true criticism, or modernity. Don't be surprised, if interested in our activities, when we project ourselves to the world as a species of something absurd. The fraud is discovered in the tone, less than the content. Look, a man with materials such as Scott, the narrative resources, could have perfectly told the truth. If today it seems to many that criminality is a popular form, that we owe to Scott. It's very modern to say that today we are not what we once were. If I had started in earnest, as I am speaking now, perhaps we could arrive at the end.

 

Translated by Ron Rodriguez©2015

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