Review: Yesterday by Juan Emar, Translated by Megan McDowell

By James McGowan

It’s an exciting literary event when a translator resurrects a writer from the obscurity of the past. To our benefit, this is exactly what Megan McDowell does with her new translation of Juan Emar’s Yesterday (New Directions, April 2022), a novel whose wonderfully frustrating exploration of the difficulties of communication comes at a time when we are reconceiving our social relationships in a post-pandemic world. As Emar’s first substantial introduction to the American reading public—fifty-eight years after his death—Megan McDowell’s translation pays deft tribute to the levity, complexity, and despair of Emar’s prose, while maintaining the intellectual fortitude of a text that asks us to reconsider fundamental conceptions of identity that undergird both the popular novel and, by extension, our understanding of ourselves. 

Juan Emar is the pen name of Álvaro Yáñez Bianchi. He was born in Chile in 1893. From what little can be gathered about his life, Emar (a pseudonym derived from the French, “J’en ai marre,” or “I’m fed up”) took great pleasure in defying categorization. Writing against the stark, realist conventions of the Criollismo movement, Emar conjured literary dreamscapes of botched beheadings, singing, dog-headed cynocephali, and amoebic forms that lurk behind everyday furniture. Having split his formative years between Santiago and Paris, he associated with members of European avant-garde movements—particularly the Dadaists and Surrealists—but ultimately eschewed their society as well as their doctrinal approaches to literary invention. Instead, Emar chose to focus on the creation of a wholly original and unsuccessful corpus that has inspired many Latin American writers, such as César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, and Alejandro Zambra, the last of whom writes the intimate and insightful introduction to this latest translation. 

In theory, the premise of Yesterday is simple: an unnamed narrator tells his emotionally estranged wife what he did the day before. The linear progression of the novel follows a clock’s hands, and the segmentation of events into discrete windows of time forms a desperate itinerary (time slots are even allotted for toothsome meals of conger eel soup, bull testicle canapés, and chicken salad). However, the bizarre nature of the day’s events—which include a belly button’s abyss and an immanent encounter with a burgundy-colored-gelatinous-thing-with-legs—hurls the narrator into a subjunctive realm of contemplation that resists the laws of time. To the protagonist’s dismay, and occasionally to the reader’s discomfort, the itinerary is perpetually disrupted. But it is precisely the narrator’s inability to contain his experiences within rational constructs that generates the novel’s profound empathy, and results in a gut-wrenching portrait of delirium, anxiety, and heartbreak that McDowell painstakingly preserves in spite of the narrator’s tendency toward neurotic and bombastic speech. 

Just as Emar’s talent for mitigating the novel’s sometimes tedious tirades with moments of emotional depth enkindles the novel’s empathy, it also produces some of the novel’s more hilarious, if baffling, scenes. In one of my favorite passages, what ought to be an unassuming trip to the zoo in San Agustín de Tango, a fictional city Emar created that one could relate to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, becomes disorienting when the narrator and his wife behold an ostrich devouring a lioness. Almost immediately—even before the ostrich digests the lion, skins it with its sphincter, and, finally, uses the hide as a blanket—the absurdity of the event forces the narrator to search for a proper linguistic expression of his experience. As the lioness moves down the ostrich’s neck, the narrator thinks, “These convulsions brought to my mind the movements an enraged cat might make struggling inside a bag of gelatin.” He says as much to his wife. Justifiably, the “companion of [his] very soul” receives his metaphor with a “questioning glance.” While the absurdity of the experience causes one of the novel’s many communication breakdowns, the disruption of language’s semantic function spawns a rich and original prose that excites the reader, even as it further estranges the narrator from his wife.

Underlying the novel’s representation of the difficulty of communication is the narrator’s resounding conviction that it is fundamentally impossible to know the self and, therefore, to transmit one’s experiences in any coherent fashion. Justifying his decision not to accept a friend’s one-hundred-peso bet to spend a night alone in a cemetery, the narrator explains that “in a situation entirely unknown [to me] . . . my thinking part, disapproving and unhappy, as it was, would be weakened, would be less capable of rising to my defense, and the other unthinking part, growing sharper, would gain strength and take control.” Such cerebral interludes, which routinely disrupt the narrator’s recollections, might irritate some readers, since they destabilize any notion of traditional character development. They might also provoke a readership to whom identity is an integral underpinning of contemporary experience. Still, even if the domestic tragedy of the conscious and subconscious minds causes the narrator a profound despair, it is worthwhile to consider his proposition: that it is only by plunging headlong into the “escape hatches” of ordinary experience that one may enter into a deeper communion with the unarticulated aspects of the self, the other, and the world that the conscious mind innocently entombs.

The reader may ask if the reward is worth the effort. It is always more comfortable to turn to literature that reinforces our understanding of individual, social, and global identity. However, Emar reminds us that these very notions of identity are undermined by a fundamental inability to know the self. To live comfortably in identity would require the cessation of thought and a subordination to highly codified systems of order that demand perpetual and naive self-sacrifice. Yesterday ends with the narrator’s manic inability to accept these terms, a decision that literally jellifies him into the creature that his subconscious mind fears: a burgundy-colored-gelatinous-thing-with-legs. Before he drips away, the narrator’s wife outlines his body on paper in a last-ditch effort to save him from nonexistence. Yet as a reader, I hope that she will not succeed, and that the physical melting of the narrator’s body will at last offer him an understanding of self outside of the rational categories of identity, language, and time—perhaps propelling him into a state of being in which people no longer seek to comprehend, but rather to behold. To resort to the same old outlines, in literature or in life, would be to deny ourselves exposure to fresh ways of thinking and being. If we have any real hope of communicating our manic, absurd, and surreal experiences in a post-pandemic world, opening these new pathways for communication is absolutely necessary.