Stuart Cooke reads Sergio Pitol's El arte de la fuga

1996 in Spanish

2015 in English George Henson's translation

although, the following is Stuart Cooke's translation:

... a simple description, without additions, without delays, echoes or shadows, fatally reduces the power of the story, converts it into a mere anecdote—something vulgar, basically. Always, from the very beginning, what I have done is scatter a series of points across a white page, as if by chance they had fallen onto it, without any visible relation between them; until suddenly something begins to spread, to expand and throw out tentacles in search of the others, and then the rest follow its example: the points convert into lines that run across the page to find their siblings, whether to subordinate them or to serve them, until that initial cluster of solitary points has transformed into an increasingly complex, intricate figure, with cavities, folds, reservations, blurring and dark flashes.

–Stuart Cooke, Apples & Oranges: adventures in poetics, Puncher & Wattmann, 2025, .p. 132

–reminding me among other things to read Pitol, even if in translation. The other things: doesn't this recall Frank Herbert working with Bill Ransom, laying the first hundred pages of their collaboration out on the floor:

I was reading Joseph Bronkowski's The Ascent of Man and Frank was reading The Upanishads.

We talked, we split up, we wrote, we came back the next day to exchange pages for the other person's touch. At one hundred pages we laid out the sheets in order for the first time across Frank's living-room floor. We put blank pages where we needed transitions or more material, and we assigned each other those parts according to individual interests or insights on a character. That's as close to an outline as we ever got.

"A story's organic," Frank used to say. "Let it grow!"

So we did.

–The Pandora Sequence, WordFire Press, 2012, p. 2

–and isn't it the case that Pitol's "series of points" are the virtual forms, singularties, each with its will to power, that will turn his work into a collaboration with himself?

–then what to make of the "simple description" which can so easily stop the "figure" from ever evolving its "cavities, folds, reservations, blurring and dark flashes" and make the story into something vulgar, a mere anecdote?