Lourdes Molina : Eres licenciada en bioquímica, pero eres escritora de ficción. ¿Cómo empezaste a escribir? ¿Cómo influye su formación científica en su proceso creativo?

Jorge Enrique Lage: Nunca trabajé profesionalmente como bioquímico. Cuando estaba en la universidad comencé a participar en talleres y concursos de escritura, así fue como empezó todo. Mi “formación” profesional es casi inexistente, pero la ciencia como tal es algo que siempre me ha interesado. Leo muchas publicaciones científicas. Siempre me ha atraído la posibilidad de combinar (y recombinar, como el ADN) temas científicos en mi trabajo, para traer información que de otro modo es ajena o distante del campo “literario”.

LM: ¿Cómo ha evolucionado tu escritura? ¿Cómo lo describirías?

JEL: No soy la persona adecuada para describir lo que he hecho, que no es mucho, pero lo he hecho de la mejor manera que sabía. Quería contar las historias que quería leer. Utilicé ciertas formas y estilos indefinidos que, en ese momento, me resultaban atractivos y era lo mejor que podía hacer. Eso es todo. No veo ningún desarrollo en eso. Fue más una lucha con mis propias limitaciones, que son muchas.

LM: Hay muchas dimensiones en tu trabajo. ¿Qué te ha inspirado? ¿Cuáles fueron las principales influencias?

JEL: Leer me inspira. Me inspiran libros y autores, estilos e historias. Pero la forma en que todo toma forma y converge en las diferentes dimensiones que mencionas, no me interesa descifrar eso. Un escritor, dijo alguien, publica resúmenes de lo que lee. Eso es todo. Vamos a dejar las cosas así.

LM: ¿Cuáles son tus obras literarias favoritas? ¿Tus escritores favoritos? ¿Qué está leyendo ahora?

JEL: Mis gustos y preferencias cambian con el tiempo, siempre están mutando. Al principio, leía mucha ciencia ficción y fantasía oscura, como Lovecraft y Stephen King. También leo mucha literatura policiaca. En diferentes momentos, por diferentes razones, me interesaron los libros de gente como Raymond Chandler, Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, Ray Loriga, Alberto Fuget, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard, David Foster Wallace, Roberto Bolaño, Mario Bellatín, Álvaro Bisama, y ​​un etcétera que podría ser infinito.

De Cuba: Miguel de Marcos, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Lorenzo García Vega… entre otros.

Como todo el mundo, pasé por una etapa de Julio Cortázar, y antes de eso, de Jorge Luis Borges. Siempre vuelvo al Pedro Páramo de Rulfo .

LM: ¿Qué obras/escritores te emocionan más en este momento?

JEL: Últimamente, quizás es el diseño literario de César Aira lo que me parece más interesante. Ahora mismo estoy leyendo una muy buena novela de Antonio Orejudo: Los cinco y yo  .

LM: De lo que has escrito, ¿cuál es tu pieza favorita?

JEL: De lo que he escrito, mi favorita es mi última novela corta, inédita, que acabo de terminar. Como cabría esperar.

LM: ¿En qué estás trabajando ahora?

JEL: Descanso y relajación. Como les comenté anteriormente, tengo dos libros inéditos. Quizá nunca se publiquen, ninguno de los dos, así que puede que sea hora de centrarse en otra cosa. En serio.

LM: ¿Qué harías si dejaras de escribir?

JEL: No estoy seguro de lo que haría. Supongo que cualquier cosa que me apoyaría y me daría más tiempo para leer. Soy un lector, eso es lo que soy.

LM: Cuéntanos sobre el proceso de escritura de La autopista: La película . ¿Cómo se te ocurrió la idea de esa novela?

JEL: Dos personajes solitarios en un paisaje devastado —La Habana— donde se manifiesta entonces una situación absurda. Esa fue la idea original. A partir de ahí, tejí una serie de historias y encuentros en forma de cuentos que empezaron a funcionar como capítulos. Así fue como sucedió.

LM: ¿Cómo lo clasificaría?—(si fuera posible clasificarlo…)

JEL: No lo clasificaría de ninguna manera, hice bastante al escribirlo. Si tuviera que llamarlo de alguna manera, lo que se me ocurre, redundantemente: un falso documental falso. O un guión desechado.

LM: La trama de La autopista se desarrolla en una Habana algo distópica. ¿Por qué eligió representar a La Habana a mediados del siglo XXI (y no en el presente, por ejemplo)?

JEL: Nunca me ha interesado el realismo. Tengo afinidad por lo fantástico, lo surrealista, para lo cual las escenas futuristas, por llamarlas de alguna manera, parecen ser las más apropiadas. Además, no aspiro a “representar” ningún tipo de La Habana; Quiero desentrañarlo, inventarlo.

LM: You live in Havana but it’s clear that you know and understand (have mastered) US general and pop culture—perhaps even better than a typical “American.” What is your relationship with the United States? How do you consume its culture?

JEL: North American pop culture has always been my culture, too. It’s part of the culture in half of the world. I don’t think I have a particular mastery or knowledge of it beyond that which any other consumer might have, except that it penetrates Cuba more slowly. But it does penetrate, of course, one way or another, and it imposes itself forcefully. It always has. Ever since I was a teenager.

My relationship with the US: excellent. I wish the inverse were the same.

LM: This novel is saturated with references to US pop culture. How do you think this invasion of pop culture works?

JEL: The thing is that it’s not an invasion, it never was, it never has been. I don’t see it that way. It is something that is in the air that you breathe, global oxygen. One of the goals of the novel was, in fact, to be intertextual, and what I did was simply turn to certain elements that were very familiar to me.

LM: Emily Maguire has written about the special temporal experience, the “temporal palimpsest,” that appears in the writing of Generation Zero. This experience seems manifest in the ubiquitous presence of (US pop culture from) the 1990s in La autopista. Why the 1990s? Why is this context so central in Havana in the mid-21st century?

JEL: I don’t know. I suppose that those 90s references in La autopista—Kurt Cobain, certain books, etc.—were an active part of the literary circles I participated in at the beginning of this century, when I started to write. In any case, it is something that refers to me, as the author, to something biographical, and in no way means that that context, that decade, is especially powerful and much less something critical to understand 21st-century Havana. At the very least, the 90s don’t help me to understand it.

LM: The characters in the novel… they are familiar (historical and/or ordinary) but also foreign, strange; it’s as if they provoke an uncanny experience. How did you come up with these characters? What did you want them to portray?

JEL: I only created two: the narrator and El Autista. Maybe they’re one and the same, if that’s how you want to see it. The rest of the characters appeared without a plan. Honestly, I didn’t mean to “portray” anything through them. I only wanted to give them a voice to move the story along until the end. If the reader has the experiences you mention, then I think that’s fantastic.

LM: A central theme of this novel is the experience of limbo, of aimlessness. What triggers this situation for the characters and in the general context of the text?

JEL: I don’t make that distinction, or at least I wouldn’t know how to establish it now, because I saw it all in a compressed way, integrated: that limbo with those characters. It isn’t something that triggers something else; there is a symbiosis, the characters depend on the context, and at the same time, they produce it. But, anyway, that’s only my understanding, which is inevitably biased and perhaps a bit obtuse.

LM: Does La autopista: The Movie aim to be prophetic? What do you imagine Havana, or Cuba, to be like in the next 50 years?

JEL: No, not prophetic at all. That’s not what it’s about. I don’t like that claim. In 50 years I would like to be in a Havana where we can say: “It’s incredible how modernized Havana has become in the last 50 years!”

LM: Gilberto Padilla Cárdenas writes that Cuban literature from the past few decades suffers from “una invasiva patología viral, de una enfermedad sistémica” (an invasive viral infection, a systemic disease) that employs “‘lo cubano’ como tótem” (the idea of being Cuban as a totem). Maguire argues that writers from this “generation,” to which you belong, reject this. With this in mind, does La autopista: The Movie aspire to represent the Cuban condition or to represent a more universal experience. I ask because, on the one hand, the novel resists classification and temporality, but on the other, it is very much grounded in a specific time and place. How would you classify it?

JEL: Again, I don’t aspire to be representational in any way. It’s more modest: make things up, assemble a story, make a cocktail of references (literary, pop), if you’d like. But I’ve never had the contemporary Cuban condition in mind. Place it and consider it within (or beyond) those coordinates, read it (or not) from there, that’s perfectly legitimate, but I don’t care to and I don’t like to be a socio-literary critic of my own work. That’s why I never know how to respond to these kinds of issues.

LM: What is the responsibility of the Cuban writer? Of Cuban literature?

JEL: I think that the Cuban writer and of Cuban literature has the same responsibility everywhere: only with the language and with the tradition. Everything else, the extra-literary, is up to the individual and their personal criteria.

LM: You live and write in Havana, have published in “dissident” publications, and you are also the editor of Editorial Caja China—a State publishing house. You are also, in a way, a “radical” writer, given that you are part of a group of writers considered iconoclast and rebellious. Is there a conflict with your role as an editor and the “rebellious” quality of your work and those with whom you associate?

JEL: There hasn’t been any conflict yet. It turns out that I am a state-employed editor and writer at a very small, very marginal, institution that’s on the periphery of the periphery of the Ministry of Culture. But I’m sure that a conflict would take no time to develop if I were to take a position at the Instituto Cubano del Libro (Cuban Book Institute), for instance, or at a more important, more central publication or publishing house with more influence.

LM: How does living in Cuba (the political, the social, daily life) affect your writing?

JEL: Living (surviving) in Cuba: writing is secondary to this. The trauma of my country has affected me and, as such, it inevitably affects everything that I am and everything that I do. But, on the other hand, I have always lived in this country, so I have no experience writing outside of the Cuban experience. I have no way of comparing these different contexts.

LM: Readers and scholars tend to insist on categorizing, defining, literary trends and work—perhaps it’s just a human tendency. You have mentioned before that it isn’t possible to define Cuban literature. Having said that, there now exists a group of writers, Generation Zero, of which you are part. I am not suggesting that the writers or its art is monolithic, but there are certain connections, as many have already observed. What can you say about this “new” generation of Cuban writers? Are they really creating a newrrative—could it be a literary tabula rasa? If you resist the idea of defining or categorizing Cuban literature, do you also resist that label? What do you think about participating in this group or about any other defined group?

JEL: That’s an issue for the critics. As I mentioned to you earlier, I don’t like to delve into what I write. What I can tell you is that the label, as such, doesn’t seem inaccurate. Brown University invited me to an event, a panel, about this so-called Generation Zero. Perhaps I would have never set foot there, had it not been for that label. Don’t you think? Maybe they would’ve never invited me. The anthologies that feature the work of Generation Zero create a readership base, which then fosters opportunities to publish in other places. These practical matters, for me, are the positive ones regarding the label: when it functions as a catalyst or simulant. How could I be against that?

LM: En la misma línea de la pregunta anterior, si se pudiera clasificar tu obra, ¿cómo crees que ha evolucionado en los últimos años? ¿Hay un mensaje, estilo o idea común?

JEL: Me gustaría pensar que en los últimos años me he vuelto menos ingenuo y un escritor más eficaz. Pero eso es probablemente sólo un engaño. Creo que el único denominador común que veo en mi trabajo es la persistencia. No la persistencia de escribir por escribir, sino la escritura como continuación de la lectura. Me gustaría pensar que en los últimos años me he convertido en un mejor lector.

diciembre 2017