La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno

La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno [Le nozze di Hitler e Maria Antonietta nell'inferno] (Emecé, 2003)
by J.R. Wilcock & F. Fantasia [translated from the Italian by Ernesto Montequin]
Italy, 1985

A total ringer for inclusion in the Spanish and Portuguese Lit Months 2018 line-up given that the Argentina-born J.R. Wilcock (1919-1978) abandoned Spanish as his writing language after he traded in the land of Borges for the land of Pasolini in the year of our Lord 1957, La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno [The Wedding of Hitler and Marie Antoinette in Hell] is, on the other hand, about as ridiculous and as farcical as you might expect from something with such a festive title and snazzy diabolical cover art.  Even if its own authors concede that it's perhaps "un texto que conviene regalar en vez de leer" ["a text that's better suited to give away than to read"] (119), don't heed that advice until you've savored the bad jokes about Marie Antoinette's wedding-threatening crush on Garibaldi ("Está loca por él, aunque se dejaría cortar de nuevo la cabeza antes que admitirlo" ["She's crazy about him even though she'd let her head be cut off again before she'd admit it"]) (11), listened in on Cagliostro's quackish confession to Seneca ("El estudio de la delincuencia y del ocultismo son los únicos pasatiempos dignos para un hombre de cierto gusto" ["The study of crime and occultism is the only worthy hobby for a man of refined taste"]) (23), overheard the horndog in hell act of piacere-seeking Gabriele D'Annunzio: "¡Ah, las diablesas...qué hembras excitantes!" ["Ah, the she-devils...what exciting females!"] (77).  In the afterword, one Du Garbandier--who I've since learned is a character borrowed from Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman--pays tribute to Wilcock's career as a paid fake critic with a doctored quote from that very same Flann O'Brien novel: "La belleza de la lectura de una página de La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno reside en el hecho de que inevitablemente conduce al lector a la feliz convicción de que él no es, de todos los imbéciles, el más grande" ["The beauty of reading one page of The Wedding of Hitler and Marie Antoinette in Hell lies in the fact that the reader is inevitably led to the conclusion that he, of all idiots, isn't the biggest one of all"] (117).  Word.

J.R. Wilcock and friend

An Un-Review: La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno

Just so you know, I've been wanting to read more of that crackpot J.R. Wilcock's oeuvre ever since a reread of his "Llorenç Riber" mini-pseudobiography last month reminded me of how devilishly entertaining most of his La sinagoga de los iconoclastas [The Temple of Iconoclasts] was for me a few years back.  So imagine my delight when, in aimlessly trolling around the internet last night, I discovered that the still as yet unseen by me El templo etrusco [The Etruscan Temple] that I'd requested for pick-up at the library today comes with this utterly genius descriptive blurb on the back of the book: "Wilcock despliega una vez más su destreza narrativa con una prosa de elegante terrorismo verbal, cuya gran precisión no nos ahorra detalles sádicos, y aun atroces, pero tampoco atisbos de una bellezza indómita" ["Wilcock displays his narrative skill once again with a prose of elegant verbal terrorism, the great precision of which does not spare us sadistic and even inhuman details nor inklings of an untamed beauty"].  "Elegant verbal terrorism"?  That, my friends, is a description of a book I want to read--and will soon.  However, the Wilcock title that I really, really want to read now is the one pictured above that I just found out about even later last night. La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno [The Wedding of Hitler and Marie Antoinette in Hell], which sounds like one of the spurious works that appear at the end of Wilcock fan Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, is a book written in collaboration with one Francesco Fantasia and only published after Wilcock's death.  What is it about?  Duh.  However, I love the sound of this thing as described by Guillermo Piro in his Página/12 non-un-review of the 2003 Argentinean edition:

La organización del libro recuerda un poco una famosa escena de Pierrot le fou de Godard, en la que Pierrot-Belmondo, al comienzo del film, se pasea entre la mayoría silenciosa invitada a una fiesta, simplemente escuchando las conversaciones que se suceden a su paso (conversaciones ridículas, en las que todos hablan enunciando slogans publicitarios).  En la boda...  los visitantes del infierno registran las conversaciones que tienen lugar entre los habitantes del infierno mientras se realizan los preparativos para la gran boda entre Hitler y María Antonieta.  Pero María Antonieta duda: Hitler la desea, es digno de ella, pero también Garibaldi cumple con todos los requisitos para poseerla. Y ella duda.  Hay un modo de resolver el asunto; una carrera.  El primero que llegue será aceptado; el perdedor deberá desaparecer inexorablemente de su vida.

[The book's organization is somewhat reminiscent of a famous scene from Godard's Pierrot le fou in which Belmondo's Pierrot, at the beginning of the film, strolls among the silent majority of guests invited to a party, overhearing the conversations that take place in his wake (ridiculous conversations in which the people that speak do so in advertising slogans).  In The Wedding..., the visitors register the conversations that take place among hell's inhabitants while the preparations are being made for the great wedding between Hitler and Marie Antoinette.  However, Marie Antoinette gets cold feet: Hitler desires her, Hitler is worthy of her, but Garibaldi also meets all the requisites for possessing her.  There's a way to resolve the matter: a race.  The first to arrive will win her, but the loser will need to inexorably disappear from her life.]

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La boda de Hitler y María Antonieta en el infierno was published by Emecé in Argentina in 2003 after originally appearing in Italian as Le nozze di Hitler e Maria Antonietta nell'inferno.  Man, would I love to get my mitts on a copy of it.  How about you?

Llorenç Riber

Llorenç Riber
por J.R. Wilcock [traducido del italiano por Joaquín Jordá]
Italia, 1972

Una de las biografías inventadas más absurdas de La sinagoga de los iconoclastas, de Wilcock (un libro que fue uno de los cianotipos posmodernos de La literatura nazi en América, de Bolaño), Llorenç Riber es una obra re divertida que trata de un director catalán, obsesionado con los conejos, cuyas producciones raras incluyen una versión musical de las Investigaciones filosóficas, de Wittgenstein.  Como corresponde a un relato de esta índole, el compilador de este homenaje documenta la vida del artista con carácter juguetón por medio de cuatro reseñas críticas de sus obras escritas por otros y el fragmento de un guión inédito de una obra teatral de Riber que se llama Tristán e Isoldo (una puesta al día gay del clásico medieval).  Aunque no tengo la menor idea de cómo ustedes reaccionarían al sentido de humor que se encuentra acá, no podía dejar de reírme a carcajadas con los pormenores biográficos falsos (dicho haber sido devorado por un león en una página, Riber es después llamado "el director prematuramente devorado" en la próxima página [242]) o las varias reseñas simuladas (Tête de Chien tiene tanto éxito en Lausanne que Riber "fue llamado a saludar hasta ocho veces"; sin obstante, el crítico entonces añade que "para un director, triunfar en Suiza es como recibir una cesta de huevos de regalo" [246]).  Al hablar de esto, una de las reseñas fingidas--la reseña escribida por un tal Matteo Campanari para Il Mondo en Roma--es particularmente interesante para razones imprevisibles.  Veamos si yo pueda hacer justicia a esta anecdóta literaria poco conocida.  Resulta que Wilcock, después de trasladarse a Italia de su Argentina natal, se convertió en un crítico de teatro suplente en algún momento.  Tan aburrido por la tarea de ir al teatro, el excéntrico Wilcock comenzó a escribir reseñas sobre espectáculos inventados por un semanario romano bajo un seudónimo. En este momento, ¡no es de sorprender que la revista fuera llamada Il Mondo, que el crítico estrafalario se llamara Matteo Campanari, y que una de las producciones falsificadas fue presentado por un director que esté mejor conocido como Llorenç Riber!

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One of the wackier fake biographies from J.R. Wilcock's La sinagoga de los iconoclastas (available in English as The Temple of Iconoclasts and a work that's one of the indisputable postmodern blueprints for Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas), "Llorenç Riber" is a super funny piece of writing that celebrates a rabbit-obsessed Catalan theater director whose bizarre list of credits includes a musical version of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations among several other way off-Broadway oddities.  As befits a narrative of this nature, the compiler of this would-be homage playfully documents the artist's life with a selection of four critical pieces on his work composed by others and an extract from Riber's own unpublished play Tristán e Isoldo [Tristan and Isoldo], a sort of gay update of the medieval romance.  While I have no idea how many of you would embrace the absurdity of all this as much as I did, I couldn't stop laughing at either the faux biographical tidbits (said to have been killed by a lion on one page, Riber is then referred to as "el director prematuramente devorado" ["the prematurely devoured director"] on the very next one [242]) or the various mock reviews (Riber's Tête de Chien is so warmly received in Lausanne that the director's asked to come out for eight curtain calls; however, the reviewer then cynically notes that "para un director, triunfar en Suiza es como recibir una cesta de huevos de regalo" ["for a director, being lauded in Switzerland is like receiving a basket of eggs as a gift"] (246).  Curiously enough, one of the mock reviews that's most interesting--the one penned by one Matteo Campanari for Il Mondo in Rome--isn't particularly interesting for any of the reasons you might expect from the above.  Let's see if I can do this obscure literary anecdote justice.  As the story goes, Wilcock at one point in time became a substitute theater critic in Rome after moving to Italy from his native Argentina.  However, the eccentric writer was so bored by the chore of theater-going that he started inventing reviews of fabricated plays with made-up facts and casts and submitting the pieces to an Italian weekly under a pseudonym.  At this point, it should come as no surprise that the weekly was called Il Mondo, that Wilcock's pseudonym was Matteo Campanari, and that one of the fake directors Campanari-Wilcock wrote about was none other than our good friend Llorenç Riber!

Fuente/source

Héctor Libertella, ed.  11 relatos argentinos del siglo XX (Una antología alternativa) [11 20th Century Argentine Narratives: An Alternative Anthology]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Perfil, 1997, 241-266.

Más

El país de Juan Rodolfo Wilcock (La Nación)

Juan Rodolfo Wilcock: Rey iconoclasta (Milenio Online)