April 23, 2020 49
a “curly-haired dog.” The story takes
its next cues from sentimental fiction—
the servant girls are first raised as play-
mates of the landowners’ children but
are gradually shown their true position,
whereupon they await their Cinderella
moment, mooning around the estate in
wretched hand-me-down dresses. The
readymade, slightly antiquated quality
of both stories’ scenarios heightens the
tang of modern irony and rapid defla-
tion that flavors both.
In the story “Diorama,” a newly
minted doctor is still startled to see an
MD affixed to his name: now, as if over-
night, he is fettered to
a waiting room smelling of ban-
dages, with bronze statues, thou-
sands of old magazines, black
cushions embroidered with golden
leaves and butterflies, and vases
with giant tufts of flowers. He
dreamed of a bright, modern of-
fice, but fate intervened: they sent
him everything left in his mother’s
house as if to some dumpster.As the story unfolds and the doctor de-
cides to play along with the expanding
lunacy of one patient’s wishes—that he
treat an imaginary patient—each es-
calation seems quite natural, since the
doctor is, after all, the kind of person
willing to let his new office become
a dumpster of Victoriana. What else
might he not say no to?
Elsewhere in Forgotten Journey we
see Ocampo’s first attempt at capturing
the experience of illness, a subject that
would become more and more prom-
inent in her later work. The day after
an operation, in “The Wide and Sunny
Terrace,” a woman feels that the slight-
est motion of her body would send the
furniture and paintings teetering as if
in an earthquake; she tries to focus on
an action but “her body seemed to have
drifted away while her eyes dissolved
like sugar cubes”:
She moved her long swimmer’s
arms gently, her hands searching
for a book on the table. She would
have been able to swim, because
swimming is just lying down, mov-
ing over dense mattresses of water,
and the sun would have cured
her.... It was useless; her hands
couldn’t grab the book.All her life, Ocampo remained reti-
cent about her artistic intentions. As
time went on she came to hate being
photographed, as though her face itself
were too legible for her liking. She took
to wearing dramatic, tinted glasses,
equal parts glamour and erasure. Of at-
tempts to capture her directly, we have
the late Argentinean writer Noemí Ul-
la’s book-length interview, Encuentros
con Silvina Ocampo (which is unhelp-
ful due to her subject’s guardedness),
a few opaque shorter interviews, and a
slow trickle of biographical scholarship
as Ocampists turn over her and her sis-
ters’ papers, now housed at Princeton.
Ocampo “deliberately allowed con-
fusion to circulate around her,” in the
words of one of the leading Ocampo
scholars, Patricia Klingenberg. She
even took to signing books written by
another Argentinean, Silvina Bull-
rich—a best seller who scoffed at
“writer’s writers” and the tastes of the
“elite” in favor of depicting the cloth-
ing and vacations of the well-to-do in
near-pornographic detail—when art-
less fans confused the two.
Still, the records of Ocampo’s men-
tors and intimates offer some clues to
her artistic principles. Around the time
she studied with de Chirico in Paris,
he had become deeply interested in
the works of Nietzsche, developing
an idiosyncratic understanding of the
philosopher’s references to Stimmung
(loosely, mood, tone, or tuning) as an
overwhelming aesthetic imperative: to
convey the “strange and profound po-
etry, mysterious and infinitely solitary”
latent in a situation. De Chirico and
Ocampo were both interested in a rep-
resentational art, but not of the known
world—rather the “secret world.” It is
useful, in considering Ocampo, to re-
member that the generation of artists
that preceded her worked in multiple
media—that de Chirico’s sometime ad-
viser André Breton was both a writer
and a visual artist, and that her other
painting teacher, Léger, had dabbled in
film before she met him.
Her fellow feeling toward the other
arts and their practitioners is deftly
used in “The Statue Salesman,” one of
the stories in Forgotten Journey. The
salesman is a man afraid of a seven-
year-old boy whose graffiti on statues
“was evicting him, stealing his tran-
quility, murdering him by undermining
him.” The man’s preposterous belief
that the small boy is “impervious and
independent as only major criminals
can be” is laughable, but his suffoca-
tion (literal and figurative) as a result of
the boy’s pranks seems to represent the
final strangulation of anyone’s deepest
hopes. As the man expires, he hears
“all the statues he had sold and hadn’t
sold throughout his life marching in
single file,” like Banquo’s descendants.
Like de Chirico’s, Ocampo’s work
often has the antique quality of a half-
lost fragment of myth, its moral missing
or not fully translatable. Her prolific
output (more than two hundred stories,
as well as countless poems, drawings,
and collaborations) only contributes
to this sense of a complete and foreign
country underlying ours—perhaps more
honest than our own in its refusal to
impose causality or logic where they do
not really exist.
Ocampo seems to have accom-
plished this enormous output and imag-
inative freedom in part by approaching
her work sideways, as though she could
trick herself into production. She wrote
on ticket stubs and napkins, the cheap-
ness and impermanence perhaps anti-
dotes to self-consciousness. She arrived
at her marriage in the same way, at
least according to her husband’s later
account: introduced by their mothers,
Silvina invited Bioy Cesares to see her
painting studio on the sixth floor of the
house. During the long walk up, he re-
alized he was infatuated. By the time
they reached the sixth floor, he was
certain, and embraced her without a
word, an act he said “she accepted with
total naturalness.” For a time they were
happy in an open marriage—his affair
with her niece Silvia Angelica, and in-
sistence that the younger woman live
with them, may have troubled this—
though Silvina’s habitual obliquity
came again to her aid when, childless
at the age of fifty-one, she discreetly
adopted Casares’s daughter by another
woman, decamping to more-permissive
France to evade the scrutiny of the Ar-
gentinean elite (though eventually she
returned to Buenos Aires).In the mid-1980s, working on a
comprehensive translation of Emily
Dickinson, Ocampo began to show
symptoms of dementia. Apart from
poetry, she devoted her final years to
the completion and revision of her
only solo novel, The Promise, a proj-
ect she had begun in the mid-1960s
and pursued intermittently for the next
few decades. (Her earlier spoof-novel,
cowritten with Bioy Casares, Where
There’s Love, There’s Hate, deserves
its own category, perhaps alongside the
spoofs à deux of Ashbery/Schuyler and
Burroughs/Kerouac.) In what would
turn out to be a kind of prophecy,
Ocampo had described the novel (in
the 1970s, when she had briefly thought
it was nearing completion) as one nar-
rator’s Scheherazadian attempt to keep
talking “so as not to die, but one can
tell she is dying.” The manuscript of
The Promise was found in her study
upon her death in 1993, typed with a
few handwritten corrections. It is un-
clear whether she thought of the book
as finished, though the presence of a
title page suggests it was at least a full
draft.
At the start of The Promise, the basic
plot would appear to be that a woman
has fallen off a transatlantic liner unno-
ticed. If she can only keep recounting
her memories to herself, perhaps she
will keep up her strength and morale
until she is rescued. She convinces her-
self that the omens of survival point in
her favor, since “those who are drown-
ing are happy, as everyone knows, but
I [am] not.” Racking her brain for sub-
jects of contemplation while she floats
and swims, she lists the shopkeepers,
flirts, and scamps of her childhood
neighborhood, the beauty secrets of
the penniless (“on her, weariness is a
pigment that makes her eyes larger”)
and their blood sports (“her drunken
stepfather tied a rope around her waist
and swung her from the first-floor bal-
cony until a crowd of villagers gath-
ered, none of them daring to say a
thing for fear that the man would drop
her”).
Through her retellings, we meet a
woman named Irene and her near-feral
child Gabriela (at times, a pronoun-
and vowel- changing Gabriel). Irene is
doggedly pursuing a medical degree
despite being destitute, in order to
woo a caddish fellow student, Lean-
dro (magnetic to everyone, including
our narrator). Leandro loves Verónica,
whom he met by impulsively attending
her sister’s funeral in order to engage in
some light necrophilia.
As The Promise goes on, however,
even stranger intrusions and non sequi-
turs begin to make the reader suspect
that the narrator—with her guileless-
ness that at first suggested an inge-
nue—is actually much older than one
supposed, and that the place she is lost
may not be the sea. Her initial account
of her own life becomes usurped by
its supporting cast, who crowd out the
planned account of herself. Their lives
grow more vivid than the narrator’s
own, enacting the casual vampirism
of youth upon age, as younger people
grow in vigor at the expense of the
blanched, dissolving presence of the
soon-to-die.
Out of the blue, as if briefly shaking
her awake, a woman named “Celia or
Clelia” is silently arranging the nar-
rator’s hair; the hairdresser’s distaste
makes the narrator suspect that she
herself is old:One day I had a sty in one eye, an-
other day a boil on the nape of my
neck, another day a cold sore on
my lip, until my hair started falling
out.... My baldness progressed,
my boils multiplied, and don’t even
get me started on the sties.As the narrator struggles to leave her
chair, she reali zes that “C elia or Clelia”
is physically stronger and more agile,
and that she’ll have to endure these
monstrous attentions for as long as it
pleases the hairdresser to inflict them.
Passages from the opening pages of
The Promise take on new meaning, no
longer simply describing a self-effacing
personality but revealing the isolation
of the very old, frail, and dependent: “I
don’t have a life of my own; I have only
feelings. My experiences were never
important—not during the course of
my life nor even on the threshold of
death. Instead, the lives of others have
become mine.” In short, though all
the old stamps of Ocampo are there (a
ghoulish mariticide, a dinner-party sat-
ire that skewers bourgeois self- regard
like a scene from late Buñuel), she has
arranged these components to sug-
gest something about decomposition:
together they form a theory of mem-
ory and its opposite—“the organ of
the brain breaking down in substance
and function,” the self “slowly disap-
pearing,” as the essayist and nurse
Sallie Tisdale has written of dementia.
The result is a bold phantasmagoria,
marked by Ocampo’s insight that in
extremis, delirium can be the highest
form of truth.
Ocampo’s following has grown in
the nearly thirty years since her death.
The recent reexamination of figures
such as the British-Mexican artist and
writer Leonora Carrington, who was
similarly elusive (though it was perhaps
Carrington’s early and misplaced reifi-
cation as muse and beauty that allowed
her to hide in plain sight for so long),
points to a rich lode of the last centu-
ry’s art awaiting further excavation.
It is hard to imagine the Argentinean
film director Lucrecia Martel, for ex-
ample—one of the most exciting direc-
tors now working—without Ocampo as
forebear. (Martel made a short docu-
mentary on Ocampo, Las Dependen-
cias [1999], before the feature- length
fictional films that brought her recogni-
tion.) Martel, whose great subject is the
ritual-loving witchiness of children left
untended (or of adults rendered child-
like by deprivation and ennui), seems
at times to revive Ocampo’s domestic
surrealism with just a few props up-
dated: cell phones, malls, and squalid
pool parties.
In a letter to her sister Victoria,
Ocampo once referred to her belief
in her own clairvoyance, her capaz de
intuir in “seeing” her sister at will no
matter the distance between them. She
seems to have meant this literally, and
elsewhere family and friends corrob-
orate her belief in her uncanny pow-
ers. But her claim of clairvoyance is
also the expression of one who insists
that what’s “present” to us, spatially
and temporally, is arbitrary, a mere
limitation of our sense organs. As she
wrote in one of her letters, quoting
Pedro Calderón’s seventeenth-century
play Life Is a Dream, “I was sad, I was
crazed/I was dead: I remained myself.”
Hers was a surrealism of memory’s si-
multaneousness, the most natural thing
in the world. Q