美国国家公共电台 NPR In 'Reputations,' A Political Cartoonist Faces Crisis Of Conscience

In 'Reputations,' A Political Cartoonist Faces Crisis Of Conscience

play pause stop mute unmute max volume 00:0008:01repeat repeat off Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser¹ to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: 

The political cartoons of Javier Mallarino were so influential² in his native Colombia that political fortunes rose and fell by the strokes of his pen. With that power came public adulation, but also death threats and ultimately the burden of responsibility for the impact of his drawings on the reputations of others. The crisis of conscience that plagues him feels very real, but Mallarino is not. He's a fictional³ character. He's the central figure in Juan Gabriel Vasquez's novel, "Reputations," and Juan Gabriel Vasquez joins us from New York. Welcome to the program.

JUAN GABRIEL VASQUEZ: Thank you, Robert. It's very good to be here.

SIEGEL: Your protagonist⁴, Mr. Mallarino, is an artist. We see people through his eyes - their bone structure, their posture⁵, the lighting⁶. Why a cartoonist instead of, say, a columnist⁷, a writer?

VASQUEZ: Well, I was myself a columnist for several years, and I still write political columns in Colombian and Spanish newspapers. But I've always been drawn⁸ to the figure of a cartoonist, this kind of special relationship they have with the political world because they deal not in words, but in images, in our public image, which is something we care deeply about. And I guess the novel was born from my interest in this political cartoonist - this Colombian cartoonist from the '20s who was, as Mallarino in my novel, capable of destroying a political life with a series of cartoons.

His name was Ricardo Rendon. And his books were all around my house when I was growing up, so I used to read them not understanding anything about Colombian politics in the '20s or '30s. But I developed this curiosity and this interest about this tradition that is so strong in Colombia, probably through French influence, that tradition in which really cartoons can shape political debates and have an influence in the political life of the country.

SIEGEL: In your novel, Mallarino drew a cartoon that led a politician to commit suicide. The reporters from his own paper ask him about it, and they appear to be in awe⁹ of his power. Should an artist seek power and try to produce work that has consequences, even horrible consequences?

VASQUEZ: This is one of the great questions in the novel. The novel is built around several questions of importance, but ultimately it tries to deal with the relationship between the private and the public. I used to write - I've written several novels about how the public impinges on the private. But in this one, things work the other way around in the sense that this guy, Mallarino, has an actual power to influence national events and public lives. But, of course, he has a private life. And he has his own fears, his own troubles in his private life - his own troubles with his wife, with his daughter - and that builds a kind of personal situation invisible to the public eye. But that ultimately will have an effect on public life because it will shape his work, it will shape his cartoons, and his cartoons will at the return shape somebody else's life. So this is one of the great questions that I wanted to explore in the novel.

SIEGEL: You write at one point of the character who committed suicide, this wonderful passage about your country. The man, you write, has been swallowed up by oblivion. Not surprising in this amnesiac¹¹ country where not even the dead are capable of burying their dead. Forgetfulness was the only democratic thing in Columbia. It covered them all - the good and the bad, the murderers and the heroes - like the snow in the James Joyce story, "Snow," falling upon all of them alike. Is Colombia special in its amnesia¹⁰?

VASQUEZ: I've always thought so, yes. Of course, we all think our country suffers more than anybody else's country. But our present moment is so urgent and so demanding that I've always believed it prevents us from concentrating on the past and trying to understand - how did we get here? The pain and the suffering in Columbia's present moment are so strong that we, in a way, have been keen to forget where it comes from. And this is perhaps one of the things we're trying to do now as we are negotiating a peace agreement to end the war that has been going on for the last 50 years.

SIEGEL: You're talking about the recently negotiated agreement between...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

SIEGEL: ...The Colombian government and the FARC, the rebel group that...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

SIEGEL: ...Has been fighting against the government for many years. By complete coincidence, I started reading your novels just after binge-watching the second season of the Netflix series "Narcos"...

VASQUEZ: Yes.

SIEGEL: ...Which is all about the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. And it seems that to be a novelist of your generation in Colombia, you have to write about politics, about fear, violence, death threats. Is it possible for a Colombian writer to extract human drama that is truly private and disentangled from that context?

VASQUEZ: Well, of course this is not mandatory¹². Literature in Colombia is now very, very rich and very diverse. But of course, the big question that has always haunted Colombian writers from early in the 19th century is violence. I've grown up with this. I've grown up with this - with these memories about conflicts in my parents' lifetime or my grandparents' lifetime and, of course, conflicts in my lifetime, and particularly the war on drugs. I was aware pretty early that there was a wealth of material about these things in TV, in documentaries, on the internet where you can go and watch a presidential candidate being shot in 1989. But where do we go - this was my question - where do we go to look for the private side, to look for the invisible side, to look for the ways this has shaped the moral and emotional beings of people? And that's what you write novels for.

SIEGEL: I've read your new novel, "Reputations," and your earlier novel, "The Sound Of Things Falling." And in each there's a mystery.

VASQUEZ: Yeah.

SIEGEL: And in each the mystery is unknowable. There's no answer. What's more important is what the question has done to the characters. Am I reading your intent correctly there?

VASQUEZ: That's very well-put, yes. I'm going to quote you on that. Yes, I'm more interested in the questions than in the answers probably because the whole idea of how literature works - this was - the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov said exactly this, said that literature's job was not to give answers but to find the most interesting questions possible. But of course, this is - in "Reputations," this is part of the subject of the novel, the fact that the past is unreliable, the fact that the only tool we have at our disposal to know the past is memory, and memory is unreliable.

And this is what the poor Mallarino finds out. He's trying to remember what happened in one mysterious night 28 years before. And it turns out that the truth in those - in that night, the truth about that night will have a strong consequence on his life and the life of this other character, Samanta Leal, who is asking him to remember, to try to remember what happened 28 years before. That problem, the problem of how unreliable memory is and how do we deal with that, is one of the possible readings of the novel.

SIEGEL: Mr. Vasquez, thanks a lot for talking with us today.

VASQUEZ: Thank you very much. It was great.

SIEGEL: Juan Gabriel Vasquez talking about his latest novel, which was translated into English by Anne McLean. The novel is called "Reputations."

1 browser   

n.浏览者

参考例句：

• View edits in a web browser.在浏览器中看编辑的效果。
• I think my browser has a list of shareware links.我想在浏览器中会有一系列的共享软件链接。

2 influential   

adj.有影响的，有权势的

参考例句：

• He always tries to get in with the most influential people.他总是试图巴结最有影响的人物。
• He is a very influential man in the government.他在政府中是个很有影响的人物。

3 fictional   

adj.小说的，虚构的

参考例句：

• The names of the shops are entirely fictional.那些商店的名字完全是虚构的。
• The two authors represent the opposite poles of fictional genius.这两位作者代表了天才小说家两个极端。

4 protagonist   

n.(思想观念的)倡导者；主角，主人公

参考例句：

• The protagonist reforms in the end and avoids his proper punishment.戏剧主角最后改过自新并避免了他应受的惩罚。
• He is the model for the protagonist in the play.剧本中的主人公就是以他为模特儿创作的！

5 posture   

n.姿势，姿态，心态，态度；v.作出某种姿势

参考例句：

• The government adopted an uncompromising posture on the issue of independence.政府在独立这一问题上采取了毫不妥协的态度。
• He tore off his coat and assumed a fighting posture.他脱掉上衣，摆出一副打架的架势。

6 lighting   

n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光

参考例句：

• The gas lamp gradually lost ground to electric lighting.煤气灯逐渐为电灯所代替。
• The lighting in that restaurant is soft and romantic.那个餐馆照明柔和而且浪漫。

7 columnist   

n.专栏作家

参考例句：

• The host was interviewing a local columnist.节目主持人正在同一位当地的专栏作家交谈。
• She's a columnist for USA Today.她是《今日美国报》的专栏作家。

8 drawn   

v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的

参考例句：

• All the characters in the story are drawn from life.故事中的所有人物都取材于生活。
• Her gaze was drawn irresistibly to the scene outside.她的目光禁不住被外面的风景所吸引。

9 awe   

n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧

参考例句：

• The sight filled us with awe.这景色使我们大为惊叹。
• The approaching tornado struck awe in our hearts.正在逼近的龙卷风使我们惊恐万分。

10 amnesia   

n.健忘症，健忘

参考例句：

• People suffering from amnesia don't forget their general knowledge of objects.患健忘症的人不会忘记关于物体的一些基本知识。
• Chinese medicine experts developed a way to treat amnesia using marine materials.中国医学专家研制出用海洋物质治疗遗忘症的方法。

11 amnesiac   

记忆缺失的，（引起） 遗忘（症）的

参考例句：

• Synopsis: An amnesiac spy awakens in a world overrun by zombies. 一个记忆缺失的特工在一个僵尸遍野的世界苏醒。
• These memories can generally be recovered through psychotherapy or after the amnesiac state has ended. 实际上，这些记忆并没有真正丧失，在经过心理治疗或病愈之后，这些记忆还可以恢复。

12 mandatory   

adj.命令的；强制的；义务的；n.受托者

参考例句：

• It's mandatory to pay taxes.缴税是义务性的。
• There is no mandatory paid annual leave in the U.S.美国没有强制带薪年假。