In the hallways of famous Argentinian writers, Silvina Ocampo held her own. She married Adolfo Bioy Casares, eleven years her junior, and was close friends with Jorge Luis Borges, who said what he loved most about her writing was its “clairvoyance.” Borges served as best man at their wedding.
She died on December 14, 1993, with Bioy at her side, sixty years of love between them: that ocean of tides, currents, waves included his affairs, which led to two children; a daughter whom Ocampo adopted as her own, and a son who stayed in the margins. Both children died young, in their 40’s.
The reader who needs a black/white narrative —one in which Bioy’s guilt solidifies Silvina’s innocence — will be disappointed. Both had affairs; both loved others; both loved each other best of all. Or longest.
There is a way in which Ocampo’s own dalliances were held against her, or complicated by her inability to bear children in a machismo culture where childbearing was excepted.
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Silvina Ocampo’s last book, The Promise , was started fairly early in her writing career, and finished towards the end of her life, as she journeyed with Alzheimer’s, and published posthumously.
“The range of Ocampo’s invention is impressive, but she frequently returns to two themes. The first is the ability to see the future, which she complicates by making its nature uncertain: can these characters predict the future, or in fact will it into being? Their powers cause them anxiety, and also rob life of its interest. Lacking the unpredictability that Ocampo’s fiction habitually revels in, life becomes a drab procession.”
The “drab procession” Chris Power mentions is true to the extent that plot, itself, doesn’t drive action in Ocampo’s narratives — it is the mind’s secret magic which drives and ruins humans; the world outside the mind is, simply, the world. Ocampo isn’t interested in the world so much as what the mind does with it.
In its recent translation by Jill Levine, The Promise has more ghosts than most posthumous books. read a longer PDF excerpt from City Lights Books here — recently translated by Jill Levine and Jessica Powell adds a sort of metafictional posthumousity at the level of translation. Jessica Powell describes how she continued the translation after Jill Levine’s untimely death, so the text itself, becomes a sort of dialogue between between the dead author, the dead translator, and the living translator who wishes to honor both their words.
This is how Ocampo opens the novel:
It is a book about memory — “a dictionary of memories”— a novel narrated by a drowning woman who has fallen from a boat and recalls events from her life for the book she has promised to write if she is rescued. If Saint Rita saves her, the narrator will write the book. And so we are given the conflict at the outset — the hinge that ends in the book we are reading.
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The epigraph is from an interview where Ocampo says she doesn’t like the convention of endings in fiction.
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From 1988 to 1989, Ocampo was ill, working on this final manuscript, knowing it would be an ending. She started writing it in 1960, and this was announced in 1966—in a byline saying she was currently working on this novel.
In 1975, Ocampo told an interviewer she felt this was the best book she’d ever written— this “phantasmagorical novel”— and she had trouble finishing it given the narrator’s promise and the constraint she built for the text. Because the narrator’s voice continuously “tells” and “recounts,” Ocampo said it was also difficult to find a way to soothe the expectation of narrative linearity that many readers would bring to the page.
“Under the guise of a posthumous autobiography”—this is how the book’s foreword suggests Ocampo had decided on this a decade before her death. And maybe she needed to feel death near in order to write it—maybe what’s at stake in this sort of story requires the proximity of personal mortality.
It is Ocampo’s longest fictional work, arranged as a series of linked stores, that dictionary of linked memories narrated by a voice in between worlds. Maybe the woman is in the water—we don’t know this, and we don’t know her name—she defines her life through the ability to inhabit others, which is to say, to write others and save them. What the foreword calls “the theater of her memory” is simply the writer’s mind, the tangle of characters and fascinations, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this, about the lyric of these translated lines.
So I wrote a series of poems while reading this book, and each poem it titled with a line from Ocampo's The Promise (translated by Jill Levine and Jessica Powell). The original punctuation and capitalization of the source text is preserved in the titling. A statue inside a statue under the sea. . .
[dying is ridiculous, but they were so meticulous, so precise.]
[Wherever. On the corner, at the ends of the earth.]
Silvina and Bioy.
For Silvina Ocampo. An embroidered ball with an ocean around the corner, all the faces he was. The seaweed circling ankles like jewelry. The book you promised to write, to name them. You promised to immortalize those who chose to forget you.