No One Writes to the Colonel

recreation

In the novel by Garcia Marquez The Colonel waits for his retirement check to arrive. He's been waiting for years, and as he takes the last spoonful of coffee left to prepare breakfast for his wife, he has all his hopes on a cock fight. This wait for the impossible and this hope in another impossible is to me inevitably bridged to the act of writing.

This recreation mimics the desk of a ghost writer that is writing The Colonel once again. In his table there's a book, Mimesis, by Eric Auerbach that tells us precisely how the history of literature (of western literature at least) can be rewritten based on selected passages of different authors. Writing is recreating other's words, appropriating them hoping for the impossible of an original writing knowing there's no such a thing but being condemned to sit in front of the typewriter and type and wait for it to happen.

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