/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/LITERATURE-ARGENTINA: Filloy, A Centenarian Master

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jul 25 2000 (IPS) - Death has a tendency to boost the fame of artists, especially if it comes at a young age. This may be why Argentina’s Juan Filloy – known by many as “the hidden writer” because he lived outside intellectual circles – stretched his own life to nearly 106 years.

His longevity ironically ended up giving him the fame he avoided as a writer, even when his colleagues in Argentina – Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Julio Cortazar – and Spain’s Camilo Jose Cela had listed him among their favourite and most admired authors.

Filloy was included in the 1997 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest living writer, and two months ago received a series of tributes as the “literato of three centuries.”

The elderly Argentinean man of letters died July 15, just two weeks before his 106th birthday, but after he reached his dream of touching yet another century.

Among his standout novels – all with seven-letter titles – is “Op Oloop” (1934), the story of an erudite character named Optimus Oloop, a fanatic about mathematics, tidy and methodical, who ultimately goes insane.

Argentinean literary experts Andres Rivera sees Op Oloop as the creation of a lively modern writer who knows what he wants to say without worrying about what happens to be convenient. Filloy’s novel was considered “pornographic” by some literary critics of the time.

The book won Filloy hand-written congratulations from Sigmund Freud, with whom he maintained correspondence throughout the 1930s.

The novel was well received in the Netherlands, and afterwards Coppens and Funck press published his writing in that country.

But his works remain almost completely unknown in Argentina. Filloy published his books there 200 or 400 at a time, and gave many of the copies away to his friends.

“The literary life is very agreeable as I have lived it, without venal purposes of any type,” he said shortly before he died.

With this approach, he published the novels “Vil & Vil,” “Finesse,” “Balumba,” “Estafen” and “Aquende,” among others, as well as short stories, poetry and sonnets.

Filloy enjoyed the recognition he won late in life. Critics had begun to turn him into a literary persona, not just applauding his ability as a creator. They focused on his amazing ability to defy the passage of time with his lucidness and his will to continue writing, correcting and publishing his books.

He recently reacted to this issue with humour in a letter to a friend, writer Mempo Giardinelli, saying that the tributes were accumulating just when he was no longer in any condition to attend such ceremonies due to his advanced age.

But no one who knew Filloy well could have ever imagined him at the centre of attention at such events.

“My books never had much impact on the literary sections in the newspapers because my publishers didn’t send them copies. I am pleased that, despite having been somewhat outside the circle of critics, they want to pay me tribute,” he told Argentina’s ‘La Nacion’ newspaper in May.

Filloy was born Aug. 1, 1894 in the Argentinean province of Cordoba, where he died in mid-July. He never lived outside the country, nor did he ever reside in bustling Buenos Aires, but expressed satisfaction with having connected with the world through literature.

“I don’t understand a word about the Internet or cyberspace, and I don’t have a television. I have always been a great procrastinator and beginning (the computer) at almost 106 years would be frivolous,” he joked when asked whether he would like to try writing on a computer.

Giardinelli, winner of the Romulo Gallegos Prize for novels, said at one of Filloy’s last tributes that the author “is in no way inferior to (Jorge Luis) Borges.”

He also said that the public’s ignorance about Filloy’s prolific works is “one of the most inexplicable cultural crimes.” The century-old writer published more than 40 books and had eight unpublished manuscripts when he died.

“This man was a sort of Argentinean Balzac,” said Giardinelli in allusion to the author’s never-ending capacity to write novels, short stories, poetry, sonnets, essays, plays and other word games such as palindromes.

His sentences that read the same both forward and back (for example, in Spanish, ‘dabale arroz a la zorra el abad’), won him criticism from his colleagues who said his obsession with clever phrases showed too much in his work.

Filloy practiced law in order to make a living and, after working several years independently, began a 40-year legal career that saw him serve as government prosecutor, judge and legislator before he retired.

The secret to his longevity, in addition to genetics (his parents and siblings also lived well into their 90s), could also be attributed to his passion for writing.

“My career is like a revenge of my ancestors, as if they had ordered compensation for so much illiteracy,” he once said.

“There is a Latin proverb that says an author should write one line each day, but I took some liberty and wrote one page each day,” he explained. And his elegant appearance undoubtedly corroborates this obsession.

Filloy said he felt “the physical need to write,” and that this allowed his passion to flourish.

While literary circles that had practically ignored him are now beginning to applaud his talent, the author himself never thought he would have much to pass on to his heirs.

As he explains why, it seems as if the ghost of Borges is present.

“In my existence I have not capitalised on anything but dreams and insomnia, and as such, I believe I am a weak example, an illusion converted into disappointment,” he said, in the impeccable self-critical style of the author of “Ficciones.”