I just finished reading a translation (I don’t speak Spanish) of Alessandro Valencci’s 1925 Argentinian horror classic Hellephant: Footprints in Flesh. For those of you familiar with Italian/Argentinian writer Valencci’s work, you will understand if I say I was scared stiff. I’m know absolutely nothing about Argentinian fiction. I gather they’re into magic realism because of the Spanish influences, but I’ve never understood the buzz about Argentinian horror novels … until now. Hellephant scared me to death. Immediately after I finished it, I found a picture of the author on the internet and did a small painting of him on a scrap of masonite with a matte medium base. The values are a little strange because of the scan.
For those of you interested, below are three excerpts from a 1965 interview with Darien Fredricks and Alessandro Velencci contained in “The Orbis Journal of Books.” I think it’s funny that he thinks we’re too hung up on Hemingway.
I typed out the three most interesting parts (in my opinion).
AV: I’m not a horror author.
DF: You don’t see yourself that way?
AV: No.
DF: But, your primarily–
AV: I don’t see myself that way. I try to write literature that strikes against time–strikes against the press of time–refutes time. The dullness.
DF: The weariness.
AV: Yes. Time dulls our experience of life. It fogs up our lenses.
DF: Is that why your work provokes fear? To clarify?
AV: I hope it provokes many clarifying emotions. Fear is one of many.
DF: Is it the strongest?
AV: For me yes. I must say yes.
…
DF: Your work is received very well in Britain, but not so much in the United States.
AV: There is an undercurrent of appreciation, but not mass appeal.
DF: But what about the States prevents appreciation?
AV: They are much into sparseness–Hemingway. They still have not recovered from Hemingway.
DF: But they have an appetite for fantasy in film.
AV: Juvenile fantasy. In film. My novels you cannot make into film.
DF: They’re psychological.
AV: Yes. Yes. Psychological. The horror films are monster stories. Juvenile.
DF: Some might say your novel Hellephant is a monster novel.
AV: Some have said it. But it is more.
DF: Brooks Davis in a review for “The Letter” said, “It satisfies the hole in the modern soul where poetry used to reside. Reynard’s flight, for I must not say journey, is a meditation on the seemingly reckless, but actually precise force of judgement.”
DF: What made you think of–some might say this idea is far out. A demonic elephant is–
AV: But is he demonic?
DF: Well, the title is–
AV: That’s a publisher’s title.
DF: Is it accurate?
AV: In Argentina the book is titled Vivir Quiero Conmigo.
DF: Which means?
AV: “I Want To Live With Myself.” It is much more literary, but Americans prefer action and external emphasis.
…
DF: How did you come to write the book?
AV: The seed of the idea started when I was a boy in Italy the first time I heard a train whistle. It was a primal experience.
DF: Did the whistle scare you?
AV: Yes. I was scared by the sound because it sounded like it came from an animal not a machine. It sounded alive–an agony of breath. And yet, the trains traveled very fast–machine-like. I began to have nightmares of trains leaving their tracks in order to smash me over.
DF: That does sound like the stuff of nightmares. How did it turn into an elephant?
AV: Much later I went with my wife on an expedition in Africa. When I first heard an elephant I thought. That’s it. I saw the two in unity. The elephant seemingly has no tracks, but yet it leaves behind an imprint of destruction. A physical testimony. I thought train tracks and elephant tracks might be an interesting spot to start an examination of the fear of judgement.
DF: Do you find one more terrifying than the other? Because it seems to me that a person hit by a train is a metaphor for fate. There are tracks. You know exactly the path of the train.
AV: Yes. Yes. Exactly.
DF: And yet an elephant is unpredictable.
AV: Yes, but what if the tracks are there with the elephant, but we cannot see them?
DF: And that seems to be the key of your novel.
AV: Yes. In my mind–the force and purpose of the train placed into a creature to represent the momentum of judgement.
DF: And when Reynard hears the signal of the elephant, or in this case Hellephant, my hairs stood on end.
Mine did too!
UPDATE:
Of course there is no such person as Alessandro Valencci. It was a late night.
