The Glass Tower

09/12/2025

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   “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”, Maya Angelou proposed, and many a writer has talked about the characters and story beginning to take control of the material, as though the writer merely has to dictate the tale into existence. The first claim is potentially very complicated, and the second close to trite, no matter how many writers invoke the notion, including Reinaldo Arenas, who says “they [the characters] start to dominate me and occupy my life.” (New Yorker) Arenas combines the pair of them as he offers a story that dissolves into the unreal and asks telling questions about creativity, responsibility and the problem with hearing voices in your head.

   We can think of Angelou’s comment from at least two perspectives. The first is the agony of writer’s block, with the writer, for various reasons, unable to express what they want to say as the words refuse to take form on the page. Tom Wolfe said at a certain point, “I now know what writer’s block is. It’s the fear you cannot do what you’ve announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn’t worth doing. That’s a rarer form.” (Paris Review) The first proposes a professional need and a personal demand. The second can appear more abstract and more demanding still, and echoes Toni Morrison’s claim that “there are times when you don’t know what you’re doing or when you don’t have access to the language or the event. So if you’re sensitive, you can’t do it.” (Literary Hub) To let the story tell itself might just be to allow cliches to formulate themselves, and thus failing literature. Trying to tell the story of a people, as Morrison would wish to do, as Arenas was interested in doing, the responsibility is to the people one is writing about. One must be careful not to fail in this task. Of course, truth to the demands of literature and the demands of the people are not mutually contradictory. The writer ideally solves the problem of writer's block by being fair to both.   

    In 'The Glass Tower', Alfredo Fuentes is a well-known Cuban exile living in Miami who, since arriving in the US, hasn’t written a single line. Not so bad if he'd recently arrived. But he has been out of Cuba for five years, and cannot seem to get down to some work. He has turned into a noun and is failing to function as a verb: he is a writer who isn’t writing. “…He had found himself accepting all kinds of invitations to speak at conferences, to participate in cultural events or intellectual gatherings, and to attend literary cocktail and dinner parties where he was inevitably the guest of honour.” It means he has no time to work, and his characters are getting impatient. “Berta, Nicolas, Delfin, Daniel and Olga, constantly vied for his attention, urging him to deal with their respective predicaments.” If a novel or story writes itself, it still needs someone to do the writing. Flattery and fun, parties and praise, will do wonders for the ego, but where does this leave the writerly self?

   Another well-worn, frayed phrase is that everyone has a novel within them. However, another way of looking at this is that only when that book within us becomes polyphonically perverse can it no longer not be written. In other words, all those voices in our head need to become characters on the page to stave off incipient madness. The narrator says in the midst of the party he attends: “Alfredo was sure he could hear quite distinctly the voices of his characters, now at very close range,” with Alfredo no longer “…able to excuse his own indolence and, still dancing, he grabbed a napkin in flight and began desperately to scribble some notes.” We may wonder if this is the writer finally putting words to paper or manifesting, publicly, signs of imminent collapse. “Wiping his brow with the napkin, he lowered his eyes in embarrassment and tried to pull himself together.” While characters might, in the writing process, start to write themselves, characters creating themselves while one is out partying isn’t so appealing. After wiping that brow, he looks up and sees pressing against the walls of the glass tower, where the party is being held, Nicolas, Berta, and Delfin, it is as though the characters he hasn’t yet created have come to haunt him: the living dead of literary creation asking to be brought properly to life. If moments before he was beginning to embarrass himself, now his momentary eccentricity looks like it has promptly slid into madness. “Yes, they had gathered here from different places to pound on the windowpanes and demand that Alfredo admit them (infuse them with life) into the pages of the novel — or story — that he had not even begun to write.''  

     We have noted that writers may be blocked as they don’t feel they have the competence to produce the intended work, or it might be that the material demands musing over it for a long period of time, since the complexity of the subject cannot be hastily put down on paper. Morrison says, "when I wrote Beloved, I thought about it for three years. I started writing the manuscript after thinking about it, and getting to know the people and getting over the fear of entering that arena.” (Literary Hub) When writing 'The Glass Tower' (published posthumously in 1996), Arenas was one of the best-known Cuban writers, and the most famous one in exile, alongside Cabrera Infante (who left in the sixties), and Alejo Carpentier (who was on good terms with Castro). Arenas detested Castro, was jailed in Cuba as a gay man. While he saw a lot wrong with the US, he was in no position to return home, and yet felt a responsibility towards many of those he had left behind and who were suffering under Castro. Some of them were writers, and several are present in Before Night Falls, the fine memoir he wrote about his life.

     Near the end of this book, he says, “In Miami I met wealthy people, bankers and business owners, and I proposed to create a publishing house for the best of Cuban writers, most of them living in exile already. The reply of all these men, all millionaires, was categorical: Literature is not lucrative. Almost nobody is interested in a book by Labrador Ruiz, Lydia Cabrera can sell in Miami, but not to any great extent; in short, it would not work out as a business.” (290) Arenas may have been doing his best going to parties and various social events, hoping to promote other writers, but would he have been better doing so by staying at home and writing about them as he would do in his memoir? In 'The Glass Tower', Alfredo is at the party based on a promise that the hostess “would lay the foundation, that very evening, of a publishing house that would print the manuscripts that he had at great risk smuggled out of Cuba…as well as help to promote the work of other important but still unknown writers…” But the sort of writers Arenas admired like Ruiz and Carlos Montenegro were living on welfare, with Montenegro staying “in a small room in a poor neighbourhood of Miami…” (Before Night Falls) There is a good chance people will know about Ruiz, Montenegro and other little-known Cuban writers partly because Arenas wrote about them in Before Night Falls.

         Partying in the futile hope that he might find a wealthy benefactor to give recognition to his generation and beyond seems less useful than sitting down and writing about them, even if Arenas benefited from the publishing house Viking/Penguin, which turned Before Night Falls into a big seller. Everyone else remained languishing: nobody wanted Cuban writers; they wanted a Cuban exile with a difficult relationship with the government. As people say in Before Night Falls: “we might be interested in publishing one of your books because you have just left Cuba and you are news…but these other authors, nobody is going to buy their books.”

   'The Glass Tower' works through increasingly disintegrating terms, the difficulty of selling oneself, promoting others and trying to be fair to the characters you have imagined but haven’t yet written about. Instead of writing themselves, they become imaginary figures in the writer’s mind as polyphonically perverse, with Daniel, Delfin and others mingling outrageously at the gathering. Alfredo even discovers they are speaking of him disparagingly, acting and dressing in ways he couldn’t have conceived. “The worst thing of all is that for all his pretentious and ridiculous posturing as a brilliant author, he has no talent whatsoever and can’t even write without making spelling mistakes.” By failing to write the characters down, he is allowing them to talk him down. But we might wonder if this is the author’s mind at its most paranoid, or the writer well aware of techniques developed in modern Latin American prose. He might never had much time for Carpentier, but the end of the story resembles a little 'Journey Back to the Source', with its reverse structure. Here, Arenas notes near the end of the story, “suddenly the foundations of the house began to move and the roof disappeared, the carpets rolled up automatically; the windowpanes freed from their casements, flew through the air; the doors left their frames, the paintings came off the walls…A everything disassembled and packed itself…Alfredo saw that the mansion had been nothing more than an enormous prefabricated cardboard set that could be installed and dismantled quickly…”

    We can see too elements of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, both writers preoccupied with dissolving fictional boundaries. Gerard Genette speaks of narrative metalepsis, saying the writers taxes “their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude — a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, and the world of which one tells.” (Narrative Discourse) Genette quotes Borges’s awareness of the unease this creates: “such inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” Genette gives Cortazar’s 'The Continuity of Parks' as an example: a man reading a book about a man who comes into someone’s house and kills the very person reading the book.

   Metalepsis can be playful, serious or both at the same time. In Arenas’s use, it suggests a responsibility towards characters that may be fictional, yet that doesn’t mean they aren’t rooted in a reality that demands exploration. It can be the height or arrogance or the specifics of modesty to believe oneself a writer responsible to a world greater than one’s own imagination, but Arenas’s book is far from only about his difficult life. It is also about the arduous existence of many friends under Castro, and the continuing problems many of them still suffered after Arenas arrived in the States. Though Before Night Falls might be exaggerated: Ruben Gallo notes, ‘Its truth-value is one of the keys to its popularity: readers are moved to empathize with Arenas’s plight to escape a repressive regime, and at the same time they are entertained by the colorful and hyperbolic stories with which the author seasons his text.” (The Princeton University Library Chronicle) Nevertheless, its value rests on the autobiographical and the sociological; 'The Glass Tower' rests on the imaginary and the fictional. It questions its form rather than assumes it can find it in reality. The narrator initially wonders what sort of work it will become as he muses over whether it should be a novel or a story that he has been carrying around in his head for so long. Two thirds into it he begins to know, as he says the five characters in the story are worth only a shorter piece, as if Arenas was aware that this tale needn’t be any more than a brief illustration showing the evident tensions of an author who feels obliged to write about his milieu, to support his country’s little known writers, and to work within fictional premises that are part of a broader literary tradition of modernism, one practised perhaps especially well by Latin American authors.

  Few will go to 'The Glass Tower' to grasp an aspect of Cuban society or even the Cuban exile, when they can instead read Before Night Falls. Yet it is a very good place to look if one wants to understand the manifold demands placed on a writer balancing the literary, the personal and the fraternal in producing a work. In the documentary, Improper Conduct, he says, speaking of his years in Cuba after escaping from prison: “I lived like a tramp, sleeping in a different friend’s house each night”, without either a typewriter or a room to write in. This was less writer’s block than a writer blocked, and between them, 'The Glass Tower' and Before Night Falls, show how they can be closely linked.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Glass Tower

   “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”, Maya Angelou proposed, and many a writer has talked about the characters and story beginning to take control of the material, as though the writer merely has to dictate the tale into existence. The first claim is potentially very complicated, and the second close to trite, no matter how many writers invoke the notion, including Reinaldo Arenas, who says “they [the characters] start to dominate me and occupy my life.” (New Yorker) Arenas combines the pair of them as he offers a story that dissolves into the unreal and asks telling questions about creativity, responsibility and the problem with hearing voices in your head.

   We can think of Angelou’s comment from at least two perspectives. The first is the agony of writer’s block, with the writer, for various reasons, unable to express what they want to say as the words refuse to take form on the page. Tom Wolfe said at a certain point, “I now know what writer’s block is. It’s the fear you cannot do what you’ve announced to someone else you can do, or else the fear that it isn’t worth doing. That’s a rarer form.” (Paris Review) The first proposes a professional need and a personal demand. The second can appear more abstract and more demanding still, and echoes Toni Morrison’s claim that “there are times when you don’t know what you’re doing or when you don’t have access to the language or the event. So if you’re sensitive, you can’t do it.” (Literary Hub) To let the story tell itself might just be to allow cliches to formulate themselves, and thus failing literature. Trying to tell the story of a people, as Morrison would wish to do, as Arenas was interested in doing, the responsibility is to the people one is writing about. One must be careful not to fail in this task. Of course, truth to the demands of literature and the demands of the people are not mutually contradictory. The writer ideally solves the problem of writer's block by being fair to both.   

    In 'The Glass Tower', Alfredo Fuentes is a well-known Cuban exile living in Miami who, since arriving in the US, hasn’t written a single line. Not so bad if he'd recently arrived. But he has been out of Cuba for five years, and cannot seem to get down to some work. He has turned into a noun and is failing to function as a verb: he is a writer who isn’t writing. “…He had found himself accepting all kinds of invitations to speak at conferences, to participate in cultural events or intellectual gatherings, and to attend literary cocktail and dinner parties where he was inevitably the guest of honour.” It means he has no time to work, and his characters are getting impatient. “Berta, Nicolas, Delfin, Daniel and Olga, constantly vied for his attention, urging him to deal with their respective predicaments.” If a novel or story writes itself, it still needs someone to do the writing. Flattery and fun, parties and praise, will do wonders for the ego, but where does this leave the writerly self?

   Another well-worn, frayed phrase is that everyone has a novel within them. However, another way of looking at this is that only when that book within us becomes polyphonically perverse can it no longer not be written. In other words, all those voices in our head need to become characters on the page to stave off incipient madness. The narrator says in the midst of the party he attends: “Alfredo was sure he could hear quite distinctly the voices of his characters, now at very close range,” with Alfredo no longer “…able to excuse his own indolence and, still dancing, he grabbed a napkin in flight and began desperately to scribble some notes.” We may wonder if this is the writer finally putting words to paper or manifesting, publicly, signs of imminent collapse. “Wiping his brow with the napkin, he lowered his eyes in embarrassment and tried to pull himself together.” While characters might, in the writing process, start to write themselves, characters creating themselves while one is out partying isn’t so appealing. After wiping that brow, he looks up and sees pressing against the walls of the glass tower, where the party is being held, Nicolas, Berta, and Delfin, it is as though the characters he hasn’t yet created have come to haunt him: the living dead of literary creation asking to be brought properly to life. If moments before he was beginning to embarrass himself, now his momentary eccentricity looks like it has promptly slid into madness. “Yes, they had gathered here from different places to pound on the windowpanes and demand that Alfredo admit them (infuse them with life) into the pages of the novel — or story — that he had not even begun to write.''  

     We have noted that writers may be blocked as they don’t feel they have the competence to produce the intended work, or it might be that the material demands musing over it for a long period of time, since the complexity of the subject cannot be hastily put down on paper. Morrison says, "when I wrote Beloved, I thought about it for three years. I started writing the manuscript after thinking about it, and getting to know the people and getting over the fear of entering that arena.” (Literary Hub) When writing 'The Glass Tower' (published posthumously in 1996), Arenas was one of the best-known Cuban writers, and the most famous one in exile, alongside Cabrera Infante (who left in the sixties), and Alejo Carpentier (who was on good terms with Castro). Arenas detested Castro, was jailed in Cuba as a gay man. While he saw a lot wrong with the US, he was in no position to return home, and yet felt a responsibility towards many of those he had left behind and who were suffering under Castro. Some of them were writers, and several are present in Before Night Falls, the fine memoir he wrote about his life.

     Near the end of this book, he says, “In Miami I met wealthy people, bankers and business owners, and I proposed to create a publishing house for the best of Cuban writers, most of them living in exile already. The reply of all these men, all millionaires, was categorical: Literature is not lucrative. Almost nobody is interested in a book by Labrador Ruiz, Lydia Cabrera can sell in Miami, but not to any great extent; in short, it would not work out as a business.” (290) Arenas may have been doing his best going to parties and various social events, hoping to promote other writers, but would he have been better doing so by staying at home and writing about them as he would do in his memoir? In 'The Glass Tower', Alfredo is at the party based on a promise that the hostess “would lay the foundation, that very evening, of a publishing house that would print the manuscripts that he had at great risk smuggled out of Cuba…as well as help to promote the work of other important but still unknown writers…” But the sort of writers Arenas admired like Ruiz and Carlos Montenegro were living on welfare, with Montenegro staying “in a small room in a poor neighbourhood of Miami…” (Before Night Falls) There is a good chance people will know about Ruiz, Montenegro and other little-known Cuban writers partly because Arenas wrote about them in Before Night Falls.

         Partying in the futile hope that he might find a wealthy benefactor to give recognition to his generation and beyond seems less useful than sitting down and writing about them, even if Arenas benefited from the publishing house Viking/Penguin, which turned Before Night Falls into a big seller. Everyone else remained languishing: nobody wanted Cuban writers; they wanted a Cuban exile with a difficult relationship with the government. As people say in Before Night Falls: “we might be interested in publishing one of your books because you have just left Cuba and you are news…but these other authors, nobody is going to buy their books.”

   'The Glass Tower' works through increasingly disintegrating terms, the difficulty of selling oneself, promoting others and trying to be fair to the characters you have imagined but haven’t yet written about. Instead of writing themselves, they become imaginary figures in the writer’s mind as polyphonically perverse, with Daniel, Delfin and others mingling outrageously at the gathering. Alfredo even discovers they are speaking of him disparagingly, acting and dressing in ways he couldn’t have conceived. “The worst thing of all is that for all his pretentious and ridiculous posturing as a brilliant author, he has no talent whatsoever and can’t even write without making spelling mistakes.” By failing to write the characters down, he is allowing them to talk him down. But we might wonder if this is the author’s mind at its most paranoid, or the writer well aware of techniques developed in modern Latin American prose. He might never had much time for Carpentier, but the end of the story resembles a little 'Journey Back to the Source', with its reverse structure. Here, Arenas notes near the end of the story, “suddenly the foundations of the house began to move and the roof disappeared, the carpets rolled up automatically; the windowpanes freed from their casements, flew through the air; the doors left their frames, the paintings came off the walls…A everything disassembled and packed itself…Alfredo saw that the mansion had been nothing more than an enormous prefabricated cardboard set that could be installed and dismantled quickly…”

    We can see too elements of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, both writers preoccupied with dissolving fictional boundaries. Gerard Genette speaks of narrative metalepsis, saying the writers taxes “their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude — a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, and the world of which one tells.” (Narrative Discourse) Genette quotes Borges’s awareness of the unease this creates: “such inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” Genette gives Cortazar’s 'The Continuity of Parks' as an example: a man reading a book about a man who comes into someone’s house and kills the very person reading the book.

   Metalepsis can be playful, serious or both at the same time. In Arenas’s use, it suggests a responsibility towards characters that may be fictional, yet that doesn’t mean they aren’t rooted in a reality that demands exploration. It can be the height or arrogance or the specifics of modesty to believe oneself a writer responsible to a world greater than one’s own imagination, but Arenas’s book is far from only about his difficult life. It is also about the arduous existence of many friends under Castro, and the continuing problems many of them still suffered after Arenas arrived in the States. Though Before Night Falls might be exaggerated: Ruben Gallo notes, ‘Its truth-value is one of the keys to its popularity: readers are moved to empathize with Arenas’s plight to escape a repressive regime, and at the same time they are entertained by the colorful and hyperbolic stories with which the author seasons his text.” (The Princeton University Library Chronicle) Nevertheless, its value rests on the autobiographical and the sociological; 'The Glass Tower' rests on the imaginary and the fictional. It questions its form rather than assumes it can find it in reality. The narrator initially wonders what sort of work it will become as he muses over whether it should be a novel or a story that he has been carrying around in his head for so long. Two thirds into it he begins to know, as he says the five characters in the story are worth only a shorter piece, as if Arenas was aware that this tale needn’t be any more than a brief illustration showing the evident tensions of an author who feels obliged to write about his milieu, to support his country’s little known writers, and to work within fictional premises that are part of a broader literary tradition of modernism, one practised perhaps especially well by Latin American authors.

  Few will go to 'The Glass Tower' to grasp an aspect of Cuban society or even the Cuban exile, when they can instead read Before Night Falls. Yet it is a very good place to look if one wants to understand the manifold demands placed on a writer balancing the literary, the personal and the fraternal in producing a work. In the documentary, Improper Conduct, he says, speaking of his years in Cuba after escaping from prison: “I lived like a tramp, sleeping in a different friend’s house each night”, without either a typewriter or a room to write in. This was less writer’s block than a writer blocked, and between them, 'The Glass Tower' and Before Night Falls, show how they can be closely linked.  


© Tony McKibbin