Elias Canetti, in his book on the twentieth century’s greatest writer, says that Kafka understood that the dice had been rolled and that nothing could come between him and writing the day he spat blood for the first time. What do I mean when I say that nothing could come between him and his writing? To be honest, I don’t really know. I guess I mean that Kafka understood that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be — a book, an expression, a misplaced object — in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck, the new, which has been there all along.
The Myths of Cthulhu
for Alan Pauls
These are dark times we live in, but let me begin with a buoyant declaration. Literature in Spanish is in excellent condition! Magnificent, superlative condition!
In fact, if it was any better I’d be worried.
But let’s not get too carried away. It’s good, but it’s not going to give anyone a heart attack. There’s nothing to suggest any kind of great leap forward.
According to a critic by the name of Conte, Pérez Reverte is Spain’s perfect novelist. I don’t have a copy of the article in which he makes that claim, so I can’t cite it exactly. As I recall, he said that Pérez Reverte was the most perfect novelist in contemporary Spanish literature, as if it were possible to go on perfecting oneself after having achieved perfection. His principal quality, but I don’t know if it was Conte who said this or the novelist Juan Marsé, is readability. A readability that makes him not only the most perfect novelist but also the most read. That is: the one who sells the most books.
But if we adopt that point of view, Spanish fiction’s perfect novelist could just as well be Vázquez Figueroa, who spends his spare time inventing desalination machines or desalination plants: contraptions that will soon be turning sea water into fresh water, suitable for irrigation, showers, and probably even for drinking. Vázquez Figueroa might not be the most perfect, but he certainly is perfect in his way. He’s readable. He’s enjoyable. He sells a lot. His stories, like those of Pérez Reverte, are full of adventures.
I really wish I had a copy of Conte’s review. It’s a pity I don’t collect press clippings, like that character in Cela’s The Beehive, who keeps an article that he wrote for a provincial newspaper, probably one of the Workers’ Movement papers, in the pocket of his shabby jacket — a likable character, by the way; in the movie, he was played by José Sacristán, and that’s how I always see him in my mind’s eye, with that pale helpless face, the incongruous face of a beaten dog, carrying that crumpled clipping around in his pocket as he wanders over the impossible tablelands of Spain. At this point I hope you’ll allow me to indulge in a pair of elucidatory digressions or sighs: José Sacristán, what a fine actor! His performances are so enjoyable, so readable. And Camilo José Cela, what an odd phenomenon! More and more he reminds me of a Chilean estate-holder or a Mexican rancher; his illegitimate children (as Latin Americans would politely say) or his bastards keep springing up like weeds: vulgar, reluctant, but tenacious and gruff, like candid lilacs out of the dead land, as the candid Eliot put it.
By attaching Cela’s incredibly fat corpse to a horse, we could produce the new El Cid of Spanish letters, and we have!
Statement of principles:
In principle, I have nothing against clear, enjoyable writing. In practice, it depends.
It’s always a good idea to state this principle when venturing into the world of literature: a sort of Club Med cunningly disguised as a swamp, a desert, a working-class suburb, or a novel-as-mirror reflecting itself.
Here’s a rhetorical question that I’d like someone to answer for me: Why does Pérez Reverte or Vázquez Figueroa or any other bestselling author, for example Muñoz Molina or that young man who goes by the resonant name of De Prada, sell so much? Is it just because their books are enjoyable and easy to follow? Is it just because they tell stories that keep the reader in suspense? Won’t anyone give me an answer? Where is the man who will dare to answer? It’s all right, you can keep quiet. I hate to see people lose their friends. I’ll answer the question myself. The answer is no. It’s not just that. They sell and they are popular because their stories can be understood. That is, because the readers, who are never wrong — I don’t mean as readers, obviously, but as consumers, of books in this case — understand their novels or stories perfectly. This is something that the critic Conte knows, or perhaps, given his youth, intuits. It’s something that the novelist Marsé, who is old, has learned from experience. The public, the public, as García Lorca said to a hustler while they hid in an entrance hall, is never, never, never wrong. And why is the public never wrong? Because the public understands.
It is, of course, only reasonable to accept and indeed to demand that a novel should be clear and entertaining, since the novel, as an art form, is at best tenuously related to the great forces that shape public history and our private stories, namely science and television; nevertheless, when the rule of clarity and entertainment-value is extended to serious non-fiction and philosophy, the results can be catastrophic, at least at first glance, although the idea, the ideal, remains compelling, a goal to be desired and aspired to in the longer term. “Weak thought,” for example. Honestly, I have no idea what weak thought was or is supposed to be. Its promoter, I seem to remember, was a 20th-century Italian philosopher. I never read any of his books or any book about him. One reason — this is a fact, not an excuse — is that I had no money to buy books. So I must have learned of his existence in the pages of some newspaper. That’s how I discovered that there was such a thing as weak thought. The philosopher is probably still alive. But in the end he’s immaterial. Maybe I completely misunderstood what he meant by weak thought. Probably. But what matters is the title of his book. Just as when we talk about Don Quixote, what we’re usually referring to is not so much the book itself as the title and a couple of windmills. And when we talk about Kafka (may God forgive me), it’s less about Kafka and the fire than a lady or a gentleman at a window. (This is known as encapsulation, an image retained and metabolized by the body, fixed in historical memory, the solidification of chance and fate.) The strength of weak thought — this intuition came to me in a fit of dizziness, brought on by hunger — sprang from the way it presented itself as a philosophical method for people unfamiliar with philosophical systems. Weak thought for the weak classes. With a bit of well-targeted marketing, a construction worker in Gerona, who has never sat down on the scaffolding, thirty yards above street level, with his copy of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, or reread it while chewing through his chope roll, might be prompted to read the Italian philosopher instead or one of his disciples, whose clear, enjoyable, intelligible style is bound to go straight to his heart.