He felt that literature had been left to amateurs. Conclusive proof: only the least eminent of his contemporaries devoted themselves to it. Frivolity, the absence of any authentic ambition, traditionally conformist commerce, indiscriminate use of obsolete formulas, myopia and even disdain for anything that diverged from the tracks of narrow provincialism ran rampant. Phenomena alien to actual creation added confusion to this panorama: the lack of stimulating and civilized social surroundings, of an environment suitable for work and fertile in truly artistic expression; even the petty social climbing, the advantage taken of cultural promotion as an access ramp to certain political positions. . Álvaro felt partly responsible for such a state of affairs. For that reason he must conceive an ambitious work of universal reach that would spur his colleagues on to continue the labour embarked upon by him.
He knew that a writer recognizes himself as such by his reading. Every writer must be, first and foremost, a great reader. He swiftly and efficiently covered the volumes published in the four languages he knew, making use of translations only for access to fundamental works of classical or marginal literatures. However, he distrusted the superstition that all translations were inferior to the original text, because the original was merely the score from which the interpreter executed the work. This — he later observed — did not impoverish the text, but endowed it with an almost infinite number of interpretations or forms, all potentially valid. He believed there was no literature, no matter how lateral or trifling, that did not contain all the elements of Literature, all its magic, all its abysses, all its games. He suspected that reading was an act of informative indolence: the truly literary thing was re-reading. Three or four books contained, as Flaubert believed, all the wisdom to which man had access, but the titles of these books also varied for each man.
Strictly speaking, literature is oblivion encouraged by vanity. This verification did not humble, but ennobled it. It was essential — Álvaro reflected during his long years of meditation and study prior to the conception of the Work — to find in the literature of our predecessors a seam that expresses us fully, a cypher of our very selves, our most intimate desires, our most abject reality. It was essential to retake that tradition and insert oneself into it, even if it had to be rescued from oblivion, marginalization or the studious hands of dusty scholars. It was essential to create a solid genealogy. It was essential to have fathers.
He considered various options. For a time, he thought that verse was by definition superior to prose. The lyric poem, however, struck him as too scattered in its execution, too instinctive and gusty. As much as he was repelled by the idea, he sensed that phenomena verging on magic, and therefore removed from the sweet control of a tenacious apprenticeship, and given to arising in spirits more festive than his own, clouded the act of creation. If what the classics romantically called inspiration was involved in any genre, it was the lyric poem. So, since he knew himself incapable of bringing one off, he decided to consider it obsolete: the lyric poem is an anachronism, he decreed.
Later he weighed up the possibility of writing an epic poem. Here undoubtedly the intervention of momentary rapture was reduced to the order of the anecdotal. And there was no shortage of texts on which to base his claim. But the use of verse involved an inevitable distancing from the audience. The work would remain confined to the sphere of a secret circle, and he thought it advisable to avoid the temptation of enclosing oneself in a conception of literature as a code only suitable for initiates. A text is the author’s dialogue with the world and, if one of the two interlocutors disappears, the process is irredeemably mutilated: the text loses its effectiveness.
He opted to attempt an epic in prose. But perhaps the novel — he said to himself — was born in exactly this way: as an epic in prose. And this put him on the trail of a new urgency: the necessity to elevate prose to the dignity of poetry. Each sentence must possess the marmoreal immutability of verse, its music, its secret harmony, its fatality. He scorned the superiority of poetry over prose.
He decided to write a novel. The novel was born with modernity; it was the instrument most suited to expressing it. But could one still write novels? His century had seen its foundations undermined by determined spade-work; the most esteemed novelists had set out to ensure that no one would succeed them, had set out to pulverize the genre. Before this death sentence, there were two appeals successive in time and equally apparent: one, in spite of trying to preserve the greatness of the genre, was negative and basically complied with the sentence; the other, which did nothing to challenge the verdict either, was positive, but willingly confined itself to a modest horizon. The first agonized in a super-literary experimentalism, asphyxiating and verbosely self-devouring; the second — intimately convinced, like the other, of the death of the novel — took cover, like a lover who sees his faith betrayed, in lesser genres like the short story or the novella, and with these meagre substitutes renounced all intention of grasping human life and reality in an allencompassing totality. An art encumbered from the outset by the burden of its lowly lack of ambition was an art condemned to die of frivolity.
Despite all the century’s swipes, however, it was essential to keep believing in the novel. Some had already understood this. No instrument could grasp with more precision and wealth of nuance the long-winded complexity of reality. As for its death certificate, he considered it a dangerous Hegelian prejudice; art neither advances nor retreats: art happens. But it was only possible to combat the notion of the genre’s death throes by returning to its moment of splendour, in the meantime taking careful note of the technical and other sorts of contributions the century had afforded, which it would be, at the very least, stupid to waste. It was essential to go back to the nineteenth century; it was essential to go back to Flaubert.
II
Álvaro conceived a disproportionately ambitious project. Examining several possible plots, he finally chose the one he judged most tolerable. At the end of the day, he thought, the choice of theme is a trivial matter. Any theme is good for literature; what matters is the manner of expressing it. The theme is just an excuse.
He decided to narrate the unprecedented deeds of four insignificant characters. One of them, the protagonist, is an ambitious writer who’s writing an ambitious novel. This novel within the novel tells the story of a young couple, suffocated by economic difficulties that are destroying their life together and undermining their happiness. After many hesitations, the couple resolve to murder an unsociable old man who lives very austerely in the same building. Apart from the writer of this novel, Álvaro’s novel features three other characters: a young couple, who work from morning till night trying to make ends meet and an old man who lives modestly on the top floor of the same building where the couple and the novelist live. While the writer in Álvaro’s novel is writing his own novel, the peaceful coexistence of the neighbouring couple is marred and upset: the mornings of fond frolicking in bed give way to morning feuds, arguments alternate with tears and fleeting reconciliations. One day the writer meets his neighbours in the lift. The couple are carrying a long object wrapped in brown paper. Incongruously, the writer imagines that this object is an axe and makes up his mind, when he gets home, that the couple in his novel will hack the old man to death with an axe. Days later he finishes his novel. The very next morning, the concierge discovers the corpse of the old man who lived modestly in the same building as the novelist and the couple. The old man has been murdered with an axe. According to the police, the motive for the crime was robbery. Shocked, the novelist, who knows full well the identity of the murderers, feels guilty of their crime because, in some confusing way, he senses that it was his novel that induced them to commit it.