“It is since Cervantes and thanks to him that genres have mixed to the point of promiscuity. They have stopped being watertight compartments and I love that,” said Gonzalo Celorio, the last Cervantes winner, writer of multiple genres, but also editor, professor, critic, bibliophile, book factotum: his favorite word is “word.”
Celorio (Mexico City, 78 years old) entered with a cane and the face of a good person, white mustache and light eyes, with his voice “somewhat diminished,” he said. He was accompanied by the director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Segade (“This is an invitation to dialogue between word and image,” he explained when presenting), and María José Gálvez, general director of Books, Comics and Reading, who remembered the recently deceased Beatriz de Moura, editor of Tusquets. This was the publishing house of the winner since his first novel, Self-lovepublished in 1992. “De Moura opened Spanish letters to the world and opened the world to Spanish letters,” explained the Mexican.
Gonzalo Celorio has obtained the highest award for literature in the Spanish language, created in 1976 and endowed with 125,000 euros (tax exempt), which rewards an entire literary career. The delivery ceremony, with the presence of the Kings, will take place, as every year, on April 23, Book Day, the anniversary of the death of Cervantes (and Shakespeare), in the Auditorium of the University of Alcalá de Henares. His speech will deal, as he confirmed at the appearance, about “the late arrival of the novel to the American continent.” In his opinion, “the novel is a very dangerous genre… the novel is not a literary genre, it is a libertarian genre.”
The author had a deep reflection on genres and the literature of the self, which he has practiced the most. “It is thought that the literature of the self is a literature of lyrical expression, but I believe that it has expanded its borders,” he said. He recalled the figure of Michel de Montaigne, considered the creator of the essay genre, who essayed on himself, who was at the same time the subject and object of writing. And Celorio recalled the definition of the essay by the Mexican polygrapher Alfonso Reyes, as a “centaur” between genders: “It has a part of intellectual domain, but it also has an imaginative and passionate part, where the self expresses itself.” There is also self, of course, in the genre of memory; as well as in the chronicle: “Without me, the chronicle is history,” said the winner.
Celorio’s literature is focused precisely on memory, especially melancholic. He has described his books as “memory novels”, where, recognizing the deceitfulness of memory (That pile of broken mirrors, titled, like a verse by Borges, his memoirs published by Tusquets), delves into the blurry territory of the family and literary past to generate new stories. “My self slips through all the interstices of writing to talk about my family,” the author argues, and it is Celorio himself—his memory—that acts as a common thread between all his novels, while at the same time drawing an image of modern Mexico.
“What is exceptional is the presence of the self in the novelistic exercise: the novel has always been considered, since the preceding epic genre, as the conquest of the third person,” he stressed. And he remembered those fragments of Homer’s work in which the Greek poet sneaks into the narrative to exhort Achilles or Hector to do this or that thing or embark on this or that battle. However, the mixing of genres and the proliferation of the self happens especially when Cervantes arrives and hybridization and the aforementioned “promiscuity” begin.
Asturian roots
The writer, who directs the Mexican Academy of Language and was director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica publishing house, is a Mexican with Asturian roots: Celorio is the name of a town near the town of Llanes, where the mountain range meets the Cantabrian Sea; It was his grandfather Emeterio who emigrated to visit the Americas, as the author relates in the novel metal and slag. He started out as a grocery waiter and ended up amassing a fortune as a liquor merchant, a fortune that his descendants squandered. In Three pretty Cuban women The adventures of three friends who met their father in Havana are narrated; only one, Rosita, became his mother. In The apostates The role passes to the author’s brothers (Celorio was the eleventh of 12 brothers): one, made aware of Liberation Theology, is absorbed by the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. The attraction for the other is the Mexican baroque architecture. A whole lineage in novels: in “memory novels.”
“No one knows who he is if he doesn’t know where he comes from,” reflected the winner. He intends for his familiar characters to gain independence from the writer and be taken by readers. “We readers are a kind of masochists who are always buying conflicts that do not belong to us, the conflicts of others: it is the only way we have to know that we belong to the human race.”
The award also seems to show a certain political-cultural reconciliation between Spain and Mexico after a cooling of relations when the then Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador demanded an official apology in 2019 for the excesses of the Spanish conquest. The latest Princess of Asturias awards also reported two awards for Mexico: the Concord award, for the National Museum of Anthropology, and the Arts award, for the photographer Graciela Iturbide. The exhibition Half the world. Women in indigenous Mexicowhich was distributed to several Madrid venues, was well received by the institutions.
Celorio believes that Spain’s request for a pardon was “nonsense.” It was “anachronistic,” judging that a pardon cannot be requested for what happened so many centuries ago, when the states as they exist now did not even exist, and when there was already violence in the indigenous societies themselves; and also “retrotopic”, for judging those indigenous societies as a kind of utopian paradise lost, without paying attention to their reality. As he pointed out, the Spanish language was not used to conquer, because the evangelizers learned the indigenous languages for this purpose: “In reality, the Spanish language was not the language of conquest, but rather that of independence.”