“From the vantage point of his experience and wisdom. Is there anything better than sex?” The phrase could be part of a Woody Allen gag, but it was one of the questions that the writer Javier Cercas (Ibahernando, Cáceres, 62 years old) asked this Sunday to the academics who were listening to his entrance speech at the Royal Academy Española (RAE), which has been received with laughter from the public. Before answering this, most likely, rhetorical question, it is worth knowing that the author had previously compared the pleasure of books with sexual pleasure. “Reading is a way of knowing oneself and others, just like sex. When someone tells me that they don’t like reading, what occurs to me is to accompany them in the feeling, just as if they had told me that they don’t like sex,” he said with humor.
This equation between reading and having sex has served Cercas, although it may seem surprising, to criticize “the practical unanimity of the literary world,” which rejects “the idea of the usefulness of literature.” “How is it possible that we continue to be stuck in the obvious nonsense of the uselessness of art?” he asked himself, gesticulating. For the author of Soldiers of Salamis, There is no doubt that literature, art, is useful, and he has cited authors who expressed it through their works: Ovid, Horace, Tirso de Molina, Kant. “It is only useless for the stupid bourgeois utilitarianism that prevails among us,” a consequence of an “epoch dazzled by commercial profit and technical progress.” Literature “is, above all, a pleasure, like sex.” “And I wonder: is there anything more useful than pleasure, or pleasant knowledge?”
This disregard for literature for not being “useful” is, according to Cercas, one of the “misunderstandings”, if not “half-truths or simple lies”, that afflict both Spanish and foreign literature. It is one of the mystifications that he has denounced and that have formed the central theme of his speech, entitled Misunderstandings of modernity. A manifesto.
The event had the air of special occasions. The entrance of Cercas into the assembly hall has been welcomed with applause. His entry into the RAE was attended by personalities from the world of literature and the media, such as the president of Prisa, Joseph Oughourlian; the director of EL PAÍS, Pepa Bueno; the writers Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Lorenzo Silva; the journalists Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, Juan Cruz, Antonio Lucas and Miguel Ángel Aguilar, the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, and the director of the Madrid Book Fair, Eva Orúe.
Cercas has been quick to prepare this speech since he was elected academic. Those elected have two years to pronounce it in the RAE assembly hall, but he has resolved it five months after his candidacy was presented by academics Mario Vargas Llosa, Pedro Álvarez de Miranda and Clara Sánchez, on June 13. Sánchez was in charge of later giving the welcome speech to the institution, who also highlighted her merits in journalism, such as her bimonthly column in El País Weekly, Sunday supplement of EL PAÍS, and his awards in this profession, “despite the fact that when he received them he said he felt like an imposter.” Novelist, essayist, Cercas has taken possession of the R chair, which was left empty by the death of the writer Javier Marías, on September 11, 2022, “whose exceptional inheritance I will try to take charge of from today,” he noted.
As tradition dictates in the house of the Spanish language, Cercas has recalled the work of his predecessor, “one of the great Spanish novelists of the last century”, with whom he spoke only once in person but with whom he corresponded in recent years. years of his life. He stood out as “the most successful novel, Heart so white. He also praised his personality, “who did not shy away from taking sides on the thorniest issues and fought relentlessly against the corniness, vileness, injustices and stupidities with which he lived.”
Pulling on that thread of Marías’ commitment “to his time and his country,” Cercas got to the heart of his intervention. “I have the growing impression that in literature we struggle in a web of misunderstandings, not to mention superstitions and prejudices that distort reality.” According to Cercas, such “trivializations of ideas turned into legends” began “a century and a half ago,” with Romanticism and then Modernism.
One of those misunderstandings has already been mentioned. Another is “that of the writer taking refuge in his ivory tower.” In this sense, he has highlighted the case of Marcel Proust as one of the creators who a fallacious and distorted vision wanted to call him a writer “alien to the society and politics of his time.” For Cercas, just take a look at the Frenchman’s letters to “dynamite that caricature.” He and other authors, such as Kafka, Borges, “perpetual anti-Peronist militant,” or Joyce, “who mocked Irish nationalism,” assumed that the best thing they could do for their fellow men was “focus on their work.”
Cercas has also referred to his origins, “born in a very humble town in Extremadura.” With his family, he emigrated to Girona when he was only four years old. They spent their childhood and adolescence in the Catalan city. In 1985 he graduated in Spanish Philology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. After continuing his studies in the United States, in 1989 he began teaching Spanish literature at the University of Girona; Two years later he read his doctoral thesis, on the writer and filmmaker Gonzalo Suárez. Today he is a teacher on leave from this educational center.
Fully dedicated to literature since 2003, he had previously become known with the non-fiction novel Soldiers of Salamis (Tusquets, 2001), literary phenomenon, later adapted to film, which recreates the failed execution of the Falangist writer and leader Rafael Sánchez Mazas at the end of the Civil War. His books also include Anatomy of a moment (Literatura Random House, 2009), for which he won the National Fiction Prize, about the coup attempt of February 23, 1981; The imposter (2014); The shadow monarch and the trilogy High Earth. His works have also reached theater and comics.
Translated into more than 30 languages, his books have won many awards in numerous countries. He is a global writer, with enormous influence on European literature, as Jordi Amat wrote in this newspaper on Sunday. His journalistic and essayistic work has also received several awards inside and outside Spain. Cercas’ works “are studied in schools and universities around the world, where they have been the subject of academic articles, doctoral theses and critical editions,” highlights the RAE. His next book, at Random House, to which he returns after leaving for Planeta in 2019, will be The madman of God in Mongolia, about Pope Francis and the ins and outs of the Vatican, written, yes, by an atheist author.
Returning to his speech, for this author, another “misunderstanding” of today’s literature is “granting excessive prominence to the author, sacralizing him and turning him into a semi-divine figure”; a glorification that seems “ridiculous” to him. That role must be played by the reader, according to Cercas: “A novel is a score, and it is the reader who interprets it (…) and that is what a large part of the spell of literature consists of. “A book without readers is a dead letter.” For this reason, “the meaning of a text depends on the dialogue that the reader establishes with it, and this is not literary populism,” he clarified, and quoting Paul Valéry, he added: “It is never the author who makes a work.” teacher. The masterpiece is due to the readers.” So, less fuss about dedicating yourself to writing.
In current literary magazines and supplements, Cercas has located one more of the “misunderstandings, this fruit of ignorance”: the one that, for some critics, good literature is “with few exceptions, minority, secret,” and that the one that enjoys numerous readers “is incapable” of being good. If we agree with this, he continued, the Quixote “it would imply some form of artistic defeat.” Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were “mass idols”, García Márquez and Vargas Llosa “attracted hundreds of thousands of readers” and the Swedish Academy “was not wrong when it awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan in 2016”, he defended. These prejudices against the popularity of literature do not mean that only successful novels are good, he added. So what is the reliable literary criterion for what is a good book? “The time.”
Cercas has concluded his love song for literature by assuring that a person with a good novel in his hands “is a walking time bomb, a potential thinker on his own”, someone capable of saying no, when everyone around him says yes. . Thus, “from Plato onwards, tyrants, inquisitors and political commissars have tried to warn us against literature in general and the novel in particular.” For the already academic, “authentic literature is composed of words in rebellion, therefore, power will always aspire to control it.”