The writer Javier Cercas has claimed the usefulness of literature as a form of rebellion against power, but also of knowledge and pleasure equivalent to sex in his entrance speech at the Royal Spanish Academy, during an event this afternoon at the headquarters of the institution.
The speech, titled ‘Misunderstandings of modernity. A manifesto’, has focused on dismantling what the author of ‘Soldiers of Salamis’ considers “a stubborn web of misunderstandings, not to mention superstitions or prejudices” widespread in the literary world in recent times.
Cercas (Ibahernando, Cáceres, 1962) listed these four misunderstandings and went back to their origins, in Romanticism or Modernity, as the case may be, to then unweave them: the idea of the writer locked in his ivory tower; the glorification of the artist; the idea that good literature must be a minority; and, finally, that of the uselessness of art.
“Authentic literature is composed of words in rebellion, and hence represents a danger to power, to any power,” stressed the writer, who posed the rhetorical question of whether there is something more “useful” than that rebellion.
Elected academic last June at the proposal of Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, Clara Sánchez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Cercas recalled that, since Plato, numerous “tyrants, inquisitors, political commissars and all kinds of individuals with a totalitarian mentality”, disguised “as benefactors of humanity”, have tried to point out the threat of literature in general and the novel in particular.
Regarding the dogma of the uselessness of art, he pointed out that it dates back to Oscar Wilde, who in 1890 finished the preface to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ with that statement in which Cercas sees “an emancipatory plea” and a form of “rebellion.” ” against “bourgeois pragmatism” and against the submission of art to ideologies.
But that original allegation, he lamented, has fossilized into dogma in the current “literary world,” “always so deaf to the ironies of the masters of Modernity and so docile to the clichés resulting from their literal interpretation.”
For the author of ‘Anatomy in an Instant’ or ‘The Impostor’, literature is above all “a pleasure, like sex”, and that is why the expression “compulsory reading” is an oxymoron and the expression “hedonic reading” is an oxymoron. , a pleonasm. But, in addition, it is “a form of knowledge of oneself and others, exactly the same as sex.”
“That’s why, when someone tells me that they don’t like reading, the first thing that comes to mind is to offer my condolences,” he said.
In defense of the popularity of literature
Javier Cercas, a popular, committed writer with readers all over the world, winner of a multitude of awards, from the National Narrative Prize to the Planeta Prize, attacked the “mental laziness” that leads to considering that a book is good just because it sells a lot or to consider that it is bad for the same reason.
And he mentioned talented writers with thousands of readers from Shakespeare and Cervantes to, already in the 20th century, TS Eliot, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Nabokov, García Márquez or Vargas Llosa.
Instead, he rejected the “glorification” of the writer – “true immortality is anonymity,” he said – and praised the good reader because, in his view, “a novel is a score and it is the reader who interprets it” and “a book without readers is a dead letter.”
Regarding the idea of the writer locked in the ivory tower, he considered that no leading Spanish writer of the last two centuries has been indifferent to reality, nor were his literary heroes, among whom he mentioned Kafka, Joyce , Borges or Proust.
Starting this Sunday, Cercas will take possession of the R chair, left vacant by Javier Marías, who died in 2022 and to whom he dedicated the first part of his speech.
Cercas praised the depth, complexity and ambiguity of the work of the author of ‘Corazón tan blanco’ and considered Marías a “committed” or “quarrelsome” writer who did not avoid taking sides on the thorniest issues.
When talking about his ideal readers, Cercas mentioned Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, willing to undertake “the most radical, risky and revolutionary adventure: the adventure of living a life in accordance with our dreams and our desires.”
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