Do we live in the age of the self? "I think we've been in it since digital cameras became popular and, of everything that had to be photographed, we decided to photograph ourselves," says Guillermo Alonso (Pontevedra, 40 years old). In 2006 the American magazine Time ruled that the famous Person of the Year was "yourself", in relation to the rise of the self proposed by the then incipient and now ubiquitous web 2.0. Nearly two decades later, we are still exploring the depths of our lives and identities, and those of those next to us.
Alonso, writer and journalist of the magazine ICON, supplement of EL PAÍS, has decided, therefore, to join the sign of the times and write about himself in The language between the teeth (Círculo de Tiza), a collection of autobiographical stories that, with a sharp humor and a certain existential despair, relate different events of his life. Events, otherwise, quite ordinary, but to which Alonso brings out the extraordinary side with his peculiar look, because that is literature. Alonso is also one of two people, along with Beatriz Serrano, who talk against the things of the world in the podcast Arsénico Caviar (Podium), winner of one of the Ondas Global Podcast Awards last March.
In his book he talks about some of Alonso's works, for example, in a television program presented by a magician and a dancer, of sordid encounters with men in subway cars, flirting networks and streets of peripheral neighborhoods of Madrid, of small flats and nights that drugs turn into noons. of a trip to Thailand, of trying to be young at the turn of the century, of a domestic worker in charge of putting some order in a student flat that smells like a joint: "Drunks, drug addicts, terrorists!" The ironic constant is diluted in the poignant chapter dedicated to the distant relationship with his father and how to accompany in death someone who has given you life and whose liver has given up. "More than a reckoning, it's a tribute," says the author.
The stigma of writing about oneself
"I have always looked with a certain disdain at those who only write about themselves, as if I think they lack that factor of invention and fantasy," explains the author, "but my favorite authors do it continuously." Of course, Alonso excuses himself in the two novels he has already published, Vivan los hombres cabales (2019) and Muestras privados de afecto (2021), as if he had thus fulfilled a necessary quota of fiction before going on to tell reality, if such a thing is possible, and this is not inevitably deformed by memory and writing.
"Surely the look and memory are condescending to oneself and we want to think that our past self was smarter than it really was, or at least as smart as the current one. I enjoy the term autofiction because we all do it every day: create our own heroes and villains and our own funny plots. The one who seems disgusting to me seems like a hero to another and probably we are both right, "explains Alonso.
Guillermo Alonso, portrayed on June 14, 2023. DAVID EXPÓSITO
This transformation of the prosaic of everyday life into the poetic of narration is seen by Alonso as an essential act to survive. "For example, the subway at rush hour every morning is a disgusting place, full of people who have been ripped out of bed by reality and sent to jobs they hate. But that's also why it's full of human density, of things worth seeing," he says. Once someone told him how, after falling asleep drunk on the subway, he woke up and discovered that they had practiced a perfect rectangular cut in his pants, without disturbing his sleep, to steal his mobile. A practice that, apparently, and weight to the bulky, is not so strange in the Madrid underground. "That's a can for a few days, but a great story for the rest of your life. I think special and funny things happen to us all the time, but we don't know until we manage to abstract a little and shake off the drama on our backs," says the writer.
Autobiographical writing also reveals not only the lack of meaning in life, but its lack of narrative structure: the things that happen to us do not have an approach, a knot and an outcome, in the manner of Aristotelian poetics, but everything seems to plunge into a frayed chaos. "So you discover that people you love die, or disappear from your life, or something that you thought was going to change the course of your career doesn't go well, or friends who you thought were going to be there always disappear into the haze, or you see how life tramples on someone and never finds justice. And there is no explanation, no moral. Things just happen," says the author. "From a point of view, it's quite liberating," he adds.
Drugs as a form of fiction
Drugs can also help you look at the world in a different way. Alonso narrates in the book the first experiences with cocaine, speed or ecstasy, and the twists and turns of the Madrid night and morning to which they usually drive, like a parallel world of bars and festive flats that runs through another channel than the rest of the city. "I don't know if normalizing drugs would be appropriate, but we shouldn't demonize those who use them or laugh at them. It's funny how naturalized they are in certain areas, professions or environments and how strange and distant they seem in others," says Alonso. He compares them, legal drugs and illegal drugs, with the writer's eye: they can make everything more literary, but turned into fiction. "A tricky and easy fiction, pleasant if anything, but useless and very expensive."
Guillermo Alonso, journalist of Icon, portrayed on June 14, 2023.DAVID EXPÓSITO
On the scroll of social networks, perhaps the most powerful and widespread drug of our time, with results still unknown in the long term, Alonso knows for a while, because he has been an assiduous writer in networks, of those who write with literary infuriations, as if they were writing articles. In fact, the episode of the book that recounts his trip to Thailand was going to be told live on Instagram, but then the author judged it smarter not to give it to a technological multinational and save it for the book. "Lately, I write less long billets on the networks," he explains, "I am glad to have overcome this form of contemporary slavery, but, on the other hand, I feel sorry, because I like to share and read very long texts that break the dictatorship of the cute photo with a short and stupid text. I think that writing something very long in networks that just want us to scroll is almost an act of militancy."
Scrutinizing Others
In spite of everything, although Alonso's autobiographical writing talks about his own experiences, the focus is usually on the other, on the opposite character to whom the narrator tries to explain himself, whether a potential partner, a roommate or a family member, as if he had the need to scrutinize the human being embodied in others. "I think that self-centeredness is not one of my defects, I have them much worse and more interesting. I am more observant than active character, I speak little, my voice is not very present in the dialogues, because in general in life I am quiet or because maybe I do not remember what I said at a given moment, if I said anything. The others always seem to me much more interesting than me, I guess that's why I write." A certain shyness, in Alonso's opinion, leaves abundant space in the narrative for the development of his gaze on others, who can be hell.
In the end, whether there is a plot or no plot, (attention spoiler) we are all going to die. "It's that the of dying is not dying, which is already quite, but the fact that there will come a day when no one will remember even that you existed. That idea does make me very sad. Sometimes I think we write for that: it's a way of fighting the idea of death. I will die, but maybe someone continues to read me, very occasionally, and I never disappear completely, "concludes Alonso.
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