literature and money

Novels where money or the price of things never comes out are usually wonderful, great fairy tales that take a lot of weight off our shoulders.

And we need them as much as novels where money and the price of things do appear.

Even the mystics had to eat and dress.

Today, Juan de la Cruz would be forced to go into a shoe store to buy some scruffy

And he would have to pay them.

Vladimir Lenin would also be obliged to dress and choose a tie color and a design cap and shoes capable of displaying great and profound revolutionary values.

And Jesus Christ would have to fix his hair in a hairdresser and choose a

.

The complexity of capitalism, since the fall of the Berlin wall, has become gigantic.

Those who identify it only with neoliberalism commit an intellectual stupidity that provokes sadness.

Because capitalism is already the totality.

The globalization of the economy and, therefore, of culture is one of the last great extensions of capitalism, whose last metamorphosis consists of having mutated into a greed for beauty and truth.

Western middle classes travel the world.

They yearn to travel, and to travel we need brand-new airports, safe planes, four-star hotels (what a great invention of the four-star category), and modern highways.

The middle classes demand beauty.

They no longer just want to eat and have a roof over their heads.

Now we ask for beauty, to see beauty, to see art, to lead high lives, to travel to Rome,

see the Sistine Chapel, travel to Paris, see the Louvre But who builds the airports and planes and hotels that will satisfy our hunger for beauty and truth?

In the world of culture, contempt for capitalism is common currency, but it ends up being a reactionary and childish act, full of intellectual laziness.

That contempt is never accompanied by any renunciation.

No one wants to live in a shack, go barefoot, give up their

or a good Wi-Fi connection or an award for professional excellence in whatever field.

The contempt for capitalism thus ends in contempt for the world of work, for the contempt for workers.

And therein lies the great paradox that turns the general condemnation of capitalism into a profoundly reactionary act.

Because there are people who get up early to make it possible for airports, planes and hotels to exist.

It is an old paradox that anthropologists know very well.

Well, behind capitalism what encourages is not only the obscene 30 or 40 great fortunes of the world, but all the wage earners of the earth, millions and millions of human beings who depend on the success of an economic system that we are ashamed to name.

Capitalism is very smart and knows that its name terrifies us;

That is why he changes his name to democracy, in order to achieve a prestigious way of presenting himself in society.

We writers are forced to look at this world, at the heart of capitalism, at the eyes of the beast, as Dante looked at hell back in 1300. Recently, I read an interview with the writer César Aira where he wondered why No one demands a social function from Mozart's music and, on the other hand, literature does.

Aira found one of the servitudes of literature, which is at the same time its original merit.

We writers do not have an abstract tool.

Words designate real things.

Yes, we writers have a social function.

And literature distills ideology everywhere,

Literature has before it the representation of capitalism and democracy;

it even has the possibility of defending the territories of individual freedom against the scorn of capitalism.

Private life, the exaltation of intimate passions, feelings, family relationships, love affairs, wherever capitalism apparently fails to enter, literature reigns there.

But with all this exaltation of the irreducible goodness of life, the writer has to build rational novels with the capacity to move us and has to return those territories of human freedom to the dirty world of prices, to the market, to commerce, to a code of bars, in search of success.

For this reason, sometimes writers cannot avoid, in an exercise of responsibility, seeing there a deep wound that burns,

a final melancholy.

Without social success literature does not exist.

But what is the success of a literary work.

The democratic success of a literary work is the readers.

But underneath that absolutely pure and legitimate success, as if it were an underground river, the waters of the transformation of emotions into merchandise, into money, arise.

So that literature, like cinema, like painting, like music, ends up returning to the gears of capitalism.

And that is where we all end up bent.

An artist —writer, musician, painter— invokes in his work the invention of a human territory, but that territory will always have a price.

A novel costs 20 euros.

Go to the cinema, nine euros.

A ticket for the opera, 50 euros minimum and with reduced visibility.

Entering a museum, about 15 euros.

Buy a work of art,

A journalist asked my friend, the Mexican writer and filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga, what was the difference between cinema and literature, and he answered that in the hotels where he was staying.

It was not an anecdotal response;

it was precise, extremely unappealable.

The success of a writer will never be the same as that of a film director any more than that of a film director will be the same as that of a rock star.

It is evil capitalism, which divides the arts before our most illustrious cultural theorists do.

It is not an undesirable scene that I am trying to describe, it is what we have before us.

Seeing that scene, looking at it in all its complexity, not reducing it to a story of good guys and bad guys, seems to me to be an act of intellectual responsibility.

To revile capitalism from a novel or from a movie or from a painting in order to be successful within capitalism seems to me to be a tiny and almost sweet moral perversion within a world of infinitely greater perversions.

It's not a crime, good God, not at all.

It's almost a fun, childish, funny perversion, it moves a smile.

It's like a children's prank.

It is also a dream.

It is our most admirable dream to some extent, although its naivete has a frightening edge.

It is the dream of our civilization.

We do have democracy left, that strategic place that fraternity seeks.

We do have what Walt Whitman already saw.

We are left with the wonderful act of living fully.

Only poetry is outside of capitalism because it is not worth 10 euro cents.

Poetry is humanity without chains.

Running away from capitalism is not easy.

For things to exist they must have a price.

I remember a Sergio Leone western titled

In that handful our lives grow, expand and disappear.

Or better yet, and remembering Bécquer: what is capitalism?

Are you asking me that?

Capitalism is you.

Manuel Vilas

is a writer.

His last published book is

(Planeta).

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