The battles of the language

Mr. Director, Dr. Eduardo Durán Gómez,

ladies and gentlemen members of this academy,

It is an immense honor to be here this morning, among you, accompanied by so many friends and colleagues, my family and my wife, to occupy a place that makes me proud in the territory of my language, which is my portable homeland, my instrument of work and the object of my efforts.

“There is no better grammar for a language than the pride of speaking it,” Daniel Samper Pizano said 17 years ago, at a language congress.

These words can be seen as a gloss to that grammar.

For reasons that one day I hope to understand, you have recently decided to admit a handful of novelists to this institution.

I hope you do not regret it, although I know very well that the responsibility of living up to this appointment falls to us.

But today I want to tell you that, beyond our dubious qualifications, I believe that this risk you are taking is in many ways a profound success.

I say that it is a risk because fiction, like poetry and drama, has always lived in deep tension with the language that makes it possible: the literary arts violate its language, disrespect it, transform it, force it to reach to unexpected places, they break their rules and invent new ones.

When he waged that war against grammar, syntax and meaning that is

Finnegans Wake

, James Joyce, who would be 142 years old today, used to say: “I've run out of English.”

And, speaking of our most established tradition, I don't have to remind you of what García Márquez does in

The Autumn of the Patriarch

so that we understand that the relationship between novels and academies does not always go through the values ​​of orthodoxy.

But I also say that the decision to open the doors of this venerable institution to us novelists is a success, and also a vindication, if one has, as I do, two intuitions.

First, that the invention of the modern novel is an important event, not only in the history of literature, but in the conquest of certain indispensable values ​​of our societies.

Second, that this invention took place, not exclusively or exclusively, but in a privileged way, in our language: in the Spanish language, which is the source of the concerns and battles of this academy as much as it is of mine.

In seven short decades, halfway between the 16th and 17th centuries, a radically new way of exploring the world took shape in the Spanish language.

It was a time of transformation: new continents were emerging on the other side of the sea, and the planet itself suddenly began to behave differently, revolving around the sun instead of continuing to do what it had always done.

It was a world of subverted hierarchies;

In it all the certainties that had been considered valid for centuries were questioned;

The human being suddenly found himself at the center of the universe, and began to need new ways to explore and understand himself.

Around that time, a short but problematic book appeared in Spain, a letter written by an anonymous author and addressed to another figure who is also not identified.

With

El Lazarillo de Tormes,

prose fiction conquered territories that until then were strange or foreign to it, into which it had never really ventured, but that would become over time its domains par excellence, the terrain of its investigations and his most daring inquisitions.

The

Lazarillo

revolution consisted of proposing to us the autobiography of a character out of our most vulgar reality: a man devoid of heroism, of nobility and good birth, of education and money.

The problem is that readers of his time would never have accepted such a narrative, nor would they have known how to read it, if it had been presented to them in fictional form.

Francisco Rico explains it better than anyone:

A book from the

Lazarillo

court , around 1552, could not be read as “fiction” right off the bat: within the framework of the prose story, the category of “fiction” – by virtue of which they are told as if they were true facts that are not – had not yet conjugated with the humble and familiar reality, had not wanted to submit to the limitations and tedium of daily experience.

In other words, a life like that of Lazarus was not acceptable in the art of literary fiction;

and that was why his author preferred to present his book as the real letter that a real man writes to another.

That is why Francisco Rico says that, more than anonymous,

Lazarillo

is apocryphal.

It is a forgery, an imposture;

and it is also the book where the modern novel begins to be what it has been after and since then, at least in the literary family that for convenience we call realism.

It was there, in our mid-16th century Spanish language, that prose fiction opened its arms to a part of experience that had never been his.

It became a journey of exploration and knowledge of our most common human nature;

a teaching of curiosity for others, for their unfathomable lives that we come across every day;

a recognition of the infinite mystery of the everyday, the only place where human beings can, as Ford Madox Ford said, know how others live

their entire lives

;

and a territory of freedom that has faced for centuries all the restrictions – moral, religious, sexual, social – that have tried to tame or suffocate it.

El

Lazarillo

was published at the beginning of the 1550s. Francisco Rico speaks of 1552;

The edition that I have seen with my own eyes, in a foundation in Geneva, is that of Antwerp, from 1554, which has a particular importance: five years later, it was included by the Holy Inquisition in its

Index

of prohibited books, along with fourteen books by Erasmus of Rotterdam that were the intellectual fuel of the Reformation.

To be honest, I understand the prohibition very well: the

Lazarillo

does not respect anything, and from its pages all the representatives of the powers, from clerics to aristocrats, come out in a very bad light.

The book is pessimistic because it is lucid, and it has been called nihilistic because it is not deceived;

For me, it opens a space where the reader can witness a life built on a human scale, a life like his, a life that takes place in a world without heroes or gods or supernatural aids – in the metaphysical wilderness, as a philosopher said – , and where one does not even have, as Rabelais's characters had, the consolation of fantasy.

Before the end of the century of

Lazarillo

, a Spaniard of almost 50 years, a failed poet and playwright, who had also lost a hand fighting for his King, wanted to make his sacrifices count to obtain a position in America.

Don Miguel de Cervantes wrote a Memorial, addressed to the King, to ask for one of several positions in the colonies: governor of Soconusco, corregidor of La Paz, accountant of New Granada or accountant of the galleys of Cartagena.

He received the response backed by the mendicant folios themselves, and his tone and words were somewhat mocking and even insulting: “Look around here for a mercy.”

It has become something of a tradition to think that this is when Cervantes, despised and disillusioned, begins to write

Don Quixote

.

Pedro Gómez Valderrama, whose ghost is present in various ways in this academy, wrote a beautiful story, “In a place in the Indies”, in which he speculates on the opposite possibility: that Cervantes had obtained the position of galley accountant in Cartagena. .

In the story, Cervantes grows old with a mulatto woman named Piedad, writing mountains of pages without ever publishing them;

He returns to Spain “consumed by alcohol and the sensuality of the mulatto,” writes Gómez Valderrama, and meets a certain Alonso Quijano, who reads him the story he has just written: the overseas adventures of Miguel de Cervantes.

The speculation is beautiful, but disturbing: I don't know about you, but the idea that Cervantes would have stopped writing

Don Quixote

to come and enjoy the Caribbean coast gives me chills.

Fortunately for us, the reality was different.

Cervantes was rejected by the ungrateful bureaucracy of the Spanish Crown and, at the same time that he loses a position and a better future, he loses all obligation of loyalty to a system – political, religious, civil – that has despised him.

He is a man without illusions, but he is also a man without obligations: in a word: he is a free man.

With that freedom that has fallen upon him, and that is accompanied by knowledge and experience, he begins to write a book, an unpredictable and multiform book, which begins with the pretext of being the satire of a previous genre – the romances of chivalry. – but in reality it very soon breaks with those humble views and begins to do things that no one, not even its author, had foreseen.

When it was published in 1605, Don

Quixote

was so successful that imitators or parasites began to appear everywhere, and it has never ceased to amaze me that we owe one of them – to his act of parasitism, of literary theft – one of them. the great events of literary history.

It is not an exaggeration to say, it seems to me, that without that man

Don Quixote

would perhaps not have the influence he has nor, therefore, the same importance.

The story, which you surely know, is like this: a second-rate writer, a certain Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, born in Tordesillas, wanted to take advantage of the success of Cervantes' book, and published in 1614 a continuation of the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho.

It irritated Cervantes so much that this mediocre plagiarist stole his creatures, that the following year he gave the press his own and legitimate second part, in which he not only allowed himself to take revenge on the plagiarist with humor and elegance, inventing scenes in which Sancho and Don Quixote mocks the writer of Tordesillas and his unfunny book, but he had the luxury of killing his main character, poor Don Quixote, so that no one else could ever steal it from him.

This is what Cervantes' pen declares, to which the author gave voice at the end of the second part of it:

Don Quixote was born for me alone, and I for him: he knew how to act and I knew how to write, the two of us are alone in one, despite and despite the pretended and Tordesilla writer who dared or will dare to write with an ostrich quill. rude and poorly described the exploits of my brave knight, because it is not a burden on his shoulders, nor a matter of his cold wit;

whom you will warn, if you ever meet him, to let the tired and already rotten bones of Don Quixote rest in the grave.

This whole episode of literary history – the apocrypha of Avellaneda, the reaction of Cervantes – has always suggested two reflections to me.

The first is what I have already mentioned: the gratitude that we deserve for the mediocre imitator, without whose book Cervantes would never have written the second part of his;

and the second part is, for me, what makes Don

Quixote

the founding book that it is, the prophecy of everything that came after, the inexhaustible work where prose fiction discovers its infinite possibilities.

It is often said that the first part of Don

Quixote

is a book for readers and the second part is a book for writers.

What we mean by this is that in the second part there are the elaborate strategies, the technical intuitions and the literary daring that we writers have been exploiting since, from the English of the 18th century to the postmodernists of the 21st century, many of whom believe that they are discovering something never seen before when they do nothing but repeat what a tired and hopeless man already did, more than four centuries ago.

The second of the reflections that the brief monologue of the pen suggests to me comes as a response to a complex question, undoubtedly one of the great mysteries of our literary tradition.

Why didn't Don

Quixote

have heirs in his language?

El Lazarillo de Tormes

opened a path along which

Guzmán de Alfarache

, by Mateo Alemán, and

El Busón

, by that Francisco de Quevedo who so mocked Cervantes, entered later: thus what we call a picaresque novel was born.

But no one in Spain – or in Spanish – recognized the immense revolution of Don

Quixote

;

In the English language, however, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne, to give just two obvious examples, explicitly declared their debts to Don

Quixote

.

“Written in the manner of Cervantes” is the legend that appears in Fielding's

Joseph Andrews

, a book that, unlike Don

Quixote

, did recognize its own novelty: Fielding boasted that nothing like it had ever been written before in their language (acknowledging that in others it does).

And in the middle of

Tristram Shandy

, Laurence Sterne invokes, so that his characters turn out well, the “gentle Spirit of the sweetest humor, which once sat on the easy pen of my beloved Cervantes.”

So the English recognized something that those of our language apparently missed.

Of course, one can get carried away with the metaphor and blame the pen of Cervantes, who asks writers to lay Don Quixote's rotting bones at rest.

Perhaps the Spanish writers took the request too literally.

But perhaps this mystery, the novelistic silence of the language that invented the novel, can be explained in other ways.

To the powers of that Spanish kingdom, indistinguishable from the Catholic Church, a book like Don Quixote

must have seemed at least worrying

, as well as the possibility that other similar books would come later.

And not because Don

Quixote

presented the portrait of a Spain of three religions, nor because in one scene the priest and the barber burned books, in a mocking and critical allusion to the arsonist whims of the Inquisition, nor because in some phrase a vision slipped in. reformist and even Lutheran;

but because the story of Don Quixote and Sancho, as told by Cervantes, proposes a contradictory and paradoxical way of speaking about the world, allergic to absolute truths and sacred values.

Elsewhere I have recalled that Fray Hernando de Talavera, confessor of Queen Isabel (who was not even a friend of the Inquisition), had special advice for Catholics: to beware of the “sin of irony.”

And precisely that, an ethic of irony, is what Don

Quixote proposes to us, taking to unexpected places the enormous conquests that

Lazarillo

had already achieved

.

An ethics of irony, I say: a presentation of the human where certainties are distrusted and arms are opened to the profound ambiguity of experience.

This is a true revolution that is aesthetic, but also moral, and after which, I fear, we have never been the same.

Neither in our language, nor in any other.

And that is, for me, cause for celebration.

In any other language, but especially in Spanish.

Thank you so much.

Subscribe here

to the EL PAÍS newsletter about Colombia and

here to the WhatsApp channel

, and receive all the key information on current events in the country.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_