The writer Javier Cercas 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 to the Royal Spanish Academy, during an event this afternoon at the institution’s headquarters.
The speech, entitled “The misunderstandings of modernity. A Manifesto”, set out to dismantle what the author of “Soldiers of Salamis” considers to be “a tenacious network of misunderstandings, not to mention superstitions or prejudices” widely spread 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 resolve them: the idea of the writer locked in his ivory tower; the glorification of the artist; the idea that good literature must be in the minority; and finally that of the uselessness of art.
“Authentic literature is composed of words in rebellion and therefore represents a danger for power, for all power”, underlined the writer, who asked the rhetorical question of knowing if there is something more “useful” than this rebellion.
Elected academic last June on the proposal of Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, Clara Sánchez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Cercas recalled that, since Plato, many “tyrants, inquisitors, political commissioners and all kinds of individuals with a totalitarian mentality”, disguised “as benefactors of humanity”, have tried to point out the threat weighing on literature in general and on 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, ended the preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” with this 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 this original allegation, he lamented, has fossilized into dogma in today’s “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 this is why the expression “required reading” is an oxymoron and the expression “hedonic reading” is an oxymoron. oxymoron, a pleonasm. But, in addition, it is “a form of knowledge of oneself and others, in exactly the same way as sex”.
“That’s why when someone tells me 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, popular writer committed to readers around the world, winner of multiple awards, from the National Story Prize to the Planeta Prize, attacked the “mental laziness” which leads to considering that a book is simply good because it sells a lot or consider it 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.
On the contrary, he rejects the “glorification” of the writer – “true immortality is anonymity”, he says – and praises the good reader because, according to him, “a novel is a score and it is is the reader who interprets it” and “a book without readers is a dead letter.
Concerning the idea of the writer locked in the ivory tower, he believed that no prominent Spanish writer of the last two centuries has been indifferent to reality, nor have his literary heroes, among whom he cited Kafka, Joyce, Borges or Proust.
From this Sunday, Cercas will take possession of chair R, 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 “quarrelative” writer who did not avoid taking sides on the thorniest questions.
Speaking of his ideal readers, Cercas evokes Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, ready to undertake “the most radical, the most risky and the most revolutionary adventure: the adventure of living a life according to our dreams and our desires.”
